#the only time i recognise a story as 'bad' is if its perpetuating some kind of harm/bigotry

[foxmulderautism]

reading for a litmag really helps realign my relationship w submission and sensitivity about rejection because ouhh there's been so many times the last week where i've said no on a piece I actually really liked in some way

[talenlee]

Story Pile: The Traitor, Baru Cormorant

The Traitor, Baru Cormorant is an exquisitely detailed book about a queer woman from a colonised people striking out to use her wits and her brains to try and topple that empire from within, and it is written very clearly and well to explore those ideas. You spend a lot of time with Baru herself, which means if she is a character that resonates with you you get to feel her emotional state very deep and true, the constant cleverness, the non-stop backbiting of things she wants to say but won’t because it’s not part of the plan, and her emotional depths when things go badly for her. She is a character who really writes in large letters the struggles of Designed Femininity, where society has mandated a way you can be, and she has to operate within those parameters, all while rankling against them. If you’ve heard me talk about living a life under surveillance, Baru Cormorant is a protagonist who lives that way and what she does to take command of her life. I need you to know this up front because that’s all I’m going to tell you before I start on the Spoiler Warning.

I’m not kidding. Yeah I know. I know! And I’m not even planning on spoiling much of the plot or anything. Yeah it’s that kinda book! Really! I’m going to discuss spoilers for the book, but not in the most specific of ways. Still, this is a book where being surprised is an important part of it, and if you’re the kind of person who wants to feel smarter than the book you’re reading by outwitting it, even knowing the kinds of spoilers can feel like I’m robbing you of some of your fun. I absolutely do not want to diminish the fun of anyone who aims to enjoy this book. And you might! It’s very raw, it’s very real, and it’s extremely high quality work that you should consider reading if any of that seems exciting to you.

I would really recommend reading the audio book, because a lot of the book is dialogue between two characters and I think a good audio book reader would be able to help differentiate those voices in a way that makes it easier to follow. No small part of The Traitor Baru Cormorant is people having important, ideologically loaded conversations with one another in reasonably similar character voice because they’ve almost all been trained to speak that way.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is about a traitor, right there on a tin. And you might think ‘ahah, of course, she’s a traitor to the empire, like the book jacket blurb says’ and yeah, of course, but also, other things as well, because this is a book that obscures information from you. And if you’re not aware, this book, on its own, has a bummer of an ending, because it’s built towards that bummer of an ending. The bummer of an ending was a short story released before the book was written, and the whole rest of the book was written to get to that bummer of an ending.

There’s a kind of narrative I often see that wants to put a character in a terrible position and then work out how they got there and how they feel about it. This is by no means a bad way to tell a story, and a good writing technique for jogging your creative process into action. What I wonder about is what situation you choose. There are impulses that create different stories; asking the question of ‘imagine if a character had to do this awful thing and it was the best thing to do’ kind of storytelling. You may recognise this as the Christian Baby hypothesis, or the Wizard With A Bomb scenario. You put the character in an impossibly bad situation to see how they handle it, and the story can only possibly explain how things got to that impossibly bad situation.

In this case, this from-the-worst-spot, fill-in-backwards narrative has a lot of options to explain things. Unfortunately for my tastes, The Traitor Baru Cormorant leaves you with two obvious forks for the story to go down; one, this ending, these choices are worth it, and there are genocides worth doing and hate crimes worth perpetuation, or, two, the realisation that no, actually, these things have been for naught and all the suffering we see is foolish and we have been in the seat next to a protagonist who has destroyed everything good for nothing. People don’t die for principles or hope, they just die, in torturous and cruel ways, because being clever isn’t the same as being good.

It’s not a book I want to read a second piece from, because I can’t imagine the story that got to this end point getting to a point where I want to see it. Like, this story went ‘here, this is an ending that makes you want to see more, right?’ and it makes me go: No! No I do not! This ending looks a lot like it sucks, and I do not care to watch you do it again. I do not think you can do a better job because you think this is a great job! My heart is not broken, my soul is not rent. I am deflated, because the book is clever, and the conclusion is smart, and it believes in economics of power, which are serious and mature, and not in the idea that you should be able to blaze a fire into the heart of an empire and just keep killing the bad people before you. I have seen queer women die for tragic conspiracy’s sake in the heart of an empire before, it has lost its lustre.

They are not the things that make my heart sing. They are not the things that resonate with me. They do not leave me thinking ‘what if I’d stayed in that cult and made it stronger and got a lot of people messed up just so I could betray the cult’ or ‘what if I could fix things by becoming Prime Minister.’ The book jacket describes it as brutal and gutwrenching, but to have that impact, I have to care about what’s happening, and I kinda don’t. I do not feel like I am in this space, I do not think any of these characters are meaningfully going to experience anything but the awful oppression of their lives and in the end, we all die. I have no hope for this story to dash, because I have been in the spaces it imagines and I do not think empires are changed by committing the right atrocities.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is a supernatural fantasy novel and the supernatural fantasy it believes in is a rational economy that can be predictably manipulated from a central source to achieve reliable ends. It’s a world where eugenics is maintained, where anti-homosexuality laws work, and where the empire has brainwashing magic that can change people’s minds. This story is about an empire that’s exactly as good at maintaining its empire as empires tell you they are, and whose systems work. It’s kinda the vibe of ‘but the trains do run on time,’ you’ll hear. How do you fight that? Well, you make a lot of compromises and you treat people like things and you plan to kill an empire by doing terrible things all while pretending you’re doing them for the right reason but you’re really doing them for the really right reason.

It does also present the possibility that you can win fights against the Empire’s agents by beating them with hammers. That seems an underrated part of the story.

These are complaints of how I felt about what The Traitor Baru Cormorant executed on what it was doing, but they are not complaints I would say that should change it at all. These are in many cases, decidedly personal dissent with the book, because of how it feels shaped against the contours of my life, of a surveillanced childhood, of fear of death, of the belief in an implacable empire. They aren’t complaints I think should concern anyone else.

I guess if I had to level a criticism against Baru Cormorant is that I don’t think anyone’s having any fun. It’s not like the story promises fun! It’s a story about the movements of economies and colonialism and imperialism, and our central character is non-stop reflecting on how this isn’t what she wants to do or how she wants to do them and how she’s obsessed with ensuring she’s presenting the truly correct vision of who she is to who she wants to be, including to the reader. Like, there are points where our second-person narrator hides information from us because it would make the inevitable reveal more interesting. That’s cool! That’s impressive! The realpolitik of the opening half of the book is absolutely interesting and impressively thorough!

But god damn it’s not fun.

There is a comparison that I have been nursing while I read this book that has been getting more and more confusing ever since I started, where the success of The Locked Tomb has been seen as at odds with The Traitor Baru Cormorant. This comparison feels alien to me. The Locked Tomb books are a mystery novel following, at first, an immense idiot who isn’t paying attention, a soaking wet goth rat trying to outwit her own history and schizophrenia, and then a YA girls’ novel. The books are wildly unlike The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which is largely a book about the movements of economies and colonialism and empires, which happens to centre on a queer woman who doesn’t do a good job of treating people like people.

I think if you made this comparison, if you said ‘this is good and this is bad’ then you’re probably making some pretty boring comparisons. Baru Cormorant is a queer woman whose – distinctly queer – inner life and her relationship to her sexuality are central and vital to the story and regularly made prominent in the narrative. Because they’re a crime and she lives in a homophobic police state. But you’re going to get much more prominence to how she thinks and feels about that than the Locked Tomb’s gaggle of failures who are safe to be open about things and then aren’t open about things, because they’re also useless.

I think The Traitor Baru Cormorant is an impressive book that didn’t captivate me.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[herinsectreflection]

I find it really interesting that though the show kind of lives in a perpetual joke about nobody in Sunnydale noticing that the town is built on a literal entrance to hell and seemingly has a 95% death rate, you can actually trace through the early seasons and see a pretty consistent build up to a gradual slipping of the mask.

S1 keeps the masquerade firmly present, though does hint that government agencies are exploiting the supernatural in Out of Mind Out of Sight, which kind of serves as retrospective foreshadowing for the Initiative. S2 drops several hints that some are more aware of the supernatural than we might assume, such as Snyder in School Hard implying to the police that they both knew what was really going on ("What do you suggest? The truth?"). Or Oz' aunt being apparently perfectly aware of werewolves, to the point of casually mentioning it over the phone to him.

S3 takes this further, by making the main villain a presumably once human man who inhabits a human political institution. In the Mayor's office, the supernatural coexists with the mundane - vampires like Mr. Trick working alongside regular guys like Alan. Gingerbread is based around the adults of the town finally recognising what is going on in Sunnydale. The Prom does the same at the emotional climax, with the students of Sunnydale acknowledging the ongoing weirdness and Buffy's role in preventing it. Graduation Day gives us an entire graduating class aware of and participating in battle against the supernatural.

Season 4 is where this is put into overdrive. The US government is aware of the supernatural world, and is actively trying to exploit it, with the entrance of the Initiative. They entirely represent the intrusion of the scientific into the supernatural. Their very existence is rooted in the fact that the national authorities are taking a specific interest in Sunnydale. Adam exists as an attempt to tear down the barriers between and unify the two worlds, horrifying Frankencreature as he is. He specifically purses possesses the power to see through false realities, as shown when he sees the falseness of Jonathan's world in Superstar ("These are lies.").

The Initiative and Adam make up the central plot and Big Bad of S4, so it's clear that the writers had great interest in this idea of the masquerade falling and normal people coming into contact with the supernatural. Riley is another example; his whole character is a Normal Man trying to make the supernatural fit his worldview. The world's perception of Sunnydale is pushed to absurd limits, with the news report in Hush reporting an apparent town-wide overnight outbreak of severe laryngitis.

However, after what seems like 4 seasons of gradual buildup, this thread is dropped and the masquerade is fully in place for the rest of the show. The only real instances I can think of the 'real' world becoming aware and interacting with the magical again are the few times the Initiative pops up for plot reasons, and the Sunnydale residents skipping town at the end of S7. The latter isn't even as clear an acknowledgment as those same residents had back in S3.

This may be due to the lukewarm reaction to the three key elements of this thread in S4 - Adam, the Initiative, and Riley. All three pretty quickly disappear from the narrative in S5. The Initiative struggled to make an impact because it never felt like a real military agency, so the point of its existence was lost. It's also possible the writers discovered that this wasn't as fertile ground for stories as they thought it might be. It certainly would've conflicted with the arc of S6 - we couldn't have seen Buffy struggling to deal with the financial realities of the world if that world had become aware that Buffy was the Slayer.

I don't know if this was actually a thread that they were building and then dropped, or perhaps just something that they turned to more often in the early seasons out of coincidence. And if it was, I think they made the right call. Buffy is best existing in this slightly heightened world working mainly on metaphor, and S4 showed that when you try to bring in the "real" world, its obvious unreality is exposed, and things get boring real quickly.

[i-did-not-mean-to]

Back to school - chapter 5

Being sick at home, I have time to update my different stories :D

So, here's another Kira-chapter with a few surprises :))))

Fandom: The Hobbit (still an AU)

Characters : Thranduil x OC (and the others being awful)

Words: 4,5 k (+/-)

Rating: Gen

Warnings: reference to alcohol, silliness, awkwardness and a small surprise :D

Waking up was hard; Kira’s head vibrated with pain.

She should not have opened that aged rum just to numb the second-hand pain; she was not 20 anymore and she now paid the price for her reckless behaviour. “A new day, a new chance.” She told herself as she saw her bleary complexion in the tiny bathroom mirror.

A quick glance on another crumpled sheet of paper Gandalf had handed her informed her that she would have her class twice today. One hour for literature and another one, in the afternoon for “social studies and integration”. If she hadn’t been that miserable, she would have laughed as Gandalf had struck out the words and written “etiquette” beneath the line.

How the ever-loving hell was she supposed to teach those kids etiquette and manners? She had almost been stoned to death for taking them out into the courtyard and now she was supposed to teach them…table manners?

Brushing her hair back in a neat ponytail and slipping into her ratty old cardigan, she opened the door just to almost bump into a pristine white shirt. “Good morning, Kira.”

“Thranduil.” She sighed, recognising the woody, masculine scent, and the melodious voice. “I am quite able to find my way to school on my own.” She ground out, trying to push past the intrusive colleague. One could count on people like him to show up, perfectly styled and handsome as the devil himself, when one was feeling low and looking like a pile of…undesirable and unattractive things that might or might not have exited another organism.

When she turned around, he stood rooted to the ground, an unfathomable expression on his beautiful face. “I thought you might care for some company, even if it’s just me.” He murmured, lower than she had ever heard him speak.

Oh, here’s another one who isn’t loved well, Kira thought and her heart gave an unexpected and involuntary jerk.

“That is very kind of you.” She nodded slowly, seeing his eyes widen. When was the last time someone had called him “kind”, she wondered, feeling strangely sorry for him.

“The kids call me Thrandy.” He informed her as they walked to the unseemly building, earning a few nods and a few fearful looks. The kids call you all kinds of names, Kira thought to herself, but kept her mouth shut.

Her first class wouldn’t start for over an hour, but she had wanted to return Thorin’s file and maybe poke around in the school a bit before having to teach. Only, how was she to get rid of the man who seemed to have become her veritable shadow in the few hours she had been in this town?

“Don’t you have a class to teach?” She asked, trying to sound as casual as possible. “Yes.” He replied simply.

Without consciously choosing to do so, Kira walked alongside him to his class. She really was not at her best on this morning, otherwise she would have parted ways with him earlier.

“Hi, Miss Kira. Do you remember me? I’m…” – “Thorin’s sister.” Kira supplied readily, with a warm smile.

“Dís, go in, please.” Thranduil ordered and she obeyed with a smirk. “Oh, Kira, you’re early.” Gandalf hastened down the corridor. “I am not late, I am never late, I arrive exactly when I mean to arrive.” He informed Thranduil when the other man cocked an eyebrow and lifted his eyes to the clock fastened to the opposite wall.

“Yes…I had an idea. I will wander around some, except if the bogeyman might come and grab me off the stairs here inside the school as well?” Kira mocked, being met with two very disapproving looks.

“You should be fine here.” Thranduil replied calmly, making his class fall into silence by merely shoving his face, quite creepily if one asked Kira, into the classroom and giving them a punitive stare.

That man had an absurdly long neck, Kira thought, and he looked quite ridiculous, poking his head around corners like a grumpy giraffe. Really, he and Thorin seemed to be in a perpetual contest who could look dourer for the longest time.

“Miss Kira.” Ah, speak of the devil. Kira turned around to find Bilbo with Thorin hovering just behind him; the young boy’s very own dark raincloud. “Bilbo, Thorin, good morning.” She turned on her teacher-smile.

In the long months before coming here, she had almost forgotten how much she loved working with teenagers. They thought themselves so grown-up already, but they smelled like cheap shower gel and half-outgrown dreams.

“Did you have a nice night?” Bilbo asked. “I…Yes, I was very eager to come to work though.” Kira replied. Bilbo was an adorable kid: small with a penchant to growing slightly pudgy maybe, he had eyes that reminded her of the rolling hills of the countryside…and of its bustling, invincible life.

“Yes, I couldn’t wait either.” He gave her a wide grin and let himself be herded into class.

“Was it really bad?” Thorin nodded at the file sticking out from her satchel; a file that might well reek of spilled rum and tears now. “You tell me, Thorin, was it really bad?” She asked back earnestly.

“He’s a troublemaker.” Thranduil interjected, lifting his hands placatingly when Kira spun around, eyes ablaze. “But, there’s a but, woman, let me finish! This one is a pain in the ass, excuse my French, but not all of what you’ll find in the files is 100% true…or fair.” She stared at him in confusion, had he really said what she thought he had?

“I’ve got to go teach. The kids usually go home for lunch, but there is a lunchroom.” Thranduil nodded and went into his classroom without waiting for Kira to collect her thoughts and reply to his surprising admission of fallibility in teachers.

“What was that about?” Kira scratched her head. “I think the dear colleague wanted to invite you to have lunch with the staff?” Gandalf said gently, but his smile was sharp and too radiant to be honest.

Kira blushed, confusion writ plain on her face. “If…my idea works out, I shall have to go home again. I’ll be fine.” She smiled, wondering if her colleague would think that her no-show would be some kind of rejection.

Thorin was still staring at the closed door, apparently aghast that Thranduil would admit that he was indeed not actually the Antichrist reborn. “Thorin, can I beg for your illustrious presence in my mathematics class?” Gandalf prompted the boy with a rumbling chuckle.

Kira watched as he slid his impassive mask back on and trudged into the room as if he was under duress when she had clearly seen the tiny smirk he had given his headteacher before returning to being the sullen boy everyone expected him to be.

“I’ll hand them over soon enough, don’t you worry.” Gandalf grinned at her and closed the door.

Kira huffed, her superior seemed to know everything and have an amazingly good understanding of what went on inside of people’s minds; she had noticed that the previous evening already, but he was so humorous and nonchalant about it, that it had only struck her when she had returned to the void of her apartment.

Resolutely, she struck out for the administration office and returned the file.

“Ah? And? Already scared off?” The same lady asked her casually. “Not in the least.” Kira replied pugnaciously; the more people tried to warn her off, the harder she would doggedly stay true to her course.

“Is there a ballroom here?” She asked. “A what? There’s the festivity room, but it’s never used. Whatever do you need a ballroom for? Do you want them to dance? Dwalin will give you a bloody nose.” The woman laughed.

“Dwalin will do nothing of the sort. He’s a decent fellow.” Kira contradicted calmly which made the woman freeze in the middle of her movement as she was bringing a cup of coffee to her lips.

Her eyebrows rose in slow-motion. “Decent? Dwalin? He brawls like he’s paid for it. Always black and blue.”

Kira’s stomach turned into a block of ice. There were other reasons for kids to be bruised and she would have to look into it. No, his brother had not struck her as someone who would mistreat a young’un like that.

“Let that be my worry. Where is that room?” Kira enquired and took off as soon as she was given the information she had asked for.

Yes, she thought, this would do nicely.

There was even a small kitchen down a corridor. “A small lunchroom, huh?” She muttered to herself.

Table manners, yes, and who knew? She might even get the kids to dance.

Either way, if it was at all possible, she would organise a ball. A winter formal for her kids, for she saw them as her very own and she was fiercely loyal to them already, and all the others.

“Air…We need air and sunlight.” No matter how dark the times were, children needed fun and something to look forward to and she would be damned if she didn’t at least try to provide that for them.

If necessary, she would clean the whole room by herself, decorate it by herself, cook by herself. Kira had a purpose, and she would not be set adrift again, not when she remembered all too well how it had felt to haunt her own life as a shadow of herself.

Dreaming her time away, she had to run to be on time for her class and she nearly bumped into Thranduil again. He was like a moving wall, always in the way, he was the very symbol of the labyrinth she had fallen into.

“Kira…” He started, but then ran out of words. “Thranduil.” She replied in that same cold tone.

“So…Oh, the Silmarillion? You know that they’re borderline illiterate?” He mocked as he saw the book she was extracting from her satchel. “You know that you’re…unfair?” She shot back and pushed past him, which felt like squeezing along a statue of marble. He didn’t budge. She didn’t even throw him off balance. Cocky bastard.

“Hello Miss Kira.” Unisono, the class greeted her, and she could see the astonishment in Thranduil’s eyes as he was still standing in front of her open door, eager to see her flounder and fail, probably.

“Hello class.” Kira replied, her warmest smile on display and then, turning to her colleague, “Was there anything else I can do for you? If not, be so good as to close the door, please? Thank you.”

Kira was unsurprised to find that the kids were not anywhere near illiterate. Yes, their reading skills had to be improved upon, but they listened carefully as she explained J.R.R Tolkien’s early mythology and were willing to read some of the parts as their curriculum for this class.

“Will we have to buy the book?” Ori asked, worrying his lower lip. “There might be a copy or two in the library…but…” He went on, looking intensely miserable.

Kira caught Bilbo’s discreet look and the almost imperceptible shake of the head; his index rubbed ever so lightly across his thumb and Kira understood: money was an issue for some of these kids.

