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psychcomposer · 3 years ago

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Alright, I have too many feelings about a video game that’s going to come out in a month that I really just need to get out. It’s been over a decade and one of my favorite games, The World Ends With You, is finally getting a sequel. I’ve been brooding on the trailers for months, and I just finished the demo, so it is time to put down my capital T Thoughts on Neo: The World Ends With You.

As a warning, this will be entirely too long. But I’m not about to keep this bound up any longer.

TWEWY is my favorite title for the Nintendo DS. It is a JRPG starring Neku Sakuraba, an aggressively antisocial teen living in the Tokyo district of Shibuya. He is suddenly pulled into a test of survival called The Reaper’s Game, where he is forced to join forces with a partner in order to survive a week of lethal objectives in a sub-planar version of Shibuya. I love the story, its such an honest and interesting take on learning to get outside of your comfort zone. But more than that, it is a game that does so much to put a modern twist on every piece of your typical JRPG. You control two characters at once, Neku with the touch screen and his partner with the control pad, forcing you to split your attention and giving mechanic weight to the idea that Neku can’t survive alone. Armor and weapons are replaced with clothes and outfits, with a character’s ability to wear them restricted not by class but by a character’s bravery. The music list is filled with punk, alt-rock and hip-hop that are a stark contrast to the symphonic tracks of other titles. Battles aren’t random impediments, but fun diversions that sport a robust reward system that encourages players to push their limits.

But even more than that, the most modern thing I appreciate about TWEWY has to be the characters. Neku, Shiki, Beat, and Rhyme all feel like believable teens that grew up in the 2000′s. They bicker, clash, and banter like teens struggling to survive and make sense of their situation. One of my favorite little gimicks of the story is just how many nicknames there are for every character. Almost everyone has earned a few nicknames. One of my favorite examples is Sho Minamimoto. He’s a reaper with an obsession with math, often infusing his speech with mathematical jargon or expressions, and seems to enjoy erecting “art installations”, which most people can only decipher as towers of trash. Over the course of the story, he gets called Pi-face, the Grim Heaper, and another nickname I can’t even mention because of spoilers. It’s just... such a nice little human touch, these kids throwing crafted insults at a human enforcer of their doom that could almost certainly tear them apart.

I’m getting into this to try to give a sense of why I enjoy TWEWY so much, why it has such a unique place in my heart. Its a game I’ve 100% completed several times over, a task that’s no easy feat with the sheer amount of collectibles and post-game objectives. Unfortunately, for the last year or two, I’ve been kind of dreading this sequel.

Neo:TWEWY has been... a long time coming. Way back in 2007 they had a whole website counting down to some sort of announcement, with the music slowly building in intensity. I remember following it with bated breath, until it finally hit zero! And we got... An ios port of the game. Talk about a let-down. To be fair, apparently it is a solid port, even managing to re-work the old battle system, one that required a second screen to work properly, into one that only needed one. But what that really offered to someone like me was the hint of a sequel, a single image of a new character being shown. They kept flirting with the idea of bringing the series back. The main cast even featured in a Kingdom Hearts game, of all things, even if they didn’t really do a whole lot. But these acknowledgments grew sparser and sparser.

A few years ago, they released a switch port of the game. Not only that, it included an epilogue! They were finally getting a sequel rolling! Of course I bought that game, beat it yet again, and fought my way to the new content and the hint of the new story ahead.

It was... Well. I found it disappointing.

The gameplay was competent, even if it was clear that the epilogue itself really hadn’t had too much put into it. One new character, new enemies just being reskins of old ones. It wasn’t meant to be dlc itself or anything, it was just there to herald a return to the series. That wasn’t what bugged me. What bugged me was the writing. It was heart-wrenching. It just didn’t feel right. It just felt flat compared to the story I’d enjoyed so many times. But what really killed my excitement was the new character, Coco.

Now, odd personality quirks are not too unusual among the ensemble of TWEWY. Pi-face is just one of the characters that is so infused with a particular theme that it shows in how they express themselves. It’s part of the charm of them, discovering the personalities that live in this dark underworld of Shibuya. But Coco... she talks like the most stereotypical young teenager possible. unironic lols, totez (yes, spelt exactly like that, in a speech format), OMG’s, and just, like, likes everywhere! It felt like someone who knew they needed to make a quirky character but had no idea how to write one well, and just made the most stereotypical caricature possible. I hated seeing that. It embodied every fear I had about the sequel being just a cynical project, pushed forward after so many years by people who just didn’t understand what made the original great. That mild dread was so persistent that even the release of the first few trailers couldn’t really get me excited for the game. Neo:TWEWY was shifting into 3d from the original 2.5d, with all the problems that could cause. What I could see of the story felt so much more like a generic fantasy tale with some modern buildings than the story I had grown through my teenage years with. And, well... Just look the original Neku and the new one they showed off.

Look at this. Look at one of the most vibrant, eye-catching character designs on the market for any JRPG in history, one that manages to mix purple and orange with striking lights and darks. And then look at the teenager edgelord bullshit they did with him. It’s atrocious. I hate it. He’s just another guy in a black outfit and just too much fucking cool guy protagonist power to not have the story be about him at this point. And look, I know that there’s Story LoreTM, I know that there could be some twist that explains this, I know that him being such a denial of his old self could be the entire fucking point. But let me tell you, when I saw this, I felt years of shifting, misplaced unease coalesce into a hard lump of dread.

And... Even... So... I did the stupidest thing I could have possibly done and preordered the game anyway. Don’t look at me like that, nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

But you know what? The damnedest thing happened. They released a demo for the new game a month before its release. And I played it, and... I enjoyed it.

Did you see that coming? I certainly didn’t. Welcome to the roller coaster.

Right off the bat, the writing soothed a lot of the fears I had. It felt right at home, like being plopped between to teens exchanging banter. One of the first exchanges is Rindo and Fret, his best friend, trying to meet up. Fret wants Rindo to meet him at someplace called Wunafo, an area Rindo is clueless about. After some annoyed texting, it turns out Fret is actually referring to 104, a local landmark of a building. Fret insists that its a stylish improvement on the name. Rindo only gives him some grief about it..

I’m not doing the scene justice, or I could just be really desperate for half-decent writing, but I can’t deny that it quickly put a smile on my face. I am almost sure I’ve had this conversation before in years past myself. And beyond that, this game boasts voice acting that brings out a ton of personality in the large cast they are introducing (besides Rindo, which is a shame because he’s the protagonist... hopefully he gets over his apathetic teenager shtick eventually). Not everything is voiced, but it conveys so much appeal and personality, and even when the character’s aren’t voiced there is a conversation screen that occasionally breaks out some stylish layouts to convey mood and temperment and clearly draw from the style that made the original game pop so much.

The battles, of course, have been completely revamped. TWEWY had you control two characters, one of which you could customize by equipping up to 6 different pins that all used different motions and unleashed different attacks. Now you control up to four characters, but each one can only use one pin. But even so, it feels very genuine to its roots. An effective build in TWEWY was usually one that let you stagger an opponent so you can unload a bunch of attacks on them, and in Neo:TWEWY the game actively pushes you to folllow up attacks with characters in succession. It would be easy for this to devolve into a mash-fest, but even with the little time I had with the game it introduced a wrinkle in that- an attack that unleashed a single powerful blow, but couldn’t just be unleashed at the end of the previous combo. It needed to be charged for a while, long enough for the combo timer to deplete. So now an effective combo requires thinking ahead, and even after that you’re paying attention to enemies to dodge out of the way when they strike back. It’s entirely possible this system will flop in the late game, but so far it is robust enough for me to think that it will be one that could make me look forward to battles.

The music hasn’t impressed me so far, besides the tracks that have made the transition from the original. But I remember those strange tracks needing some time before I appreciated them too.

Finally, the story has hooked me. I don’t think that needs much more explanation. I want to see more of these characters and see the changes that have been made to the world in what I assume is years after Neku’s game. And to address the elephant in the room, Neku has not made his appearance in what is available in the demo. Odds are I will probably hate whatever they do with him. But there is enough happening in the space around it that I’m interested in exploring, and a bruised apple can still taste sweet.

Almost all of this, of course, is mostly just saying that Neo:TWEWY is not doomed to fail. There is still plenty of room for things to go wrong later on. There are entire systems I haven’t really seen in game, like shops, pin evolution, clothing and food (Though it looks like they have changed the food system significantly, which I approve of). The things that unnerved me so much in the trickle of information after this game’s announcement could still be enough to turn this sour. But I’m smiling as I’m strapping myself in for this ride now, one I’ve waited quite a long time for. Whatever’s coming, I’m excited.

#long post #TWEWY #Neo:TWEWY #The World Ends With You #Neo: The World Ends With You #Sorry for the length but #look this isn't even all the thoughts I have on this upcoming game #but I'm not sure if any of my followers even care about these games sooo #the original examination of the new stuff and a sequel compare/contrast kind of got lost when I got into my history with this series #but I like how this turned out #even if its just for me

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gallagherwitt · 5 years ago

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Socialism, Capitalism, & Coronavirus.

I've seen at least a dozen people post to the effect of "now that you've had a taste of socialism (restricted movement, curfews, long lines for food) how do you like it?"

Putting aside the part where anyone posting this is fully showing their ass and demonstrating how little they actually know about socialism, let's talk about the role CAPITALISM is playing in our country's present dire straits!

In the middle of a pandemic where (absent any viable alternatives) experts have recommended shutdowns and social distancing to slow the spread, the United States is faced with:

People losing their jobs and, along with them, access to healthcare (a uniquely American problem). In the middle of a pandemic. That our lawmakers even have to discuss if COVID-19 testing and treatment will be covered is a purely capitalist and American scenario.

Companies that had *billion* dollar profits suddenly demanding (and receiving) multi billion dollar government bailouts while also laying off workers, and those bailouts being justified as "without these companies, no one will have jobs to go back to."

Workers at risk of losing their homes because rent/mortgage freezes aren't happening like they are in other countries.

Lawmakers actually debating how much individuals should receive for the stimulus and for unemployment because if we give them too much money, they won't have an incentive to go back to work. Instead of figuring out how much money people actually need to survive, they chose the absolute bare minimum ($1,200 is the equivalent of 1 month's pay at $7.50/hour for 40 hours). The priority is not making sure people survive, it's making sure they're still broke enough to be willing to go back to work when this is over.... because those companies mentioned in #2 are nothing without their workforce, even if their pay, benefits, and treatment of the same don't even begin to reflect that.

While we hotly debate "how will we pay for it???" every time there's a discussion of helping small businesses and individual workers, our government injects *over a trillion dollars* into the stock market to keep it afloat.

If workers are in such dire straits after only a few weeks, then clearly they should manage and save their money better! No. Those billion dollar companies who pay workers the absolute bare minimum and suddenly need bailouts despite a) massive profits in previous quarters and b) had enormous tax windfalls last year which they squandered on stock buybacks -- THEY should be managing their money better. And paying more taxes.

The same people who screech about socialism being deadly and oppressive are unironically demanding the right to return to work. They're rejecting a society where (particularly in a crisis) we take care of each other like the social animals we are, and instead are *begging* for the right to return to work because they believe in the system where if you're not working, you deserve nothing. They shout that "even during a pandemic, we can't kill the economy" without realizing that WE DON'T HAVE TO BUT CAPITALISM DEMANDS IT. Under capitalism, you can either have a thriving economy OR you can weather a pandemic like this with minimal casualties.

Only under capitalism are farmers throwing away food and milk while food banks are desperate for food to provide to those in need. We are literally letting crops rot and people starve because profit is paramount. This has been going on for a long time, but the fact that it continues during a crisis like this is about as American and capitalist as you can get.

We are in the middle of a crisis, and we're debating who *deserves* help and *how much* instead of acting like a society and just helping everyone until the crisis is over. But that's socialism, and the same people who reject that are marching in the streets and demanding the right to return to work, and they can't even begin to see the irony.

People don't HAVE to starve, lose their homes, lose their jobs, lose their businesses, and lose their healthcare, even while we get through COVID-19. We as a society can choose to reject profit as the top priority, and instead prioritize people. We as a nation can make changes -- some temporary to get us through the crisis, others permanent to prevent this from happening again -- but Americans are too quick to reject anything that resembles socialism (read: anything that helps someone who hasn't labored to earn it), and instead cling to not only capitalism, but to its cruelest manifestation.

The point here is not to suggest that socialism is the perfect way to go or that it never goes awry for the working class. The point is that in all our kneejerk Red Scare responses to anything that even *smells* like socialism, we've created a society in which people will literally march to demand the right to put themselves at risk in order to work for the wealthy capitalists who feed them scraps and expect them to be grateful for it.

We don't have to live like this. The answer is not 100% socialism, but Americans have got to acknowledge that the answer is not 100% capitalism either. The answer in fact lies somewhere in the middle, where people have their basic needs met, workers are properly compensated, healthcare is not a privilege, and no one suffers at the bottom while a handful hoard wealth at the top.

We CAN have better wages, better healthcare, better living conditions.

But first we have to let go of our fear of socialism.

We have to let go of our infatuation with capitalism.

We have to let go of the idea that America is somehow unique and that those systems that work in other nations won't work here (American exceptionalism is pure unadulterated nonsense).

We have to find an answer that prioritizes people over profit.

(Okay to share but please don't remove my name.)

#capitalism #socialism #capitalist #socialist #coronavirus #stimulus #COVID19

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mediaeval-muse · 4 years ago

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Book Review

Warbreaker. By Brandon Sanderson. New York: Tor, 2009.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

Genre: fantasy

Part of a Series? Yes, Warbreaker #1

Summary: Warbreaker is the story of two sisters, who happen to be princesses, the God King one of them has to marry, the lesser god who doesn't like his job, and the immortal who's still trying to undo the mistakes he made hundreds of years ago. Their world is one in which those who die in glory return as gods to live confined to a pantheon in Hallandren's capital city and where a power known as BioChromatic magic is based on an essence known as breath that can only be collected one unit at a time from individual people. By using breath and drawing upon the color in everyday objects, all manner of miracles and mischief can be accomplished. It will take considerable quantities of each to resolve all the challenges facing Vivenna and Siri, princesses of Idris; Susebron the God King; Lightsong, reluctant god of bravery, and mysterious Vasher, the Warbreaker.

***Full review under the cut.***

Overview: I’ll come clean here... despite Sanderson being a pillar in the fantasy genre, I haven’t read one of his books until now. A friend, who is a big Sanderson fan, suggested I start with Warbreaker, so my review is going to be based on no other knowledge of Sanderson’s work. Overall, I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would; Sanderson has a talent for creating complex worlds and an imagination which makes his setting memorable. I also think there were a lot of good ideas built into the structure of the narrative, as well as infused in the character archetypes. The main reason why I didn’t give this book a higher rating, however, is personal preference: I don’t think the main action of the novel kicked off soon enough, and I personally didn’t feel invested in the war plot or the personal arcs of some of the characters. That being said, I do look forward to checking out more of Sanderson’s work. There was enough in this book to intrigue me, and though I didn’t love everything about Warbreaker, I can definitely see why Sanderson’s books are so beloved by fans.

Writing: Sanderson’s prose is fairly straightforward. It doesn’t contain a lot of rhetorical flourishes or figural language, but it doesn’t leave the reader in the lurch, either. I never had a difficult time picturing the world Sanderson creates or wondering what characters were thinking or feeling - everything was described well, and I never had to go back and read something multiple times in order to understand it. In that sense, Sanderson’s prose is simple, yet effective. It’s easy to get through, which helps the story move quicker.

There were a couple of info dumps (the two I can think of off the top of my head include the scene when Siri learns of Hallandran history from a storyteller and the scene where Vivenna learns about the theories of Awakening), but other than that, I think most of the worldbuilding was shown well through descriptions of the scenery, the actions of the characters, etc. I really did have the experience of being immersed in the world, and I think Sanderson knows how to craft a complex setting without overwhelming his readers with pages and pages of exposition.

Plot: The plot of this novel follows four main “threads,” centered on four prominent characters: 1. Siri, the youngest daughter of the king of Idris, who is sent to the kingdom (?) of Hallandren to marry their God King as part of a peace treaty; 2. Vivenna, Siri’s older sister, who was supposed to be sent to the God King, but was held back because of favoritism. She follows her sister in part to rescue her and also to prevent war between her kingdom and Hallandren; 3. Lightsong, one of the gods in Hallandren’s pantheon, who finds himself reluctantly drawn into the politics between the gods; 4. Vasher, a mysterious figure who wields a sentient sword named Nightblood.

Each of these “threads” were bound by the looming threat of war, but I personally didn’t find the war aspect suspenseful, in part because 3 of the 4 characters were “upper class” (and thus, war would impact them differently), and partly because we don’t spend much time with Idrians, who have the most to lose. I also think that the main action of each of these threads didn’t really take off until halfway through the book, and while I appreciate a slow pace to become familiar with the worldbuilding, I think the plot could have moved a bit quicker.

In terms of the individual threads, each had their ups and downs. I first found Siri’s storyline to be a little icky - she’s only 17, yet much of her plot involves discussions of sex and fertility. On the one hand, I get it - she’s sent to the God King as a bride, and her job is to produce an heir. On the other hand, I felt uncomfortable when reading about how often she was naked and how everyone calls her “vessel” rather than something proper, like “my queen.” I didn’t find her story particularly interesting until she finally begins to interact with the God King; for the first couple hundred pages, most of her time is spent getting used to Hallandren and palace life while her husband ignores her. Only when the God King begins to form a relationship with her did I feel invested, in part because Siri finally had a meaningful connection with another person, and thus personal stakes in the war.

Vivenna’s plot seemed interesting on the surface, but I ultimately found her to be too passive for my liking. Vivenna spends most of her time inciting then stifling a rebellion amongst her people, many of whom live as second-class citizens in Hallandren’s capital. It seems like that would be an active role for her, but most of the time, she’s acting under orders/guidance from other characters around her. I personally didn’t care for scene after scene of her meeting with people to convince them to do something, or scenes of her failing and being helpless. She often had to rely on male characters to get around, and while I don’t think she had to be perfect at everything, I do think she could have made use of her extensive training to be a bit more active. I did like, however, that her plot challenged a lot of her biases and supposed values of her religious teachings, shedding light on how we can’t judge people who are living in desperate conditions.

