#the “same circumstances” line is a prime example of this

[homehauntsyou]

I think the worst thing about the gadreel situation is that dean doesn't even try to understand why sam is upset. which then leads to him never feeling guilty for the reasons he should be. like he feels guilty for trusting gadreel, but he doesn't feel guilty for lying to sam for months. he feels guilty that kevin died and that gadreel got out of his control, but he doesn't feel guilty for letting an angel have basically unlimited control over sam's body.

[enwoso]

INVISIBLE STRINGS — alessia russo

*i started writing this and loved it then got bored by the end so sorry for the rushed ending:) but thank you for the love and support on my first post!!

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google would define invisible strings as a thread that connects two people who are destined to meet regardless of time, place or the circumstances. the thread may stretch or tangle but it never breaks.

you and alessia both truly believed you were a prime example of the invisible string theory.

the two of you always existing among each other but neither ever really acknowledged each other until later on when you were both older.

you lived on the same street as alessia growing up, only a few doors down, she was the blonde girl you would always see from afar playing in the park with her two older brothers as they blasted the ball at the young girl.

however she always gave back as good as she got.

you had even went to the same school, however she was in the year above you. there were plenty school photos with the two of you in only a few metres apart. walking past each other in the corridor every single day - not having an idea how important each other would become to be to the other in the future.

you had played football for the local team as did she. the blonde playing in offence taking any spot on the front line whereas you sat at the back and played in defence stopping the opposition from scoring.

that is how the two of you met, well kind of. you played for the same team but you two never really friends. it wasn’t that you didn’t like each other it’s just you never really spoke to one another bar the few words when necessary.

however you only played with each other for a few months before she moved onto a new local team. only seeing her now when your team would face her new team.

you both existed in the backgrounds of each others lives.

when you were sixteen, you were scouted by the arsenal's academy for the under seventeens teams, it took you a little time getting used to playing academy football and not the usual sunday league but after a few months you had found your feet and began to settle in.

you had one goal, the england youth squad. your family pushing you each day to try and help you achieve your goal however just a month before the squad announcement you tore your ACL at sixteen.

you were out of football for a year, endless days sat with a physio, in the gym just trying to get your knee to bend again like it once used to. watching from the sidelines as your friends in the academy got their calls up for the youth teams and how you wished it was you.

you felt as though you were fighting a battle you were never going to win, you were falling out of love with sport that you had played your entire life.

after three hundred and sixty two day you were finally allowed to play again, however your return it wasn't the fairy tale dream you had spent the past year dreamed about. you ended up spending a lot of time on the bench not playing as regular as you did before your injury and you spent many of those ninety minutes wondering why you were no longer good enough.

losing all your confidence in yourself and your ability to actually play football - you felt as though you had hit a brick wall. finding yourself some days where you didn't want to play football anymore.

but thankfully your family, mainly your dad, were not going to let you give up so easily on the talent that they had spent watching over the last ten years. your dad repeatedly telling you 'that you time would come'

and like the fairy tale you had dreamed about you slowly begun to get minutes again and fell back in love with sport all over again. forever thankful for your family for their support each day, for sometimes dragging you to training even when you had told them multiple of times that you were done and that you quit.

and you dad was right, your time did come. your hard work finally paid off and just after your nineteenth birthday you made your appearance for the arsenal first time - even bagging yourself an assist.

the next few season were spent learning and being loaned to another other club spending half a season at brighton when you were 20. but you saw it all as learning and a way of improving - you were getting minutes, plenty of clean sheets and you were working towards a new goal: the 2023 world cup.

you were back at arsenal and were a regular starter in the back line for arsenal and with that came your good from and finally your call up for england came as they were beginning their campaign to quality for the world cup in australia.

"are you excited?" leah asked swinging her arm around your shoulders as you walked towards the changing rooms, she had been a big mentor to you since you had came into the first team, along with helping you to improve your game. you could say you became her little prodigy.

the squad had just been announced on social media for the first time and hearing your name on the sheet of paper had you feeling something you could even begin to find the word to describe.

“yes.. but no, i’m a little nervous” you admitted with a small laugh as leah gave you a soft smile and a squeeze of the shoulders to reassure you.

“listen, you’ll be fine! just play with the passion you always have” she said as you nodded slowly, “plus you’ll have me, beth and jordan!” the blonde added as you playfully groaned, leah gasping and unthreading her arm from around your shoulders.

“i’m just kidding, you know i love you all” you smiled, as leah rolled her eyes as you reached the doors of the changing rooms, “i do kiddo! ..but i’m at the top of that list, right?”

“whatever helps you sleep at night, lee!”

leah was right - you were fine. while you didn’t get any starts in any of the games at your first camp, you did get some minutes as a sub which was more than you were expecting. but while sitting on the bench you did find yourself talking to a particular blonde.

“you said you were from kent, didn’t you?” alessia asked as you hummed, a puzzled look growing on your face as you waited for the blonde to carry on. your eyes were glued to the girls running around on the pitch as you sat on the bench with a bright orange bib over your jacket.

“me too! what part?” the blonde asked as you turned your head at the question being slightly caught off guard at the fact she was also from kent.

“um maidstone” you gave her a small smile, your attention turning back to the girls on the pitch as the ball was close to going into the back of the net. alessia gasping making you think she had seen something you had missed on the pitch as well as making you jump a little, “me too!”

you turned back to her, giving her a shocked look. confusion filling you as the two of you spent the rest of camp talking about each others childhood finding out your grew up on the same street as well as going to the same school.

when the next england camp rolled around, you and alessia had became even closer to the point you were counting down the days until you next saw each other.

short and sweet messages turned into hours and hours spent on facetime until the other fell asleep. friendly comments turned into subtle flirty ones and the touches turned to ones that lasted longer than friends and slowly you found yourself falling for the blonde.

the last england camp before the euros in the summer at home had finally arrived, you had arrived at st george’s park with beth and leah but before alessia.

you found yourself sitting patiently in the common room, like a lost puppy waiting for the blonde to walk through the door. the other girls chatting and playing cards in the background.

“kid, if you stare any longer at the doorframe your gonna burn a hole in it!” lucy teased as you glanced away from the doorway for the first time in a least thirty minutes, rolling your eyes at the teasing comment you moved your gaze to fix at watching leah try and beat beth’s high score on the basketball hoop game.

eventually after what felt at least a year to you and fifteen minutes to everyone else - the blonde walked through with ella, as she made a beeline for you as you wrapped her in a tight hug.

the two of you finding a rhythm and falling into a deep conversation about all the things you had forgotten to tell each other over the phone.

“so then me and ella had to stop, so i could get a coffee and she-“ alessia was in the middle of telling you a recount of her journey here before you interrupted her with a big gasp, jumping up out of your seat to find your phone quickly.

“what?” alessia asked as she watched you frantically search for your phone on the beanbag you were sitting on - finding it wedged under the beanbag.

“i have to show you this before i forget!” you said a grin on your face getting bigger with ever swipe your finger did on your phone screen. moving closer to the blonde, your shoulders touching as she peered over your own shoulder wondering what on earth you were about to show her and why was it such a big deal.

"look-" you moved your phone so that it was in her eye line and on your screen was a group school photo, "i don’t get it? what am i looking at?" the blonde asked her squinted her eyes trying to get a better look at the photo.

"there's me and.." you paused as she pointed to herself as a small gasp followed from her, "and there's me" alessia whispered, so quietly you also couldn't hear her. shock has consumed the blonde and you sat back with a smug smile as she examined the photo a little more.

"how’d you find this?" alessia asked as she turned her head back to you, handing you back your phone, "my mum sent me them,, there's more if you swipe across" you said beginning to swipe along your camera roll.

the two of you spent the next hour looking through the photos, some from school and others from your grassroots club, recounting each others side of the memories both of you in shock of how close you to were to each other growing but in reality how far you were to each other.

"we've literally been in the background of each other lives forever" alessia smiled as you nodded. "attached by an invisible string" you added.

the international camp came to an end and you both went back to your respective clubs, this time the two of you were making an effort to see each other without it being on a pitch or about football — so on your days off you went to see alessia and on her days off she came to see you.

your feelings for alessia were growing each time you saw her, her smile was infectious, her blue orbs were the most beautiful thing you had ever seen. but you didn't want to admit your feelings to her in case it ruined your friendship, plus why would she like you back, alessia sees you as a friend and a friend only.

or so you thought.

"less, why don't you just admit you have feelings for the girl!" ella said as she caught the blonde smiling at her phone knowing that she was messaging you.

"w-what" the blonde stuttered her phone dropping into her lap. "less, we can all see that you like her!" ella paused as alessia's cheeks tinted red, "except for y/n - but she definitely likes you too!"

"she does?"

"of course, everyone can see the way you both look at each other!" ella said bumping her shoulder with the older blonde as alessia gave her a small smile and nodded processing the information that had just been given to her.

before the euros came around in the summer alessia managed to make the first move taking you on the first date — a fancy dinner accompanied by going back to her apartment and spending the rest of the night cuddled into each other while watching a film.

the euros had come and you were back with alessia and the rest of the england girls. the tournament had been the best time of your life making unforgettable memories with the girls. slipping in a few dates with alessia when you two had some downtime.

you were just beginning to enter the second half of extra time the score being 1-1 in the final, yes the final at wembley. the little girl inside of you was buzzing with excitement, you couldn't believe you were going to get to play here. your whole family had made the trip to wembley, sitting proudly in the crowd.

it was england's chance to score, germany had conceded the corner. alex was hovering over it to take it as white shirts littered germanys penalty area.

the ball swing in as everyone jumped up, you watched alessia drop to the ground and then watched as chloe poked the ball into the back of the net. chloe running off to celebrate as the stadium erupted, as you all gathered around chloe celebrating.

all you had to do was hold on for the next ten minutes and the trophy was englands.

keeping the ball in the corner, desperately waiting for the final whistle to blow.

germany had one last chance but before it got into the final half the whistle blew, england where european champions.

running to the closest person near you which happened to be leah, engulfing her in a hug as the tears began to fall. "we did it!" you whispered as she hummed, the two of you sniffing and wiping your eyes and going off to celebrate with the others but your eye caught the sight of your favourite blonde moving toward her.

you don't know if it was the adrenaline of the win that was flowing or if you had finally just grew the confidence to say it but after months of dancing around your feelings for the blonde.

you ran up swinging your arm around her neck, as you both cheered before you faced her grabbing her hands, "less! will you be my girlfriend" you blurted out, clearly catching the blonde of guard as her head perked up, alessia thinking she had misheard you before nodding, "yes, a thousand time yes!" 

you smiled bringing the blonde in for a bear hug, not wanting to let go. enjoying her touch, it made you feel safe and loved. as she pulled away she wrapped an arm around your shoulders pulling you into her, kissing the top of your head lingering there for a few moments.

"all along there's been an invisible string tying me to you."

liked by lucybronze and 915,703 others

alessia day one or one day?

comments -

lucybronze well y/n looks thrilled on the first one

24m 140 likes     reply

-> yourusername she annoyed me that day.

-> alessia how on earth can you remember that?

-> yourusername i can’t? i’m just guessing that you did

yourusername i love you<3

24m 140 likes     reply

-> alessia love you more, my love<33

[lookingforhappy]

Now I've had time to think (rationally) I really do have to disagree with the fandom consensus that Fivela was out of character - I say this as someone who prefers the platonic relationship. Let me explain:

The main arguement I see is "they would never do that" but one of the biggest and best pieces of advice I've seen on fiction writing is: it's not "would they do that" it's "what would drive them to do that". Everyone is capable of anything and everything if given the right motivation and circumstances, and the same is true of fictional characters.

Five and Lila both have incredibly good reasons to do what they did. The problem is a lack of time. No time is spent on their plotline, and the lack of insight that's given to the audience as to why they would act this way affects the reception of this development hugely. No time is allowed to show the repercussions, and how this is dealt with and what decisions are made. Fivela needed two seasons all to itself to explain everything - one to show their development in the subway, and one to show everything after.

If the showrunners wanted to do Fivela, they needed bare minimum a full 10 episode season, ideally with episodes that are actually longer than normal (Steve, 10 minutes is not enough to count for anything). They shouldn't have tried to tackle something that complex without the time to spend on it.

See, a combination of problems led to Fivela, beginning with the most obvious, isolation. It seriously fucks people up, it seriously fucked Five up, and it seriously fucked Lila up in the subway. Not just the loneliness but the lack of support, medical facilities, knowing no one will turn up to save you. Basic necessities like food, water, hygiene. Everything is now entirely on Fivela to gather for themselves, and if they don't find it, they can't have it regardless of how badly they need it. That alone is a tremendous amount of stress.

Add onto that, Fivela became the only support each other had, essentially invoking a sort of stockholm syndrome where they began to see each other as a sort of saviour, each other's knight in shining armour. It's not unbelievable that they'd begin blurring the lines between platonic and romantic and even sexual love when they rely on each other's goodwill to survive (Five moreso in the emotional sense, and Lila moreso in the experience/knowledge sense).

For Lila in particular, her survival method has always been her connections to people. She feels intensely, and attaches herself to others with that same intensity. Even after a lifetime of living amongst conniving, backstabbing manipulators at the commission, she still attached to Diego and in a (platonic, spiteful, playful) way, to Five. In the subway she is stripped of all but one connection. Of course she felt it intensely, of course she clung to it.

As for the cheating - Lila obviously had a choice, and she made the wrong one. She hurt Diego, betrayed his trust. But she was in an incredibly traumatic situation, and forming unhealthy bonds with her sole companion was her coping mechanism. And she figures this out for herself! As soon as she knows she can leave she drops her coping mechanism and returns to make things right for Diego. Diego doesn't have to forgive her, but in most situations, where one spouse believes the other to be dead/missing/unreachable for YEARS it's not weird for them to move on.

Five's survival method has always been blending reality with fantasy. Delores is the prime example, and I honestly don't understand the debate that Five was cheating on her. She's a fantasy he used to cope with the apocalypse, she doesn't exist outside of his head and that's a blaring alarm. It means that unlike Lila, who snapped out of her fantasy once she left her traumatic circumstance, Five is unable to separate fantasy from reality even when outside of a triggering situation. This is why Five taking Delores back to the department store was a huge moment in S1, he was taking the first step in healing and approaching a better mindset. He may not have been able to acknowledge that Delores isn't real, but he was able to recognise that she served a purpose, and that purpose was fulfilled so she should be returned to where she belonged, separate from Five.

I don't think that Five is unaware of what Delores is, I think he subconsciously knows that she's a mannequin. Hence his general inoffense at others describing her as a mannequin, or calling him mad for being with her. He knows his situation, he just can't confront it himself, especially not while still under incredible stress and physical threat.

The reason Delores and Five's inablility to distinguish reality is important is because Five and Lila treated their relationship as a fantasy, except Lila was able to resurface from it while Five was not. I don't want to excuse his actions, but given that this has been a severe, near debilitating (it affects his relationships) problem for Five since S1, I think his being a vulnerable, chronically mentally ill person needs to be considered when looking at his actions.

This is also a major reason as to why Five hid the journal from Lila, because showing Lila meant leaving that fantasy, and Five needs fantasy to cope. Again, still a dick move and not an excuse, but an understable one. (Add on top of this that The Handler likely waited until Five had given up on going home before rescuing him...)

I think it's highly likely that what Five has with both Delores and Lila is a projection of what he thinks normalcy looks like, and safety along with it. He waited until he was an adult to actually marry Delores, before that she was likely just considered a friend or maybe girlfriend, because that's the normal thing to do. When you're an adult, you should be married, you should probably also be scolded for drinking too much or being too mean. That's what wives/spouses do in Five's mind. He created Delores as the one "normal" thing, so that he could retreat for a minute and pretend everything was okay and just take a breather.

He did the same for Lila. With the addition of the deleted scene/blooper where Five dreams about Lila while in the subway, it seems as though Five was becoming worried that Lila was also losing her mind, maybe becoming like him. The way he suggests them taking a break, he seems to be doing it for her benefit (if he was alone, I don't think he would have. I think he would have continued to hunt for answers until he lost his mind, died, or found his answer).