“I’ll see if the school can order them.” Kira replied vaguely. “And we get to keep them?” Ori exclaimed, his eyes sparkling like precious gems in a deep cavern.

Kira looked at her class, everyone but Bilbo looked wretched, but Kira knew that it was not for the same reasons. Having experienced Thranduil’s reaction first-hand, she could understand why Legolas would be afraid to bring home a book his father would think so far beyond his capacities that it would make the boy hate it; Tauriel, Ori and Bombur were probably loath to ask their parents or guardians for money for a schoolbook, especially as their actual schoolbooks were clearly hand-me-downs. Thorin and Dwalin worked hard for their money and should have the right to spend it on fun and extravagant teenage pleasures rather than dusty old books.

“The school will not spend one cent on us.” Thorin grumbled. “Well, tough luck for them, because I have a long wish list.” Kira replied, a steely note in her voice.

“What if the school says “no”?” Tauriel asked, taking into account everything that had been said.

“If the school says “no”, I’ll ask them why.” Kira answered. “Because they think we cannot read.” Legolas muttered.

“In that case, I will buy the rotten books myself and we will read them and that will teach them…No, I’m sorry, but is this a school or a prison? If a school decides that kids are denied materials to learn because they are unable to learn, then the fault lies with the school and not the kids. How about that?” Kira took a deep breath; it would not do to show the students her irrational frustration and anger with the school system in general and this school in particular.

“You’ll get yourself into trouble, Miss Kira.” Bombur commented between two bites of his sandwich.

“Good. I have to prove myself worthy of my class. So, where are we on those presentations?” Kira asked.

The minutes just flew, intelligent questions were asked, and answers were dug out, discussions were sparked and entertained, and Kira could feel herself breathe again. This was what she had dreamt of doing all her life.

“Listen class, I see you this afternoon and I wanted to ask you for a small favour. I want you to draw up, in your mind, your understanding of formal clothing. We’ll meet in the festivity room, and we’ll talk about an idea I had.”

Blank stares followed by excited chatter.

Bilbo’s eyes lit up. “I can wear my formal clothing. If I do, will you?” He asked Kira with earnest joy in his eyes.

“Deal.” She said and they shook hands on it. “No lunch for me then…” She chuckled, not in the least dismayed.

“See you this afternoon.” She waved at her class and made her way out of the school before someone else got it into their head to walk her to and from home.

What had she agreed to? Kira was exasperated by her hair and her sickly pale face, but she had given her word and she would not go back on it.

The long dark red dress shimmered in the midday light as she stepped out of the shower and pulled her hair up in a formal bun; she might as well go the whole nine yards, she thought, and put on make-up.

She felt silly and she couldn’t shake the impression of being watched as she walked back to school, her dress sweeping over the floor with every step.

“Kira.” Jesus Christ, was he everywhere? How many times had he said her name today?

“Thranduil?” She turned around, the flowing fabric billowing around her and almost making her stumble.

“Why do you…You look…Why…?” He would have looked adorably flustered if it hadn’t been for the frown that crossed his forehead as if some moody god had tried to strike out his face.

“Etiquette class this afternoon. We’ll start with formal clothing.” She replied haughtily and tried to walk away from him again, but he took one smooth step to block her path. Now, he was definitely doing it on purpose.

“Ah ok…Erm…Good afternoon.” He snapped, turned on his heels and walked back into the very direction he had originally come from. Did he often just walk to and fro for no reason?

“Miss Kira!” Ah, that was a much more welcome voice, Kira thought as Bilbo caught up with her. “Amazing idea, I am invited to Tho…Dís’ this afternoon and now, I don’t have to go home to change.”

Kira cocked her head questioningly. “That is nice, what is the occasion?” She asked. “Homework.” Bilbo replied.

“You do homework with Dís? In your formal clothing?” Kira frowned mockingly, exaggerating her confusion.

“No…erm…I…I do my homework with Thorin of course, but Dís invited me and I wanted to make a good impression on his…her…their family.” Bilbo spluttered, blushing a dark pink and rubbing his nose in embarrassment.

“Well, that is even nicer. I am glad to hear that you take your homework so seriously.” Kira smiled and let the boy lead her into the school. He was wearing a white shirt and a tawny waistcoat over a very formal looking pair of brown pants. Down to the pastel cravat and the pocket handkerchief, Bilbo looked like the very picture of sophisticated adolescence.

“I think you should not have worried that much.” Kira whispered as they approached the locked festivity room.

“Oh sweet potatoes and gravy.” Bilbo cursed under his breath, or at least his tone made Kira believe that it was meant as a curse.

Thorin looked like he was going to a funeral. All clad in black and dark blue, he reminded her of a raven more than of a boy, and his perpetual scowl had never looked as appropriate as in this moment.

“I look like a fool.” He complained, and Kira was about to tell him that she had never asked or forced him to don his most refined clothes, but Bilbo was quicker and his breathless “You look amazing” was probably also the better answer.

While she unlocked the room, a swishing sound got Kira’s attention and she turned around to see Legolas and Tauriel coming their way; they were both wearing clothes that looked foreign in cut and material: flowing, silky and absolutely stunning.

Kira patted herself on the back for her idea and, a few minutes later, when the whole class had arrived, she could feel excitement and interest burgeon instead of open hostility. Apparently, all of them had agreed to dig out their Sunday best for this class and Kira had to hold back not to stare at them in amazement.

They had never seen each other like that and the fact that they all seemed awkward and ill-at-ease made it easier for them to bond over the shared experience of trying to wear the clothes and not let the clothes wear them.

“You look absolutely marvellous.” Kira declared finally; her voice heavy with pride.

“I look like a clown.” Dwalin grumbled, the dark grey dress shirt taut over his broad chest and his dark hair slicked back elegantly. “You don’t.” Kira contradicted. He looked imposing and obviously uncomfortable, but he also looked very elegant and handsome in his dark trousers and his well-ironed shirt.

“We grown-ups wear our best clothes as an armour and as a reminder of who we want to be and what we want to represent. I see that you respect the weight that comes with formal clothing; your posture has improved, and this is the first time I don’t see any downcast looks and averted faces.”

She sighed: “You deserve to be proud of yourselves just as much as anybody else. This class is an etiquette class…and I want it to be a redemption. Children…we will have a ball.”

“A ball?” Tauriel piped up, her voice strangled with emotion. “A ball. We will have a winter formal.” Kira confirmed.

“Just us? Dís would love that.” Thorin blurted out and then hid behind his disapproving, grumpy mask again.

“No, not just us. We will organise it and the others will come and dance.” Kira smiled.

“We will?” Ori was doubtful. “Yup, we will see where your strengths lie and then we’ll work on everything that goes with it: cooking, serving, making small talk with Thranduil.”

“Are you sure you’re able to teach us that?” Dwalin muttered, apologising immediately when he realised that he said that out loud and that it was an insult that might well lead to ruining the good will Kira had for them.

“I am not, but we will all try. Should we try that?” Kira was worried that they’d refuse outright, that they’d laugh at her, but once again, the class surprised her when they all started talking at the same time.

“I am a good cook. God, I love food.” Bilbo exclaimed. “So do I!” Bombur laughed and ambled closer, already thinking up recipes that would work in that context.

“You’d dare organising a ball?” Thorin was standing right in front of her, his voice dangerously low.

“Yes…I’ve been told that Dwalin would give me a bloody nose for it.” Kira replied, acting braver than she felt.

“Dwalin? Never…He’s a good dancer and he loves it.” Thorin chuckled, a sound like faraway thunder rolling over the land and shaking the ground. “A ball…” Thorin mumbled pensively, his eyes wandering to Bilbo again and again.

Ah, yes, that was a part she had not thought about duly, Kira had to admit: with formals came the whole teenage anxiety-inducing ordeal of asking someone out and buying flowers and corsages.

“Hmmm, there should be fairy lights.” Ori muttered beside her, chewing on the end of his pen pensively. “We’d need a contraption of sorts for that, wouldn’t we?” Kira thought aloud, charmed by the idea and happy to have another one of them on board.

“That can be done. Legolas here is good at climbing things and we are good at crafting things.” Dwalin muttered in a low growl that was much less impressive as his eyes shone with a fierce glimmer of joy.

Kira had the feeling to grow taller by the minute; she was so proud of those kids who had been hailed as Satanists and who had followed her into every single thing she had pitched as a project. She would do her best not to let them down.

“Uh-oh.” Legolas made, standing a few feet away from her and looking around the walls to gauge how tall the ladder would have to be to attach fairy lights below the ceiling.

Whirling around, Kira almost ended up smothered in a dark grey woollen cardigan partially covering the white button-down she had looked at from much too close up this morning already. How many times could this man just manifest right behind her? Did he float? Was she deaf?

“The door was open.” Thranduil declared as if that explained his sudden appearance. “Yes, this is a school. If I locked myself in with a bunch of teenagers, with this bunch of teenagers, I’m sure someone would have called the firemen and the police by now.” Kira rolled her eyes. “Are you spying on us?” She asked with a wink.

“No…Class is over and I…I was curious what you were doing, looking like that…” He looked around and caught the embarrassed gaze of his son. “Oh, you look nice, Legolas.” He commented which made the boy’s ears turn pink with pleasure. “Thank you, Sir.” He breathed shyly.

“So…what is this going to be when it’s over?” Thranduil leant against the door he had pulled shut behind him and Kira couldn’t help noticing how tall he was; he had slender limbs and his whole body seemed to flow in almost liquid lines.

Snap out of it girl, he has asked you a question, Kira admonished herself and replied: “A ball. We’re going to have a ball.”

The closed door made her feel claustrophobic all of a sudden; it felt strangely as if she was the one pressed against the hard surface with Thranduil towering over her, the cool, gauging expression in his eyes making her squirm.

“Ah, really? And…will you send hand-written invitation to said ball?” Thranduil cocked one eyebrow. “Maybe we will.” Kira gave back in a stroppy tone. “So, the other classes are invited?” He pressed on.

“Why? Do you want to chaperone?” Thorin chuckled grimly. “As their headteacher, it falls within my responsibilities to oversee this kind of celebration if my class is to attend.” Thranduil answered stiff-lipped.

“Oi, lads, we are going to send old Thrandy an invitation.” Dwalin hooted under his breath, for he had caught the flash of embarrassment in the teacher’s eyes; Thranduil wanted to come, he wanted to be invited.

“Yes, quiet, Dwalin, thank you. Those are things to decide later in the process.” Kira tried to prevent a complete derailment of the conversation into complete and utter chaos.

“You are dismissed, I’ll see you the day after tomorrow.” Kira ushered the children out, confused by the fact that her colleague made no attempt to follow either the stream of chattering youngsters or his own son.

“I had hoped you would come to the lunchroom.” Thranduil murmured as soon as the students had vanished around the corner, flipping a strand of his perfectly smooth almost colourless hair over his shoulder nervously.

“Dude, this,” Kira pointed at her face and her dress, “did not happen in a jiffy. I had to go home and change. Otherwise, I would have come.”

“Ah…yes…well, it would be a shame to waste such a tremendous effort.” As he saw Kira’s face sour, he went on quickly: “Not that I want to insinuate that it would take a great deal of effort to make yourself look lovely, but as you’ve pointed out that you’ve taken pains to create this…” He waved helplessly at her, “I wondered what you had planned for dinner.”

I don’t cook myself a three-course menu, Kira thought, remembering the can of beans in her cupboard; she had not had the time or the inclination to go shopping since arriving and she was not exactly looking forward to the beans.

“Nothing. Why?” She asked, shrugging and retrieving her satchel from the floor.

“If you don’t mind seeing your students AGAIN today, there’s a little restaurant down the street. I feel like we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. Maybe, we can resolve that issue over dinner.”

Was she seeing things or did his face twitch?

“What makes you say that?” She asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

“You’ve called me an asshole? I am confident in saying that you do not like me overmuch.” He muttered, visibly annoyed. “True. I am sorry for insulting you.” Kira stood firm, not sure if she fancied having dinner with her stuck-up colleague whose eyes were dancing with dizzying stars like fireflies over a frozen lake.

[divineluce]

The Champs || Frank & Luce

Timing: Flashback to August

Location: Soul on the Rocks & Al’s

Tagging: @frankmulloy & @divineluce

Description: New to the job, Frank gets to know one of the regulars. Luce is as charming as ever.

Warnings: Alcoholism

There was nothing particularly distinguishing about being one of many of White Crest’s bartenders, but Frank has learned that being one who knew how to handle Soul’s more rambunctious crowds afforded him a degree of influence, and that was even without the use of his pheromones. He also learned that Soul’s patrons would sooner bend under a firm fist than a kind word--of course a kind word from him was a force within its own right, so it was just as well that he was just as competent in wielding the former. Unfortunately for Frank, he liked the use of neither, and the result was a bartender who mostly communicated through monosyllabic grunts, and lost more fights than won them. But he kept coming back for his shift the following night with no complaints and no apparent scrapes or bruises and while his pacifist method served him ill in a brawl, he always got the troublemakers out, so they kept him on. As long as they kept paying him, Frank was happy to stay on. 

It was Frank’s second week into the job, but as far as anyone was concerned he was a regular fixture in the beer-soaked tapestry of Soul on the Rocks. In return Frank was also starting to recognise common faces; who was there for a drink, who was there for a fight, and who wasn’t meant to be there at all, then there was Creepy-Joe, and finally coming to the conclusion that Jake was a massive tool. His first memory of one, Luce, was not what she looked like, but of heat. Literally. And Frank, perpetually cold, was like a moth to  flame, conscious of his distance and yet unable to help himself all the same-- heat, and the stink of cheap tequila. He put another shot glass down in front of her, which was an anomaly in itself considering Frank never got near enough to anyone to actually put their order down in front of them, but rather slid it to them across the bar top from a safe distance of at least 6 feet. “Your fifth shot...or is it your seventh? Who’s keeping count.” He wiped his hands down on the towel that was draped over his shoulder. “You sure that’s wise?”

Like so many other nights before her, Luce had been looking to get fucked up the night she’d walked into Soul. After all the shit she’d been through, with the Ring, with Remmy and Erin and Adam and her sister… The horrible, terrifying fucking conversation she’d had with Nadia, or rather, whoever was controlling Nadia’s body. And, as the final garbage cherry on top of it all, they’d been excommunicated. The threat of death at the hands of some of the women she trusted most, at the hands of her mother? It had shaken her up. Their mother had done… so fucking little to keep them safe. She’d abandoned them, banished them, went along with the whims of the goddamn council. And, on top of it all, there was all the normal shit. She was hauling ass all day, every day, trying to stay afloat. Bills had been coming in non stop and it was all she could do to keep her head afloat. After getting out of a particularly long session of tattooing, Luce had headed straight for Soul on the Rocks. She needed alcohol. Lots and lots of fucking alcohol.

Waving a hand at the bartender-- a new guy, she’d seen him around a few times, but never paid much attention to him-- Luce took the shot with a nod. But, his question made her pause and Luce stared at him over the rim of the small glass. Glancing at him blearily, she stared at the shot glass full of tequila. Fifth or seventh was a good question. But fuck him for asking. “Not me.” She said, tipping the liquid down her throat. It hardly burned, but alcohol never really did. Perks of being a fire witch. Swallowing, she set the empty glass back on the bar and stared at him. “Do they pay you to ask if people’s drinking habits are wise?” She replied. 

He met her drunken gaze with his own measured one, undaunted and undeterred. Yet there was a softness that blunted the edge; the good intention behind a stern word, though Frank was never great at dishing out the latter either. He answered her blunt edge in the way he did with most harsh words: an untiring patience and sometimes even a smile. This time, it was a slight upward tilt to the corner of his mouth, as he relieved her of the empty shot glass. “No. They pay me to kick people out when they’ve had one too many, but I like to give them the courtesy of asking before I start lugging bodies out.” Well that sounded horrifically ominous. “Alive bodies. Obviously. Just unconscious--most of them are passed out by the time I get them into a cab.” Frank said with some good-humour, a trace of a chuckle on each word in the hopes of easing the slip of the tongue that was more menacing than he meant. “It’s a lot easier for everyone concerned if I just walk them out instead of carrying them, and it helps the driver find the right building when they’re awake enough to give the right address.”

Frank had his head tilted to one side, quietly observing the woman that sat in front of him. He recognised her to be a regular, he also noted that she seemed off today. Albeit an easy conclusion to make for anyone that used Soul as their regular haunt. Tonight she looked like she brought a history with her and it was etched across her brow, and in her eyes, in a silent language he was not versed in reading. The temptation was to ask if she was alright, but at the risk of making himself over-familiar, he said instead, “should I be getting a cab ready?”

Rubbing the back of her neck, Luce let out a long sigh. Her fucking neck hurt from spending so long hunched over at the table. The piece had turned out great, just like all her work, but christ. It’d been five long hours of nothing but tattooing. So, a drink or five was what she’d wanted. Not some random bartender getting up in her business. “Lugging bodies, huh? Did I step into the funeral home on accident? This tequila or formaldehyde you’re pouring?” She joked, her words running together just a bit as she spoke. Shrugging, she sighed. Either way, it didn’t really matter much to her. She just wanted to get the fuck out of her head, at least for a little bit. And, with Nadia definitely not an option and Remmy… even less of one, Luce had gone for the old stand by. Alcohol. “Fair. Probably works out for the uber driver too.”

At his words, Luce shook her head. “I’m good.” She said, stubbornness apparent in her voice. She wasn’t dumb enough to drive-- she wasn’t interested in wrapping her 4x4 around a tree and having to deal with more fucking bills. But, she wasn’t ready to go back to Bea’s house just yet. Bea was never there anymore and Nell… who the fuck knew where Nell was most nights. Which meant that Luce would be alone. No, she wasn’t interested in going back to that place, the house that felt more like mausoleum than a home. 

“A funeral home is probably a lot cleaner for one,” Frank said, wiping a spill off the bar top as he does. In fairness, you need only step inside of the pub and he was sure that his point was made on first impression, and she seemed comfortable enough in her seat to suggest that she was a frequent patron of the establishment (that information alone had a whole story to itself). He was asked once why he bothered to clean the place up after the close if it was just going to end up being exactly as it was the following night. His answer was something along the lines of: he was more concerned with what the place might look like if he didn’t clean it up at all. “And if you can’t smell the difference between tequila and formaldehyde, let alone taste it, you are a lot more drunk than I thought.” There was a pause. “I mean...not that I would know what formaldehyde tastes like but I would imagine that it is significantly worse than tequila. Like, cancer-level bad. I would assume.” And this is where you shut up Frank. And fortunately for everyone, he does. Her reply hinted at a stubbornness that was both inherent and unyielding, and Frank’s been in enough fight to recognise those that he wasn’t going to win. Of course, that never stopped him from trying either.

 “Look,” he began, the single phrase intermingling with his exhalation until they became one, “I don’t know you. Obviously. So you do whatever you want. But I’m just saying, I’ve served people enough tequila shots to know that the solution to your problem—whatever that is—isn’t going to be found at the bottom of the fifth or seventh or fifteenth shot.” He concluded by collecting any abandoned and empty glasses, loading them onto a plastic tub to be brought out to the kitchen. “But like I said, you do whatever you want.” 

Snorting at the man’s joke, Luce’s expression sobered slightly at the thought of Erin. She didn’t know the funeral home attendant well, but she was very aware of the last conversation they’d had. Fuck. “I’d hope so.” She gestured to the stains on the bartop, the familiar wear on the wood grain, the slightly ripped and faded stools next to her. “Can you imagine a fucking wake in here?” She said with a slight curl of her lip. As the man continued to talk, she quirked an eyebrow. “Uh huh. Sure you haven’t.” She replied before running a hand through her hair. She fucking… didn’t want to deal with the world outside the doors of Soul. For now, she could just sit and pretend like nothing was happening. She could joke and drink and push aside all the stupid fucking feelings and responsibilities that weighed down on her.