Lightsong’s plot started slow but picked up steam. As a god who is not convinced that his divinity is earned, he copes by indulging in a decadent lifestyle and putting up a jovial façade. At first, he tries to stay out of the debates about war, but once he’s dragged into the politics of the pantheon’s court, things get a little more interesting. I liked the moments when his story was less about war and more about discovering who he was before he became a god. They felt a little more personal, whereas the war didn’t seem to threaten his well being one way or the other.

Vasher’s POV chapters are less frequent, and when they appear, he’s doing something sneaky for reasons we don’t understand until some 2/3 through the novel. While I found his interactions with Nighblood amusing, I was frustrated by the lack of a clear motivation until the point where we learn what he’s up to. After that, I found him more fun to watch.

Characters: There are a lot of characters in this book, so I’m going to cover the main ones and a couple prominent supporting roles. Overall, I can say that each character archetype was interesting, and I often liked the idea of a character on its own as opposed to how the archetype was used in the narrative.

Siri is an impulsive, rebellious princess who has trouble respecting authority. While I’ve seen this archetype before, I think Sanderson avoided the “not like other girls” trope and instead wrote Siri as one who uses her impulses against the authorities that are restricting her. I was actually pleasantly surprised that Siri went from a fish out of water (because she doesn’t have the training her sister has about Hallandren society) to someone who is better equipped to spearhead a resistance within the God King’s own palace, all because resistance requires the guts to take risks and stand up to authority. In that sense, I liked her story a lot.

The God King, her husband, was also likeable, in part because he seemed to genuinely want to be a good ruler. I admired his affection for Siri, as well as his desire to use his power for good.

Vivenna, on the other hand, seemed like a good character at first, but I quickly started to dislike her. All her life, she was raised to be the God King’s bride, so she has extensive training and education. She’s also poised and confident, up until she is out of her element and has to find a way to operate on the streets of T’Telir. I thought Vivenna would use her training in a more meaningful way; knowing about Hallandren so thoroughly, I thought she would do more to apply that knowledge when concocting a plot to save her sister. Instead, Vivenna always seemed to be passive, letting the people around her make decisions and tell her what to do. She also doesn’t seem that interested in saving her sister after some time, despite being protective of Siri when they were younger. As an older sister myself, I found the easy abandonment of her sibling a little hard to believe, and I wish the desire to save her family was more of a driving force than Vivenna’s sense of duty to her people. While she does manage to do things on her own towards the end, I also found that to be undercut by her deference to Vasher. While it might be realistic to let characters with more skill/experience take care of stuff, it made me wonder why we were following Vivenna at all (in other words, why is Vivenna a main character and not Vasher, if all Vivenna is going to do is get in the way?). I also found Vivenna to be a little stuck-up and judgmental, which, granted, she learns to overcome, but for the majority of the book, she just seemed holier-than-thou, and I didn’t find her fun to watch.

Within Vivenna’s chapters (or sections), we see a number of side characters, the most prominent being the band of mercenaries that help her meet with influential people. At first, I liked these mercenaries; Denth seemed to be a good friend, while Jewels challenged Vivenna’s assumptions about Hallandrens in a way I found productive and enlightening. In all, it seemed like these characters were written in a way that broke stereotypes, and I was wishing they could have formed a little found family. However, after the twist, I didn’t quite like how the mercenaries were handled. They seemed to disappear from view, and we only heard of their actions by word of mouth (so everything they did seemed to happen “off screen,” then relayed by another character later). Because of that, I didn’t ultimately feel like they were much of a threat. I did like that their beef with Vasher was seeded early, so that when they finally come into contact, it felt like we were getting a payoff.

Lightsong is full of charisma, so even though his plot was slow, I enjoyed following him. He has some nice banter with Blushweaver (another goddess in the pantheon) and his high priest, Llarimar. I particularly found his relationship with Llarimar rather sweet, and I liked that Lightsong was curious about his past life without letting it distract from the threat at hand. The end of his arc felt a little unfair, as did Blushweaver’s - I was hoping he would get to do a little more.

But speaking of Blushweaver, I found her to be complicated. I liked that she seemed to genuinely care about whether or not Hallandren went to war, and wasn’t just playing a power game for power’s sake. However, I hated how she was written as a sexpot, using her body to distract (or try to distract) the other gods and to get what she wanted. I have no problem with a female character being sexual, but I do hate female characters who use sexuality as a manipulative tool. It’s just a tired trope, and I don’t enjoy it. Also, can we talk about how she calls Siri a slut at one point?

Vasher at first didn’t seem that interesting to me until we learn of his true motivations. After that, I enjoyed his character archetype immensely. He seems like a gruff badass at first, which I am also tired of reading about, but after a while, he’s shown to be something of a softy with terrible interpersonal skills. I probably enjoyed his conversations with Nighblood the most. Nightblood jokes and pouts and talks about killing in an almost childlike way, which was quite amusing. I wish we had gotten more of those interactions.

Other: The thing I appreciated most about this book was the worldbuilding. Sanderson creates a world that feels unique - instead being set in the gritty faux-Middle Ages where everything is violent and dirty, the narrative takes place in Hallandren, a kingdom full of joy and color. I particularly liked how color was important not just to Hallandren culture, but to the magic system. In Sanderson’s world, everyone has a life force or aura called “Breath” or “BioChroma,” which can be used in a variety of ways. BioChroma allow users to enchant objects (so to speak) or sustain life, and I liked that possessing and using BioChroma affected things like sound and color. It was a refreshing change from the dull worlds of grimdark fantasy.

I also liked the tension between the polytheistic religion of T’Telir and the monotheistic religion of Idris. Hallandrens worship “gods” that they can see and speak to, whereas Idrians worship a single god who is unseen. It posed some interesting theological debates, as well as a subtle, yet critical, examination of things like the hypocrisy of priests, the superiority complex of conservatives, etc.

Overall, I did enjoy this book, even if there were things that I wish were different. I hear there is supposed to be a sequel coming out at some point, and when it is out, I will pick it up.

#book reviews

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luciferpens · 4 years ago

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( EMMA WASTSON, FEMALE, SHE/HER ) ⌇ have you seen EVELEEN MCCARTHY around icaria? they are the 28-year-old child of DIYONISUS. they remind me of OVERFLOWING BOOKCASES, SEX IN PUBLIC PLACES, LAVISH PARTIES THAT GO UNTIL THE SUN RISES, AND INK STAINS ON STACKS OF MANUSCRIPTS.

BASICS

FULL NAME: Eveleen Alexandria McCarthy

NICKNAMES: Eve, Evie, Eevee

FACE CLAIM: Emma Watson

AGE: Twenty-eight

SEXUALITY: pansexual & panromantic

DATE OF BIRTH: April 25, 1992

GENDER/PRONOUNS: cis female she/her

EDUCATION: MBA

OCCUPATION: Fashion designer and author

GODLY PARENT: Diyonisus

GODLY POWERS: Teleportation (limited) & Chlorokinesis. Passively has 'immunity' over wine. If someone so much as thinks the word 'party' she has the ability to teleport to that place. Chlorokinesis but only over vines (specifically grape and strawberry)

BIO + BULLET POINTS

Born to a fashion mogul who started her own magazine

Has a little sister named Hilary who is 4 years younger than her.

Her mother is very harsh and has very high expectations of both children. Forcing them to do more than most would by their ages and being horribly disappointed in them if they fail.

Eve starts writing stories and modeling at a young age.

At 15 Eve starts sewing her own clothes and at 17 she has her own clothing line for teens and young adults.

At 18 she had published her first YA book.

Her mother threw her a party to celebrate which is where she meets her father Diyonisus.

By 19 she had three books under her belt in a variety of genres; YA, fantasy/sci-fi and romance.

She moved to LA and got a roommate, Harley, and then a boyfriend Chester.

TW : Rape and Abuse

Chester blackmailed Eve with explicit photos that he took while raping her in her sleep.

This continued on for months before he broke things off with her

The two “remained friends” as Eve desperately tried to regain control over the photos.

Harley moved, she started to travel the world while writing and working on her designs.

She met Ivy and the two became the best of friends/FWB

TW: Murder / Death / Blood

One day Eve was at a part where she ran into Chester. He acted as if nothing happened

He tried to blackmail her back into a relationship when she snapped and used her vine to pull him off the side of a small cliff and into a bunch of thorny vines 30 feet below. The fall killed him.

She teleports herself to Nightshade, gets Ivy and the two cover up the murder and her involvement best they can.

Eve moves back to London, resumes her life of fashion and novels. She gets a roommate named Vera, the two become thick as thieves and when both of their fathers tell them to move to Icaria. They do.

Eve now lives on Icaria with Vera.

Bonnie McCarthy never wanted anything more than to be her own boss. She spent the first 20 years of her life working one weird job after another until she landed a small-time position at Vogue. Over the next six years, Bonnie worked her way up until she was the assistant to the editor-in-chief. Then -- then she got stuck. A year later she married her boyfriend, and two years after that … two more years of not getting promoted, of not getting moved to a better position, Bonnie took all her knowledge, all her contacts and all of her skill, and left Vogue to open up her own magazine.

She was 30, but she had more drive and willpower than most, and within a year she had a magazine up and running. It was on the anniversary party of the magazine launch that Bonnie’s world got flipped on its head. She had just been enjoying her party, enjoying the drinks, the praise, the attention and celebration of the magazine growing so big in only one year. When she walked in on her husband having an affair; Instead of flipping on him, she quietly closed the door, returned to her party, and promptly found someone to sleep with. What she hadn’t been expecting was for that man to be Dionysus; what she hadn’t been expecting was three months later realizing she was pregnant and having no idea if it was her husband or the man from that lone night.

The answer wasn’t made any clearer six months later when little Eveleen McCarthy came screaming into the world. She looked most like Bonnie, no clear sign if it was the random man or her husband’s, or soon to be Ex-husbands. She had worked herself hard, accomplished so much that her husband asked for a divorce; he tried to claim half of her stocks, her money, her things, but when she brought up that she had caught him cheating and pointed to the clause in their prenup… well, he was left getting nothing. Bonnie brought little Eve to work and hired a nanny to keep them both close.

Raised mainly by a nanny Eve learned to read, write, and draw and once she turned 4? Well, then schooling started. Her baby sister, Hilary, was born, and attention was slowly beginning to shift. Her nanny read to them every morning, their mother every evening before bed. Eve started to devour books; she loved them and wanted nothing more than to read everything she could get her hands on. Her room, over the years, was filled with sketches of clothes and novels… hundreds of them lined her walls. Eve was addicted. She adored all books and could never get enough. By 6, Eve had been pulled into her mother’s world of fashion and modeling. She was used as the child model for almost every product that required a child Eve was used to flashing lights, to cameras, to people fawning over her. And while most children would fall into a self-righteous, big-headed, mentality, Eve stayed relatively calm and sweet. Maybe it was because, at the age of 10, Eve realized she wanted to write stories, and every time she showed her mother she was patted on the head and told: “That’s nice dear, but let's find you something that can actually earn you some money.” The idea was dismissed, ignored… and promptly forgotten about. Every time Eve tried to show her mom a story she wrote for class, the same thing was said, the idea dismissed.

Still, Eve kept a smile on her face and became known as the butterfly of Spellbound Magazine. She would move from one area of the magazine to another, fluttering in and out and bringing smiles and excitement wherever she went. As the magazine grew into an international seller and started to rival other magazines like Vogue and Elle, her family’s wealth and influence grew just as much. The attention that was brought on them wasn’t… new, but it was more intense and extreme. She was harassed and ripped apart even as a 15-year-old in the gossip magazines and online, she has ridiculed if even one hair was out of place or she wore not quite the right shoes to an event. This scrutiny caused Eve to do more research, to learn more from her mother, to study the magazine so carefully she could talk fashion with her mother and hold her own.

This fueled a passion and a will deep in her bones to tell off any magazine or journalist who had picked on on her to second guess what they said. So, she picked up her sewing machine and got to work. She started to make her own clothing. It took years of practice, a lot of failed attempts and cold words from her mother. She knew she wasn’t living up to her mother’s expectations… so she tried harder, stayed up until the sun rose, sewed until she felt like her fingers were going to bleed… and the first time she had gotten a small smile from her mother and a nod of her head Eve almost wept. Overjoyed Eve knew she was doing a good job, and every time someone asked who the designer was, she said herself or Spellbound. Slowly her work started to gain attention and her mother; ever the businesswoman capitalized on it. Eve started creating her own fashion line for teens and young adults. Her interest and talent in fashion and modeling lead Bonnie to start teaching Eve the ins and outs of running the company at just 16.

She started attending all the parties, dressed to the nines a smile on her face. This… was when she started noticing something a little different. Whenever her mother started planning a party, without her even being told, Eve knew. She’d appear at her mother’s door and ask if she could help with the planning. Sometimes she’d even be a bit unsure of how she knew or got to her mother’s room to ask the question. But once the party rolled around? Being there felt like being a kid finally let loose in a candy store. She felt energized and elated, as she wondered the parties she noticed those around her got more excited and happy as well. For years Eve chalked it up to her mother’s abilities to plan a good party. But she’d come to learn the real reason just after her 18th birthday.

How she learned of her godly parent started with her younger sister Hilary. She was 17 and showed Hilary the novel she had written. The novels she had tried to show her mother a week before and was brushed off about. Her sister, only 13, read it, burst into her room the moment she finished and told her to do something about it. To “ignore mom” and do what she wanted. That little push from an angry preteen was exactly what she needed. So Eve did just that. She looked into getting it published, she shopped it around to different agencies, talked to agents, got readers to go over it, and by the time she turned 18… she published her first YA novel under a pseudonym. She didn’t want her name and fame to affect how people viewed her book so she used a fake name, Jean Fink.

Her mother, surprisingly proud of Eve for successfully publishing a book, but probably more so for her latest line of clothes, threw her a party. It was here with all her friends invited, with everyone drinking and enjoying themselves that Eve noticed something. Having been gifted a bottle of wine, she popped it open, and upon the first sniff, she felt a new sensation. One she still can’t quite explain. But she and her friend started to drink, and she realized rather quickly -- that her friends were feeling the effects of the wine but she? She was fine. Handed a glass of whiskey a couple of hours later… she felt that. But the wine? It was like drinking grape juice. Yummy grape juice, but it had no side effects like the whiskey.

The party raged on, and as Eve got looser, her just being around the partygoers influenced them, it released more ecstasy and need to party the need to make it more chaotic. By 3 am the party was still raging, people were getting drunk; they were enjoying themselves it was wild and crazy, Eve stumbled outside of her house that night and sat in the garden. But when she touched the ground, a plant sprung up below it. Before her eyes, the plant grew into a small grape tree. She freaked out. Was she hallucinating? Was she drunk? Eve had a minor panic attack causing her to throw up -- not something wholly uncommon for her; she had been diagnosed with anxiety and bulimia at the age of 12, but this was major. She was unsure of what was happening. And to make matters worse -- a man appeared with a grin on his face and a wine glass in hand.

He explained himself to be Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, parties, homosexuals, plays and well, he was her father. Eve had never known or questioned her mother on her biological dad was. It had never been important… until now. He explained that this made her a demi-god; it allowed her to have powers and dominion over certain things. She asked so many questions and wasn’t satisfied until Diyonsus had explained it all and taught her a couple of tricks. Finally, calm and satisfied with what she learned, Eve started to approach life in a new way.

She started practicing, started testing her limits. She would teleport herself to parties around London, then around the UK and after some time? The world. Appearing all over the place, showing up in magazines and slowly earning the name of a party girl. She started growing vines wherever she could, and having Bonnie for a mother? She began to invest; she found some winery’s she enjoyed and invested money into them and every time she came she sent out a tendril of her powers and made the grapes grow big and flavorful. She partied hard, influencing those around her to enjoy themselves more, she slept around, she drank or smoke barely feeling the effects that others did. She was learning to master her powers.

But it was learning that her father was the god of plays, of drama and writing, that had the most profound impact on the woman. While her first YA book didn’t sell great, she started to dip her toes into other genres; Sci-fi and fantasy was written under the name Eden Allesan. But the one that picked up the most traction? Romance novels. This time under another pseudonym Lucy Ariadne. Lucy -- well Lucy became a well-known romance author in the span of three books published in under a year and a half. These were stories that Eve had written as a teen, fanfictions reworked into stories so separate it’d be hard to tell where the inspiration came from.

With her name and designs growing ever more popular, Eveleen figured it best to move to the one city where her red-carpet looks would do best. L.A. A city she knew she could do both of her passions; fashion and writing. She found an ad online for a roommate and -- before she knew it she met the girl, Harley, and the two were hitting it off. They became the best of friends spending all their free time together. When she wasn’t working or out partying she was hanging out with Harley. There were almost no secrets between the two women…. That was until she met Harley’s male best friend Chester; the two fell for one another and for the first time Eve actually settled down. She was 19, dumb, and in love and the three of them were thick as thieves...

TW: Rape and abuse

Until one day when she was awoken with her boyfriend overtop her, camera taking photos...and both of them were naked. She was in shock, unsure of what to do, what to say, and just clenched her eyes and hoped for it to be over soon. She tried to ignore it, tried to forget it, but it happened, again and again, and again. He started to try to control her, trying to control what she wore, where she went, and how she acted. He demanded to go with her everywhere she went, especially if it was where they would be seen in the public. He started using her for fame and notoriety. He told her that if she left him that he would release the photographs and video he had taken of them over the past seven months. Terrified of what would happen Eve did her best to just be the happy bubbly girlfriend she had been but slowly she worked on breaking the relationship apart, making him think it was his idea to end the whole thing.

And after four months -- it finally worked. He ended the relationship, they said it was mutual and “stayed friends.” She never let anyone know what happened, never spoke or even really thought much on it after it happened -- terrified of confronting what had happened to her over the past year. Terrified of those photos one day making it onto the internet. If you were to have met her or talked to her during this time, you never would have guessed he had spent the past year in such a state.

End TW

The next couple of years were a bit chaotic for Eve, she worked until her fingers bled, published three more novels, and completed two collections. She was back to being an overly motivated party girl. Sleeping around whenever it suited her and refusing to bend to anyone else’s whims, she was terrified of relationships and outright refused to be solely dedicated or to ever sleepover in anyone’s bed. She enjoyed her free time with Harley and her friends and looked forward to the next big thing.

