#the main issue with working with new to the craft kids is convincing them to let their walls down

[gayofthefae]

Also a consideration to think about what type of performance young Will, Mike, and Jonathan demands when we know that none of the kids were an open call, the were all required to be experienced in the original auditions - and the same with Holly, and I don't think Martie (young Eleven) was open call either. Young Will also wasn't open call.

The resemblance was more important that the performance for them on this because they trust that the performance will be able to be achieved.

Whatever the performance, it is coachable.

[r6shippingdelivery]

headcannons for hobbies? Like what they do on their off time?

Hi nonnie! I actually did a Hobbies HC for “all” ops a long time ago. But seeing that was before the expanded bios, and it only reached up to Gridlock and Mozzie, I’d say it’s time for an updated version, don’t you say? 

Some of the answers are unchanged from the old post, because I already nailed it or the new info didn’t disprove my ideas. But I had to revise a lot of the answers I gave the first time around! In order to find their hobbies and/or get a glimpse of their lives beyond Rainbow and what they might like, I read all the bios, and looked up concept art, and elites, and past battlepass content, etc. And when none of that was enough, I just went with my gut instinct 😂 Thank you to @grain-crain-drain, @dagoth-menthol & @todragonsart for bouncing ideas with me when I was stuck! 💕

Hobbies Headcanons for ALL ops (up to Neon Dawn)

FBI

- Ash: According to her savta, shooting things is not a hobby, but Ash disagrees. And since according to her expanded bio she knows Hebrew, Arabic, English, French and Greek, I’m willing to bet she enjoys learning languages as well. - Thermite: He grew up on a ranch and loves riding. He’s also taken an interest in improving gadgets it seems, so my old proposal that he dabbles in forging/smithing stuff seems plausible. And based on this concept art, demolition derbies attending and maybe even competing himself too? - Pulse: He’s interested in a variety of topics and goes through phases of intense, nearly obsessive focus, until something else captures his attention. He still has a lingering fondness for building muscle cars, since it was something he used to do with his father. And like Thermite and Hibana, it seems he might enjoy demolition derbies. - Castle: He’s a language nerd, studying/reading/practicing new languages is his hobby for sure. Since the expanded bio says he rescues abused dogs, I don’t think it would be far fetched he volunteered at animal shelters too.

SAS

- Thatcher: Aside from repairing his boat, The Iron Maggie, he also enjoys fishing. He used to do that with his dad & brothers, and tried to take the rest of the SAS fishing as a bonding experience. It didn’t go very well - Sledge: He plays rugby, and has an inexplicable fondness of trying the wildest ideas that tend to end with something broken, be it one of his bones or a structure or wall (just read his extended psychological profile and you’ll see, lmao) - Smoke: Boxing, it helps him focus all his chaotic energy. And chemistry in general, it’s not just a hobby but a passion of his. - Mute: he enjoys tinkering with stuff, taking it apart and then putting it back together in a different way, just to see if he can improve it or make it work in his own way. Flying drones plays perfectly into that, with the added bonus of being able to do the flying part just for fun too.

GIGN

- Montagne: His main passion is working with people, teaching and mentoring others, and therefore when he’s not on duty, his main passtime still is mingling with people and getting to know them. I could see him making overtures with Castle, interested in the American and fascinated by his knowledge of various languages, an area Monty feels insecure about due to only knowing French and English.  - Twitch: Engineering, robotics and developing an empathic AI is her life.Twitch is a workaholic passionate about those topics. She also greatly enjoys traveling and, according to her expanded bio, people watching.  - Doc: He surely had some hobby at one point, but he can’t remember it, or the last time he had free time for it. Doc is also a workaholic, although one that loves to complain about it.  - Rook: Apparently he’s passionate about cycling, auto racing, and rock concerts. Mainly cycling though, since he dropped out of university to cycle around France.

Spetsnaz

- Tachanka: He collects and repairs old weapons. Mostly soviet, but he has some interesting pieces from other countries too. And he dances surprisingly well.  - Kapkan: Aside from a certain interest in psychology, his main hobby is hunting, of course. But he also whittles and carves wooden figurines.  - Glaz: Quite obviously, painting. He’s an artist, and quite a good one. He also likes playing cards, especially poker. - Fuze: He builds new weapon prototypes for fun. And tests them, if he can convince Six of it. He also likes to bake from time to time, a skill he learnt thanks to his grandma - and because he has a sweet tooth.

GSG9

- Jäger: Planes. Model planes, repairing old WWI & II planes, you name it. And watching copious amounts of documentaries.  - Bandit: His bike is his main hobby, both taking care of it and riding it. He also likes playing pool; and, if pranking people counts as a hobby, that’s his oldest one, dating from when he was a kid. - Blitz: He was and still is an athlete at heart, and Blitz loves running. - IQ: In order to disconnect from engineering pursuits, she indulges in rock climbing, spelunking, and writing science fiction stories.

JTF2

- Buck: He crafts mechanical puzzles, and enjoys all kinds of physical activity that can take place outdoors. - Frost: She just loves being surrounded by nature, and often goes mountain climbing or diving.

SEAL

- Valkyrie: Swimming and diving, of course! She wanted to be a professional swimmer, but now it’s just a hobby. And apparently she enrolled for a helicopter pilot license, and language classes. - Blackbeard: According to the expanded bios, he likes sailing and even participated in a championship. And since he climbed Mount Everest, it’s safe to say he also likes mountain climbing.

BOPE

- Capitao: He loves football, playing or watching it, doesn’t matter, he’s all for it. - Caveira: Spends a lot of time practicing Jiu Jitsu, in the gym and also on unofficial tournaments.

SAT

- Hibana: For her it’s traditional Japanese archery (Kyūdō). And probably demolition derbies too accounting that concept art from before with Thermite and Pulse. - Echo: According to the expanded bio, he has few interests outside work, but I always imagined he’d be into gaming and e-sports. Hacking too, and that’s a direct influence from Dokkaebi.

GEO

- Jackal: He plays the acoustic guitar/spanish guitar, and sings too. And now we also know he volunteers with at-risk youth. - Mira: Fixing cars is second nature to her, and thanks to her expanded bio we know she also does metal sculptures that incorporate used mechanical parts.

SDU

- Ying: Extreme driving, which can sometimes trigger her PTSD, and traveling. Especially exploring cities by randomly jumping in public transport and just going anywhere. - Lesion: He is also one to volunteer in underprivileged areas (like Junk Bay, where he grew up), and clearing mines and other unexploded devices. I also imagine him with a certain gusto for playing blackjack.

GROM

- Zofia: If obsessing about her father’s supposed suicide and the oddities surrounding it, and desperately trying to reconnect with her sister count as hobbies, sure, she has those. - Ela: She’s also an artist, one with a very particular vision that some have called narcissistic. Apparently she also does some “freelance” volunteer work, roaming the streets at night and offering help/comfort, or a willing ear to the people she meets.

707SMB

- Vigil: He likes to take walks around the forest, just aimless exploring and marvelling at nature and any animals he might come across. Often listens to relaxing music while doing so, and he might pick a pretty rock here and there to bring home. - Dokkaebi: Hacking is her hobby, of course. She also has several social media profiles and is an active member in a couple of hacking forums. As per a previous battlepass, I believe she enjoys mountain trekking too. And dancing to electro beat, due to her elite.

CBRN

- Lion: His rebel years left him with an appreciation for rock music and a dream to be in a group. Lion still plays the electric guitar, when he’s not off volunteering at the local church. - Finka: Pushed by her parents from a young age to try different sports, just like her siblings, she eventually discovered a strong love for fencing and ice-skating.

GIS

- Maestro: Cooking, and boxing, an interest he shares with Smoke. But mostly cooking. - Alibi: She’s also a marksman, engages Ash in friendly shooting competitions.

GSUTR

- Clash: She’s very involved in different activist causes, mostly surrounding racial issues and inequality. - Maverick: Photography, mostly nature or candid shots of his fellow operators. I also think he likes horses and riding. And Buzkashi of course, but he hasn’t played since he left Kabul.

GIGR

- Kaid: Playing chess, he’s a good strategist and it shows. And  while dozing off with a cat on his lap is not a hobby, he also loves that. - Nomad: Traveling to all sorts of remote locations, she’s an explorer with a thirst to prove herself. She also keeps a travel journal, which includes maps and some drawings of the places she’s seen.

SASR

- Mozzie: Dirt biking, of course. The more dangerous the jumps and stunts are, the more he likes it. He knows his limits and works to surpass them. - Gridlock: Robotics. She still wants to compete again in robot championships, just like she and Mozzie did so many years ago. She would consider that fixing cars and vehicles has become more part of her job than a hobby, but still loves it too.

Phantom Sight

- Nokk: Fencing, as evidenced by some of her concept art, she participated in fencing tournaments. - Warden: He knows appearances are important, and he cultivated a very specific image, so he likes to take care of that, be it by buying luxury or antique cars, or designer suits, etc.

Ember Rise

- Amaru: Archeology and exploring the Amazon jungle is her passion. It used to be her whole life and job, but since she joined Rainbow, she’s been busy with training and missions, yet she never lost her love for adventure, history and protecting her country’s cultural artifacts. - Goyo: He’s a really good chess player, and enjoys other games where he either has to think, or his usual poker face and calm demeanor can throw his opponents off.

Shifting Tides

- Kali: When she’s not writing reports about her underlings progress, or making lists about who should be ascended/rewarded, who needs to be punished or chastised, etc, she’ll be doing yoga, since it helps her focus. Or hardcore pilates when she needs to burn away some frustration first. - Wamai: Diving and being underwater in general, be it on his special immersion tanks or on the actual sea, it doesn’t matter. He finds it calming (and he’s addicted to the anoxia sensation)

Void Edge

- Iana: Space exploration fascinates her, and she’s always trying to learn everything she can about the cosmos, watching documentaries and conducting her own in-depth research. - Oryx: Wrestling helps him hone his physical prowess, and it’s also a measured outlet for his deep seated rage. He also greatly enjoys reading poetry.

Steel Wave

- Melusi: She’s committed to the conservation cause, which stems from both her love of wildlife and nature, and her protective instincts. She likes to explore too, although she’s not driven by a will to prove herself or reach certain goals, but simply for the joy of seeing natural spaces. - Ace: Social Media. He’s obsessed with his public image and popularity. While he travels quite a bit, it seems he does it more to share new and exciting selfies on Instagram than for the pleasure of visiting new places.

Shadow Legacy

- Zero: He knits and crochets, it’s an engaging hobby that helps him clear his mind, plus he enjoys making stuff too. Not many people know about this side of him though. 

Neon Dawn

- Aruni: She and Hero, her giant pouched rat, volunteer on landmine detection and removal efforts. She also likes to travel extensively, and has done so in the company of Twitch and Nomad.

[popculturebuffet]

Ducktales: New Gods On The Block! Review or THE INCREDIBLE STORKULES: COCKBLOCKER OUT OF MYTH!

We’re back, and i’m doing away with intros, for now, i’m trying to see if offering people a bit of the review makes them more receptive to reading it and now we’re nearing the end of this hellyear, and the trump presdency, i’m going into this one with a ton of energy, so let’s get quackin!

We open with the Scrooge and Kids on a quest to get a golden helmet he’s been after for years and has been one of his lifelong goals using a carefully crafted plan with all the kids skills needed. Okay i’ll admit that last part is unique to this show: given how interchangable the boys are outside of this continuity,  I assume he’d just throw them at the monster like Pikmin as a distraction while Donald grabbed the helmet and just grow new ones in his vast venture bro style clone mine if they happen to die. Thankfully there’s no Child Death but there is Child Failure as the team comes back sad and defeated and doubting themselves.. Della having a confetti cannon ready to celebrate dosen’t help. Though it does bring me to the subject of Della being out of focus this season. It’s a mixed bag for me: On the one hand I do get it, as she was the main focus of last season, even more than Louie, and now we’ve gotten to know her, she can sit back and play more of a supporting role, especially since Donald , who himself was more of a supporting character the past two seasons, is now getting more screentime and Beakly’s getting fleshed out more. Their trying to balance a rather massive cast, so it’s natural the one whose already got a ton of focus at this point would take a back seat and all around the show’s done a far better job giving everyone screentime this season. Launchpad has been lacking of late but given a Darkwing Duck spinoff is probably in the cards, and he’s had tons of episodes at this point compared to Donald and Beakly, i’m understanding of it. 

On the other.. there’s still a lot of stories to tell with her: We still haven’t had her deal with Scrooge basically erasing her for a decade at all nor Donald hiding her past from the kids.. he had reason and all, but he still made their mother a stranger to them. They had no stories, nothing to really go on for 10 years. That’s gotta have impacted both the kids and gotta hit della hard at some point that her father-uncle and brother both just kinda.. erased her to the kids. Plus we don’t know how she’s been adjusting to have a life OUTSIDE the kids especially since she’s been sitting out so many adventures, likely to let Scrooge have time with them and be a good daughter and mother and what not, but still there’s a LOT of ground to cover they simply haven’t yet. The Donald and Della plot we did get, while glorious, didn’t really add anything to either’s likely strained relationship and it’d be nice to give the two a subplot to work this out. Granted this might all be coming in the Castle McDuck Episode for all I know, but I can’t pin all my hopes and dreams on that one. And this all COULD’VE easily happened off screen.. but it’s something the audience really wants and needs. I’m not sure if we’re getting it and that worries me. But again theirs a large chunk of the season to answer this if this is the last one, and another season possible if it’s not, so i’m willing to wait for it. I’m just getting impatient is all. 

That being said this episode makes up for the Della Deficet as she’s one of the main driving forces of this side of the episode. I’ll get into that more in a second but Della’s been on the rare misfire adventure and knows Scrooge’s stages of grief and that he’ll come out of it with a better plan. Unfortunately for the kids that plan dosen’t include them and Scrooge runs off to assemble a better team leaving the kids utterly devastated. One of the other main driving forces besides depressed children and the greek gods is scrooge being really bad with people, but i’ll get to that. 

Point is the kids understandable emotional devastation and Della trying to mom for all of them at once because Launchpad had to get to his other job and is taking Beakly this weak to teach him and Drake how to raise a child, is interrupted by said Zeus ASSHAT RAPIST OUT OF MYTH! Along with Storkules COCKBLOCKER OUT OF MYTH and Selene, DELLA’S FIRST TIME WITH A WOMAN OUT OF MYTH!  There here because Zeus has lost his powers, as the Gods all collectively decided he was a dick and voted him out of office.. er stripped him of his powers. Sorry an asshole, narcacistic, sociopathic racist getting removed from his position of power happening a few days after the election was called.. the timing just could not have been better. But yeah Zeus is out, roll credits. Join me after them and after the cut for the rest of the review. 

So yeah the Gods are fed up with him, and Selene and Storkules are there to pick a worthy inheritor to his Laurel Wreath, his lighting bolts, and his collection of playboys he keeps alphabatized in his mancave.. also his mancave will also go to the winner. Storkules however, having a one track mind, notices Donald isn’t there and goes to find him. The kids are all eager to try but Selene is there for Della, which they all agree makes sense: I mean she has the disposition and sexual appitite of a green god but without all the rampant sex crimes and murder, and given most of them have clearly copped to the times except Zeus, that’s a plus. Plus she and Selene have already been together before so the fact they can smooch into infinity along with all the fun stuff is a nice bonus. It’s not like Storkules isn’t selecting his candiate soley with his 13 inch penis, so ther’es a precident. But Della, seeing the kids clearly need this more than she does, convinces her once and future girlfriend to let them try out. I really do wish we got more of the two this episode but what we get is great, and Selene reluctantly agrees after Della makes the valid point their STILL more mature than her dad. The fact Zeus punctuates this by getting into a “No you” contest with an 11-12 year old probably helped.  As for where Donald is he’s preparing for a date with Daisy! Horay. I’ve been waiting for Daisy to come back since the last time she was here, and Donald has naturally been considerate: Setting up a bunch of hearts, flowers, some punch that is likely just box wine and sprite, he has a budget and throwing all his garbage in the pool with bricks because he’s still Donald. Romantic, a good dad.. but still a disaster of a person who dosen’t know quite how to live like an adult... which naturally I immensely relate to and hope i’m lucky enough one day to have a lady or fella to hide all my garbage from. I mean i’m probably dying alone, but that’s likely my old buddy crippling depression talking. Oh you old scamp.. please fuck off an die.  But enough chilling looks into my psyche, point is Storkules barges in to ruin it, and eat his carefully made grilled cheese. As though Storkules may be incredible he’s also STORKULES, GOD OF NOT REALLY READING THE ROOM. Daisy comes in, and we find out it’s their second date.. and i’m assuming their first wasn’t that time they ended up in a direct to video sequel to Die Hard that’s still far better than Die Hard 5.. then again a colonoscopy is preferable to that movie so I Dunno. But she’s nice, friendly, if put off by the big sweaty man suddenly in their date. Storkules COCKBLOCKER OUT OF MYTH, does not help matters by, upon hearing that seeing how in love they are, and finding out it’s the second date assumes their getting married and hugs them in THE SWEATY ABS OF STORKULES. Do me next. 

Back at the God Tests, god I love a job-ish thing that lets me say that, Louie is up first, and being Louie has thought up a plan that benifets him wether he wins or looses but one that has serious underlying issues he hasn’t thought of. Naturally it turns out to be a gold touch which, as with Midas, works out about as well as you’d expect.. with Dog Murder and mass murder to follow. Selene undoes it, So Louie gets nothing. And yeah this has been a major issue this season that while I talked about it back in “Let’s Get Dangerous” bares repeating:  Louie feels like he learned NOTHING from the events of last season. He still likes, he still dosen’t think plans through, and he still cheats. In contrast Dewey DID grow from his season.. it’s subtle, he’s still the same loveable trainwreck and pre-teen Hank Venture he’s always been, but he no longer hides secrets or family stuff and is more of a team player. Still an egotsitical one, but it’s there. But Louie.. hasn’t changed at all. He’s still conviving, still thinks only in short term.. it’s only once or twice like with the Impossibin the events of last year really seem to have sunk in. It feels like the writer’s couldn’t figure out how to write a smarter Louie and just gave up. It’s really disheartning especially when most other character development, subtle and otherwise, sticks. 

While Huey sweats over his turn and Della tries to encourage, we cut back to the date which is going okay, Daisy’s trying to roll with it but Storkules, TERRIBLE WINGMAN OUT OF MYTH really isn’t good at talking Donald up or letting them get to know one another. While things breifly get better when Daisy brings up her career and Donald talks it up like the loving soon to be boyfriend he is, Storkules FUCKUP OUT OF MYTH screws things up by saying, when she explains to him she hasn’t made any Toga’s because she works primarily in dresses that she can “work up to them eventually. “ As proof this is the best Daisy she dosen’t dump Donald immidetly despite none of this being his fault and him trying to explain he didn’t invite him, but instead just makes an angry, and understandably so , face and goes to powder her beak.. which is clearly code for “Scream Obscenities into Donald’s Mirror for the next ten minutes”. Which if it already wasn’t abundantly clear they were perfect for each other this would be the clincher. Donald wants Storkules to go and TRIES to tell him, but Storkules just assumes he wants him to make a big romantic gesture for them and goes to “let Cupid’s Arrow” strike her. Donald understandably wants conformation he doesn’t mean that literally. Spoiler alert: He does. 

IT’s Huey’s turn next at playing god and he decides to be God of Intuition, gaining future sight so he can know everything and prevent tragedy. We instead get a damn funny scene where after adjusting to his powers he tries to prevent a breakup.. only to play both parts himself and cause it anyway. Just some great acting from Danny Pudi there. We get some more as Huey slowly melts down from the information, traumatizing a kid and nearly getting beat up with a guy who wants to “Beat up the freak for making everyone uncomfortable” which.. 

Yeah it’s not acceptable for what looks like a grown adult, or even a Teenager if that was an intent, to whale on a CHILD, let alone ANYONE for being “a Freak”. I mean yes Huey did screw up big, not mass murder bit but still.. but he’s still a fucking child. As someone who was prone to breakdowns at that age, and up to present day... I take this personally, especially since I see Huey as high functioning autsitic. So this hits home as i’ve had many people just tell me to get over it instead of trying to help. So yeah fuck this guy, take off that Gizmoduck shirt you do not deserve it. We fans do though, I hope that becomes real merch. 

But yeah Huey failed and Zeus is gloating..mostly because in his already considerably warped brain, he thinks that if they all fail he dosen’t get it. Selene explains basic logic to him: If they fail to find a new god here, they’ll just keep looking. Zeus naturally has a tantrum as Scrooge enters, wondering why the kids care about god powers and Della, being a supportive mom, tries to get him to encourage them. He instead focuses on his team. Again, we’ll get to him trust me. Selene also calls her dad out on the fact he hasn’t done anything good since defeating the titans centuries ago.  Naturally being THE GREATEST SHITHEAD IN ALL OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY Zeus takes the exact wrong lesson from this and calls his brother Hades to whip up a titan for him to fight because that was her point and not that your an irredemible dick tip who their desperate to replace and who was dethroned because no one liked you, not even your horrible presumibly now ex wife. I mean unlike DC Comics Zeus he’s not planning a cou but only because he has no powers. Hades however is well aware his brother has no powers, as the gods have been talking about it and laughing about it because Zeus sucks eggs. Also Hades has a great goth look and personality here as well as muscular arms to hold my bi ass at night. A-Plus character design. I may also have a thing for goths and emos I never realized I had. Just an observation. 

Back at the boat Donald and Daisy are enjoying drinks, which again has to be wine.. I mean again box wine, Donald needs a lot of booze after a hard days nearly getting murdered and Costco has great deals on it, but still booze. They cuddle a bit and it’s fucking adorable.. and Storkules WHO JUST KIDDNAPED HIS COUSIN CUPID AND STOLE HIS SHIT naturally ruins this moment by first trying to fire one date rape arrow at them, then takes donald’s rampant headshaking no as a sign to fire all of the arrows... with Daisy ending up in the water and unsettling the garbage. Granted Donald COULD’VE prevented this by explaning things to her.. but i’m betting he didn’t simply because he’s.. tired of this shit. He’s tired of adventure, tired of it intruding on his life and just hoped Storkules was gone and out of sight and didn’t have a chance to prepare for that till it was too late. NOW Daisy storms off.. but unlike say Cabs Daisy, whose a living nightmare, or Comic Daisy, whose not a great person but has her moments depending on the comic, she has VALID REASON. Donald lied to her about garbage and dind’t just take it out like a normal Duck, and didn’t just outright yell at his friend to leave on their date, a friend who just attacked her and already insulted her. IT’s understandable, especailly given a line coming up she’d WANT to leave and leave Donald behind.  Donald however is naturally miserable and it finally gets through Storkules thick skull he messed up and he runs off to cry while Donald miserably floats among the garbage and my heart both relates to that nad breaks seeing it. I mean .. Daisy meant a lot to him: After years of presumibly avoiding dating, or if he did not doing so for long, to focus on the boys, after a year of putting their needs ahead of his and living with his demanding uncle, of being dragged out of a normal if miserable life and into a less miersable but adventerous one he didn’t want, of being stranded in space and on an island wondering if his kids would be okay.. he finally not only has time for himself, and his sister back after years of thinking her dead and thus someone else to take care of the kids needs for a while without feeling any guilt over it or worrying about them, but found someone special. She’s talented, beautiful, charming, and understanding. And most importanlty she LISTENS to him and throughly likes Donald for who he is. And he looses that only PARTLY due to his won incomptence but mostly because someone he already barely allows in his life came in and ruined it. Once again the adventure and everything took something from him and while not nearly as big as loosing his sister, it still fucking hurts to once again have one small bit of something just for himself, one bit of normalcy, one person who loves him for who he is now through and through.. and it’s seemingly gone. It’s why I like this relationship even if this part panes me: Donald can FINALLY be happy... finally have someone who genuinely cares about him.  This also boils down Storkules character and why I don’t ship the two of them: He’s a good god, he’s brave, compasionate, carring, and generally wants the best for donald and does genuinely love him.. but he also dosen’t care really what DONALD wants half the time. He’s the embodiment of Donald’s biggest gripe with his life: No one listens to or repsects him or what he wants. Storkules wants Donald the adventurer, Donald the brave, Donald the undaunted, DONALD THE IDEALIZED VERSION THAT ONLY EXISTS IN HIS HEAD. He dosen’t really get Donald isn’t the same person, and even that person wasn’t into him. Not because he’s a man, like his sister Donald could easily be bi or pan.. but because he’s just SO MUCH and Donald’s family is already SO MUCH.. and that was BEFORE the kids and the launchpad. Donald has made peace with adventuring but it’s still clearly not his faviorite thing while for Storkules adventure and experince is his life. Storkules needs someone like him and Donald needs someone down to earth, someone who can HANDLE the amount of chaos that follows him and the famly, but someone whose .. normal. And Daisy is that. If you ship then fine fine, but I just don’t because they just don’t go together and both deserve a partner they can truly be a partner with, not someone they clearly don’t understand or someone they DREAD visiting. They both deserve better than that. 