But, this shitty fucking bartender just kept talking. Talked about how drinking wasn’t gonna help her-- like Luce didn’t already know that. It wasn’t about helping her, or finding answers. It was about forgetting. Glaring at him, she drummed her tattooed fingers on the wooden bartop, her skin burning hot with simmering anger. “Yeah, you don’t know me,” She paused, the alcohol flowing through her system making her head spin slightly. Squinting at him, she shook her head. “Who the fuck even are you? Shit, I’d rather deal with Creepy Joe instead of some Pop Psychology bro.” She said with a grimace.

Frank took in her anger with a calm appraisal as he continued to dry the newly cleaned glasses with practiced efficiency. While most would reasonably shrink from the fire, he was almost somehow more drawn to it. Like moth to flame—quite literally, it felt as if heat was just pouring out of her in waves. He could not pinpoint exactly when this happened but his 6 foot rule had been abandoned and Frank was now standing close enough that he could touch her. He just needed to take his hand away from the glass, reach out across the bar, and touch her. Boy did he want to, and he almost did, but then she shook her head. Frank found himself almost doing the same as his attention was snapped back into reality and his focus was drawn back to the intensity of her glare. He took a conscious step back and realised with overwhelming awareness how much he did not want to. “Fair enough.” He resigned with a nod. He looked around. A quiet spell had settled over the bar, and the threat of a brawl was distant enough that if he was quick he could probably get away with ducking out the side door for a couple of minutes. He grabbed the towel from the shoulder and tossed it aside, from his jacket pocket he produced a small white cigarette packet.

“Keep drinking then, see if that helps you, I’m sure Joe wouldn’t mind the company. I’m going for some air.” An invitation could be heard in there somewhere; Frank was seldom ever cordial enough to properly extend the invitation…or any invitation. “Do whatever the fuck you want. You’re right. I don’t know you.”

What the fuck was up with this guy? He was leaning across the bar and, maybe the alcohol was messing with her depth perception, but he seemed way too close. Luce pushed back in her seat, just to get a bit of space between her and the bartender. But, he seemed to realize that he was being a fucking creep and backed off himself. Good, she didn’t feel like throwing hands with someone tonight. For one, she wasn’t sure how well she’d be able to do, the alcohol clouding her vision and loosening her hold on the fire magic that dwelled within her. For another, she’d had… enough of fucking fighting lately. She just wanted to drink and sit and not think about all the shit that’d been going on in her life.

“Yeah, you don’t fucking know me.” Luce repeated. The bar wasn’t as busy as it usually was, but her anger had her blood boiling in a literal way. It was too goddamn hot in here. And fuck it, if this guy was going to be bartending at Soul, she might as well try and talk to him. Even if he was weird. The same could be said of most people in the bar, and of her too. Sliding off the barstool, Luce steadied herself on the bar for a moment has her vision swam. “But air sounds like a smart idea.” She said, more to herself than to him. Walking out of the bar, the cool night air washed over her. Thank fuck summer was over and done with. “Need a light?” She asked, leaning against the brick wall of the bar.

It seemed Frank’s entire existence was damned to fight his most basic instincts: to hand his customers their drinks, to close his distance when he was with friends (to have friends), to help steady a stranger who has had one too many drinks and was maybe not as steady on her feet as she first thought. Even as she swayed Frank did not so much as stir, even as every part of him itched to. He let her out first, following behind at a measured distance. “Look at that, a solution to your problem that isn’t alcohol.” He grinned around the stick of cigarette as he brought it to his mouth, “but what the fuck do I know.”  

The air was cool, and with the door closed behind him he was acutely aware of how warm she felt, even at his distance. He made home against a wall a little ways down from her, shaking his head at her offer with a polite thanks, “I’m good,” and he had to be. Mostly because if he wasn’t, that was an invitation for her to come closer, to hand him the lighter, and then for him to hand it back, and that was altogether too many hands for comfort. Frank didn’t smoke for the taste. He didn’t care much for the nicotine either. Like the alcohol, it never lingered long enough in his system to become a proper addiction, but with every inhalation of the hot smoke that was a few more precious moments between him and the undeniable hunger to feed, whether it was happiness or heat. Prolonging the inevitable, as he liked to call it. Not that he ever told anyone why he smoked, most of them were more interested in telling him why he should stop. Frank wasn’t interested in doing either. “So what is your problem?” He said finally, turning to face his new smoking companion, “you were downing your seventh tequila shot in a span of less than an hour in one of the biggest shit-holes in town. That could not have been an inspiring journey.”

“My solution to my problems so far,” Luce let out sigh, her breath coming out in visible trails in the mild fall night, “Have been paying the bills for you. So…. you should be thanking me.” She muttered as she pressed her back against the wall a bit more firmly. Her legs felt like jelly under her, courtesy of the tequila that ran through her system, as well as the run she’d taken earlier that morning. Running. She’d always liked running, but it felt like that was all she was doing now. Wake up, run, work, drink, and then collapse into bed, to try and snag a few fitful hours of sleep if she was lucky. And if she wasn’t lucky, she’d run and run and run until she was too tired to do anything else.

At his question, Luce glanced over at the man for a long minute before shaking her head. “Oh you know. The usual.” Being kicked out of her coven for resurrecting her sister from beyond the grave, nearly dying herself. “Family drama.” The fact that one of the women she’d been sleeping with had been possessed by a ghost, hell-bent on keeping her body. The fact that the other was a zombie who just kept getting themselves in fucking trouble? “Some people I care about have a knack for getting into trouble.” How she was so goddamn tired all the time? Well, that one she didn’t have to lie about. “Insomnia. Take your pick. All of them are good reasons to drink in the biggest shithole in this town.” She corrected. The Ritz Soul was not. 

“Right,” Frank’s mouth shaped into a smirk. A gesture accompanied by a faint laugh that almost, to perceptive ears at least, sounded like a scoff, “yours and everyone else’s in that damn bar.” The solution to most of Soul’s patrons, it seemed, was found either at the bottom of a glass or at the end of a fist, the former was usually a lot less messy. Neither seemed to make anyone any happier come day light. It was a temporary salve to a much deeper wound, and they come back the next night, and the ritual repeats itself again. Frank was no stranger to this particular practice and so, it seemed, was she.

Frank gave the woman a long, appraising look, as she proceeded to divulge the source of her problems. It was as vague as it was short, its details hidden by their unfamiliarity. He didn’t blame her, and a part of him wondered whether it was in his best interest to find out. Probably not. Distance, advised caution. He took a long drag of his cigarette, comforted by the warmth, and eased of his awareness of hers. She looked so tired—more than that, she felt tired. There was plenty of heat (strangely) but with his own cravings temporarily satisfied by the cigarette, there was not much happiness to be attempted by. He could feel the ache in her bones, the very weight of. He recognised it in himself. “Hmm,” his eyes returned to hers, attentive and empathetic. Oh he tried so hard to be hard, but he was always very bad at it, and worse at following his own advice. “You want a burger or something?”  He said very suddenly. “You look like you could use a burger.”

“Well, means business is booming for you.” Luce said glancing back into the bar through the dirty windows, her head listing as her body tilted just a bit more than she expected. Stumbling slightly, she caught herself on the wall. Her elbow smacked into her side, and she let out an involuntary yelp, “Siktir, motherfucker…” She mumbled, rubbing her side. Fuck, her head was spinning, the wall felt like it was shifting behind her back. And unless there was some new kind of fucked up wall monster that was going to… what, absorb her into the wall? No, she’d just drank too much. Again. It seemed like more mornings than not, she’d woken up with a foul taste in her mouth and started the morning with a few aspirin. Christ.

As the man looked over at her, Luce felt her lips tighten into a thin line. There was something she didn’t like about the way he looked at her. It felt like the way that people had talked to her when she’d revealed that Bea had died. Something halfway between pity and judgement, was what she would guess. And she didn’t really fucking want either. But, at the mention of food, her stomach growled loudly. Her stomach didn’t have the same reservations, apparently. “You know what? Sure. Why the fuck not, it’d be a quick walk. Al’s isn’t far from here.” She said, before remembering. Al’s. Celeste, she’d worked there before... Remmy, they’d had that conversation where they told her what they were in a booth tucked in the corner of the diner. Fuck. Maybe not Al’s. That’s what she wanted to say, but now her lips remained stubbornly shut. 

“Al’s it is.” Frank smiled. It was pleasant. Amicable. It was a smile that might have come paired with an offer of a hand to shake or an equally pleasant gesture, but since it didn’t (it never does) Frank had become practiced in making it so that a smile was just enough. Not that he got much use out of this particular skill. Most people couldn’t even get the slightest hint of an upward lift let alone a fully realised smile. Maybe it was his off day. Maybe because when he looked at how tired she looked he saw a reflection of himself. Whatever it was, it remained there as he pushed himself off the wall, extinguishing the last of his cigarette under his boot. Kindness was in short supply in a place like Soul, and this served as a good reminder that Frank was not the place he worked at. Which reminded him—“oh and by the way, when you say business is booming for me, you do realise that just because I serve the drinks there, doesn’t mean I actually run the place, right?”

The walk, as she remarked, was blissfully short, and quiet. This served Frank just fine considering he wasn’t much of a conversationalist, even if his previous insistence might suggest otherwise. She also seemed absent, as if occupied by distant memories, he didn’t need to see the downward tilt of her mouth to know that they weren’t pleasant, he could sense it. He could also sense that no talking, at least on his part, was going to make anything better, although some carbs to soak up some of the seven tequila shots she’d knocked back in the few short hours might. Thankfully Al’s didn’t host a great many customers in the early hours of the morning. “Get a booth,” he told her, which shouldn’t be any hardship considering only one or two were currently occupied, “and get whatever you want. You look like you could use it...no offense.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m familiar with the dickhead who owns Soul.” Luce replied as she made her way down the sidewalk, her feet stumbling slightly as she walked. It was fine. This was fine. The way the world was rotating around her, the way the pavement seemed to rise and fall like cresting waves? Totally fucking fine. She was good. So fucking good. Just another fucking day. “You’re a bartender. Tips. More people, more tips. I know half the guys in that bar and they tip just fine when I work on them.” She said, the words coming out in more of an innuendo than she intended. “Tattoos.” She explained, gesturing to the dark ink that covered both of her arms. “I do tattoos.”

As they entered the diner, Luce looked around at the place-- it wasn’t all that busy, which was good in its own way. “Don’t tell me what to do.” She growled before deliberately walking over to the counter and settling down there. Across the way, Luce heard a startled cough and, before she knew what was going on, a young man had tossed a twenty on the counter and was hurrying out of the door. She spun around in the plastic seat, scrutinizing the man as he hurried away. The light of the diner caught on his face as he opened the door of his car and Luce’s stomach lurched. Will. One of the members of the coven-- her mom’s coven, the coven that had… “Fuck.” She muttered, shaking her head doggedly. She wished she was back at the bar. As the waitress cast a skeptical look at her, Luce quirked a crooked smile. “I’d like a number five. Extra fries. And a large water, please.” As the bartender sat next to her, Luce cast him a long look. “I’m paying for this myself.” She didn’t need his charity.

Frank grinned, but his laughter remained stifled, the only hint of its existence was in the silent vibration of his entire frame. Tips. At Soul on the Rocks. Now that was a joke. “Right, see…Soul is known for a lot of things, but never for their generosity, especially when it comes to tipping their bartenders.” This was not entirely fair. Of course Frank could, as she did, work on them. Being what he was, he could have probably completed the task with even greater success, and with the profits to prove it. Alas, that was never Frank’s style. In his short time working there, he had already created an image of himself as the grumpy new bartender that would sooner bite your hand off than shake it. This was not an accurate assessment of his character by half, though it had more truth in it than Frank pretending to be pleasant and charming. He was bad at it, and he didn’t have the taste for it to try and be better. He turned to her arm as she gestured toward it. “It looks nice.”

Her sharp demand elicited an amused grin as she pushed past him toward the counter. He might have said something, a smart ass reply already half way formed on his tongue, were it not for another stealing his attention. A young man, his plate and drink unfinished, tossed some notes on the counter and hurried out. Strange. More interesting still was the woman’s reaction. They knew each other, more than that, there was a history there. Very strange.  Alas, Frank said nothing on this, but noted it quietly as he pulled up a seat next to her (respectably distanced, of course). “She’s paying for herself, and I’ll have a black coffee. Thank you.” He said, handing over what he owed. The waitress accepted it with a very pretty smile. Frank acknowledged this with a single nod and did not notice the string of numbers scribbled on the back of the receipt, and what was most likely her name followed by the letter ‘x’. The coffee was the first to arrive, blissfully hot. He took a ginger sip, not because he was bothered by the heat, but normal humans weren’t usually as tolerant to scalding hot coffee as he was. “Odd reaction,” he murmured around the rim of the cup. His head tilted ever so slightly in the direction of the waitress who was just now collecting the bill left behind by the mysterious man. Or perhaps not so mysterious if the woman’s reaction was anything to go by, “a friend of yours?” He paused for a moment, “or maybe not so friendly?”

As the man explained his situation, Luce nodded in thanks as the waitress set a large glass of water in front of her. Forgoing the straw, she took a long drink of ice water, the temperature soberingly cold. Well, not sobering, she thought to herself as she regarded the slightly slanting walls of the diner. “You could always go for the ‘grin and bear it’ tactic.” She said, pressing her finger into her cheek and twisting it, offering a fake smile she reserved for her mother and particularly stupid clients. “You could try asking the boss-man to throw on a “Hey, if I’m gonna be an extra bouncer, pay me like one” bonus. Or don’t, whatever. It’s your wallet on the line.” At his comment about her tattoos, she nodded. “I know. I designed them.” It wasn’t a brag, not really, just statement of fact. She did her own shit and she was good at it. That was her whole MO, right? She stayed in her lane and did what she was good at.

Watching the way the girl cast a bright, beaming smile, Luce rolled her eyes. Did this guy think he was some kind of player? But, if he was, he didn’t comment on the receipt. He didn’t even really talk about it. Instead, he gestured towards the seat the Will had previously been sitting at. Scowling at the ice cubes in her glass, Luce’s knuckles flexed around the glass. “Family friend. Bit of a shit, but that’s how it goes.” She muttered, thinking back to August. He’d been a family friend, before he’d decided to come for her sisters. And now, he wasn’t much of anything at all. She could still remember the way he’d fallen to his knees, how he’d willingly submitted himself to Lydia’s commands. A shudder ran down her spine and she took another drink from her glass. “What’s your deal, huh? You like being some kinda… bartender Superman or something?” She asked, glancing over at him.

The twisted smile that warped around her mouth, strangely enough, inspired a more genuine one to shape around his own. “Yeah, the whole fake-it-till-you-make-it thing isn’t really my m-o.” Sure he could be reserved and withdrawn—cold and severe were a few more of the choice descriptors that people often had assigned to Frank. He could be a lot of bad things but one could never say that Frank was ever disingenuous. As much as he might speak ill of his work, which he does when he was ever in the rare position of wanting to speak at all, he’d rather it be him than another person who might be more liberal in using the end of their own knuckles to finish a fist fight. Even, as she rightfully pointed out, if it was his wallet on the line.

Her knuckles tightened around the glass, and her words bit into an old memory—an old wound. A small gesture, a small shift in tone, but neither went past Frank’s notice. Probably best if he kept that particular observation to himself, and he does. “Right. That’s how it goes.” Translation: sore subjection, duly noted. She sought comfort in her glass of water, and he continued to nurse the heat out of his cup of coffee, looking up only when she spoke again. An amused smile flitted across his lips, half hidden by the mug as he lifted it to his mouth, as he mentally traded his wings for a red cape, and his jacket for a blue costume with a giant S on it. He looked fucking ridiculous. “I don’t like being anything, I just want to do my job, get paid, and get the fuck home. Frankly if your standard for Superman is breaking up drunk bar fights, then it is tragically low. Besides,” he took another drink of his coffee and put it back down. It formed a wet brown ring around the receipt, he noticed for the first time black ink stains peering through the damp ring, but didn't bother investigating further, instead returned to the thought at hand, “you’re the one sitting next to me, what does that say about you?”

“You do you. Like I said, it’s your paycheck.” Luce shrugged. She didn’t give a shit, it was this guy’s loss either way. Didn’t affect her any, as long as he kept pouring her drinks. And, given how many she’d had at Soul, he didn’t seem to have a problem with that. The waitress slid her plate in front of her, a large burger with a mountain of fries on the side. “Thanks. Could I get more water, please? ‘preciate it.” Luce said before taking a large bite from her burger. As fucked up as she was, she wasn’t gonna be a fucking dick to people who were just trying to do their job. Which meant the waitress. But, Superman here? Different story. He at least had the sense to drop the fucking topic of Will. “Mhm.”

Glancing over at him, she raised an eyebrow. Swallowing her mouthful of food, Luce replied thickly, “That’s bullshit if I’ve ever heard it.” She pointed at him with a fry. “You just wanna do your job and go home? Unless you’re working double shifts between here and Soul, this,” She gestured to the two of them, “seems pretty fucking off the clock to me.” Luce said before popping the fry in her mouth.  Lifting her now full glass of water to her lips, she shook her head. “It says I’m drunk on a Wednesday night and I need more carbs. Needed.” She deflected, looking at her already half-empty plate. “I guess you were right about the burger.” 

Frank took a sip from his coffee, his eyebrow cocked up from behind the mug in a silent answer to her accusation. He didn’t say anything for a moment, mostly because he wasn’t sure how to, which probably meant that to a certain degree, she was right. Of course, just because he knew she was right, didn’t mean that he also knew the answer to why he did the things he did. Why he warned her against that seventh shot, why he invited her out for a smoke, why he would’ve probably paid for her burger too had she let him. Whatever it was, he wasn’t about to find answers tonight. That was what he paid his shrink to figure out and then tell him about it so he could ignore it completely. Because caring for someone else was just too fucking hard sometimes. Caring for himself infinitely so. “Mhm.” Another sip from his coffee.

“I know.” She had positively tore through her burger. Frank exhaled a short, barely formed, chuckle. “I’m really good at my job.” She was also not the first drunk he’s had to deal with. Although, speaking of jobs, he also had his actual job to return to. Someone was bound to have noticed his absence by now…or not. It was Soul they were talking about after all. He finished the last of his coffee, scrunched up the napkin with the receipt and then dropped it into the now empty mug. He took out his phone from his pocket, pushed it across the space between them and drew his hand back. “Do yourself a favour, call a cab. Spare yourself that eighth shot and call it a night. If you’re lucky you might even hate yourself a little less in the morning.”

“Sounds like it.” Luce said as her eating began to slow, picking at her fries. Grudgingly, she had to admit that this guy had a point. He’d called her out on how fucked up she was. And, though the room still shifted around her, was still fuzzy at the edges, it was better than it had been. The water and food was making all the difference. As the waitress left her receipt on the counter, Luce glanced over at the tall bartender. Soul wasn’t a nametag kind of establishment and she hadn’t bothered to ask his name when she’d rolled up to the bar and ordered shot after shot. “What’s your name, anyways? I’m Luce.” She said, sticking out her hand. At his advice, Luce let out a small snort. A cab? What, and go back to Bea’s house? The house her sister hardly even stayed in any more? With all of it’s baggage and it’s memories and quiet, cold stillness? No fucking thanks. She was gonna crash on the couch at Ink Inc and call it a night there. But, Mr. Superman Bartender Bro didn’t need to know that. “You’re not wrong about calling it a night. Jury's still out on the hating myself bit.” She mused, the last sentence coming out of her mouth without her intending to.

“Frank.” He said, but didn’t take her hand. He almost did. The smoke and the coffee had offered some relief but it did little to distract from the fact that she was still very very warm, and never once did the awareness of her heat escape his notice. His hand hung awkwardly for a split second, unable to touch her but unwilling to pull away. He let his hand fall in the end, but by then the split second was a split second too long, though he managed to cover it by pushing the phone further toward her, as if he was meant to do that all along. He drew his hand back very quickly, and wrapped it around his coffee mug, clinging to any heat that may still be lingering. Jesus H, he always fucking hungry.