He doesn't see his version of "a break" aka break from reality, to be unhealthy, and so he shows Lila how to "cope". Lo and Behold, he finds the most normal thing he can - domestic bliss, Lila, the woman/wife, is at home most often in the garden, while Five, the man/husband, is away hunting, gathering, provdiding. It's an incredibly stereotypical view, but that's exactly why Five likes it. It's normal, and he sees normal as safe (normal means no powers, no missions, no apocalypse).

This isn't to say that Lila had no part in this, she also has issues with "normal". She tried to force normal on her family (affenctionately), probably why there's no discussion on her parents being alive, because she wants normal. It's also why she acts like the typical overwhelmed mum, because she feels she needs to be normal. This isn't the whole of her issues at home (bad writing and forced conflict mainly), Diego also has issues with belitting Lila and resentment. His masculinity and need to prove himself a "man" also causes issues. But Lila has been trying to be normal without really knowing how, and so when Five begins doing the exact same thing in the subway? Lila knows how to play that game.

This was very Five centric and I apologise, if there's more to add on Lila from a Lila fan I'd welcome it!

Essentially, I think that Fivela was understandable, and the characters would do that. I also think that despite Fivela adding salt to an already bitter ending, Fivela was one of the better episodes of S4. It was just the wrong plotline to try and do with so little time.

Also Steve needed to treat it like the psychology mindfuck that it was and not the cutesy romance drama he thinks it is.

[chickenstrangers]

Bad Buddy, Tragedy, and Queer Futures

I want to take a closer look at Kwan & Riam and Romeo & Juliet, and the intertextual methods Bad Buddy employs with those narratives. Bad Buddy is an extremely self-aware show and comments on and subverts tropes and expectations of the genres it employs, putting itself in conversation with other BLs, but also romantic comedies and romantic tragedies more broadly. @shortpplfedup has done a much better job than I could do in her excellent Romeo and Juliet analysis series (which was very helpful in getting my thoughts in order), so instead I want to focus on how Bad Buddy plays with the idea of tragedy and explore it through a queer theoretical framework.

Bad Buddy straddles the line between comedy and tragedy. While, as a romance, the audience is primed to expect it will end happily, there is a thrum of tension behind all the jokes and banter. Specifically in the first half of the show, which feels the most rom-com like to me, there's sadness underlying Pat and Pran's interactions. Every time Pat makes a flirty joke, there's a spark of hope in Pran's eyes that he quickly pushes away, knowing or thinking that Pat doesn't feel the same way. It feels like the characters are on a knife's edge, and every little misstep cuts deeply.

The smiley face is an external representation of Pran's feeling (for example, he switches its direction on his door depending on his mood) but it also signifies a choice. He chooses to surround himself with icons of happiness and he chooses to turn the frowny face into a smiley face. People often don't have that much control over the big external things in their lives, but the important thing is adapting and making choices within their circumstances. The idea of choosing happiness is at the core of Bad Buddy.

Pran knows that this will probably not end happily for him. That even if his feelings are reciprocated it might not work. In some ways, his reactions can be read as genre-awareness, part of all the little signs that the show is putting out that this is not your typical rom-com, that it might not have the happy ending that the audience expects. He may not necessarily know that he is in a story, but he anticipates its trajectory. But then Pat comes in and breaks through these genre walls. He's in a rom-com! He's got all the tropes! He falls second but he falls hard and he doesn't have the years and years that Pran has had to build it up in his head.

This is exemplified so beautifully in the rooftop scene and the aftermath of the kiss. For Pat, this feels like the culmination of the story. All good rom-coms end with a kiss. After they kiss, Pat has such a blissful expression on his face, it's pure happiness and belief that things are working out all right in the end. But this isn't the end and Pran knows this. When Pat sees Pran's devastated face, he starts to realize this too.

The post-kiss episodes have a different tone, especially once Pat and Pran actually get together in episode 7. They feel a lot lighter now that Pat and Pran know how each other feel. There's a sense of domestic happiness once they're dating. But the buzzing of potential tragedy and heartbreak doesn't come from Pat and Pran anymore, but from nebulous external forces. This is also when the show starts to signal more and more explicitly that it is a tragedy.

The clearest case for this is the introduction of the school play. The inclusion of Kwan and Riam led to a lot of speculation that Bad Buddy might not get a happy ending, along with P'Aof's comments that they had taken liberties with the source material. Kwam and Riam's story is from the 1936 book Plae Kao or The Scar. The 1977 film adaptation was Thailand's highest grossing film up to that time and it's legacy continues, with two other adaptations in the twenty-first century (for more information and links, see @fiercynn's very helpful post). It tells the story of two star-crossed lovers whose families separate them, and it ultimately ends with both their deaths. Kwan is killed by Riam's brother, and Riam takes Kwan's knife and stabs herself to die alongside him.

Bad Buddy explicitly emulates Kwan and Riam's story. Pat and Pran's story is essentially the BL retelling of the story that the architecture faculty is producing. With the Kwan and Riam narrative shedding new light, we now see that Dissaya sending Pran to a different school mirrors Riam's father sending her away (though it is much darker in the original). Bad Buddy also has direct references to Romeo and Juliet, especially with the balcony scenes and the intense longstanding familial rivalry.

From this point on, Bad Buddy toes the line between whether it will end happily or tragically. But, crucially, the successive near-misses all hint towards the show's final message of queer futurity and queer possibility.

The first act of near disaster comes at the end of episode 8 when Wai pulls back the curtain on Pat and Pran on stage. The fact that this takes place on the set of the play puts it into direct parallel with Plae Kao. Kwan and Riam's story gets transposed onto Pat and Pran's story. They become the actors playing out the story in real life. After this point, we don't see much more about the play at all, other than the curtain call of the performance, we don't see Pat acting as Riam on stage, but we do see them playing out this narrative in real life.

This is the first real test to their dating relationship, but they do not break up. Their friends turn on them, especially Wai, who won't even talk to Pran. Pat suggests they pretend to break up and continue dating in secret (foreshadowing), but that is ultimately unnecessary. Pat's friends only put on a show of abandoning Pat, and Korn quickly reveals he still fully supports his friend. This is the first of a series of misdirects.

The next crisis seems completely anticlimactic, but maybe that's the point. In episode 9, Pat gets shot. It comes seemingly out of nowhere, and then is quickly resolved. We once again have a fake out: the audience is misled to think this is a dramatic event with the way the hospital scene is shot, and Pran is misled by Pat's friends, who play up how hurt Pat is. But Pat is complete fine, the bullet just grazed him. This incident feels very out of place in the narrative of Bad Buddy. Yes, it is an important step in reconciling Pran and Wai, but couldn't this have happened some other way, that didn't involve a random guy who we'd never seen before and a level of violence that the show hadn't prepared the audience to expect?

But what if this was a deliberate allusion to Kwan and Riam/Romeo and Juliet? Here we get the physical injury from those stories' conclusions, Kwan's fatal shooting. Except...its not a big deal. With this scene we get further hints that something else bad might be coming, but we get another sign of tragedy being forestalled. This is further emphasized by the following confrontation with Pat's dad, who is unhappy to see Pran at the hospital, but in the end shows grudging respect for Pran getting Pat's name cleared. Disaster averted.

Then we come to the true brink of tragedy: episode 10 and 11. Pat and Pran find out the real reason their families hate each other, the reason why they are meant to hate each other. At this point they both know that they're not going to be able to stay together and have their families' approval. Running away to the beach feels like a delay of the inevitable. On the beach, they are in a liminal state, a state of paralysis. They have their "honeymoon" but both know there's no happy wedded life to follow.

This calls back to the moment of death in Plae Kao, when Kwan flees into the water after being shot and Riam follows after him, taking his knife from him and stabbing herself while they're both underwater. The waves obscure their death in the film, suspending them in the moment of transition between life and death. This liminality carries over onto Pat and Pran's retreat, which echoes the water motif. This is the scene where Juliet takes the poison, creating the effect of death, though not death itself.

We are back to the beginning. Pran knows this is a tragedy. He's the one who first thinks about going home, even knowing they will not be able to go back together. Pat wants to cling to this little slice of possibility for just a bit longer, but Pran knows that this can't work forever, and Pat knows this too. While Pat is more willing to delay this looming conclusion, they both know they'll have to go home.

Okay, and so what? Romance stories often have a third-act breakup, there needs to be some sort of conflict. What makes this any different from a traditional romance narrative?

When the show was airing, there was a lot of worry that the show wouldn't have a happy ending, or if Pat and Pran did end up in a relationship, it would be after an extended breakup. The show definitely tried to cultivate this response with the inclusion of the Kwan and Riam play and the preview for episode 12. But the show also had put out all these little signals that things weren't as they seemed, and that disaster would be averted once again.

It is important to note that there isn't actually a third-act break up. They never break up! There's not even really any miscommunication. Bad Buddy has been laying clues for the audience, with the multiple bait and switch tragedies, from the curtain to the gunshot. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, but a key element of that tragedy is the deception: Juliet taking the poison to fake her own death so that she be with Romeo. But Romeo doesn't know about the lie, and he is tricked as well. Pat and Pran, alternatively, are together in this deception, lying to their families and most of their friends, and in turn, the audience.

They take control of the narrative. They choose what details to share and with whom. When they finally let the audience in on the deception, they do so directly, breaking the fourth wall by narrating their own story.

This is where I'd like to bring in the idea of queer futurity and queer temporality. Queer temporality addresses the idea that queer time operates outside of and in opposition to linear normative institutions and chronologies, and that experiences of the past, present, and future can feel different to queer people. For example, coming of age milestones can take place on different timelines for queer people. Queer futurity looks specifically to the future as queerness's domain. It allows us to imagine a possible world beyond the present, a future that is not yet here. (Shoutout to @shannankle who brilliantly applied this lens to The Eighth Sense and got me thinking about this topic).

Bad Buddy plays with the idea of queer time with the realization of the queer romance. There are two time skips in Bad Buddy (between episodes 6 and 7 and between 11 and 12). Already this creates the sense of delay. Much of Pat and Pran's relationship is characterized by waiting, from the three years when Pran was sent away before university to the four years where they hide their relationship. It wasn't the right time for them then, and it isn't even really the right time for them now. They are waiting for a time to be free, a future that is not here yet, but on the horizon.

Nevertheless, there is an optimistic turn to this waiting; they are facing this delay together. Discussions of queer futurity creates the impression of separation between the present and the future, but here they are holding hands, creating a continuum between these temporalities. This optimism is in direct defiance of the expectations of tragedy, especially as common as it is in queer narratives. So much of queer media does not end happily; however, Pat and Pran do get a happy ending and their story does not end in tragedy like Kwan and Riam's or Romeo and Juliet's.

But its a nuanced ending. The parents don't reconcile; although they are starting to thaw towards the idea of their sons dating, the show ends without the parents talking. But that's not what it's about. It goes back to Uncle Tong's words. As Pat says, "We might not be able to change the people around us, but they couldn't change the two of us either." All they could do was "adjust to it and live happily." They are looking towards a world beyond the present, but while they are waiting, they can still be happy.

Pat and Pran make the choice to have a happy ending. They have a lot of agency in this decision, thwarting familial and genre expectations. It all goes back to the smiley faces Pran surrounds himself, putting himself in a sea of optimism when he isn't necessarily a very optimistic person. It's about the ):) face. That face is also about choice, its about perspective, and how close happiness and sadness are to each other. But Pran chooses to have it be a smiley face instead of a frowny face. Pat and Pran choose to stay together.

Bad Buddy takes two straight romantic tragedies, combines them with audience expectations of queer tragedies, and subverts all of it.

In both Romeo and Juliet's and Kwan and Riam's stories, the lovers die alone. Pat and Pran live together.

Bibliography

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Halberstam, Judith. A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

Helmsing, Mark E. "Queer Futurity." Encyclopedia of Queer Studies in Education, ed. Kamden K. Strunk and Stephanie Anne Shelton. Leiden: Brill, 2022, p. 518-522.

Muñoz, José Estaban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Plae Kao. Directed by Cherd Songsri, Cherdchai Production, 1977.

[konohagakurekakashi]

Favorite ninja weapon

It depends on the situation, really.

Different weapons work best in different circumstances, so I like to be well versed in the use of most of them, since you never know when you might need to pick up a certain weapon or skill as a shinobi.

A bow and arrows : It's quiet and its projectiles can be used over and over again - if you're not against plucking it out of your dead target and cleaning it up a bit. It's also good for catching a meal when you're out on a long term mission and your rations are starting to dwindle.

Kusarigama : There are three types of this weapon and all of them can be used to entangle an opponent's spear, sword, or other weapon. It can also be used to immobilize arms or legs. Having an opponent immobilized makes it easier to cast a close range Ninjutsu like Chidori or to strike the opponent down with the sickle end of the weapon. Also it looks cool.

Ninja Wire / Chains : Probably some of the most versatile items on the list. Wire string is light, lengthy and durable, with a variety of useful functions. It can be applied to traps, used to bind an opponent or to restrict their movements. It can cut through flesh and bone when tightened. And like chains you can use it to manipulate weapons and channel chakra; not to mention rappelling. Did I mention makeshift laundry line! Since you can use it to hang your flackjacket on to dry after an unexpected downpour.

Tantō : A short sword used for piercing and stabbing. Easy to carry and conceal. The Hatake clan tantō could also absord, channel and release chakra with a practices swipe.

Ninjatō : Sword shorter than a katana, but used in the same way. The shorter lenght allows for fast draw techniques centered around drawing the sword and cutting at the same time to create a simultaneous defensive, parying and attacking action. Used by many Anbu agents.

Shiruken : Long ranged weapon, mainly used to mislead or distract your opponent from your actual attack. This is one of the first, fundamental lessons taught at the academy.

Kunai : The most basic shinobi weapon, but also one of the most useful (and very likely the favourite). Can be used as a foothold or hold in rock / wall climbing. Can be used in hand-to-hand combat to block and deflect attacks and also to stab and slice through enemies, their attacks, or any barriers. It can serve as a projectile and is sturdy enough to be used in conjunction with other tools and shinobi arts, like Fūinjutsu, to expand on its function. A prime example being an explosive tag, which is just a kunai with an explosive seal tagged at its hilt.

Scrolls : Not typically something you would add to a list of weapons, but can be weaponized easily through sealing techniques and a little bit of chakra infused ink or blood.

So, did I answer the question? No? What a shame. Lesson over, I must be going now. I have plants to water.

[kuramirocket]

Anti Magic AU

Okay, so for months I have had this idea running through my head and I have finally finished writing the first part of this au which in part has been inspired by talking with other fans. It's not written like a fanfiction exactly, more like bulletin points of ideas happening within this au, if that makes sense.

Please note that this is supposed to be a mariocest au! So, keep that in mind.

With that said here is the ideas for my Anti Magic au:

Magic is looked down and frowned upon in the Mushroom Kingdom. The only exception being power ups because these items occur and pop up naturally in the wild. It is viewed as being acceptable to use them in times of battle, but only in battle. However, even then those who are exceptional in their usage may get a bit of side eye glance or whispers about them because it's unnatural for a person to be so talented in their usage. As a result strict laws exist in their usage and cultivation.

Despite being the hero of the Mushroom Kingdom and being very well liked, some hushed underground whispers by some Toads may follow Mario behind his back about how is it possible a human not native to their world has such good control and grasp of these powers. The same scrutiny may follow Luigi, but not as intensely in this particular area as Mario, seeing as Mario is the one who has gone on the most ‘adventures.’

Due to Bowser and Koopas such as the Fire Bros ability to use fire, one of the magical abilities most looked down upon with distrust is wielding fire. And wouldn't you know it, the power up Mario most exceeds at is using the Fire Flower.