Back on the god plot, it’s Webby’s turn as she becomes Goddess of Friendship. And helps the mood at the pier by spreading sunshine.. and then deals with the pier’s greatest menace and my honorary uncle, because he’s really not much worse than some of my actual uncles...

GLOMGOLD, SCOURGE OF CHILDREN’S KIDDIE RIDES. Because of course a seemingly regular habit for Glomgold is hogging a children’s ride he somehow fits into. Of course it is. It’s cheap and he’s not the best human being but I love him anyway. Webby heats it up to scare him then tries to get the kids to hug before having a breakdown at everyone not being happy. This does fit with her personality.. I didn’t think so at first but thinking back her first response in any friendship crisis is to panic and overreact. Her reaction to her best friend telling her she may have to stop sleeping over with her and her sister/webby’s giflriend because of magic danger is an implied death threat. She’s getting BETTER with people, but she still dosen’t have the life experince to fully deal with it and naturally upon seeing things get worse and worse goes on a lighting filled rampage Selene thankfully stops and likely undoes. Though Glomgold is likely on the moon now. He’ll be fine. 

Dewey is last and auditions.. but forgets the god part and fails which fits him perfectly and is a great bit. The kids have all washed out and are depressed about it. While Della is hopeful when talking to Selene, Selene gently explains to her girlfriend she shares with a space alien that the kids just aren’t ready and that maybe the power of a god just isn’t the thing you give to a kid for a self esteem boost. Della MEANS well here, she just wants her kids, Webby very much included, to feel good and get their self esteem back after Scrooge swallowed it whole. But Selene is right that this is just too much power, and given it nearly drove Huey insane  and nearly made Louie and Webby murderers, she has a point. It’s a good thought, but Selene needs an actual replacement for her dad. Sadly though this breaks the kids further after this and they slink off and Selene gets she messed up.. while she was right to reject them, she missed WHY Della was trying so hard. However credit where it’s do unlike her brother, while she dosen’t try to fix her issue, it’s likely out of emotional maturity: she knows just saying nice things to the kids wouldn’t help them or would wring hollow and their mom is better for that. IT’s things like this that are going to make her a good step mom.. yeah i’m shiping Della with both her girlfriends at once. Just because I gave up on her and Launchpad dosen’t mean poly’s off the table, and frankly selene is strong enough to win Penumbra’s favor and Penumbra has the kind of pepper and violence a greek goddess likes in her women. They’d be cute all together. I likes it. 

Less cute is ZEUS, SCHEMING BOWL OF ELEPHANT PISS OUT OF MYTH!, who realizes his greatest gift isn’t his powers: I’ts manipulating his children. 

And since he found a sad STORKULES POOR SAD BOY OUT OF MYTH. , and hears his issue, with Storkules hilarious sitting in his poppa’s lap, he spins it into getting what he wants: Saying since he and his wife, and Storkules mother in this version apparently I dunno, fell in love with battle, summoning Chronos will do just that for Donsy. Granted for most people your dad’s tale about how he met your step mom who tried killiing you a bunch and who he’s cheated on dozens of times would raise a red flag, but STORKULES IS THICK AS A BRICK.. in both senses of the word and calls forth Chronus. 

Daisy meanwhile is driving her car away, but is battling with herself. On one hand she doesn’t want to play mother to a guy who can’t dispose his trash or his weird friends. On the other she admits she can really be herself around Donald. We then get the most telling line though.. “You do not need to fall for another man who needs saving!”

That.. is clearly setup for the future. It MIGHT be Gladstone but it could be anyone. Hell it could be someone entirely new. She also could have a kid like we’ve all wanted. We could get a canon version of Juinor.. not named Donald Juinor because 1) He’s not donald’s son and 2) that name’s been forever tainted and we all know which living bottle of axe body spray to blame. I.. genuinely can’t wait to find out who this is and I expect we will before the season’s up and i’ts nice to see Tress, like last time, get to dig into some emotional complexity with the character instead of just yelling at Donald or talking about bows and stuff. Here she grapples with herself as she does love Donald but the past has burnt her a lot. But as a wise pansexual once said “ But I think it's important for us to remember that sometimes, sometimes it does work out. And even though everything inside us is telling us to protect ourselves, when you've got it, don't let it go. And I am telling you, that you have got it, if you want it. “ Love is hard, love is messy, maybe that among many other things is why i’m alone. But it’s worth it when you take the time.. and upon seeing a giant monster heading for Donald’s house, Daisy realizes he is worth it.. or that frustrated with him right now or not she dosen’t want him to die. Either way she’s a coming and i’m gathering hornets in a box in ancipation of finding out who hurt her so I can mail them to him. I popped an H on there so I know it has hornets. 

Back at the mansion the mood is bleak as heelllllllllll with Louie ordering pizza minus the toppings and Della’s attempt to give the kids hot choclate just getting an ow from Webby. It does make sense: Scrooge and adventuring are their lives.. if he dosen’t need them.. how would they ever do it themselves? Plus their 11 and 13 and at that age kids are very fragile so having their mentor and grandpa reject them like this really hurts, not helped by Scrooge proudly announcing his new team and trying to awkwardly bounce not getting this is his fault, though Della is staring at him with a look that just screams. 

But before Della can stab her Dunkle, we cut to a depressed donald who switches from one natural state, Depression, to another, fearing for his life, as Chronus arrives and Huey rightly wonders how he’s here. The kids all defer to Scrooge while Della continues to just be the best. Seriously for the entire episode her only throught is her kids, and their emotional well being and had this crisis not popped up she probably would’ve stabbed scrooge then yelled him out for hurting her babies. She’s graduated from trying to be a mom but having issues with it due to mentally still being in her 20′s, to genuinely being GREAT at the job. Good on her.  Daisy is naturally horrified to arrive to find Donald being eaten while Storkules is overjoyed. I WOULD say his stupidity’s overplayed this episode.. but he’s never displayed good judgement before why start now? It fits his character and his joy turns to distress when Chronus eats donald.. and has a cage in his tummy. with glass walls. I dunno, it’s a cool design. Daisy is understandably pissed and yells at it for eating her boyfriend, which gets an adorable oh boy oh boy from donald> Again love is rough, but one jackass screwing with you does not equate to every man or woman or person you date being a jackass. Daisy has realized this. Storkules is overjoyed, but soon finds himself and his sister fihgting Chronus and honestly both are damn impressive doing so. Seriously when the justice ducks form.. give htem a call. I mean She has moon beams and he’s a greek god.. plus Drake and Launchpad could use a third.. I mean he fits better there and Drake is already dating one manchild, and is one to a smaller extent, another won’t hurt. Just consider it shippers.. or foursies with Morgana because as this episode shows Storkules is bi as he is mighty. he’s Bighty. But the god squad fails, and gets eaten and Zeus’ time to shine predictably ends with an “I’ve failed immediately”, to no one’s suprise. 

Scrooge starts working on a plan as he and Della, naturally scale the colossus. We then get the scene that’s been boiling all episode: When Scrooge wonders where the kids are, Della calls him out pointing out they’ve been plauged with doubts about him replacing them.. because he literally was replacing them, and when Scrooge is earnestly suprised by that Della points out the obvious: Their children, as I said their fragile and as Della puts it, Scrooge puts a LOT of pressure on them, something she likely knows from experince.  And this is what i’ve been leading up to and putting a pin in all episode: Scrooge himself. It’s something I thought of days ago but this episode hammers in heavily: Scrooge really dosen’t have a ton of personal social skills. Sure he can work a board room pitch, lead a team of adventuerers, and run a vast empire while never forgetting the human element, for a lack of a better term, he’s not lacking in empathy or the ablility to talk to people, but when it comes to reading them it’s just surface level. He’s genuinely been show to struggle with empathy, with feeling someone elses emotions or realizing them till they’ve already been hurt. He spent a good ten years desperatley trying to bring Della back, avoding his pain and guilt instead of talking to Donald and making amends with him. His relationship with Goldie took decades to get anywhere healthy as he just put his walls up and assumed she’d never change when, as we’ve seen now, she always could she just needed a push. And when confronted by the kids he lashed out and then pushed them away instead of mending the wounds he created. Even on a much smaller level, when Lena and Violet ended up along next week he’s utterly lost when Adventure isn’t on the menu and only picks up from being baffled by two normal ish (One’s a parnaomal expert the other is the paranormal) joining him once it’s clear at least one of them fits right in with his intrests. He can deal with people on a problem by problem basis, but he’s just not good at dealing with their emotional needs or opening up.  It’s why this works so well: his oblviousness fits. To him and the way his brain works, the crown is just a problem to solve and he just needs diffrent tools to fix it, not realizing replacing the kids for a mission would bother them or they’d ever think they were replaceable. Until now I hadn’t seen much similarity to Huey but both.. are just not great with PEOPLE. They put them in boxes, try to solve problems that way.. it’s just their specific issues that way are diffrent. Scrooge can anticapte the unknown and how people he’s fighting act.. but can’t anticipate personal hurt and pain well because he bottles all his up. When checking off a problem.. i’ts just something he dosen’t consider and thus his biggest blindspot, the thing he has to overcome time and time again: How his family feels and how he can deal with it.  Here however he deals admirably.. now he KNOWS there’s a problem, and in a genuine show of character development over the past three seasons, he apologizes fully, saying their the best team he could ask for, better than zeus and don’t need his powers and they can get the helm together. Instead of putting up walls.. he’s letting his in and showing humility, which given Scrooge’s ego.. is a tall order. But for those kids, for his strength, it’s no small feet. Of course said speech gets Him and Della eaten, but the kids, now reinegized, ahve time to plan, with Daisy further stalling by roaring at Chronus to stop. Because she’s fucking awesome and Storkules finally gets that. The kids however take the leaves and breifly retake their powers, Dewey’s is for dance naturally, and use them together to take down Chronus, freeing everyone else, defeating the titan and throwing him back into the pits.  Donald and Daisy reunite and get a RELLY sweet moment, blushing and looking lovingly at one another, getting lava on each other, before kissing. STORKULES, DOSEN’T GET THEY DON’T WANT A THIRD PARTNER OF MYTH, of course interrupts and hugs them hostage for the remaider of the episode. I’m assuming Beakly , when she got home, pried htem out and explained them not wanting a third int heir relationship to him, and it’s a weak end to the plot as Storkules learned nothing and one of the weaker parts of this episode. The rest is stronger as the kids and Scrooge plan to make another run at the helmet and Selene wonders off to “use your shower” and then order pizza.. so she basically just asked Della out. And has used her shower before. 

I mean again, she can have two partners. This episode alone has earned that and they seem like they’d mesh. Penny would just have to learn some lessons about sharing and godly vagina’s is all. Nothing wrong with that. And what about Zeus.. no one asked but he gets his wreath back only to fall in the pit, with Hades naturally laughing his ass off.. and likely also taking Zeus’ laurel back. So Zeus is trapped in hell with a goth mocking him. HORAY! HAPPY END.  Final Thoughts; This was a pretty good one. It does have it’s weak spots: Storkules learned nothing, the kids stories endings were easy to see coming and there wasn’t enough Dellene. But really despite that. .it’s still a solid episode mostly because it’s REALLY damn funny. The comedic timing is just pitch perfect and while like most of the plots I could see the rhythm of the donsy plot, the reasons for it were all funny and fresh and the scene with Daisy in her car was a nice bit of character building/clear setup for the future. And showing off Della’s own character developement and history with scrooge, the latter without ever having to mention it, really brought the episode up, as did the guest cast’s game voice acting and timing. This episode is far from perfect, but it’s still a fun episode that felt needed despite not being tied into the main plot: Bringing back some old friends, and having an intresting story to tell. Plus we got more Donsy so there’s that. Overall while not the BEST episode of the series, it was a funny, enjoyable half hour of television and sometimes, that’s enough.  If you liked this review follow me or more, and if there’s an episode of Ducktales from seasons 1 or 2 you’d like me to cover, you can comission it for 5 bucks, 5 bucks an episode, 5 dollars off your order when you comission more than one, via my personal messages. You can also follow me on patreon at patreon.com/popculturebuffet if you want.  NEXT WEEK: FLASHBACK EPISODE! BABY DONALD AND DELLA! BRADFORD ORIGIN STORY! POSSIBLE HORTENSE AFTER SO LONG! MY BODY IS READY!

[statticscribbles]

Branch Evolution

Summary: There’s a reason the Ghoulies phrase is ‘Evolve or Die’; also featuring my personal headcanon about Malachai’s family

”What is it Lance.” Malachai snaps at the boy who nervously stands in front of him. “I was just wondering..” “No fuck off; I’m not giving you a day off or listening to your teenage woes; or college essays or… Fine you got ten seconds; spit.” “How did the Ghoulies come to be?” “I started the gang; you idiot.” “But why; how and-”

“You keep asking questions and i’ll…” Malachai doesn’t finish; hand brushing over the knife he keeps embedded in the couch. “Course; sorry to bother you.” “Hey kid; grab a milkshake at pop’s would you.” Lance nods gripping the list and money that Malachai had tossed to him. He leaves to laughter and Malachai settles back into his chair.

“Seriously how did you form.” Penny asks fingers curling around the beer bottle she’d gotten. “You should know; you’re old enough to remember us forming.” Malachai grins at her and she laughs, shaking her head. “I may be but I never knew you before this southside; issue shall we say.” Malachai grins and sighs through his nose. “Liar.” He snarls, shoving past the incoming Ghoulies to retreat into his bedroom.

”I don’t give a fuck! That’s oppressive and outdated and SHIT!” Malachai stumbles back when the fist hit’s his jaw and he growls standing up and sneering. “You can beat me till I’m half dead but like hell I’m letting my baby sister do that snake dance for a bunch of fuckin’ pervs. Least I have morals.” “It’s a Serpent right! It’s our laws!” “Laws can be changed; she’s-” “Just cause she’s your kid sister don’t make a difference; my kids will do the trials just the same if they want to join.” “We’re by blood ain’t no need for us to play initiate. We already live and breathe as snakes; we don’t have to prove ourselves to-” Malachai doesn’t finish shivering slightly as FP throws him out of the Wyrm. “You stay the fuck out Malachite.” FP sing songs and Malachai stands up, shoving FP back into the Wyrm.

“You call me that shit name again and I’ll rip the crown from your fucking dead fingers.” “But that’s who you are kid; crown prince of the Serpents, a jewel in the gang’s crown just like your sister. You did the trials and so will she.” “She’ll do ‘em but not that fuckin’ stripper dance you pass off as-” Malachai ducks his head sighing when Tall Boy pushes himself between the two. “Come on let it go; just for now; we ain’t accepting new members anyhow; it’s off season.” “Yeah, too many jobs, not enough bodies.” FP nods to Malachai who huffs before returning back to his house and trying to avoid the shouting that hasn’t stopped since his sister ran away.

Malachai doesn’t see FP again until two months later; he pushes it off as strategic job assignments; that FP wanted to avoid Malachai annoying him for as long as possible. All it did was give Malachai more and more of a motive; pulling at the ears and heartstrings of the Serpents and the other southsider’s that were loyal to him; that were indebted to him. He crafts himself a fringe community; pulling in anyone the Serpent’s shun; be it those that failed the trials; or those that were double crossed. Even a few of the die-hard snakes assure him they’ll stand with him; of course this is purely due to them falling out of favour with FP but Malachai will take what he is given and let it grow and evolve.

“Malachai, come on kid.” FP hovers in the door frame and Malachai half looks up from the couch, his upper body jerking forwards before the rest of him twists off the couch. “I ain’t a kid FP, just under ten years younger than you, and already head of the gang, took you years, and being in your daddy’s pocket to make it this far.” He grins and his teeth gleam in the shadows. “Ki-Malachai; seriously is this really over those dumb job assignments; I can-” “You can’t do shit FP; you lost your main source; the candyman and the flowers are mine now; you just slither on out of the garden of eden that is the Southside; go on.” “Enough; when will you see this is the problem; we should be united; not divided; the southside is all our homes; we all belong here.”

“Tell that to those that didn’t make it in the gang; those that you pushed and gave the worst jobs because they talked back or got too mouthy about traditions and rules like me. You dug your own grave Snake King.” “And you’re the fallen angel to save them from my wrath?” FP snaps back and Malachai tilts his head back laughing. “When did I call you a god in this FP? When would I ever worship you?” FP grimaces.

“Malachai just dissolve this little game and come back; I don’t want this…” “Want what FP; to fight for your territory? For your members? What happened to the snakes being a family? To the law; no serpent stands alone.” FP turns away and sighs dragging his hands down his face before he grabs Malachai and shoves him to the ground. “Don’t move kid.” It’s the last thing Malachai obeys from FP.

“What happened?” Penny asks, looking at the scar on Malachai’s back that runs onto his ribs, the skull tattoo covers most of it. “Cover up.” She rolls her eyes and jabs him, pulling his shirt as he covers it back up. “Let me see it kid.” She hisses at him and he grips her bandaged wrist shoving her off of him. “Serpent’s never shed their skin right?” He snarls in her ear. “As a snake you should know when one rattles and when to stay away.” Penny’s eyes widen surprised at how his voice drops down into threatening; how his words drawl out mimicking FP Jone’s speech pattern. Penny mulls it over slightly unsurprised that Malachai would use FP as a role model; the man was running a successful gang after all.

“So that’s why you’re so into the snakes; they’re like your ideal gang.” “They ain’t.” Malachai snaps and Penny arches an eyebrow. “Well it’s obvious the Serpents are a sore spot for you; not have the stomach to make it in?” She taunts wondering how easy it’ll be to rile him up if the implication of touching a bar fight wound was enough to make him bristle. “You shut it.” “Oh no dead boy walking. I’m going to talk about my gang as long as I want. The Serpents are my family and even if they cut me out I’m still one of them. And I want back in.”

“You think you’ll get special treatment cause you’re their lawyer? Being special like that; being more than a random member don’t get you nothing when you commit a crime against them.” “Sounds like some of your members have experience with that.” Penny grins but wipes it off her face when Malachai just nods to the other ghouls clustered around. “Out.” They follow his order and each pat Penny on the shoulder, none of them look her in the eyes.

“You should know better Penny. You should be more careful. Evolve or Die. Stop talking about the half done snakes and start talking about what we all become when we die; ghouls.” “Oh so scary; spooky ghosts.” She laughs carefully maneuvering her wrist out of Malachai’s reach; he simply leans over her; fingers digging into the bandages until he sees red on them. “Listen Penny. Evolve or Die.” “I get it your dumb catch phrase.” “You think getting a little skin off your arm hurts; that after throwing yourself at my mercy they’re gonna let you back in?” “God they must’ve rejected you something fierce.”

“No; I made it in. I was just like you; except i didn’t want to ride FP’s dick straight into a high position or jail. I wanted to stop all the shit they praise and pass off in the Serpents. I wanted them to be better; to grow.” He grins at her and she stares in his eyes as hers widen in fear “Evolve or die. You catch my drift Penelope?” Malachai hums and then swipes his hair back pulling it up so it’s out of his face; miming as if it’s slicked back. “Malachite.” He breathes into her ear and she stiffens.

“Oh; you really didn’t know then? How; cute.” He pauses returning back to his chair and tapping the wall. Before Penny can move the Ghoulies swarm back in and she retreats outside; shaking and unable to look at Malachai.

“Told you then?” Lance asks, offering a shake towards her from another Pop’s run. Penny’s convinced he’s doing something besides playing gopher but she’s not really sure of anything anymore. “Malachite Topaz; one of the great-grandkids of the Serpent founders. Yeah shocked me too when I found out. How’d you figure it out? I managed to see his scar; nasty piece of work.” “Yeah can’t believe he; how did he get it?” “Same way you got yours; Jones carved him up.” Penny turns looking horrified. “Jones carve-” “Yeah something went off in FP that day; he was right mad according to everyone that saw; pinned Malachai to the ground and sliced off his serpent tattoo; poor kid got it on his side and back; one of those big snakes eating itself.” “He’s older than you.” Is all Penny manages to say trying not to picture a younger Malachai on the ground alone and bleeding. “Yeah; he treats us like family; i think it’s cause of his little sister; I’m the same age as her apparently. We go to school. I give him updates whenever he needs.”

“And when does he need?” Penny laughs a little and Lance waves the shake in his hand. Penny thinks back to how he seems to always have on in his hand; what she had thought a teenage addiction was the second cover up she’d seen that day. She thinks about Malachai for a moment longer; how desperate he is to appear tough; to appear strong and she doesn’t have to wonder for very long why anymore; she slowly unwinds the bandage on her wrist surprised when Malachai’s hand offers her clean ones.

“You should wash it first; it’ll burn like a mother fucking asshole but it’ll be better that it getting infected and you ending up half dead in the hospital.” “Course; Evolve or die right.” She tries to be casual; tries to wave off his concern but she lets him lead her back towards the house of the dead and she wonders if it’s really all that bad to come back as a ghoul.

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Order of Dust, with Nicholas J Evans

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The following is a transcript for this episode. For the complete transcript, please navigate to the show’s website.

[00:00:00] So I have a very important question for you, my dear friends, and this is how we're starting off this episode. Are you passionate enough about the things you like to do? And because this is this podcast, are you passionate enough about writing to be able to release something bad at first, knowing that you will get better later that going through those trials and going through the process of releasing something is part of the experience of getting better. Then you need to take a second and listen to today's guest, Nicholas J. Evans, who went from writing a collection of short stories in high school that he was convinced nobody would want to read to landing a three book deal today on Writing in the Tiny House.

[00:00:58] Hello. Hello. Hello, and welcome to the show. Welcome to Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and I am the guy living in a tiny house who is here to show you that you can write that work of fiction regardless of how busy you think you are. And the perfect example of that is today's guest Nicholas J. Evans. He is 30 years old. He works full time. And in his spare time, when he's not playing with his kids, he writes. And he has a beautiful message to share. And we will get to that message here in half a second. 

[00:01:58] As far as announcements go with this podcast, I have teamed up with Editor Krissy Barton, from Little Syllables Editing. She was on the show back in March, and we had a wonderful show. I fully recommend that you go back and listen to the final show that happened in March. She was here with me in the tiny house, talking about the process of editing. Anyway, I have teamed up with her to roll out kind of a new program. And I say that as a way to kind of tease.

[00:02:35] I apologize right now, but I want to let you know that fun things are rolling out, provided things work out according to a specific schedule. Sometimes I get some hairball ideas and sometimes the execution is kind of hard to do, kind of impossible to do at other times. And so we are discovering different ways that I can share my writing with you, my listeners, and also with people who don't listen to this show.

[00:03:10] So basically I have started writing some smaller things. I have blabbed on and on and on about my book about my works in progress, and I still have those. And those have certainly not been like thrown in the garbage or something stupid like that. They have been put on the back burner for a second, just because I am eager to share my writing. On this podcast I blab all day long about the tips and tricks to do it. And so I actually want to show examples. Release something for people to read sooner than a book, sooner than a full blown novel, which can take up to two years or longer to write or produce or whatever, especially if you're not already published through a major publisher.