Frank could sense that her thoughts were not meant to have formed into words, and even as she said them, it didn’t look as if she realised that she did. That the guard that she had maintained through harsh words and sarcasm had cracks in them, and tender thoughts were slipping through, and she didn’t notice. Perhaps she was more drunk than he thought. Alternatively, maybe she was sobering up, and sobriety was a tiring thing to have to deal with. Frank doesn’t say anything, but he noticed. And now, she wasn’t just some drunk woman he would have sent home on a cab and forgotten about until the next night she came stumbling back into Soul (the way she spoke about it, it was obvious that she was a regular), she had a name. Names were powerful things, and terribly intimate. Frank squeezed his eyes shut, ran a hand over his face. “Or…I could drop you off. If you would like.”

“Frank.” Luce repeated. The name suited him. Short, to the point, and… well, frank. For a second, he left her hanging, as though he didn’t want to touch her hand but then seemed to think better of it. He nudged his phone closer to her which was fucking… Weird. He couldn’t just hand it to her like a normal fucking person. Shaking her head, she pulled her hand back from his and pushed it into her jacket pocket, pulling out her own phone. “It’s not the 90’s, I’ve got a phone of my own. I don’t need you to call anyone.” She growled, though the words lacked their usual bite. At this point, she was just tired. Tired of this town, tired of the well-intentioned people who kept trying to help her, and tired of the fact that she couldn’t do anything to change any of that. As he offered to drop her off, Luce scowled at him as she tossed a bill onto the counter. He really was trying to play that “Knight in shining armor” card, wasn’t he? First his phone, now a ride? 

Shoving her phone back into her pocket, Luce stood up from the counter. “I think the fuck not. Listen, you seem like a decent enough guy, which is why I’m just gonna say, you’re barking up the wrong tree here.” She said, shaking her head. “Trust me, this is nicer treatment than what Jake got when he made a move on me the first time.”

Luce’s reaction was not an uncommon one. The registering of rejection as they realised he would not answer their offer of a handshake with his own, the confusion that inevitably followed because what person was that much of a dick to refuse a simple handshake? Sometimes even outright offence because who the fuck does he think he is? The corner of Frank’s mouth twitched. Perhaps he should attempt an encouraging smile. Jesus H. He had done this a hundred times before yet it never became any less tedious. For his efforts it seemed, rather predictably if her prior behaviour around him was of any indication, she seemed to follow the ‘outright offense’ route as she growled her reply. He thought it wisest to not add acid to fire and opted to silently pocket his phone instead, wondering all the while why he even tried in the first place. Why he kept trying.

She stood up. Very suddenly. He’d thought he was being kind, but clearly Frank wasn’t very good at it. He was silent at first and then, with a start, the weight of what she’d said came flying back to him. “Oh! Ohhh…no. I mean—” He stifled a laugh and it came out as a choked cough. Frank pressed a hand to his face and shook his head, a smile visible between his fingers as his shoulders quivered through a silent laugh. He should be offended that she had made the comparison with him to Jake of all people, but it seemed fatigue had imbued the whole misunderstanding with a strange sort of amusement where there usually wouldn’t be any. “Yes ma'am,” he said once he had recovered some degree of solemnity, “duly noted.”

[spaghetti-machete]

TMA season 5 ending predictions

if everyone was jumping off a cliff would you do it? the answer is, I don't have a choice, Mother "Eight Legs McGee" of Puppets wants me to and therefore I also want to. everyone else is doing predictions why not throw my hat into the ring I'm callin this bad boy the "spider down the drain" theory. lemme give you a run down: - Anya Vilette being sent through the ripped seam in the shit $3 leggings fabric of reality in the basement of Hill Top Road? mama spiderlimbs just testing out the reality rip to see if it worked. sends Anya to the Institute as a gift and proof of experience. take that jonah. there's your blessing from the Web, stick it in your piehole - the Gang™ clamber up/crawl sobbingly to Hill Top Road and use it as a refuge. and it's weird, it kind of works but also it messes with them in a way that's not really better. outside is dangerous. inside is just another form of more concentrated, more scary dangerous. theyve walked into a spiderweb because everywhere else is taken. im not saying Jon is the Virgin Mary taking shelter in a stable to give birth to the Anti-Apocalyse, but im not not saying it - they start accidentally going through the crack in reality. at first its just jon, by accident, because he thinks he can control it. almost. he's wary but Basira is less wary, and decides to go through without him finding out. she comes back and this is when we, the listeners, find out - but it fucks her up, somehow, it messes with Basira, she's not really Basira Proper anymore. it's not the NotThem, but it's clear that she's evidently aware enough of her difference, and how she is supposed to be, and how she isn't that right now, for it to be distressing - eventually the climax of the story is (this is 3am im writing this cut me some slack) that the answer to Gerry's question - "are [the Fears] something we created, or are they the reason we're afraid? maybe they've always been here, maybe they turned up the first time something felt afraid" (paraphrased it is 3am) gets answered - the answer, to every single one, is yes. Jon gets sucked through the crack, he's closed off from the other side completely, and he's in this new world where the Magnus Institute doesn't exist because it doesn't need to exist. People are afraid but nothing feeds on that fear. There are no entities, no Avatars, no nothing. And what happens to a very very hungry Archive? An Archive that has a documented record of all the world's worst ebbs of every single fear a person could have? He starts bringing those fears to life himself. I don't know how, but seeing as Elias came out with the line "a living testament to people's fear" or some bullshit, it's clear that Jon isn't a passive record of these fears, he's actively involved in every single one of them. I mean - "the job I put everything into had trapped me into spreading evil" (Martin, Panopticon) - even the Archivist's assistants recognise that this is a thing that's happening and is possible. And what better, more satisfying end for Jon's emotional character arc than for him to be trapped in a new world, to have saved the old one somehow, but to have finally realised that the whole reason for his very existence is basically an ouroborous of fear that he cannot escape? that his timeline in space and reality is essentially self-perpetuating, that he'll never truly learn what the Mother of Puppets is, only that the Fears he chased for so long were ones he now brings himself to another world? I mean I almost feel like the Spider is nearing God in this situation. Every time an entity or an avatar talks about the Web, they downplay it so fucking hard that it's almost inconceivable that the Web wouldn't be pulling the strings of literally every entity at this point. The Hunt? trap you can't escape. "It didn't make me want it... just made me...need it" (Daisy, in the coffin) The Lonely? Peter Lukas describes falling into it (not literally) as if everything lined up so utterly perfectly. "I could scarcely believe that any God could line up so perfectly with my heart". The Vast? Very obviously everyone's Favourite Gay Uncle with Pizzazz Simon Fairchild literally fell into it. And it caught him. The sky caught him...like a web. it just kind of did. I mean, have we ever heard from a failed Avatar? one that didn't quite pass their SATs, their GCSEs, even the equivalent of a Fear BTEC PE? I don't know if it's simplifying it down too much, but in every instance, Avatars and their Kinder Horrific Suprise Happy Meals are the equivalent of spiders, webs and prey. And not always direct and unchanging comparisons, either. In this instance, was it Peter Lukas who was preyed upon and drawn in? Or was he the spider, when he made his very first victim disappear? Simply searching for a meal to feed another God without realising, or feeding himself? Did his desires and needs for Utter Loneliness develop from Shitall, Middle of Nowhere, Nonexistent Country? Or were they a gift bestowed upon him by the Mother of Puppets, ensuring she had enough playing pieces in the right colours to serve her endgame? As Oliver Banks said - easier to just do what she asks.

[justkeeptrekkin]

Celestial Bodies: the OCs!

Hi everyone! So, my 1920s ineffable husbands fic, Celestial Bodies, was received with the most ridiculously unexpected praise- I was fully prepared for people to hate this fic because it had so many original characters. But you all seemed to love them just as much as I do, and that really means a lot.

I had a think about this, and figured, hey, some people might be interested in hearing a big of back-story. If you want to find out more about their appearances, you can find it in this post here. 

Julian Knackerton (Jules)

Jules has always stood out amongst the rest. As a child, people immediately identified him as ‘the strange quiet one’, the child who stood at the periphery and measured the situation before joining. So introspective and, to his teachers, almost frighteningly advanced in his studies. Jules has never considered himself that strange, really, just different. The two needn’t mean the same thing. 

His was born in Kensington. His mother, nee Edi Abramovich and daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrant Lev Amramovich, married local businessman Fenston Knackerton. They had just one child, Julian, who showed signs of being incredibly empathetic and kind, if not very quiet. They had no concerns for him at all, despite what his school peers (and their parents) said about him. 

Julian went to a local grammar school and subsequently to Cambridge, where he met Dodders and Bingy. They fast became friends, as not a single one of them performed any pretence- unlike some of the boys at the University. Jules never had so many friends as he did at Cambridge, and it’s for that reason that he loved the experience quite so much. He is unfailingly loyal to each of them. His parents often asked whether he had met any nice girls in Cambridge, their letters regular and comforting. He always responded: not yet, mother. I’m not at all interested in marriage and daresay I never shall be. I hope that doesn’t disappoint.

Perhaps it did disappoint, at first, and likely neither one of them understood. But they didn’t mention it any further, and when they saw just how comfortable he was without any prospect of a wife, they didn’t feel like they had to press the matter. 

Jules has never had a job, living off the rewards of his father’s successful mattress business. Or at least, that’s the impression that the others have had. 

His employers, the British Secret Service, know otherwise.

Xenophon Smith (Xeno)

Xeno will never work for the British Secret Service, and we can thank God for that. But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a wonderful way of looking at the world that we could all learn from.

Xenophon Smith is one of four children, a middle child; the oldest, Alcibiades; second, Agrippina; then, Xenophon; then the youngest, Hektor. Each of the Smith children shone in one particular way or other. Alcibiades became a minor politician, being fairly skilled in rhetoric and encouraging the crowd. He is quite fierce, to this day. Agrippina is a spectacular sportswoman, and became one of the few women to play at the Olympic games, in swimming. Hektor is a chef, and cooks at the Ritz. (How he came upon this job is unknown to anyone in the Smith family. Xeno had told Crowley that his little brother was looking for a job, so perhaps it something to do with that? Xeno will never really know.)

Xeno’s skill, meanwhile, lies in his optimism. It is not a skill to be downplayed, although people have done so throughout his entire life. He is one of the only people amongst his friends to have not gone to university, instead, enlisted in the War. 

He is a survivor of The Somme. 

Stronger than anyone in his family, including his athlete sister and rhetorician brother, Xeno emerges from the tragedies of World War I and re-enters the social scene in London, living with his parents. He finds good in all things and all people, finding joy in many things that might help him forget the rest. Very few people can mentally survive such monstrosities as he’s seen, but Xeno does. 

He meets Jules one day in the post-office queue, when Jules helps him find the right sized envelope to post a letter to his sister. How they ended up being so close, it’s hard to say, though it may have something to do with the fact that after their post-office meeting, they went to The Ritz and got extraordinarily drunk.

Shortly before Crossley Hall in 1923, Xeno thinks he’s actually quite ready to live on his own. After the heart-break at Crossley Hall, and no longer living with his family, he thinks he might, in fact, need a little help to get back up on his feet. And thus he meets Evans. 

Evans is the first person to speak to him neither with patience nor impatience; only with interest, and perhaps something close to admiration. Xeno, at last, feels special.

Tilly Topping (Tilly)

Tilly is from a large family based in Birmingham. During the industrial revolution, her father, Samuel Topping, worked in a cutlery manufacturer, it being a city well-known during the Industrial Revolution for its metalwork. The owner of the factory, Gerald Smythe, had been a cruel employer and overworked his men and women. Samuel had led a rebellion against Smythe Metalworks, and ended up, inadvertently, being elected its new leader. Samuel Topping thus came into a sudden influx of wealth, formally bought the factory off of Gerald Smythe, and renamed it: Topping’s. 

Samuel and his wife had already two young children, and moved from their smog filled little home to a countryside mansion. They had two more children before they had Matilda, aka Tilly. She is the youngest of the family and by far the feistiest. Her father, ironically, has never been keen on her attitude, fearing it would bring a bad name up on their family; her mother keenly encouraged it. Tilly still likes to spend time with her parents, but moved to London once she finished at school to see a little more of the world. Samuel Topping hoped that this would earn her a good husband from a wealthy, London-based family. 

Tilly was dazzled by London and its nightlife. During her younger years, she found that boys were quite entertaining, but only to laugh at. This hasn’t changed in her adult years. It wasn’t until her first burlesque show in Hackney that she realised that she was extraordinarily interested in women, and not just in the mischievous girlish way she’d always told herself had been the case. 

She has a brief but tumultuous relationship with a dancer from a club in Hackney, waking up one day to find that she’s been both robbed and left for a man, of all things. She mends her broken heart by finding some silly men with little pretence and nothing to hide- running into Dodders, Bingy, Xeno and Jules at Henley rowing regatta. They take her under their wing like they’ve known her all their lives, and they are immediately dedicated. 

Although she has never been afraid of entering social spheres alone, with no recognisable name title, no one to link arms with her, she is far happier having her boys around. She especially loves how no-nonsense Jules is. And it is through Dodders that she meets a certain girl, pretty and perpetually pink cheeked. Constantly smiling and gentle in way that Tilly has never encountered. 

Tilly has a pet guinea-pig called Sausage. This surprises any guests who come to her flat. Lottie Swaddle-Swidworth loves both of them. 

Lottie Swaddle-Swidworth (Lottie)

Lottie went to Hanford Girls’ School in Dorset. Lottie specifically chose this girls’ school in the countryside because it has a lot of horses. There is very little that brings her as much joy as riding a horse, answering to no one and feeling no pressures of the world other than whether Sugar-plum the horse needs to stop for a drink.

The Swaddle-Swidworth family go back generations. They hail from Wiltshire and own half of the county. Lottie has a sister called Phillida, who is substantially more intellectually endowed than Lottie but not necessarily any better for it. The Swaddle-Swidworth parents were sad not to have borne a son, but were happy, at least, with two content daughters, should they marry well might inherit the estate. Phillida is three years older than Lottie and does just this; she finds a silly but impressionable man from Lancashire and they both inherit the family home. Phillida reigns there for many decades.  

Lottie quickly realises that she, in her family’s eyes, is now superfluous. She is loved, but nothing she will do will make any of them proud. In a way, she is relieved; she has never had her sights set on greatness. But it naturally, of course, makes her feel dull and unappreciated (when she is in fact shining-bright and wonderful). 

Seeing little else that she can do, she moves to London to live with a school friend. She misses the countryside enormously, and dreams of cuddling chickens and mucking out the stables. At night she dreams of fields, but during the day, she dines at the finest restaurants, shops at Harrods, and drinks at the best watering holes. It is at one of these watering holes that she meets Humphrey Doddering-Heights, and the both of them get on enormously well. 

It makes perfect sense to get engaged the following day. It pleases both of their families enormously. 

Lottie likes all of his friends, and they all like her. It all seems like it’s going perfectly, could she want anything more? It’s only when she meets the most astoundingly beautiful, powerful, witty woman on the planet that Lottie reassesses everything she knows about herself. (Perhaps those midnight games she played with the girls when she was at school, kissing each other for a dare, were a bit more meaningful than she’d realised at the time.) Tilly is larger than life, but kind and intelligent. She is unabashedly herself and she sparkles. 

Tilly makes her feel like she can sparkle too. 

Humphrey Doddering-Heights (Dodders)

Dodders comes from an old Devonshire based family. In England, you do still get these types of families, even after the economic drain of the war; they have generations of history, having owned estates in the countryside, having owned their land and seemingly going back forever and ever. If you walk down the corridors of Crossley Hall, you’ll see the esteemed Doddering family, once a strong line of soldiers, wise and sometimes cruel. You’ll see them marry into the Heights family for peace-keeping reasons, and over the years, each Doddering-Heights master portrait becomes a little less intimidating, a little less foreboding, and there’s possibly a little more creative licence used in making their jaws appear squarer than they probably were.

Dodders is the gentlest of them all, the softest product of the Doddering-Heights lineage. But by no means the least brave or good of heart. He has a younger brother, Eustace, whom he has done all he can to help out of the Doddering-Heights home; an oppressive place that was filled with dread and anxiety during their childhood. He’s learned to cling onto his golden-retriever smile and bouncing attitude, if not just to make his little brother smile. Life was often spent tip-toeing quietly downstairs so as not to disturb their parents, playing loudly in Humphrey’s room with toy soldiers. They weren’t allowed to play outside, or on the beach. 

Sometimes, the butler Thomas would sneak them away to the dinghy for an afternoon, conspiring with their tutor (who would tell their parents they’d be going for an educational trip to the Roman ruins in Bath). Thomas would be the one to come running if they had nightmares; and Dodders would be the one to wipe his little brother’s nose when he cried.

Shortly after graduating (with an underwhelming qualification from Cambridge, having just scraped by in his exams) he left the Doddering-Heights estate and moved to London, where he lived off a monthly allowance from his parents- who assumed he was training to be a lawyer, soon to return to Devon. He ended up being fired quite swiftly from his job, and did not tell his parents. His little brother, hating Cambridge just as much as he had, ran away to live with him in London. 

His parents think they’re supporting his training in London up until 20th February 1924, when he tells him he’ll be moving in with Bingy (who does end up having a job, and can hold one, too.) He adds to this that he is no longer engaged to Lottie. Their parents do not take this well. 

Eustace marries a lovely girl from a Lincolnshire family, more old money that doesn’t look like it’ll dry out soon in the wake of the war. He is very happy walking dogs and doing little else. This, at least, pleases the parents.

Dodders is a naturally joyful man who’s used this demeanour to brighten everyone’s lives. 

Particularly a certain-

Alistair Bingham (Bingy/Bing)

Bingy does not come from old money, but he does come from a background of relative privilege. His father is a doctor from a small town North of London, and his mother is an History teacher. Bingy inherited their wits, and gained something more that neither of his parents had; a sense of humour. 

When he joined Eton, he prepared himself to hate it, knowing that his peers would all be children of politicians and Lords and Dukes, people who were far higher up the food chain than himself. At the tender age of 11 he ended up being put in a dorm with two rather brutish boys, twins of the Earl of Kent, and another boy. This boy was quite short and round; little did either of them know he’d shoot up to six foot five by the time he was seventeen. This boy was Humphrey Doddering-Heights, and he was the first person Bingy met at Eton. 

When the others teased him for his relatively low social standing, Humphrey didn’t seem to care. More than that, he seemed to like Bingy, despite his serious demeanour. Perhaps because, through it all, Dodders knew how to identify someone who was actually dull, actually cold. Bingy warmed around Dodders immediately. 

They became a duo very quickly, the other boys singling them out at first, hiding their books or leaving dog turd on their desks. After a while, people grew bored of teasing them. Bingy never retaliated, only coolly dealt with said dog turd without comment or a turned nose. There was something disappointing in that, for the bullies who lived with them. 

Bingy has known that he loves Dodders since pretty much the beginning. 

He graduates with a 2:1 at Cambridge in History, going through it all with Dodders. They find something in each other that they’ve never known from anyone else. 

It seems perfectly natural to spend the rest of his life with Dodders. 

[painfullyshoreditch]

I accidentally stalked an e-girl

Oh god, this may be clickbaity and makes no sense but I have no idea how on Earth I’m supposed to title it, so I should just explain.

I’m really just using this blog as a playground where I can just talk about things on a whim rather than get in my head about how its curated, so if a title makes me kinda look bad, so be it. 

We’ll refer to this lady as G. She is a recognised (not prominent) singer/rapper in the UK, specifically London, and I was a fan of her music. At that point, she was fairly fresh in the game, with her 30 minute soundcloud mix/EP released that garnered traction from my spotify suggestion playlist.

Absolutely typical e-girl look. Conventionally attractive, with a alternative edge of coloured hair and piercings.

The first time I had seen her in person, she was getting off the overground at highbury and islington station. I recognised her by her hair, but didn’t have time to properly see if it was her, so I decided to tweet her when I was home asking if she was there wearing a lilac maxi-skirt. 

Turns out, she replied, it was a pair of long and loose trousers.

Anyway. You’d think the story ended there, however not on my watch apparently. 

I was in a cafe near my university and I saw her!

She was sat down, drinking a cup of tea or something, and I asked her if she was who I thought she was.