Another thing to note, one of the reasons magic is looked down upon with harsh laws surrounding its usage is also due to the animosity between the Mushroom Kingdom and the Darklands. As mentioned Bowser's ability to shoot fire from his mouth and his top ranking council of magikoopas being prime examples of the distrust of magic.

While some light magic may be acceptable such as the laws and rules that keep the universe in tact and in balance, again, unless a person is from the Star Realm (e.g. Rosalina, Star species, etc.) or a higher otherworldly authority, every kind of magic is forbidden from being used unless necessary in combat to defend the Mushroom Kingdom. And even then the only real acceptable magic to be used in these scenarios are power ups. A person who has natural magical abilities are discouraged from ever using their abilities due to magic's tricky, powerful and ever fluctuating state.

In terms of Princess Peach, while she wields some faint light and healing magic it is faint and strong enough to counter Bowser's dark magic as they are polar opposites. The Royal family line is expected to wield just enough magic to guarantee their lineage's survival and for the good of the Mushroom Kingdom as if Peach were to fall the MK could fall into havoc and disarray. As such, law decrees that the Royal family may only use their light healing magic on themselves for their own survival. The use of light and healing magic outside of this is forbidden no matter the circumstances. The safety of head of state and the royal family is top priority above all else. Because of this Peach is often counseled to stay behind where she will be safe when an attack or invasion occurs. This is why soldiers exist to to be on the front lines (Mario in particular and to an extent Luigi having unintentionally taken this role). If all else should fail, then the ruler will have no choice, but to fight and be the last line of defense.

Despite being a good fighter, caring about the safety of her people and their well being, Peach does not like having to sit back while others fight to protect her and her kingdom. But due to the council and laws of the Mushroom Kingdom being strict, unyielding and having more traditional ideaologies, she has no choice, but to head the words of her council. Despite being the ruler of the MK, Peach's words are not law and much must be debated and discussed between the royal council and herself. Thus, the council does have a lot of power and political influence.

After the events of Luigi's Mansion, both Luigi and Mario want to plant a garden of fire flowers. Luigi because he likes gardening and finds the task relaxing. Luigi has always found pleasure in the up keeping of the house, especially in times when Mario is away. It's his way of helping. In Mario's case, he finds the idea of a Fire Flower garden appealing because not only will it be beautiful, cared for his baby brother, but because this means having quick access to the power up he is most skillful at using. Mario has found he has a great affinity to fire. 

After his experience at the hands of King Boo, part of the reason Mario wants the garden is to feel safer. Luigi shares the same sentiments in wanting to feel more secure. Boos and ghosts cannot be physically fought and defeated, thus, they make for a challenging foe even for a skilled fighter like Mario. Fire flowers, while they cannot really damage Boos, they can stop them for a bit. It's not much, but it's something. A Super Star, light and the poltergust are the only real things that can stop Boos and ghosts.

Unfortunately, word quickly gets around until it reaches the ears at the Castle. Royal Toad guards arrive at the bros home and they ask the brothers to accompany them back to the castle as Toad neighbors watch in hushed whispers. Luigi quickly and bravely steps up asking if this is necessary right now seeing as Mario is still recuperating from the ordeal he suffered with King Boo, however, the guards quickly state both of their presence is required without delay. No exceptions. Resting a hand on his bro's shoulder Mario reassures Luigi he is feeling fine for a simple trip to the castle. As the brothers pass by them, 2 guards flanking them in front and behind them, they can hear the Toads whisper how it's odd for someone like Mario to be so fond of fire, especially fire magic. And even how Luigi does not seem bothered by the flowers heat and magical properties as those who even just get close to the flowers feel the sting of the simple heat emanating from the flowers. Those who use the fire flower have found it taxing on the body, though the adrenaline from combat may help to wield it somewhat, the heat from the power eventually becomes too much and a person is normally only able to be use the power for short periods of time before it takes its toll.

All the while, as the bros are walked through Toad Town up to the walls of the Princess’ castle, they can't help but feel as if they were being marched in a sort of show of exhibition - this is what happens when you do something you should not. Mario and Luigi can only silently look at each other as they feel an uncomfortable tension in the air, Toad eyes all around them with even more whispers as the MK's heroes are escorted, for what and why they aren't sure, but presumably for an audience with Peach. Seeing Luigi wriggling his hands together in anxiety and his own hands balled up in fists, Mario reaches his hand out for his baby brother at his side to take. Clasping their hands together, both brothers smile warmly at each other, hands entertwined as the whispers continue more intensely as ever.

Upon arriving at the Castle, the brothers are greeted with the sight of Princess Peach sitting on her throne, high atop the stairs. At the bottom, her royal council are seated along a semi long table. The guards that had escorted the bros excuse themselves, shutting the castle doors behind them, the echo of the door closing, sounding like a loud bang as the noise reverberated the high walls and ceiling around them.

“Hello, Mario, Luigi.” Peach states, “Thank you for coming on short notice and I apologize for the inconvenience. I know Mario is still recovering from King Boo's failed revenge” states the princess cordially, nodding at Mario. Mario simply shrugs, stating it was no big deal, even though he can't help, but think neither he or Luigi really weren't given much choice. Peach quickly explains the reason they were summoned - the fire flower garden is not allowed. Luigi quickly steps forward surprised, asking why. He afterall, like Mario really enjoyed creating and tending to it. She apologizes, saying the entire garden must be destroyed. The Mushroom Kingdom has strict laws on the use of magic and power ups, she explains. Once more Peach apologizes, seeing the expression on their faces, but it is law.

At this point, one of the council members, an older Toad, a strict expression and frown on his face, states if the brothers are to live in the Mushroom Kingdom, despite their past deeds and heroics they must adhere to the kingdoms laws and learn them. Ignorance and failure to comply will not be tolerated. Luigi quickly steps forward saying they were unaware and didn't mean to cause trouble. 

Seeing the way the brothers have their fingers tightly clasped together since their arrival; Adding on, the older Toad states that other laws in particular the bros should be aware of is anti incest laws. (Such relationships are heavily frowned upon, equally as taboo and illegal as back in Mario and Luigi's old home in Brooklyn). Upon, hearing this, Mario and Luigi quickly release their hands, not being able to help blushes of embarrassment darkening their faces. All Luigi can do is nervously nod, while Mario resists the urge to ball his fists in anger. Were they not even allowed any semblance of physical affection either? Mario and Luigi had always comforted each other through soft and gentle physical touches - hugs, holding hands, kisses to the cheek and temple, and most of all forehead touches.

Walking down from her throne, Peach puts a hand on both bros shoulders, much to the chargin of the council, saying that what happened is okay and not their fault. She should have explained all this to them from the start when they decided to move here from Brooklyn. Despite her kind words and reassuring smile, another council member speaks up reminding the brothers once again, that regardless, ignorance and failure to comply won't be tolerated. No one is exempt. It would do well to remember that. Bowing quickly, Luigi apologizes again and says they will remove the fire flower garden immediately. Mario stays silent all throughout, trying to keep his emotions in check. It was quite clear the position they were in as he looked straight at the strict and firm faces of the royal Toad council.

With that, Peach states this was all that needed to be discussed and walks the boys to the front doors, one hand on each of the brothers back, once more apologizing to them they had to come all the way to the castle for such an uncomfortable reason. Luigi smiles and tells her not to worry about it. He and Mario know she was unhappy with the situation as well, as another apologetic and sympathetic look crosses her face. The three say their farewells.

Once back inside the castle walls, the Toad council berate the princess for being so familiar with the two plumbers. Regardless, as their unofficial status as soldiers, she is a princess and customs must be followed. Next time, Mario and Luigi will be also be expected to learn and follow etiquette guidelines when meeting with and addressing the princess. Furthermore, the discussion of their roles in defending the MK need to be discussed and officially decided upon if they are to be so close to royal affairs. Peach can only inwardly sigh and shake her head at the strict regulations. She likes and trusted the brothers after everything that has happened since their sudden appearance in their world.

All throughout walking back to their small home, both Mario and Luigi are silent. Each processing what they were told at the summons. 

With everything that has happened since their arrival in the MK it feels like the brothers had hardly time to rest. They are still getting comfortable with their names and faces being known throughout the kingdom. It seems wherever they go, looks and whispers abound ever since both accidently fell through and became seperated via the green pipe that connected this world to their old home in Brooklyn. Furthermore, after Luigi's capture by Bowser and Mario's quest to find and save him and Bowser's subsequent defeat by them using the Superstar, it wasn't long before another skirmish with the Darklands’ king and new enemies (the Boos) occurred. 

Luigi can't help, but worriedly glance at his brother, who has yet to utter a single word, eyebrows narrowed. His brother tended to become silent when stressed, angered or overwhelmed. He wanted so much to hold his hand again, but refrained from doing so, the council's words still echoing in his mind, another blush threatening to cross his face. The thought of he and his big brother being something more… It was a ridiculous notion. Sure, they had always been close, even closer still after all that had happened living in the MK. And Luigi couldn't imagine not having his big brother by his side. Still, them together like that it was impossible, yet his traitorous heart beat faster at the thought.

Finally, arriving at the privacy of their home, Luigi quietly asks, ‘Mario are you okay?’ Mario who had been facing away from Luigi quickly turns, surprising Luigi with a sudden fierce hug. It only takes a second for the surprise to fade and Luigi instantly relaxes, nuzzling his face into the crook of Mario's neck, rubbing his hands up and down Mario's back in a comforting gesture.

“I don't care what those Council members said. They're not going to stop me from showing my love to you like I always have.” Heart dangerously racing once more at his big brother's words, Luigi tightens his grip on Mario. “But we'll get in trouble,” whispers Luigi. Gently pushing Luigi back to look him in the eye, hands on his shoulders, Mario speaks, “We're not doing anything wrong. We've always comforted each other this way. So, why should we stop because of some stuffy Toads and laws?” Now, moving his hands to gently rest on his brothers cheeks, Mario just as gently guides Luigi's head to his, foreheads touching, never taking his blue eyes off his baby brother's same colored eyes. “Being affectionate isn't illegal.” Luigi can't help but close his eyes and nuzzle a cheek to his brother's strong, but always so gentle and warm hands, a sigh of content at the physical contact and the pleasant warmth it always spreads throughout his being.

Opening his eyes again, Luigi can't help but want to be even closer with his brother, fully aware and conscious of how close their faces are, each word his brother had spoken, he could feel the warmth of his breaths over his own lips. However, pushing those feelings down and wishing he could stay like this for a while longer, the single focus of his big brother's loving gaze, Luigi addresses the problem at hand. “I think we still need to get rid of the fire flower garden.” With a click of his tongue, Mario finally releases his brothers face and turns around sighing. “You're right. It seems we can't avoid that,” states the older twin, running one hand through his hair. 

“I'm sorry, big brother. I really wanted to do something nice for you.” Quickly turning back around, Mario grabs Luigi's hands into his own. “I know and it isn't your fault.” Both of them had really thought that the idea Luigi had come up with for a fire flower garden, a beautiful sight of this world's natural wonder and emergency supply of power ups, had been a great idea. Thinking about how it was supposed to be cared for by him and not just to bring both of them a sense of security, but especially as a way to bring his big brother comfort after his capture at the hands of King Boo, Luigi's fingers squeeze Mario's hands in another show of apology and comfort. Mario can only smile sadly. The garden Luigi had tended to really was beautiful. Almost as beautiful as the field of wild fire flowers he witnessed when he had desperately sought to rescue the person he loved the most.

Despite the bros feeling a bit down trodden at the unexpected turn of events, they know there is no other choice, but to dismantle the garden. Luigi reassures Mario to rest and that he'll be the one to get rid of the Fire Flowers. “Are you sure?” Asks the other in a quiet tone. Nodding, Luigi simply states he wants his big brother to relax and rest. Mario needs to recuperate his strength after the traumatic experience of being trapped within a frame. Not to mention being the target yet again by powerful enemies who would love nothing more than to see them both, especially Mario, out of the way. Luigi will be okay with this task. With one last look into his twin's eyes, Mario places a soft kiss to his forehead, before retiring to their shared room.

Thus, knees down in the dirt, Luigi starts to rip out each fire flower from the ground, the heat they emit, even from the stems, engulfing his hands, yet never stinging or uncomfortably hot. As the green plumber places each one in a bucket of cool water he had brought and placed next to him to sadly extinguish their bright glow and power; Luigi is all too aware of the neighbor Toads eyes on him the entire time. Their whispers back, reaching his ears.

“It seems even the kingdom's hero got lectured for planting those fire flowers.” 

“Yeah, didn't they know it's not permitted?”

“It's odd both don't seem bothered or even suffer small blisters from being in contact with the flowers so much. It's not natural.”

“For being a coward, the younger brother doesn't seem to have any trepidation of using power ups either. I heard, both brothers found the prospect wielding their powers exciting.”

“Magic shouldn't come so easily. Even the royal family must practice and train from a young age to get a good grasp on its control.”

“An affinity for magic is a dangerous thing. I heard the younger brother like the older has his own affinities, but they seem more… problematic.”

With all these words, Luigi only sighs, now knowing why the neighbors had looked shocked to see him and Mario daring to cultivate these power ups. How could it be that in a lush world brimming with wondrous magic that people could only dream about back in their old world, could be talked about in such a hushed and taboo way?

With unease filling him, Luigi holds one fire flower close to his heart, part of him longing to at least be able to preserve one in secret and present it to his brother as a gift. It's what he had wanted with the garden after all - to console, to reassure, to show his love for his precious brother. The person he cared for most in the world, who deserved everything and more. But with eyes and whispers following them still, even now, Luigi knows it's a futile attempt. Word could reach back to the palace just like however it had already. It seems gestures of security and love through a simple garden would not be granted even to the supposed hailed heroes of the Mushroom Kingdoom.

So, with this au. The timeline of events up to this point are as follows:

- The Super Mario Bros Movie

- Another battle with Bowser soon following after the events of the movie.

- Mario has some skirmishes with the Boos resulting in King Boo wanting revenge on him.

- Luigi's Mansion.

- Mario and Luigi being summoned by the council and whispers of Toads throughout all this despite their heroics because of their apt usage in power ups.

I definitley, do have more ideas and do want to add a few other games following this timeline of events. Though, I need to polish these ideas and add more details.

I just really wanted to explore the potential of political drama, mistrust and fear of magic even with regards to the heroes, in this case Mario and Luigi. Plus we need more mariocest ;D Again the potential of drama and angst are too good.

Hope you guys liked this! Let me know what you think! :)

[winns-stuff]

LO RANT:

Okay this is the anticipated rant you’ve all been waiting for cause I’m just over it really, yes I’d like to see how this shit ends but am I going to entertain it more? Yes and no. I’m sorry but my favorite characters (LO’s most wanted) are still in the comic and at this point I feel like they’re being held hostage and I want them freed immediately they don’t deserve to be locked up in this social experiment that is the relationship of Persephone and Hades.

The biggest hugest gripe I have with this whole thing is that.. I just don’t get the point of anything leading up to this. What was the point in the whole “Hwades!!! I want indepwendence, I want mwy own life and I want a nwormal relationship!!” speech that Persephone gave us after the Kronos battle? What was the point of after days of Persephone continually trying to remind Hades of her boundaries every single day while being constantly ignored and put on the back burner just so Hades can continue implanting all of his wishes and dreams onto her without even discussing any of it. There was no point in trying to develop that plot line if there wasn’t going to be a plot anyways, it was just incredibly annoying.

This just raises another thing I absolutely despise about their relationship, and I feel like I’m a broken record because I keep saying the same thing over and over again but their relationship is so incredibly stupid. Like I feel like Rachel is just adding “romantic” things in the comic while ignoring the actual context. Persephone has just been crowned Queen of the Underworld which should’ve been a much bigger deal to everyone involved because we don’t know if she’s capable and we don’t even know if she wanted to be queen. Before this she was just the goddess everyone knew and now she’s queen of a whole realm, she’s not a dumb village girl and she has the power to control things now. This should’ve been a much bigger point in the story, why even introduce the fact that she’s queen now when obviously it seems like she doesn’t even care about the title. Why is her first thought getting an apartment? Why is she more worried about shopping than her literal royal duty?? Why is she more concerned with sex rather than being the ruler of the Underworld? That’s like if you fought this intense battle and won just to be made president of the country all in one day, you’re going to feel some changes and there’s gonna be pressure but we don’t even get that from Persephone because she’s too worried about the little things with Hades that they’ve already been doing.