[00:04:03] And so I have started doing some shorter things. They all tie into the books that I'm writing. They are short stories set in the same world as the books that I am working on too. And these, I am going to put on a schedule. I will tell you more about what that whole schedule will look like in a later episode of Writing in the Tiny House, but be excited.

[00:04:30] This whole process is so fun. Writing something according to a schedule is hard and awesome. And it really gets me excited about writing and it gets me more eager to share it with you, my listeners, what I can do, what I have done, some of the ideas that are in my mind. And so it's not just about advice or guidelines anymore.

[00:04:59] Now we are going to actually have the real written word to share with you on a regular basis. So I will touch base on a later episode to give better explanation and better description as to what all of this is actually going to be. But I wanted to share with you today that things are in the works. And so that's super exciting.

[00:05:26] So without further ado, let's go ahead and meet our guest. Nicholas J. Evans.

[00:05:35] I'm originally from New York and I've moved a lot over the course of becoming an author, and I'm writing novels and writing short fiction, so I lived in Delaware for a brief period of time. And I currently live in Maine with my wife and our three very young children. We have three daughters, all under the age of five and I work full time.

[00:05:56] I travel for work which means I, am not home as much as I would like to, be, but I try and use that time to my advantage. And that's where I work on a majority of my stories. So I work on them when I'm in hotels. I work on them when the kids are asleep at nap times, pretty much whenever I get the opportunity. Even going as far back as to when I started writing short stories, I would work on them on my phone, just so I would have the time during brief periods of the day.

[00:06:22] As you can see, Nick is a busy man and the idea of fitting in writing where you can fit it in is not new to most writers. Most writers do not support themselves with their craft. And so to be working a job and to be cranking out novels in his spare time is something that a lot of us are doing, which is so cool and so admirable.

[00:06:44] And so I wanted to find out a little bit more about his published works and what he's working on now.

[00:06:52] I began writing Order of Dust, which was my debut novel all the way back in 2017. I actually was working on a different novel at the time and I had hit writer's block. It was a completely different genre too. And I was like, I need something to work on. What am I going to be working on, while I'm just sitting here staring at a screen not knowing what to put down?

[00:07:11] So I began writing something that I originally thought I was going to release as a graphic novel. Actually, I began writing it in a script format with the hopes of sending it out that way. and I found that might've not been the right medium. So I turned around and started drafting it into a novel. And then around 2018, I was finished up with the second draft of it. And then I had started sending it out to publishers directly because it was my first work. I didn't want to get anything agented. I didn't think I was there yet. And I was lucky enough to get picked up by the Parliament House for a trilogy for my series. So I was very excited about that and I mean, that led to where we are now with the novel release in 2020, which was a weird time for books to release. It was a little bit of a different experience because everything had to be pushed digitally. We couldn't do signings. We couldn't do cons. We couldn't do anything. so a lot of it had to be just reaching out to different digital agencies to take care of things for us and hope that things were going to go well. Luckily enough, they did go well, which led to me working on throughout 2020 after we were already edited and everything was finished up for Order of Dust. I ended up working on the second novel of the series. And I had just finished a different novel, that I'll go into in a little bit that is actually releasing this September for a different publisher. COVID was very, very unfortunate and working from home was very difficult, but at the same time I was able to try and use as much downtime as possible to really hammer this out and give what I feel like is even a better product than the first novel. 

[00:08:48] So the name of the trilogy is For Humans, For Demons, which will make sense in the grand scheme of things? So it's For Humans For Demons. The second, book comes out January of 20 22, no release date on the third, but I am halfway through the first draft of it and very excited. And then, Like I said, I do have another novel coming out with a different publisher in September of this year. 

[00:09:11] The For Humans For Demon series is essentially about what if modern religion collapsed Similar to what we've seen in history where different religions end up taking the forefront. And this is about what if it's turned on its head and what if in a modern society what everybody believed to be true ends up not being? And everybody finds out about that truth and the chaos that ensues.

[00:09:36] So bringing that as the larger universe, it focuses on the story of one character Jackson Crow who dies at the hands of the Unascended, which essentially to bring it to better terms a soul in this universe is called a Dust and sometimes they do not ascend for different reasons. So they end up remaining and taking on a host basically. They take over a body of a living person and they hide among people. Jackson was unfortunate for him and his fiance, were assassinated by one of the Unascended, which leaves him with a little bit of a grudge, and he gets the chance from the true higher beings to come back and basically work for them to take care of the issue, which is these Unascended who are hiding as normal people are committing heinous crimes that they are not actually being targeted for. 

[00:10:28] So it's all about his story, about getting revenge. And then it slowly opens up to this bigger issue at hand, which is the world around him that is essentially collapsed because people do not have a belief structure anymore. And that goes for all of the different religions and how it affects the different groups of people, which really ends up coming out in the second and the third books

[00:10:52] So I have read Order of Dust and it is a wild ride. It is fast paced. It is exciting. It is filled with action and all of the things you could hope from a book like that. And so I wanted to figure out what was his inspiration to write a book like this.

[00:11:10] I wanted to write something That was, based on religion. I wanted to go that route. But originally when I was doing this, the only idea I had was what if somebody had to hunt people? What if somebody had this job where they had to hunt people cause they were different? And it just kept breaking down until I was like, well, what if he's also different? A lot of the influences for that book came right from graphic novels from monga, from old scifi, noire stories. So things like Philip K Dick or even things like Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman. A lot of inspiration from Yasuhiro Nightow who is best known for writing Trigun in the nineties and Gunn Grave. So a lot of that I want it to kind of mush together and I was like, this would just be something fun. And, and that's what I did. 

[00:12:00] Book number two was Wing Clipper, that one releases in January of 2022. And that one is going to break into the larger world. The first book was very focused on Jackson, focused on introducing characters and introducing some antagonist, but the second book really opens up. It is longer. So it won't be as fast of a read. But that was the goal. I wanted to introduce people in a way, almost like what Stephen King did with Gunslinger, the dark tower series. The first book gunslinger is very short. It's a very quick read and then slowly gets longer.

[00:12:31] That was my goal here is I want to get people drawn in and then really open it up in the second and say like look how everybody else has been affected by this. And then the third book right now is called The Arm of the Savior. In the third book, we'll close everything out in a very large scale. I've been building up to something with these hoping that it ends in a larger way than it started, where it starts very narrow, very singular, and it ends more global. And that one does not have a release date as of yet just because the second book's not even out, but I would say that's probably going to be somewhere around, early to mid 2023. 

[00:13:07] Now while his trilogy for humans for demons is with one publisher. Nick has done what many successful writers have done. And he is publishing another book under a different publisher. Another publishing house picked him up for this book for this idea. And so. Just depending on contracts and agreements, it is entirely possible for a person to put out work under various different publishing houses.

[00:13:39] And Nick has done that too with his upcoming novel that releases this month, even though in the dialogue here in the audio, it says it releases in September. We get to remember that it is now September and this interview wasn't recorded this month. So please don't get confused. 

[00:13:57] The book releasing in September is with a different publisher, Black Rose. What ended up happening was I was working on another while I was doing the editing process for Order of Dust. I wanted to work on something else, but I didn't want to dive into the second book without first working with the different content editors, the line editors to kind of get their idea and feedback on that first book. But I wanted to work on something.

[00:14:19] I had been writing a lot of shortstories, and I wanted to break it up from the normal. And at the time I had just come up to Maine for work. So I was very far away. My wife and kids were down in Delaware. On the weekends I was driving down there 10 to 12 hours to see them and then driving back So it was a lot of alone time for Monday through Friday. And I just felt like I needed to do something with this time, so I wrote the book.

[00:14:43] It's called The Ones Who Could Do Anything. And it's an urban fantasy, but it's mainly just about dealing with struggles. I don't want to give too much away, but surviving after something terrible happens. And it follows just a group of young people who find each other because of their misfortunes and discover that they have some innate abilities that lend themselves to each other. So it's, again, it's something that at first, and this is, this is what I loved when I had brought up to the publisher at first, they were like, this sounds like, like the premise of it, like something that we've read a hundred times.

[00:15:21] And I was like, I know, you know, I'm not trying to give you something that everybody already knows just by looking at the cover of the book. But luckily they were like, you know, We read the first three chapters of it. Can you send us the rest of the manuscript? And when they did, they really like, they're like, this is different.

[00:15:37] As many writers bring out a certain work or certain ideas or bring these different things to life. Oftentimes there are specific goals that they have with these things. And I wanted to find out what was the reason behind four humans were demons and this new book, because they are so different, different publishing houses.

[00:16:06] Different ideas, different concepts. And so I wanted to figure out more about that.

[00:16:11] One thing I would love for everybody to know is everything that I write and put out. I want to be very different. And I think the people who enjoy For Humans For Demons and enjoy that series, maybe would read The Ones Who Could Do Anything and feel like, this is different. It's a little bit darker and more base of reality rather than something that's completely scifi.

[00:16:33] But I want everybody to be open minded to that. I think some of my favorite authors branching from every different medium, have always tried to dabble in that a lot of their books are not linear. Obviously there are authors out there who do release very similar books and they do very well. But when I think of my favorite Neil Gaymon I don't feel like his books are the same. I feel like I pick up any of his books and they're different and that's my overall goal. And I wanted to let people know that right from the start, because I want people to pick up different books and be like, this is different from that one. And I love them for what they are. 

[00:17:06] And so came the big question. How did any of this get started? How far back does this go for him? When was the first time he put pen to paper in a creative way? And how did all that go?

[00:17:24] I appreciate this coming up because I don't get to share this a lot because I don't want them to intertwine, but I've been in bands my entire life. I was a musician for most of my life. I'm 30 now. I was in bands all through high school and everything.

[00:17:36] And then in 2011, I was in a band called Nora Stone, and we were a post hardcore group. I say we were, but they're still together. A hardcore group. And we ended up releasing a short EP and it got us on a label. We did a lot of traveling. We did a lot of touring. So were on the road, a good amount. We did Metal Mayhem Festival.

[00:17:56] We did Crowd Surf America with CHODOs and Blessed the Fall. This is all a bunch of Warp Tour bands. But we did a lot of that for a very long time. And after the birth of my first daughter, I realized I had to start dwindling it down. I had already started the career I'm in now.

[00:18:11] And I was like, what can I do? And back in high school, and when we're on the road, I would just write short stories. A lot of it, I'm going to be honest with you. If anybody remembers my yearbook shout outs to to New York, if anybody remembers my yearbook, it asks something about what do you want to do?

[00:18:26] And at the time I want it to be a graphic novel writer. And that is in my yearbook. So I would just create characters, write backstories for them. And that's what I would do on my phone to pass the time is what I thought was fun. So when I moved to Delaware and parted ways with the band, I needed something to occupy my time and I did not want to dive back into music.

[00:18:45] I had done it for too long. I didn't want to start over. I ended up just writing short stories again on my phone for fun. And my wife had actually read one of them and she was like, how come you never release anything? Like, how come you just sit here and write in the notes section of your phone and then delete it.

[00:18:59] And I was like, I don't know. I don't think I have anything people want to read. I worked on something and she read the first draft of it and was like, I really like this. Like, you should just try and get this published. And I was like, I don't think people are going to like it, but okay. And then it got published.

[00:19:13] And then all of a sudden I have my mother, my friends, my family, who were like, you know, I like this. I don't understand why you didn't do this sooner. And I'm like, I, I don't know. You probably wouldn't like what I wrote in high school.

[00:19:23] And so this is actually the take home, this upcoming little statement that Nick makes for me during this interview. And this is why I opened this episode with that question of, are you willing to release something bad or at least release something that requires some refinement and requires some work in order for you to get better?

[00:19:45] My biggest piece of advice, would first, I guess we'll start with one. Right. Even if it's bad, even if you just have a story in mind and you're like, I'm not going to put these words together properly, and people are not going to like this Cause that's where I was at. Write. And then just send it in. Have faith in yourself, send it in and trust me, trust me When I say the publishers are going to tell you when it's bad I've had a lot of publishers. I've had my own publishers tell me it's bad. And that's just part of the process is how you get better. And I've said this in the beginning, but I feel like every time I write something new, it gets better.

[00:20:24] And for new writers, that's going to be the case. The first thing you put out there might not even get published. And then you have to really look at the feedback you got and say.

[00:20:31] Okay. They didn't like it for these reasons. Is it the story? Is it me? Is it something I need to change? But at the same time, you want to maintain your own voice and you're not going to please everybody.

[00:20:42] And eventually you'll get good enough. And eventually the right publisher will come along, have faith in your project and really carry you through the way. And second piece of advice, listen to your publishers. If you're going that route, if you're going self published Listen to your beta readers and listen to the editors that you bring on.

[00:20:58] But if you're going a traditional or an indie publisher route, listen to them. Because most of the time, 99% of the time from my experience so far, they want what's best for your book without removing the parts of the book that make it yours. So definitely just write whatever you can send it in. They're going to tell you it sucks and then listen to them when they tell you it sucks.

[00:21:22] And that is the biggest lesson with developing any form of talent, just like learning to play the piano or learning to play a musical instrument or learning how to paint or draw or whatever. It may be different skills that you have at work. So wing. I don't know. All of these things are talents and talents require practice and paying attention to feedback.

[00:21:49] And so that means that sometimes you get to be brave and you get to write something that may not be great. And you get to give it to a few trusted people in order for them to find the holes in it that you don't see. And in order for them to pick apart some of the clunky things and to offer some guidance and some advice.

[00:22:10] So that, that bit of work can be even better than it was when it, when you began it. And so that is the take home from me to you. If you are looking to seriously get into writing, and it's not something that you do all the time, just start, write anything and then give it to somebody to critique.

[00:22:34] The feedback is the most important lessons. With writing so that you can get better hearing how your work can improve is a very vulnerable space to be in. But it, like I said, it is the biggest lesson on how to do it better and on how to make that specific piece better. So that is it for today. If you are interested in reading Order of Dust or The Ones Who Can Do Anything, go ahead and follow the link in the show notes and you will be able to check those out. 

[00:23:09] Otherwise, thank you so much to my patrons who donate to this show every month without your generous donations, the show could not be possible. Go ahead and follow me on social media. My Instagram handle is @authordevindavis and my Twitter handle is @authordevind. Thank you so much for listening and have fun writing.

[00:23:33] 

Check out this episode!

[blackfemmecharacterdependency]

16. Introducing Hazel Doe

The past few chapters have been rough, seeing characters go from questionable and suspicious into their worse versions of themselves, but now that we’ve gotten past those things, there’s no other way that they could go but up, Amen?Amen. Here is a somewhat sad, but hopefully sweeter chapter than what I’ve taken all of you through in the last few. Thank you to anybody still able to read. I’ma dedicate this to the lil’ home @strawdool Because, I have put Friend THROUGH it. 

Word Count: 3505 Trigger Warnings: Abortion mentions, grieving, abandonment issues, institutionalization. 

Previous

The facility was more like a complex. There were different centers, in this cluster and she was in a private room, but had to go to the main center for appointments and activities. She didn’t like being alone so much, but since everything had happened, maybe that was for the best. She had a personal caretaker, because her file indicated that she was prone to violence + she was rich. Someone had to make sure that she didn’t explode on anyone and also make her go to all of her appointments. She wasn’t very responsible when it came to things that she didn’t want to do. 

Grace looked out of the window down at the children from the children’s wing playing on the playground. Real talk, she kinda wanted to go with them. Swinging seemed fun right now and she hadn’t in a few years and her caretaker would probably take her if she asked… Then, she saw her for the first time. 

She was a little (potentially biracial) girl, with coarse, wavy, long blond hair with a leaf in it. The girl wasn’t playing with any of the kids… which wasn’t extremely unusual. Several of those kids were doing their own thing and just happened to be near the other children in their group. But this girl stood out to her because not only was she sitting still, in a fetal position, but she was staring right up at Grace.Why was this kid looking at her? Nobody seemed to notice it, and why was she laying like that. Her arms and legs collected to herself and her eyes piercing into Grace.

Grace furrowed her eyebrows, twisted the rod on her blinds to close them and went to head for her afternoon activities. That wasn’t the last time she saw that girl.

The next time, Grace was in the music room, picking out an instrument for the music time that they allotted her and she heard something shuffling around in a chest. She knew better to investigate it, but also… nothing interesting ever happened here. Mostly just her poking at her emotional wounds with a sharp, jagged stick, so she dared to open the chest and saw the kid in it. Once again, the girl went into a fetal position, this time, not staring at her, but Grace couldn’t help but be shaken by this. She screamed when she saw her and ran out of the music room, with a ukulele. “Ms. Monroe! Where are you taking that?” She heard behind her. She dropped it and kept running to the bathroom.

“Okay. Okay… maybe she just wants to tell you something. Maybe she’s here to THANK you… for… for sparing her. She was gonna be the biggest mistake that you and Simon ever made. One or both of you would’ve hated her. You did her a kindness." 

"Or, you were being as selfish as ever before. Simon hurt your feefees and so you got rid of his baby,” her own reflection said back to her.

“Simon did far more than hurt my "feefees” and any child that would have come from the both of us would have been DOOMED. I did all of us a favor. I had no choice…" The reflection shrugged her shoulders, her face not convinced about Grace’s conviction. 

Grace jumped towards her, like she was going to punch her, but jumped back, because of course, it was her reflection and paid her with the very same response. Why for a moment it had used her inner voice to haunt her, she had no clue. Just like she didn’t know why the girl kept appearing to her. “Maybe I should see what she has to say,” she decided.

It was days before she saw her again. When she did, she was sitting on a bench, watching the other kids play. Grace’s group fortunately had outside time at the same time with the kids that day. Fortunately? She’s not real. The schedule doesn’t matter…

Grace sat next to her and the girl perked up and looked at her in awe. It was the first time she seemed this responsive, and her reaction alone indicated that she wanted to be able to engage with Grace, further cementing in Grace’s mind that this was some type of visitor or some type of vision. Whatever the case, she was going along with it.

“Hey. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.for what I did. I mean… no… that’s not right. I’m not sorry. I had to do what I did. I know that you’re just here to make me think about things, and it’s working. I’ll always think about you and who you could’ve been. I just want you to know that I only would’ve wanted what was best for you and at that time, I’m sure that was it.” The girl looked confused. “I won’t get in the way, if you have something that you need to tell me.”

The girl studied her with a “Hmmmm” sound, then announced, “I can turn into a turtle! Bye bye, Pretty Lady! Thank you for letting me tell you what I needed to say. I feel so much better now.” She got up and rushed off. 

Grace sat there confused. “I guess I have to research turtles for the significance of that message…” she wrapped herself up in her cardigan and went to see if she could get an escort to the library.

“Turtles are a symbol of good luck… oooh, that’s nice! Apart from being thought of as very lucky, they also symbolize strength, longevity and hope. They are symbolic of a steadfast tranquility – safe in the knowledge that they can survive during bad times until things improve for the better.” She started crying… “Does… this mean that she’s here to help grant this to me, to be a sign that I can be this? Or is she here to show me what I can never have because I sacrificed her?” She spent another week hoping the girl would reveal herself to her again. She would ask her about this. 

When she saw her next, she was crawling beneath a bush. Grace rushed over and crouched. “Hey… I need to talk to you about last time.” The girl didn’t react to Grace’s words. “See… I’ve read about this before in a book. So, I’m gonna just think of you as Beloved, even though I hope that you aren’t going to spend all of that time haunting me, but I was confused by the turtle message, and I want to see if I can get some clarity… What are… what are you doing?” The girl had put her face down in the grass and started biting. “You can’t eat that!” Grace said and reached to stop her. She. Was. Bitten. Grace screamed and held her hand, breathing heavy. How could she feel that?

“Grace?” her caregiver called. 

“She bit me!” Grace said, shocked.

Another worker came to collect the girl and apologized to Grace. “We should get that addressed.” 

Grace looked at her hand, “That girl is real?” She asked, pointing with her good hand.

The workers gave each other a look. “Of course she is. Have… you been having hallucinations, Grace?” That was a potential side effect of one of her medications and they must’ve been worried.

Grace touched the bite mark. “Guess not.” She stared at the child on the way back to get her bite mark tended to. She was hardly moving until one of the workers went to try to remove a leaf from her hair and she started flailing. Grace was startled, but the other worker said, “Leave it, leave it… We just leave it there when she’s awake.” To Grace she said, “Sorry that she got away from us. The new girl must’ve neglected to read her file.” 

Grace wanted to read her file too. “She can talk, right? Because she talked to me last time I saw her, but not today.”

The worker rocked her head from side to side in thought for an answer that she could give Grace without violating any of the girl’s rights. “She can talk. She probably won’t right now, but yes… sometimes she talks. Sometimes, she doesn’t stop talking,” she booped the girl on the nose and sat her down in a seat. “They really should stop trying to assign other staff members to you,” she said, getting paperwork out that Grace knew was about to go on the girl’s record. This kid was like 4, 5 or something. Small.

“Hey… I’m okay. You don’t have to like write anything down on her. I wouldn’t want that to be in her file or whatever…” Grace said.

“That’s very sweet of you and I’ll note that you said so in my report, but we unfortunately have to make note of all incidents, for legal purposes.”

“I’m never gonna be a legal problem for her or you…”

“Pretty Lady… nice try, but my file is full of stuff. This is just one little thing,” she finally spoke.

“Hazel… Nice to have you back with us,” the worker said. “Someone bit Miss Grace Monroe here today.” Hazel looked at Grace, noticed her hand and clutched her shirt tightly with both hands. Grace… stared at the gesture. She remembered when she used to do that, usually whenever she was nervous. “What do you think you should say to her?” The worker asked the girl.

“That doesn’t sound like me,” Hazel said, but her eyes told that she was embarrassed and sorry. 

“It’s okay,” Grace said. “I’ve done much worse things to many more people. Maybe this is part of my atonement.”

“What’s atonement?” Hazel wondered.

Grace’s caretaker escorted her back to where she was meant to be. That subject wasn’t something that Grace could be talking to a small child about. She heard the girl ask the worker, “What is atonement? That lady took Grace before she could answer!”

.

Grace would ask the staff that helped her with the bite about Hazel when she saw her. Sometimes, she wasn’t assigned to her that day, sometimes she was “in arts and crafts” or stuck in her room for timeout. Grace was beginning to worry about her, after a couple of weeks passed and she was never around.

When Grace saw the kid again and made a beeline to her and sat next to her again. She smiled up at her. “I’m a girl today. Your hand is safe.” Grace nodded and smiled back. “I’m sorry. I would’ve said it before, but I don’t like when they try to make me say it. I was gonna say it on my own! I don’t like when people try to control me.”

“Like I said, it’s okay. So… where’s your watcher?” Grace looked around and spotted the lady. “There she is. So, Hazel, was it?”

“Yeah. Hazel Doe.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“Some dude in a hospital picked it because of my eye color and lack of parents. I was there for a while, from being so sick, so it stuck. Usually, they like to let the family name you, but it’s hard to stick when they know that you might be sick and stuff. I kept the random hospital name.”

“Oh,” Grace said sadly.

“I mean… I like it. Sounds kinda like a superstar. Introducing Hazel Doe…!” She cheered and then wrapped herself in her sweater, blushing. “That’s silly. I’m just trying to make myself look cool.” 

“Hey… You are cool! You’re wearing a tie and I like the signature leaf in your hair. Is it… does it mean something?”

Hazel bit her lip and she took it out, “No, not this one. But, there was a story they told me that whenever I was found and taken to the hospital, there was a leaf in my hair. It’s kinda… the only thing that I feel like is like my old life.” She shrugged her shoulders and put it back in. “I’m no savage. I change them out as they die. Sometimes, they’re special, if something really great happens while I have them with me, but that doesn’t happen a whole lot.” Grace didn’t know what to say. They were quiet for a moment, then Hazel asked, “Who is Beloved?”

Grace blinked and said, “Oh… This character in a book…” Grace thought about the book content and decided it wasn’t really for a little kid. “She was the… long lost daughter of another character…” That wasn’t a complete lie. She was a ghost haunting her mother, but…

“That sounds sad. I don’t like sad books.”