Sadly the next big thing was her best friend moving across the country for a job. Heartbroken but excited for Harley’s big step up in the world, they promised to keep in touch. For the first couple of years they did, they texted throughout the day every day, things were great. Eve was working, she traveled more and wrote more and more novels. She designed clothing lines and got to debut them all over the world. She helped start up the American side of Spellbound magazine. Eve made friends across the globe, and for the first time in three and a half years she let herself actually feel something for someone. Ivy. Ivy had been a friend she met traveling abroad and the two quickly became travel buddies, jumping from country to country. They fell into friends with benefits sort of relationship with…. Slight feelings cropping up here and there. But what was most important to Eve? That Ivy was there for her through the good times and the bad.

TW: Murder/Death & Blood

One evening just before her 28th birthday Eveleen felt the call of a party on the coast of Maine. It was just starting at 5 pm, but it was already loud and chaotic and just the type of energy she needed. Halfway through the night was when the atmosphere, at least for her, changed. Chester. He had shown up at the party. He smiled at her waved her down and tried to act as if he hadn’t blackmailed and raped her for years. She kept it polite and sweet before moving on.

Three hours later she was standing over his body, he was strangled and tangled up in the vines she had conjured on the outskirts of the property just off the side of a small cliff. Facedown, a drink inches from his hand, blood oozing from multiple pricks along his skin as the vine dug deeper and deeper. He had threatened to release the photos of her if they didn’t resume their relationship... and Eve snapped. She felt nothing as she watched his last breath leave him, she felt nothing as she turned her back and teleported away to a party where Ivy was at. She felt nothing until she collapsed into Ivy’s arms and told her what she had done in a back room of a club that the woman had owned in Icaria. After pouring her story out to the once assassin she teleported them back to the party where the two women cooked up a plan to cover Eve’s tracks. They made their way into the main part of the party, they talked to anyone and everyone they could, took photos and made their alibi as being in the party and inside as strong as possible. They knew Eve had already been seen arriving so there was no hiding that she had been there. But a couple of minutes she was gone? They wrote that off as a trip to the bathroom, a trip to touch up makeup and gossip. They convinced everyone that they had never left to go outside.

They made it seem as if she had only said hello to her ex in a very public setting and turned her back to continue enjoying her time. He wasn’t found until the next morning when the staff was cleaning up the grounds after the party. But by then? It didn’t matter, Eve was long gone, having returned to London, to work with her mother. The corner ruled it an accident, a drunk man stumbled off the side of the cliff, they ruled the fall as the cause of death and the vines as insuring a fatal blow practically impaling himself on thousands of little needles.

End TW

For the next six months, Eve stayed in London, working with her mother on running Spellbound and when her father appeared to her one day and asked her to move to Icaria for her own safety. She decided the change of scenery would be nice…. Besides her roommate and best friend, Vera’s father had appeared and told her the same. So the two packed up their lives and moved to the isle so many others had already made a home on.

#Icaria: intro

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workersolidarity · 5 years ago

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[Today's Worker's Unity March: Burning of an effigy of Cop as a Pig in uniform and another police uniform in front of the statue of Andrew Jackson in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana 9/27/19 7pm.]

Tonight I marched for Socialism.

I marched for various Socialist and Social causes more generally including Worker's Rights, police and prison abolition, LGBTQ causes and more. The march was organized by a coalition of groups including the New Orleans Worker's Group, the New Orleans People's Assembly, New Orleans Hospitality Workers, and other local, regional and national groups fighting for Immigrant Rights, disolution of our borders, and the various struggles our Immigrant Community is faced with daily among other things. The march was also dedicated to all the incredibly talented Street Musicians in our beautiful city. Our amazing musicians who represent the purist expression of New Orleans culture. This is a culture so rich and unique that it draws in millions of people and millions in tax revenue to our city every year. Even though these musicians are an integral part of the exotic experience of New Orleans culture, they are still being driven out by the gentrification of our city. The rich Bourgeois scum moving into our city suck up the profits WE earn, then turn around and avoid paying THEIR SHARE in taxes, and then profoundly drive up our rents. To top it off, these Bourgeois scumbags have a habit of calling the fucking pigs on these incredibly talented and hard working musicians (conveniently only the Black ones) who've been in the city long before themselves, and will surely be here long after they're gone. Our March was also in Solidarity with our wonderful New Orleans Hospitality Workers! Women and men who cater seemingly endlessly to the Bourgeoisie and their freeloading grown children day in and day out. Hospitality workers display unparalleled patience in dealing with these rich, drunk assholes, and they do it daily for disgustingly low wages, no health insurance or any other benefits, unreliable hours, and Bosses free to fire workers on a whim. These supercilious fucks treat our hospitality workers like human trash. Our Comrades toil away in horrible conditions, living with constant job insecurity. They invest their blood, sweat and tears into the restaurants, stores and hotels in which they work. Many put up with intolerable practices like illegal wage theft, pervasive sexism, sexual harassment and even sexual assaults that go unreported for fear of losing their jobs. Yet, despite working extra hours without overtime pay (a common practice in the city) and other indecencies, these workers at the end of the day can no longer afford to live in their own city. How fucked up is that?

Tonight we also Marched for and stand in Solidarity with our Comrades in the LGBTQ Community, Comrades who suffer these indecencies often to extremes our straight, cis-gendered Comrades would NEVER tolerate. We love you all. Your battle is our battle. Your blood spilled is our blood spilled. Your struggle is our struggle, and we'll gladly stand by your side, and die by your side fighting the injustices you suffer. Our hearts are with you Comrades. ♥️

Of course we also Marched in Solidarity with our incredibly resilient but ever struggling Black Community. I stand in awe of our Black community that rebuilt after Katrina despite the Local and State Government's sickening efforts to permanently prevent black communities from rebuilding; using the immense power of the State to exclude Black Communities, often using zoning regulations designed to be nearly impossible to comply with in order to exclude Black and Brown people from the years long rebuilding effort. These efforts coincided with the firing of all public school teachers in Orleans Parish, a majority of whom were Black and Unionized. They then proceeded to Privatize the entire public school system in Orleans Parish, leading it to become the first school district in the United States to completely privatize the public school system and turning public education in New Orleans into a grand Neoliberal experiment with Black and Brown children playing the part of lab rat. The effect this all had on teacher's wages has been astounding. Some teachers are now making less than $10.00 an hour to educate the majority black students. Most of the public school teachers who were fired after Hurricane Katrina never got their jobs back, leading to thousands of Black educators forced to choose between early retirement, unemployment, or moving out of the city entirely. The city's newly empowered Charter Schools recruited (mostly white) recent college graduates, many of them without ANY teaching experience at all! Just hundreds of deeply inexperienced, completely unqualified, non-unionized "educators" paid starvation wages.

And then of course there is our Immigrant Community. These Comrades give so much back to the rest of us, words could never do them justice. Our Immigrant Communities that do so much to enrich our culture and add so much to our city that we could never repay them for it in a thousand years. And yet, Louisiana is on the frontline of the race to incarcerate, profit off and deport them back to violence filled, corrupt countries with few, if any, opportunities. Despite the fact that their work, their farms, and even their tax dollars form the backbone of American society, this is how to Bourgeoisie choose to thank their hard work. US Imperialism, regional domination big oil and big ag industries and other forms of profiteering has so decimated the countries from which many immigrants seek to escape, that it has become nearly impossible, and downright dangerous to raise a family in countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatamala. The US empire has spent centuries controlling these country's governments for the benefit of the US Bourgeoisie in the name of Capital. Throughout our shared history, the US has been busily overturning those governments we've deemed unsatisfactory to the needs of our mega-corporations, with our CIA sponsoring Right-Wing Military Dictatorships, Fascist Regime's, and death squads. And yet we have the audacity to act surprised when these families seek to escape these auxiliaries for corporate control we call "Independent" governments? They deserve our welcome, our hospitality, and our love. They are our brothers and sisters. They are our working class Comrades.

Maybe one of the most important issues on which to take a stand is that of the history and struggle of indiginous peoples in the Americas. Tonight we proudly march in Solidarity with our indigenous Communities. Indiginous people have endured genocidal slaughter, torture, starvation, and some of the most horrid political, cultural, and educational oppression imaginable. Over the course of centuries of being dominated by the colonization and Imperialism of European Capitalist States, it's unquestionable that the indiginous community lived through the kind of systematic slaughter that only a handful of cultures worldwide have ever experienced. We are not unaware of who's land it is on which we protest tonight. The struggle for indiginous rights, indiginous emancipation, and the continued suffering of indiginous peoples at the hands of their colonizers is a crime of unimaginable proportion that weighs heavily on our minds tonight. Your struggle will no longer be ignored as long as we have air in our lungs to make ourselves heard! We will never forget your struggle. And when the Revolution we seek comes and we can stand together on the piles of Bourgeoisie bones, begins the moment when all the oppressed people of this nation can finally begin the healing process that is so desperately needed. This will be the very moment we begin to dismantle the farce that is the republic of the United States of America. We will dismantle this empire of the rich and our very first governing action will be to return the land stolen so long ago by the Imperial European colonizers to the Indiginous people's it was stolen from. The oppressed will become the oppressor and never again will we allow the interests of a few to dominate the workers of the world again.

That is the future we march for today.

All of these different groups, with different histories, suffering from different forms of the same Capitalist oppression, are all united on this night as ONE Working Class. We are the Proletariat! We clean your toilets, cut your grass, grow your food, make your dinner, take out your trash, fix your cars, play the music you listen to; we are your designated driver, your waitress, your bar tender, your street cleaners; we fix your roofs, educate your children, check you out at the store, deliver your Amazon purchases. WE ARE THE WORKING CLASS AND WE OUTNUMBER THE RULING CLASS 10'000 TO 1. WHEN WE STAND TOGETHER IN SOLIDARITY WITH ALL OUR COMRADES, WE ARE UNSTOPPABLE. WE MUST REJECT THE IDENTITIES GIVEN TO US BY RULING CLASS AND THE BOSSES. WE MUST FIGHT BACK AGAINST ALL FORMS OF OPPRESSION, INCLUDING RACISM, SEXISM, GENDER BIAS, XENOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA AND ALL THE TOOLS THE CAPITALISTS USE TO KEEP US DIVIDED SO WE CAN NEVER BECOME A THREAT TO THEIR PROFITS. WE MUST ORGANIZE, MARCH, DEMONSTRATE, PROTEST, USE CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND ANYTHING ELSE WE CAN THINK OF TO BREAK THE GRIP OF THE CAPITALISTS AND THEIR STATE APPARATUS. WE MUST SMASH THIS STATE APPARATUS THEY'VE BUILT SOLELY FOR THE PURPOSE OF VIOLENTLY ENFORCING OUR CLASS POSITIONS!!!

The time has come for workers to claim the mantle of those Revolutionaries who came before us, and to destroy the Capitalist system and the ruling class once and for all.

Viva La Revolucion!

Viva La Liberte!

Viva La egalite!

Viva La Socialisme!

Viva La Communiste!

Da zdravstvuyet bol'sheviki!

Solidarity to all my Comrades!

Tonight we march!

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calebthomas93 · 5 years ago

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Plot Summary and Analysis of Parasite

To me, Parasite is a devastating, brilliant story about the dehumanizing effects and consequences of Capitalism gone to the max. If you have not seen it, I cannot recommend doing so highly enough, and please stop reading here until you do because everything else will be spoilers.