She was! I was excited! We had a long chat about her situation and found out she was local to the area. I thought it would be a great idea to keep in touch with her as one of my upcoming projects was to film a music video, and I figured that this would be the perfect opportunity to do so. 

We exchanged socials and went about our day. 

I was so joyfully inept after that interaction, that I left my Macbook in the cafe, as I was supposed to be working there.

Thankfully I managed to retrieve it, but the story of getting to that point will probably be a shorter, separate one. I’ll add the scope for a hyperlink here when I get to it. 

Long story short, although G was lovely, her management refused to let us shoot with her for the music video, and that was fine. 

We found another artist, and moved on with our lives. I was happy that we (to this day) are still mutuals and was comfortable admiring her from a distance.

Our paths crossed again during- wait for it- a Charli XCX/PC music halloween party I won tickets for. 

When we (my friend and I) were in, it was quickly established who won their entry, and who was invited, made possible by balenciaga drip coating members of The Echelon™️ and different coloured wristbands. 

That’s why some people on the invite list actively refused to talk to me, and it really affected my confidence in speaking to others at the time, making it a bit overwhelming to do more than wave at her when we caught each other dancing. 

To summarise, a lot of shit went down (enabling another linkeroo here) but there was a succinct moment where I could’ve caught up with G, beyond just dancing with her during a DJ set, but due a massive kerfuffle to the say the least, I had to rush around and ignore her. 

Looking back on it, it would’ve been a good idea to have shot her a quick DM apologising for the lack of catch up but I was really overwhelmed by the entire situation and figured she was “over me” because she got invited to a party that I could only enter by chance. 

Fast forward to not much interaction until I meet her by absolute chance! One of my favourite pastimes has and always will be viewing live music- and as someone who had their fair share of viewing industry giants (a privilege I can attribute to my childhood bestie’s mum’s career), at that point in alternative-ville I was obsessed with those who were up and coming. 

So we are at this gig, and I am aware that the musician performing has, in fact, interacted with G on social media in the past, but figured that was about it. 

The person performing was a really little known musician from Scotland that spotify suggested for me (thanks again, spots) and it was really surprising to see that G was there!

I bit my tongue again the entire time, and kept to the rear sides/bar although I’m pretty sure she noticed me. Firstly, I was just way too awkward to initiate the reunion, and Secondly, was under the weird impression that to her, there could only be so many weird occurances to see my face and call it a coincidence. 

Hence the title of this post!

Gosh, I hope that whoever is reading this is finding it entertaining.

As mentioned previously, we are still following each other on social media, but I’ve never and am still really uncomfortable communicating with her because I have been perpetually feeling like an awkward fan who’s toeing the line of accidental stalker, when I really just want nothing other to be a chill acquaintance or maybe friend if I got to know her better. 

The reason why I made this my premier post is because it was recently brought up in (socially distant) conversation with my friend. They mentioned that they had a crush on this guitarist they knew in a band, and with a bit of research I discovered guitarist and G were mates, and that the band they were in were going on tour with her at the end of the year!

Who woulda thought. Now I have to wrestle with the idea of playing wingman to my friend and risk gig security being on my ass in the event that I am seen as some kind of threat. 

I promise I’m not!! I’m just here for the vibes.

Tell me, team, should I go to the gig? Am I being too anxious about this whole palaver? Let me know by messaging me! 

Also, what type of content would you like to see more of? As much as this is a personal contribution, I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts of Shoreditch and how painful it can actually be. 

Signing off, 

L xx

[twatd]

Once Again

We return. WicDiv is in the final stretch, and so is TWATD. The first of our two essays on #44, focusing on the issue’s echoes and callbacks. Spoilers – like oh so many spoilers – below the cut.

Alex: Remember issue #14 of The Wicked + The Divine? The Woden remix issue? I reckon, with a bit of ingenuity, you could use the same method – cutting up panels from elsewhere in the series, pasting them in new contexts – to make a fan edit of #44, front to back.

The issue is crammed tight with echoes of old images. It put me in mind of Avengers: Endgame, the way it’s constantly calling back to moments from the past twenty-one movies, and the criticism of that tendency as ‘fan service’.

In WicDiv, this echoing feels inevitable. The series has always had its repeating motifs. Going  back to the very first issue, we get a whole host of phrases we’ll be seeing over and over: “Once again, we return.” 1-2-3-4. “I’ll miss you.” “Don’t.” Kllk. And images, too – from that very first cover, with its carefully-framed headshot echoed on the first page inside, something the first arc plays with again and again.

But what is the purpose of it, other than reminding us of something we’ve seen and loved in the past?

To answer that, let’s look at some specific examples – beginning, as the issue does, with Lucifer. From the very first panel of her, stood in a variation on her classic power pose, Luci is pretty much playing the Greatest Hits here. She lights a cigarette on her own inferno, holding a familiar eyebrow-cocked expression. She teases a finger-click, taking us back to the courtroom. Her threat of violence to Laura, framed side-on, recalls Lucifer’s murder in issue #5, and Ananke’s millennia of practice for that moment as seen in #36.

Lucifer wraps herself in motifs and echoes possibly more than any other character this issue, and it feels like armour. She’s the one member of the Pantheon clinging on to the lie of godhood, playing her role because it protects her from the consequences of what she’s done. She’s perpetuating Ananke’s cycle, and so she reaches for the easy iconograpy, the tropes, of the Lucifer myth.

It’s worth noting that most of these images are inverted. In that last example, Lucifer stays on the same side of the panel, but switches her role, from victim to the position of power. Even the colours of her outfit are flipped – white to black, blue to red – and her pose too, with arms up rather than down. Tim is going to be exploring the Two Girls in Hell sequence in his essay, so I won’t go too deep on that, except to point out that when Laura saves Luci, it’s by taking Ananke’s “I’ve missed you” and making it sincere.

#44 does this over and over, taking a familiar motif and inverting the meaning. We’ve heard a lot of variations on “it’s okay”. Minerva, begging Ananke to tell her it’s going to be okay, a conversation we’ve likely all had with ourselves at some point. Its answer at the end of that arc, laid out in black and white: “It was never going to be okay.”

Here, it’s Dionysus who wields the phrase, and for the first time “it’s okay” isn’t a lie. Dio isn’t pretending that death won’t come for us all, or that Minerva’s situation is anything less than fucked. Instead, he’s encouraging her not to fear the inevitable. He isn’t offering denial, but acceptance.

Then there’s the other character interaction Minerva has this issue, which inverts something familiar in a much uglier way – her relationship with Baal. Time and time again, we’ve seen Baal wrap his arms around Minerva’s tiny frame. It’s indicative of the role he thought he played in her life, somewhere between bigger brother and father figure, but he now knows this was just a way of manipulating him.

In #44, Baal takes Minerva in his arms one last time, with very different intent. That big hand, able to cup her entire head, used to comfort or protect her, is used instead to smother. That tight embrace becomes a murder weapon. The contrast turns what could be a triumphant moment – this is the defeat of WicDiv’s big bad, after all – into an unsettling one.

Of course, it wasn’t much better the last time WicDiv’s big bad got taken out, as #44 is ready to remind us. The issues it draws from more than any other are the series’ first, and its midpoint. #22 and #44 are both stories about what happens when you beat the minions and get to the dark lord in their tower to find them helpless.

Here the repeated image – Laura with arm outstretched weighing up whether to kill the villain – acts as a kind of mental hyperlink. We’ve been here before. Twice before, in fact, just a couple of issues apart. (The second also introduced the idea of Woden’s kill-switch video release, which is vitally important to where this issue ends up.)

Both times, Laura hesitated – and then acted anyway. Our expectations are primed for the same thing to happen again. But, as any comedian will tell you, you set up pattern on the first and the second beat, then break it on the third.

This time, Laura hesitates – and is talked down. We see how much she’s grown as a character, because she’s put in the exact same situation, right down to the composition of the image and the people around her – Cassandra always hovers over her shoulder like a goth Jiminy Cricket – but the outcome is different.

I’ve mentioned fan service already, but there’s an alternative term I’ve been skirting around: payoff. A good final chapter (depending on how you view the epilogue) should bring together the threads of the story up to that point. That’s as true of WicDiv as it is of Endgame, as it is of a Dickens novel.

I do still worry about accessibility – how much of this comes across if you’ve only read each issue once, like a normal person – but maybe that’s not giving enough credit to the fantastic work of Jamie McKelvie + Matt Wilson making these images so immediately iconic, so mentally sticky, that you can recognise their vague outline five years later. As Tim suggested when I raised this question, these connections are likely kicking around in the subconscious of a more casual reader, even if they couldn’t put together the full serial-killer wall I’m making here.

There’s another thing, too. The fact that all these echoes are backing up feels indicative of what Laura is trying to do: breaking the cycle. Ananke’s six millennia-long plan is in its death throes, and this is one final twitch. Over and over, the issue shows that while the circumstances and tools might be the same, intent can change the meaning and outcome.

I suspect we’ll be free of echoes next issue, for the first time. I wonder if I’ll miss them.

Enjoyed this essay? You’ve got like 24 more hours to throw a bit of cash our way over at patreon.com/timplusalex, before we close down the Patreon in August. Think of it as a going-away present. Or a tip.

[unpack-my-heart]

Above, Beneath, Betwixt, Between (formerly ‘The Ghost of You’) – Updated

@tinyarmedtrex @violetreddie @xandertheundead @constantreaderfool @eds-trashmouth @mrs-vh

PSA: I changed the name of this fic. It was once ‘The Ghost of You’ but I don’t think that fit the story anymore, so I changed it. Hope that isn’t too confusing!

Chapter 4 - Nothing Ever Becomes Real Until It Is Experienced

Read on AO3 HERE

A stream of lava-hot water hit Richie’s back, waging a brutal war against the knotted muscles of his back.

“SHE’S ALL I NEED ALL OF MY LIFE!”

He rubbed the bar of ivory coloured soap between his hands, before rubbing the soapy lather over his chest.

“I FEEL SO GOOOOD IF I JUST SAY THE WOOOOOORD”

Turning around, Richie closed his eyes against the torrent of water, letting it rush over his face and chest, the soapy suds disappearing down the drain.

“ SUH-SUH-SUSSUDIO”

Richie opened his eyes, mouth still half open from where he’d been singing, and, as if he had always been there, Eddie’s disembodied head looked back at him from where it was sticking directly through the shower curtain.

“Richie! The lambs have come back down off the hills and – oh good lord, you’re naked!”

“JESUS FUCK!”

A primal scream tore its way out of Richie’s throat as he unceremoniously tumbled to the floor of the shower, clasping helplessly at the shower curtain as he fell. The curtain ripped from its fastenings, and floated to the ground gently. Richie grabbed at it, yanking it towards him to cover what was left of his modesty.

“What the fuck, Eddie!”

Eddie was standing in the bathroom, looking scandalized but also very mildly amused.

“I’m ever so sorry, Richie!”

“The door was locked, how the hell did you even get in here?!” Richie demanded, feeling his face bloom with blush, caused not only by the scalding temperature of the water.

“I – I didn’t use the door”

Richie blinked, incredulous.

“You didn’t use the door” he deadpanned, raising his eyebrows, an invitation. ‘Explain yourself’.

“I haven’t used a door in seventy years, and I don’t intend on starting now!”

For a moment, neither of them speak. Eddie has his arms crossed in what Richie imagines is supposed to be indignation, a silent ‘I’ve been here longer than you, this is more my house than it ever will be yours.” Richie can’t help but feel a pang in his chest, something so close to affection it’s uncanny, a cloying kind of feeling that envelops his heart and holds it hostage.

Eddie breaks first.

“It really was an accident, Richie, I sort of forgot – I forgot about …” he trails off before he can say it, but Richie knows.

I forgot what it’s like to be alive. What it’s like to spend time with another person.

Richie’s annoyance melts like snow.

– X –

The house is almost finished. Nearly all of the major appliances have been installed, the water runs perfectly, and the electrics have been wired and approved. The only major task facing Richie now was decorating, which was unfortunate because Richie had been cursed with perpetually shaky hands meaning that his lines were never straight or clean enough. He’d been complaining about it to Eddie one evening, sat out on the porch, wind rustling Richie’s hair like autumn leaves, but leaving Eddie’s untouched, each hair frozen in time and space.

Richie had fallen asleep outside, a combination of the lake’s lullaby-ripples, and the warmth of the balmy night. He’d slept deeply, watched over by the moon and the stars, and woken up with a crick in his neck and freezing hands.

Eddie was no-where to be seen, but Richie was unbothered. Eddie made a habit of wandering the moors at night, unbound by the mortal need to sleep, dream and recharge. He was free to roam as he saw fit, truly a being of the night, drifting amongst the dreaming lambs and the trees that stretched humbly towards the moon. He always returned, though. Returned to the house that he’d died in, and, by association, to Richie.

Richie hauled his heavy bones into the house, and up the rickety stair case, desperate to change out of the stale smelling clothes from the night before. He could hear the clanging of something metallic, and Eddie’s high and bright whistling, like a bell beckoning Richie into the room. When Richie cautiously pushed the door open, his mouth opened in shock.

While he slept, the summer sky had materialised on his bedroom walls. Fluffy marshmallow clouds on a cornflower blue sky.

Eddie was standing in the corner of the room, paintbrush in hand, looking somewhat guilty.

“I didn’t think you’d wake up yet. You don’t normally wake up before 7 or so”

“Eddie what the hellllll” Richie drawled, eyes scanning the room in astonishment.

“Do you like it?” Eddie asked, eyes and voice earnest and so sugary sweet Richie couldn’t take it.

“I so wish I could hug you right now, this is fuckin’ torture, s’what it is. This is beautiful, Eds. It’s – I don’t have the words”

“Heh. The oven mitts are downstairs, so, I suppose … I’m glad you like it, though. I was worried you’d hate it and think that I’d over-stepped, or something”

“No! Not at all. It’s … thank you, Eddie. Seriously, thank you. This might be the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me”

“I know you hate painting and I used to paint a bit, when I was, y’know, so … I thought I’d help you out a bit”

“You’ve done more than just help me out, Eds, yowza!”

Richie sincerely wished Eddie was wearing those damn oven gloves, as he wanted nothing more than to squeeze his hand and never let go.

– X –

The kitchen hated Richie, and, by all accounts, the feeling was pretty mutual. Laying a new floor down had been an absolute nightmare, considering the fact that the room was bizarrely shaped, so Richie had had to painstakingly cut each piece of timber out with a circle-saw to the exact measurements. This had taken longer than Richie cared to admit, but he had eventually finished, and the glossy oak floorboards smiled up at him, thanking him for his time and effort. Painting the kitchen was a breeze in comparison, throwing a white emulsion onto the walls before covering it with a blueish-grey, light and bright enough for a kitchen, but not an emotionless white. The back wall was the only one that was still just white emulsion, and Richie had planned to paint it grey in the afternoon.

That had been his plan, before he heard an almighty crash echo throughout the house, a metallic clang, and then a horrified yell.

“Eddie?! Eddie, are you okay?” Richie shouted, running down the stairs at light speed, expecting to find Eddie contorted in pain, or gone from the house entirely, or a number of equally as horrifying possibilities.

What he found when he rounded the corner, and burst into the kitchen, was blueish-grey paint covering practically every surface in the kitchen, and a very forlorn looking Eddie staring at the mess.

“What – What happened in here?!”

Eddie looked up at Richie with pleading, guilty eyes, wringing his hands together.

“I… I tried to walk through the wall carrying the paint and … Well, I suppose paint cannot travel through walls”

“What have I told you about using the effing doors!” Richie bellowed, gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder to the door that he had just sprinted through.

His new floor, his expensive oak floorboards that he had laboured over for weeks, ruined. The oven had thankfully not been installed yet, and sat in its protective plastic packaging, but even that was splattered with paint. The clock was covered in paint. The gas stove that Richie had been using to cook was covered in paint. In short, everything was covered in a sheen of grey paint.

“I was trying to help,” Eddie mumbled, mouse-small, “You said you loved your new bedroom walls and I thought – I thought I’d save you some work because I know how much you hate painting and – I am a catastrophe”

Richie felt awful.

“Naw, Eds, you’re not. C’mon, it’s not that bad. I can get some white spirit on the floor, that’ll probably lift most of it, and maybe Mike will let me borrow his electric sander. Hey now, Eds, c’mon, you look like you’re going to cry, you’re killing me”

“I would cry if I could”

“Can you cry?”

“No, because if I could, I would be doing so now”

Richie opened one of the now grey kitchen drawers, and pulled out Eddie’s oven mitts. He passed them over to Eddie, who reluctantly slipped them onto his hands, the scrunch of concentration that Richie had grown so fond of etched onto his face.

“I’m gonna hold your hand now,” Richie announced, before taking Eddie’s hand in his, “I promise that I’m not mad with you. I’m just – I’m just a bit frustrated but it’s not the end of the world. Kitchens come and go but Eddie Spaghetti’s are forever”

“Is that a joke … because I am dead?” Eddie asked, voice hesitant but Richie watched as a smile formed on his face, slowly, like a flower opening to pray to the sun.  

“It wasn’t ‘sposed to be” Richie shrugged, hand still gripping onto Eddie’s mitted-hand tightly.

“Are you sure you’re not mad with me?”

“I promise”

– X –

One thing that Richie soon came to learn was that Eddie loved music. Richie often heard Eddie’s ethereal whistling echoing around the house, or heard him humming little ditty’s that Richie didn’t recognise. Sometimes Eddie sang properly, a surprisingly rich and strong tenor that stirred things in Richie’s heart that had been dormant for years.

One day, when Richie was sanding the grey paint off the floorboards in the kitchen and singing along to Higher Ground by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eddie’s voice announced his presence before Richie was even aware of him being in the room, a habit of Eddie’s that he was growing slowly used to.

“This music sounds so different to the kind of things I used to listen to when I was younger”

Richie turned off the electric sander, before turning the radio up, Anthony Kiedis’ voice booming out of the speaker. Eddie looked vaguely alarmed, before tapping the toe of his boot slightly, face screwed in concentration, as if he was sampling the music like wine, trying to decide whether he liked the taste of the beat or not. Richie hopped around on alternate feet, pretending to slap an imaginary bass, his face screwed up in his best approximation of ‘bass face’. He wasn’t sure that Eddie would know what bass face was, but he didn’t care. Eddie watched Richie with wide, half-confused half-amused eyes, the toe of his left boot still tap-tap-tapping away to the beat.

The song drew to a close soon after, and Richie bounced over to the radio and turned it off.

“So, d’ya like it?”

“It’s … interesting. It’s different, absolutely, but … it’s good. It’s got a good beat, I like the rhythm. I … rather liked his voice,” Eddie stuttered, and Richie was sure that if it were possible for Eddie’s face to flush with embarrassment, it would be doing so right now, “but one thing I don’t understand is where you put the records in that tiny machine? Are records really tiny now?”

“Records? Why would there be records?” Richie asked as confusion washed over him in waves, before realising that Eddie had no idea what a twenty-first century radio looked like.

“Oh, no, this is a radio, not a record player. Some people still use records, but those people are called ‘hipsters’ and you wouldn’t like them. But this is a radio, you know what a radio is, right?”

“Yes, Richard, I know what a radio is. I wasn’t born 700 years ago” Eddie groaned, rolling his eyes.

“Jus’ checkin’, jus’ checkin’. So you know how radios work, right? Like … the music is in the air? Radio waves and all that jazz?”

“The music is in the air?!” Eddie spluttered, eyes wide like dinner plates.

“I thought you said you knew what radios were?!”

“Well, I know what they are, I never professed to know how they work”

Richie can’t help but laugh at the expression on Eddie’s face, a picture of exasperation mixed with confusion, and he is semi-horrified by the realisation that he wants to kiss it off Eddie’s face.

Well that’s new.

Richie tries to squash all ghost-kissing desires deep into his brain into a box marked ‘bad idea’ but he knows that that box has a habit of refusing to remain closed and springing open unexpectedly.