“What books do you like?” Grace asked, genuinely interested, as she tucked her hands between her thighs with her legs held together at the ankles.

“Hmmm… Ones with pictures of animals. Do you like any books that aren’t sad?”

“Yeah… I like lots of books. Mostly about family and friends.” 

Hazel frowned. “Those can be sad too.”

“Tell me about it,” Grace said.

“No. You tell me about yours.”

Grace glanced at their workers, watching them closely, but out of earshot. “My family and friends are how I got here.”

“They abandoned you?” Hazel asked, teary eyed.

“Sort of. I gt really mad at my mom for not really being there for me after my friend turned on me, or maybe I turned on him, I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t sound like you,” Hazel said.

Grace laughed, “You don’t even know me.”

“I know that you were nice to me whether I was a girl or a turtle, and you tried to make sure that I didn’t get in trouble. If you do that for strangers, I think you do it for friends.” 

Grace teared up as she admitted, “I felt a little connected, I guess. This is gonna sound stupid, but before the bush incident, I thought you were my kid…”

“You have a kid???” Hazel asked.

“No. I mean. I was… I would’ve. I had to let them go.” She shrugged her shoulders, sadly.

“Why would anybody ever have to let their kid go?” Hazel asked, a little heartbroken to learn this about her new friend.

“I would have been bad for them. I would have been here, still, I’m sure and I would have spent years failing as I figured out what to do. I had a bad mom and I think I would’ve been a bad mom. And I didn’t want to do that to myself or to them, the kid that they might have become.”

“There’s books for that, Grace,” Hazel said. “But… Why did you think I was your kid? Did you leave them in the bushes?”

“No! No… I wouldn’t have done that. My mom took me to a doctor and the doctor used their knowledge to take them - him or her or whoever.”

“Did they get named?”

Yes. “They weren’t big enough to get named,” Grace said, flippantly.

“If you’re thinking of them, they were big to you.”

Fuck. “How are you so smart?”

“I’ve had to go to a lot of different homes and in and out of hospitals and stuff. You pick up a little bit of something everywhere…” Grace hummed. They were quiet for a while. “Did you say goodbye to them?” Hazel saw that Grace looked like she might cry, and matched her body language, but added, “It helps to say goodbye.” Grace let a tear fall and she wiped it with the back of her hand. Hazel took her hand away from her face and said, “And it helps to let it out.” 

She stood up and pulled Grace along, back to the bush that she had been under when she bit Grace. “I don’t have a mom and you don’t have a kid, but we can always have this bush.” Grace was confused. “They weren’t big enough to name, so I think you didn’t bury them. You didn’t choose something to represent them when you said goodbye. You can do that here.”

Grace shook her head, “I don’t… It’s complicated. I don’t need to say goodbye..” Hazel stared at her suspiciously. “I mean… sure, I thought for a moment that maybe you were them, haunting me for getting rid of them, but… I had to. I couldn’t take care of them. Even if I wanted to try, my mother wouldn’t have allowed that…”

“You can say goodbye to her too,” Hazel said with the shrug of her shoulders.

“My mom’s alive.”

“Mine probably is too… But she isn’t here when I need her, so what’s the point?” Grace’s eyes went wide. That was surprisingly a good point. Maybe her mom was dead to her. 

But, Grace shook her head, “She’s alive and living well. If there’s anybody I should say goodbye to, it’s me. I feel like i lost myself, and I mourn that, even though I don’t even know if I ever knew who I was.”

“We are supposed to be here to change,” Hazel said with a shrug.

Grace said, “Here lies Grace, as she was. She met a really cool kid who is very smart, right here at this spot, and it’s the best thing that’s happened to her in a long time.”

“You got bitten,” Hazel reminded her, blushing.

“Bitten by greatness!” Grace said. Hazel’s eyes lit up and she fought a smile.

Hazel spoke next, “You’re supposed to say something nice, so… I haven’t known Grace long, but she’s very pretty and seems really nice. I’m sorry that her friends and family killed her and her kid. If she’s not strong enough right now, I will lay them to rest for her. Her mother. Her kid. Her friend. Grace can say goodbye to all of that. She’s got me to protect her, now.” 

Grace knelt in front of Hazel and looked into her eyes, “Hey… It isn’t your job to protect me. I wouldn’t let you put yourself in that position.”

“I told you that I don’t like people trying to control me,” Hazel said, with a half smile. 

“Hazel! Time to go inside!” The caregiver called. 

The other children were being collected and Hazel rolled her eyes. “I guess I’ll see you again, Grace.” Hazel removed the leaf from her hair and handed it to Grace, then plucked one off of the bush to replace it. “That one’s special now. Because it was there when we became friends.” Grace’s eyes were filled with tears again. 

“Ivory,” Grace whispered.

“What?”

“They would’ve been called Ivory.”

“They ARE called Ivory,” Hazel corrected and went to join the line back to the children’s ward.

Grace’s caretaker showed up now and watched her staring at the bush. “Are you ready for music therapy?” Grace tilted her head in thought. She hadn’t written any music since she got in. She had been only playing songs she knew, to occupy her time, but she felt like writing, now. She nodded and let her escort bring her. She had a song to write about today, about saying goodbye when she should… and about Hazel. 

She practiced it during music therapy, as she taught herself to play the ukulele. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to. Maybe because ti was so different than something that she might have done before, and she wanted to find herself and try everything out to see what made her happy. She didn’t tell Hazel that she was working on it, but an arrangement was made for her to be able to perform in the children’s ward as a treat. 

The girl was really excited about it. Some of the children were in their own worlds. Grace was warned that most of them might not pay attention, and most of them didn’t. But, Hazel did. Grace looked out at the audience. she saw a spotlight on some chairs, where were her parents, Simon with a Baby Ivory on his lap, waving their little hand at mommy. Hazel shouted, “Play Freebird!” and Grace laughed. The seats were empty of her old family, and the spotlight was on her new little friend as she found the confidence to begin her minimal ukulele skills in front of a bunch of children who didn’t care. But one did. She was smiling in excitement and clenching her clip on tie in both fists.

I said goodbye to the dead today. 

Wanted to hold them close to my chest, wanted them to stay.

I let go of a fear or two.

I’ve always kept those guarded, hoping that wouldn’t show through.

But, I found something in all of this dark.

Some wisdom, some little spark,

That lit up in front of me so that I could see myself, and lay all of those broken pieces to rest.

I knew that I’d be better, but I never expected Hazel, though. Hazel though.

I knew I could grow, but I didn’t know about Hazel though. 

But now, I know. You’re a superstar. Introducing Hazel Doe.

Next

[haru-sen]

IAL/Overwatch Characters in Quarantine

First, I’m assuming they’re at base, maybe even in their own quarters. So they aren’t short on resources and there are plenty of drones and omnics that can visit/deliver items– they just need have their chassis sanitized afterward.

Torby:  He would immediately craft a hazmat/containment suit so he could go out.  He would also neglect to tell most everyone, because he could use the vacation.  He would also be making them for his wife, kids, and cats. If there are mechanical requirements, he would also be designing potential solutions - nano filters, early detection modules, air scrubbers, etc. There would be weird handwashing jokes.  

Reinhardt:  He would take quarantine very seriously, because he’s protective of his fellow agents and Angela has explained exactly how much harm he could cause if he doesn’t keep his distance from them.  But he is such a social person, and he would get lonely, so he’s always making video calls and switching between comm channels, jumping into everyone’s conversations, ordering food, and badgering Torby to make him a giant armored containment suit.  He would have teleconferencing tea parties with Brigitte and Ana and send Ziv lots of messages requesting help because he’s stuck on a kind-of-tricky platforming game.

Ana: It would have been a vacation, but Reinhardt keeps calling her to chat about everything ever. (He thinks she might be lonely? She doesn’t really feel like bursting his bubble.)  Lucky keeps calling to ask advice. (With Ana out, Lacroix and other troublemakers are running around unsupervised).  And Lacroix keeps sending her cheerful messages about how well he is managing everything. She is very suspicious, but reluctantly commits to not worrying about what is out of her hands. She can focus on fixing things afterward. Her hair might go a little grayer. She would be receiving lots of snack and tea deliveries from Athena drones.

Gabriel: He would be fine running Blackwatch remotely, but several agents would require “just wait till I get out of here...” threats.  He would enjoy wearing his pajamas while working, and catching up on mending Jack and Lucky’s clothing.  They really are so destructive.  He would take great pleasure in sending dirty messages/videos to his lovers just to wind them up.  But that is mutually assured destruction as he’s stuck by himself too...  

Jack: At first he would appreciate the slowdown, but after the first twelve hours, he would get very antsy. Yes, he’s issuing orders and handling situations, but he would like to go for a run, or spar, or do more sweaty dirty things with Gabriel and Lucky. Plus it would be nice to hover behind his lovers and steal food off their plates. There would be a lot of pouty “I miss you” messages, and beefcake selfies. But after a few days, he could go really off the deep end and do the opposite. He would just sit there in a bathrobe and eat green beans out of a can and drink out of the ketchup bottle. Or he’d take pictures of himself in Hawaiian shirts and socks with sandals and send them with taunting messages like, “Who says I can’t wear plaid with floral print?” Jack should probably not be quarantined alone.

Lucky: Lucky would probably try to enjoy the first day or two, but then she would be getting all kinds of messages from everyone about how grumpy the Blackwatch Commander is, how Ziv is running amok, and how their socks keep disappearing and where exactly is Isha? It would be very stressful, but Jack would make long calls while wearing silly outfits to try to cheer her up. (Jack would put on a blanket and pretend to be ghost or grandmother. It would not be convincing, but it would be cute.) Gabriel would cook her delicious meals and make plans for the future: where should we take our next vacation? Do you think this would look better on Jack or me? On you? OK, we’ll get three.” Lucky would curl up in a blanket and fall asleep to Gabriel reading to her or Jack snoring on the line because he drifted off at his desk.

Lacroix: As long as he could meddle, plot, and make his minions do his bidding, he would be fine. He would probably even get dressed properly, cook a gourmet meal, and have romantic video-call dates with his lovers. But because he isn’t outside to personally grief his friends/victims, he would be hiring other agents to do it for him. Athena might be amused enough to help him carry out these plots or at least cover his tracks.

Winston: Because his expertise would be required to help solve the problem, Winston would remain in his lab, hard at work. He would check in with his friends daily, and have mandatory downtime thanks to Athena. Basically, it would be like every other day, except Ziv can’t come in to badger him. So...more productive?

Amélie: Only boring people get bored. Aside from her strenuous exercise regiment, Amélie has plenty of books, films, and fancy wines. Perhaps she will have a boudoir photo shoot. Perhaps she will adapt and choreograph a modernized version of Twelve Dancing Princesses. Perhaps she will craft long term strategies for assassinating every member of the UN Security Council, just for fun. Most likely, she will go on an internet shopping spree and Lucky and Ziv will wake up the next day with entirely new wardrobes. The clothing would be accompanied by detailed stylistic “recommendations,” as well as notes clearly expressing how disappointed she will be if they fail to comply.

Hanzo: He would stick to a disciplined exercise regiment, meditate, and eventually have a cake craving. He might try cooking/baking if the facilities were available. If he tried to make something complex, there is fifty percent chance of him completely screwing it up. But fortunately no one saw, right? There is a one hundred percent chance that Athena recorded it.

Genji: Genji’s actions would be (un)surprisingly like Hanzo’s. The main difference is that Genji also likes video games and would ask Athena to read recipes and help him monitor whatever food he was making. So it would have a much higher chance of turning out successful. There is a one hundred percent chance that he would taunt Lucky by sending video of him eating his successful cake, though he might not tell her where it came from.

Angela: Let’s be honest, she would enjoy her vacation while everyone else freaked out, especially if it was just isolation and there was no dire need for her help. She could also remotely task Zenyatta or Athena to handle things.

Jesse: He would send lots of plaintive message to Lucky and Gabriel, mostly about how he was really hungry, and not feeling good, and maybe someone could make him some chili? Or soup? He would spend the first few hours on the couch with Bandit watching westerns. Though if Bandit wasn’t there, he would make the babysitter (probably Lucky) make multiple video calls so he could fuss over his dog. He would also get bored the fastest. He would start making cocktails based on people he knows.  It would get ridiculous (and drunk-ish) very quickly.

Tataryn: He would take the time to catch up on his skincare regiment, beauty sleep, and knife sharpening. He would be responsible and check on Vo... And then he would start sending messages to Lucky making increasingly outrageous requests. It would start small like, “could you pick up my dry cleaning and some fresh pomegranates?” And escalate from there into “borrow the Mona Lisa” and “hand deliver this love letter to Captain Amari.” He would also make lots of calls to Kseniya, and make an effort to study whatever subject has caught her interest: the social behavior of lemurs, sourdough starters, and a new magical girl show.

Ziv: He can do his job in isolation. He’d probably revel in the luxury of getting to wear sweatpants and not having to dress up. He would also binge video games, movies, and play D&D or Shadowrun remotely with his internet friends. There is a chance that Ziv doesn’t actually need to be quarantined, but Gabriel just signed off on it for personal reasons.

Távio: He would be incredibly bored, sending increasingly desperate messages to his friends, until Lucky finally cobbled together a mission for him to plan remotely. “We need to breach this casino’s security. Coordinate with Ziv.” Which of course, would just turn his attention of Ziv and the two of them would keep each other busy. Of course, it could just as easily be, “help Amélie arrange the catering and entertainment for Captain Amari’s birthday luncheon,” or “talk to Reinhardt for an hour.”

Chang: She would chainsmoke and drink most of the time, possibly calling Jack once every other day to check on the situation. Yes, she would exercise too, but Chang’s idea of fun involves a lot more destruction than those facilities can handle.

Feng: Feng would be bored and manic, but she would be fine. Whose fault do you think this entire thing is anyway?

[mamthew]

A Final Fantasy Ranking

Over the course of the quarantine, and because I had such a good time with the Final Fantasy VII Remake, I've ended up blazing through a ton of Final Fantasy games. Since April, I've played IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XII, and XIII. 6, 7, 9, and 10 I'd beaten before. 4, 12, and 13 I'd played to some capacity before. 5 and 8 were completely new experiences. I had no interest in going further back than IV, since it was the first one to really put any effort into character work, and I didn't play either MMO because MMOs don't really appeal to me (I'm planning to try XIV whenever this new update drops that makes the story mode more accessible, but it keeps getting pushed back so oh well). I also didn't replay XV because I've played XV three times and watched other people play it in its entirety twice, so I have a much better handle on it than any other game in the series.

Anyway, I didn't really have any plans for what I'd do with this, besides get a better understanding of the series as a whole, but I was kinda inspired to do my own Final Fantasy ranking. I'll probably be a bit more detailed than I should be because I tend to overanalyze my media and end up having too much to say. I’m actually not placing VII Remake in this ranking half because I regard it as a spinoff and half because it’s not yet a complete story, even though Part 1 is unquestionably a complete game. If I were to put it somewhere, it would probably be close to the top, possibly even in second place. Also worth noting that this is gonna have SPOILERS for every game I discuss here. I really just wanna use this as a place to nail down some of my thoughts on these games, so they’re pretty stream of consciousness and I didn’t bother avoiding any details from the plots.

10: Final Fantasy VIII.

I don’t think there’s another game in the series with a more obvious corporate hand in it than VIII. It’s kinda the Fant4stic of FF games; there are the bones of a substantive game in there somewhere, but every aspect of the game is such a bald attempt at checking off a 1999 list of “things gamers want” that the whole affair feels hollow and sickening. A major trend I’ve noticed throughout this series is the extent to which FFVII’s success pushed the architects of almost every subsequent game to try to recapture whatever it was that worked about VII, and VIII got the worst of it. It’s got the sullen guy with a special sword. It’s got the sci-fi. It’s got the terrorists with hearts of gold fighting against an oppressive state. It’s got the train scenes. It’s got the case(s) of amnesia that hides the true premise of the story. It’s got the ability to give any character any loadout.

Besides that, they kinda crammed in just a bunch of stuff popular with kids at the time. Jurassic Park? It’s in there. Beauty and the Beast? Here’s the ballroom scene. Hunchback of Notre Dame? Here’s that carnival. Alien? Now you’re alone on a spaceship running away from a horror monster. Saving Private Ryan? The party shares brains with war veterans and dreams of their experiences at war I guess. Half of anime? It’s all about a high school for mercenaries and the party is trying to get back in time for the school festival.  Fandom culture? Zines are a collectible item, and each one you find adds an update to Selphie's Geocities page. It also has astronauts, and transformers, and a haunted castle, and a prison break, and Rome, and Alpine Wakanda, and war crimes, and lion cubs that have attained enlightenment, and there’s almost no connective tissue from one idea to the next.

Also the junction system is convoluted and terrible, using magic makes your stats worse, all enemies level up every time you do, and I couldn’t tell you which character excelled in what stats. The characters were all very flat, and the first time I felt like I was seeing the characters interact in ways that helped me to understand them was in the cutscene that plays during the end credits.

Also the female lead’s role in the story changes entirely with no warning every five hours or so. She’s a terrorist, oh no she’s aristocracy in the country she’s terroristing against, oh no she’s jealous of the others because they grew up together and she didn’t, oh no she’s Sandra Bullock in Gravity, oh no she’s the villain and it’s too dangerous to let her out, oh no it’s actually fine and they were bad for locking her up.

It’s an absolute disaster of a game. However, the music and background art is absolutely beautiful. Maybe they never gave me a good enough reason to be in an evil time traveling haunted castle, but damn is it a gorgeous rendering of an evil time traveling haunted castle.

9: Final Fantasy XII.

I’ve known for years that FFXII had issues in development. The writers came up with a story for it, and execs got scared because there were no young characters and they’d convinced themselves that young protagonists are what makes games sell. So two more characters - Vaan and Penelo - were added, one was framed as the protagonist of the story, and the entire story was rewritten so it could feasibly be from his perspective.

While the two characters they added are egregiously tangential to the plot, XII honestly has no protagonist. The writers originally wanted Basch to be the protagonist, but his entire arc is really just following Ashe around and being sad about his evil twin. Ashe is probably the most important to the story, but doesn’t have much presence for a good chunk of the story, and makes her most character-defining choice offscreen before having it stolen from her by a side character. Balthier has the largest presence in the story, and is most closely related to most of the events of the story, but has pretty much no role in the ending.

Honestly, if I were writing FFXII and told it needed a young protagonist, I would have aged up and expanded the role of Larsa, the brother of the main villain, who shows up as a temporary party member from time to time. The entire game is about family ties, and a journey spotlighting Larsa could have involved his learning about Ashe, Basch, Balthier and Fran’s family situations and using their experiences to grapple with his own. Damn, now I’m sitting here thinking about how good that could have been.

As it is, the game feels disjointed and aimless, and the ending is so bad it’s farcical. When I reached the ending, I watched Basch and Ashe forgive Basch’s evil twin for his villainy rampage, harking back to the moment earlier in the game when Ashe turned down the chance to gain powers that would have allowed her to avenge her country because she realized that those powers could also drive her to hurt innocents in the crossfire. In this moment, I realized how Vaan fit in as the protagonist of the game. “Oh, he’s going to realize that violence begets violence, and that he must break the cycle by forgiving Vayne for the death of his brother. He’s going to let go of that hatred he’s been trying to push onto someone for so long, and it’ll finally allow him to heal.” I realized that even though the road to this point was rocky, the writers had managed to craft a satisfying ending from the seemingly disparate pieces of this uneven plot.

And then Vaan picked up a sword and screamed AAAAAAAAAAA and charged Vayne down and stabbed him, and Vayne turned into a shrapnel robot dragon and exploded all the star wars ships and I threw my controller aside and laughed uncontrollably while my characters beat him up and completed the game on their own without any further input from me.

Oh yeah, the battle system is also incredibly boring. Instead of battling, the player writes up an AI script for each character, then lets them act based on those scripts. I would straight up put the controller down and watch youtube videos whenever a group of enemies showed up. I was pretty excited about the job system, but then there didn’t really feel like much of a difference between jobs, and my characters all behaved pretty much the same as each other.

The hands-off battle system, unfocused story, lethargic voice acting, and tuneless music all left me pretty uninvested in the whole affair. The art style and locations are beautiful, though, and it did make me want to eventually check out some of the Tactics games, which take place in the same universe but are supposed to have excellent stories and gameplay.

8: Final Fantasy XIII.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had two such opposing opinions of a game’s story vs. its gameplay. This game is the only one that plays with a bunch of story elements from FFIX, which did a lot to endear it to me. It’s sort of a game in which the protagonists are Kuja, the villain of IX. Like Kuja, they are created as tools by an uncaring god for the purpose of fighting against one world on behalf of another world, and are subsequently forced to grapple with the horrors of having an artificially shortened lifespan.

The story actually has a lot of Leftist themes, too. The gods of that universe spread ideology among the populace, and the people unquestioningly believe these false stories, as the gods have provided for them for as long as there has been written history. Much of the character arcs center on the characters being forcibly removed from their places within those ideological frameworks and having to unlearn what they’d always believed to be objectively true about the world.

So the story actually is pretty good, but it’s held back by some really clumsy storytelling; it constantly uses undefined jargon, has almost no side characters with which it might flesh out the world, actively fights against players trying to glean information from environmental details, and maintains (at least for me) a weird disconnect between the characters in the gameplay and the characters in the cutscenes. I think this partly stems from Square’s original failed plan for FFXIII to be the first game in a much larger series of games sharing themes and major story details. Despite these issues, however, the characters are all likeable and (mostly) believable, and their interactions are grounded in real emotional weight even while their universe feels intangible.

This all got dragged down by the gameplay, which is total dogshit. It’s got the worst battle system I think I’ve seen in an RPG. The game only stops being doggedly, unflinchingly linear about thirty hours in, the whole game took me about fifty hours, and I spent the last fifteen hours beating my head against each individual battle, waiting until the system hiccuped long enough to accidentally slide me a win. That meant I had about a five hour window of euphoric play, convinced that I actually loved this game, thrilled with every new experience it gave me, and excited to see what would happen next. I guess those five hours are what pushed this game over XII in my ranking.

7: Final Fantasy V.

Until FFXV, this game was the last of the “Warriors of Light” games, in which the game follows a party of four set characters for its entirety. To this day, it’s the last of the “Warriors of Light” games to let the player customize which character holds which roles through the job system.

FFV’s job system is the reason to play the game. Its story is mediocre, and its characters are all fairly flat, but there’s something viscerally satisfying about building party members up in jobs that might enhance the role they ultimately will fill. For my mage character, I maxed out Black Mage, Blue Mage, Mystic Knight, Summoner, and Geomancer. Then at the end, I switched her to a Freelancer with Black Magic and Summoning, and she kept all the passive skills for those jobs and also the highest stats across those jobs.

It was super fun and kind of a shift of focus for me, since I tend to place story above anything else in games. Despite the story not being special, though, the game’s writing is actually a ton of fun. It’s definitely got the most comic relief in the series, and I came away loving Gilgamesh as much as everyone else does.

And while it’s nothing special graphically, it does have some really cool enemy designs, and the final boss design is one of the most memorable ones they’ve ever done. Which is impressive because I keep having to look up Exdeath’s name because the character himself is super forgettable.

6: Final Fantasy IV.

This wasn’t the first game in the series to feature actual characters with names and depth, but I have no interest in playing FFII, so it might as well be. I actually played the DS Remake for this game, so it definitely had some quality of life improvements, like full 3d characters and maps, voice acting, an updated script, the ability to actually see the ATB gauge, and the ability to switch to other characters whose turns are ready without using a turn.

Apparently one thing the remake didn’t do was rebalance the difficulty for more modern sensibilities. Instead, this remake is...harder? It requires more grinding than the original? Why??

Either way, though, the story is actually solid! The game opens on its protagonist, Cecil, committing a war crime on the orders of his king, who raised him as a child. The first ten hours of so of the game follows Cecil as he tries to understand why he was ordered to kill so many innocents, turns his back on his country, and works to redeem himself.