The Plot Parasite begins by introducing an impoverished family in Seoul – two parents, Mr. and Mrs. Kim, crossing middle-age, and a boy and a girl, Ki-woo and Ki-jung, each about in their early 20’s. The film shows the family scrambling to stay alive by folding thousands of cardboard pizza boxes, and struggling to stay, for lack of a better term, modern, by attempting to find spots in their basement apartment where they can siphon wi-fi from neighboring businesses. Right away, this action creates an interesting effect – the kids’ desperate need to be internet-connected plays to a common stereotype of young people being phone-obsessed and spoiled by the excesses of the web, yet they do live, undeniably, in harsh poverty: hunger is a constant concern; their home is a small basement frequently pissed-on by drunken passers-by; their toilet is crammed in an elevated corner where one needs to crouch to use it even while seated; they leave the windows open during street fumigation to get free pest-extermination, despite breathing the rancid gas themselves. The mother too has an almost childish compulsion to check WeChat. It immediately creates in the film an ambiguity, a set of complications that is never resolved – are we supposed to laugh at these people? Cry for them? Root for them? It seems like all three and certainly the third, though they’re far from the type of Hallmark-perfect poor family one encounters in many dramas. The opening scenes also draw attention without straining in the slightest to show just how essential technology and access to it is for the survival of people living in poverty. The mother reveals that she wanted to check WeChat because she thought the pizza company was going to message her about folding the boxes for a small amount of money. Though no one says it outright, it seems clear that the pizza box job is extremely important for this family, and that if the kids hadn’t found a source of free wi-fi and gotten the WeChat message, the job would’ve slipped right on by to another just-as-desperate family. The event that begins the plot of the film is that Ki-Woo’s friend, Min, a college student, comes by before a semester abroad with two gifts: an encyclopedia-sized, jagged rock that is said to bring material wealth to the family in possession of it, and an opportunity for Ki-woo to take over for Min as the English tutor for the high school sophomore daughter of an extremely rich family in the city. Min says that he wants to one day marry the girl, Park Da-hye, and knows that one of his frat-boy college friends would salivate all over her if they were her tutor, but that he knows he can trust Ki-woo. Min also says that the mother is young, beautiful, and naïve – it seems like he is implying that Ki-woo might be able to seduce her, though it’s not stated explicitly. It isn’t ever made clear why Min thinks he can trust Kim-woo not to make a move on Da-hye, the daughter, and indeed he successfully does so almost immediately, but my personal suspicion is that even Min believes there is some intractable divide between the true poor and the true rich, such that even if Ki-woo is pretending to be a middle-class college boy, as he must to get the tutoring job, there is still no real possibility of romantic connection between him and Da-hye. Of course, maybe Min and Ki-woo just have a friendship built on deep trust, but the film does nothing to establish that if it is the case. With the prospect of a high-paying tutoring job from Min and some forged documents from his technologically gifted and artistically inclined sister, Ki-jung, Ki-woo goes to the rich neighborhood of the Park family for an interview and trial tutoring session. He is greeted through a gate-intercom by the Park’s housekeeper, who opens the gate for him where he sees that there are about a dozen sprinklers in the front yard, designed to make sure every inch of grass receives a perfect sprinkling whenever needed for a perfect lush lawn. The housekeeper comes out and leads Ki-woo through an incredibly opulent and stylish home designed by a fictional architect called “the great Namgoong,” who seems to be the Korean equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright. The housekeeper has to wake up Mrs. Park, who is dozing in the sunlit yard. Mrs. Park then interviews Kim-woo in the house, saying she doesn’t really care about the documents (expertly forged by Ki-jung) that he’d brought, but puts stock in Min’s recommendation. She notes, however, that if Ki-woo isn’t up to par with Min, he won’t be able to keep the job, and she insists on observing him for his first tutoring session with her daughter. The stakes are thus laid out clearly as Mrs. Park leads Ki-woo upstairs for the session, and as an audience member, I was pulling hard for him: the elegance of the Park home contrasted with the squalor of the Kim basement makes it understood that even a six-hour a week job with the rich family would be life-changing for Ki-woo. It is one of the most exciting and triumphant releases of the film when Ki-woo absolutely crushes the first tutoring session, providing Da-hye with a new, aggressive test-taking philosophy that establishes him as an authority to be respected by both the mother and daughter – so much so that Mrs. Park voluntarily pays him even more than she was paying Min, whom she spoke so highly of that one wonders if he had a romantic relationship with the mother as well. The exhilarating and comedic rush of Ki-woo’s first tutoring session continues for the next 40 minutes or so of the film as the Kim family unleashes a plot to get all four of themselves on the Park payroll. Immediately after the first tutoring session, Mrs. Park shows Ki-woo some crayon drawings which she calls “paintings” made by her son, Da-song, who’s about nine years old. She expresses an absolute belief, groan-inducing for the audience, that her son is an expressive genius. Ki-woo humors her masterfully and suggests that, with a bit of training, Da-song could become a generational artist. Mrs. Park latches onto the idea, and Ki-woo has an epiphany when he remembers that he has a cousin who went to art school with a girl who had a true gift for cultivating artists, which excites Mrs. Park very much. Ki-jung, Ki-woo’s sister, is, of course, this gifted artist and teacher who studied in the US. She memorizes some biographical information that Ki-woo made up for her, does a bit of research into “art therapy,” and ad libs the rest. Her vibe is quite different from Ki-woo’s when she enters the home. Whereas he was polite and deferential until the tutoring session began, Ki-jung is aloof and commanding right away, giving off an aura of self-confident control. Though Mrs. Park attempts to demand to observe Ki-jung’s first tutoring session with the son, Da-song, Ki-jung shuts her down and says she never tutors in front of parents. Mrs. Park obeys but is obviously unsure if she wants to stick with this new girl. She gets the housekeeper to go up to Da-song’s room to see how things are going – the housekeeper isn’t a parent, after all – but Ki-jung is already done, sitting quietly at a table with the usually wild and unruly Da-song. She then totally convinces Mrs. Park of her genius by asking if something happened to Da-song when he was in first grade, saying she gathered that he’d suffered trauma by a mark in the lower right corner of his drawing, which is where most artists store their trauma. It’s a funny moment for the audience, knowing Ki-jung is just ad-libbing, when Mrs. Park breaks down crying. She says something did indeed happen to Da-song, but doesn’t say what, and agrees to pay Ki-jung whatever she wants to keep leading her son through art therapy. Ki-jung then sets a trap to get Mr. Park’s driver fired, and she too is waiting with a recommendation for a new hire – who is, unbeknownst to the Park’s, her father. Mr. Kim goes to a luxury car dealership to learn some of the features of such vehicles, meets Mr. Park, and immediately sets to work flattering him. Mr. Kim drives well, garnering a compliment from Mr. Park on his “cornering,” and earns the rich man’s respect by stating that he’s been working as a driver for 30 years – Mr. Park says that he admires a man who sticks to one thing for that length of time, indicating a sort of socio-economic conservatism: Mr. Park likes people to remain in their place, and of course he does, because his own place is so incredibly high. The last person the Kim family sets out to replace, and the most difficult, is the housekeeper. She was at the house before the Park family even lived there, and does an excellent job – the only complaint is that Mr. Park says she “eats enough for two people,” but a few dollars a day of food is nothing to him. But with impressive ingenuity, the Kim’s manage to convince Mrs. Park that the housekeeper is infected with tuberculosis and must be replaced for the sake of the children’s safety. And sure enough, Mr. Kim knows about an excellent agency that hires out maids and nannies and drivers, and within a few days Mrs. Kim is the Parks’ new live-in housekeeper. The sequence is funny but still disturbing and tense – at any moment, with any slip-up, it could go wrong and the Kim’s could be back to total poverty, and if everything goes right it still results in the driver and housekeeper being fired by no fault of their own. It’s something the Kim’s wrestle with in a following scene, sitting together, having a celebratory drink in the Park’s living room while the rich family goes away for a weekend camping trip to celebrate Da-song’s birthday. They note that the driver is young and has “a good build” so he will be fine, but they all seem a bit uncomfortable when thinking about the housekeeper, an older woman who’d been working at the house for decades. They quickly pass that by and continue trying to enjoy themselves. They talk about Ki-woo’s relationship with Da-hye, how much she adores him, and the Kim parents get very excited at the prospect of Ki-woo marrying the rich girl. No one seems to care that they would then have to live the rest of their lives in a constant lie – it would be worth it to have real and permanent access to such wealth. They even discuss hiring actors to play Ki-woo’s parents at the wedding. Ki-woo notes that it’s Ki-jung who really seems to belong in the upper class – the way she luxuriates in the bathtub being his strongest source of data, seemingly observing that the most important trait of the rich is fully and composedly enjoying their riches. The Kim children then note how kind Mrs. Park is. Mrs. Kim, in one of the few explicit acknowledgements of the way wealth influences behavior in the film by its characters, scoffs and says that she’d be nice too if she had that much money – that it’s much easier to be nice when you don’t have to worry about keeping a family fed and housed. The scene in the living room gets momentarily heated when the family disparages Mr. Kim in comparison to the successful Mr. Park. Mr. Kim throws the liquor glasses off the table and acts as if he’s about to hit his wife for her insult, then bursts out laughing. The whole family laughs, and the audience is relieved, not wanting the family to start fragmenting just as they’ve all made it to a place of seeming stability, with four tethers to the Park family and all the money and comfort they represent. And then there is a ring at the gate-intercom. Mrs. Kim gets up to answer it, as the only person who should still be in the house at that time. It’s the old housekeeper, saying she really needs to get something out of the basement of the house. Mrs. Kim, in an apparent act of pity towards the older woman, lets her in. The housekeeper looks beat up, aside from being soaked by the pouring rain that becomes an important plot point as the night wears on – already stricken physically by the roughness of joblessness in a harshly capitalistic society. Mrs. Kim follows the housekeeper into the basement, where the housekeeper is attempting to move a heavy cabinet. With Mrs. Kim’s help, they reveal a secret passageway that the housekeeper says the Park family doesn’t know about – that the architect had built in case of emergency. It’s here that some audience members, who expected a horror movie, asked, “is this where the horror part starts?” The housekeeper and Mrs. Kim go down multiple flights of stairs to a creepy secret room with a man living in it. The housekeeper embraces him and starts feeding him from a bottle, which he suckles hungrily, having been trapped down there since the housekeeper was fired. It turns out that he is the housekeeper’s husband, and he lives down there because he’s hunted by loan sharks – he attempted to stake out his own living with a “King Castella” cake shop, a food craze that swept Korea and led to a huge glut of shops before the bubble burst and left thousands of hopeful business-owners in massive debt. The man in the basement, Geun-sae, says that even after over four years in that secret room the loan sharks will still try to find him, and will kill him if he doesn’t have their money. So he stays down below, waiting for his wife to bring him food (the reason she “eats for two,” from Mr. Park’s perspective), and thanking Mr. Park with devout reverence for his provisions via Morse code communicated across lamps that wire down to the room, representative of the admiration the poor have for the rich, cultivated largely by a society that makes the poor’s existence contingent on the decisions of the upper class. It’s revealed that the trauma Da-song had suffered in first grade had been “seeing a ghost,” which had been Geun-sae coming upstairs in the middle of the night to get some food. Mrs. Kim is just preparing to call the police, completely unsympathetic to Geun-sae’s predicament if it’s going to threaten her own newfound security, when the rest of the Kim family, who had been spying on the scene from the secret stairway, tumbles into the scene. The housekeeper quickly gathers that they’re a family and deftly records a video of the four and has it ready to send to Mr. Park – all she has to do is press send, and the entire ruse will be up. Using the phone like a gun, she leads everyone upstairs, and she and Geun-sae take the couch that the Kim family had just been seated at, forcing them to kneel on the floor as they consider their next move and enjoy some of the Park family’s food. The housekeeper loses focus for just a second, and Ki-woo rushes her, knocking the phone from her hands. All six characters begin fighting each other for the phone, Ki-jung even dumps a bag of peaches on the housekeeper, who is fiercely allergic to them – all possible regard for each other stripped away by the stakes of access to the Park family wealth. As the Kim family gets control of the situation, the gate-intercom rings again. Mrs. Kim answers it, and it’s Mrs. Park calling from their car – she says they called off the camping trip because the rain had flooded the campsite, and would be home in eight minutes so could Mrs. Kim please make some Ram-Dan. In the ensuing chaos, the Kim family attempting to pull off a herculean feat of cooking, cleaning, and brutal suppression of two other people to keep their place in the home, the kids and Mr. Kim wrestle the housekeeper and her husband back down into the basement and sweep the mess that had been made before and during the fight under furniture while Mrs. Kim whips up “Ram-Dan,” a meal she’d never heard of. Just as the Park’s are coming inside, the housekeeper, her feet tied up, comes hopping up the stairs to the kitchen, and Mrs. Kim kicks her down the stairs and shuts the door. The housekeeper falls backwards down the stairs and her head slams against concrete with a sickening thud. The scene cuts back to Mrs. Park sitting down to enjoy the Ram-Dan. It’s only here that it really feels like things have gone too far, that the Kim family has truly allowed greed to overtake them as opposed to simply operating selfishly by necessity. Before Mrs. Kim kicked the housekeeper down the stairs, there was a sense of scrambling “all’s fair in love and war (and late-stage capitalism)” improvisation, stressful but basically justified, a family trying to survive with guts and guile. But despite this sudden sense of change, one is still left without a clear feeling of how and when to have pulled out of the lie – should Mrs. Kim, and would you, audience-member, have allowed the housekeeper to come up into the kitchen? It would have destroyed everything. The Kims would have likely been arrested, in an even worse position than before. Or would you, too, have swiftly and almost mindlessly placed your foot in the chest of the bound woman on the stairs, not even thinking twice about her life to preserve yourself? There had been a sign before Mrs. Kim kicked the housekeeper down the stairs that something was becoming warped in the Kim family. All four family-members on the Park payroll, they’d been in their basement apartment. Mr. Kim toasted Mr. Park, the family thanking him for his success which allowed them to be so prosperous in turn, never considering that the type of lavish prosperity Mr. Park enjoyed might just be the reason that the norm for so many in their country was desolate poverty. The same drunken man from the beginning of the film starts pissing on their house and the family groans. Instead of just watching, as they had before until Min came along and told the guy off, Ki-woo grabs the rock that Min had given them and starts to go outside. The audience barely has time to wonder if he’s going to scare the guy with the heavy, jagged rock or actually hit him with it, likely killing him, before Mr. Kim gives his son a bottle of water to use instead, diffusing the tension again. But when Mrs. Kim kicks the housekeeper down the stairs, it becomes clear that the struggle to attain comfort and stability in the harshly unequal society has demanded of the Kims not just cleverness and a certain disregard for others well-being, but also a ruthlessness, a brutality towards life itself, and it’s hardened them, this greed that’s come into their lives, symbolized by the rock and encouraged by capitalistic structures. The Kim’s have to continue to hide in the Park home until the family goes to sleep, but before they do, they hear Mr. and Mrs. Park disparaging the smell of Mr. Kim, comparing it to an odor of boiled rags. It harkens back to another earlier scene, a tense moment when Da-song says that all four of his family’s new workers smell the same. The observation gets laughed off, and later, back at home, Mr. Kim says they need to start using different soap when they shower. Ki-jung says it isn’t the soap that makes them smell the same – it’s living in a shitty basement apartment. The smell that Mr. Kim apparently carries most heavily, the smell the Parks laugh at and make fun of him for and sometimes plug their noses from, is the smell of poverty. When the Parks go to sleep, Mr. Kim and his kids sneak out of the home and into the still-pouring rain. It’s clear that it must be deep into the a.m. hours by this point, and the sequence from celebrating their infiltration of the Park payroll to the housekeeper’s revelations to successfully maintaining their ruse and escaping the house had been so tense and long that you feel exhausted for the family, these three that didn’t just possibly kill the housekeeper, hoping that they can get home and get some sleep. However, as they get closer and closer to their poor neighborhood, the streets become more flooded. By the time they get near home, they are wading through sewer water, flooding the impoverished. People are using buckets to desperately and fruitlessly try to throw water outside. The Kim’s home is completely flooded, water up to their chests in a claustrophobic scene in which they go inside trying to save a few precious items. Ki-woo grabs the rock Min had given them. Ki-jung gets the envelope in which they’d been keeping their cash earnings, but it’s soaked through. She sits on the toilet, the only thing in the apartment fully above water, sewage belching up against the seat and spilling over, and weeps. It’s a striking image – this girl who just a few scenes previously had been luxuriating in the Park’s jacuzzi tub watching a flat screen television now crying on a shit-covered toilet gurgling over in a flooded basement apartment – and it makes one wonder what exactly the film is trying to say. That lies and greed cannot be kept down, that they will explode to the surface, impossible to salvage or scrub clean – a moral message to apply to the individual? Or that the ills of a nation cannot remain buried, that they are beginning to boil-over, that the horrors of poverty that many wish to forget, including those who have been a part of it, still exist and cannot be ridden of by merely hiding from view – an indictment of society, an illumination of the most horrifically oppressed and ignored? While the Kim’s salvage a few things from their flooding home, the housekeeper regains consciousness and hops weakly to her husband in the secret room in the Park house. She unties him and repeats Mrs. Kim’s first name, telling him that she is about to die, but wanting him to enact revenge for her. She then fades and dies, the hideous concussion she’d sustained in the fall overtaking her. In the morning, Mr. Kim and his children are awakening in a cartoonishly crowded gymnasium filled with thousands left homeless by the flood, an image that reminds Americans of Hurricane Katrina news coverage. They all get texts from Mrs. Park about a party that afternoon at the house for Da-song in lieu of the camping trip. Mr. Kim has to go help her buy food and party favors, and Mrs. Park talks about how the rain was irritating but afterwards it’s always nice – how it clears the air of pollution. It’s apparent that Mr. Kim can barely hold back his anger at her privilege: that the rain was just an annoyance to her, when thousands were utterly ruined by it; the cramped homes and few possessions they did have destroyed by the sewage water, by a city that is designed to drain through the poor neighborhoods. Ki-woo goes to the house and up to Da-hye’s room, where they continue their love affair and afterwards, he looks out over the lawn at all the party guests, how well-dressed and nice and elegant and perfect they seem, and he asks Da-hye if she thinks he could fit in with them. It seems then that Ki-woo’s self-image is running against his dream of breaking, fully, into the upper class. He expresses genuine doubt that he could ever really belong, wondering if his class is something deeper than chance and situation but something immutable, emblazoned on the soul. With everything set up, Mr. Kim waiting in the bushes with Mr. Park to stage a little skit with Ki-jung when she comes out to the yard with Da-song’s cake, Mrs. Kim finishing the food, Ki-woo heads down to the secret room to, it’s implied, kill the housekeeper and her husband, Geun-sae, with the rock Min gave him. When he gets down there, he sees that the housekeeper is already dead, and then he is ambushed from behind by Geun-sae. Ki-woo nearly escapes up the stairs but Geun-sae catches him in the kitchen and bashes him in the head with the rock. It’s assumed that Ki-woo is dead, killed by the rock that represents material wealth, while everyone else at the party is out in the yard. Geun-sae wanders outside, the first time in over four years, face bloody, dead-eyed, holding a knife he grabbed from the kitchen, in back of the crowd of clean and smiling rich people, the brutalized lower class emerging into the sunlight to wreak havoc. He sees the daughter carrying the cake and stabs her in the chest in front of everyone, momentarily frozen by confusion – is this the skit? – and then stricken with fear. Da-song has a seizure, seeing the “ghost” again. Geun-sae finds Mrs. Kim, after seeing Mr. Park and yelling, “Respect!”, and attempts to take vengeance for his wife, while Mr. Kim rushes to his daughter, trying to stem the blood. Mr. Park screams at Mr. Kim to drive him and Da-song to the hospital, not caring about Ki-jung, and then screams for Mr. Kim to just throw him the car keys. Mr. Kim does this, but the keys fall short. Mr. Kim sees his son being dragged out of the house by a hysterical Da-hye, a huge gash in his head. His daughter is dying in his arms. His wife has been slashed by Geun-sae before she’d stabbed him with a meat-skewer sword. The keys end up under Geun-sae. Amidst this horror, Mr. Park comes forward to grab the keys on the grass and gags at Geun-sae’s smell, getting too close to that indelible smell of poverty that is so apparently pungent on Mr. Kim as well. The pain of such indignity and callousness, in all this horror and violence, Mr. Park still has the nerve to be disgusted by the smell. It drives Mr. Kim over the edge and he grabs the knife that Geun-sae had used to kill Ki-jung to stab Mr. Park in the chest. The rich guests don’t do anything, they just stand there in absolute horror, paralyzed, having never experienced life-or-death crisis before on any level. Mr. Kim simply walks by and leaves the property. Mr. Kim’s reaction to Mr. Park’s gag is a curious moment. Just moments earlier, Mr. Park had been quite nice to him – acknowledging that dressing up as a Native American for Da-song’s skit was demeaning but pointing out that he was being paid overtime for it. Geun-sae, of course, has just murdered Mr. Kim’s daughter and, unbeknownst to him, his son, and had attempted to kill his wife. But when Mr. Park expresses his uncontrollable disgust at the smell of the man who had been hidden in the secret room beneath the house, the man who had looked up to Mr. Park with devout reverence, who had said “thank you” to him in Morse Code every night through the light system, the utter disregard by Mr. Park of Geun-sae’s humanity awakens a rage in Mr. Kim. Perhaps what is awakened is a rage of class solidarity. Acknowledging Geun-sae as a brother in a struggle much vaster than any of them had previously recognized, even though on the surface he should hate the basement ghost with his whole being, negating Mrs. Kim’s previous refutation when the housekeeper called her “sister.” The denouement is narrated by Ki-woo, who survived the blow to his head after an extended coma. When he wakes up, he can’t stop laughing, despite the fact that he and his mother are back to poverty, his father is missing, and his sister is dead. One of the most heartbreaking parts of the entire movie is seeing Ki-jung’s grave – a cubby, like one might have had in grade-school, amongst thousands of others in a cramped basement, with a picture of her and a few small personal belongings: even in death, the poor get the bare minimum amount of space, just enough for the rest of society to be able to say, “here you go, now shut up.” The only time Ki-woo doesn’t laugh is when he watches news coverage of the murder of Mr. Park and the disappearance of the killer. The only time he can’t laugh is when he sees the events sucked into a larger narrative – the innocent rich, slaughtered by the evil, jealous poor. Ki-woo goes up on the hill over the Parks’ old home, now housing a German family who didn’t know about the murders that occurred there. He sees the light flickering, the light that Geun-sae had used to thank Mr. Park in Morse code. Ki-woo writes down the sequence of dashes and dots and translates the message – it turns out, his father had went right back inside the Park house after killing the patriarch, down into hiding in the secret room. Ki-woo vows to get rich – he daydreams about overcoming his class, making it all on his own, earning enough money to buy the house – his father walking upstairs and embracing him, going out in the yard, parents and son, triumphant and freed, into the sunlight. Then the scene cuts back to Ki-woo’s reality – back in the basement apartment, in the poverty where the movie began, and ends.