This brings me to my next point, the whole romance thing is so incredibly lackluster and underwhelming and you wanna know why? Because there’s absolutely zero stakes and tension between them. Oh wow, Hades and Persephone got engaged? That’s totally not surprising at all and I’m completely shocked. With the way they treat each other it feels like they were engaged since they’re first meeting. Ever since the start they were familiar with each other despite being total strangers and meeting under disturbing circumstances, they had obvious feelings for each other and displayed it for everyone to see with help from other characters moving them towards each other for that sole reason, when they became “friends” they were still very flirty and physical and having the comfortability that you would have with your partner of 8 years. You see what I’m getting at? In no point in time was there ever a question if their relationship was ever going to develop or become anything more than flirting and fluff and that’s just so incredibly boring to me. Especially with their dynamic, they both can do no wrong in each other’s eyes and they will continue to place the other on a pedestal. Their relationship is highly disturbing and I hate how it’s marked as healthy, just because you’ve never mistreated your partner physically doesn’t mean that your relationship is healthy. This is a prime example of unhealthy and obsessive relationships.

Another thing I absolutely hate about all of this is how absolutely fucking hypocritical all of this shit is especially with Hades being involved. That was the biggest mistake of the century, why the hell would Hades be defending Persephone from Demeter’s emotional abuse when he does the same exact shit? It’s fucking ridiculous. If this was realistic he’d most likely side with her mainly because he doesn’t see anything wrong about stuff like this cause he does it all the time. This is like an abusive parent trying to argue with another abusive parent about how abusing kids is wrong while continuing to be an abusive piece of shit, you see how the shit doesn’t work? I’d rather see Hestia or even Artemis defend Persephone since let’s be real this whole situation is essentially about them and their group so why would Hades even be there to begin with. The way that Demeter being emotionally abusive towards Persephone is disgusting and terrible (which is completely understandable) but all the times Hades personally humiliated and created such a hostile environment for Thanatos that he literally SHAKES and STUTTERS when he’s in the presence of Hades especially when he’s mad is excused is absolutely horrendous. Honestly with how out of the blue this whole thing is I feel like this is only the first instance of this stuff happening while with Thanatos we’re shown dozens on dozens of chapters where he gets severely mistreated emotionally by Hades and it’s basically a daily thing for him. You have no room to say Demeter is a terrible parent and not bring Hades down with her because there should be no excuse of why Thanatos is absolutely terrified of Hades and how Hades knowing this fact uses it to continuously intimidate and degrade him.

The double standards of this whole thing is incredibly telling as well. Hera literally pressured Persephone into having an extravagant coronation even when Persephone obviously wanted to have a small get together and yet she got pushed down and ignored by Hera and she acted like Persephone was being ridiculous because of her response. I don’t understand why everyone is okay with Hera putting Persephone’s ideas down and not actually respecting her voice or even her title as queen of the Underworld yet when Demeter does the same thing she’s in the wrong for it. I’m not understanding why we aren’t calling out Hera for it as well since they did the exact same thing just framed in different scenes. This is just more reason for me to believe that Rachel really just doesn’t like Demeter and that there’s no actual reason why Persephone and Demeter have a bad relationship because when it comes down to it no one treats her good at all not even Hades. Everyone is a manipulative parent to her and no one gives her the respect that she deserves yet the comic truly wants us to believe that everything is completely fine when the main cast mistreats her yet when it’s Demeter it’s a capital offense.

All I’m saying with this rant is I’m tired of people putting down Demeter for her actions towards Persephone yet instantaneously supporting similar actions made by other characters. It feels like it’s just Lore Olympus vs Demeter at this point because of how extremely immature and underwhelming this whole thing is. Everyone walks all over Persephone and they force her to do things she doesn’t want to, it’s a theme and common scene in this comic I’m tired of everyone acting like only Demeter has ever done it and if I’m being honest with you before this chapter came out Demeter really was the only person who treated Persephone like she was competent, she never babied her or made her feel less than and she valued her well being and happiness. Everyone in her “support” group including Hades denies her access to her full potential by doing and handling everything for her and they obviously don’t think she’s capable of pretty much anything, the way they treat her is really pathetic and it really makes it seem like Persephone has no dignity especially with her peers. Very hard to watch.

[crossdressingdeath]

Looking through the TSatS tag again because I am starving for content to tide me over until May, and I actually love Will snarking about how Nico's never happy in one section but being Very Much Not Amused by the "Are you sure it's not post-traumatic stress disorder?" "My whole life is a disorder!" exchange later, because it fits nicely with one part of their relationship I really love, which is that they drop the constant snark and bickering the moment shit hits the fan. Like, so often with this sort of playfully antagonistic relationship the author keeps the bit going even under circumstances where things are so bad for one or both of the people in the relationship that the bickering really feels more like twisting the knife than an affectionate rapport, but Nico and Will stop bickering in favour of solid, clear support when they need it. It's good shit! In this case Will snarking about Nico never being happy is happening in a pretty lighthearted moment where Nico is happy (or at least as happy as he can be under the generally terrible circumstances that are the beginning of TSatS); it's a joke along the same lines as him calling Nico a Debbie Downer in ToA. On the other hand when he's asking Nico if he's sure that he's not dealing with some pretty severe PTSD rather than magic, that's serious. This is a "Hey, I think you're in pressing need of actual psychological help from the closest thing we've got to a professional because you're clearly doing really bad" conversation. It is not the time for jokes.

I just really like that these two know when to turn the banter off! Leo and Calypso's relationship is a prime example of what happens when a couple or writer doesn't know when to stop with the play fighting before it becomes real fighting, but Nico and Will's is a good example of what happens when they do know when to stop.

[emergency-vehicle]

one of my favourite things about prime is how it showcases scale. rarely do i find a piece of media that accurately depicts the sheer scale of something, especially in relation to a form we are all familiar with.

dune is a good example of media that does it right. every time dune shows one of the buildings or machines, its always on such an awe inducing scale, especially when it comes to their human counterparts. they look like sheer ants in comparison.

it's the same with prime. there are lots of shots where it's just the bots, and because our brains like familiarity, we perceive the bots on a human scale. but every now and again, there is a shot where humans are shown as tiny things compared to these massive pieces of living machinery.

i get this sense less with the kids and more with like fowler or june. they're adults, my size, and they are put in much more intimidating circumstances (dgmw the kids are too, but its different). so when you see the adults next to the bots it's just...a totally different feel.

anyway, i love the artistic direction of transformers prime. while the models leave something to be desired by today's standards, when it came out it truly was top of the line. and, even by today's standards, it's still really fucking good.

[droughtofapathy]

"Welcome to the Theatre": Diary of a Broadway Baby

Mother Play

April 26, 2024 | Broadway | Hayes Theater | Evening | Play | Original | 1H 30M

I am now deeply, and unsurprisingly, in love with Jessica Lange. After so many new and disappointing musicals this month, being able to sit third-row in a smart, well-written, expertly-acted play with no pomp and circumstance is a relief. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel, the play examines her own childhood with a mother who should never have been a mother. Under Jessica Lange's masterful craft, Phyllis is part-Joan Crawford, part Mama Rose. Sympathetic and deplorable, enchanting and repulsive. A prime example of a woman who had motherhood forced on her, and tried to cope, but failed at every turn. Celia Keenan-Bolger, no stranger to embodying child roles as a grown woman, is the playwright's stand-in (here named Martha, not Paula) and carries the show's narrative with the same competence as the character has in packing up a house and moving out when the eviction notice comes. Jim Parsons, also a wonderful performer as Carl, the brother who doesn't survive. The three actors are so well-connected.

The show is comedy and tragedy. Morbid in the best way. The last scene, as a middle-aged Martha takes care of an elderly mother who no longer recognizes her, carried more power and nuance than the entirety of The Notebook's handling of the same disease. Vogel trusts her audience to still have an ounce of critical thought. The biggest example of this is in the play's subtle analysis of Phyllis's own sexuality. Her children, Martha and Carl, are very openly gay. Something that horrifies their mother, who slowly comes around (sort of) as the years pass, only to heartbreakingly not in the end. Martha, the narrator, never once comes out and says "I think my mother might've been a repressed lesbian," but that idea is woven into the entire piece. Phyllis, who is so tactile with her young son, but can't bear to touch her daughter, and who avoids any contact with women. In the end, old and senile, she is bathed by a daughter she thinks is just a nurse at the home. And as Martha drags a damp cloth over her mother's neck and collarbone, across her bare shoulder and down beneath the robe over her breasts, the relief and simple pleasure Phyllis gets out of this touch reveals more than any blatant statement. Jessica Lange's expressions in this moment are mesmerizing. And Celia Keenan-Bolger's just heartbreaking.

There's also something delightful in the way Phyllis, who starts the play at 37 and continues into her seventies, is allowed to visibly age. By the curtain call, Jessica Lange is onstage with her wrinkles and lines and bags visible for all to see, and I love a woman who is allowed to be old on stage.

Verdict: Why I Love the Theatre

A Note on Ratings

[aqueeracademic]

morse being queer (and other commentary) pt 14:

season 4, episode 2, “Canticle”:

- so far this season isn’t very gay 🫤

- i miss jakes ‼️‼️

- SINGGGGG BITCH

- this music video would be a target pride ad tbh

- don’t even try to say i’m wrong

- wait isn’t this episode super gay?

- IT IS

- omg

- get ready for me to go absolutely ballistic

- character hasn’t even introduced himself yet and we r already seeing his entire ass

- also can this lady stfu?

- “‘kiss me.’” “what?!”

- morse panicking every time theres even a suggestion of physically intimacy is so….

- anyways

- as someone who grew up in colorado, i forget constantly that weed has ever been illegal

- the way morse looks at the younger brother when he meets the band

- clocks the queer and is immediately interested 🥰

- i actually have 0 clue if that’s the gay one i’m just guessing

- “never did anything for me.”

- thursday smokes pot and listens to the grateful dead is my new hc for him

- “you ever tried it?” “i’m a serving police officer!” MORSE U ARE LAME BOO BOO BOO

- “you put enough beer away.”

- TELL EM THURSDAY

- “beer is brain food.”

- YOU TELL EM MORSE

- [i am fully joking. smoking is bad for you, and i would never encourage it under any circumstances. i would also never shame anyone for partaking. i do vouch for the legalization of drugs such as marijuana and shrooms tho. just do what u wanna do!]

- i love summertime because they’re all walking around in just their shirt sleeves 🥰

- thursday and morse just laughing at this lady is so real of them

- the daughter immediately becoming attracted to morse because of how he talks to her mom is the realest shit i’ve ever seen

- i am obsessed with The Wildwood

- like i said in the tiger episode, the episodes where a woman is guilty are always more interesting and this one is the PRIME example

- let’s not pretend like loads of rock songs aren’t based on poetry

- they could have been onto something 🙄🙄

- this band is a bunch of 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

- debryn choking morse ???????

- like okay

- pressing up against his back and shit

- i love these two together

- given the marching band coats they’re all wearing i wanna say this band is supposed to represent the beatles during their sergeant pepper days which had me wondering which of the beatles this writer thinks is gay

- joy pettybon is SO ANNOYING 🙄🙄

- this song is an absolute banger

- so basically the position the gay guy has in the band is the same as john lennon for the most part

- so this writer thinks john is a lil 💅

- and i respect that

- however!

- the english band that was supposed to tour with the kinks and got denied their visas was the Moody Blues so they could be referencing that band also

- THURSDAY IS SO MEAN

- pettybon’s daughter is kinda…

- jk

- free her from this hell tho!

- the way he goes 🤫 at her after she asks him not to tell about the cigarette

- i’m obsessed w him 😭

- the way her talking about homosexuals is not even an outdated argument

- like

- we have not progressed

- props to this guy for standing up for himself and other queer people

- and i hate that nick is the one she said all that homophobic shit to directly

- i know morse hated her ass

- “he’s a pervert” SHUT UR BITCHASS UP

- as a gay, i can guarantee you gay people want nothing to do w ur dirty ass kids

- “it was about love. she said it was dirty. how can love be dirty?” “well if it isn’t then i suspect you aren’t doing it right.”

- HES FUCKING GAY

- this man jessop is talking about writing about the queer experience and wondering how it can be dirty and morse tells him that if it isn’t a little bit then he isn’t doing it right

- that’s like a quadruple entendre

- he’s fucking queer and that line alone proved it to me

- also good on him for telling joy her supporters got violent with jessop

- she’s a bitch

- her performative goodwill-doing is SO ACCURATE

- HOW HAVE WE NOT PROGRESSED???

- oh this bettina girl is a hoe

- good for her!

- morse instinctively straightening up when he decided to have a drink w her 💀💀

- he’s such a whore

- this girl straight up called his life sad because he’s alone 😭😭😭

- like she’s right but goddam girl

- “you seem lonely”

- FINAL STRAW

- death by chocolate is so wild

- the way she catches morse’s eye the day after and he just looks away 😬

- “the threat was made against you. so far as i can see, you’re still here.”

- GO MORSE GO

- the way morse smiles while jessop goes off about pettybon

- and the way that after they accuse him he looks to morse

- people go to morse for comfort in every scenario i hate it here

- OMFG I HATE JOY

- her daughter has NO FRIENDS and sought comfort in an older man via CONVERSATION because her father died and she’s projecting and her mom slaps her across the face for it

- like what the fuck 😀

- i. hate. her.

- the way nick is mourning a lover this entire episode and we don’t know until the very end

- and the way that queer people had to mourn silently for lovers, dead or alive, just because they couldn’t be together

- and people still now have to do that

- i’m sick.

- this is my favorite episode if you couldn’t tell

- combines my two favorite things

- gay people and the 1960s progressive movement via its ties to rock music and bands

- like i live for this shit

- also detectives

- i love a detective

- “comparing his [nick’s] lyrics to james joyce and oscar wilde” AKA TWO QUEER AUTHORS (joyce was only alleged it’s never been proven)

- like how did people not clock him as a homosexual

- tf?

- trewlove is so real for being a serious police officer and genuinely a genius while also being a boy band fan

- the reverend literally shit himself to death

- i’m not laughing 😐😐

- morse listening to rock and roll agenda ‼️‼️‼️

- nah this girl is wild for showing up to his flat

- him letting her in is even crazier

- his face when he says “no more than usual” IM SCREAMING

- why is he so 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️

- i’m gonna lose my mind over him

- her asking him if she’s gonna burn in hell and him being like 🫤 like girl he does not believe in hell

- YOU WHAT

- “i love you” GIRL WHAT?????????

- his face

- boy said

- 😮😧

- “there’s someone else” GIRL U WERE NOT EVEN ON THE ROSTER

- “nick wrote it about me”

- girl….

- and then says she’s not allowed to go to the Enchanted Place but fully lets morse go

- like queen

- she looked at nick and said I Know What You Are and then committed murder over it

- so wild!

- PLEASE IM DYING

- bro gets offered a drink and says no SO aggressively

- trying not to catch the sleeping with suspects allegations out here

- nick reaching for his drink the second barry comes up 😭😭

- i feel so bad for this kid 😀 but i’m normal about it i swear 😀

- “don’t you want to expand your mind?” translates directly to “i know ur gay and u should act on it”

- “you ever tried em [mushrooms]?” “only as part of an english breakfast.”

- and then BOTH OF THEM GIGGLING?????

- morse couldn’t help but flirt huh

- i hate him

- and then smiling at him genuinely and asking him about his interests???

- hello.

- PLEASE THE SMILE WHILE NICK EXPLAINS WHATS BEYOND THE DOOR

- AND THE WAY HIS FACE DROPS WHEN NICK SAYS “infinite love”??????