In his desperation to sway his attention from Eddie’s grumpy, kissable face, Richie cranks the radio up even further, switching the station to the all-day 80s bangers station he’d found a few weeks ago. Bonnie Tyler’s voice filtered out of the speakers, and Richie lip-synced along with her as she lamented about the fact that she didn’t have a street-wise Hercules. Eddie watched as if transfixed, eyes following the minutia of Richie’s movements but standing on the side lines, not joining in Richie’s one-man dance party.

“Dance with me!” Richie yelled, waving his arms erratically in the air as Bonnie’s voice howled around the room.

“I can’t!”

“You can!”

“I can’t!”

“YOU CAN!” Richie practically screamed, “dance with me, Eds! Please!”

Richie’s pestering finally broke Eddie’s resolve, and just as the song peaked, Eddie started to dance.

Now it was Richie’s turn to gawp.

Eddie threw himself around the room wildly, feet a blur as he alternated between rhythmic walking, jumping and kicking his feet , whilst waving his arms in a jaunty swing, occasionally snapping his fingers or clapping his hands in time with the music.

“You’ve been holding out on me, you sneak! Look at you go!” Richie yelled over the music, hardly moving, just watching Eddie spin and twist and jump.

“I may or may not have been quite the accomplished swing dancer when I was … y’know …” Eddie gasped, mid spin.

“I fuckin’ bet you were! Look at your fancy feet!”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” Eddie laughed, performing a particularly complicated piece of footwork, and peeking up at Richie with his tongue caught between his teeth.

“Damn straight, look at us, a couple-a movers and shakers, but damn, Eds, you shake it the best. You gotta teach me.”

Eddie laughed as he span past Richie, and Richie followed him, shimmying his shoulders and shaking his hips in a way that he assumed looked ridiculous, but the way Eddie’s eyes lingered on the swivel of his hips suggested otherwise.

The song finished, and a slow ballad started to play – all slow, smooth guitar and mellow vocals.

Richie, gasping from exertion, stopped dancing, and so did Eddie, who looked exactly the same as he always did, not a hair or piece of fluff out of place.

“How do we dance to this one? It’s a bit slow, Rich”

An idea crashed into Richie’s brain at warp speeds.

“Hang on”

Richie disappeared downstairs, and returned clasping Eddie’s oven mitts in his hands.

“Put these on” Richie instructed Eddie, like he always did, and once Eddie had put the mitts on, he grabbed his hands and placed them on his shoulders.

“We gotta slow dance to songs like this, them’s the rules”

“Uh … but we’re both … you aren’t a … I’m not a woman”

“I won’t tell if you won’t”

Eddie didn’t say anything in response, but he didn’t move his hands, either. Knowing that he couldn’t put his hands on Eddie’s waist like he wanted to, Richie settled for placing his hands over Eddie’s mitts, on his shoulders. They swayed back and forth.

“Are you like me?” Eddie whispered, voice barely loud enough for Richie to hear over the music.

“Depends what you mean by that, Spaghetti. Am I dead? No. Am I a wicked dancer? Yes. You gotta be more specific”

“You are a brute! You know exactly what I mean”

“Do you mean ‘do I fall in love with men’?”

Eddie hesitated for a second, before nodding the affirmative.

“Then yes, I am like you. But I also fall in love with women. I like ‘em both. Greedy like that”

“Is that … is that possible?”

“Sure is, sugar!”

Eddie closed his eyes, and Richie was sure that if Eddie could cry, this would be another occasion where he would be doing so.

“I only … I only fall in love with men. I had – Rupert. We – he died. I never got to say goodbye”

A heavy sort of sadness settled in the room. Eddie’s eyes, downcast and lidded, refused to meet Richie’s. They stood in the middle of the room, touching but not really, dancing but not really, in silence.

“I hate that I can’t hold you, Eddie”

“I hate that you can’t hold me, too”

– X –

Something changed after they danced together. Not a seismic shift, but a small tremor. Eddie told Richie about Rupert, and how they’d lived together in relative sin, and as he spoke, he’d screwed up his face as if willing himself to cry, to feel something. Richie cried enough for the both of them.

A few days later, it was a lazy Sunday, and Richie is listening to a local Scottish radio station sat out on the porch with Eddie in a comfortable silence.

“I don’t know what everyone else’s plans are for the afternoon, but I’m off to have a lovely roast dinner!” the radio host announces, before signing off for the day.

“Oh, I do miss a roast dinner” Eddie announces wistfully, rubbing at his stomach comically.

“What’s a roast dinner?”

“You’ve never had a roast dinner?!”

“Uh… no? Should I have? What is it?”

Eddie abruptly stands up, and walks back into the house, listing off all the components of a roast dinner as he walks. When they get to the kitchen, Eddie marches straight over to the fridge and, without opening it, sticks his head right through the door, before also sticking his left hand straight through the metal, as if the fridge was not a solid object at all. Richie is sure that there will never be a day that he doesn’t find that unbelievably funny.

“You have all the vegetables, but the only meat you have is … this!” Eddie pulls his head back through the fridge door, looking at his hand triumphantly, only to find that his hand is empty.

“I keep forgetting I cannot move things through other solid objects” Eddie deadpans, smacking his forehead in embarrassment.

Richie cackles at him, before moving to open the fridge himself, and seeing a lonely looking peperami lying on the bottom of the fridge. With Eddie’s help, Richie manages to cook the roast dinner without too much issue. The only time Eddie screeches at him is when he pours way too much oil into the roasting pan for the potatoes, but that issue is quickly rectified. After a few hours, the meal is prepared, and Richie plates up feeling overwhelmingly guilty that Eddie can’t share in the meal that he helped to prepare. Eddie assures him that he doesn’t miss eating that much, and ushers Richie into the dining room, where the new dining table stands proudly in the middle of the room. Richie places his plate on the table, before realising that he’d forgotten cutlery and a glass of water. Eddie, who had been standing behind his chair, follows him into the kitchen, walking straight through the table, and babbling nonsense about how Richie was about to experience something truly magical.

When Richie returned to the dining table, he found that his food was now burnt beyond recognition, the fresh vegetables that had been lying on his plate mere seconds ago now transformed into a smoky black sludge.

“What in God’s name …” Richie muttered, staring at the burnt food in disbelief as the cutlery slipped from his hand and fell to the floor with a thud.

Richie looks at Eddie, then back to the ruined food on his plate, then back to Eddie. Without saying anything, he ran back into the kitchen, grabbing a piece of broccoli, before charging back into the living room and throwing the broccoli directly at Eddie’s head.

The broccoli fell to the floor.

Or, more accurately, the broccoli that was now a black, burnt sludge fell to the floor.

“For fucks sake!”

– X –

Richie stays up late that night, sleepy eyes glued to his computer, scrolling through useless website after useless website before he lands on the first thing that looks even remotely promising 16 pages into the google search.

Stanley Uris – Corporeal Reanimator

[moonshinemornings]

bad apples

with the tragic happenings of late, I’ve had some thoughts about social movements and divisiveness that I am not thick-skinned enough to actively share on large platforms, but am self-indulgent enough to want to note down.

a lot of social movements that try to target institutionalised privilege enjoyed by large groups of people have been met with angry responses that these allegations don’t hold true against the entire group of people e.g. “not all men”, “not all cops are bad” etc. I feel like the reason for this has a lot to do with 1) a lack of understanding of the movement, but more importantly 2) unrecognised insecurity/guilt.

when people make statements like “men are trash” or “men don’t understand their privilege” it’s not an attack against literally every single man on this earth - it’s a statement about the men who do have misogynistic beliefs and behaviours. if a man is confident about his beliefs in gender equality and the kind of person he is when it comes to gendered issues, he has no reason to feel threatened or offended by such statements because they don’t refer to him. if a man is provoked by such statements and replies with “not all men”, he is right, not all men are sexist, but the question we should ask is why did he feel the need to respond by saying “not all men”? is it because he is threatened that women are recognising and calling out the inherently gendered nature of our societies? is it because part of him enjoys the privileges that come with being male and is subconsciously concerned about having to give them up? does he make (true) assertions that men also get sexually harassed/stereotyped just as a response to women bringing up their struggles and not to bring attention to how toxic masculinity also affects men, and by extension want to continue to perpetuate toxic masculinity?

this is similar to the All Cops Are Bad (ACAB) movement. being a cop in America is difficult, and there are most definitely cops whose service are grounded in their desire to protect all citizens and their rights equally. but the basis of the ACAB movement is that if there is 1 bad cop and 10 good cops who don’t turn the bad cop in or view him as an issue, there are 11 bad cops. and its especially problematic because the law enforcement systems of the country have racialised prejudices that are well ingrained. segregation only officially ended 66 years ago, the “unofficial” issues are very much in existence. if one’s response to ACAB is to vehemently insist that “that’s not true”, we should question why it is that they are so insistent on upholding the legitimacy of a state authority, instead of recognising painfully obvious problems in the way they treat civilians that are already systemically discriminated against by the state as a whole. because they fail to recognise the privilege they have? because they are subconsciously guilty that they benefit from these systems and don’t want to address the fact that they are doing little to help their brethren?

which brings me to what really triggered this post. in a lot of social movements there is the narrative that if you are silent in times of social unrest, you are as bad as the oppressor. some have taken offence to this - how can you fault people for not posting a story or tweeting something about being heartbroken or standing in solidarity? this is a fair point and a real concern; virtue signalling and performative allyship are sometimes more detrimental for a movement if it works only to absolve individual guilt without generating real action, or worse, if it brings on board “allies” who have a wrong understanding of the movement and give social justice warriors (and I use this term with the utmost admiration) a bad name. however, all that aside, linking back to the ideas of unrecognised insecurity and divisiveness, the disapproval of silence is not meant to imply that every single person who doesn’t talk about the issue with their friends and family, or doesn’t make an obligatory post or story is a racist/sexist/classist person who doesn’t care about social issues. it’s telling people to be aware of and have their beliefs aligned with these movements. if you are secure in your solidarity and beliefs, there is no reason for you to be offended by such calls to action - you are already completely aligned with these movements in spirit. if someone is a racist to you or someone you know or a stranger on the street in front of you, this call to action that you have already accepted will manifest. but if you are provoked or offended by those that deplore silence, consider why it is you feel so. are you actually, in fact, unconcerned/unbothered by the racism faced by others? does it provoke in you a guilt stemming from your lack of awareness/belief/action in racism not just in another country, but even your own? why is it that a social movement against a deplorable action draws a reaction out of you more than the action itself?

of course, it has to be acknowledged that we don’t live in institutions that are as explicitly and heavily discriminatory as those in America. there is much less sexism in Singaporean systems (owing to the fact that a focus on economic development meant we needed all hands on deck), and the racism and classism is, although very much present, much less apparent (whether or not this is more insidious is a discussion for another day). and to give a disclaimer, there is a lot wrong with how social movements are being conducted nowadays in terms of divisiveness and lacking real impact. but that does not mean we cannot hold opinions of right and wrong and stand in solidarity with these movements. if we find ourselves questioning why social movements are increasingly more divisive and why it is that a fight for something that is theoretically a good cause makes us uncomfortable, it might be good to consider if these feelings stem from a personal place. if so, maybe we are the ones these movements are trying to target. an all or nothing allegation is bound to make the many who (understandably) straddle lines feel upset. but while there truly may only be “a few bad apples”, we forget the rest of the adage - they “can spoil the bunch”.

[willidleaway]

Star Wars, episode 9

In short: Without spoiling anything, remember how I was on about how Episode VIII was a good movie, a mediocre one, and a bad one fighting for space to each other’s detriment? And remember how this (I thought) left Episode IX with way more to bite off than it could chew?

Well, probably not, but it seems I had reason to worry. Episode IX is full of droids and spaceships and fights and explosions, but it also feels simultaneously empty and overstuffed. The plot isn’t stretched nearly as thin across so many parallel subplots as was the case with Episode VIII, but it’s still got two to three movies’ worth of story squeezed together into something resembling a supercut with just the essentials, and part of the problem seems to be it's more of a sequel to Episode VII than it is to Episode VIII.

So even though it competently hits familiar beats for fans of the original trilogy, and even though many people will like it well enough for that, it feels regressive and conservative and lazy. Good actors are wasted. Good characters are underused. Noise and nostalgia take precedence over sensible storytelling. It warrants more disappointment than anger, but maybe not a non-zero amount of anger, and it worries me about the future of Star Wars movies.

Spoiler-filled breakdown behind the Read More break.

In less short: OK, so let’s review where we were when Episode VIII ended:

Kylo Ren has killed Snoke and become Supreme Leader, with nobody to dictate his actions. Cool.

Rey’s parents are nobody and we shouldn’t be fussing about her heritage as if heroes always have chosen status or weird bloodlines. Cool.

The Resistance are basically now a ragtag crew that fits in a light freighter, with no allies to come to their rescue. ... This is a bit of a difficult spot to get out of.

Within the first 30 minutes of so, Episode IX sets it up so that:

Not only is Snoke not dead, but it turns out he was Sheev all along, and he’s still going to dictate Kylo Ren’s actions. Oh.

The Resistance is magically where it was at the end of Episode VII. Oh.

Then a bit further in—maybe an hour or so?—it turns out Rey has some kind of weird bloodline after all, namely Palpatine’s. Oh.

Palpatine being Snoke is annoying because Palpatine’s supposed to be dead and Snoke’s supposed to be dead, and when you have a long-dead Sith Lord that turns out to have been pretending to be a recently dead Supreme Leader, it seems reasonable enough to demand an explanation—none is given, of course.

The Resistance being magically reverted to its Episode VII state is understandable given the need to have Carrie Fisher in the movie through unused footage from that movie, but in view of all of the other retcons of Episode VIII, one can’t help but give this a bit of side-eye as well.

The retcon of Rey’s heritage is the real tell that

this is trying to be half of the trilogy all at once, which is a problem because it’s supposed to be the third act;

and in the process it’s also trying to erase a lot of the actual Episode VIII, which is a problem because it’s canon.

The thing is, much of what happens in the sequels could fit sensibly into three films with just a bit more work. Keep VII mostly as is; for VIII, trim the pointless safecracking subplot and the misguided mutiny subplot (and ideally replace them with a single subplot that keeps Poe and Finn in the same madness), and extend to include the reveal that Snoke was Palpatine and that Rey is his granddaughter; and then this leaves IX with enough breathing room to actually flesh out the implications of those reveals, the Force dyad, and so on, before moving on to the action of tracking down the Sith dagger and everything that ensues from there.

Of course, then it would follow exactly the beats of the original trilogy. Episode V ends with a big family reveal, and Episode VI then spends time dealing with the implications and reconciling the reveal with what was previously stated. But the sequels have been in such lockstep with the original trilogy that frankly I’m surprised that’s not what they went for to begin with.

Yet it makes sense when you take into account the completely on-the-fly plotting that the sequels have obviously been subjected to. VIII basically tore down some of the most delicious set pieces of VII—the mystery behind Rey’s identity, the presence of Snoke as Kylo Ren’s puppetmaster—and IX is basically tearing down that tearing-down. I know JJ Abrams wasn’t wholly responsible for the story of Episode IX, but it does feel quite a bit like he’s going ‘oh god no, that’s not what you were supposed to do with that from my movie! or that! or that! this is what you were supposed to do!’ and trying to build the house of cards back up. He’s not got enough time to do it right in two hours and a bit, and he knows it, but gosh darn it he’s still going to try. And maybe at some point he gets frustrated and yells ‘okay, Snoke was supposed to be a puppet of Palpatine, all right? just—just start the movie with that, it’ll be fine, because I don’t know how to even make that work with the carnage that Rian left behind’. So then facts are rapidly established and moved on from, because we’ve got a lot of ground to cover—mainly a lot of ground from VIII, to cover up.

It’s funny how the themes of these movies are supposed to be progressive—VIII was all about moving forward from failure and fear and despair, IX about recognising you are not alone and facing the problems of the world with that knowledge—and yet the plotting of these movies are continually regressive, retreating to ground already trodden to death by the original trilogy (both figuratively and, in the case of JJ’s films, literally—Death Star II, Endor, ...), and in many cases retreating within itself. A regressive strategy may work for prequels—after all things must gravitate towards the ground truth laid down by the originals—but it doesn’t work quite as well for sequels.

That’s really the key thing I wanted to say—IX feels insular, like it came from a parallel universe with a completely different JJ-led VIII and only realises it about ten minutes of the way in, and it feels a bit lazy falling back on clichés that VIII tried to explicitly preclude. But I do have some more specific thoughts on a few characters.

Rose: So, there was a lot of media buzz when VIII came out about Rose because ooh look she’s the first Asian woman to get any kind of significant screen time in a Star Wars movie isn’t that nice. And then there was a lot of racist and sexist abuse thrown at Kelly Marie Tran and that’s not very nice at all. And Rose’s character arc in VIII unfortunately overall turned out a bit lacklustre frankly so that’s just a bit mediocre. So clearly, given that Rose has been held up as this point of diversity in an otherwise not-terribly-intersectionality-friendly universe, we want to maybe shore this up a bit, right? Make sure that if Star Wars is going to have an Asian woman, that she’s going to be really prominent as things start going down in this last movie?

Erm, no. We’re just leaving her at the Resistance base to do tech things. Oh, we’ll bring her back out for the final battle, sure, and she’ll be part of the ground invasion, but for most of the movie you’ll barely realise that this was almost a major character in the last movie. The droids will have more agency and screen time than her.

Good choice, lads.

Hux and Pryde: VII wasted Max von Sydow, VII and VIII mostly wasted Gwendoline Christie, and now behold: the whole sequel trilogy wasted Domhnall Gleeson.

As demonstrated by performances in films like Brooklyn and Ex Machina, Domhnall Gleeson is actually an excellent actor, not merely competent. Yet in these movies, he doesn’t seem to have actually been given a role, only a caricature of one and a set of gags. First, he’s supposed to be a sort of perpetual rival to Kylo Ren—very mad, but very competent. Then, he’s basically openly laughed at by the Resistance and entirely subdominant to Kylo Ren. But finally in this movie, the writers remembered he’s supposed to be a peer, and makes him a mole out of spite against Kylo Ren, but basically absolutely nobody involved can take this seriously because of course it’s ridiculous. 

To be honest, I don’t see how they could have ever made a rival to Kylo work. Here’s a more compelling idea. How about this: a former Imperial officer, high enough in rank to occasionally report directly to the Emperor himself, obviously loses all of his power and prestige with the end of the Empire. But then the First Order rises up, and he somehow gets to head the First Order’s military forces—but has to report to this upstart, this Kylo Ren. It disgusts him to have to report to this undignified hull-tearing snot nose, but he does it because he knows that behind the mask of Snoke is the Emperor, having cheated death, and through his devotion and the devotion of many others, the Emperor will rise again and—Kylo Ren or no Kylo Ren—reclaim what is rightfully his!

Oh right that’d basically have been General Pryde if they’d thought of him back when they were making Episode VII.

And of course, Richard E Grant—star of Withnail and I, of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and of many fascinating Doctor Who stories of various canonicity—is in this role, and good god that’s even more of a tragic waste because of what General Pryde could have been if they’d actually plotted out a proper trilogy and realised that someone like Pryde would have worked a lot better than someone like Hux as right-hand man to the main villain.

Still nowhere near as wasted as Gwendoline Christie, mind.

Jannah: Yeah, Jannah and her company are all right. I just mention her because I am so glad that we didn’t get another Mickey Smith and Martha Jones situation where the black people just got coupled up at the last minute. Just thought I’d mention that.

Poe/Finn: Look, it’s like Kirk/Spock, okay? All the subtext is there, and it’s just a matter of you reading between the lines. How you read between the lines is entirely up to you—I argue there is a place for deep platonic relationships as much as romantic relationships, homo- or hetero-gender (although there may be a personal bias involved here).

But let me just say this: in the original trilogy, you had a young Jedi trainee and a pilot and his rescuee, with the latter two having this bickering old married couple dynamic. Those two are absolutely an item by the end of the trilogy, as in they have their big rotten kiss at the end of VI. (Possibly at other points too. I couldn’t possibly tell you.)

In this sequel trilogy, you have a young Jedi trainee and a pilot and his rescuee, with the latter two having this bickering old married couple dynamic. So where’s my Poe/Finn kiss at the end of IX?