Class and Self-Image The thing that struck me most about Parasite was the distortive effects that the intensely capitalistic society presented has on people’s perception of themselves and of others. One of the most obvious examples is when Ki-woo doubts he could ever belong in the upper class, standing in Da-hye’s room overlooking the assembling party in the yard. This doubt comes after weeks or months of lies and the previous night’s fight with the housekeeper and Geun-sae, after wading through sewage water in his flooded home and spending the morning in an overcrowded gymnasium full of refugees, after hearing his father’s resigned speech about the futility of making plans – a striking comment on the sense of instability and impermanency that suffuses the lives of the working poor. Ki-woo seems to see himself as a stained person, in comparison to the rich visitors to the party. Just the night prior, he had observed how nice Mrs. Park is. Of course, and as his mother pointed out, the wealthy people don’t need to scratch and claw for every bit of comfort in their lives. They are never faced with the choices and situations that have constantly come up in the Kim family’s lives – between being ruthless or being broke, between being duplicitous and violent or being hungry and homeless. When such choices and situations are a part of one’s life, virtually everyone will become stained in the same way Ki-woo seems to see himself; they’ll get the smell on them like Mr. Kim; they’ll have to do things that the higher society would say are immoral, but that the higher society can avoid at far lower stakes. When morality and decency are divorced from consciousness of a society that makes adherence to individual values infinitely more difficult for the lower class, the people within that society will view it as a series of individual failures rather than a systemic failure when people in the lower class are systematically more likely to fall short of those values than those in the upper class. This distortion comes from both the rich and the poor – from Ki-woo wondering if the rich are simply, immutably, better than he is, and from Mr. and Mrs. Park having no awareness that the smell of Mr. Kim might be due to anything other than his own individual grossness. It’s part of the same distortion that leads to the Kim family and Geun-sae repeatedly thanking Mr. Park for amassing such great wealth that they can siphon a tiny piece from it to support themselves, never considering that the fact of his ability to have such inordinate wealth might be the reason they need to siphon in the first place. Early in the film, when Min comes by and stops the drunken man from peeing on the Kim household, Mr. Kim states that college students have “vigor,” apparently unpossessed by the less educated. Perhaps this too is a product of distortion, a sense put into the minds of the more privileged that a home is not something to be pissed on, but a sense withheld from the impoverished, because their place and their comfort and their recognition is always contingent upon what is most convenient for the more powerful classes (take Ki-jung’s grave-cubby as an example), and the society doesn’t want to give them any sense of entitlement whatsoever, even if it’s just entitlement to a home not covered in bodily waste; everything must be demanded, fought for – even charity isn’t possible when the would-be recipients are rendered invisible. In this society which both favors the upper class, allowing them to be divorced from the material concerns of the rest of the population – for instance, the rain which flooded the poor neighborhoods but only posed a minor annoyance for the Parks – and leads to the distorted view that the rich are inherently better than the poor, lower-class fragmentation is an inevitable result. The fight between the Kim family and the housekeeper and her husband is a fight for who gets to have a spot on the Park payroll – which of these poor families is more worthy to have a piece of what the Parks, in both families’ minds, rightfully own? It is the poor who are each other’s enemies, by necessity. From the very start, the film shows that there is little room for empathy within the lower class and the hard-scrabble lives they are forced to lead. The girl who runs the pizza van that the Kim family folds boxes for probably has barely more wiggle room than they do, and so she must be tough on them, unsympathetic, dock their pay for a sub-par job. The Kim family gives little consideration to the driver and housekeeper they replace and Mrs. Kim, when she finds out about Geun-sae in the basement, was going to call the police – the Kim’s recognize empathy towards the other working poor as a threat to the stable income they are fighting for. The housekeeper even calls Mrs. Kim “sister,” appealing to solidarity, to common understanding of what it’s like to struggle, but Mrs. Kim, so nascently a part of the middle class, refuses this gesture. Attempting solidarity with the rich is more immediately profitable than solidarity with the other poor, and the situation of the poor is dire. It is their situation that systematically forces the lower class to unscrupulousness, and the effects of this near-necessary behavior are felt by others in the lower class. The effect is that the offenses people in the lower class recognize most directly are the ones enacted by each other, while the much larger oppressions carried out anonymously by the rich are diffuse and imperceptible. It is like war: soldiers see the ones shooting at them as their enemies, because they are the immediate and visceral threat; they do not recognize that those people shooting at them don’t want to be shooting any more than they do, don’t have any more stake in it than they do; they don’t recognize that the people with a real interest in the outcome, who can profit by it, are nowhere nearby; that we see our enemies across from us when we should be looking up. The distortive effects of class – the way wretched lives lead to wretched self-image, and good lives lead to the self- and external-perception of goodness, that all are getting what they deserve, is also brought to light through the very fact that the Kim family, especially Ki-woo and Ki-jung, have to lie about their credentials. Ki-woo, who aspires to go to college one day if he can save enough money, is a legitimately good English tutor – the fact that he isn’t actually a college student has no bearing on that. Ki-jung, posing as “Jessica,” a Korean-native who studied art and art therapy in Chicago, is extremely talented with art and digital media and is also the only character in the movie who appears able to control the unruly and bratty Da-song, despite being, really, an untrained girl from a poor family. Both know that the Park’s would never give them a job if they knew the truth of where they came from, regardless of their actual abilities, of their actual merit. Just as the movie presents the way that class distorts peoples’ perception of themselves and what they deserve, it also shows the harsh truth that for those below a certain station, there is little opportunity to demonstrate any higher level of deservedness. They feel shame about where they come from and want to earn their way out, but to do that they have to lie, hid their true lives, which makes them feel shame as well. There is a harsh paradox just on the edge of formation here – that for the poor to prove their worth, they will have to do things that will make them feel unworthy, or at least as though they are not living honestly. The parents too are good at their jobs. Mrs. Kim is an able housekeeper and an excellent cook. When Mrs. Park calls and asks her to make “Ram-Dam,” a dish she’d never heard of, she makes a bowl in just eight minutes that Mrs. Park eats with satisfaction. Mr. Kim gets a compliment from Mr. Park for his “cornering” as a driver (though he turns his whole body to look at the person he is driving in the backseat). Throughout the film we see evidence like this that the station of the poor is not explainable by lack of ability or intelligence. This comes in comparison to the portrayal of the Park family. Da-hye seems like an ordinary, angsty teen; Da-song seems like a pretty ordinary young boy – his parents’ absolute belief in his brilliance is used as a joke, but what that joke might represent is that misguided, even delusional belief in one’s exceptionality can be used to justify one’s place. Mrs. Park is beautiful and sweet but brings little else to the table, as all characters seem to recognize, including her. Mr. Park is authoritative but we never really get any indication whether he is actually good at his job, value-producing as a CEO, or is simply in control of capital and must therefore be bowed to. To sum, the movie effectively portrays a situation in which, if there is actually a difference in ability between the rich family and the poor one, that difference is dwarfed by that of their comparative wealth, refuting perhaps the most pernicious myth of capitalist ideology: that our station in life is reflective of our deservedness; that the way things fall in “the market” are just and unquestionable. That’s prosperity-gospel bullshit, and Parasite puts it right in the forefront how that ideology justifies the position of the wealthy and the poor, and how it convinces people in both groups to believe it.

Crossing the Line Another compliment Mr. Park, speaking to his wife, gives Mr. Kim is that he never “crosses the line,” though he sometimes comes close. We are never told exactly what crossing the line means, but there is one scene while Mr. Kim is driving Mr. Park which provides insight: Mr. Park says something about his wife, and Mr. Kim says, “but you love her, of course” (paraphrasing – I can’t remember the exact line). Mr. Park’s mood darkens a bit and he narrows his eyes at his driver’s head before he allows the moment to pass. Adding this scene to Mr. Park’s statement that Mr. Kim’s smell does cross the line, and we can build a hypothesis about what “crossing the line” is: things that threaten the illusion; that call into question the flawlessness of Mr. Park’s life or offend his taste; that, consciously or inadvertently or without any control on Mr. Kim’s part whatsoever, draw attention to any of the many realities constantly concealed by his wealth: that the Park’s marriage might be based more on money and beauty than love; that underneath that money and beauty might be emptiness; that poverty and suffering and death and that awful smell exist while Mr. Park lives in a massive and immaculate hilltop home and feeds his dogs Japanese crab meat. The theme of suppressing poverty, hiding it from the rest of society, is a constant and powerful one in Parasite. When Ki-jung first gets her job tutoring Da-song, Mr. Park has his driver take her home. The audience understands that he mustn’t see where she lives or the ruse will be up – he’ll tell Mr. Park she isn’t actually a successful art teacher. Geun-sae is hiding in the basement of the rich family, and though he is no imposition on them down there, he still must be kept a secret – the housekeeper knows they would want him gone if they knew he was there. Mrs. Park appears completely unaware of the thousands left homeless by the flooding when she comments on how the rain is nice because it clears up pollution – indicating that the media chooses not to bother its wealthier patronage with bad news about the poor. The suppressed emerging from below is foreshadowed by the image of Ki-jung sitting on the toilet as sewage spills out into her flooded home. The following day at the Park house, Geun-sae comes out of the basement to have his revenge – but his revenge, of course, is not on the loan sharks that forced him into hiding or the capitalist system that led him to invest his life in the “King Castella” cake market bubble. How could it be? Enemies within this society become more abstract and diffuse and unfightable as they become more powerful and consequential. But the Kim family, the matriarch of which killed his wife in a flash-panic mindless kick of self-preservation, is flesh and blood and right there. And Geun-sae walks out into the sunlight, face wretched with his own dried blood, eyes betraying his madness, and kills Ki-jung in front of the horrified partygoers. Da-song has a seizure at the sight of Geun-sae, the ghost that had appeared to him a few years before. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see this as a comment on the fragility of the upper class’s sensibilities, the way they are protected, by their own class’s design, from knowledge of the reality of the impoverished, the suppressed, the buried. Da-song, this spoiled boy, adored to the point of near-worship by his rich parents, was traumatized by the mere sight of this person that lives in the shadows of his home. When he sees Geun-sae in the full light of day, he immediately begins convulsing. As Ki-jung is dying in her father’s arms after Geun-sae stabbed her, Mr. Park commands Mr. Kim to drive Da-song to the hospital. Even at the doorstep of death, the expectation is that the needs and demands of the rich will trump over those of everyone else. Mr. Kim is driven into a rage by the immediately following indignity of Mr. Park gagging when he smells Geun-sae: at this climax, Ki-jung taking her dying breaths, Ki-woo appearing already dead as Da-hye and others carry him past, Mr. Park still had the nerve to express his disgust of this unwashable attribute of poverty. Even if Mr. Park didn’t mean to gag, Geun-sae doesn’t mean to have the smell, and neither does Mr. Kim, and Mr. Park had joked about it earlier, quite on purpose and unnecessarily. In this moment of terror, the poor men still didn’t have the privilege of just being people; they had to be, Mr. Park had to let him know they were, also, poor, old, disgusting. To see Mr. Park gagging at the offense of his own sensibilities in this most humanity-shattering of moments – believing his children to both be dead or dying – was too much for Mr. Kim, and he lashed out, killing Mr. Park – and the news would say, nobody knew why. Mr. Kim goes back underground, taking Geun-sae’s place in the basement of the next rich family. The symbolism is direct: for such wealth to exist as that in the immaculate home, there must be something below, struggling to survive, on the verge of starvation, miserable, unseen. I think Mr. Kim recognizes this symbolism. It’s why he goes down there. He killed Mr. Park in a moment that seems like it could be one of sudden and complete class solidarity gone violent. Recognizing a solidarity with the lower class, something his son misses, Mr. Kim takes position down below to wait – probably for the rest of his life.

The Delusion We conclude with Ki-woo’s promise to become rich and buy the house and free his father. The scene illustrates the perniciousness of capitalist dogma. Ki-woo has hope that he can make it in the system – and likely, that hope is misplaced, and he will work himself to the bone to the profit of those above him. But perhaps he will become rich. Perhaps he will make it – some always do. Because just as Geun-sae is replaced in the secret basement with Mr. Kim, so the Park family is replaced by the German family: in capitalism, there must always be capitalists; there must always be haves and have-nots, and there’s always the chance (or at least the illusion of one) of becoming one who has, otherwise the system would collapse in the blink of an eye. But it’s that very hope that prevents so many of the have nots from collectivizing their power, recognizing that their holistic interest is in changing the power structure rather than participating in the rat race which will reward a tiny few of them but many many more of those that come into the society from a place of high privilege, as Da-hye and Da-song will. Perhaps even more sinister is the side of the dogma that says that success will come to those who work hard enough – if you end up poor, hungry, with unstable shelter and no opportunities, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough, and that’s proven by the fact that there are likely to be some people who succeed who came from a similar station. If Ki-woo succeeds in his plan, he will become justification for the continuation of the same societal structure which led to his sister’s death, to his father’s imprisonment, to his own and his mother’s destitution, to the desperation that plagued the family throughout the film. If he fails, it’s because he just didn’t work hard enough or didn’t have The Right Stuff ™. Ki-woo’s plan and the daydream of it succeeding comes shortly after his father telling him that making plans is pointless. Mr. Kim, who so many times throughout the film beforehand had advocated for having a plan, is psychologically broken – or, one might argue, realizes the basic truth – after the flood. He comes to believe that with poverty comes powerlessness, and plans only have value if one has some power to enact them and reap from their reward. He does not. His family does not. The lower class does not. Ki-woo seems to feel bad for his father when he says this – Ki-woo still believes, still has hope. Even after his sister is dead and his father is locked away, Ki-woo still has hope. Perhaps it’s simply youth. Mr. Kim has suffered through poverty for much, much longer – tried to escape it many times fruitlessly. And with this latest horror – the money they’d saved and their home being destroyed by flooding – he finally accepts that poverty is inescapable. And in a sense, he is right – within capitalism, at least as it is practiced in the film and arguably most of the modern world, poverty is essential to the system – scarcity drives demand, drives profit, and just as wealth concentrates in a few, so does scarcity concentrate in a significant minority, defining their lives, their health, even their deaths. Maybe it’s Mr. Kim’s acceptance of this fact that makes his smell grow stronger – at least, the Parks seem to react to his smell more strongly after he comes to this belief. It’s a belief rancid to those who would seek to justify and embrace the ideology of capitalism. Or maybe the smell is worse because he spent the night wading through chest-deep shit-water. Who’s to say? I think Ki-woo doesn’t come to his father’s understanding even after the horrors he’s gone through by the end of the movie because of his head injury, the physical trauma that leaves him laughing at virtually everything. It was a deliberate choice by the filmmakers to end with a shot of Ki-woo’s reality, sitting in his family’s half-basement, in the same cyclical poverty where he was introduced, rather than in the triumphantly hopeful scene at the Park house, hugging his emergent father in the sunlight. It’s a hammering home of reality – Ki-woo will NOT escape his poverty. Not because he is dumb or inept or lazy, clearly, based on the events of the film thus far, but because he IS poor in a steeply hierarchical, late-stage capitalist society. He’s fucked. And even if (God, the perniciousness of hope) he does somehow make it out of the struggle and instability, most like him will not, they cannot, it is impossible for them to do so because of the structure of the society. The stomach-drop moment of the film is not the shot of Ki-woo back in his basement, a statement that he will almost certainly fail; it’s Ki-woo sharing his dream of becoming rich. That is the end of real hope. We see then that Ki-woo is dead; we all saw it: we all saw the jagged rock smash against his head; Ki-woo was murdered by the rock, murdered by materialism: what’s left is a puppet, a parasite in his body. Ki-woo’s dream shows that he is looking right past the systemic inequities all around him at the golden image of utter prosperity beyond. He is looking right past all the others like him, all the other Kim families subjugated and oppressed and hidden, and if he gets a lick of power and wealth he will do nothing to attempt to bring justice to the system; he will give no regard to those in the position he came from; just as his mother rebuffed the housekeeper’s plea for solidarity in calling her “sister,” Ki-woo sees himself as a man on an individual’s journey, divorced from broader consciousness. He’s brain-damaged, socket-blown, delusional, completely sold on the ideology of inequity, of the dream and the hope that keeps moving capitalism towards complete domination by the few over the many until the many actually join together and demand change. There was hope until Ki-woo shared his dream. Hope that the horrors he’s seen caused by wealth disparity would light a fire in him to fight to shrink it. But no, he wants to live above, in full knowledge that there will have to be others hidden, starving, suffering below. If he makes it, he will abandon the overwhelming majority of the poor like him. But he won’t make it, because he is poor.

The Parasite As I’ve already noted, I think the film’s title could refer to Ki-woo’s state at the end: animated by the hollow spirit of materialist dreams and pseudo self-elevation, the base of the ideology that keeps capitalism, as it is practiced in the film, alive. Parasite could also most obviously refer to the Kim family, leeching off of Mr. Park’s wealth. But that doesn’t seem quite right – the Kim’s are good at their jobs. They haven’t caused any harm to the Park’s, other than perhaps Da-song’s art lessons being semi-fraudulent (though Ki-jung at least gets him to behave). The Kim’s only caused harm to the Park family’s former driver and housekeeper, but that doesn’t seem a parasitical relationship, rather, a traitorous one. Parasite could refer to Geun-sae, and then Mr. Kim, living in the basement off another family’s food. That seems like a decent interpretation – they’re not doing any work for the Parks when they’re down there, and they’re eating some of their food (a lot of there/their/they’re in that sentence – very risky). But really, what’s a few pieces of fruit or whatever to the Parks? It’s nothing. So if that is the Parasite, it’s not really a danger to its host. The Parasite could also be the rich. It could be the Park family. They own huge homes that are pieces of art (and the housekeeper says they don’t even appreciate it) built by renowned architects while many of the essential workers of the city live in tiny half-basements; they have a dozen sprinklers watering their lawn; they demand the time and obedience of those of a lesser station; they feed their dogs Japanese crab meat while many others in the city struggle to afford decent food themselves. And what did they do to deserve so exponentially much more than those others? What will Da-hye and Da-song have done to deserve it? The Park’s live luxuriously and spaciously atop a hill overlooking the rest of Seoul, where the people essential to the creation of their wealth and the material goods they buy with it live below, many in near-squalor, in unstable conditions, the little they earn with their work subject to the whims of the forces around them. When the rainstorm comes, to the Parks, it clears the air – to the poor, it destroys their homes and all they had saved. The comfort of the rich comes upon the backs and toil of the essential millions beneath them. When Mr. Kim stabs Mr. Park, perhaps that was a moment of the host lashing out against its leech. “Parasite” could be a description of a system in which advantage is perpetually increased, more blood continually taken, until the host takes notice and claws at it; demands restructuring, revolution.

Conclusion Walking out of the theater, one of the people I watched the movie with commented, “It just kept getting worse and worse for them (the Kim family). It made me want to grab everyone and scream, ‘can we just stoppp?!’” I think that’s exactly right, exactly what the film should do. From the high point of the Kims’ position, sitting in the Park living room at the start of what should have been a weekend celebrating their new life, to the end, things just keep getting worse and worse. And it all makes sense: it all goes so terribly, logically wrong, and believably so. Of course the Kim family doesn’t get to keep having money; of course they fall even farther than they began; of course they are met with violence and death and despair; of course the family is ripped apart; of course Ki-woo doesn’t even take the right message from all of it, meaning the cycle will continue. When it’s laid out as clearly and poignantly as it is in Parasite, you do want to dive into the screen and make everyone stop hurting each other, killing each other, letting each other be hungry and homeless, lying and keeping secrets, recoiling at Mr. Kim’s smell, beg them to, beg them to just treat each other as goddamn human beings, is that so fucking much? You really want it all to just stop, and you see how inequality is a runaway train towards destruction, compared to when you’re in it it’s made to just seem like the status quo. The question is, can we make that impulse last? Can we keep that consciousness, that vision, that empathy? Can it survive the daily toil of our own lives, now that we’ve watched Ki-woo get shattered by the jagged rock? Can we avoid letting ourselves and our own perceptions be warped by class? Can our humanity survive when the jagged rocks are everywhere, all around us, being thrown at our heads by so many who benefit from what it represents? In the hours and days after watching Parasite, it seems clear what we must do. We must denounce greed, denounce the myth that, in a wealthy society, poverty is justified by worth; we must come to Mr. Kim’s realization that a person’s gagging in disgust of the poor is truly disgust of humanity, an impulse towards insulation from the lives of others. We must come together in empathy, and not lose sight of each other in dreams of individual elevation. In this sense, the film is art as wisdom – learn from the mistakes of the characters on screen so our own real-life crucible won’t have to be so soul-crushing. It took death and horror and misery for Mr. Kim to learn this lesson: what will it take for us?

#parasite #socialism #capitalism #sanders2020 #films

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sushigirlali · 6 years ago

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The Politics of Dancing - Part I (Reylo Fanfic)

Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV

Summary: Ben has known Rey most of her life, but when things change between them one tumultuous night, can he convince her that they have a future? Or will secret legacies, scheming parents, and fetching suitors get in the way?