- he figures it out really early on he just didn’t want to out him

- i stand by that

- “there is no shame. no guilt.”

- and morse finally breaks eye contact and looks away??????

- this scene is so inherently queer

- and then nick finally breaking down over barry 😭😭😭😭

- and morse is just not judgmental

- he KNOWS what happened between them 😐 and he won’t out nick 😐

- i’m normal about this episode 😀

- morse refusing to look at her naked 😧 sir i need you to be normal

- “Well, i hope you’ve arrested him. Dudley Jessop. He’s an abomination in the eyes of our lord.”

- “Strangely enough, the police training manual omits to mention abominations.”

- i just want to point out that no one in this entire show defends queer people the way morse does and i feel like it’s really telling

- just like jessop, he stands up for queer people

- they are comparing the two of them

- and they juxtapose him to nick while also making it clear that there’s something similar between them

- like HELLO????

- wake up.

- writing my dissertation about this episode

- anyways ‼️

- “Thankfully, Thursday and I can remember a time when people were decent.”

- the way morse looks absolutely disgusted by her

- i love him

- morse is literally celebrating in his mind when this lady gets arrested

- he’s so fucking happy 💀

- “he’s hiding something.”

- once again, i fully believe that morse KNOWS that nick is queer

- he knows that nick was with barry

- but he refuses to out him

- morse going back to nick’s spot because he knows where he goes to escape is so…

- morse just understands the queer people in this show and i’m obsessed w it

- nick 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

- justice for my boy!

- his brother is so real for keeping the girls away from him

- this girl is FUCKED for fully melting his brain to cover for herself

- i hate her

- debryn is awfully aware of the culture surrounding acid 🤨

- anything you’d like to tell us doctor?

- i like thursday referencing cain and abel

- makes u think it might have been the brother’s doing

- but no!

- i love a lil red herring

- morse finding the proof of nick’s relationship with barry 😬

- he can’t keep it on the dl now

- how unfortunate

- always sucks when ur fellow gays are tied up in murder 🙄

- “it was what he deserved.”

- GET HER BETTINA

- saying that someone deserved to die because of how they were “carrying on”???????

- ma’am

- you married a gay man

- it’s as simple as that

- there’s no need for all this hatred

- just divorce and move on there’s no need to drive people to end it all

- “she’ll be back.” “no. she won’t.”

- GET HER THURSDAY!!!!

- trewlove being a fan of boy bands is the ONLY reason morse solved this case so here’s a shoutout to all my boy band girlies out there!

- it’s me. i am the boy band girlie

- morse’s freckles 🥰🥰🥰

- the lemonade was already spiked when he drank it which means that girl was tripping ballsack and speaking completely normally

- good for her

- he drank so much 💀💀💀

- bro is about to meet god

- ope i was wrong

- nick is bisexual

- bisexual awareness!!

- OSCAR WILDE APPRECIATION

- morse being privy to the contents of a book about… actually i won’t say 🤨

- the book is called Justine by de Sade

- if ur curious

- the contents are sensitive tho so be wary

- ANYWAYS

- i always appreciate queer people from that period using oscar wilde as a means of communication or identifying other queer people

- and the fact that morse knows that off the top of his head…

- oh my god

- chris and nick 💀

- what all of you don’t know is that i assumed chris was the gay one at the beginning of the episode because i couldn’t remember which of them was gay

- and i wrote in these notes that it was him

- and then went back and deleted it because i was wrong and it was nick

- BUT I WAS FUCKING CORRECT

- CHRIS IS QUEER TOO

- i’m losing my mind

- just like morse is about to 🥰

- morse having a bad trip is so unfortunate

- it would b interesting to see him have a good trip and change his entire perspective on drugs tbh

- except that he has an addictive personality

- so it’s actually good he had a bad trip and will never even attempt drugs again!

- we won ladies

- his waist is soO SNATCHED

- morse 🥺🥺

- i don’t wanna know what he was hallucinating but yes i do

- because i’m a nosy bitch.

- “he went to hell and back.”

- thursday gets it

- morse in a wife beater agenda‼️‼️🗣️

- “what day is it?” “corned beef.” “it’s friday.”

- I LOVE THEM OH MY GOD

- i hate it here

- there’s no way that pillow is comfy

- why is it up so high

- oh my god he’s so fine

- GOOD FOR YOU BETTINA

- nah joan is foul for calling him and then not saying anything

- absolutely foul.

- to be quite honest i’m not sure i can forgive her after this little plot point

- so for anyone who isn’t privy to tarot card meanings:

- the hanged man, upright, means the person is experiencing sacrifice and martyrdom. this is obviously applicable to morse as he is very self sacrificial. martyrdom is typically defined as suffering or death to obtain sympathy; this can be applied to morse as he is intentionally being made to suffer by the people around him and it is causing people to swarm to him. we will see more of this in the future.

- the lovers, upright, represents duality and union as well as an important relationship. it is interesting that they chose to display this card upright given he keeps losing people he loves and the card in reverse (representing loss of balance and disharmony) would be more fitting. it does mean, though, that he could be seeing a relationship coming into his life that will provide him balance and unity

[lord-squiggletits]

Anyways. For all the aspiring authors out there, if you want to write a really epic and cool story where character agency matters and things happen as a consequence of people's actions, don't have the epic plot twist of your story be "this character who fucking died on screen in a very unmistakable fashion actually didn't die, he just went back in time to machinate the entire history of this story, literally everything that happened including major political/cultural revolutions was his machination, everything that has ever happened ever was his doing and btw he's the antagonist of this plot line again" because it's shit writing and it basically makes the entire storyline pointless.

Like, in a lot of my IDW OP posts I've harped a lot about character agency and how it's better for a character to have agency and be responsible for some bad things happening than for them to be responsible for nothing and be boring as a result, and it's the same principle here.

If you ass-pull such a massive retcon to the plotline of your story, making it so that EVERYTHING THAT'S HAPPENED is the result of One Guy in a convoluted man-behind-the-man-behind-the-man-behind-the-man plot, then you're just going to render the entire storyline pointless to your readers because. Okay so if everything that's ever happened is this one guy's fault, doesn't that render the actions of every other character in the story futile? Like, sure they technically made all of their choices of their own will, but the entirety of history and the circumstances of the planet were engineered by this one guy and they were all just helplessly playing into his plans so like.... Doesn't that basically make everything that happens in the story pointless?

Like. Especially since in the example I'm vagueposting about (Onyx Prime = Shockwave in the OP series), a few of the fundamental themes of the entire story center around things like responsibility, privilege, the way that good intentions =/= good consequences, the way that personal bias can influence the way that people think. Not to mention all of the crazy socio-political things going on and the genuinely touching things like, idk, a miner doing his best to change the system of Fuctionism, or a veteran from Cybertronian pre-history regretting the fact that she participated in xenophobic genocide. The entire story of IDW1 is full of BIG characters with big impacts big responsibility for what happens.

And you're telling me that the best fucking plot twist Barber could come up with for this continuity is "yeah Shockwave didn't actually die (even though he got shot in the chest by two people at once and then sucked into a black hole and got no medical intervention whatsoever) he just went back in time and IN FACT ALL OF CYBERTRONIAN HISTORY HAS BEEN HIS MACHINATION" like. Okay I guess the Primacy doesn't matter because Shockwave machinated that for his own purposes, I guess colonialism doesn't matter because Shockwave machinated that for his own purposes, I guess Nova Prime and Galvatron and the Guiding Hand and all of them just went exploring/colonizing as part of Shockwave's master plan, I guess the corrupt Senate with all its cool/underappreciated evil Senators was just all part of Shockwave's master plan, Megatron's writing and the existence of the Decepticons trying to rebel against functionism was all of Shockwave's master plan, in fact literally every part of Cybertronian history and myth and culture was engineered by Shockwave for his own nefarious purposes!!!!!!!

And his purposes were pretty much....................... "because I wanted to be evil and make people give up on hope because I love chaos" like okay bitch then why did I even get invested in this entire years-long continuity if you were just gonna pull a "actually everything happened specifically because of this one guy" plot twist on me?

Like the Functionist Universe is annoying but at least it's an alternate universe whose existence doesn't retcon THE ENTIRETY OF THE CONTINUITY at the last fucking minute of the entire story years after the majority of the comics were written, come the fuck on.

[agent-bash]

Would you be willing to provide examples of where morals have to be put aside for ethics?

How many do you want?

Under the cut because, well...yeah.

Mass casualty events. Victim Triage. It's not easy to black-tag anyone. Let alone someone who, if circumstances were different, we would be rushing like hell to the hospital with. But circumstances aren't different, and we have too many victims and not enough time or resources in the field and/or at the hospital to treat them in this instance.

Evacuate immediately calls. Chicago Fire has actually done this quite well a few times. We might hear you, we might see you, we might be on our way to you. Then the call comes. All companies pull back. Evacuate immediately. Then there is no minute, no second. I can't save you; as much as I want to, I can't. I have to leave, or we both die.

Then, there are the patients themselves—how they are as people, what they've done in their lives, or what they've done to get to this moment where they need our help.

Drunk drivers are a prime and probably our most frequent example of this. Sure, they may have just wiped out a family because of their stupidity and selfishness. You might, according to your own morals, think at that moment, 'Let the head lac bleed,' 'Let them feel the pain of their broken,' well, ethically, I can't do that; I still have to treat them to the same standard of care I would anyone else. Even if I might agree morally with you, in that moment.

Convicts. I've had to treat criminals. People whose injuries may or may not be seen as poetic justice for the crimes they were convicted of by some. People who, when others hear about may not or may not have asked, 'Why didn't you just let them bleed? That's what I would have done.' Well again, your morals are yours, mine are mine, and they may or may not line up. Ethically, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what they've done. It doesn't matter if I think they're the lowest of scum. It doesn't matter if I agree with poetic justice or not. I still have to treat them to the utmost of my ability.

The list goes on.

Again, morals are the reason for ethics. If we as a society lived by our morals rather than ethics, it'd be the Purge.

[bohanzhaoblog]

Heartfelt voice-How our lived experiences shape ourselves-3

Trevor Noah's friendship with Andrew is a prime example of how lived circumstances can shape one's development. Noah learned from Andrew's privileged background, gaining insights beyond formal education. As Noah reflects, "I realized you need someone from the privileged world to come to you."

But Noah's bond with his mother, Patricia, molded a different perspective on education. Despite apartheid's challenges, Patricia's determination emphasized the value of learning. Noah shares, "I always believed that education was the key to breaking barriers and overcoming our circumstances." Her resilience instilled in him a powerful drive to excel.

My experiences in China echo the influence of lived experiences. In China, students usually need to attend additional tutoring classes to improve their grades to enter their desired schools, rather than solely relying on personal efforts. Moreover, educational resources are unequally distributed across different regions, making it challenging for students in remote areas to access high-quality education, while large cities often have well-established educational systems and training methods. This situation results in many talented Chinese students being unable to fully realize their potential due to their circumstances.

In many parts of the world, whether you were born in a villa or a slum almost determines your future. Wealth is the insurmountable gap between poor students and higher education. But even so, there are someone helping individuals navigate a more inclusive and equitable path forward, and those individuals are trying their best to help themselves to break away from the shackles of the original environment as well.

Maybe one day, every child can start on the same starting line, everyone can use their talents, do what they want and like and are expert in. Instead of being shackled in the chains of "origin",

I hope that will be tomorrow.

[celestefox13]

All of them have at least a group that they do approve of saving. However, they're also characters that are extremely aware of a proverbial time limit on their lives and would very much like to focus on not dying. Which, fair, dying would definitely not be great.

Zevran approves of saving elves and the mages because he empathizes with their plights, especially in terms of the alternative being that they're catching the short end for no reason other than existing, the same way he did. However, stopping to help each and every passerby is, in his mind, a bit of a practice in futility. On top of that, there are examples of him drawing the line in arguably weird places, in example: he's against killing the mages but then is for supporting Branka against Caradin, even if you ask what goes into making golems; he approves of multiple outcomes in Honnleath, most of the ones that net approval from him end with the dad or the girl being possessed by a demon, but then also approves of just killing Connor in Redcliffe.

Fenris approves of killing slavers and freeing slaves because he of course he disapproves of slavery, as well should we all. However, he also makes clear that he's playing a waiting game with the goal of killing his master, not really focused on anyone else's struggles outside of Hawke making them the group's business. Would he probably still go down to Darktown and the Docks and end slavers in the night? Probably. But traveling with Hawke means he also ends up entangled with the Templar-Mage fight, where he disapproves every time you help the mages, regardless of the circumstances. Personally, I find his apathy to helping anyone who asks really just because he has nothing better to do than sit around his stolen house drinking and dancing choregraphed number among corpses he just won't toss out for some reason.

Astarion strikes a middle ground between the two. He's not totally apathetic to the struggles of other beings, and some of them he empathizes with. However, he's got 2 time crunches against his life and/or sanity to contend with, at minimum, and spending the first time he's been able to do what he wants solving other people's problems of course feels like a waste of that precious time. What's the point of that supposed good feeling if he ends up a Mindflayer cause the side quest for random child 35 took just that little bit too long? But then at the same time he approves of adopting the orphan owl bear cub. He approves of telling Lae'zel to get out of the zaith'isk, and of defending Karlach when you first meet her. He does approve of murdering a lot of others, for sure, but he's got approvals for good deeds too.

Even Lae'zel and Morrigan aren't truly out to ignore people or be mean to them just for the sake of it. They just think the bigger picture/final goal matters more and should be the only/prime focus. They think that side quests are taking time away from preparing/getting the job done, and that there's no time to help each and every person you come across.

It's just a piece of my take on the characters and you absolutely don't have to agree as that's part of interpretation and reaction to media. However, I hope that where my thought process is coming from is at least a bit more clear now

Playing as a mostly good-alignment Tav that romances Astarion really does just feel like romancing Zevran and Fenris all over again. Like,

• Yes, we are going to be helping this rando

• No, we're not ignoring them just because you disapprove

• Yes, we're looting the place of just about everything we can carry

• No, we're not leaving the problem boss/other rando/enemy alive

• Yes, you can have the item we got for helping the rando

• No, I'm not going to say "I told you so" about you feeling good about us helping the rando

And all the approval rollercoaster movements that go with each of those decisions are steps to a dance I've done before and will do again without hesitation

[blackswaneuroparedux]

ltdan2288 asked: As a fellow veteran of the Afghan Campaign, might I ask if you have any thoughts about the imminent end of Allied air support & combat-advisory operations over there? The fall of large swaths of the country to the Taliban is already underway, which can only be seen as an unspeakable tragedy for the people there. From a strategic perspective, there’s no reason to believe that we won’t have to return in some capacity of AQ or ISIS reestablish themselves under Taliban sponsorship. At the same time, it’s not clear to me that our presence did anything beyond kick the can down the road and delay this inevitable outcome. As someone with such a deep knowledge of military history, I’m curious if you have a different perspective.

I have been avoiding answering this post for a while now because Afghanistan dredges up so many conflicting emotions inside me. I wrestle with so many memories of my time there with my regiment to fight in a war that we all didn’t really understand what we were fighting for.

Deep breath.

Almost two decades of conflict in Afghanistan has cost British taxpayers £22.2billion, or $31.3 billion according to UK government figures. As British troops prepare to leave Afghanistan, the 20-year deployment bill could be even higher. As of May 2021, the total cost of Operation Herrick (codename for the deployment of British soldiers to Helmand province) is £22.2billion. There were 457 fatalities on, or subsequently due to, Op Herrick. Of which 403 were due to hostile action. During the operation between January 1, 2006 and November 30, 2014, there were 10,382 British service personnel casualties. Of these 5,705 were injuries and the remainder being illness or disease. The UK’s remaining 750 troops in Afghanistan, involved in training local forces, started exiting the war-devastated country in May. Most of them will return home by the end of July.

They, like every one of us who went to fight in Afghanistan, will ask the same questions, ‘Why did we go there?’ ‘What was the real purpose of the mission?’ ‘Was it worth it?’