This arc is reinforced by the game mechanics, too, which is super clever. His redemption is marked by a change in job from a Dark Knight to a Paladin, which also resets his level. For a time, his life is considerably harder because he’s finding his footing as a new person, which is marked by battles which had been easy becoming much harder for the player for a time.

This game places storytelling over gameplay more than I think any other game in the series. Each character is locked into a job, which I much prefer in my RPGs to games where characters function pretty much interchangeably. I dunno if it’s because I cut my RPG teeth on Tales, but it really bugs me when I can give Tifa the exact same loadout as Barret. I want the lives of the characters to bleed into their functions as gameplay devices.

However, the developers clearly had a ton of different jobs they wanted to add to their game, but hadn’t figured out how to allow for the player to switch in and out party members in standby. To fix this, they increased the in-battle party to five characters rather than or four (or the later constantly frustrating three), rotated the roster a ton, and had a ton of characters who straight up leave permanently. One character dies and never comes back. Two characters die and only are revived after it’s too late to rejoin the party. Four characters end up too injured to continue traveling.

This let the developers make a ton of jobs, but it doesn’t let the player exploit these jobs to their fullest. Characters’ stats reflect their role in the story, as well. One character is quickly aging out of adventuring, so his magic stats increase on levels, but his attack and defense stats actually decrease, signifying his failing body. Another character has already achieved some form of enlightenment, so he gains no stats when he levels up at all. The purpose of IV is the story, over any other aspect of the game, which makes it even more mindboggling that the remake would have increased the difficulty.

Besides that, the biggest issue I had with this game was the overbearing constant drama of it. While there were a few more lighthearted parts, they were mostly relegated to NPC dialogue and sidequests. The characters in this game don’t become friends so much as they become companions who bonded over shared tragedies, and this makes for quite a few scenes of every character separately wallowing in their own immeasurable sadness. I played FFV directly after this game and the light story and jokey dialogue was a much-needed palette cleanser.

5: Final Fantasy VI.

Before the unexpected success of FFVII irreparably changed the franchise, Square constantly mixed up the story formula for the series. IV, V and VI all handled their stories really differently from each other, and what I remember of III also felt fairly different from the games that came after.

Every game from VII on had a very clear protagonist (except XII, whose botched protagonist was still clearly marketed as the protagonist). The concept of the Dissidia crossover series is built on the idea that every FF has a protagonist at the center of its story. FFVI’s Dissidia character is Terra, but Terra is not the protagonist of FFVI.

Apparently while developing FFVI, the directors decided they didn’t want the game to have a clear protagonist, so they asked the staff to staff to submit concepts for characters, and they’d use as many as they could. This game has fourteen characters, each with their own fun gameplay gimmick in battles. Three of the characters are secret, and one can permanently die halfway through if the player takes the wrong actions. Of these fourteen characters, the main story heavily revolves around 3-6 of them, while five more have substantial character arcs.

There’s kind of a schism in the fandom over whether this game or VII is the best one in the series, and I can see why; this game is absolutely fascinating. No other game in the series has done what this game did, which means it’s one of the two FF games I really want to see remade after they complete this VII remake.

The first half is very linear. It breaks the beginning party into three pieces, then sends each character to a different continent, where they meet more characters and build their own parties before everyone reunites. Once the story has taken the player everywhere in the world, the apocalypse hits. The villain’s evil plan succeeds and tears the entire world apart.

The second half of the game picks up a year later with one character finally getting a raft and escaping the island on which she’s been marooned. In this half, the player navigates the world, which has all the same locations, but in completely different parts of the map. The driving factor for much of the second half is to learn from incidental dialogue where each party member has gone in this new world, to track them down, and to try to fix some of the bad that’s been done to the world before finally stopping the villain who destroyed it.

It’s unique and clever and occasionally legitimately tugs at the heartstrings some, which is impressive for a poorly translated SNES game. The final dungeon is a masterpiece all on its own. It requires the player to make three parties of up to four characters, then send them in and switch between them as new roads open. This way, the game manages to feel like an ensemble piece up to the very end.

4: Final Fantasy VII.

As I previously mentioned, there’s kind of a schism in the fandom over whether FFVI or FFVII is the best game in the series. Neither is the best game in the series. FFVII is better than FFVI. Oops.

When I was first drafting up this list, it was before I’d reached my replays of VI or VII, and I tentatively placed them next to each other, with the strong assumption that I’d end up placing VI a bit higher than VII, since it has so many strongly differentiated characters with solid story arcs, beautiful artwork, great music, etc. etc. Then I reached FFVII and not even four hours in, I realized it would have to be higher on my list than VI.

VI has a better battle system, its characters are much more differentiated by their gameplay, its character sprites have aged much better than VII’s character models, and it has four party members in battles instead of three. But I couldn’t overlook VII’s gorgeous artwork, sharp character work, and character-driven story. In the end, I had to give it the edge.

VII is a strange beast. It simultaneously really holds up and has aged horribly. The story is excellent and I love the characters, but the actual line-to-line writing is pretty bad, making the whole experience of the game a bit like swimming upstream; you’re getting somewhere good, but the age of the game is still pushing you back the best it can. Similarly, the background artwork is fantastic and gives the game locations a sense of place incomparable to anything that had come before it, but the character models are so low-poly that the two are constantly at odds with each other.

Still, the game is more a good game than it is an old one. I think it’s managed to duck the absurd level of hype around it by actually being very different from what the most popular images of it make it out to be, if that makes sense. The super futuristic techno-dystopia city only makes up a very small portion of the larger game, and most newcomers to the game won’t have seen Junon, or Corel, or Cosmo Canyon. Heck, I didn’t know Cait Sith or Red XIII were characters before I played the game for the first time. One of the many reasons I’m excited for the rest of this remake is to see newcomers to the story learning just how much variety there is to the world, events, and characters of this game.

FFVII also began (and pulled off really well) a number of storytelling trends that continued in subsequent games in the series. Obviously, almost every game since this one has a clear protagonist with a cool sword for cosplayers to recreate, and an androgynous villain whose story is closely linked to the protagonist (or one villain who is linked to the protagonist and a second one whose purpose is to look like Sephiroth), but it’s started broader, more quality shifts, too.

FFVII is the first game in the series to try to give all its characters arcs based on a similar theme, for example, a trend that has helped give it and future games a sense of thematic unity, especially in IX, X, and XV. Heck, that trend was why I almost came around on XII before they nuked it. It was also the first game in the series to have a real ending, rather than closing out with essentially a curtain call featuring all the party members, like they did in IV through VI (and I assume earlier).

Another common feature of FF games that it didn’t start with VII but certainly was canonized with it was the mid-game plot twist tying the protagonist to both the villain and the larger story. FFIV had this as well, of course, but I feel like the orphanage twist in VIII, the Zanarkand dream twist in X, and the time skip twist in XV were all meant to recall VII’s twist of Cloud’s…very complex existence (IX’s two worlds twist actually is a clear homage to IV, but it’d be hard to argue that Zidane’s connection to Kuja - and the character of Kuja generally - weren’t more influenced by VII).

2: Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XV.

Sorry, this one is a two-fer. I’m not gonna spend too much time on why I placed these two together in the #2 spot (I wrote a long thing on it here, if you’re interested). In summary, the games kinda mirror each other, in story and design. Each game can be seen in the negative space of what the other game leaves out, and at the end, the characters react to similar situations in completely opposite ways. For this reason, and that they’re of comparable quality, I think they’re best viewed as companion pieces.

FFX was the first mainline Final Fantasy game I ever completed, six years late. It was the first FF game with voice acting and many fully modeled locations. It also kinda marks the beginning of the series’ constant changes to the battle system.

That’s not to say the previous games’ battle systems didn’t also differ from each other, but they all had the same setup, with levels and an ATB gauge. This was the first game since III not to have any real-time element to its battle system, nor numbered levels gained through experience points. Since X, no two FF battle systems have been remotely comparable, which is cool and innovative and keeps things fresh, but also means I’ve been starved for just a regular ATB FF game for too long.

In many ways, FFX feels like a bridge between the PS1 games and the later games. It feels much more streamlined than VII, VIII, or IX, in terms of both storytelling and design. The game is very linear, pushing the player from one area to the next and not allowing much backtracking until the very end. It also loses the aging look of the PS1 games’ menus and UI, finally updating the classic font and the blue menus with white borders to fully modernized and sleek graphics.

However, movement still feels very similar to movement in VIII and IX, the music definitely evokes the PS1 games more than the later games, and most locations are portrayed with beautifully painted backgrounds, rather than modeled in (which I actually prefer, and I was glad to see that VII Remake has gone back to that in some places).

Voice acting in this game is phenomenal for 2001, and honestly on par with many contemporary games. I can’t think of a voice actor for the main cast who didn’t do a great job. Tidus’s narration, especially, is emotional and evocative in all the right ways. Grounding the plot in a very personal story about Tidus’s difficulty coming to terms with and proving himself to his abusive father keeps the story relatable and real.

Something interesting about my experience with X is that because it was my first Final Fantasy game, I thought for a very long time that the series was about organized religion, and the ways it is used to justify evil acts. This might be the only game of the ones I’ve played that is about organized religion, or even prominently features a religious doctrine, which really sets it apart from the rest of the series.

The game’s thematic unity is on point, even if there is a scene where they state the central themes a bit too plainly. Every character, and even the entire universe of the story, is held back by the past, and every subplot and the main plot revolves around finding ways to move forward and leave the past behind.

I love FFXV. It feels like a return to form after XII and XIII. It’s also probably the furthest any game in the series has strayed from the original formula. Battles are entirely real-time, and the game is a straightforward action game. There is very little time spent with menus, and even the leveling system has been stripped down to a few skill trees. It’s immediately obvious that the game was originally created to be a spinoff, not a main title.

FFXV is also probably too much a product of the current era of microtransactions and payment plans. The full story is spread out across *deep breath* a feature film, an anime series, an anime OVA, a standalone demo, two console games, four DLC story chapters, a multiplayer side game, a VR fishing game, four phone games (though really three phone games because A New Empire straight up isn't in that universe and also is terrible), an expansion including several entirely new dungeons, and finally a novel set to release sometime this year. That’s a whole lot of story. I’ve not played the phone games or the VR fishing game, or read the novel yet, but I’ve experienced all the rest.

But I also played FFXV when it first released, before any patches, before I knew there was a film, just the game all on its own. So you can believe me when I say that without any supplementary material, the game is still great.

It goes back to the FFI, II, III, V “Warriors of Light” system, where the party has four characters who do not change at all throughout the game. While this bugged me at first, I soon came to appreciate having a story where almost all character interactions involved these four characters. It meant I came to understand them well enough to feel like they were my friends, too. Most characterization in this game is understated, presented through small shared moments, dialogue, and body language as they travel the world together. Much like X, the overarching story might be expansive and far-reaching, but the real show is in the personal journeys the friends have.

Much of the first half of the game is spent exploring an open world, driving along the road and getting out of the car for pit stops or to explore the forests nearby. This is one of the very few games where I don’t mind just exploring an area without the promise of an upgrade or a new scene, just to see what’s around the corner, or to hear whatever banter the characters might engage in next.

The entire world of this game is gorgeous, and the orchestrated music is some of the best they’ve ever done. The main plot is beautiful, too. It’s bittersweet and emotional, with a charismatic villain and a twist that blew me away the first time I reached it.

The supplementary material is also mostly really quality. I’d recommend the Royal Edition over the original edition for sure, and to watch Kingsglaive as well. The anime series is quick and fairly fun, and Comrades expands on the universe in some great ways, but neither has as much bearing on the overall plot as the DLC chapters and Kingsglaive. I’m so in love with the DLC chapters, actually, that two years ago I wrote a piece just on how much Episode Ignis affected me (here if you care).

This is definitely getting long, so I guess I’ll move on after saying I’m upset that they patched Chapter 13 to make it easier, and I’m angry at everyone who complained that Chapter 13 was too hard. It was a brilliant piece of storytelling through game mechanics, and it’s mostly been stripped of all that, now.

1: Final Fantasy IX.

It’s IX. It was always IX. I actually did come into this with an open mind, wondering if one of the new games I’d experience (IV, V, VIII, XII, XIII) might end up hitting me harder than Final Fantasy IX, but as I replayed my favorite game in the series I quickly realized that wouldn’t be happening.

There are only a handful of games that make me cry. IX is one of two without voice acting. There are several songs from IX that make me tear up just when I hear them.

The story of the black mages gaining sentience, learning that they can die, and trying to force themselves back into being puppets just to lose that knowledge really moves me. The same goes for the story of Dagger no longer recognizing her mother, setting out to find a place to belong, learning that her birth family is long dead, then watching her mother return to her old self a moment before losing her forever. And Zidane’s story, where he has nowhere to call home, finally discovers the circumstances of his birth, and realizes that had he stayed in his birthplace, he would have become a much worse person than he ultimately did.

More than any other, though, Vivi’s story will always stick with me. He was found as a soulless husk by Quan, a creature with the intention of fattening him up and eating him, but each of them awoke something in the other, and Quan ended up raising Vivi as his grandson. When Quan passed, a rudderless Vivi went to the city to find a new home, and eventually learned he was created as a weapon. Other weapons had also gained sentience, but none had the worldliness that Vivi had gained from his loving relationship with Quan. When Vivi discovers that most weapons like him die after only a few months, he grapples with the possibility that he may die at any time, and eventually decides that he can only take control of what life he has by living each moment to the fullest. He ends up becoming an example for the other weapons to follow.

FFIX is a game about belonging: both yearning to have somewhere to belong and learning that the place where you think you belong is actually toxic and harmful to you. Even the menu theme is a tune called “A Place to Call Home.”

IX ran counter to the trends of the series in a number of ways. It was a return to high fantasy after the more sci-fi VII and VIII, and was also much more lighthearted than those games, while still being heartfelt and occasionally bittersweet. Gameplay-wise, it locked each of its characters into a single job, gave them designs based on their jobs, brought back four-character parties, and introduced a skill system in which characters learn skills from equipment. It also had a much softer, less realistic art style, and mostly avoided the attempts to recapture VII that have plagued most other subsequent titles (besides Kuja’s design, I guess).

The story is also structured so well. It regularly shifts perspective for the first thirty hours, allowing the player to spend ample time with each of the party members, and shaking up character combinations for fun new interactions. It introduced a system similar to the skits from Tales games, showing the player often humorous vignettes of what’s happening to other characters at the time. Once the characters have all come together in one party, the game has earned the sense that all of them (except for the criminally underexplored Amarant) have become a family.

The supporting cast are a blast as well. Zidane’s thief troupe (who double as a theater troupe) are likeable and fun. Kuja’s villain arc allows him to be sympathetic without losing his edge. The black mages are tragic without being overdone.

The development team for this game put so much more work into this game than they had to. The background artwork was all made in such high-definition resolutions that the act of downscaling them to fit in the game removed details. Uematsu traveled to Europe to make sure he’d get the feel of the soundtrack right, and has said it’s his favorite score he’s ever done. Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, says IX is his favorite game in the series.

FFIX is one of the two games I would like them to remake after they finish the VII Remake, but I’m terrified they’ll mess it up in some way. Honestly, the game’s only flaws (which I do desperately want them to fix) are a lack of voice acting, the underdeveloped party member Amarant (and to a lesser extent Freya), the dissonance of Beatrix never getting punished in any way for her hand in a genocide, and the fact that very few of the sidequests are story-related because so many of the smaller story details that would normally be relegated to sidequests are covered in the main plot.

Despite the danger, though, I think revisiting IX is absolutely essential moving forward. It represents so much of what made older games like IV and VI great, and its story is much more grounded in real emotion than many current Square stories tend to be. Remaking VII will be good for getting VII out of Square’s system. Remaking IX would be good for putting IX back into Square’s system.

Here’s a IX song as a reward for getting this far. I’m gonna go listen to it and tear up again.

[mtg-thrill-of-possibility]

A Reflection on Magic, the Pandemic, and the Dark Side of Arena

Hello to all the readers who may stumble upon this in the search for new Magic content. I wrote this mostly to fill a void in my life that has opened up over the last year and more of a mental health thing than some form of Magic related advice but since it is about that, I thought they’d go hand in hand. I love Magic. Or at least I have loved Magic? It’s hard to tell. Like nearly everyone on this planet, I’ve been shut off from in-person Magic and it had/has me left down. I normally volunteer at my LGS and help them organize their tournaments and judge the events and generally whatever else they ask me to do because I really love Magic. I love playing with my locals who don’t spend hundreds of dollars and craft GP/MF level decks. I love watching a group of people playing draft chaff and off beat home brews and where adults and teenagers can compete with one another on that level. I enjoy sitting off to the corner on the store’s EDH night and listening to games and drawing tokens for games in my own corner while I wait for my own games or sometimes my ow turns. I also love traveling with my wife to cities and go compete in GP/MFs where we usually both scrub out of the main event by round 3 or 4 and then hit the vendors and side events as well as explore the cities for new restaurants. I miss Welcome Days where adults bring in kids and I show them the ropes. I love meeting adults who poke their noses in and ask me “Magic is still a thing? I played that in high school” and show them the changes. I can still remember the Theros Beyond Death prerelease last year and thought how much fun it was to not work the event for once and just play. And looking back, boy am I glad I entered the THB prerelease.

February was the start of the downturn. Our EDH night was slightly less full but I just figured it was due to the weather since the winter usually has a downturn in the attendance for every event. But then the rotating cast of 10-15 FNM players was 6; Pioneer on Saturday had 3. The next week, the EDH crowd was down to from the usual 6-8 pods to 2. FNM and Pioneer failed to fire. The news that COVID-19 was starting to creep into the Midwest prompted me to ask the store what precautions we wanted to take and when we were going to stop in general.

I work in chemical research and I have a background in pharmaceuticals and once (or twice) studied the MCATs and considered going to med school. I was definitely concerned but in February it hadn’t reached my state (yet) and I wanted the store to be ready for the imminent shutdown and continued downtick in participation (my LGS and I had been strategizing how to move up in events and the store ranking on the WPN). But it’s a red state. Science denial must be a recessive trait that the Midwest incorporated into its identity for a long time and I was told that I had some freedom but to not go crazy. I thought I’m a volunteer. I’m not spending what little money I have on stuff for you guys. So, I did the best thing I could think of for free, I started a Discord server. I was really excited at the prospect. I had just bought a webcam in case my workplace started working from home and thought how cool it would be to be able to organize events in Arena and talk through Discord when the store wasn’t available. I asked if we could hang up a flyer and tell all the Magic customers that they continue with tournaments and Magic if they joined the Discord I set up in the store’s name.

My LGS asked how much this was going to cost them and I said exactly as much as it costs them now if not a little less since we don’t need the store’s utilities or a cashier behind the counter in the after hours to work the tournament. They were happy and I got the greenlight. Things worked okay at first. Those with Arena accounts showed for a few weeks. Others I knew were interested were convinced that we were overly sensitive to the virus and FNMs continued to limp along with 4-6 people until everything ground down to a halt.

Come mid-March, COVID had finally reached the state and the city. Cases were light, a few hundred people tested each day, single digit cases detected but I again was worried. My workplace had already begun educating everyone on how to wash their hands properly and disinfect every surface and everyone was issued a bleach spray bottle with their name and a serial number on it. While the mayor and governor hadn’t ordered a shutdown yet, I advised strongly that the store go ahead and if they wanted to continue that I wouldn’t be there to assist until the curve was sufficiently flattened.

I’m not sure why but they trusted me and listened. I was glad and I pushed again for people to join the Discord server. Players were reluctant but I assured them that this may be the future for some time and if they get on now, they can still get the Ravnica intro quests and start building up their Arena collections. I got more on my side, we had 8-10 and got them all to try and hook anyone else they knew to join us. However, by the end of March, my workplace had moved to 100% virtual and with my extra time, I had begun to unwittingly shift the power dynamic in the store by accident. You see, I really love Magic. I was now working from home for a job that required me to have direct physical access to hundreds of thousands of dollars or sensitive equipment that need recertification when they get moved 12 inches down a work bench and dangerous chemicals I don’t want near me unless I know there’s an inspected chemical shower nearby. When the campus shut down, I got very bored. I did what research I could from my home portal, attended virtual conferences and webinars every day, but I had tons of down time. That meant watching my wife play Animal Crossing, playing with my dogs, marathon sessions of Civilization but most crucially, I also began grinding Arena.

My local meta had been defined by the understanding that none of us were really Arena players. I had played when the Kaladesh and Amonkhet closed betas were happening, but I was turned off by the fact that all my playing of those formats amounted to nothing when it launched with Ixalan and I would start from square one. Everyone in the group typically shied away from tier 1 tournament decks because to all of us, it was more fun to goof around with RG auras and Tilonalli’s Summoner decks than it was to grind Esper Hero or the new Uro decks. And the limitation that everyone didn’t have all the shocklands meant we were all playing on roughly the same card pools with some variation due to our play styles. So when I suggested we all start playing Arena to replace the tournaments, it worked because it meant we all played the same dumb decks we’d play in person with a few exceptions of having less than perfect mana bases.

But I would find myself grinding Arena everyday where my friends and locals were not. Even though I jumped into Arena at mid-March, I finished the Theros Beyond Death mastery at level 78 when Ikoria began to creep around the corner. I had just begun to get back into Magic when Fate Reforged hit and didn’t realize how much I love wedge color alignments over shards but boy did I love Abzan in Khans standard and now I was in love with Abzan again in Ikoria standard. Grinding the way I did meant I drafted most afternoons for the first month of Ikoria (and forced Temur every time) and started climbing the ranked ladder in the evenings. Ikoria would also mark the first time I spent money on Arena. I’m notoriously spend-thrift in video games and anything you can free-to-play I do religiously because you shouldn’t make a game grindable over the course of years if you give me that option. But drafting took gems and I really love drafting but most people at my LGS are too concerned about rares than learning to do it properly and a lot of younger players feel lost when I draft a zero rare deck and go 4-0 and collect my prizes. By the end of April, I would reach Platinum in constructed and Gold in limited. But now my LGS was far less inclined to play with me. I didn’t brag about any of my rankings but the skill disparity had begun to creep in as well as the difference in our collections. Having played so much Arena, I could see the tells the software gives away that paper Magic doesn’t. I learned to read when the game would hang up on the beginning of combat and end steps because they’re holding potential responses. I began to do the full control shortcut to bluff counter spells and removal. In paper Magic, if my opponent would sequence things wrong or tap their mana wrong, we’d make jokes and rewind it because it’s one of those human errors that we all make and redo it the right way.

But Arena was different; some learned the hard way to not trust the auto-tapper, some didn’t realize that the way they normally stack triggers in paper is backwards and too late to fix after a spell or ability resolved. And I couldn’t help them. And I let them make their mistakes because I can’t change Arena. If they use the auto-tapper and they realize that Arena doesn’t tap the Castle Vantress even though they couldn’t activate it anyway and they lose a dual source, I couldn’t help them. If they have the lethal Explosion in hand but forgot to hit Control in their second main so they can stack the Wilderness Reclamation triggers in their end step, I don’t concede out of pity.

In May, I try and keep the Magic going by suggesting that we shift the format to a draft limited but they’re unconvinced of the website that allows you to simulate an 8-person draft and then import the drafted card lists to Arena. Why? Because they don’t have the cards already and I’ve changed the dynamic. They know I’m much more skilled at Arena and Ikoria drafting. The news has also been reporting that the curve was flattening, and our state was lifting restrictions on gatherings. They want to play EDH and paper Magic, not this digital intangible game. I reluctantly agree but keep grinding on Arena anyway. My friends didn’t want to play Magic on Arena and I couldn’t understand why. I was getting burned out on drafting at this point and the drafts were harder to fire off a month and a half later, work was returning on a limited schedule where I was onsite 75% and virtual 25%, it really did seem like things were returning to normal.