Parings: Rey + Ben Solo|Kylo Ren, Finn + Rose Tico

Continuity: Regency AU

Rating: E

A/N: Pride and Prejudice is my jam, so I’ve been wanting to set a story in the Regency period for a long time. This is also a Christmas fic, so happy belated holidays, everyone! Also, special shout-out to a few of my fellow Capricorn mutuals! Happy Birthday, @rad-braybury & @dvrkrey & @atchamberlin 💙❤️ Can’t wait to see what you talented Reylos come up with on the lead up to EPIX and beyond!

Master list –> AO3 | ff.net | Tumblr

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The Politics of Dancing - Part I

By: sushigirlali

——————

London, December 1818

——————

Lounging indolently on his mother’s favorite crimson chaise, Ben Solo pretended to listen to the incessant prattle of the desperate debutant sitting across from him. Miss what’s-her-name was more demanding than most, but unfortunately for her, he was too busy searching for his uncle’s distractingly beautiful ward to care.

Where is she? Ben frowned, smoky eyes darting toward the grand staircase for the fourth time in as many minutes. It’s been nearly three hours.

Impatiently tapping his fingertips against the soft velvet of the couch, Ben wondered whether he should go check on her. Purely out of concern for her wellbeing, of course. She must be tried after last night, he smirked.

Recalling the sated look on Rey Niima’s flushed face as he brought her to orgasm after shattering orgasm the night before, Ben shifted restlessly in his seat. It would be unseemly to make a spectacle of himself in his parents’ drawing room, but the memory of his lover’s tantalizing response was proving difficult to suppress.

Turning in the direction of the immaculately decorated evergreen tree in the corner, Ben attempted to focus on something less sexually charged when a sudden sense of déjà vu struck him. The room had been similarly decorated the first day he’d met Rey, more than fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years, Ben marveled. It seems like a lifetime ago now…

Orphaned at the age of five when her parents died in a freak factory fire while touring their holdings in the industrial district, Rey’s future had been precarious in the days leading up to Christmas. The Niima’s were of the nouveau riche variety, and consequently, they owed money to numerous lenders, up to and including the Bank of England itself. But with no other family or capital to help settle her parent’s ill-kempt accounts, Luke and Leia had felt it was their duty as longtime friends of Lord and Lady Niima to take care of Rey in their stead.

As a spoiled teenager, he’d been resentful of the attention she’d garnered from his family, feeling left out while his mother fussed over Rey like the daughter she’d always wanted. But despite his attitude in those early years, Rey had blossomed under the Skywalker’s care.

Since money was no issue for one of the wealthiest families in the country, Rey was afforded everything a young lady needed to thrive in society, including a world class education in music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages. In addition, Luke fully supported her dream of studying mathematics and engineering, something no other lady of his acquaintance could boast.

But then, we’re an unconventional family, Ben allowed.

Although Skywalker Manor was entailed to Luke as his father’s heir, his uncle had opted to raise Rey in his small but comfortable country estate instead, leaving the mansion in London to his beloved sister and best friend. The move had raised quite a few manicured eyebrows, but Luke had never been one to follow tradition.

I’m still curious about what his motives could have been. Beyond the Skywalker party line, that is.

Whenever the subject was broached, his mother simply stated that her brother had volunteered to mentor Rey out of loneliness, but Ben wasn’t so sure; the old hermit seemed pretty self-sufficient to him. Still, it was impossible to deny the effect that Rey’s bright personality had had on his uncle’s taciturn disposition.

Or mine, for that matter, he thought wryly, acknowledging how thoroughly the young ingénue had wormed her way into his heart.

The initial antagonism he’d felt toward Rey had ended the year before he’d gone away for University, when old man Snoke had slashed him across the face for stealing apples from his prized orchard. Although he’d been guilty of the crime, the brass seven-year-old had covered for him with his parents, making up a story about how he’d cut his cheek on a tree branch while out riding instead.

He’d felt guilty for deceiving his parents, but when Snoke suddenly succumbed to syphilis a few weeks later, Ben didn’t see the point in correcting the lie; it was best to let the past die with his attacker as far as he was concerned.

Tracing the faint mark still maring his right cheek, Ben contemplated the old injury. It had piqued his vanity at first, but the slight imperfection hadn’t stopped him from attracting friends—or women—while attending Oxford. In fact, most people seemed to be interested in the faded scar while far less were off-put by it.

I’m sure my family’s money had something to do with it as well, he mused, not blind to the fact that his status had paved the way through a great many obstacles.

After school, Ben had worked for his father for a number of years, traveling around the world and securing their interests against outside threats. By twenty-six, he’d earned a reputation for being a ruthless negotiator and was able to stave off French control of his family’s assets leading up to Napoléon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815.

He was proud of all he’d accomplished while abroad, but once the war was over, Ben was shocked to discover how much Rey had grown up in his absence. Coming home on her eighteenth birthday, he’d been instantly captivated by her delicate beauty and unbridled intelligence. Ignoring his growing attraction to the lively orphan had become more difficult with every subsequent family gathering, but the ten-year age gap between them had given him pause.

Up until last night, that is.

Now twenty-one, Rey was fully in control of her own sexuality; she knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to ask for it. He supposed he should’ve resisted her advances when she slipped into his room after the rest of the house had gone to bed the previous evening, but after flirting with her all throughout dinner, not to mention the several glasses of wine he’d imbibed, Ben hadn’t been able to keep his hands off his adopted cousin.

Thank the maker that we’re not actually related.

Succumbing to her charms had been a long time coming and he was frankly impressed with himself for holding out for so—

“Don’t you think, Lord Ren?”

“Huh?” Ben stared blankly at the source of the interruption.

“I was remarking on unpatriotic Lady Lintra’s gown is!” she tittered. “It’s just so French!”

Lady who?

“Lord Ren?” she said when he didn’t react, resting a hand on his muscular thigh. “Are you listening to—”

Staring past the airhead still jabbering away at him, Ben’s jaw dropped as Rey appeared at the top of the stairs in a striking ivory gown. She wore no jewelry or makeup, but the healthy glow in her cheeks made her look radiant. Her hair, swept up into an intricate coiffure and studded with little white flowers, completed the look to perfection.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said absently, ignoring his suitor’s feeble protests as he brushed her off.

Moving to intercept Rey, Ben’s jovial mood quickly soured as she brushed past him without a word, crossing the room to seek the company of Finn Johnson instead.

What the hell?!

Ben had only known the Earl for a short time, but judging by the warm reception on her lovely face, Rey and Finn were old chums. Up until tonight, he’d liked the younger man, but now he wasn’t so sure…

——————

Rolling her eyes at the frivolous bows and bonnets vying for Lord Ren’s attention, Rey covertly tracked his movements through the crowd. He was all politeness and grace when it was time to turn on the charm, but if the ladies of the ton knew how hot-blooded he really was, they’d be shocked senseless.

Glaring at the dark-haired woman who’d been fondling Ben’s thigh when she walked in, Rey wondered whether Ben had slept with her as well. Had this painted tart been as agreeable as she’d been the night before? The thought didn’t sit well with her, but having fallen for the conceited wretch herself, she really couldn’t blame the young coquette if she had.

Don’t be a hypocrite, Rey, you would’ve done anything to have him just last night; and you did. Shivering as she recalled the pleasure of losing herself in Ben Solo’s arms at long last, Rey diverted her attention back to her lifelong friend. It was much easier to endure her inexplicable jealousy with Finn around.

“So, how is Rose? Have you proposed yet?” Rey inquired mischievously.

“Shh!” Finn whispered, looking around to make sure no one had overheard. “I’m still working out the finer points, so I’ll thank you to hold your tongue until the moment is right.”

“It’s been three years, Finn, how much longer are you going to make the girl wait?” she teased.

“Until such a time as I can convince my family that I’m not throwing my life away by marrying a, and I quote, ‘uncultured commoner who’s only after my fortune.’ ”

“Oh, Finn…” Rey said sympathetically.

“Why do you think my mother has been pushing for us to make a match? She’s in love with all that nice Skywalker money,” he said in disgust.

“It’s not like she would see any money out of the arrangement. Uncle Luke has been like a father to me, sure, but I’m not a Skywalker. I’m not blood,” she said without heat.

“But you’re his heir,” Finn stated glibly, “so that doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

“I’m his—what?” Rey exclaimed, looking around to make sure no one was listening. “Wherever did you hear such an outrageous lie?” she hissed.

“What?” Finn gaped at her. “Wait a minute! Wait just a damn minute! You don’t know? He didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?” she said uncertainly.

“Luke submitted a last will and testament to his lawyer right after your twenty-first birthday, naming you heir to the Skywalker fortune,” he informed her.

“But…what about Ben?” Rey made the mistake of glancing at him across the room, drawing Ben’s attention away from his latest admirer. “Oh, no, he’s—”

“Leia’s son, not Luke’s,” Finn reminded her.

“No! He’s walking toward us,” Rey interrupted. “Quick! Dance with me! I need a moment to think.”

Finn immediately complied, taking her hand and leading her into a simple country dance. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to spring this on you. I assumed you knew.”

Rey shook her head. “Luke never said a word.”

“I know he’s not the most talkative chap, but he should’ve discussed this with you before acting,” Finn said thoughtfully, tracing his foot along the floor.

“Tell me about it,” she said, matching his steps with practiced ease.

“Why do you think he kept it to himself?”

“Probably to keep me from running off before Christmas,” she sighed. “I never would have come to London if I’d known that Luke was going to strip Ben of his inheritance.”

“Do you think Ren knows?”

“I’m not sure,” Rey said hesitantly. “Why?”

Finn eyed the other man over her shoulder. “He’s been watching you since you descended the staircase. He looks…well, angry isn’t the right word. Jealous, maybe?”

“Jealous? I’m sure you’re mistaken,” she laughed, trying to play down Ben’s interest. Now wasn’t the time to admit that she was a fallen woman and Ben was likely feeling territorial. There were more pressing matters at hand. “He’s probably just bored and looking for someone to talk to. We are family, after all.”

Finn seemed to accept her explanation, but he kept looking from her to Ben and back again as if trying to work something out.

“But back to you!” Rey attempted to divert him. “Tell me more about Rose. I hear she’s quite the tinkerer…”

Rey half-listened as Finn began talking animatedly about the woman he hoped to marry, thinking back to the morning of her and Luke’s arrival several days ago. Ben hadn’t been hostile when he’d greeted them at the estate’s grand entrance gate and helped them unload the carriage, so it seemed unlikely that he knew about Luke’s revised will. If anything, he’d been more approachable than usual.

Ben’s never been particularly sociable, although his attitude has certainly improved over the years…among other things. Rey bit her lip as she remembered how he’d looked without a stitch of clothing on, how he’d felt lying full-length on top of her.

She’d been shy at first, despite provoking the situation, but Ben had taken his time with her, arousing her until she was breathless and begging. But did he take such good care of me because he wanted me as much as I wanted him or…? Rey stalled as a terrible thought crossed her mind.

What if Ben knew about his change of status and simply hadn’t let on? What if he’d slept with her knowing that she would be compromised and therefore beholden to him if he chose to make her loss of innocence known? Would Ben stoop to sleeping with her to ensure that he had access to Luke’s money?

Once again searching for him in the crowd, Rey started when she realized that Ben had maneuvered himself behind her partner, clearly intent on cornering her before she left the dance floor.

“Rose and her sister, Paige, are both—”

“Oh, no!”

“What’s wrong?” Finn said, giving Rey a quizzical look.

“Ben’s right behind you!” she whispered. “What should I do if he asks me to dance? I have no idea what to say to him right now.”

“You’d better brace yourself then,” Finn chuckled as he looked over his shoulder, “because I don’t think he’s going to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

——————

Glowering as Rey leaned into conversation with her handsome partner, Ben waited impatiently for a break in the music. Feeling like a fool for waxing poetic about her for hours on end while she was content to ignore him in favor of another man, Ben was determined to get an explanation out of her. Had their midnight rendezvous meant so little to her? Was he the only one who’d laid their heart on the line? He had to know.

“Lady Niima, may I have the next dance?” he requested as soon as the last note sounded, giving Finn the barest of nods before holding out his arm for Rey.

“If you must,” she said tightly, curving her fingers around his thick bicep while her friend respectfully stepped to the side.

“Thank you, my lady,” Ben said, amused by her haughty tone. Damn, but he liked her. “Give me your hand,” he directed when the orchestra took up a dreamy ballad.

“A waltz?” Rey inquired curiously, assuming the correct posture by placing one hand on his shoulder and the other in his. “Are you sure we should be doing this, my lord?”

“Whatever do you mean?” he replied, expertly leading her into the foreign dance.

“In some circles, the waltz is considered inappropriate between unwed men and women, as you well know—oh!” she gasped as he suddenly swept her off her feet and twirled her in a wide circle. “Ben!” she laughed in an unguarded moment of pure joy, exhilarated by his display of strength.

“That’s better,” Ben beamed, lacing their fingers together. “I’ve been waiting to see you smile again all day, sweetheart.”

Rey’s eyes widened at the endearment before sliding surreptitiously around the room. “Put me down, please,” she said coolly.

Gently lowering her to the ground, Ben searched her pretty face. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” she denied curtly.

“You’re angry with me,” he said in surprise, picking up on her mood.

“I’m angry with myself,” Rey corrected.

“Whatever for?”

“I’m not like you, Ben,” Rey huffed. “Despite what I instigated last night, I can’t just sleep around and damn the consequences. I can’t just flirt with whomever I want and hope for the best. If I want to make a good marriage, I have to—”

“Who do you intend to marry?” he interrupted sharply, pulling her to a stop. “Johnson?”

“It doesn’t matter. Look, there’s something I need to tell—”

“Of course it matters!” Ben growled, tightening his hold. “You’re mine!”

“Excuse me?! I’m no one’s property,” she shot back.

“Don’t test me, Rey, I’m not in the mood for games,” he said, dragging her flush against him and lowering his lips to within an inch of her own. “We’re nowhere near done with each other and you well know it.”

“I don’t—Ben, you’re too close,” Rey whispered, swaying towards him in spite of her words. “People will talk.”

“Let them.”

“Ben…”

“Come out onto the terrace with me, then,” he said, ghosting his lips over hers. “I’m not letting you out of my sight until we’ve discussed this properly.”

“I shouldn’t,” Rey faltered.

“But you want to,” he said confidently.

“Yes,” she conceded, “but don’t let that go to your thick head, you arrogant swine!”

“Never,” Ben smiled, backing off slightly and placing her hand in the crook of his arm. “Right this way, my lady.”

——————

Alarm bells were going off in her head as Ben lead her out to the deserted veranda, but she ignored them. What could he possibly do to her thirty feet from his mother’s packed drawing room?

Quite a lot, as it turned out.

Rey moaned as his wide lips crashed over hers the moment they reached a secluded alcove. He didn’t give her time to think let alone argue, backing her into the cool balustrade and cupping the back of her head with firm fingers. Leaning into his massive chest without a shred of self-preservation, Rey gripped the front of his finely made dinner jacket, pulling him even closer. It felt so good to be in his arms again.

Too good. Get ahold of yourself, Rey. You were supposed to discuss…you were…there was something… Losing her train of thought as Ben’s hips slid into contact with hers, Rey was instantly aware of the hard jut of his body. He was a large man, her Ben, all over.

When they parted to catch their breath few tumultuous minutes later, Ben took the opportunity to rumble, “Does Finn Johnson kiss you like that?” and ruin the moment.

“What?” she asked, dumbfounded by the abrupt accusation.

“Johnson,” he glowered. “How long have you known him?”

“Finn? Why do you—Ben, are you jealous?” Rey gaped, shocked by the notion. The man’s family had more money than the crown for goodness sake! He could have anything he wanted, any woman he wanted. So, why was he jealous of her?

“Of course I am! You went from my arms to his within a matter of hours!” he grumbled, honest to the point of insolence. “It’s insulting!”

“That wasn’t my intent.”

“This isn’t funny, Rey. I need to know how deeply you’re involved with—”

“Ben, it’s not like that,” Rey interjected. “You needn’t be jealous; the Earl and I are just friends. We used to play together as children, that’s all.”

“Just friends, huh?”

“Yes! And if you don’t believe me, you can—”

“I believe you,” he broke in. “You’re many things, Rey Niima, but you’re not a liar.”

“Oh, well, good,” she said lamely.

A tense silence stretched between them until Ben chuckled, his deep voice surrounding her in the relative darkness of their hideaway. “Is that what we are?”

“What?”

“Friends,” he said with a crooked grin. “Are we friends?”

“We’re…” Family? Friends? Lovers? Rey trembled with uncertainty and barely repressed desire. Tell him, Rey. Tell him about Luke. “I don’t know what we are.”

“Is that why you’re upset with me?” he probed, absently playing with the fine hairs at the nape of her neck. It was an oddly comforting gesture and Rey had to fight not to lean into it. “Because you’re unsure about the future of our relationship?”

“The future of our relationship?” she parroted.

“We’re lovers, Rey,” Ben reminded her with a smirk. “You’re my woman now.”

“I’m not—we’re not—it was a one-time thing,” she stammered. Tell him!

“We’ll see about that,” he challenged, dipping his head toward hers again.

“Am I the only one?” she queried, quickly turning her cheek to avoid his tempting mouth. “What about that woman who was hanging all over you earlier?”

“What woman?” Ben tilted her chin to make her look at him again.

“The one sitting next to you on that ostentatious bolt of red velvet when I came downstairs,” Rey reminded him.

“Oh, her?” he said dismissively. “I barely heard a word she said to me; I was waiting for you.”

“You were?”

Ben nodded, gently framing her flushed face. She tried not to melt under his sincere stare, but it was tough going.

“Well, you still shouldn’t have let that black-haired hussy put her hands on you the day after making love to me,” she chastised half-heartedly. Did you make love to me? Or was it just…

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, pressing a tender kiss to her freckled cheek.

“Stop it,” Rey breathed.

“Stop what?”

“You know what!”

Ben trailed his lips across her face to her mouth, but he didn’t close the distance. “Kiss me, Rey.”

Don’t you dare, Rey! You need to find out what he knows about the inheritance before you give into your baser needs. Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it!

“Please,” he whispered longingly.

Dammit.

Rey slammed her lips over his, kissing him so fiercely that he actually staggered back a few paces before wrapping her up against him. His hands were in her hair, on her body, everywhere, as uncoordinated as his harsh breathing, showing her without words just how much he wanted her. Emboldened by his enthusiastic response, Rey fumbled with the buttons holding his coat closed, frantic to push aside her doubts and lose herself in his arms instead.