Both my older brothers fought there with special distinction and I later fought there too. I have very mixed emotions when I think about my time in Afghanistan. For all its faults and tortured history, I love that country and love its many ethnic people. I even started to learn Pashtu as I already had a spoken command of Urdu because I had been raised partly in both Pakistan and India and it’s where many Afghan refugees living in the UN camps for over a generation had learned Urdu too.

It’s not just that my family has history in Afghanistan going back to the days of the East India Company but I had a sincere respect for its culture and history as one of the central hot spots for great civilisational achievements, but also as a stubborn and unruly country who proudly defied the Great Powers to bend the knee and turned it into a ‘graveyard of empires’. Most of all I think of the friendships I made there and how my perspective on life changed as a consequence of knowing such resilience and fortitude in the face of catastrophe and death.

I’m sure like everyone else I wasn’t too surprised by President Biden’s announcement that he was announcing the imminent withdrawal of all American troops in Afghanistan. He wanted to pivot to something else when asked about it. “I want to talk about happy things, man!” He said. Who could begrudge him given that America has been at war in Afghanistan for a better part of 20 years and has nothing to really show for it. Except of course the loss of its brave service men and women as well as the death of thousands of Afghan civilians. It spent more than $2 trillion to kill Osama bin Laden, the architect behind 9/11 attacks and failed to convincingly snuff out both murderous terror groups, Al Qaeda and ISIS.

When the Secretary General of Nato announced back in April 2021 all alliance troops were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan, it was made to look like a nice, clean, enunciation of a joint decision. The end date was set for 11 September, 2021 - 20 years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington - and it was in line with the oft-repeated alliance maxim: we went in together; we will come out together. Except that, on closer examination, it was all rather messier.

This was partly because the withdrawal from Afghanistan had actually been Trump’s policy, so here was Joe Biden, the anti-Trump, co-opting a policy from his predecessor (a policy Trump had been so keen on that he tried to accelerate the withdrawal after he lost the election). Biden then tried to detach it from Trump by slowing down the withdrawal date a little and expressing it in terms more comprehensible to the Washington establishment and to US allies.

Where Trump had essentially done a deal with the Taliban and set a withdrawal date of 1 May, Biden left the Taliban out of it and invoked the totemic date of 9/11. This does not mean, of course, that the withdrawal will not be completed a good deal sooner - once you announce a withdrawal, you might as well get on with it.

In fact, Biden had to make a decision one way or another, given the rapid approach of Trump’s 1 May withdrawal date. And, whether it came from Washington or Nato, it was pretty low key for an announcement that a 20-year military involvement that had cost 4,000 allied lives was ending. Indeed, many people beyond Washington and Afghanistan might not quite have registered the news, given the considerable noises from Nato’s simultaneous dire warnings about Russia massing troops on the Ukrainian border, the death of the Duke of Edinburgh in the UK, and the Covid pandemic everywhere.

And distractions were needed not just because Biden was implementing a Trump policy. It was also because he was ordering an unconditional withdrawal – which he justified, correctly, by saying that setting preconditions would mean that the troops could be there forever. It was a risk Biden knew all too well, given that Barack Obama had been persuaded by General David Petraeus – against his election pledges and his better judgement – that what Obama really wanted was not a withdrawal, but a ‘surge’ with conditions attached before a withdrawal could take place.

Distractions were also useful for London, where the timing was hardly ideal. Imagine you were in government in London, you had watched the dismal failure of the UK’s Herrick operations in Helmand Province between 2006 and 2014, you knew that your armed forces had suffered 456 deaths in 20 years, with many more severely injured, but you had hung on in there.

Your government had also just released a blueprint for foreign and security policy, setting future priorities even further from home, in the Indo-Pacific, and your Prime Minister was about to make a high-profile visit to India as part of his post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ branding . In those circumstances, an announcement that the US had decided to leave Afghanistan, giving you no choice but to follow, was almost exactly what you did not need. Rather than showing the UK as a powerful, autonomous military actor and a valued ally, it showed the exact opposite.

It also reminded an unhappy British public about a costly conflict it had rather forgotten. And those who did more than bother to remember - like the families who lost loved ones on the battlefield - and who over the years have blamed successive governments for moving the goalposts and lacking an exit strategy (all true too).

All of which might explain why the UK’s Foreign and Defence Secretaries followed the US example by changing the subject to the iniquities of Russia and China, rather than issuing a joyous pronouncement to the effect of: hooray and thank goodness, our boys and girls are coming home.

The UK’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter gave a subdued, unenthusiastic response to Biden’s announcement. I cannot remember such open acknowledgement of UK-US military policy friction in recent decades - or such an abject admission by the UK of its defence dependence on the US. What Carter said was that the unconditional withdrawal was ‘not a decision we had hoped for, but we obviously respect it and it is clearly an acknowledgement of an evolving US strategic posture’. In other words, the UK had opposed Biden’s decision – or would have done, if asked (which is not clear). Also, that it was Washington’s ‘strategic posture’ that had ‘evolved’, not the UK’s. He suggested there was a real danger that progress made could be lost and that there could be a return to civil war, with the Taliban maybe returning to power - again, all true.

Given that the UK officially has only 750 troops in Afghanistan at present, and most of them are there in a training capacity, to dissent from the US position so openly would be considered decidedly rude in the Ministry of Defence. Perhaps to that end, General Carter played the dutiful soldier and had to - through gritted teeth - put a positive gloss on Afghanistan’s future, insisting that the objective in going into Afghanistan, ‘to prevent international terrorism emerging from the country’, had been achieved which was ‘great tribute to the work of British forces and their allies’.

He also said that Afghan forces were ‘much better trained than one might imagine’ and that the Taliban ‘is not the organisation it once was’, so that ‘a scenario could play out that is actually not quite as bad as perhaps some of the naysayers are predicting.’ Blah blah blah. He’s wrong, and I think he knows it but only in the sanctity of his gentlemen’s club might he truly admit it.

I know he’s wrong because the chatter amongst ex-veterans I know is that we’ve made a balls up of Afghanistan yet again - by ‘again’ I mean from the past 200 years of us Brits trying to bring order to chaos in Afghanistan and getting burned for our troubles.

Both my father and my older siblings tell me what their friends and ex-service peers (some very senior indeed) have been nattering over a drink at their gentlemen clubs where ex-veterans haunt the club bar. Many just shake their heads in sighed resignation before burying themselves in the Times crossword or drowning their sorrows with a beer or two at how lock in step we’ve become to the Americans at a time when the British army is re-branding itself as a more independent nimble hi-tech impact army (the creation of a new ranger regiment being but one example).

Still if President Biden wanted to tie a neat bow on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan - saying, as he had, that the logic for the war ended once al-Qaida was gutted and Osama bin Laden killed - then it reveals a stunning lack of introspection about the United States’ role in the conflict that will continue in Afghanistan long after the last American and British troops leave.

Less than three months after President Joe Biden declared that the last American troops would be out of Afghanistan by September 11th, the withdrawal is nearly complete. The departure from Bagram air base, an hour’s drive north of the capital, Kabul, in effect marked the end of America’s 20-year war. But that does not mean the end of the war in Afghanistan. If anything, it is only going to get worse.

It is true that the president had no good choice on Afghanistan, and that he inherited a bad deal from his predecessor. There are never good choices when it comes to Afghanistan: only bloody trade offs.

But in announcing an unconditional withdrawal, he made the situation worse by throwing out the minimal conditions U.S. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad had negotiated under the Trump administration. U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has delivered to the Afghan government and Taliban a draft Afghanistan Peace Agreement - the central idea of which is replacing the elected Afghan government with a so-called transitional one that would include the Taliban and then negotiate among its members the future permanent system of government. Crucial blank spaces in the draft include the exact share of power for each of the warring sides and which side would control security institutions.

The refrain now from the Biden administration is that the United States is not abandoning Afghanistan, that it will aim to do right by Afghan women and girls, and that it will try to nudge the Taliban and Kabul toward a peace deal using a diplomatic tool kit.

But the narrative ignores much of the reality on the ground. It also ignores history.

In theory, the Taliban and the American-backed government had been negotiating a peace accord, whereby the insurgents lay down their arms and participate instead in a redesigned political system. In the best-case scenario, strong American support for the government, both financial and military (in the form of continuing air strikes on the Taliban), coupled with immense pressure on the insurgents’ friends, such as Pakistan, might succeed in producing some form of power-sharing agreement.

But even if that were to happen - and the chances are low - it would be a depressing spectacle. The Taliban would insist on moving backwards in the direction of the brutal theocracy they imposed during their previous stint in power, when they confined women to their homes, stopped girls from going to school and meted out harsh punishments for sins such as wearing the wrong clothes or listening to the wrong music.

More likely than any deal, however, is that the Taliban try to use their victories on the battlefield to topple the government by force. They have already overrun much of the countryside, with government units mostly restricted to cities and towns. Demoralised government troops are abandoning their posts. In the first week of July 2021, over 1,000 of them fled from the north-eastern province of Badakhshan to neighbouring Tajikistan. The Taliban have not yet managed to capture and hold any cities, and may lack the manpower to do so in lots of places at once. They may prefer to throttle the government slowly rather than attack it head on. But the momentum is clearly on their side.

America and its NATO allies have spent billions of dollars training and equipping Afghan security forces in the hope that they would one day be able to stand alone. Instead, they started buckling even before America left. Many districts are being taken not by force, but are simply handed over. Soldiers and policemen have surrendered in droves, leaving piles of American-purchased arms and ammunition and fleets of vehicles. Even as the last American troops were leaving Bagram over the weekend of July 3rd, more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers were busy fleeing across the border into neighbouring Tajikistan as they sought to escape a Taliban assault.

As the outlook for the army and for civilians looks increasingly desperate, so do the measures proposed by the government. Ashraf Ghani, the president, is trying to mobilise militias to shore up the flimsy army. He has turned for help to figures such as Atta Mohammad Noor, who rose to power as an anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban commander and is now a potentate and businessman in Balkh province. “No matter what, we will defend our cities and the dignity of our people,” said Mr Noor in his gilded reception hall in Mazar-i-Sharif, the key to holding the north (sounds like Game of Thrones). The thinking is that such a mobilisation would be a temporary measure to give the army breathing space and allow it to regroup and the new forces would co-ordinate with government troops to push back hard on the Taliban.

However this is Afghanistan. The prospect of unleashing warlords’ private armies fills many Afghans with dread, reminding them of the anarchy of the 1990s. Such militias, raised along ethnic lines, tended to turn on each other and the general population.

With America gone and Afghan forces melting away, the Taliban fancy their prospects. They show little sign of engaging in serious negotiations with Mr Ghani’s administration. Yet they control no major towns or cities. Sewing up the countryside puts pressure on the urban centres, but the Taliban may be in no hurry to force the issue. They generally lack heavy weapons. They may also lack the numbers to take a city against sustained resistance. On July 7th they failed to capture Qala-e-Naw, a small town. Besides, controlling a city would bring fresh headaches. They are not good at providing government services.

Perhaps the Taliban have learned their history lesson and might refrain from attacking Kabul this time around. Their best course may be to tighten the screws and wait for the government to buckle. American predictions of its fate are getting gloomier. Intelligence agencies think Mr Ghani’s government could collapse within six months, according to the Wall Street Journal. So clearly the momentum is on the side of the Taliban and they just need to chip away at Ghani’s forces one district after another until the inevitable and hateful surrender of the central Afghan government to their demands.

At the very least, the civil war is likely to intensify, as the Taliban press their advantage and the government fights for its life. Other countries - China, India, Iran, Russia and Pakistan - will seek to fill the vacuum left by America. Some will funnel money and weapons to friendly warlords. The result will be yet more bloodshed and destruction, in a country that has suffered constant warfare for more than 40 years. Those who worry about possible reprisals against the locals who worked as translators for the Americans are missing the big picture: America, Britain and other allies are abandoning an entire country of almost 40m people to a grisly fate.

Nothing exemplifies - at least in Afghan eyes - of all that has gone wrong with American involvement in Afghanistan than in the manner of their leaving.

The U.S. left Afghanistan's Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base's new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans' departure more than two hours after they left in the middle of the night without raising any alarms.

They left behind 3.5 million items, including tens of thousands of bottles of water, energy drinks and military MRE's (Meals Ready to Eat ration packs to the uninitiated). Thousands of civilian vehicles were left, many without keys to start them, and hundreds of armoured vehicles. The Americans also left small weapons and ammunition, but the departing US troops took heavy weapons with them. Ammunition for weapons not left for the Afghan military was blown up.

Now that is some feat considering the logistics of this mass exodus without drawing any attention. You have obviously been to Bagram and so you will know just how big and sprawling it is. Bagram Airfield is the size of a small city, roadways weaving through barracks and past hangar-like buildings. There are two runways and more than 100 parking spots for fighter jets known as revetments. One of the two runways is 12,000 feet long and was built in 2006. There's a passenger lounge, a 50-bed hospital and giant hangar-size tents filled with furniture. And all those shops to remind Americans of home from familiar fast food restaurants and hairdressers and massage parlours to buying clothing and jewellery and buying a Harley Davidson motorbike (or so I’ve been told).

I’m guessing that the Afghans were certainly outside of the wire and probably had not been inside Bagram Airfield for months. So from the outset they would not have had any reason to think anything was going on until the generators probably ran out of fuel and it started to go a little too quiet. The inner gate was probably discretely left unlocked and when the US stopped answering the radio/phone and then they probably investigated.

Before the Afghan army could take control of the airfield about an hour's drive from the Afghan capital, Kabul, it was invaded by a small army of looters, who ransacked barrack after barrack and rummaged through giant storage tents before being evicted, according to Afghan troops. Afghan military leaders insist the Afghan National Security and Defense Force could hold on to the heavily fortified base despite a string of Taliban wins on the battlefield. The airfield includes a prison with about 5,000 prisoners, many of them allegedly Taliban members.

I’m pretty sure some bright spark in the US Pentagon public affairs dept convinced his military superiors that it was important to avoid the optics of Americans leaving in the same way they did in Vietnam in case it depresses the American public and the US military. Instead it demoralised its allies, the Afghan national army who are now the only line of defence against the Taliban.  In one night, they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area. The manner in which the Americans left Bagram air base amounts to a resounding vote of no confidence in Afghanistan’s future. It just looks bad.

The U.S. choice came with costs attached to each decision. With staying, the cost was potential U.S. troop casualties and a fear that things would not change on the ground. With leaving comes the cost of a deeper conflict in Afghanistan and a backsliding of progress made there over the past two decades. In many ways, the costs of staying seem shorter-term and borne by the United States, while the costs of leaving will be predominantly borne by Afghans over a longer time horizon. Yet, even if those costs seem remote now, history tells us that they will be blamed on the United States.

Biden perhaps reflective of history of Americans getting into quagmires abroad didn’t want to be seen exerting time and energy for a losing cause. His decision also reflects his administration’s foreign policy for the American middle-class paradigm, which focuses on domestic considerations over international ones (and is this so different from Trump’s “America First”? No, it is not). The irony, though, is that the American middle class largely doesn’t care about Afghanistan - their ambivalence gave way to support for this decision once it was announced, but it wouldn’t be hard to visualise the public approving of a scenario that kept a couple thousand troops there for a while longer.

What’s perhaps most disturbing is the narrative the president has presented along with the rationale for withdrawal: that America went to Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaida after 9/11, that mission creep led America to stay on too long and, therefore, it is time to get out. This takes an incomplete view of U.S. agency in the war in Afghanistan. The narrative implies that the civil conflict in Afghanistan today did not originate with America - that this more than 40-year war began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, preceded America’s interference in Afghanistan, and will follow our departure.