As I say, though, it’s like Kirk/Spock, and like Kirk/Spock, it’s such brilliant chemistry that you can always rely on fan fiction to compensate for the cowardice of the canon writers. But it’d have been nice to have some level of canon validation.

Kylo and Rey: Yeah, speaking of big rotten kisses ... That is not the kiss I wanted at the end of IX. You didn’t have Luke kissing Anakin at the end of VI, did you?

That’s my main complaint, really, and otherwise I still think Adam from Girls (I’m sorry that’s just how I think of Adam Driver for some reason??? even though I’ve never even seen Girls???) looks a bit goofy at times. But Kylo and Rey’s arc felt like one where they were equals (possibly the bloodline reveal helps a bit there), they worked together well, it had a reasonable conclusion, etc. The Force bond thing is still creepy, and still a bit weird in how you can pass matter back and forth, but I suppose it was established in VIII, and I happen to think the way it was used in this movie on Exegol was actually pretty brilliant.

The droids: You thought I was going to talk about C-3PO, but it was he, D-O!

Sorry, couldn’t resist. Overall, I'm still not entirely cleared up on what happened with the droids, actually. It seemed like there was just this whole roundabout subplot around Threepio only to return everything to status quo, and maybe D-O had some information they could probably have used to begin with???

Other miscellaneous thoughts:

How much study in the Living Force does it take to do the becoming-one-with-the-Force thing, anyway? We see that Leia and Ben both vanish into nothing after death, and Leia definitely is a Force ghost confirmed at the end. But I thought season 6 of TCW made it pretty clear that this required a lot of training and study, which is why Qui-Gon was training Yoda so that he could then presumably train Obi-Wan (as the end of III suggests) in the art of immortality. To be fair Anakin never was trained in this, but given that he’s the Chosen One, I think he gets a bit of slack on what Force powers he can use. Luke and Leia were never trained on screen, of course, but Luke had years to read all the sacred Jedi texts, and he knows Force Telepresence (still can’t be bothered to find the actual name of that), so I figure he’s a very good autodidact, and likely trained Leia at some point as well as a Force ghost. So where does that leave Ben? I don’t know, maybe the Force ghosting thing is just a thing that runs in the Skywalker bloodline.

‘The dead speak!’ is the goofiest way to open a crawl since ‘War!’ from Episode III. Another reason the Palpatine reveal should have just been towards the end of Episode IX.

Trebuchet jetpack troopers? Really? Was that meant to be threatening, hilarious, or both? Because I only found it hilarious.

Also oh hi Wedge. Also oh hi Hayden Christensen’s voice. God I wish they’d had his actual visual Force ghost alongside Luke and Leia.

Did ... did Maz do anything other than basically be at the base and then give Chewie a medal because har har we love making references to the original movies? No? ... What a waste of Lupita Nyong’o, then.

[snkpolls]

SnK Chapter 111 Poll Results

RATE THE CHAPTER 1,677 Responses

While still a highly rated chapter, satisfaction was down slightly over last month (4.33 for 111; 4.49 for 110). Many people expressed surprise that Isayama was able to pull off such an emotional chapter despite the predictable setup. Now that the Braus dinner has reached its conclusion, most are eager to get back to the main cast.

I loved the mood whiplash Isayama was doing. A happy moment already ruined by a tragic one that escalated higher. The main course was supposed to be delicious, but everything the Blouses and the SC tasted was treason and deception. Pure evil.

Glad to see further development for the characters of Falco & Gabi as well as the beginnings of preparation for war against Marley. (Albeit very slight) Hopefully in the next chapter we will get to see what the warriors & Marley have been up to while this revolution has been happening.

Good chapter, nice way to start a volume

I get why this chapter needed to happen, but I feel there were ways to advance these plot threads without killing the momentum we had last chapter.

I'm glad the Blouses are teaching Gabi that war is bad. Now let's get back to the damn war! Also, is Historia ok?! She wasn't looking good last we saw her, and now the Yaegerists are targeting her, and I'm worried.

not enough floch and no funeral/memorial for zackly and shitmachine, disappointed :'( good chapter though

I would like to file a petition for Isayama to stop repeatedly stabbing the already open wound he caused in to my chest pls?

  WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE PART OF THE CHAPTER? 1,678 Responses

With so many options it was difficult to choose but “Wine Mystery Revealed” edged out “All of the Above” with almost 20% of respondents. “Mr. Braus’ speech” and “Mikasa, savior of children” also had strong showings.

I honestly wanted to choose more than one which was Mikasa protecting Gabi, Mr Braus's speech and Gabi asking if they didn't hate her but I can't pick more because of the question type so ;-;

Favorite moment? Nicolo christening the Falbi ship. Yeah.

Mikasa saving Gabi was an incredible scene!

The way Nicolo insulted Jean to protect him was so cute, but if I were Jean I'd feel offended too lol.

Jean's new hair is awesome :D

OMG MIKASA IS PERFECT. MARRY ME!

Sasha eating pizza was sooo cute and i don't know if my heart can take it anymore because all this cuteness turns into angst because of what happened to her :(

  PAPA BRAUS, BEST DAD IN SNK, OR BEST DAD OF ALL TIME? 1,673 Responses

On a scale of 1 out of 10, Mr. Braus scores an 8.6. Although we haven’t asked you guys to rate other dads in the SnK universe, we’re confident he takes the number one spot of best father, and probably best parent as well.

Mr. Braus is the best parent in this entire universe (not that the bar was set very high, but still). I nearly cried during his speech.

Mr Braus showing this act of compassion - an act of letting go of revenge to stop the cycle of hatred and oppression is probably the most valuable experience Gabi could've learnt from (more valuable than any words spoken to her).

Step aside Eren, papa and mama Braus are the real Humanity's Last Hope! Their kindness and empathy are the only things that can stop the cycle of violence that this series is depicting on the most intimate and personal level. My appreciation for Sasha as well has grown exponentially through Nicolo, Kaya and the Braus parents.

Mr. Braus is like the only person in all that fucked up world that actually understands the root of the problem. Keeping people "into the forest" in a perpetual fight for survival between "preys and predators". I do believe that his words are everything we need to understand the moral of the story and may be hinting to what Eren and Zeke are trying to achieve (though from extremely different mindsets).

Sasha's dad's speech is so touching. Almost gave me hope that the series will end in a good way--people will find a way to deal with this unforgiving forest that is our world.

With all the allusions to World War II and the Holocaust, Mr. Braus' speech might have been the single most realistic depiction of the entire series. There are echoes of Oskar Schindler here. This is the same compassion that some Germans showed when hiding Jews in their basements, barns, etc. and saved lives. I was absolutely floored by this chapter, especially because my grandparents were Holocaust survivors themselves.

  AFTER SEEING GABI'S EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO THE BRAUS FAMILY'S GRIEF, HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT HER? 1,668 Responses

Believe it or not, but compared to previous polls it seems more and more people are warming up to Gabi (or at least don’t hate her as much as they used to). 46.4% are glad she finally got some character development. Nearly 30% of the fandom are starting to like her or have always loved her. However, 17.9% of all respondents would rather not deal with Gabi at all.

Between warming up and loving her

Always loved her. Just keep loving her more and more. It was NEVER her fault.

Doesn’t put me up nor down

Feed her to titan falco

Finally some character development, but I still don't like her. She just grates on my nerves.

Gabi's scenes this chapter gives me hope for the story's message. Gabi's heartfelt question juxtaposed with Kaya's instant reversal was the most powerful scene in the recent chapters.

Great character development, but sorry she'll remain the one whom I hated.

I can't decide I just need a bit more time

I have always felt the hatred towards Gabi was unjustified so i'm glad that people are starting to like her character more

In that "Do you really not hate me?" there is everything Gabi is and represents as a character. Can't wait to see how she will further develop now.

This shows that regardless of the environment she has been raised in, Gabi is still just a confused child and a human being with feelings. I approve.

My hopes for her are very very low, but it's nice finally seeing a human and not radical, violent, aggressive reaction for once. hopefully she'll start seeing walldians as repressed ppl like the ghetto dudes

  WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE TERM  “YEAGERIST”? 1,676 Responses

The fan translation gave us “The Jaeger Faction” which over half of respondents preferred over Kodansha’s official translation of “Yeagerists.” 14% like the term, while 10% are not fans of it.

"Yeagerist" sounds like a name of some crazy group of fan girls. I prefer "Jaeger Faction" - sounds more serious.

I hope to become a member. better because it could mean both yeagers, not just eren

Could've come up with something better.  

I like the name, and hereby identify as a Yeagerist.

The abs empire

It's more respectful than "Idiots" I guess

Silly as fuck and hilarious. Jaeger Faction is superior.

I chuckled. It’s fine.

I like the term! It sounds perfect for an extremist faction!

The name doesn't matter. It just had to be called a sect, so it's fine.

  DO YOU THINK ANY OF THE SOLDIERS AWARE OF ZEKE’S AND/OR HISTORIA’S LOCATION COULD BE A “YEAGERIST?” 1,672 Responses

63% of respondents suspect that at least one of the 30+ soldiers aware of Zeke and/or Historia’s location are loyal to the Yeager brothers. 28% aren’t sure, and a small percentage are certain that these soldiers are all to be trusted.

  LET’S TALK ABOUT COMMANDER PIXIS SURRENDERING TO EREN. WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING DO YOU MOST AGREE WITH? 1,672 Responses

Very few of us took Pixis’ word at face value. 47.3% believe he was at least partially putting on a show. 41.6% have no idea, but trust him regardless.

I don't know how this negotiation is going to work but I'm glad someone finally has some plan which doesn't involve fighting or doing nothing. I think he's a wise man and he knows what he's doing. I'm going he's in charge now.

Pixis is smart and has a strategy that aims to save lives. Momentary surrender is a necessary step to take back control of the situation as a whole. That's called leadership.

Loved it, he’s playing chess. Sacrificing his bishop for another move

Why has Pixis become my hero these past two chapters? He is smart and brave enough to not only recognise the military's mistakes, but also humble and determined enough to take corrective steps to bring the lost sheep back into the flock for the higher, long-term good. I love how there's one adult in the room who is above petty bickering and suspicion at a critical moment like this. Pixis is an Erwin-level class act and I'm so grateful we still have a character like that in the series ;--; (RIP Erwin)

He trusts Hange enough to let her lead the secret mission of screwing the Jaegers' plans, and he will do something important in the right moment. Of course, he can't say it directly because there are still traitors that want to put bombs here and there.

Pixis has no idea what he's doing, dawg, he just wants to get vored by a pretty lady and this is harshing his buzz

HE'S A YEAGERIST...

  WHO MASTERMINDED THE SPIKED WINE PLOT? 1,657 Responses

At 71.8%, the overwhelming consensus is that Zeke masterminded the spiked wine. 9.4% gave Yelena the credit, and 8% attributed it to the Yaegerists.

Onyankopon seemed real suspicious with Nicolo this chap…

Zeke masterminded it, but he's too slippery to ever take responsibility for it. Yelena would probably go to the ends of the earth to claim it was her plan.

Both Jaegerists and Volunteers

Probably Gordon Ramsey, who's mad that his potential customer Sasha was ripped away from him.

I think it was Zeke's plan but Eren doesn't know about it, or the bomb. I think Zeke has more interests than meets the eye and will betray Eren.

  DO YOU THINK EREN IS AWARE OF THE SPIKED WINE? 1,667 Responses

With a relatively close split, nearly 40% believe that Eren isn’t aware of the spiked wine. 32% don’t want to say either way, and 27% are certain he’s in on it.

I think Eren has been shown too evil to be true, i really think that in reality he has a plan that for some reason he couldn't share with his friends, and he is trying to save as many people as possible.

EXPLAIN WHAT EREN'S UP TO ALREADY

I never trusted Zeke for one second and I’m glad ta starting to pay off. I do still believe Eren isn’t really working with Zeke as closely as Military believes.He doesn’t want any of his loved ones to turn into Titans and I’m certain the hidden spinal fluid is Zeke’s intent because I believe nothing the disciples are doing is without his knowledge.

  WHY DO YOU THINK THE WINE WAS SPIKED WITH ZEKE’S SPINAL FLUID? 1,648 Responses

58% of respondents believe that the wine is spiked as an insurance for Zeke in case Paradis turns on him. 18% believe it’s a way to hold leverage over Eren specifically, and 14% feel that the intent is to have pure titans available in case Paradis is attacked.

A way to easily get rid of pesky opposition

I’m not quite sure but none of these strike me as correct.

There are so many possibilities here: i mostly believe it’s some kind of insurance in case eren or paradis go against him, but there’s also the possibility that zeke was never actually on the eldian’s side in the first place

He will use it when he wants to eliminate Paradise if Eren refuses his true plan

Bargaining tool to gain control over everyone, like a threat/hostage

I'm hesitating between it being a conspiracy, and Zeke trying to do a coup d'état, by replacing all the higher up by people he somewhat trusts

I’m not so sure it’s just insurance... I think zeke might just be straight up planning on turning the higher ups into titans either way. I think he ultimately is not allied with Paradis and wants to be able to overthrow their military command structure at the drop of a hat.

It's Zeke's trump card and bargaining chip all rolled into one

Since they only used the wine on the military police members, it could be a protection toward Historia

I knew Zeke was going to stab them in the back, I was just wrong about how.

  WHO DO YOU THINK DRANK THE SPIKED WINE? 1,655 Responses

36.3% believe the wine was limited to high ranking MPs. 63.7% of us worry that the wine has reached beyond that narrow scope.

A FUCKTON OF PEOPLE

Anyone in the high ranks of each branch, and possibly the entire MP (since their overall living environment is much fancier than the other two branches, they probably were also served by Marleyans)

I think just the MPs, but dear god I hope Nile didn't drink it. He was the only one from his training days' friends group that made it it out of the depressive cycle of violence and managed to have a family. He deserves better. Marie deserves better.

Wouldn't be surprised if Jean starts racing for the alcohol rack again after this chapter. Everyone is mentally and emotionally exhausted already and the storm hasn't even began. Time to get some wine fellas.

PLEASE NOT HANGE AND DOUBLE PLEASE NOT FALCO

  WHAT IS YOUR THEORY REGARDING FALCO’S FUTURE? 1,654 Responses

Nearly ⅔ of all respondents think Reiner will pass on the Armored Titan to Falco. Another 11.5% think he will turn into a mindless titan, and not gain any shifter powers. The least popular choice was Porco or Pieck giving their powers to Falco. We also received quite a few write-ins:

He is going to die at the venerable age of 128 surrounded by friends and family

He will become the next Beast Titan

He won't transform at all and continue living the source of all pureness (fingers-crossed)

he will become flying titan

I love the fact that Falco in a way has already managed to fulfill his mission. He wanted to save Gabi from the horrors of becoming a Titan - and he just did that. By pushing her out of the way of the wine, he shortened his own lifespan, but managed to save her from dying a potentially early death.

He's going to have to save Gabi at least 2 or 3 more times.

It's going to be tragic and I'm very sad already!! He'll either end up as mindless titan killing people or he'll inherit Reiner's titan, meaning he'll be the one who kills him and inherit his memories. And of course his life will be shortened!! Either way I hate it!! He doesn't deserve any of that!!

SAVE BEST BOY

  WHY DID NICOLO CONFESS AT THE END? 1,664 Responses

With a fairly even 3 way split, slightly more people felt that Nicolo confessed because of his friendship with the SL. Following that at 26.6% and 26.4%, Nicolo may have confessed because he was already caught red-handed, and that Mr. Braus’ speech moved him to come clean.

!All of the above!

He knew that it was almost time for Zeke’s plan to go in full swing, so he told them after it became too late.

Honestly, for me it's a toss. He was very emotional in this entire chapter, and he let it get the better of him. Why he confessed is beyond me. Maybe it has something to do with him wanting to seek vengeance against the Yeagers and Marley for both indirectly contributing to Sasha's death?

He felt guilty because Falco is innocent and he regrets that he took the hit and had wine in his mouth as a result (but he doesn't regret attacking Gabi)

It was probably quite a big burden of knowledge to carry. I imagine it was all those things at once.

He broke down under the enormous emotional pressure, as simple as that.

He participated in serving the spiked wine, maybe willingly at first. But at some point, maybe because of his relationship with sasha, he become uncomfortable and was compelled by the volunteers to continue against his will. After his arc, he know he's going to be arrested, and just confesses to unburden himself.

He felt guilty about using the spinal fluid on Falco at all - he was trying to use a normal wine bottle

  HOW DO YOU VIEW NICOLO AND SASHA'S RELATIONSHIP? 1,666 Responses

Wow. Two thirds of the fandom believe Nicolo and Sasha were a couple. 23.3% believe it was a one-sided love affair, or as one comment put it, “Friendzone with food benefits. ”

I HOPE they were dating but the chapter made it to where there’s not really solid evidence that they were…

Nicolo loved Sasha in the conventional way. Sasha loved Nicolo the only way she could, alimentarily.

I'm a huge Springles shipper, so I'm kinda of sad about the whole thing with Nikolo, to be honest. Springles is really what helped me through a lot of dark times, so the fact that Nikolo and Sasha may have been dating really kind of hurts XD

The way Nicolo confessed his feelings toward Sasha in front of everyone especially Sasha's parents made me emotional.

I want to care about her “relationship” with Nikolo because I like the Romeo and Juliet setup but it also got zero development so.......how am I supposed to believe Nikolo was THAT upset about her when I never really saw them together in the first place?

If it turns out they really were together, I won't have a problem with it. But until Isayama confirms it in a more direct manner, I don't buy any notion of romantic relationship in Attack On Titan, especially with someone like Sasha, who seems to only be interested in food.

Sasha was a food-digger

  SOME HAVE SUGGESTED THAT ONYANKOPON IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED AND WAS PERHAPS SENDING A MESSAGE TO NICOLO. WHAT DO YOU THINK? WHOSE SIDE IS ONYANKOPON ON? 1,653 Responses

Nearly half of us are in the dark about where Onyankopon’s loyalty stands, though 31% think that his allegiance lies with his own faction of volunteers.

¡Que lástima! As much as I like him I no longer trust him because of the wine reveal. Compared to everyone else, the look on his face makes me believe he knew exactly what was going on.

Eren, Zeke, Yelena, Floch... Literally everyone is a double agent. Can't we have a single person who is not a traitor?

He's not with Marley and not with Yelena, but does this mean we can 100% trust him i'm not sure

He's in relationship with Kiyomi. Not his fault Kiyomi's hot.

Liar liar paths on fire

I don't believe that he's totally innocent, totally 100% devoted to Paradis and Eldians. But I do believe that Yelena's acting separately from him.

I think Onyankopon probably knows more than he's letting on which is disappointing because I'd like at least one fucking person to not be shady as fuck. It's overkill.

If best boi onyankopon betrays hange I’m rioting

WILD CARD BITCHES!!

  KIYOMI WAS PROMINENTLY FEATURED DURING THE WAR COUNCIL. WHAT BEST MATCHES YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT HER BEING THERE? 1,641 Responses

35.8% of responders think the military knows something is shady about Kiyomi and are trying to set her up, followed by 31.7% think the military made a mistake allowing her to hear their argument. Only 10.2% believe Kiyomi is actually being sincere about her plans and Mikasa.

Her motive is clearly not pure but I think she is (for now) on the right side. At the moment it's a game of maneuver between her, Mikasa, and Paradis.

She's aware of Zeke's spinal fluid plan, as it's extra insurance to insure her access to resources.

Paradisian incompetence continues on full display. To let an outsider in on the unfolding crisis situtation is amateur hour to say the least.

Kiyomi wants to screw everyone over for their money and resources and she's pressing the flesh aggressively

Kiyomi had something to do with Zackley's assassination...

Kiyomi is no threat to Paradis as long as their relationship benefits her and Azumabito. I can see she that if she perceives instability and civil war she will cut her losses and side with Marley / the world. Also Hizuru does not seem to condone what the Azumabito clan is doing. If the pressure is great enough from multiplicative forces, she will budge. I can also see her running back to Marley, figuratively and/or literally, and be basically disposed of as an example or due to sheer brutality. It's an archetype I feel Isayama would use - it's consistent with this arc's themes of political intrigue and moral ambiguity. Yams will definitely still make it his own in some way if this does happen though.