In June I finish the Ikoria mastery and at this point my wife had begun to show more interest in playing on Arena and trying to get her account a little more stocked since our normal paper system is I aggregate everything we typically need and I make her desired deck and hand it off to her to wreck people on FNM but since I didn’t have to judge, I got to play and we couldn’t both play from my account at the same time. I casually start hers and I get the wild hair that maybe I should make a loaner account in the store’s name and if anyone says they don’t have the cards, they can borrow the store’s account for the tournament. I make the account but put the pipe dream on hold when Wizards announces that in-store play can resume with the Core 2021 prerelease. I could read between the lines and see that the curve was trending the wrong way and thought it was a bad idea but at my insistence, everyone would have to wear a mask at all times and hand sanitizer was available every 15 feet and the store had lots of space for players to spread out. The turnout was low which helped as well, and I had everyone who showed up at least aware that I was trying to keep the Discord going and that in case there’s another shutdown that there was another avenue for them.

Well, I got my wish because within a week of the launch of Core 2021, my state had regressed, and cases were exploding and gathering restrictions were sent back in place. Shortly after that, Wizards suspended in-store play again and with that I created the store’s Arena account. At the time, things were pretty good. The locals weren’t playing as much and my server was still fairly empty but most of the Magic Twitch community I interacted with had strongly adjusted to the new paradigm. EDH streaming was commonplace, I had my new Arena account to focus on building up as well as my own. Pro level events and Opens were being held on Arena and the expansion of Amonkhet Remastered gave me hope that Magic was on the mend. But I also think it was with Core 2021 that things started to slide into the negative for me. Grinding the second account was frustrating me a lot. The lack of human interaction was tilting me out for no reason. Some days the server would have me wait a whole minute (the horror?!) for a game and then my opponent would be the world’s slowest red player where everything seemed delayed. There would strings of games I would play where I couldn’t get a third land drop after a mull to 4 and other times where I’d flood out and would have won if it weren’t for generic whiny reason why everyone says they lose.

Maybe it was when I began to see that Arena is not Magic the Gathering as much as it is a video game that it began to really sour on me. For those of you who don’t play a lot of Arena and instead interact with humans over webcams is that Arena is designed for you to not play off beat home brews except in direct challenges with your friends. The game is meant for you to play the best combination of 75 cards and for you to help it machine learn through millions of matches what is and what is not the correct play pattern based on the available information you have. It wants you to play the very best decks in a format against the other best decks. I started to see this in Ikora standard when decks would scoop if you were on the play and went turn 2 Agonizing Remorse. Decks were and still are so linear that they can’t handle that kind of disruption or it’s a matter of the players know it’s faster to accumulate wins by scooping than grinding out a long game.

If you need evidence of whether or not this is true, you should play Arena now and see how often people scoop against the double Ruin Crab opener with a Fabled Passage back-to-back. Or if an opponent against your Lurrus Auras deck will time out when they know they can’t win. In paper Magic, when you drive 4 hours to a major venue, pay your entry fee, you never see your opponent rage scoop unless it’s Legacy and you know what your opponent’s on and you mull to zero so you can see what’s in their deck. You call a judge to your table if they start stalling. Nothing is more annoying that an opponent spamming “Good Game” at you through a match when it’s obvious that you’re not killing them that turn but they’re empty handed and have nothing relevant on board.

I’ll admit myself that what my wife calls “Wizard Chores” for the Daily quests, if I’m 1 red spell short of finishing a quest, I’ll log in for one more game and Boulder Dash my opponent’s creature or cast Shock to face and immediately scoop. Who is that helping? I’d spend the week at work in my down times thinking about what dumb cards I hadn’t played with from a set, start making a list, furiously find the cards on a Friday afternoon and grab dinner with the wife and then race to my LGS for FNM.  Magic used to be something I only got to do twice a week with people in a shared setting and we’d unroll our playmats, shuffle up our jank, and laugh and generally have a good time for three to four hours. With Magic at my fingertips, Arena is a distillation of efficiency at spell slinging combined with the minor rewards system we’ve come to recognize the free-to-play traps to “encourage” us to play different things. If I want to play 100 matches in a day, all I need to do is sit at my computer long enough. If I want to play my old jank on Arena, I can’t even count on the Casual play channel to help since it’s always filled with people with 55 of the 60 cards that make the best deck learning how to play before they commit the wild cards for the deck.

Zendikar Rising has been a pretty dark point for everyone on Arena I believe. It seems like a lifetime ago that Omnath was printed and that I had immediately cashed in four mythic rare wildcards for the deck I would get to play with on Arena for 2 weeks before Wizards realized their mistake. Honestly before I had started writing this in the week before Kaldheim will hit Arena, I forgot that Omnath was part of the most recent set as all I can remember Zendikar Rising giving us is the extremely irritating Ruin Crab and Soaring Thought Thief. The few locals I had left on my Discaord server when ZNR released had lost interest in Arena since they enjoyed the Ravnica standard that was rotating out and Pioneer was not yet available for Arena. I’ve encouraged nearly everyone I know from my LGS to buy webcams since October given that the current state of the COVID world is not likely to go away and the new culture and channels that have opened up in the world to fill the void of EDH has some level of benefit even when in-person play resumes. Not many people play and I’ll search for an occasional game on the official Discord when the craving strikes. Some of my friends have been taking advantage of the webcam world and started playing older formats with me over webcam such as Pioneer and Modern to rekindle their love for Magic and the hope that we can start playing tournaments over webcam. Finishing up the ZNR mastery passes on my two accounts and my wife’s account has been giving me a much-needed break from Arena and honestly, it’s probably done the most to lift my spirits.

I’ve been taking a lot more time to reflect on why I love Magic and I plan on doing in the future. The first thing I know I’m going to do and stick to is not get a Mastery Pass for mt LGS store’s account. They don’t pay for all the work I put into the one already grinding multiple accounts is not good for my mental well-being. The second thing I know I am going to do is relearn how to have fun in Magic again. Not really hinted at in this article so far is the fact I love the art in Magic and I’m often inspired by my own crazy mind to illustrate my own works or reimagine my favorite cards with my own art. Since the release of Rise of Skywalker, I had been working on a personal project of creating a second expansion to the largely underground Star Wars the Gathering card game and ended up making 200 unique, draftable cards. I wouldn’t call myself an artist because I’m still learning and I don’t necessarily aspire to an artist but I would love to improve my skills and one day make a piece that’s so good someone wants on a card. Over the last two years, I’ve been deeply jealous of how amazing and hard working the Magic cosplayers are and that I should put my art to good use and make my own cosplays. And then there’s the playing of Magic. I miss the Gathering part of Magic. So this brings us to the bedrock of this piece. I hope to continue this blog steadily as time moves forward. I’m rarely ever satisfied or have my attention on any one project for too long but 2021 is a new year. And I hope that the title is a hint to the future. Whatever it is; whether it’s deck construction, art alters, or Magic cosplay, story, general discussion, that’s what I’m here for. It’s the Thrill of what I might work on next and I promise because I’m terrible right now at doing so, I’ll be sure to take pictures and try and stream when I can to keep myself honest about the whole deal. I hope you’ll all join me or at least join the Discord to yell at me.

[stattic-writes]

Branch Evolution

https://statticscribbles.tumblr.com/post/639099629845233664/masterlist

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[thedeaditeslayer]

Running Time Restored Interview: 1997 Josh Becker and Bruce Campbell Indie Gets a New Life in 2K.

You can read the full interview on the upcoming release With Josh Becker, Bruce Campbell, and Don May Jr. from Diabolik Magazine below. 

In 1995 on New Year’s Eve, Josh Becker had an idea. Born out of a session pondering Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary, true crime classic, Rope, he decided that he was going to improve upon the master of suspense’s legendary concept of shooting a film in real time. A daunting task but Becker was up to the challenge.

What resulted was perhaps one of the most ambitious efforts to ever grace the silver screen, Running Time. This neo-noir thriller about a heist gone wrong and a small-time criminal who rekindles his love affair with his high-school sweetheart was a hidden gem that didn’t get the recognition that it deserved. Written expressly for Becker’s childhood friend and Super 8 cohort, Bruce Campbell, the pair were once again, doing gonzo-style filmmaking just like when they were growing up in Michigan with the likes of Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert.

Josh Becker was and is an adventurous soul who does things his way, just like the director gods of old. When I think of his work, the names of John Ford, William Wyler and John Huston readily spring to mind. There is something admirable about his driven determination that was the heart and soul of this black and white throwback to another era which is ultimately endearing. Yes, I have a special place in my heart for Running Time because it is honest and not filled with “tentpole” tendencies. At the core of it is the written word. The end result is one of the most overlooked masterpieces of both Becker’s and Campbell’s careers.

What is truly amazing is that this flick was shot in two weeks and that everyone went home early. It was like having a 9 to 5 job. No 18-hour-days, just fast, efficient, run and gun style filmmaking that resulted in a production that could stand toe to toe with noir classics from a bygone era like The Petrified Forest and Desperate Hours.

Prior to Running Time, Bruce was known predominantly for his work in the horror and science fiction genres which can sometimes be limiting for an actor. Becker gave him an incredible script to work with that really showcased his range as a thespian. Behind the smart-ass quips and bravado lies a talented individual who takes his craft seriously. He is capable of creating complex characters and he is most assuredly fit to be a romantic lead.

I had the chance to sit down with the major players in the restoration of Running Time (Josh Becker, Bruce Campbell, Don May, Jr. and Gerry Kissell) to reminisce about the journey of this film from its humble beginnings to preserving this indie classic for future generations.

The Director and His Muse

Diabolique: Bruce, I have to start off by telling you that Running Time is my favorite out of all of your films.  

Bruce Campbell: It’s a cool, little flick. Too bad it sort of escaped, it wasn’t released as the old joke goes.

Diabolique: What I like so much about it is the neo-noir aspect. It’s a throwback to the 40’s and 50’s. In Josh’s book, Rushes, he talks about how he convinced you to be in the film. You weren’t getting paid and you invested in it. What was his pitch, how did he sell the concept to you?

BC: The pitch was that it was NOT McHale’s Navy. I just spent 11 weeks in Mexico just sort of bullshitting our way through that film where we would make up our lines of dialogue because there was nothing written for us. In the script it would say things like, “McHale and his guys get off the boat,” “McHale and his men go to Cuba.” Which means they hadn’t thought anything up for you. I did it because I liked the show as a kid. It was a very popular thing; it was from Universal. It made sense at the time. It was just a case of when something is underwritten, the problem that it causes actors. I had just come off of that, and Running Time was very ambitious, low budget it was meant to be this conceit of being done in one shot so it was cinematic. So, I was like, okay, yeah. It was like the anti-studio movie, small crew, fast moving and yet no money. Basically, I invested the money that I was paid back into the movie in order for them to make it. It was definitely for a love of the movie type deal.

Josh Becker: I’ve known Bruce since we were twelve and I’d seen him in a number of plays. I knew that he had a much bigger range as an actor than he’d had a chance to show at that point. Plus, he’s a pleasure to work with. Once I pitched him the idea, he was all for it, partially because the long takes are a way for an actor to really show their ability.

Diabolique: Thinking about your filmography, Bruce, you haven’t played a traditional romantic lead. Do you see Running Time as a love story of sorts?

BC: What’s funny is Josh had Carl come back. In a proper film noir, he would have gone, you would have heard the tires squeal and she would be sitting there crying and the credits would roll and that would be it. It would be bleak, but Josh deep down is a sentimentalist and I think I am too. We had no issue with the happy ending. We wanted to make the audiences think for quite a long period of time that it’s going to be a sad ending. She packs her bag and then she unpacks it. The whole thing is quite an extended piece but I thought it was well worth playing just to kind of throw a little wrinkle in it. Maybe even in a criminal story you can have a happy ending.

Diabolique: In terms of the storyline, Josh, we all know that Rope was the blueprint for Running Time. You hadn’t made a film in 7 years. What was it about that production that captured your imagination besides the challenge of the “long take”?

JB: Part of my inspiration was simply getting another feature film made after seven years of working in television, which was never my goal.  But as I thought about Rope, I wondered why the continuous, real-time concept didn’t really have any impact on the story. Then it occurred to me that there was no time element involved.  Two young men—ostensibly Leopold and Loeb—have killed another young man for the fun of it, put the body in a chest, then invited people over for a party, including a cop. Well, if the chest was spring loaded and had a timer on it so that at some point it would pop open and reveal the corpse, that would be a time element. So, I thought, how do you use the real time technique and add a ticking clock? The first story that came to mind was a heist which generally has a time element—we’ve got to get the money and get out of here before we’re caught.

Diabolique: Running Time was shot in sequence like a play. Did it pose any challenges for you as an actor?

BC: I liked what Josh was trying to do. These long uninterrupted takes from an actor’s point of view, you know stuff can get really choppy these days. My complaint from Burn Notice is they wouldn’t let a full sentence stay on camera; they would have to cut away to somebody else. It felt like they had to keep cutting, cutting and cutting. This movie was no cutting for like ten minutes at a time. It’s great from an actor’s perspective because you can feel the juices flowing. It’s like a play. You can work on the pacing; you can have something build over a period of time and minutes to play out in literally real time. It’s a real time crime drama. I liked it conceptually and it was challenging. There was a fair amount of dialogue because my guy, Carl is calling the shots. I thought it was a good premise. Guy gets out of prison turns right around and robs the prison because he knows how the prison laundry system works. I thought that was pretty sound. I am always sympathetic for the low budget independent movie. I always will be.

Diabolique: Were there any other films that influenced you and your writing partner, Peter Choi? The entire concept is very noir and the desperate situation that Carl finds himself in is reminiscent of any number of films from the 1940s.

JB: My main inspiration was Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman, an overlooked movie from 1978. And though I didn’t think of it at the time, several folks brought up Joseph Lewis’s Gun Crazy after it came out, and I do see that. The film has one long take in it during a bank robbery, and even though the camera stays in the backseat of a car, it has that same feeling of a real time event.

Diabolique: I know you are a fan of classic movies, Bruce and in a sense Running Time reminds me of Desperate Hours or The Petrified Forest especially when the robbery is botched and the situation is escalating in the enclosed office. Did you find any inspiration from the noir genre for your portrayal of Carl?

BC: No, but the classic tough guys were always awesome. We loved them all, Bogart and Robert Mitchum…the fact that Josh shot the film in black and white was perfect. Because it really helped lend itself to a look of that time period when Jack Palance was a leading man.

Diabolique: In your book Rushes, you talked about your decision to shoot in 16 mm Kodak ASA 64 black and white stock. You get sharper images due to the finer grain of the film, but did that pose any problems in terms of showcasing your work at that time since most people weren’t shooting in black and white?

JB:  I didn’t think of it regarding showcasing my work. I thought it was appropriate for the subject matter and that it would be visually striking.  Also, moving the camera from inside to outside in color posed the problem of adding or removing filters which would not be an issue with black and white.

Diabolique: You shot over a period of 10 days which was unheard of even back in the 90’s. How were you able to keep things moving along?

JB: It was based on pre-planning. I knew exactly what I wanted. We rehearsed the film and the actors were all very comfortable with the dialogue. Then it was just an issue of getting the complicated camera moves in regard to the actor’s blocking to work right, and that didn’t turn out to be all that difficult.

Diabolique: As an actor, did you enjoy working on an accelerated timetable?

BC: It was exciting to do and so different. The toughest thing was the technical demands. It wasn’t like there were explosions and stuff like that. But in order to do blocking inside of an apartment, the camera is moving in circles, well, the crew had to move every object behind the camera before it got there and then had to put it back before the camera saw it again. So, there was a lot of voodoo, a lot of magic. We would rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and we could never get it right. Finally, we were like fuck it. Let’s just start shooting because everyone gets a little more alert when you shoot. That did it. That allowed us to conquer the impossible. After 3 or 4 takes if we got it, we were done even if it was 10:30 in the morning. I don’t think we spent more than two thirds of a day getting that particular shot. The end result is cool. I’ve seen the cleaned-up version without all the scratches and the dust marks. You can’t even tell what year it is. It almost seems like its videotape transferred like those teledramas of the 60’s that were done on TV. There were moments in the film that weren’t perfect, and that’s okay.

Diabolique: When I revisited Running Time recently, I was impressed with how well it holds up because some efforts don’t. With the 2K restoration, Bruce, this will give your fans a chance to see it. For some, it might be their first time. Do you have a scene that you are particularly fond of?

BC: There’s some scenes that are fun to do. After I get shot, I am in Janie’s apartment and she’s trying to put me together, that fainting on the toilet while she’s trying to patch me together it felt kind of real, playing shot and being delirious. Stuff like that. Just fun to be able to take the moment to do it.

Diabolique: Josh, do you feel shooting in black and white made the 2K restoration more challenging?

JB:  Slow speed black and white film stock has a lot of silver in it which creates an inordinate amount of static electricity. When I did the initial film transfer back in 1997, the negative kept getting covered with dust, causing us to have to stop and clean the film every 30-60 minutes. Since the transfer was $375 an hour—in 1997 dollars—I could only stop so many times before it became financially prohibitive.  Dust on a black and white negative shows up as white dots. Using the newest technology, Don May was able to remove all of the dust digitally. Therefore, the film has never looked as good as it does now.

Diabolique: What excites you the most about Running Time getting restored, Bruce?

BC: I am always happy when something gets re-released which means in this case, it gets preserved. It will look fantastic in 2K. That’s why with all these reissues fans are like, “Why should we care?” Like well, if you care about preservation, this means it will be the latest version of a movie that is fairly obscure. Sometimes a movie can die on the vine because no one will pay the money to keep it current. Now, we can show the sucker, hopefully, anywhere.

Diabolique: Josh, do you have any plans to showcase Running Time once the restoration is completed? This is a great film that fans should definitely see.

JB: We have no plans at the moment, but then the film isn’t out yet. When it’s done, we’ll see what happens.

Breathing New Life into Running Time: The Art of Restoration

Don May, Jr. along with Jerry Chandler and Charles Fiedler created Synapse Films in 1997. Known for their work in preserving unique genre classics, May had previously collaborated with Josh Becker when his company restored the director’s 1985 production, Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except.

Gerry Kissell was the official artist on Running Time and will be reprising his role for the 2K restoration. He has been friends with Josh since the Freaky Film Festival where he and Bruce premiered the film on the University of Illinois campus.

Both gentlemen were kind enough to take time out of their busy schedules to talk to us.

Diabolique: Were you able to obtain the original negative for Running Time?

Don May, Jr: Yes, thankfully. Josh Becker is a true movie fan and loves the filmmaking process, so we were fortunate to work with him. He kept everything stored properly in a climate-controlled vault, as a man who cares about his movies should.

Diabolique: Can you talk about the scanning process for 2K?

DMJ: The 16mm negative was separated into A/B rolls, so we had to scan a lot of reels separately at Prasad in Burbank, CA. Luckily, because of the actual nature of the “one-take” aesthetic Josh utilized, there were only a total of about 30 cuts in the entire film… hidden in editing, of course. So, we basically scanned the 30 separate shots, and then assembled them digitally using DaVinci Resolve. We had to be VERY careful the way we put the 30 cuts back together, making sure the shots were frame accurate and of the proper length. Unlike a film that has a conformed negative separated into 10- or 20-minute reels, Running Time was all in separate pieces, with each shot edited on separate reels. It was a challenge, but we were able to use a previous master as a reference and most of it went together without a hitch. Being shot in B&W also helped in color correction to hide the edits properly to make the real-time aspect as seamless as possible. Once the film was properly assembled, we were able to ship everything off to India for restoration. Because Josh had everything stored properly for decades, the negative itself was fairly free of a lot of dirt and scratches, but we did carefully sonically clean all the pieces before scanning commenced.

Diabolique: How long does it take the digital artists to fix debris or scratches on the original negatives?

DMJ: There’s a lot of data wrangling involved. Copying data for safety. Making backups, etc. But we have a great working relationship with Prasad. They have worked on such classics as Lawrence of Arabia, How the West Was Won, A Fistful of Dollars, Gandhi, The Red Shoes, etc. They do the lion’s share of my output, and I put a lot of trust in them. They’ve never failed me. We do ship the film scans to India and that takes time. I think Running Time took about 4-5 months. I let them take their time, though, because I don’t want to have to keep sending things back for fixes. With Running Time, they did an excellent job, right from my first restoration test reels. But, again, Josh had taken very good care of his materials, so it wasn’t much of a challenge.

Diabolique: Gerry, what artwork did you originally provide for Running Time and what can we expect from you for the 2K restoration?

Gerry Kissell: I did promotional art that ended up on tee-shirts. It included the shot of the three main characters, which I called Tres Hombres, on one, Jeremy Roberts aiming the pistol at the camera on another, and the last, which you’ve seen of Bruce’s mug all heroic and chinny. All of the art was done on Bristol cold press illustration board. The new painting for the Synapse release is me, 20+ years later, a tad bit better at drawing and painting, lol.

Diabolique: Besides the idea of preserving Running Time, Don, what attracted you to the project?

DMJ: We had worked previously with Josh on Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except, and we had a lot of fun with that one. I like working with Josh. He’s a great guy, and I love that he’s so passionate about film. He loves movies, and he loves MAKING movies. It’s so great to see people like Josh doing things like Running Time, back when using computers to do a “one take” approach was non-existent. You see things today like the film 1917, which is a fine film in its own right, but they cheated a lot of its “one take” aspect using computers. Josh did Running Time, but used his brain, and actual organic film splicing and editing to achieve the same result. He’s smart, funny, talented and I love working with people like him. It also doesn’t hurt that Running Time stars Bruce Campbell, so… yeah… of course, we jumped at the chance to do it.

Diabolique: When can fans expect to see the Running Time 2K restoration?

DMJ: I would imagine late summer/early fall 2020. We’re wrapping up extras and artwork now.

[thecloserkin]

book review: C.J. Hauser, Family of Origin (2019)

Genre: the most literary of fiction

Is it the main pairing: yes

Is it canon: yes

Is it explicit: kinda

Is it endgame: no

Is it shippable: if you’re into unhealthy ships

Bottom line: i hate literary fiction. ok i don’t hate fiction obviously i just hate when it tries to be too literary?? u feel me fam

Two estranged half-siblings spend a week tying up loose ends on the remote island where their father died (it is unclear if he committed suicide). The “loose ends” are that they had sex once, as teenagers, and now it’s weird. The island is populated by cultists and nut jobs who are convinced it’s the end of days and evolution is going in reverse. I have… many equivocal feelings about this book. On the one hand there are so many lines that just peel me like an orange, lines like “There was nothing more humiliating to Elsa than her own desires” or “Elsa was never surprised when someone killed himself. She was only surprised by her own animal perseverance day after day.” Plus I think this book really gets the dynamic where they’re constantly needling each other and every interaction is doused in fifteen gallons of repressed attraction. I think this is a novel that accomplished everything it set out to do with assurance and aplomb; I’m just fundamentally uninterested in what it’s trying to do. It’s about damaged people who learn to heal but the problem is the healing is much less engaging than the hurting.

Here’s the difference between speculative fiction and literary fiction: SF/F presumes zombies are literal zombies. Instead of assuming the zombies metaphorically represent something abstract, you just take them at face value ok? You spot a time machine or a vampire, you take it at face value and you add additional layers of meaning later. Which puts me in a pickle because Family of Origin is decidedly not a genre book, so what am I supposed to think about Famous Bigshot Biologist Ian, Elsa and Nolan’s dad, and his reasons for relocating to this island? There’s no cell phone service; it is quite literally removed from civilization. When I said nut jobs I mean it’s populated by secessionists, survivalists, doomsday preppers, anti-establishment types of all stripes. And they have some kooky theories about ducks. Which Ian apparently subscribed to. If this was SF/F I would just go along with it because maybe Elsa and Nolan, having arrived on the island, will finish Ian’s life’s work and find this elusive duck and prove Charles Darwin wrong haha??? But it’s fucking literary fiction which means I have to look for SYMBOLISM gahhh kill me now.