Argh! Why won’t these stupid things—

“Ben? Rey? Are you out here?”

The young couple froze in horror as Han Solo’s voice cut through their passion like a knife.

“Oh my god!” Rey exclaimed. “Your father!”

“Bloody hell,” Ben swore.

“Oh my god!” she repeated. “Ben, if he catches us like this…”

“It’s okay, we’re well hidden,” he assured her, but his tone was less than convincing.

“Are you sure? What if—”

“Calm down,” he mumbled, still breathing harshly.

“Calm down?!” Rey returned incredulously. “Calm down?! How dare—”

Ben laughed despite the seriousness of the situation, hugging her close. “I was talking to myself.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry,” she said sheepishly as his arousal nudged her flat stomach. “So, what should we do?”

“You go first and take my father back inside. If he asks, tell him something came up and I had to step away,” he instructed.

“What about you?”

“I’ll follow in a few minutes, once I’ve had time to collect myself.”

“Okay,” Rey agreed. “How do I look?” she asked, stepping back.

“Beautiful,” he said gruffly.

Blushing to the roots of her sable hair at the appreciative look on Ben’s handsome face, Rey impulsively reached up to place a kiss on his long chin. “Don’t be too long.” Hurrying forward before he had a chance to respond, Rey intercepted Han before he could wander too far from the house. “Here I am, uncle! Is it time for supper yet? I’m starved!”

“Just about,” Han replied. “Leia sent me on a mission to find you and my son. You haven’t seen him, have you?”

“Ben? He went upstairs to take care of something,” Rey said easily. “He should be back shortly, though.”

“Is that so?” Han raised one dark eyebrow, taking in her slightly disheveled appearance.

“Yes,” she lied, nervously tucking an errant curl behind her ear. “Shall we?” Rey indicated the patio door.

“We shall, my dear,” he chuckled, looking toward the spot where she and Ben had been sequestered before turning around and opening the door for her. “I think you’ll find the seating arrangement interesting this evening,” Han said conversationally, taking her arm and leading her across the dance floor and into the dining room. “Your aunt really knows how to plan an entertaining party.”

Confused by his enigmatic statement, Rey just smiled and nodded. As long as nobody looked at her too closely, she was sure that she could survive the rest of the evening without scandal and have a civil conversation with Ben about Luke’s will after dinner.

But as Rey sat down in her assigned seat near the head of the huge dining table, Han’s words came into startling focus. Reading the name cards on either side of her plate with growing trepidation, Rey realized that Poe Dameron, Viscount of Yavin, was to be her dinner companion for the evening, not Ben.

Oh, Leia, she sighed when Ben arrived a few moments later, looking apoplectic as his mother escorted him to the other end of the table. You don’t even know what you’ve done.

——————

A/N: Or does she?! Haha! You’ll just have to wait and see, friends! I’m planning to finish up the second part of the tale in the next week or so, so please let me know what you think so far. I hope everyone is ready for the Year of Reylo because I sure as hell am!

#reylo #reylo fanfic #reylo fic #rey #kylo ren #ben solo #regency au #christmas au #my fanfiction #my art #sushigirlali #the politics of dancing #happy birthday friends #capricorn

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ashetta-yla-blog · 6 years ago

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ASHETTA YLA

Rank: Commoner

Position: Messenger

DETAILS

Age: 18

Height: 5’

Weight: 103lbs

Physical Description: Ashe is both slight of stature and demeanor, preferring to maintain an air of anonymity. It’s a skill that’s perhaps not as necessary as it once was, but it’s been a tough habit to break. With raven black hair and skin as pale as a bloodfiend’s, the comely original certainly should not be short of suitors, but finds that a cold disposition and sharp glares with her unnerving blue eyes prove to be successful deterrents to most. Her lips are a shapely rosebud when not stretched into a smile or pulled into a frown, but she prefers to be without any sort of color or rouge. There have been those who have mistaken Ashetta for a feminine looking boy, surely showing hardly any shape of a woman in her frame. With a lacking bosom and hips that leave some to be desired, Ashe has found it easier to step into the role of a street urchin boy rather than try to fit into the mold of “woman”.

Personality Description: Prickly might be what comes to mind when asked to describe what Ashetta is like. She doesn’t have a warm or welcoming way of being, and most find that they don’t enjoy her bitter company much. She hasn’t got much in the way of a sense of humor, and most jokes are wasted on her. She takes life far too seriously, seeing everything as a desperate fight for life. Growing up as first a beggar, and then trained as an assassin, she has fostered a personality shaped by hyper vigilance and suspicion. Deep down, she is a lonely young woman whose parents are long gone, and those she thought were family betrayed her. She never trusted those that took her in, not truly, but the betrayal hurt all the same. It has hardened her, and convinced her that she must learn to depend on only herself. Her entire life, she has relied desperately on others to support and protect her. No more. She lives a solitary lifestyle with nothing but her magic. Ashe is not explicitly unkind to others, but rather standoffish. She avoids confrontation like a plague, preferring to deflect and placate. She is not strong, not large, and depends on a quick wit coupled with lightning reflexes to survive. In this new land, and new life, she has a hard time adjusting to lack of immediate danger to her life. She earns her keep as a messenger and appreciates the solitude, but cannot abandon the instincts conditioned into her.

Strengths // clever - perceptive - driven - brave - compassionate

Weaknesses // prideful - mistrustful - impulsive - obsessive - skeptical

COMBAT

Class: Magician

Sub-Class: Elemental Assassin

STORY

20 YEARS AGO

Vervain Clayborne was a young woman full of promise, such a vast life laid out ahead of the original. While still a commoner, her parents jealously guarded her hand for marriage. If she were to marry anyone but another original, all that potential within her would collapse. Her proud family kept a close eye on her, of course, as she was the only girl of their children and could afford to scrutinize each and every suitor that came sniffing at her feet. Vervain’s thoughts on the matter were pointedly ignored, of course. Silly girl, only sixteen, how could she know which family would bring her family higher? How could she know which she had to stay away from? She was restless, stifled, and all to eager to break away from the suffocating mold her parents sought to stuff her into - a tale as old as time.

Trusten Yla was entirely unaware of the role he would play in Vervain’s escape. A young shapechanger that worked as a horse trainer on a coast, able to turn from trainer to black stallion at will, he was a valued employee of the family business. They had dealings with people from all over Northwind, but there was one family they outright hated. The Clayborne family were pointed enemies of the Yla family - an old blood feud and horse-business rivalry that would never fade. Sensing the chance at rebellion, Vervain made a trip to visit the ranch. She did love horses, after all. Trusten soon became the Clayborne daughter’s most valued friend. He adored Vervain, and it was no secret that he was terribly in love with her within just a few months of taking her on her sunrise rides. She was the first original, that did not look down her nose at him, and found joy in his form of a stunning black steed. It wasn't long before he even consented to her riding him through the trails and galloping in open fields. How he loved bringing her joy, making her howl with laughter as he careened down the marketplace with her on his back and disturbing the city. She was the light of his life, and began to dread the day she'd be sold off the most eligible bachelor. Already it was a struggle to even see her with how desperately their families despised each other.

It was a star flecked morning at the top of a knoll that he asked for her hand in marriage, She cried openly, knowing what could happen, how furious their families would be. But for all she had tried to avoid it, Vervain loved Trusten with all of her heart. They married quickly and quietly, and they fled their families to find a home for themselves. Trusten established himself as a horse trainer on his own on the coast, trying to gain a foothold in a society that saw him as less than. They lived peacefully. Comfortably. He did everything in his power to provide for his wife, to give her the life she deserved. Vervain was unaccustomed to doing her own work - laundry and dishes and cooking and cleaning. These were skills foreign to her, and she was quite terrible at them. She did not complain, though, and her husband was patient. It was hardly a year into their time as newlyweds that Vervain announced herself pregnant.

ASHETTA YLA

Ashetta was a stunning little girl, her eyes bright blue and hair raven black. Vervain and Trusten never knew they could love so much until they laid eyes on her, and Ashe believes she will never know love as pure as what her parents wrapped her in and nurtured her with. If she’s being honest with herself though, she realizes she hardly remembers her mother, with no memories at all of her beyond the age of four - no memories of the way her mother praised her baby's lightning, no memories of the way her father urged her to keep it hidden.

For you see, Vervain grew very, very ill. Her family, the Claybornes and Rowans, knew magic healers, but when Trusten approached them, to beg them to heal their daughter? To be sure their granddaughter had a mother? No, they told him, we will not. She was no longer their child, and Ashetta was no relative of theirs. Ashe’s father tried and tried and spent every penny they had trying to keep her alive. He stopped working, he needed go take care of his wife, raise his daughter. Nothing he did could save her. Perhaps a healer might have, but an unemployed shapechanger could not afford such services. Ashetta lost her mother a couple of months after her fourth birthday. She stopped using the magic her mother loved so much.

Trusten had forsaken his livelihood to care for his sick wife, and with her gone, he lost much of his purpose and life. He did not abandon Ashe, at least. He was there for her, never brought up her missing magic and certainly never spoke of her mother anymore, and loved her more than ever... but being there for her with no income soon lost them their horses, their belongings and soon their home on the ocean. With no other choice, the family of now two abandoned their seaside farm to seek refuge and salvation in the capital city.

Having lived rurally for a long time, Trusten never expected it to be so hard to find work in the city. He was a shapechanger whose form was a stunning black stallion - surely someone could use him as a worker? He even began to offer himself in his animal state, a horse that could pull and work and do it more efficiently than a normal horse could. It was with no avail. His late wife’s family had worked hard to spread the word of who he was, tarnishing his name and reputation. With every employer wary of hiring someone so "morally corrupt", he was turned away at every door. He and his small daughter were beggars now, and he had nothing to give her.

Ashe never fully understood what it was that they had lost. She knew she missed her mother desperately, and cried for her often, but her father was quick to sooth away the tears. Sometimes, she would awaken to a soaking wet bed, thinking it was the blood her mother had vomitted on her death bed. Sometimes she swore she could feel a snap of electricity when she was angry... but Trusten was always quick to calm her fits, never making her think it was unusual. He took her on many rides, developing her skill as a master horseback rider and effectively distracting her from the woes of street life. This could not last forever, of course, and soon hunger became a constant companion to the little girl. By the age of five, she looked more like she was three with the extent of her malnutrition, and her father seemed to have aged ten years. As time progressed into the harshest winter they’d known, Trusten knew his little Ashetta would die there on the streets if they didn’t do something.

With trepidation, her father took her on another horseback ride. She lay on his neck and held onto his mane, savoring the warmth of her father as he plod through an unfamiliar part of the city. ‘Papa, where are we?’ she’d mumbled, forgetting that he could only answer her with a chuff and a swish of his tail. He halted outside of massive iron gates, distinctive enough that Ashetta recognized the place from other street urchins speaking of it. This was the assassin’s guild.

Trusten secured employment and residency as an infiltrator and stablehand in the massive estate, but for a price. With great regret and desperation, he handed over his five year old little girl to be trained and schooled as an assassin. Growing up was comfortable - she had her father still, and she was given wonderful clothing. Ashetta ate delicious food, and she was taught to both read and write - something not usually available to a girl of her station. And? She learned to fight. She learned to kill silently. She learned to wreath herself in shadow and disappear before anyone knew where the kill came from. It wasn’t often that the guild got to mold someone from such a young age, and soon she was favored by the Master of the guild. Some called her his prodigy, something that had something snapping and crackling in her bones. Every day, every month, every year that passed, Trusten became increasingly sure he’d sold his daughter to the devil.

Ashetta, now twelve years old and proud of her skill, loved her home and her role. She was a force of nature, unstoppable, and her masters had fostered a deep seeded hatred within her for the injustices of classism and racism in the world. Trusten tried to reason with his daughter, to convince her that enough time had passed, he was confident he could find work elsewhere, they could leave! Ashetta was no fool, of course. The guild would never allow them to leave - she and her father would be killed before they could ever leave, and she told him as much. He tried to promise they could get away, she’d get on his back and they’d gallop as far as he could. She refused, reminding him that her first solo contract would be assigned soon, and then she’d have a place in the guild, a real place. She could start paying off their debts. Trusten was unable to convince his daughter that becoming a killer was not the answer. He was a fool, she thought. He was the one who’d brought them there seven years ago. She’d swept away from him and headed for the training rooms, entirely aware of the burn marks in the shape of handprints she'd left on the table... and unaware of the man watching them from the shadows. Her father would have to deal with the consequences.

She was sent on her first mission a week later, a contract to assassinate a minor lord in a specific manner - she had to send a message to whoever his allies were and leave his ring finger at their door. She’d killed before, so this was not the concern for her, not anymore. Her masters had provided controlled kills for her, taught her do it quickly, silently, effectively. She knew how to torture a man, she knew how to destroy them, but… this would be different. All those people had been evil, terrible people. Rapists. Murderers. Pedophiles. This was just a man. Something in Ashetta broke that night, something that had been poised to fall and break for quite some time. There would be no coming back from that, her hands would never be clean.

She returned home to the estates the following evening, the job done. She was hungry and tired and only made a swift report to her masters before retiring. She did not look for her father. Her relationship with him was strained from then on. He wanted to take her away, to save her from the brutality of the guild and their work, and she railed against those desires. This was her job, and she was good at it. Nevermind the abuse she suffered, the intense discipline and violence inflicted on her. Daggers and darkness and silence were like a second nature, and Trusten would not take that from her.

Years passed, and she grew more skilled and more sought after for contracts. She constantly had to evade the Storm Guard, but this soon became much easier as they were called away to handle the war that loomed on their doorstep. War was good for her, profitable. It would get her closer to paying off her debts, because her father’s meager wage certainly brought them no closer to not owing anyone. Sometimes, she had a good evening with her father, or he’d take her on an early morning ride and she was reminded that she did love him.

It was a few days following her seventeenth birthday that something in her snapped.

Ashe had disobeyed. She had gone against her master more than once, yes, but this had been different. Ashe had been returning by carriage to the estate, having had a nice evening blowing some of her Master's money on dresses and jewelry and delicious sweets. At a stop, a scantily clad woman slipped into her cart. Ashe had drawn a blade, but held back when she saw the tiny baby in the woman's arms. 'I must leave,' she cried, tears streaming down her face. 'I've been sold to a man far more cruel than your master. You must take her! Your master must not know of Theea, and I cannot bring her. Keep her safe!

Ashe didn't even have a chance to protest before the infant was left in her arms and the nameless woman was gone. Ashe was left with a child of the man she hated and feared. She managed to sneak into the manor undetected. Ashetta fell in love with little Theea, managing to care for the child for months before she was finally discoved. She had never seen her Master so angry, and... Ashe wasn't afraid. She didn't remember much after she had set the child down behind her, taking up a defensive stance in front of the baby. She remembered suffocating heat and snapping in the air, her hair standing on end. And then?

She was in darkness. Complete, suffocating dark. Ashe had been in this pit before, and always, it brought panic. She was in a small space, nothing more than a deep hole dug in the earth. She didn't know much time passed. More than a week, at least, with nothing more than stale bread and a flask of water lowered down now and then. She had been in there so long, she nearly forgot who she was, where she was. It was insanity that frayed her mind, made her feel like her very soul was being suffocated by the earth.

When she was dragged out, she was covered in her own filth and mud, and blinded by the sudden sunlight. Rather than be allowed to wash and return to her rooms, her arms were strung up at the posts. She registered the sound of a whip slapping the ground. 'Twenty lashes, Ashetta. The sound of his voice stirred up a deep sense of hatred in her. Where was Theea? She suddenly remembered the babe. What had he done to her? 'You will count each one.

The first lash came with searing pain, but she made no sound. She did not count. 'If you do not count, I will keep starting over at one. His voice was chillingly calm. He swung again, and still she made no sound. By the time he reached twenty, still she did not count. He started over again, and again, and again. She shook violently, and her shirt had long since been sheered off by the whip and leaving her torso bare. The earth greedily soaked up her blood, and she could have sworn it had been steaming.

It wasn't until one of his lashes ripped through an already slashed open wound that she screamed. He did it again, and she cried now. She heard the whip slide back to strike again, but someone's murmuring stopped him. She didn't know who saved her, and never discovered it. She screamed when she was moved again, blacking out before she'd been fully dragged down the stairs and to the healer's cellar.

She spent five weeks in that cellar, laying face down while the healer worked on her. It was during that time when she became aware of something… alive in her blood. The first instance was a jolt of electricity that was too powerful to be called a static shock. She began to see and feel and understand that magic was crackling to life in her bones, whispering in her blood, pulling at her heart. It was real and there and strong and alive, boiling her blood and cooling her bones. She had magic, real magic. Through her physical therapy in the cellar with the healer, she gently explored her budding abilities with lightning, feeling like she'd found someone familiar.

When she was allowed to return to training and accepting contracts, she never spoke of her ordeal, and her Master never did either. She was muted, less sassy and more bitter. She was interested in her newfound abilities, though. A trained assassin and a magic original? Commoner or blueblood, soon she would be unstoppable. Ashe ran to her father and begged him to take her on a morning ride. He was all to eager to agree, considering she had hardly spoken to him since the whipping - he hadn't tried to save her. When they reached the outskirts of the city she asked for him to find them a secluded place. It was there that she showed him the electricity that hummed to life in the palms of her hands. She looked at him with such a grin, it broke Trusten’s heart. His daughter looked so much like her mother just then, Vervain’s stunning smile shining through the darkness that Ashetta had been forced to endure. He was proud of her, so proud of her, and he told her so. But… yes. But.

Ashe’s smile faded, her brow furrowing as her father expressed his fear for her, how he was sure the guild would use her magic, and her newfound status as a blueblood. Well yes, of course, she thought. Of course they’re going to use my magic, they need to use me! She did not seem to understand what they would ask of her. Trusten recognized the magic she used as destructive, as dark. What else could it be? There'd been hints of it when she was a child. At first he'd thought her one of those Elementals, but lightning was not their domain. It would destroy her. In anger, she demanded he return her to the estate. She stormed to her room and retired for the evening, but something about what he said had wormed into her head.

Ashe was sent on another contract, leaving without telling her Master of her discovered abilities. She tried to learn and fiddle on her own, but the electricity was unpredictable and hard to control. She knew she’d need to tell her Master soon, she needed to learn. But… would she learn the right things through them? Perhaps her father could find a way to get her into a magic school without Master knowing. She never got the chance to ask him. When she returned home, her latest target’s lifeblood still staining her clothes, he was nowhere to be found. On an infiltration mission, they told her. Odd, it’d been a long time since he’d been sent on one of those.