The fact of the matter is that, by beginning the campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrowing the Taliban, who were then engaged in their draconian rule, and installing a new government, we western allies began a new phase of the Afghan conflict — one that pitted the Kabul government and the United States/Britain/NATO against the Taliban insurgency. The Afghan people did not have a say in the matter. That we allied powers are leaving Afghan women, children, and youth better off in many ways after 20 years is due to us, and we should be proud of that. But that we are leaving them mired in a bloody conflict is also due to us, because we could not hold off the Taliban insurgency, and we must all reckon publicly with that.

I have to ask myself why did we fail?

I’m only speaking about us Brits now as I’m sure you have your own thoughts as an ex-Marine officer of what you thought of the American military effort. Yes, I’m copping out of really bashing the yanks because first, I have too much respect for those fantastic American service men and women I did have the privilege to fight alongside with; and second, we Brits have nothing to crow about as we fucked up in lots of ways too, and to make things worse, we should have known better given our imperial history with Afghanistan.

The seeds of our failure in Afghanistan lies in not learning from history. We didn’t have a mission that was properly defined nor did we have a strategy that was clear, coherent, and easily communicated to both its fighting men and women as well as to the British public.

Were we there to get our hands bloody and to root out and destroy extreme Islamist terrorists or were we there to indulge in state building out of some idealistic notions of liberal humanitarianism? This question was at heart of our failure within our government and also within the British army as well as our relations with America and our NATO allies and finally the Afghans themselves.

Although never colonised in the same manner as other central and south Asian countries, the modern Afghan state is very much a creation borne out of great power rivalry. A land occupied by a number of different ethnic, linguistic and religious groups, it is a country whose borders were defined by, and whose sense of national identity was forged in response to western great power competition. Its geopolitical position - landlocked, mountainous, and surrounded by past great powers and present regional rivals - lends Afghanistan a dual role of geographic obscurity and great strategic significance, and has as such frequently been treated as little more than a buffer state between empires and a proxy of local powers. Its shared historical border with Russia and British India made it an object of imperial intrigue and, by consequence, has been subject to five European military interventions in the last 175 years.

The first three interventions of these occurred during the era of ‘the Great Game’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which Britain and Russia (latterly the Soviet Union) competed for influence and control over Afghan politics in order to protect their respective imperial holdings in India and central Asia.

The fourth and fifth interventions, ranging from the late 1970s to the present day, similarly involved attempts by Soviets and then by an American-led international coalition to remove political leaders acting against their interests and to protect their favoured candidates.

The unifying feature of all these conflicts was the idea of Afghanistan as the site of potential threats to the interests and security of more powerful states.

Britain’s legacy in Afghanistan in particular set the tone for the country’s historical pattern of conflict and political contestation, fuelling both the intermittent emergence of Afghan national consciousness and a fractious political lineage that saw thirteen amirs in just eighty years. Interventions by the Empire during the Great Game set the conditions for the assassination of ostensibly national leaders by their compatriots (Shah Shuja Durrani in the First war) or their exile by the British (Shere Ali Khan and Ayub Khan in the Second).

Despite the British achieving their aim of protecting India in the second and third conflicts by maintaining Afghanistan as either a pro-British buffer state or as a neutral party, the Afghan narrative tends to emphasise successes such as the massacre of British forces retreating from Kabul to Jalalabad in 1842, the defeat of British and Indian forces at Maiwand in 1880, and the gaining of sovereignty in foreign affairs in 1919.

Soviet intervention in the late 1970s and 1980s further buttressed this identity of resistance, and the failure and ultimate overthrow of the Communist-backed Najibullah government, as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union shortly after their drawdown from Afghanistan, led to a sense amongst the victorious mujahidin of the country as the ‘graveyard of empires’.

Afghanistan’s modern history should thus be seen as inextricably linked to the ebbs and flows of great power politics. Each intervention exacerbated extant internal power struggles between rival elite individuals and groups vying for nominal control over the country. Foreign intervention in Afghanistan was met on each occasion with fierce resistance from tribal militias coalesced around religion; as has been remarked upon by one historian of the country, the threat of external domination has been one of the few means of uniting its disparate population around the concept of an Afghan ‘nation’, and in most cases this shared sense of identity cohered around religion, not nationalism.

Indeed, the presence of intervening powers and the development of the Afghan state may be seen as mutually supporting: whilst most Afghan leaders throughout the last two centuries have asserted their sovereignty over the country, the reality has in most circumstances been one of competing tribal chiefs and/or ‘warlords’ rather than a single dominant leader.

Where leaders have managed to cohere the disparate tribal and ethnic groupings of the country under one banner - most notably under the regime of Dost Mohamed Khan (1826-1839, 1845-1863) – this was due in large part to their diplomatic abilities of compromise and co-optation with Afghanistan’s regional power- brokers. In other cases, such as that of the reign of Abdurrahman (1880- 1901), power was maintained by an unflinching ‘internal imperialism’ and the use of punitive force against rebellious factions.

The challenges of maintaining and projecting centralised power in Afghanistan allow us to see the relationship of its leaders with world or regional powers in the last two centuries as one of mutual exploitation. Throughout the Great Game and the Cold War, whilst the British/Americans and Russians/Soviets would use threats and bribes (and occasionally force) to compel Afghan rulers to comply with their geopolitical needs, Afghan rulers themselves often deftly manipulated those powers to maintain and extend their own power.

The pattern followed by Afghan leaders from the nineteenth century to the present day is remarkably similar in the respect that most have relied upon a rentierist economic model, seeking external aid in order to sustain the cost of security and administration. The plan of modern rulers was to warm Afghanistan with the heat generated by the great power conflicts without getting drawn into them directly. Abdurrahman, for example, used British subsidies to fund his military campaigns against rebellious factions; the Musahiban rulers of the mid-twentieth century used American capital to develop its nascent economic infrastructure and Soviet finance to bolster its armed forces; and, following the overthrow of the last royal leader of Afghanistan, Mohamed Daoud, in 1978, the quasi-communist leadership of Babrak Karmal, Hafizullah Amin, Nur Muhammad Taraki, and Mohammad Najibullah during the late 1970s and 1980s relied in the main on Soviet money and military assistance in its ultimately failed attempt to implement socialist policies and put down the American, Saudi and Pakistani-backed mujahidin.

These trends continued into the post-Cold War period in respect to both the Taliban movement (essentially directed and funded by Pakistan), the Northern Alliance (funded largely by former Soviet central Asian states) and the regime of Hamid Karzai (maintained in economic and military terms by the American-led, NATO-operated International Security Assistance Force and the wider international community). In the former cases, occurring in the main in the period of civil war between 1992 and 2001, rentierism was limited to the maintenance of proxy parties and the continuation of conflict.

By contrast, the ISAF mission bore similarities with the Soviet-backed socialist regimes of the 1980s, insofar as it focused huge amounts of capital and military resources on stabilisation and state-building efforts. Both intervening parties made the error of ignoring Afghanistan’s political history and focused their efforts on bolstering the authority of a centralised state, both promoted policies that were deemed ‘universal’ in their application and were, unsurprisingly given such hubris, vulnerable to accusations by Afghan opposition to being alien and imperialistic ideologies, and both expended enormous amounts of blood and treasure in order to sustain the regimes they supported.

The UK’s struggle to locate a coherent strategy for Afghanistan should, therefore, be seen firstly in the light of the historical problematic of Afghan state-building. This is important in narrative terms because difficulties of defining strategy imply similar challenges in explaining strategy. As with its efforts to ‘think’ strategically, Britain’s ability to explain the strategy(ies) for the war in Afghanistan have been frequently criticised by various commentators. The most strategically debilitating aspect of the Afghan campaign has always been the incoherence of the mission’s purpose; indeed the question ‘‘why are we in Afghanistan?’’ has never really been settled in public consciousness. The international community massively underestimated the difficulties of state-building and greatly overstretched themselves in the commitments made to Afghanistan, and that they did so because ‘strategies’ for Afghanistan rested on assumptions of the universal applicability of liberal state-building.

The international community from the start (meaning from the Bonn Conference of late 2001) fundamentally misunderstood the nature of an Afghan society deeply ravaged by decades of conflict, and failed to foresee the malign effects state-building ventures would have on the country. Specifically, the Bonn Conference, which set out the parameters of the post-invasion Afghan state, implemented a centralised state system onto a state whose experience of such was limited, and where the success of such a system in extending its authority beyond the major cities was predicated on coercion and the use of force.

Historically this has rarely been a credible option for Afghan rulers or their international backers, and was even less so under the self-imposed restrictions of liberal war-fighting and state-building. Rather, re-creating a centralised state required Afghan and international actors to enter into the same methods of co-optation and compromise as those of the past; in necessitating these kind of measures – as opposed to implementing a looser, federal system of governance – the centralisation of the Afghan state paved the way for a reconstitution of a ruling order based on tribal elements and ‘strongmen’. This produced something of a paradox for state-builders, as the creation of a strong, central state capable of implementing liberal policies across Afghanistan came at the cost of entering into alliances with ‘warlords’ known for their illiberal and coercive political approaches and illicit economic activities.

Another unintended but unavoidable consequence of centralised state-building identified by scholars is the re-constitution of the rentier state in Afghanistan. Post-Bonn, Afghanistan returned to its historical norm of maintaining the state via the extraction of external security and development rents, without which it would almost certainly implode due to the ruinous state of its economy and taxation system. Studies have shown that his new rentierism differed from previous patronage systems at the state level insofar as it was fuelled by an unprecedented influx of capital and resources into the country. This had the effect of introducing regulated systems of ‘neo-patrimonalism’, where departments were to be distributed as rewards to the various factions that took part in the Bonn conference, and there had to be enough rewards to go around.

In other words, the structure of the post-invasion Afghan state was, to a great extent, defined not by the demands of good governance, the needs of the country or the demands of post-conflict stabilisation and reconstruction – the purposes for which the centralised model was chosen to promote – but rather by the first-order need to avoid the derailment of the centralised state by co-opting regional power brokers.

Because of the imperative of shoring up a nascent state by securing support from potential competitors, the gulf between the ends of liberal state-building and the illiberal means required to facilitate its functioning can therefore be seen to a certain extent as inevitable.

A major issue, however, was that the patrimonial linkages created by the state for its regional proxies was not comprehensive, as it did not extend to the Taliban’s Pashtun heartland and, as such, fuelled resentment and alienation as much as they placated and co- opted extra-state power brokers. Key players in the Northern Alliance - the primarily Tajik opposition to the Taliban - received prestigious posts within the state, whilst the predominantly Pashtun Taliban were themselves excluded from such arrangements. Because those rewarded by the state tended to be given ministerial or governorial roles in cities, the conflict dynamic tended to reflect an urban – rural divide similar to that of the Soviet occupation. Along this reading, the neo-Taliban insurgency was in many ways a product of the political miscalculations and deficiencies of post-invasion state- building activities.

Given this starting point, such a view concludes that the strategic problems encountered by the international community in Afghanistan were, to a large degree, problems created by (or at the very least exacerbated by) the state-builders themselves. They misread Afghan politics in a way that reflected their own philosophical assumptions about the state and society.

Strategy in Afghanistan suffered because the coalition effort, comprised of multiple national actors and the United Nations, rarely took on the form of a unified effort. Part of the reason for this was a divergence of opinion between actors as to the ultimate purpose – counter-terrorism or state-building – of the intervention.

In the first years of the Afghan campaign, the United States’ Bush Administration remained staunchly opposed to what it called ‘nation building’ and opted instead to pursue a policy of capture- or-kill missions against suspected terrorists. For the United Nations and most of the United States’ European NATO allies, however, state-building was considered a necessary element of any counter-terrorist strategy. This difference of opinion was manifest from the start by the creation of two parallel missions – the US-led, counter-terrorism-focused Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and the stabilisation missions of the European Union, United Nations (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA)) and NATO (International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)) – engaged in seemingly incompatible aims of military prosecution and peace building.

Opinion on the impact of this dual approach varies. Some scholars have noted, along lines similar to those critiquing the state-building efforts of the international community that the approach taken by the UN, EU and ISAF was too ambitious, naïve and unrealistic, and therefore bound to fall short of their liberal political and economic goals. Both Europe and these international agencies ignored the necessity of paring down the international community’s state-building efforts to core, security-centric capacity building within the Afghan National Security Forces. But of course one can make the counter argument, as many have of course, that on the contrary it was the insufficiencies of state-building approaches vis-à-vis OEF’s counter-terrorist approach that led to subsequent failures in UN and ISAF efforts; specifically, that a disproportionate focus on counter-terrorism missions meant that opportunities of peace- building were irreparably compromised.

Within NATO there was a division not just of opinions but also one of mission relating to different political perspectives about the purpose of the Afghan mission and its ultimate referent object – whether it was primarily about the interests of the coalition member states or concerned in the main with Afghanistan itself – and, from that, the methods to be employed in pursuit of one or another objective. This was not merely a debate bounded by strategic necessity, however; rather, such debates stemmed as much from institutional disagreements over who would or could do what in Afghanistan, which in turn arose from the differences in political constitutions and cultural attitudes towards counterinsurgency and counter- terrorism.

These ‘national caveats’ or ‘red cards’ of participation created significant problems for NATO in Afghanistan, both political, in terms of the relations between states and the abiding sense amongst some that others were ‘free-riding’ on the collective security system and, and strategic and operational, in the sense that command-and-control capabilities and cohesion between forces were limited by the engagement restrictions placed on certain armed forces. Indeed, the disproportionate burden placed on combat-oriented states like the United States, the United Kingdom, and several new member states in Eastern Europe led to political statements denouncing Europe’s perceived transgressors of collective security participation; former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates argued, for example, that NATO had effectively become a ‘two-tier alliance’ ‘between members who specialise in ‘soft’ humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks and those conducting the ‘hard’ combat missions - between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of alliance commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership... but don’t want to share the risks and the costs’.

A lack of strategic unity was the natural consequence of a structural compromise that produced two distinct strategic authorities that were, in many ways, competing with one another. Along similar lines to the political arrangements between the Afghan state and its regional proxies, the NATO alliance structure can be seen (and evidently is seen by officials such as Gates) as patrimonial: states participated on the basis of fulfilling their own interests and along operational lines that were complementary to those interests, for the purposes of securing an alliance structure that accommodated all participants ahead of the imperative of creating a coherent strategy for stabilising Afghanistan. As with the neo-patrimonialism of the Karzai regime NATO’s efforts would be dictated by the limitations imposed upon it by circumstance.

Thus, in the cases of Afghanistan’s and the international community’s internal political dynamics, strategy was confined by the structure of the Afghan state and society, the structure of the international community and NATO, and the interplay between those structures. The implication here is that the agency required for the possibility of a workable strategy may have been illusory from the start.

Leaving Afghanistan was never going to be pretty, but the latest turn is uglier than expected.

No one quite expected the speed of collapse within the Afghan National Army to hold of attacks of the Taliban. I don’t think it’s do with the lack of training or their professional skills is lacking (though there may be some truth in it). A big driver in the collapse is the money for wages, food and medical care for troops is syphoned to Dubai, so the Afghans who want to fight, and there are quite a few who hate the Taliban, get less replenishment than the 6th army in the last weeks of Stalingrad. They have arms, ammo and boots for this season only and that is it. Both money and morale are in short supply for these soldiers.

If I was a trained soldier in the Afghan National Army I would desert. I would say to them abandon the fixed defences these ‘ferenghis’ (foreigners) have gifted you and move to the hills and seek refuge with your tribal clan, who will be glad of the arms and experience you bring. Or get over the border if you are lucky to be in the North, if in the West you hire yourself to the Narcos in the badlands on the Iran border. Most other places it is either a last stand or defection, your Government and their relatives have already got their planes fuelled up in Kabul ready to move to their villa complexes in the UAE.

I’m being a trifle cynical but for good reason. Everyone who has been to Afghanistan sees the veil lifted on the corruption of aid and how the elites protect themselves ahead of defending the masses who bear the brunt of the bloodshed.

The corruption has been endemic from the get go, but the international community ignored it all for 'progress'. Any Afghan politico you hear on the media complaining about the West abandoning Afghanistan has at least $30 million parked in Dubai that should have gone to the soldiers, teachers, doctors, builders etc.