C.J. Hauser knows what she’s doing. Her bio says she’s a creative writing instructor and you can see why. It sucks that “what she’s doing” only glancingly aligns with “what I want her to do,” but c’est la vie. I was immediately taken with her choice of island setting (remote islands breed intimacy!) and the familiar configuration of type-A older sister paired with a younger brother who begs for a scrap of notice or attention. From the get-go Elsa’s priority is control. Nolan’s is acceptance. This quote sums it up pretty handily:

The problem was that Nolan wanted answers, and Elsa wasn’t sure what she would do with answers if she found them.

Like, I personally identify more with Nolan than with Elsa, because there’s this sense of learned futility that I find kind of charming in him but everyone finds annoying af in me:

Nolan wished he could return to a time before anyone had any expectations for him.

Elsa, otoh. Here is Elsa thinking about her ex, a relationship she clung to well past the expiration date merely because he loved her more than she loved him back, and she wasn’t willing to give up that bargaining position:

As long as his side of their love had more ballast to it, she felt in control and like he would not leave. Everyone left Elsa, so she had to be sure.

Nolan and Elsa are certified disasters. They’re both so burnt-out, and twisted up inside with shame and guilt and impossible desires, and the island is the ideal backdrop for them to resolve their issues:

There was so much that was not allowed that the island seemed willing to permit. Things underwater. Things offshore.

That night, they made no pretenses about the sleeping bag and slept cupped like shells in their father’s bed.

Jesus Joseph and Mary this woman can write. I’ve even seen lines from this novel quoted in those tumblr compilation poetry posts.

Anyway Elsa and Nolan’s dynamic is they do not get along and they’ve never gotten along. It starts with Elsa’s resentment at being displaced by a new sibling, which was compounded by Elsa’s mom being divorced and replaced by Nolan’s mom. These kids have spent all their lives probing at each other’s weaknesses and I am reminded of a very apt line from a book that has absolutely jack shit to do with incest: “When siblings spar, the true cause is proximity.” This seems to apply to Elsa and Nolan’s situation more potently than most.

Will you just LOOK at this god-tier sparring though:

Nolan touched a drop of rain that hung by her ear, letting it spill onto his fingers. Elsa smacked his hand.

Don’t— Elsa began, but Nolan, dirty water dripping from his fingers, grabbed Elsa around the ankles and shook her, groaning, Graaghh! like some B-movie Swamp Thing from the deep, ready to pull Elsa into the pool. Elsa considered Nolan’s hands around her ankles.

It’s one part goofing off, one part competitive banter, and one part violent sexual tension . Elsa takes meticulous mental inventory of every instance of skin-to-skin contact and I’m like—girl you know it only means something if you let it? Who the hell pays that much attention every time their brother accidentally brushes shoulders with them?!

There was a knot between Elsa’s shoulders that twisted taut when she saw him.

Nolan is shiftless and aimless, doesn’t even have the balls to break up with his girlfriend, his internal monologue is a constant refrain of “Nolan wished there was some more-adult adult whose job this could be.” Child you are TWENTY-EIGHT years old and need to start owning your choices. I think this hypothesis that’s sorta floated in an early Elsa POV is pretty conclusively disproved in the course of the novel:

But people didn’t change. They just ran away from everyone who knew them too well so they could start over and do a better job of obscuring the worst parts of themselves.

Because they do change, both of them change and mend their ways and they become a family again and ok here’s where I have a problem with C.J. Hauser: Her idea is that you have to choose—Nolan is either Elsa’s brother or her lover:

And he understood then that he could have kept Elsa as a sister or slept with her. It was a choice, and what he’d just done was to have given her up.

It seems her whole motivation for seducing him was as a big fuck-you to their father. I’m not saying she was not attracted to him I’m saying her field of vision is dominated by Ian:

Everyone here is insane, Elsa said.

They have their reasons, said Nolan.

They have stories, not reasons.

What if you’re my story? What if the story of why I’m on this island is you?

What’s my story?

Your story is Dad.

Go to sleep.

Tell me a story.

Which is really sweet and I am a fiend for these callbacks that deliberately echo the older sibling interacting with the younger one as a baby, but Ian’s stature is such that he takes over everything?? We find out that he wasn’t that great of a scientist. That he wasn’t a great dad was clear from the start.

So the really interesting thing from a craft perspective is the climax of this book occurs in the middle of it instead of at the end. The only other novel I can think of that does this is Cloud Atlas but that has a very unique structure. The film The Talented Mr. Ripley also kind of does this?

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

It’s revealed that Elsa isn’t Ian’s biological child. Her mom had an affair and when Ian found out he divorced her and married Nolan’s mom. When Elsa learnt the truth, she took the radical step of sleeping with Nolan to prove a point, I guess? To wit: If she wasn’t Ian’s daughter then it wasn’t actually incest. If Ian was troubled then it must be because she was his daughter:

But you are this kid, her mother said. You’re so totally his kid that you think biology is the only way you can be his kid.

I’ll admit that the “they’re not related” reveal does in this instance actually serve a purpose, unlike in some other books (yup this is a Wasteland callout post). And it ties into the theme of biology, and the stupid elusive ducks that supposedly inhabit this godforsaken island:

”We’re no longer good at adapting to things in the natural world because it’s too hard to tell which parts are real anymore so we don’t know what to adapt to.”

So there you have it. Family of Origin is not a book that spoke to my soul but it is a devastatingly exquisite book, and it has a number of really shippable scenes even if the relationship taken as a whole is not one I was rooting for. Here’s Nolan trying to get laid at college:

He didn’t know what to do because there had only ever been Elsa that one time before and Elsa had known what to do.

And then he has a breakdown so bad that he calls Elsa??? For emotional support??? Even though she’s at least 50% of the reason he’s so broken. When Elsa shows up she says ”I drove over two goddamn hours so you could yell at me in person” lolololol every single line of dialogue is so on-point. Oh oh and Elsa biting his ribs and his neck while they’re lying half-naked in bed is another pearl of a scene.

I saved so many quotes from this book and half of them have nothing to do with incest but they’re SENSATIONAL so I’m going to end this review with an assortment of quotes:

that she was afraid to ask for small things like this because the need in them did not seem big enough to draw attention. That she was afraid her small needs would go unnoticed, and so she made plays at bigger ones instead.

Whatever inner thing guided normal people in their choices … Elsa’s was broken. Nolan had been her first wrong choice, years ago, and as much as she’d have liked to pretend she was different now, that it had been a stupid teenage mistake, there was too much other wrongness that came after. Dozens of dubious choices that all seemed to bloom outward from that first moment.

But no, there was a difference between realizing how wrongly he’d been made and the moment the wrongness actually happened.

Because it wasn’t perfect. Because she couldn’t tell the difference between unconditional and infallible.

Maybe the sooner Elsa stopped trying to hunt down some class of people who had all the answers—adults, scientists, Mars missions, Ian—the sooner she could stop the cycle of trying to win. Could look around and decide what kind of game might actually be worth playing.

[illbefinealonereads]

Blog tour day! Keep scrolling to learn more about How to Build a Heart by Maria Padian, and read my spoiler free review.

HOW TO BUILD A HEART by Maria Padian Algonquin Young Readers Ages 12-18 ISBN: 9781616208493 On sale: January 28, 2020 256 pages $25.95

All sixteen-year-old Izzy Crawford wants is to feel like she really belongs somewhere. Her father, a Marine, died in Iraq six years ago, and Izzy’s moved to a new town nearly every year since, far from the help of her extended family in North Carolina and Puerto Rico. When Izzy’s hardworking mom moves their small family to Virginia, all her dreams start clicking into place. She likes her new school—even if Izzy is careful to keep her scholarship-student status hidden from her well-to-do classmates and her new athletic and popular boyfriend. And best of all: Izzy’s family has been selected by Habitat for Humanity to build and move into a brand-new house. Izzy is this close to the community and permanence she’s been searching for, until all the secret pieces of her life begin to collide. 

“Two years ago my mother, who is Latina, attended a Habitat for Humanity fundraising luncheon,” says Maria Padian, freelance writer, essayist, and author of the young adult novels Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress, Jersey Tomatoes Are the Best, Out of Nowhere, and Wrecked. “She and my father, a blond Irish guy, were among the donors, and my mother was unnerved to see the Habitat family, who was of Mexican origin, marched up on a stage for all the nice, wealthy white people to applaud—especially the teenage daughter, who looked like she wanted to disappear. My mother completely empathized with the awkward teen, her teen-angst exacerbated no doubt by her feelings of ‘otherness’ in that company. I realized right then that I needed to write that kid’s story. Unlike my mother, whose first language is Spanish, I barely speak a word, and I didn’t grow up identifying as any sort of racial/ethnic/cultural minority. Writing HOW TO BUILD A HEART has been a way for me to explore my own questions about identity, as well as to step into my mother’s skin. I’ve been able to write these characters because this is my family, from my Spanish mother to my Irish father to my North Carolinian husband. This book is my love letter to all of them and our crazy quilt of a family.”

Advance Praise for How To Build A Heart

“A Pretty In Pink story about grief, family, class, and first love.”

—Bustle

“Padian masterfully portrays the internal struggles Izzy goes through in her Catholic faith… An absolutely enthralling depiction of family and self-discovery.”

—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“Padian takes a familiar theme—a girl hiding her background from others—and makes it fresh with her protagonist, Izzy Crawford… The characters around her are well-defined and support Izzy and the plot well. Throughout the novel, Izzy's strength, candor, and humanity shine through.”

—Booklist

“Padian creates a world that the reader can easily dive into. Anyone who’s ever been a self-conscious teen will see themselves in Izzy.”

—Book Riot

“Padian creates a compelling world with relatable characters and deals with serious issues without feeling heavy-handed…An excellent classroom or book discussion starter. Hand this to readers who are ready to tackle these issues with a lighter touch.”

—School Library Journal (Starred Review)

Praise for Maria Padian’s Wrecked

“Revelatory, deeply real, and urgently important.”

—Nova Ren Suma, author of The Walls Around Us

“Outstanding, powerful, and important…This is hands down, one of the best sexual assault reads in YA.”

—Book Riot

“Powerful, suspenseful and illuminating… With intriguing, flawed characters and a gripping storyline, Wrecked by Maria Padian offers readers a view of a college sexual assault case that is as engrossing as it is important.”

—Shelf Awareness for Readers (Starred Review)

“Padian’s latest boasts a swift, excellently crafted plot, exceedingly readable prose, and painfully relatable characters.”

—Booklist (Starred Review)

“In the face of recent college rape trials, readers will be rapt and emotionally spent by the end. An important, devastating new perspective on an all-too-timely subject.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Padian’s characters come beautifully to life in this enthralling and powerful novel. They allow us to step into their shoes and wonder how we would act, what side we would choose and if right and wrong can be defined as sharply as the world wants them to be.”

—The Middlebury Campus (Middlebury College, VT)

“This is an important and, unfortunately, timely novel…This isn’t just a book that all young men and women should read; it’s gripping and human enough that many will want to. Shelve and display alongside Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Courtney Summers’s All the Rage.”

—School Library Journal

“Padian excels at showing the messy aftermath of a sexual crime in a college community…This is a novel about truth and the damage done—to a community, to a person, and to relationships—when hard truths are hidden.”

—Portland Press Herald

“A fast-paced read…With down-to-earth characters and a relatable setting, Wrecked hits close to home.”

—The Bowdoin Orient (Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME)

About the Author

Maria Padian has a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College and a master’s degree from the University of Virginia. She is a freelance writer, essayist, and author of young adult novels, including Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress, Jersey Tomatoes Are the Best, and Out of Nowhere. Maria lives with her family in Brunswick, Maine. Visit her online at mariapadian.com and find her on Twitter: @mpadian.

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary

Rating: 4/5 stars

Review: How to Build a Heart is an absolutely beautiful story about finding your place. The writing seemed so sincere, and it flowed really well. I really enjoyed how it was paced, it kept the story entertaining and dynamic. The dialogue was amazingly written as well, it had really good back and forth between the characters and it wasn’t dull as it sometimes can be. On the subject of the characters, they were well-developed and brought to the page in such a convincing fashion. They were really easy to connect to, especially Izzy. Feeling like an outsider is a common thing teenage girls deal with, and I feel like that was exactly why she resonated with me. She brought me right back to my high school days. All in all, How to Build a Heart is wonderful read that had me hooked from the beginning. I recommend it.

[tmiquotepage]

I REALLY Need Advice

(LONG post, but I appreciate any feedback you guys can offer me here!)

I currently work as a babysitter for three wonderful children for the summer. They are 7, 10, and 13. I used to watch them before school during the school year, and I watched them for Spring Break as well. The parents got a divorce not long after I started working for them, and so the kids travel back and forth between two apartments five minutes apart. That's the gist of the background.

Now, normally, my fee for babysitting, especially for 3 kids, is $10/hr. The hours I agreed to at the beginning of the summer were 6 am until 3 pm. (I also live 30 minutes away, but my hour of commuting and my gas were never on the table for reimbursement.) Well, the mom asked me on Spring Break if, since I would be watching the kids for 8 weeks, we could do $300 a week, as $450 would get "quite expensive after 8 weeks" (like, yeah. Individualized care for kids is expensive. If you want cheaper, put em in a camp or daycare. Jesus.). I got her to raise that amount to $350, because $300 for 45 hours a week is highway robbery and less than minimum wage. I wouldn’t be able to afford my car and the gas to move this summer. Okay. That was settled.

Summer time rolls around and, at the end of the school year, the mom gets a new boyfriend, who immediately moves in with her. We'll talk about this dude later, because WHEW. Anyway, despite the fact that this dude is constantly hungover and/or day drinking and/or sleeping, the mom decides he is an adequate babysitter for the kids a few days a week. So, my schedule becomes completely confusing (as in, the mom will literally wait until 10 pm the night before to tell me whether or not she needs me the next day, whether she wants me to come in late, etc.). Keep in mind, even though we said "$350 a week," I am really getting paid $70/day. Which is the same thing. Unless you get told at last minute that you aren't needed for the three days of the week the mom has the kids with her boyfriend, in which case, it's only $140. So, I am already having issues with how much I am getting paid BEFORE I get into the shit show that is the family dynamic I have to work with.

Now, let's talk about the family. I'll obviously give codenames, not real names, because I'm not a monster. We'll start with the parents, Popeye (Dad) and Diva (Mom).

Popeye is a good dad. Works hard, doesn't make a ton of money, but always spends what he has on his kids. His apartment has more kids toys than signs of being a bachelor pad. He works hard, hasn't seen anyone since the divorce. His primary focus has ALWAYS been his kids. He cooks dinner for them almost every night (eating out is MAD rare. He's a really good cook.) He is ex-Navy, so he can be a bit strict. He doesn't accept mouthing off or being rude, but he also isn't mean. I have never seen him yell at his children or get angry. He is completely in control of his emotions around them. He's not a huge hardass about censoring his kids either. He'll let them listen to explicit rap music, play war video games with the kids. He's careful, but not overprotective. He is a balanced, comfortable, imperfect but loving parent

And then there's Diva™️. Diva is an Australian transplant who has a master's degree in the art of giving facials. She is all about pristine living, Michael Kors jackets, and acting way more rich and perfect than she is (though she has a LOT more money than Popeye). Acts like she is God's gift to all mankind. She has a boyfriend, who we will call JT, that she puts above all else - including her 3 children. Dinner at her house is almost always take out because, as her 10 year old tells me, she knows how to cook, but badly, and she's just too lazy to do it. She runs her own business, is constantly looking for groupons for the kids to use. Or rather, looks for cheap things "kids their age" would like. I am convinced she knows nothing about her children's likes and dislikes. Their rooms are her house are sterile and clean and don't have much feeling. Whenever things are out of place, she makes them clean it up and chastises them because "they are old enough to know better." She acts the part of the nurturing, caring, all-natural mother, but her eyes and words are always cool and sharp as a blade. She, the small woman I could probably break like a toothpick, scares me more than the buff retired navy father or the ex-con she has living with her and her children. I get the feeling, from the way the kids talk about her, that they have the same fears as I do.

As a tack on the end of the adult descriptions, allow me to tell you the bit I know about JT, the mom's boyfriend. He is significantly younger than her, halfway between the ages of her and her 13 year old daughter. He is a hot head. No job. Sleeps most of the day. Often leave the apartment reeking of booze. Often hungover. Has been in jail before, though I am unsure as to what he was arrested for. From what the kids said, I believe it was some sort of assault, burglary, or armed robbery. He occasionally cooks the meals at the house, which means the kids are at least getting a little bit of non-fast-food when they stay there (or, as the mom puts it, when they “visit.” They apparently don't “live” there. They visit, like you might visit a grandparent.). He has a daughter that is 10 years old, who also lives with him at Diva's house when she isn't with her mom. JT is confrontational with Diva's 10 year old boy, which I'll talk about later. I never feel comfortable when he is around, because he seems misogynistic (he called his daughter a ho for wearing yoga pants out to play) and always looks like he's ready to start a fight. Even though he and the mom are just dating, he already acts like a stepdad to Diva's kid, and he is NOT the good kind. When the kids do something he doesn't like, he will call Diva and tell her to chastise and punish the children. Occasionally, he even gives them punishments like grounding them for three weeks, even though he has ZERO authority to do so. Diva always takes his side in arguments.

On to the kids. Diva and Popeye have three: Uni (13), Pathfinder (10), and Sharknado (7). JT has one daughter, Mellie (10).

Uni is the most mature of the kids. She is a very talented artist who has been dealing really well with the divorce, as she surrounds herself with friends, a positive attitude, and creative outlets, like skateboarding and drawing. She cooks for herself often, and easily adapts to whichever situation she is in. It rarely ever feels like a chore to watch her when we go somewhere. She helps with the boys when I am swamped, occasionally, and knows how to calm the youngest's tantrums. The only real issue I have with her is when she and the middle child get in arguments and she tried to mother him and chastise him. It doesn't go well.

Next up, we have Pathfinder. Pathfinder is a 10 year old boy, the middle child. He plays video games very well, and has a soft heart which he will show when you prove he can trust you. He is, by far, the best dancer and beat spitter in the whole family, and he is proud of the fact. Pathfinder has a few behavioral issues where he will lie, and push boundaries every once in a while. He gets heated when playing video games, and often plays way too roughly and/or doesn't share with his little brother. Pathfinder, however, I understand more than I think I used to. He is a middle child with a sick younger brother and an older sister who wants nothing to do with him. He gets bullied at school and doesn’t make friends easily. He is starting to show early signs of major depression. Perhaps most importantly, Pathfinder is not taking the divorce well. More specifically, he clashes like hell with Diva's boyfriend. JT often picks fights with him and gets in his face. JT constantly feels the need to assert authority over Pathfinder and intimidate him. Pathfinder has shared with me that he never feels comfortable staying with JT. He begs me to take him to his dad's, to get him out of the apartment whenever possible. A few weeks ago, he stood up for himself to the boyfriend. JT gog in his face and yelled at him, then grounded him off all electronics (which, let's be honest, was because he wanted to play Pathfinder's Xbox at Diva's apartment without Pathfinder telling him no, because he's the one that got it for his birthday). When Pathfinder told his dad that he didn't want to go to his mom's anymore, the mother called the kid while we were at the store getting supplies for a craft project to tell him he was grounded for longer and that she was now going to shave his hair that he's been growing out for two years because he isn't respecting her boyfriend. She told me he wasn't allowed to even do our craft or watch TV. He could “sit on the couch and twiddle his thumbs" all day. (I eventually said fuck it and let him do whatever he wanted because we were at Popeye's place, and I could see that this kid was positively distraught.) He is STILL grounded, 3 weeks later. Yesterday, JT came out of his bedroom while the kids were talking, got in Pathfinder's face and started calling him gay because his shorts were sagging a bit. I took Pathfinder to Popeye's because he was shaken at the altercation, and told his mom what happened. Her ONLY response was “[Pathfinder]’s main problem is that he can't take direction or obey adults, and he needs to work on that.” What's worse about this situation is this kid has since told me (since he knows I am gay and proud and accepting) that he feels like he might be bisexual. He doesn't feel like he’d be safe if his mom and JT found out he is interested in a boy in his class. Pathfinder has openly stated that he hates his life, dreads staying at his mom's place, feels completely alone, thinks no one loves him. He barely calls her “mom" anymore. He has said that, if she goes through with shaving his head, he will never call her “mom” again, and will basically disown her as his mother. Keep in mind with all this shit that this child is 10. Ten years old and already a god damned nearly suicide risk, judging by his words and behavior lately. I had a meltdown yesterday when I realized this much because, unless this kid get serious help, he could very easily be just another name on the news in the coming years, and that breaks my heart.

Finally, we have the youngest child of Popeye and Diva, Sharknado. Sharknado is seven. Sharknado is a total trainwreck in the behavioral department. This kid has an adrenal insufficiency that means he is reliant on a steroid the way a diabetic is reliant on insulin. He is a bit more prone to disease than other kids. As a result, the mother babies the ever-loving shit out of him. She lets him get away with absolutely everything, and blames Pathfinder if they are ever in an argument. Tells Pathfinder he has to be gentle with his little brother. As a result of this parenting, Sharknado is a MAJOR tantrum thrower, even at age seven. If we are not playing the game he wants to play, the screaming and stomping starts. If he is losing, the screaming and stomping starts. If we are not actively paying attention to him, he will scream and make a spectacle of himself. Where the mother loves seeing that Pathfinder has an issue taking direction from adults, she is blind to the fact that her youngest is exponentially worse. When we go to the store, he runs off. When we go out to do something, he is instantly bored. When I tell him not to touch things in the store, he thinks it is funny to grab it an run away from me. If he is in any way unhappy, he will drop onto the floor and start screaming. Even in public (bowling alley, the zoo). Rules just do not apply to him, and he is positively dumbfounded when you try to correct this behavior through punishment (like taking away a toy, or banning video games for the day). We played the quiet game one day where all winner would get a dollar when we got back (because I had a headache and it was an hour drive and they just kept arguing). He talked the entire ride home, and the others didn't. They got a dollar each, he didn't. He pitched the biggest fit, pounding on the floor screaming, hiding under the bed, saying he wished he was dead because I was being so mean to him. He is always yelling about “fairness" when you tell him “no.” I don't think he actually knows what the word means. Sharknado is a nightmare who never listens and screams his head off on a daily basis, louder when I tell him to stop. And yet the mom has never threatened to chop his locks off. He is her perfect angel.

Lastly, I'll introduce you to Mellie, JT's daughter. She is 10. She is kind and generally respectful, which I assume comes from her mother's side. She is a daddy's girl, however, and so takes on her father's qualities when it comes to his treatment of Diva's kids. She's best friends with Uni, which is great, because Uni needed a girl friend to hang out with during the summer. She let’s Sharknado win in games and babies him. And, of course, she constantly belittles and picks fights with Pathfinder. This week was the first week I was babysitting her as well, so I don’t know much more than that.

So here's my main problem (yeah, all the above was essentially preface. That's the stuff I am USED to putting up with for barely minimum wage). This week, I watched the kids at Popeye's apartment Monday and Friday, with the rest of the days at Diva's. JT was at Diva's, but he is unable to travel, I guess, and two of the kids had dentist appointments two of the days. So, I went. At Diva's request, I came in later at 10 am on Tuesday and Wednesday, then 7:30 am in Thursday. On Tuesday, the kids were having a pillow fight in the apartment at, like, 1 pm, which apparently woke JT up, so he came lumbering out of the bedroom, snatched up the Xbox controller Pathfinder was using to find a YouTube video, and yelled at everyone – Mellie included – to get dressed and go play outside. I was then (without ever being asked) babysitting a fourth child outside with my three. We ended up going to the pool all three days, too, by the way. Three days with 4 kids in a pool. I stayed an hour late the first day, and an hour and a half late yesterday, too, because I came in late. I drove the kids to their appointments, and also made 4 different trips to and from Popeye's apartment to retrieve things for the children, and I drove the girls around to gather ingredients for their bake sale. Keep in kind, it was nearly 50 miles just with the kids in my car (not counting my commute or anything) that I was not getting reimbursed for. I also went and spent $60 on pool toys for the kids (including Mellie), because I love them and want them to have a great time. I spent personal money, knowing I wouldn't get reimbursed. But here's the kicker. When I contacted Diva to ask about adjusted payment to include the fourth child, she just said (I swear I could literally hear venom dripping from her teeth) “of course I won't short you for those days, even though you came in late. You will get the full $350 we agreed on.” Basically, even though she is already paying me peanuts, she assumes the fourth child is covered by the extra hours in the day I didn't come in. As if I shouldn't be getting paid at least $70/day, regardless of what hours I work, because even that is barely acceptable for the job I do. I should also mention that she and the dad split the childcare costs. So, if she really is saying the rest of that $350 completely covers the cost of a fourth kid, that means Popeye is shelling out childcare costs for his ex-wife's boyfriend's daughter.