Ashe patiently waited for her father to return. She trained, she secretly tried to practice with her lightning. Two days passed. Four. A week. Ashetta approached her Master, demanding to know where he was. I have not heard from him. the masked man had told her. Yes, that was normal. Sometimes they didn’t hear from spies for weeks, even months. And yet something didn’t feel right. Her father was not a spy. He was a stablehand, and he occassionally helped spies get to where they needed to go. No he was not stuck on a mission. Something was wrong. Ashetta set to work, gathering all the information she needed on where he’d gone. She discovered that he’d been sent to a merchant’s manor, deep in the heart of the city. He was not there, nor was he anywhere close by. No, she learned with carefully, torturously, gleaning information from a guard that she would never find him. Dead,he’d panted in his wet, fear drenched voice. I remember now! Dead, buried a big black horse outside the city, gold cuff ‘n all.

A certain kind of silence gripped her then. Ashe doesn’t remember much of what followed. She did not return to the estate and murder them all, as the magic in her bones roared at her to do. She played nice until she got a chance to slip away, shaking any tails following her. She approached the authorities, the King, and she sold out the guild. She witnessed a few public executions and trials, and she knew many of her former “family” were locked deep down in the dungeons. Many, though, evaded capture. Many searched for her, for her life. She hid, desperately trying to preserve her life through whatever means she could. She knew they would kill her if the impending war didn’t, and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could evade them. Finally, a chance arose.

She approached her rulers and her oppressors again, reminding them of the information she gave them, and begged for passage to the new world. She would put her skills to use as a master horseback rider, run messages, and she would attend the new magic school to hone her gifts. Please, she begged. Yes, they decided. Magic blood running through her veins, she was perhaps worth saving.

And so Ashe’s new life began, sent in the second wave to The Settlement. Still she lives looking over her shoulder, wondering when the guild will catch up to her and seek retribution. She spends her days maintaining her skills, and trying to master this strange, unknown magic within her.

Perhaps somewhere along the way, she'll learn of what she truly is, rather than believing herself to be an arcane mage.

RECENT UPDATE:

When Ashetta first came through the portal, she was hardly a husk of what she once was - which was something altogether dark to begin with. She was bitter and cold and distant, wrought with paranoia that everyone could be someone from the guild sent to exact revenge and take her life. She never imagined how much worse her situation really was: her Master had followed her through the portal, and he was intent on making her his once more. While her paranoia heightened to a constant state of fear… There have been other, unexpected changes in the Assassin in Blue. She has long since discovered her magic to be a one of a kind elemental combination, and through making friends for the first time, finding people she loved and loved her, she had uncovered parts of herself she never knew existed. Her desires and hopes extend far beyond being so powerful no one could hurt her again. She has gotten to know the people in the settlement in addition to the people she has come to love, and has found she would gladly use her dying breath to protect them. Many events have occurred to spur these awakening changes in her: falling in love, building her own family, defending Northaven.. her Master murdering people she cares about, and remaining more untouchable than ever. She is on a crusade to find her Master and put an end to things once and for all, to stop him from hurting anyone else she loves.

Ashe is still impulsive. She is intense and obsessive, certainly still riddled with paranoia and self loathing, and perhaps she will never be someone normal that fits. But she laughs brightly, loves fiercely, and has begun to learn about life and death and humanity in a way she never had the chance to before: through trust and connection…and hope.

#ashetta #ashetta valentus #ashetta yla #ashe yla #ashe valentus #character bio #original chatacter #oc

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probatelaw · 4 years ago

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Thinking About Estate Taxes – Again

Retirement Assets - Avoid These Eight Mistakes

Below is a really good article on the taxation of estates. For a long time we have not had to think about this. However, with the change in the shift in power in Washington, as well as the now desperate need for new revenue streams for the government, it appears that we are headed for more estate taxes.

See more at: https://theeastmanlawfirm.com/

https://ift.tt/3t4Zdjk?

It May Be Time to Start Worrying About the Estate Tax

Most people have been able to pass on assets like a family home without federal tax, but that could be changing.

Under current rules, the federal estate tax won’t ever affect you unless you’re quite wealthy. But that could change rapidly, even if you are far from rich.

Proposals under consideration by President Biden could extend the tax to millions of people. That could happen in two ways: by raising rates and lowering qualifying thresholds on estates, and by increasing the liability of people who inherit and sell any assets.

Together, these changes could raise money from the truly wealthy while also imposing a levy on vast numbers of people who inherit assets like a modest family home.

Inheritance taxes are paid by the estate of a person who has died. While many states have estate taxes with lower asset thresholds, right now, a married couple would need an estate of more than $23 million to even start worrying about federal taxes on it.

But as a candidate, President Biden spoke about several possible changes to the estate tax that could affect far more people, and in the process, raise tax revenue. One of those changes would end a tax shelter that many people have taken for granted.

Known as the “step-up in basis at death,” this provision erases all of the capital gains in a deceased person’s portfolio and values everything at the date of death. If the step-up in basis were eliminated, inheritors would have to pay capital gains whenever they sold the assets, including millions of dollars worth of stocks or a family home.

Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview with The New York Times last month that she intends to examine the implications of ending the step-up provision.

For people lucky enough to inherit wealth, this nugget in the tax code has been something of an accounting gift from the gods. Someone who inherits stock doesn’t need to worry things like what mom or dad paid for shares of IBM years ago. That’s because all the capital gains in those shares — and any other inherited investment — are effectively wiped out when the benefactors die. Whatever the assets are worth at death is what family members inherit. There are no pesky capital gains to calculate — or taxes to pay.

What’s gained by heirs, though, is lost by tax collectors and the public at large. Had the recently deceased sold those shares — or, say, an apartment building — during their lifetime, capital gains taxes would have been incurred. As the law now stands, though, those capital gains are extinguished at death.

Elimination of the step-up rules could capture billions in taxes from the rich but hurt some people who do not have enormous wealth. Consider a hypothetical couple who bought their home 40 years ago for, say, $75,000, paid the mortgage, maintained the yard, made some upgrades and now find themselves with a house worth $300,000 or more. For many families, a house like that forms the basis of a modest estate to pass to heirs. Now, if heirs ever sell that house, they will be responsible only for gains above $300,000; if the step-up in basis were eliminated, they would owe taxes on any amount above the original $75,000.

The loss of a step-up in basis at death would change the calculus for real estate and any other highly appreciated asset. (Think of Apple stock bought in the 1980s, or Bitcoin from 10 years ago.)

“Most of America has their wealth concentrated in their home,” said Chris Bixby, senior wealth adviser at Mariner Wealth Advisors. “That would be subject to the step-up. I’m talking to people about gifting the house earlier to get it into their heir’s name, so the appreciation happens in their name, not yours.”

That may be a step too far for many people, who will want to retain ownership of their home.

There is also a broader equity issue.

Elimination of the step-up in basis could make it harder to bridge the racial wealth gap, said Calvin Williams Jr., chief executive and founder of Freeman Capital, a wealth management firm. He noted that the Brookings Institution has found that Black families, on average, have about one-tenth the wealth of white families — $17,150 versus $171,000. In addition, Brookings estimates that only 10 percent of Black families inherit any money, about $100,000 on average, compared with about 30 percent of white families, who receive about $200,000.

Elimination of the step-up rule would make it more difficult for Black families to pass on whatever wealth they have been able to accumulate, he said. “The fact that the inheritance gap has continued to grow, even as Black income is continuing to grow, shows just how much work needs to be done to close that gap,” he said.

It might be more equitable to create a cap on the step-up in basis that would exempt people below a certain amount of wealth, he said: A $500,000 exemption would provide relief to many middle-class families. This would be similar in spirit to another proposal under consideration by the Biden administration, an increase in capital gains taxes for people earning more than $1 million a year.

Another proposal, reducing the estate tax exemption, could induce modestly wealthy people to make estate plans they haven’t needed in years.

Twenty years ago, the estate tax exemption was $675,000 a person and the tax rate was 55 percent. But the exemption grew and the rate fell over the next two decades. When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, the exemption was $3.5 million, with a 45 percent tax above that amount. It’s now $11.7 million a person, with a 40 percent tax above that amount.

President Biden has discussed lowering that exemption, perhaps back to the 2009 level. That would capture more estates and increase tax revenue.

“There were 4,100 estate tax returns in 2020 and 1,900 were taxable,” said Joseph Velkos, trust tax director at Key Private Bank in Cleveland. In 2009, when the exemption was one-third of what it is today, he said, “there were 12,900 returns, and 5,700 were taxable.”

Some wealthy people may want to use their current estate tax exemption to make gifts now, before that loophole shrinks: Under current rules, you are permitted to give away up to $11.7 million, which is counted against your total estate when you die. But if the rules were to change and you gave $5 million today, and the permitted exemption level dropped from $11.7 million to $3.5 million next year, you could no longer make tax-free gifts.

That’s the way changes in the tax code have traditionally worked, said Amanda DiChello, shareholder at the law firm Cozen O’Connor. “There’s no carry-over that would have been left as a result of a prior administration or prior tax code,” she said. “The only thing that is portable is if you had a spouse who died when the exemption was higher.”

In that case, the surviving spouse, with some planning, would get to tack on the current exemption level as if they were still married.

Much of this is speculative, of course. Hanging over any long-term tax planning decisions are perennial questions: Will the current administration enact these changes, and if the answer is yes, will they last into future administrations?

“If we look at the last number of administrations, all the tax bills they’ve passed have been temporary,” Mr. Bixby said. “We shouldn’t make long-term decisions based on something that will likely change in the future. We need to make the right long-term decision, not one guided by taxes.”

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New Indicators of Financial Misery Emerge as Trump Imperils Assist Deal With the destiny of a federal help bundle out of the blue thrown into doubt by President Trump, financial knowledge on Wednesday confirmed why the assistance is so desperately wanted. Private earnings fell in November for the second straight month, the Commerce Division mentioned Wednesday, and shopper spending declined for the primary time since April, as waning authorities help and a worsening pandemic continued to take a toll on the U.S. economic system. Separate knowledge from the Labor Division confirmed that purposes for unemployment advantages remained excessive final week and have risen since early November. Taken collectively, the experiences are the newest proof that the once-promising financial restoration is sputtering. “We all know that issues are going to worsen,” mentioned Daniel Zhao, senior economist with the profession web site Glassdoor. “The query is how a lot worse.” The reply relies upon closely on two components: the trail of the pandemic, and the willingness of the federal authorities to supply assist. Congress, after months of delays, acted on Monday, passing a $900 billion financial aid bundle that would supply help to the unemployed, small companies and most households. Most urgently, it will stop thousands and thousands from shedding jobless advantages on the finish of this week. However on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump demanded sweeping adjustments within the invoice, throwing into doubt whether or not he would signal it. Mr. Trump’s criticism of the aid effort, which he referred to as a “shame,” was that it was not beneficiant sufficient: He referred to as on Congress to supply $2,000 an individual in direct funds to households, quite than the $600 included within the invoice. Many economists view direct funds as among the many least efficient measures within the bundle, as a result of a lot of the cash would go to households that don’t want it. However past the deserves of any particular measure, the true danger is that Mr. Trump’s feedback might delay the help, or derail it totally. The information launched Wednesday underscored the economic system’s fragility. Private earnings fell 1.1 % in November and is down 3.6 % since July, because the lack of federal help greater than offset rising earnings from wages and salaries. Shopper spending, which proved resilient in the summertime and fall, declined 0.4 %, an ominous signal for small companies attempting to outlive the winter. A number of the greatest drops got here in classes most uncovered to the pandemic’s impression: Spending on eating places and motels fell 3.8 % in November, and spending on transportation, clothes and gasoline additionally declined. The pullback in spending is spilling over into the labor market. About 869,000 folks filed new claims for state jobless advantages final week. That was down from per week earlier however is considerably above the extent in early November, earlier than a surge in coronavirus instances prompted a brand new spherical of layoffs in a lot of the nation. An additional 398,000 folks filed for Pandemic Unemployment Help, considered one of two federal packages to increase jobless advantages that had been set to run out this month with out congressional motion. Some forecasters anticipate the December employment report to indicate a internet lack of jobs. “The information simply underscores the significance of fiscal assist,” mentioned Aneta Markowska, chief monetary economist for Jefferies, an funding financial institution. With out it, she mentioned, “there can be everlasting injury, and it will most likely be fairly vital.” The aid invoice was smaller than many economists mentioned was wanted to hold the economic system by the pandemic and guarantee a strong restoration. It gained’t revive the toughest hit industries or undo the injury left by months of misplaced earnings for a lot of households. However the bundle could also be sufficient to forestall the wave of evictions and small-business failures that many economists warn is inevitable with out it. And it needs to be sufficient to keep away from a fall again into recession, which an growing variety of forecasters have mentioned is probably going with out a fast injection of federal cash. Up to date Dec. 27, 2020, 5:49 p.m. ET The stakes are significantly excessive for the thousands and thousands of People who can be left with out an earnings throughout what might be a number of the worst months of the pandemic. The aid bundle handed this week would lengthen two emergency packages that cowl people who find themselves ignored of the common unemployment system or whose advantages have expired. Roughly 14 million folks had been enrolled within the two packages in early December, in accordance with the Labor Division, though fraud and data-collection points imply that determine could overstate the true whole. But when the invoice doesn’t turn into legislation, the 2 packages will expire on the finish of this week. That might push almost 5 million folks into poverty just about in a single day, in accordance with an estimate from researchers at Columbia College. Carson Noel has spent 35 years in dwell occasions, engaged on cruise ships, on Broadway and at conventions throughout the nation. The pandemic wiped all of it away. “Actually over a one-week interval I watched the subsequent six months of my work go away,” he mentioned. Mr. Noel, 51, has reached the tip of each his common unemployment funds and the emergency pandemic advantages, leaving him with no earnings. The invoice handed by Congress would restore his advantages for at the least a couple of weeks, however now these are unsure. Even when the invoice does turn into legislation, Mr. Noel mentioned it was too late to rescue his funds. He has reduce his grocery invoice and moved in along with his sister in Tucson to save cash, however even along with his bills pared to a minimal, his financial savings are largely depleted. “I’m good for about one other month after which I’m in hassle,” he mentioned. “I’m simply attempting to outlive at this level.” The Second Stimulus Solutions to Your Questions In regards to the Stimulus Invoice Up to date Dec 27, 2020 Lawmakers agreed to a plan to challenge stimulus funds of $600 and distribute a federal unemployment good thing about $300 for 11 weeks. The invoice overwhelmingly handed each homes of congress, however President Trump is resisting signing it. Discover extra in regards to the invoice and what’s in it for you, ought to the President finally signal it into legislation. Will I obtain one other stimulus cost? Particular person adults with adjusted gross earnings on their 2019 tax returns of as much as $75,000 a yr would obtain a $600 cost, and heads of households making as much as $112,500 and a pair (or somebody whose partner died in 2020) incomes as much as $150,000 a yr would get twice that quantity. If they’ve dependent kids, they might additionally get $600 for every little one. Individuals with incomes simply above these ranges would obtain a partial cost that declines by $5 for each $100 in earnings. When would possibly my cost arrive? Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin informed CNBC that he anticipated the primary funds to exit earlier than the tip of the yr. However will probably be some time earlier than all eligible folks obtain their cash. Does the settlement have an effect on unemployment insurance coverage? Lawmakers agreed to increase the period of time that individuals can accumulate unemployment advantages and restart an additional federal profit that’s offered on prime of the same old state profit. However as a substitute of $600 per week, it will be $300. That will final by March 14. I’m behind on my lease or anticipate to be quickly. Will I obtain any aid? The settlement would supply $25 billion to be distributed by state and native governments to assist renters who’ve fallen behind. To obtain help, households must meet a number of circumstances: Family earnings (for 2020) can’t exceed greater than 80 % of the realm median earnings; at the least one family member have to be liable to homelessness or housing instability; and people should qualify for unemployment advantages or have skilled monetary hardship — immediately or not directly — due to the pandemic. The settlement mentioned help can be prioritized for households with decrease incomes and which were unemployed for 3 months or extra. Even when Mr. Trump does signal the aid bundle, thousands and thousands of individuals might quickly lose their advantages. By ready till the final minute to behave, legislators pressured state labor departments — which administer each state and federal unemployment advantages — to arrange for the packages’ finish. Many states gained’t be capable of reverse course in time to keep away from a lapse in funds. State employment officers mentioned that they had been monitoring developments in Washington and had been consulting with the federal Labor Division in order that they may transfer rapidly to reinstate advantages. However some affirmed that at the least a quick lapse was inevitable. Any delay in signing the invoice would make the lag even longer, mentioned Michele Evermore, senior coverage analyst for the Nationwide Employment Regulation Undertaking. “On daily basis that this drags on, that’s a day that it’s laborious to place meals on the desk for the children, it’s one other invoice missed, it’s simply one other hardship,” she mentioned. At the same time as thousands and thousands of jobless staff face the prospect of a bleak winter, nonetheless, some folks and industries are in a lot stronger form. Capital items orders — a measure of enterprise funding — rose in November, the Commerce Division mentioned Wednesday, an indication that massive companies stay assured whilst eating places and different small companies wrestle to outlive. As well as, family financial savings are greater than $800 billion greater than in February, earlier than the pandemic upended the economic system. Economists mentioned these financial savings had been most certainly concentrated amongst white-collar staff who’ve held on to their jobs whereas saving cash by slicing again spending on journey and leisure. Many have additionally benefited from the hovering inventory market. Excessive financial savings ranges are one motive that many economists have been skeptical of the necessity for one more spherical of direct help to households, not to mention the $2,000 an individual demanded by Mr. Trump. Such funds would possibly assist individuals who have stored jobs however misplaced hours or earnings. However a lot of the cash would go to households which are financially safe, and would most certainly be saved quite than spent. These financial savings might assist gasoline a fast restoration as soon as coronavirus vaccines are extensively obtainable, permitting People to renew touring, attending live shows and gathering in bars and eating places. However that prospect solely underscores the necessity for help to make sure that companies make it till then. “Just some months down the street, issues will probably be dramatically higher, however that’s not a motive to endure within the meantime,” mentioned Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Economics. “It’s simply capturing your self within the foot to permit companies to go bust.” Supply hyperlink #Aid #deal #Distress #Economic #emerge #Imperils #signs #Trump

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