As spectacular as the collapse of the Afghan National Army has been it’s been even more scarier seeing how swift the Taliban has been in taking over vital provincial areas through propaganda, civilian intimidation, and rapid attacks. One by one, the Taliban has been taking over areas in a number of provinces in northern Afghanistan in recent weeks. The Taliban says it has taken control of 90 districts across the country since the middle of May. Some were seized without a single shot fired.

The UN's special envoy on Afghanistan, Deborah Lyon put the figure lower, at 50 out of the nation's 370 districts, but feared the worst was yet to come. Most districts that have been taken surround provincial capitals, suggesting that the Taliban are positioning themselves to try and take these capitals once all foreign forces are fully withdrawn. On a map, it's easy to see the point Lyon is making. A stark example is Mazar-i-Sharif, the biggest city in the north and a significant power centre in its own right. It was the rock upon which the Northern Alliance fought against the Taliban.

It is significant the Taliban are kicking off this offensive in the north, not their heartland in the south and east. The north was the toughest part of the country for them to crack last time. Their expectation is if they have victory there, success will flow much easier in their traditional homelands further south.

The strategy of taming the north extends to emasculating and profiting from trade routes to neighbours. On Monday night they captured the important border town of Shir Khan Bandar, Afghanistan's main crossing into Tajikistan. Earlier in the day, top Tajik government officials had met to discuss concerns about the growing instability next door. There is no indication that the Taliban intend to take their fight north of the border, but in the past Tajikistan has been a vital conduit for supplies flowing to the militants' northern enemies.

The last time the Taliban controlled the city was 20 years ago, when they left hundreds of captives in steel trucking containers to suffocate and die in the scorching desert heat. Now, the militants are back at the city gates once again, as part of a lightning offensive against Afghan government forces that has set alarm bells ringing from Kabul to Washington. So it should worry us all where will all this lead to.

America's drawdown seems to be the game changer. The Taliban have been beaten back several times in recent years, notably from Kunduz in 2015. The Taliban captured it briefly before US airstrikes were called in. Civilian casualties were high but the militants were driven out. The militant group has never been able to withstand the heavy US and NATO air assaults backing Afghan ground forces, but now the US and NATO are leaving, so is much of the threat of sophisticated and sustained air power. And the Taliban are well aware of this.

It seems to me behind the choice of withdrawal by the Biden government lies a bigger assumption that drives that choice. That is the Taliban militants' perceived desire for international recognition. This has been the mantra underpinning the American exit. The logic of the American argument has been simple: The Taliban wouldn't renege on their agreements with the US because they crave international acceptance. The events of this past week and more appear to blow a hole in that assumption.

Another assumption that’s currently being blown out of the water is the US establishing some presence outside of Afghanistan so that if it needs to intervene again to combat terrorism or flush out militants then it can do so from the safety of a neighbouring country. But so far no country has come forward to reciprocate. And why would they? Like the Afghans, no one likes foreign troops with boots on the ground in their country. Only the central Asian republics and possibly Pakistan would come close to allowing that but there would be a political cost those governments would pay with their people. Moreover by welcoming the Americans in, they also allow the militants to target that country too.

Another assumption is the nature of the Taliban support and links to terrorist groups. The U.S. may not face any serious post-withdrawal Afghan support of extremist threats to the United States, even if the Taliban does take over. It is all too true that the Taliban continues to talk to the remnants of Al Qaeda, as do elements of the Pakistani military. It is unclear, however, that these remnants of Al Qaeda focus on attacks on the U.S., and the Taliban does seem to oppose ISIS. It is also unclear that the Taliban will host other extremist movements that focus on attacking the U.S. or states outside the region.

It is unclear that any key element of the Taliban has an interest in such attacks on the United States. Even Al Qaeda now focuses largely on objectives inside Islamic countries, and it is unclear that some other major extremist force will emerge in Afghanistan that do not focus on regional threats and on taking over vulnerable, largely Islamic states.

At the same time, one needs to be careful about the assumption that the U.S. can defeat any such threats by launching precision air and missile strikes against extremist targets. It is unclear that the forces in Afghanistan involved in any small covert attacks on the U.S. will be easy to target and cripple if they do emerge. The Taliban is unlikely to tolerate major training camps and facilities for extremist forces, and any such strikes will present major problems for the U.S. if the extremist threat consists of scattered small facilities and small expert cadres that shelter among the Afghan population.

It is also far from clear that more intense U.S. air attacks on Taliban forces from outside Afghanistan will have any decisive effects. The loss of limited numbers of Taliban fighters as well as some key Taliban leaders and facilities will not offset the pace of their victories in the countryside or enable the central government to survive. A continuing U.S. ability to target and kill some key Taliban leaders and fighters also does not mean that the risk of such strikes will deter future Taliban willingness to let small, extremist strike groups conduct well-focused, well-planned strikes on U.S. or allied territory, especially if such groups in Afghanistan sponsor attacks on the U.S. or it strategic partner by strike units or cadres based in other countries.

At the same time, it does seem more likely that the Taliban, and/or any independent extremist groups, will focus largely on Iran, Pakistan, Russia, China, and the other “-Stans.”

Going forward I think we need to re-evaluate many of our assumptions about the war in Afghanistan.

The objectives of the Authorised Use of Military Force approved by the US Congress in 2001 have long been accomplished. Once Osama bin Laden was killed in Operation Neptune Spear in 2011, the last element of the AUMF was met. The American and British mission in Afghanistan was complete. But America and Britain did not leave because we wanted to do a spot of state building to curb the spread of militant islamist terror. That was a mistake as it turned out.

Post-Neptune Spear, The American, the British, and their  allies’ conventional mission should have been ended, adopting instead a laser focus on intelligence collection and offensive special operations to prevent al-Qaeda (or any terrorist organisation) from re-establishing safe havens and training areas.

What was needed for an acceptable ‘victory’ and a ‘saving face’ withdrawal  was to embrace the use of Afghan Militia Forces the same way the Allies did for our initial entry way back in 2001.

In 2001, Western powers won the initial military engagement in 42 days using special operations forces with local and regional allies - we need to return to this format - and through a combination of special operations and specific information operations efforts, regaining the high ground and influence over ‘centres of gravity’. The issue is not the number of troops, but the mission of the forces there. Once the mission is defined, the number of forces needed would be clear.

It has never been about the number of troops - it’s been about the lack of an achievable mission assigned to our forces in Afghanistan.

The US engaged in ‘nation-building’ for the wrong reasons - and has seen bad results. We installed Hamid Karzai, served as his praetorian guard to protect the new central government and abandon our AMF allies and attempted to build a large, bulky, expensive and ineffective Afghan National Army - a force that is now evaporating before our eyes. It was folly.

Americans will never make the Afghan people more like them - nor will they be able to instil what my American colleagues used to fondly refer to as ‘a Jeffersonian democracy’ in Afghanistan. That day may come but only when the Afghan people wish it to be so. Lest it be forgotten Americans sought independence in 1776; the Afghan people seek self-reliance and independence from foreign influence. This is their defining historical DNA: escape from any outside control.

The Afghan people are not ungoverned, they are self-governed - with no tradition of central democracy and no desire for our version of democracy or ‘prosperity’. By pushing ‘prosperity’ we had become targets for both the Afghan government and the Taliban. This has ended, but we must draw a distinction between the end of nation-building and the continuation of our own interests in Afghanistan and the region.

It is time to adopt a practical policy based on what will work and is in our allied interests, rather than by funding the aspirations of progressive politicians who have no real understanding of Afghanistan.

First, we must establish a clear post-‘state-building’ strategy - with achievable objectives. We must return to the policy and operational format we know will work - cooperation with Afghan tribal leaders and militia. This type of force was used to achieve the initial victory in 2001. Empowered warlords and regional leaders were the force multiplier that worked as the Afghan Militia Forces - and can again, in partnership with our Special Operations Forces work now. Intelligence collection and limited military operations should be our focus.

There is no way around it. One has to play the Great Game. Think tribal rather than central. Afghan nationhood is a liberal Western wet dream.

The central government is weak and corrupt just like all the other rulers of the past. The Afghan National Army is not as strong as it is on paper. It can hardly prop itself up rather than any government. Most of the Afghan National Army troops have stronger tribal loyalties than to the concept of a nation. Since the tribal chiefs play both sides to hedge their bets, it's no wonder 'their' people do what they're told. The Taliban know this because that has always been the Afghan way, so the tribes go with them. Provided the Taliban honour their promises to the tribal chiefs, the Taliban can do what they want.

On one hand, the tribes won't now be too bothered by central government and have a large pool of Western-trained troops to prop them up. On the other hand, they now have to do business formally with the Taliban again. Largely in order to get their hands on Western-supplied aid that will surely follow after the Americans leave.

Second, we must accept the reality of Pakistani influence in Afghanistan - and work with the Pakistanis to counter al-Qaeda and the other militants now attacking Pakistani targets within Pakistan. Pakistan has made great advances in securing the tribal areas on the other side of the border and they have always been the de facto control of much of the Taliban force capacity, such as the Haqqani network. Working with Pakistan is the best option within the current circumstance.

‘Endless wars’ are not an American value. The use of the US military must only be used in response to genuine threats, when American interests are at stake or lives in danger. Withdrawal of conventional military forces and discontinuing nation building is in the US interest: leaving Afghanistan is not.

Third, make Afghanistan China’s problem. Afghanistan could easily become a hotbed for growing Islamic extremism, which would to some extent affect stability in Xinjiang.

It is not without reason that Afghanistan is known as the “graveyard of empires”. The ancient Greeks, the Mongols, the Mughals, the British, the Soviet Union and most recently the US have all launched vainglorious invasions that saw their ambitions and the blood of their soldiers drain into the sand. But after each imperial retreat, a new tournament of shadows begins. With the US pulling out of Afghanistan, China is casting an anxious gaze towards its western frontier and pursuing talks with an ascendant Taliban. The burning questions are not only whether the Taliban can fill the power vacuum created by the US withdrawal but also whether China - despite its longstanding policy of “non-interference” - may become the next superpower to try to write a chapter in Afghanistan’s history.

Beijing has held talks with the Taliban and although details of the discussions have been kept secret, government officials, diplomats and analysts from Afghanistan, India, China and the US said that crucial aspects of a broad strategy were taking shape. An Indian government official said China’s approach was to try to rebuild Afghanistan’s shattered infrastructure in co-operation with the Taliban by channelling funds through Pakistan, one of Beijing’s firmest allies in the region. China is Pakistan’s wallet.

It has been reported that Beijing has been insisting that the Taliban limit its ties with groups that it said were made up of Uyghur terrorists in return for such support. The groups, which Beijing refers to as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, are an essential part of China’s security calculus in the region. The ETIM groups were estimated by the UN Security Council last year to number up to 3,500 fighters, some of whom were based in a part of Afghanistan that borders China.  Both the UN and the US designated the ETIM as terrorists in 2002 but Washington dropped its classification last year. China has accused the ETIM of carrying out multiple acts of terrorism in Xinjiang, its north-western frontier region, where Beijing has kept an estimated 1m Uyghur and other minority peoples in internment camps.

In a clear indication of Beijing’s determination to counter the ETIM, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, exhorted counterparts from the central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan this year to co-operate to smash the group. “We should resolutely crack down on the ‘three evil forces’ [of extremism, terrorism and separatism] including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement,” Wang said in May according to Chinese news media which I follow.

The importance of this task derived in part from the need to protect large-scale activities and projects to create a safe Silk Road. Silk Road is one of the terms that Chinese officials use to refer to the Belt and Road Initiative, the signature foreign policy strategy of President Xi Jinping to build infrastructure and win influence overseas.

An important part of China’s motivation in seeking stability in Afghanistan is protecting existing BRI projects in Pakistan and the central Asian states while potentially opening Afghanistan to future investments. China would have to more actively support efforts to ensure political stability in Afghanistan. So make them work for it. Western powers need to leverage China’s problems in Xinjiang to be more active in Afghanistan.

International media outlets and intelligence agencies worldwide have been circulating reports pointing toward the creation of a Chinese military base in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province for a while now. Although China has not embarked on militarisation programs on foreign soil historically, and has profusely denied the rumours about building an Afghan “mountain brigade,” China’s first overseas military base in Djibouti provides an example of China’s newly adopted strategy of leveraging economic influence to further its strategic objectives. There’s even some chatter amongst Chinese officials that Beijing may entertain the idea of being part of a future UN international force should one be needed in Afghanistan (a bad idea but hey, let China find out first hand for itself).

The Afghan government was able to maintain a measure of stability largely because of the superiority of US air support. The drones, gunships, helicopters and heavy air artillery were unmatched by the Taliban. But when the US leaves, that advantage will evaporate. China’s imperative to create overland trade routes to Europe and the Middle East may draw it inevitably into Afghanistan’s domestic strife.

Of course China’s forward policy in the Wakhan Corridor needs to be assessed with a critical eye. Although on one level it seems to be motivated primarily by the threat of radicalisation, China’s interest in the region is also contingent on the strategic role that Afghanistan is capable of playing in the larger scheme of things. Despite China’s vehement denial, there seems to be sufficient evidence available indicating a definite military build up in the region, which provides China with an opportunity to showcase its ability to transform into a balancing force in the regional dynamics. I think that is a trade off that both America and Europe can afford to concede under the current circumstances.

In conclusion In the face of failure, there is an impulse to move on and not ask “what led to this?” But to avoid a reckoning with our follies is to risk their repetition, or worse.

it is probably too late to salvage either the civil or military situation in Afghanistan. It almost certainly is too late to salvage it with limited in-country U.S. forces, outside U.S. airpower and intelligence assets, and with no real peace agreement or functional peace process. Limited military measures are not the answer, and neither is simply reinforcing the past processes of failure. Tragic as it may be, withdrawal may not solve anything and may well make conditions worse for millions of Afghans, but reinforcing failure is not a meaningful strategy.

I do feel strongly that both the American and British governments must establish a clear path of redemption so that those who served and the families who sacrificed loved ones know that their loss was not wasted. At the same time our civilian governments must limit missions to intelligence collection and counter-terrorism missions that will prevent the metastasis of al-Qaeda or Isis in the region should the Afghan government fall. How we balance these two is going to be very interesting to follow in the next chapter in Afghanistan’s tortured history.

I apologise for the length of this post. This has been a hard post to write because of the subject matter and the many conflicted emotions and memories I have of my time in Afghanistan. I wish I had all the answers but I suppose the beginning of wisdom would be to know how to ask the right questions. Because we didn’t ask the right questions when we went in, we ended up making a real mess of it.

There is an understandable desire to bring all our allied troops home safe and that not another life is lost there. Yet I doubt this policy of withdrawing all troops will bring peace to anyone, not to us and most of all, the Afghanis themselves. As always in war it is the native population that will bear the real cost of war, in this case women, girls, and others brutalised under Taliban rule. What lies for them if the Taliban regain power to govern the country in their image is something I care not to imagine but retain a deep foreboding of their continued suffering. Ordinary Afghanis just want a respite from war and have a chance to live in peace, but without having us foreigners or the Taliban around. It is hard to imagine that happening at all. Our desire to save our soldiers’ lives set against ordinary Afghanis being left at the mercy of the Taliban is one of those humbling and brutalising trade offs that any war can only offer.

Near the end of his famed novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald described two of his privileged characters, Tom and Daisy, as “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures” and then “retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness” to “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

That description applies to America as a whole but also to we Brits and other Europeans, especially when we tire of a misguided war. Americans and we Brits are a careless people. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we smashed up things and human beings with abandon, only to retreat into our materialism. No scratch that, returning soldiers retreated into themselves struggling with PTSD whilst the rest of our citizenry carried on with their own material struggles and their insipid culture wars. The point is we always leave others to clean up the mess in a very bloody fashion that never troubles our conscience.

Count on us, probably sooner rather than later, doing precisely the same thing in Afghanistan. Again.

Thanks for your question