So that's my situation right now. I just want advice, you guys. Should I stay, leave, ask for more per week? I mean, the thing is, I know the dad will pay more if I ask, but he's already spread pretty thin with the income. Diva is the one who always asks me to cart the kids places and has me watching extra kids and do extra stuff like crafts with them, and she’s the one who makes so much money, but she's the one who is being stingy and not giving me what I deserve. It bugs me. I just need advice on future steps, guys. I love these kids, and I don't want to just leave and have them think it was something they did wrong, but I am at the end of my mental rope. What do I do here?

[texanredrose]

Communication is Key

A commission for @psychicrebelartisan! Based on a joke.

Ruby narrowed her eyes, flipping her pencil around to erase the last line she’d written. Blake laid on her best, entirely engrossed in her latest book while Yang did push-ups between their expertly crafted- if she did say so herself- bunk beds. A nice, calm weekend filled with some quality downtime that each of them spent in their own way.

Well, honestly, she’d rather not be spending her morning studying for their upcoming test in Grimm Studies, but her partner had them on a bit of a schedule. Seeing as Weiss had gone off to the combat rooms two hours ago, Ruby either had to study now or get an earful and then study, which always kinda put a damper on the whole thing.

“Did you know that Creepers can congregate into colonies of more than two hundred?”

“I thought it was one-fifty?” Yang paused, pushing out a breath. “Or was that how many push-ups I was on? Crap.”

“You were on one hundred and fifteen; you’ve been counting under your breath the whole time.” Blake flicked one of her feline ears, the ribbon she used for her bow set aside for the moment. “And they just recently discovered the colony size; one-fifty was the old estimate.”

“Oh, cool.”

Ruby chuckled. “Sorry, Sis, didn’t mean to throw you off.”

“Hey, you probably helped me ace the test!”

“Yes, because missing that perfect score would be oh so tragic.”

“Ah, c’mon, Blakey, don’t be a-”

“Finish that sentence and I’m throwing my book at you.”

Ruby smiled, trying hard not to laugh out loud. No doubt Yang was about to make a very specific pun, one she’d made countless times before but got shot down before it could even come out this time. A quick glance over proved that Blake wasn’t actually mad about it and probably wouldn’t throw her book- she usually at least grabbed her bookmark if it was going to leave her hands- but her sister relented anyway with a chuckle before returning to her exercise.

Then, the door opened and Weiss drug herself inside, obviously worn out from her practicing. “The next time Pyrrha suggests we spar together, someone please remind me of this moment.”

Ruby winced, collecting up her papers and setting them in her book- as close to a bookmark as she ever came- and turning around in her chair. “Oh, she didn’t go easy on ya, did she?”

“Unfortunately, I’m quite certain she did.” The heiress groused, her combat outfit showing worse for wear and Myrtenaster still in hand. Which, odd- usually, Weiss secured her weapon in the assigned locker near the combat practice arenas; she only brought it back to the room for maintenance. “Apparently, my skills are still in need of some refinement.”

“What happened to Myrtenaster?”

“Hm?” She raised a brow at Blake before looking down, the pinch to her brows indicating annoyance. “Dust damnit.”

“You didn’t even realize you’d carried it all the way up here, did ya?” Yang chuckled, pausing in her exercise to sit back on her heels with a grin. “Yeah, sparring against Pyrrha kinda wipes your mind blank. She’s really good.”

“That’s one way of putting it.��� She turned around. “I’ll be back-”

“Hey, wait.” Although she couldn’t really tell at that distance, she thought the dust rapier sported a few new knicks along the guard. “I have to go down to check on Crescent Rose anyway. I’ll take it back for you.”

Briefly, a war raged, between a chiding remark on weapons not needing daily maintenance and her exhaustion from the spar. Ultimately, the latter won out. “Fine. I’m in dire need of a shower and a fresh change of clothes anyway.” She walked over, handing off Myrtenaster before heading to collect up her small armada of hair care products- put to shame only by Yang’s- and other essential shower supplies before heading out the door. “If I’m not back in two hours, assume I’ve expired and let me rest in peace.”

Once the door closed, Yang clicked her tongue. “She’s always so hard on herself. Girl’s gotta lighten up.”

“Good luck with that,” Blake said, almost returning to her book but catching something out of the corner of her eye. “Ruby? Are you okay?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” She held up Myrtenaster, which she’d been inspecting thoroughly for the past few minutes. “Weiss was so tired, she didn’t notice the damage, and I’m not sure if I can fix it.”

“Whoa, back up, damage?” Yang got to her feet and came over, whistling low.

As far as weapons went, Myrtenaster had a fairly straight forward design. The chambers that housed the dust were probably the most complicated part; as luck would have it, the plating that covered them was the part that was damaged, bent at such an angle that it probably wouldn’t cause any functional issues but it definitely looked like changing out the dust would be a bit more difficult than it should be. Add to that a few scratches in the otherwise durable metal and Ruby had to sigh, shaking her head.

“These plates need to be replaced and I don’t have the spare materials to do it.” She winced. “At least, not in white. I have an extra casing for Crescent Rose’s headpiece but-”

“Well, hold on; there’s machines down in the shop garage that could easily cut a new plate. We just need to pick up some Hunter grade metal.” Yang went over to where her scroll sat on the dresser, smiling as she tapped on an icon. “Yeah, I should have enough to grade some raw metal. How much would we need?”

Without hesitation, she pulled a fresh piece of paper out and started scribbling away, rounding up to make sure they’d have enough; she could eyeball it pretty well but definitely wanted to err on the safe side. While she was at it, she did a rough blueprint so she could visualize how they’d need to machine it in order to make a seamless replacement.

After a few more calculations, she circled the ending number with a smile. “There.”

“Sweet, I can afford that.” Then, Yang winced. “Not sure how we’re going to get the detailing down, though.”

“I can do that part.” Blake offered, setting her bookmark between the pages and getting off the bed, amber eyes tracing along the undamaged plate before she nodded. “It’s not too different from calligraphy.”

“You know calligraphy?”

“It’s a hobby.”

“Great!” Ruby quickly wrote down the weight and specifications of the metal they’d need on a separate paper, handing it off to her sister. “While you’re grabbing the materials, I’ll get to work on a better schematic.”

“We can hide Myrtenaster under my bed until it’s done.” At the curious looks she received, Blake merely shrugged. “It’s not like we can put it under your beds.”

“Point.” Yang snatched up the paper. “Back in an hour!”

“I’ll meet you down in the garage!” She called out as her sister threw on her jacket, shaking her head. “Not sure what to tell Weiss about where Yang and I went, though.”

“Leave that part to me and send me a text when it’s my turn.” Blake patted her shoulder. “Trust me, I know how to keep a secret.”

Ruby laughed, bending over the desk to start working in earnest on the dimensions.

Later that night, they’d managed to successfully keep their teammate in the dark about the location of her weapon, Ruby somehow managing to convince her that she’d put it in Weiss’ locker, just as she said she would. While Blake slipped off to put the finishing touches on the new plates that Yang had machined out, her sister used jokes to thoroughly distract Weiss from all thoughts regarding Myrtenaster, eventually leading to a pun war that had almost made Ruby bang her head against her desk.

One would think she’d be used to it by now but one would be wrong, in fact.

“Ya know what, I gotta be honest, you’re starting to get pretty good at this!” Yang laughed, lounging on her bunk while watching Weiss, glaring up at the blonde from hers. “A few more years and they might even be funny.”

“Forgive me if I’ve only had the past few months to indulge in bad habits,” Weiss replied, though she couldn’t hide the way she preened at that bit of praise. Ruby didn’t exactly get it but somehow the heiress responded better to teasing compliments that flat out ones and Yang had picked up on it first. “Now, where is Blake? We should be heading to dinner sometime soon.”

“Oh, uh, I’m sure she’ll be right here!” She’d pulled the ‘team leader’ card earlier to keep her partner from sending a text earlier but now found herself running out of excuses. “She said she was on her way!”

“That was thirty minutes ago.”

“C’mon, Princess.” Yang hopped down from her bunk. “Let’s go down and grab ourselves a table. You know how Blakey is; I’m sure she just got lost in another book. Ruby can wait for her to get back.”

A huff. “Fine.” Getting to her feet, the two started for the door. “And you’d better come down soon, Ruby Rose! You’re not having another dinner that’s only comprised of dessert because the main line’s closed!”

“Okay, okay! We’ll be down as soon as Blake gets here!” She ducked her head, letting out a sigh of relief the moment the door closed. Now, she could retrieve her scroll, hoping she wouldn’t disturb the Faunus. She’d actually never sent the message earlier, for exactly that reason.

A moment later, the door opened and Blake stepped through, letting out her own sigh of relief and leaning back against the door, holding Myrtenaster in her off hand. “That was close.”

“But she didn’t see you, right?”

“No.” A small smile. “I thought you two would’ve gotten her to go down for dinner already. Thankfully, Yang’s loud.”

“No kidding.” Bounding to her feet, she quickly closed the distance. “Can I see?”

Wordlessly, Blake handed over the weapon, and she hadn’t been kidding about her skills with the engraving. Ruby wouldn’t have noticed the swap between the busted plate and the new one, were it not for one slight addition.

Property of Weiss Schnee A Great Friend and Teammate

“I… couldn’t help but make the addition.” Blake shrugged. “It’s like Yang said. She needs to lighten up.”

“Oh, man, she’s going to love this!” Ruby couldn’t help but giggle, though she immediately jumped and hid Myrtenaster behind her back- a bad plan, in hindsight- as the door opened and Yang slipped in with a grin.

“Ah, good, that was you in the hall.” She made a motion with her hand. “Well, c’mon, don’t keep me in the dark! Let’s see it!”

She showed Yang Blake’s handiwork, all three of them beaming that they’d pulled it off- until they heard a certain someone stomping up the hall.

“Quick!” Amber eyes flicked. “My bed!”

In a flurry of rose petals, Ruby stashed Myrtenaster away, knowing better than to try presenting the repaired weapon now. A few things one did not keep from Weiss Schnee: her beauty rest, her favorite chocolate, or her dinner.

“WOULD YOU-” The door burst open, blue eyes scanning the interior of the room before she continued. “THREE HURRY UP?”

“Yep!”

“Right.”

“Coming Weiss!” Ruby hurried to the door, smiling wide.

Yeah, she could be a little demanding from time to time, but Weiss was a great friend! She really couldn’t wait to see her expression!

Although she tried to play it off as best she could, Ruby could hardly sit still. Last night hadn’t provided a good opportunity to present Myrtenaster- Weiss went straight to bed after dinner and, again, one did not mess with her beauty sleep- so she sat on her bed, pretending to be engrossed in playing a game on her scroll against Yang, across the room on her own bunk. Blake had dived straight back into her book while Weiss did some studying of her own, though she abruptly stood up after about an hour.

“I’m going for a walk.” She grimaced, putting a hand to her lower back. “I’m afraid I’m still sore after yesterday’s spar.”

“Don’t let Pyrrha catch you limping; she’ll offer to carry you back to the room.” Yang warned with a chuckle. “She takes that stuff hard.”

“Duly noted.” She scanned around the room. “You three could do with some exercise as well.”

The blonde shrugged. “I went for a run this morning.”

“I did pull ups!”

“Pulling yourself out of bed doesn’t count.”

“I will do pull ups!” She amended. Really, Ruby didn’t mind a little exercise- it took a fair bit of muscle to swing Crescent Rose around- but she didn’t keep as strict a regime for a number of reasons. The first being: she liked to enjoy her time off.

Blake merely looked up from her book, ears canting back briefly.

“Right, well, then, I’m off.”

Weiss left the room, allowing her teammates to spring together, all wearing smiles.

“Oh, man, this is going to be great!”

“Yeah, I can’t wait for her to open her locker.” Yang laughed. “She’s going to be so floored!”

“I do hope we’ll be around when she sees it.” Blake tilted her head slightly. “You know we’re not going to hear the end of it for a while.”

“It’s not like she’s going to be mad.” Ruby reasoned, though she didn’t doubt the veracity of the Faunus’ claims. “She’s just going to try to one up us or something.”

“Oh, I can hear it already.” Her sister adjusted her posture and raised her voice. “How dare you three keep a secret like this from me, really, are we not teammates, we’re not supposed to keep secrets!”

The three of them laughed.

This was going to be good.

The weekend came to an end and they returned to classes with anticipation. However, after a few days, Weiss didn’t seem to act like anything had happened. Which, okay, they had some tests and bookwork on Monday and Tuesday, but surely she checked her weapon locker at some point, right? Ruby couldn’t help it; she’d started to get discouraged.

Did Weiss not like the new plate? Did she even notice?

A hand smacked her shoulder, startling her away from staring blankly at her textbook while supposedly studying. “Hey!”

“Ruby.” Weiss crossed her arms over her chest, starting down at her with just a hint of fury. “What did you do with it?”

She frowned. “With what?”

“With Myrtenaster!” Throwing her hands into the air, the heiress immediately launched into a rant. “When I noticed it wasn’t in my locker on Monday, I didn’t mention it, because maybe you’d put it in yours for some reason, but it’s Wednesday and we have a combat exam in two days! I need to practice!”

“Wait- Yang!” Leaning around her partner, she looked over at her sister. “Did you not put Weiss’ weapon in her locker?”

“What?” The blonde blinked. “I didn’t- you were supposed to put Myrtenaster back!”

“Hold on.” Blake sat up in her bed. “Neither of you put it back?” Then she leaned over, reaching under her bed and pulling the rapier in question out. “Are you two serious?”

“Hey, it was under your bed!” Yang snapped her fingers. “And you were the last one to work on it!”

“I brought it up here so you two could see it! Ruby should’ve put it back!”

“Yang said she was excited about Weiss’ reaction and she’d already gone out on a run!” She defended herself. “I thought she put it back!”

“What are you absolute dolts screaming about?” With a huff, the heiress marched over, finally retrieving her weapon.

“WE DID SOMETHING NICE BUT SHE FORGOT TO GIVE IT TO YOU!” All three of them spoke in tandem and-

Okay. Granted, they probably should’ve talked about who put Myrtenaster where. It wasn’t any one, single person’s fault.

But also, Ruby thought, it wasn’t hers.

She couldn’t really see Weiss’ face but she could see the slight shake in her shoulders as she stared down at Myrtenaster’s guard.

“How dare you,” she said, and for a moment the three exchanged worried glances because they could hear the warble in her voice, but then she snapped her head up to look at them, and they could very clearly see the tears she just barely held back. “How dare you three do something nice for me with absolutely no warning!”

“Wait, Weiss, don’t cry!” Ruby rushed over, throwing her arms around her teammate.

She wasn’t the only one, quickly joined by Blake and Yang as they surrounding the heiress while she clutched her weapon to her chest. “Yeah, c’mon, no tears!”

“We thought you would like it?” Blake offered, ears twitching.

“Of course I like it!” Despite a tear or two slipping out, she cleared her throat and tried glaring at them, though it… wasn’t very effective. “But here you three are, engraving my rapier, and I have no idea how to repay you! I don’t know enough about engraving-”

“Actually.” Yang smiled, reaching up to run a hand through her hair. “Ruby noticed one of the guard plates was damaged, so we wanted to replace it for you. The engraving was all Blake.”

“It was Ruby’s idea.” The Faunus shrugged slightly. “I just… added a few touches.”

“Yang machined the parts though and bought the materials!” She smiled, catching her partner’s expression as she obviously fought back even more tears. “You deserve it, Weiss!”

“Not yet,” she replied, before carefully tossing Myrtenaster on her bed and doing her absolutely best to return their hugs. “But I’m going to.”

Ruby smiled, happy that it all turned out for the best and enjoying the group hug with her team.

She just hoped Weiss didn’t go overboard with her ‘payback’; there were a terrifying number of things the heiress to the SDC could buy and they only had a dorm room.

[script-a-world]

Hi guys, I’m glad I came upon your blog. If you could give me some help in the right direction I’d really appreciate it. My idea is to have a planet [not our earth nor solar system, I need to create new ones to fit my story] devastated after a genocidal war and the end result is the bad guys completely defeated and the ones left over fled the planet. Now, the planet is pretty much ruined and sort of back in the Bronze Age with random bits and pieces left over of more modern stuff but anyone who can create more is basically gone so everything will have to be rediscovered and reinvented. But most importantly, the people that are left are from all over the world, hundreds of little tribes with as little as 1 to 2000 survivors with a total of a million population. They did get off world help to finally defeat the bad guys so there’s a further extra quarter million aliens staying behind to help rebuild the world. You’d think with aliens, they’d have technology? Nope. Everything is magic for them. So here’s a dilemma, use magic to rebuild the world or stay in the Bronze Age and rebuild with their own technology, that would take another thousands of years. People are divided or mixed. So we got a world that looks like a magical realm one town and the Bronze Age the next town over, and everything in between. End result is like I’m writing a fantasy story set in the Bronze Age but people have modern ideas and knowledge with no way to actually use them. They know what democracy is, the minority know they deserve rights and freedom. They can drive a car, they can use a computer, but those things are basically all destroyed and no one knows how to make them. So, any ideas on where I should do my research or problems the people will face, or perhaps similar stories I could draw inspiration/ideas from? Thank you!

Synth:  For any computers they had, look into the worst-case projections from back in the 1990s when Y2K was becoming a looming concern, and for electric stuff in general check out what mega huge solar flares have the potential to do right now.

Saphira:  The best thing about this scenario is that though the people are decimated and scattered, they have not lost their memories. This means anyone who had any training whatsoever still has it. Even better, literacy is still strong. They can still teach these things to their children and that is their greatest asset. What you have is not so much a race to resources, but a race to a Communal Knowledge, a Library of Letters.

What tradesman still live? How much do they understand the craft? How can one tradesman get help from another? How do we preserve what knowledge we still have before it fades? Sure we know what a pencil looks like, how it works. I can figure out a wood barrel, but I have no idea where to get graphite, or how to make rubber for an eraser. Maybe someone in the next tribe over might know. We can substitute graphite for charcoal for now, and send out a letter to every town nearby...

Most will not be tradesmen, I'm guessing. They can still read. They can still run. They might go about the destroyed world and look for scraps. Maybe a snapped motherboard. Maybe an entire gundam: who knows? Whatever they bring back, if it can jog the memory or provide insight, it has value. Look at how much we humans learn about our history and technology just by looking at old common tools and of all things the jars and plates.

Now not everyone will be so dedicated. Some will see the Arcane way of doing things that the Aliens provide, and think Well, why not? What if we simply cannot figure out some piece of advanced tech? Really hard to rebuild computers when you don't have a way to make silicon. Well, until we figure that out... Why not... Cheat? We'll uh, make it genuine later but for now we just need it to work...

I suggest try recreating something you have with household items. How would you recreate a doorknob? Yes, seemingly simple. Deceptively so. Take down what problems you face. Consider asking Google the same as asking the Arcane Aliens for help. What problems, what thoughts, what sort of experience is it?

Good luck.

Feral:  The first thing that comes to mind is what's left?

People remember how to drive cars? Are there still cars hanging around? People who not only know how to drive but how to maintain and/or hotwire the left over vehicles may very well do so.

The same goes for any and all technology that people can get their hands on. For all of human history, we have re-purposed the cultural artifacts left by previous societies; why wouldn't your people?

In terms of why people might choose to go with the aliens or try it on their own  is going to depend heavily on their access to clean water and food sources. A clean water source is paramount. And after a planet wide war, there might not be many water sources left that do not require filtration. Do the people have access to filtration technology? Or are their options alien magitech, war with a tribe that has filtration, or die from dehydration?

Constablewrites:  From the related works to study angle, the Schizo Tech trope is probably a good place to start, since the order in which they revive given technologies is probably not going to be the same order in which they were originally developed.

Like a lot of After the End stories, a lot is going to depend on how long they've had to recover from all of this. Consider that if it's been more than a generation or two, a lot of the knowledge of how to use this stuff will die out just because there's not much point in passing it down anymore. Are parents going to teach their kids to drive once they can no longer make the cars function? There will still likely be records of this stuff and people who choose to study it, but the widespread practical knowledge and experience will die out as soon as the technology is no longer viable. Just look at how many people these days don't know how to sew their own clothes, which was considered an absolutely critical life skill less than 100 years ago.

Synth:  The pro-alien-tech people clashing with the pro-DIY people seem like another potential source of conflict to help drive your story. Do the pro-tech people think the anti-tech people are stubborn and stupid for not wanting such easily accessed assistance? Do the anti folks think the pros are lazy for just accepting these handouts instead of working hard to do things themselves? Are there conspiracy theorists asking "But what are their real motives and goals?" about these aliens? Have people split themselves off into different groups/factions/entire separate settlements based on whether they embrace or shun the alien magitech? Which side do your main characters fall on, and what happens when they meet someone from or have to travel through an area populated by people from the opposing side? Hell, do all the members of your main gang of characters even share the same views regarding magic vs. going it (very) old school? What kinds of experiences might someone have that could change their mind about the alien magic? (e.g. someone against magic comes down with some horrible disease for which medications no longer exist, but can be cured pretty easily with magic. Does magic suddenly seem acceptable now that it's their life at stake, or will they go down with their principles? What about someone gung-ho about magic? What might make them decide "Actually how about No," and turn away from it?)

Tex:  I wonder if those survivors communicated with each other - the survivors of zombie-style apocalypse/ELE (Extinction Level Event) in movies such as I Am Legend and Zombieland utilized ham radios and sent out distress signals and messages containing news about holdout locations where other survivors could travel to and be safe. Radios don't require a ton of materials or knowledge to build from scratch (Boy Scouts of America has kits for building a crystal radio), and they're relatively easy to learn how to use. If there's manuals around to build something, and someone deems it important, it's probably going to get built.

That being said, the first generation of survivors is integral for the rebuilding of society. If there was enough tech left over for survivors to leave the planet, did they do so without contacting those left behind? Was any technology repaired or retrofitted for other purposes? Does this planet have any sort of internet, or even libraries? What about fleeing survivors that pledged to come back after X amount of time or Y reason? Settling on a new planet is awfully similar to restructuring society after a devastating event, so the skill sets between the two activities have a lot of overlap.

Being able to flee the planet and presumably settle somewhere else implies that the people are capable of interplanetary travel, if not interstellar. If there's FTL drives, could these be used to power city grids, so as to take advantage of electricity, LANs, and digital information repositories? What about power supplies or engines in transportation vehicles? These can be retrofitted for use as generators, and if you're crafty enough, to boost the range of telecommunications equipment.

You only need less than a thousand people to start up a society, so having a million people, even disparate, means that the aggregate knowledge is much higher than would even be needed for colonizing a new planet from scratch. The fact that these aliens use magic isn't necessarily an issue - can they be convinced to move heavy objects, can their skills in magic be used to repair power lines or other things? What about using them to help find ore and mineral deposits to make the raw material for tech again? Are these aliens capable of scrying or telepathy, and would they be willing to create a pseudo-telecommunications net (think magic phone network where the aliens are the phone booths) across the planet to allow the different tribes to talk with each other and come up with some sort of plan? A division of labour to complete a task according to skill set can be complementary instead of contradictory, and would allow the planet to recuperate to its antebellum technological peak much faster, even if some people decide to go without it.