She's a shady Bitch and I wouldn't trust her with my car insurance let alone anything to do with this series.

WILD CARD BITCHES!!

  WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON NICOLO’S ATTACK ON GABI AND FALCO? 1,664 Responses

With ⅔ of all votes, most people could understand Nicolo’s anger, but do not condone his actions. A good chunk (28.2%) of people would have rather he’d hit Gabi with the wine bottle instead of Falco. A mere 3% want to see him swinging from a tree for what he did.

It was good but felt a bit forced. Kaya’s reaction was strange and Nicolo was genuinely unhinged. It’s alright to an extent as people tend to do absurd things in terrible situations.

Falco in his hero complex brought himself to trouble. I understand Nikolo.

Gabi is very bratty, stubborn, close minded and rude - she definitely doesn't deserve all love and protection. I was happy to see Nicolo kicking her ass.

I understood and I actually did not care if Gaby dies. I would be glad actually, It would be sad for Falco though.

I can maybe understand the bottle and punch but him treating a 12 year old like a sacrificial lamb was insanity.

It doesnt sit well with me at all tbh but i dont hate him

Nicolo comes from a place where it’s heavily socialised that Eldians are sub human. So while I disagree completely with him hurting children, I can see how he did it so easily.

Nicolo's actions were horrible, yet very human. It's clear he felt something towards Sasha, and he doesn't view Gabi or Falco as children in this scenario--he sees them as soldiers(or warriors), which is why he had no hesitation attacking a child.

  HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT MIKASA’S DISPLAY OF COMPASSION? 1,661 Responses

Nearly half of respondents were just pleased to see Mikasa get attention on anything that doesn’t involve Eren. 28% were simply just excited. A few agreed it was a good show of Mikasa having room in her heart to spare and a few wished she wouldn’t have interfered.

A great example that she cares for others and hates to see death especially from children. She does not want to let them have the same future as herself.

Loving Mikasa in this arc, it really feels like she's matured in those 4 years.

Extremely important. She's stopping Kaya from "stepping into the forest".

Honestly the most powerful scene in the chapter, along with Papa Braus putting down the knife.

I don't know how to feel. She didn't have the right.

Considering none of Sasha's friends attacked Gabi or Falco on the airship and Mikasa's always been like this I don't see what the big deal is. It could've easily be anyone else imo but I guess it's nice she's getting to do something other than wanting to get to Eren asap. I just wish she was given more to do when I still cared about her. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I never really liked Mikasa, but I adored this scene. It shows a part of her that we don't often get to see so plainly in my opinion. She prevented a very bad situation from unfurling by being a bit more merciful, even if only for Kaya's sake.

Mikasa used to be one of my favorites. Not anymore. Not after this.

it's nice i decided to not take a drink each time mikasa shows concern for someone other than eren and ppl react by saying "finally! she shows concern for someone other than eren!" i'd be a chronic alcoholic by then.

We don't all have a Mikasa to craddle us in her strong arms so i hope Gabi appreciates this eventually. She seems shook already.

  HAS THERE BEEN TOO MUCH ATTENTION ON SASHA’S DEATH? 1,657 Responses

Maybe it’s fate that this pie chart looks like a peace sign since fandom discussion on this topic is surprisingly civil. Very few people resent the attention Sasha has gotten. Only 11.9% are unhappy with it.

I appreciate how Sasha’s death this way is much more impactful than if she died how Isayama had originally planned.

I think there’s so much emphasis on Sasha’s death because 1. she made it so far with the group that they never thought they could lose her and 2. It’s peaceful enough on Paradis that they finally have time to mourn their dead (when before they had to figure out how to get back wall Maria and take out the titans).

I understand why people are frustrated that so much time has been spent on Sasha after her death, but I think there's a difference between spending time on her to mourn her death versus spending time on her death to advance the plot—revealing the wine scheme, yikes Falco+titan juice, Gabi's struggle with her indoctrination, discovering that even an integrated Marleyan like Nicolo isn't actually on Paradis's side. I think no other death in the series had as much potential to move the plot because because before now, the enemy was almost always a titan. A death at the hands of a human—moreover, a pseudo-protagonist and a child—in international warfare has a lot more to unpack in terms of what-happens-next than a death from a monstrous natural disaster.

  WILL KODANSHA EVER RELEASE A CHAPTER WITHOUT TYPOS? 1,646 Responses

We were so close to having “No but in red” end with 66.6% of the votes earlier last week! Nonetheless, we are all in agreement that Kodansha’s translations will never improve. Not even for the tankobon.

ChildEREN Of The Sun... maybe Kodansha are sending us a message

  WHAT ARE YOU MOST HOPING TO SEE NEXT CHAPTER? 1,665 Responses

With over 50% of the votes each, most of the fandom want so see the Yaegerbros reunite and catch a glimpse of the queen. In third place are the warriors (including their disguises, hopefully). Next on the list is a flashback to Eren’s time in Marley, while more Gabi and Falco ended in fifth place. Only 3 out of 10 people want to watch Monsterbowl.

Abs of anyone but Jeagers.

All of the above, and a pizza too, thanks.

What happened the to EMA conversation?

Historia's baby goes fetus deletus

Hange NOT turning into a titan.

This chapter has made me eager to see how Falco and Gabi would interact with the Warriors now that they are wiser. Also Zeke's plot has really thickened. Also, really appreciate the use of Sasha's death as more than just a GoT-esque stunt.

ANNIEEEEE

Eren and his horde. Zeke and Levi. The Warrior infiltration. Revelations on any other plots/schemes/conspiracies taking place on the island. Historia and her role in all of this. The arc is just beginning, but it's building up to something big. I can't wait for all this to finally blow up! Soon!

How widely the spiked wine was disseminated and drunk.

Floch, naked, in a stream with Eren, also naked, washing his back.

WHERE  DO YOU PRIMARILY DISCUSS THE SERIES? 1,600 Responses

Tumblr? Are you ok? We had more Facebook entries than yours.

  ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHAPTER?

Attack on Titan universe is 100% worth living in now that we know it has pizza.

Best birthday gift my dream comes true so many feels EEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKK

Best boy Jean looked so hurt when Nikolo used a racial slur against him (to save him - you could tell Nikolo didn’t want to call him that) : (

Clean af. And it didn’t  even touch the more exciting plot lines: Yeager bros, Annie, Warriors, Historia.

FALCO PLEASE BE OKAY MY BABY

Gabi's actions are revealed, Nicola's actions are revealed, Zeke's potential plans are revealed, Pixis' possible plan is revealed, the Volunteers' plans are slowly unravelling, now we just need to move onto Zeke, Eren, Levi, and Reiner.

Haven't enjoyed a chapter this much in months.

I think this is the first time in more than a year and a half that people are gonna understand what I've been saying about Gabi all along. If people don't change their opinions on her from this chapter they just have their hate blinders on.

Honestly I think it was pretty boring compared to the past like 10 chapters, but also because the bar has been set really high. I'm expecting each chapter to be amazing, when in reality, I should be looking at the overarching story. That's what's amazing.

I thought I would hate this chapter as much as the one where pregnant Historia was revealed but I hate it a little less because Gabi is getting the character arc she deserves. I'm super worried for Falco BBY tho. And Nicolo is a dick.

I thought it was really great in displaying the manga's most important message: Stopping the cycle of hatred. Mr. Braus had all the reason to direct his hatred towards Gabi, but realised the world is cruel. It's eat or be eaten, just like in the forest. Gabi was a victim of propaganda and was indoctrinated into her beliefs.

I was initially disappointed this chapter didn't stick/continue with the chaos of last chapter, but was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

It was a great chapter! However, if it had at least one panel of Eren, it would have been even better. I cannot wait for more!

Last Christmas chapter was crazy, here's hoping the next one will be as well! As for this chapter, I enjoyed it as usual but was a little frustrated that we still didn't get more information about Historia. I mean, her last real apperance was back in July! I really hope we'll get to see her before the new year but I've got a feeling we may not. Also Annie. Please let 2019 be our lucky year, she's been gone long enough…

NicoSasha is so cute...!!! I'm glad to finally see the most anticipated scene. Mr. Braus's speech was really emotional. Never felt so much better after reading a chapter. But felt bad for Falco. He doesn't deserve this.

Not a huge fan of how melodramatic the nicolo part was (I understand why he snapped, but no mater how angry/upset he was would someone in that situation jump straight to murder? Really?) but overall I enjoyed the chapter. Now I’m just eager to see what happens when eren shows up to the zevi picnic!

oh Nic, the things you do for love. Sasha -saved- 2 people now, Kaya from the 2m titan and Nicole from the hatred the war caused. I really, really miss her

Really really emotional and fantastic chapter..... I'm sort of sad at the discourse that this has sparked in the fandom, but that's nothing new honestly. If anything, it's a sign of fantastic writing that everyone always has such strong opinions in any direction. At this point I would be concerned if a chapter DIDN'T spark such strong opinons and controversy. I am moved by the amount of human compasion showed in every single corner of every single faction, and shocked by how attached I am to every sect. I'm nervous for the future but ready to start seeing some outcomes.

The character development in this series is absolutely incredible. Its way beyond the simple gorey/edgy battle shonen reputation that it received way back from season 1. The themes, the characters, the plot, the attention to detail have evolved so much that this series truly is one of my favorites of all time. Its reached the complexity and "realness" of Monster for me. This was one of the best chapters to date, I loved it!!

Yeah, I loved Sasha but I'm salty she gets so much focus after her death considering she wasn't that important in the overall story. Meanwhile Erwin got nothing despite the fact 90% of the events of the story would have happened very differently or not at all if he hadn't been there (no Levi in the SC, Eren  shipped off to the MP, no Uprising... etc.). I get she's the catalyst to Gabi's characater development but... wait, why does Gabi gets more screen time than most MCs in this story anyway? That's how many chapters with the main focus on her? Is she a MC now? Isayama changes MCs like he changes his undies I swear.

Nicolo was tempting the Braus family with a violent solution that promised quick satisfaction, while Kaya just lost her cool long enough to go with what had been offered to her on a silver platter. However, in return, the sight of the Braus parents and Kaya's raw sadness in the aftermath of the confrontation and what he almost made Kaya do returned Nicolo back to his own senses as well. They are all such wholesome characters despite the moments of weakness.

Gabi’s character arc seems very predictable, which is not a bad thing really, but i kinda want it to be done so that the story moved on to more interesting things and characters

I want to know what the warriors are doing. No one strong enough is watching over Annie right now so Pieck, Reiner and Porko might try to get her back in the next chapter.

I would have killed for just one panel of Historia or Eren.

Isayama handled the gabi-sasha-nicolo plot line well.

More questions , less answers ... every time Isayama does his thing.

[abzilp]

Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel. It seems vain to ask why. Men are born with various manias: from my earliest childhood, it was mine to make a plaything of imaginary series of events; and as soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to the paper-makers. Reams upon reams must have gone to the making of ‘Rathillet,’ ‘The Pentland Rising,’ ‘The King’s Pardon’ (otherwise ‘Park Whitehead’), ‘Edward Daven,’ ‘A Country Dance,’ and ‘A Vendetta in the West’; and it is consolatory to remember that these reams are now all ashes, and have been received again into the soil. I have named but a few of my ill-fated efforts, only such indeed as came to a fair bulk ere they were desisted from; and even so they cover a long vista of years. ‘Rathillet’ was attempted before fifteen, ‘The Vendetta’ at twenty- nine, and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till I was thirty-one. By that time, I had written little books and little essays and short stories; and had got patted on the back and paid for them — though not enough to live upon. I had quite a reputation, I was the successful man; I passed my days in toil, the futility of which would sometimes make my cheek to burn — that I should spend a man’s energy upon this business, and yet could not earn a livelihood: and still there shone ahead of me an unattained ideal: although I had attempted the thing with vigour not less than ten or twelve times, I had not yet written a novel. All — all my pretty ones — had gone for a little, and then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy’s watch. I might be compared to a cricketer of many years’ standing who should never have made a run. Anybody can write a short story — a bad one, I mean — who has industry and paper and time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills. The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste to blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature has certain rights; instinct — the instinct of self-preservation — forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in weeks. There must be something for hope to feed upon. The beginner must have a slant of wind, a lucky vein must be running, he must be in one of those hours when the words come and the phrases balance of themselves — EVEN TO BEGIN. And having begun, what a dread looking forward is that until the book shall be accomplished! For so long a time, the slant is to continue unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a time you must keep at command the same quality of style: for so long a time your puppets are to be always vital, always consistent, always vigorous! I remember I used to look, in those days, upon every three-volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a feat — not possibly of literature — but at least of physical and moral endurance and the courage of Ajax.

In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother at Kinnaird, above Pitlochry. Then I walked on the red moors and by the side of the golden burn; the rude, pure air of our mountains inspirited, if it did not inspire us, and my wife and I projected a joint volume of logic stories, for which she wrote ‘The Shadow on the Bed,’ and I turned out ‘Thrawn Janet,’ and a first draft of ‘The Merry Men.’ I love my native air, but it does not love me; and the end of this delightful period was a cold, a fly-blister, and a migration by Strathairdle and Glenshee to the Castleton of Braemar. There it blew a good deal and rained in a proportion; my native air was more unkind than man’s ingratitude, and I must consent to pass a good deal of my time between four walls in a house lugubriously known as the Late Miss McGregor’s Cottage. And now admire the finger of predestination. There was a schoolboy in the Late Miss McGregor’s Cottage, home from the holidays, and much in want of ‘something craggy to break his mind upon.’ He had no thought of literature; it was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting suffrages; and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of water colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture gallery. My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to be showman; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a generous emulation, making coloured drawings. On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island.’ I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of ‘Treasure Island,’ the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters. How often have I done so, and the thing gone no further! But there seemed elements of success about this enterprise. It was to be a story for boys; no need of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to be a touchstone. Women were excluded. I was unable to handle a brig (which the Hispaniola should have been), but I thought I could make shift to sail her as a schooner without public shame. And then I had an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself funds of entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine (whom the reader very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin. Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common way of ‘making character’; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him? Our friend, with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know — but can we put him in? Upon the first, we must engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the few branches that remain we may at least be fairly sure of.

On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the rain drumming on the window, I began The Sea Cook, for that was the original title. I have begun (and finished) a number of other books, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more complacency. It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet. I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are trifles and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. The stockade, I am told, is from Masterman Ready. It may be, I care not a jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet’s saying: departing, they had left behind them 

“Footprints on the sands of time,

Footprints which perhaps another—”

and I was the other! It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the Tales of a Traveller some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters — all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed the spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning’s work to the family. It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye. I had counted on one boy, I found I had two in my audience. My father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness of his original nature. His own stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travellers before the era of steam. He never finished one of these romances; the lucky man did not require to! But in Treasure Island he recognised something kindred to his own imagination; it was HIS kind of picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but set himself acting to collaborate. When the time came for Billy Bones’s chest to be ransacked, he must have passed the better part of a day preparing, on the back of a legal envelope, an inventory of its contents, which I exactly followed; and the name of ‘Flint’s old ship’— the Walrus — was given at his particular request. And now who should come dropping in, ex machina, but Dr. Japp, like the disguised prince who is to bring down the curtain upon peace and happiness in the last act; for he carried in his pocket, not a horn or a talisman, but a publisher — had, in fact, been charged by my old friend, Mr. Henderson, to unearth new writers for Young Folks. Even the ruthlessness of a united family recoiled before the extreme measure of inflicting on our guest the mutilated members of The Sea Cook; at the same time, we would by no means stop our readings; and accordingly the tale was begun again at the beginning, and solemnly re-delivered for the benefit of Dr. Japp. From that moment on, I have thought highly of his critical faculty; for when he left us, he carried away the manuscript in his portmanteau.

Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and now a positive engagement. I had chosen besides a very easy style. Compare it with the almost contemporary ‘Merry Men’, one reader may prefer the one style, one the other —‘tis an affair of character, perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail to see that the one is much more difficult, and the other much easier to maintain. It seems as though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage to turn out Treasure Island at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight. But alas! this was not my case. Fifteen days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. My mouth was empty; there was not one word of Treasure Island in my bosom; and here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me at the ‘Hand and Spear’! Then I corrected them, living for the most part alone, walking on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a good deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I can depict to you in words at what remained for me to do. I was thirty-one; I was the head of a family; I had lost my health; I had never yet paid my way, never yet made 200 pounds a year; my father had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book that was judged a failure: was this to be another and last fiasco? I was indeed very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had the resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the novels of M. de Boisgobey. Arrived at my destination, down I sat one morning to the unfinished tale; and behold! it flowed from me like small talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again at a rate of a chapter a day, I finished Treasure Island. It had to be transcribed almost exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboy remained alone of the faithful; and John Addington Symonds (to whom I timidly mentioned what I was engaged on) looked on me askance. He was at that time very eager I should write on the characters of Theophrastus: so far out may be the judgments of the wisest men. But Symonds (to be sure) was scarce the confidant to go to for sympathy on a boy’s story. He was large-minded; ‘a full man,’ if there was one; but the very name of my enterprise would suggest to him only capitulations of sincerity and solecisms of style. Well! he was not far wrong.

Treasure Island — it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first title, The Sea Cook — appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the least attention. I did not care. I liked the tale myself, for much the same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of picturesque. I was not a little proud of John Silver, also; and to this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer. What was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had finished a tale, and written ‘The End’ upon my manuscript, as I had not done since ‘The Pentland Rising,’ when I was a boy of sixteen not yet at college. In truth it was so by a set of lucky accidents; had not Dr. Japp come on his visit, had not the tale flowed from me with singular case, it must have been laid aside like its predecessors, and found a circuitous and unlamented way to the fire. Purists may suggest it would have been better so. I am not of that mind. The tale seems to have given much pleasure, and it brought (or, was the means of bringing) fire and food and wine to a deserving family in which I took an interest. I need scarcely say I mean my own.

But the adventures of Treasure Island are not yet quite at an end. I had written it up to the map. The map was the chief part of my plot. For instance, I had called an islet ‘Skeleton Island,’ not knowing what I meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque, and it was to justify this name that I broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe and stole Flint’s pointer. And in the same way, it was because I had made two harbours that the Hispaniola was sent on her wanderings with Israel Hands. The time came when it was decided to republish, and I sent in my manuscript, and the map along with it, to Messrs. Cassell. The proofs came, they were corrected, but I heard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked; was told it had never been received, and sat aghast. It is one thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data. I did it; and the map was drawn again in my father’s office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailing ships, and my father himself brought into service a knack he had of various writing, and elaborately FORGED the signature of Captain Flint, and the sailing directions of Billy Bones. But somehow it was never Treasure Island to me.

I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost say it was the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson’s Buccaneers, the name of the Dead Man’s Chest from Kingsley’s At Last, some recollections of canoeing on the high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite, eloquent suggestion, made up the whole of my materials. It is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is always important. The author must know his countryside, whether real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the compass, the place of the sun’s rising, the behaviour of the moon, should all be beyond cavil. And how troublesome the moon is! I have come to grief over the moon in Prince Otto, and so soon as that was pointed out to me, adopted a precaution which I recommend to other men — I never write now without an almanack. With an almanack, and the map of the country, and the plan of every house, either actually plotted on paper or already and immediately apprehended in the mind, a man may hope to avoid some of the grossest possible blunders. With the map before him, he will scarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it does in The Antiquary. With the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow two horsemen, journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ six days, from three of the Monday morning till late in the Saturday night, upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and before the week is out, and still on the same nags, to cover fifty in one day, as may be read at length in the inimitable novel of Rob Roy. And it is certainly well, though far from necessary, to avoid such ‘croppers.’ But it is my contention — my superstition, if you like- -that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words. Better if the country be real, and he has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, short-cuts and footprints for his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was in Treasure Island, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.

[theathenianinspector]

Contemporary portrayals of Ares, the god of war (not Kratos), have not been kind. A fair amount of emphasis has been placed on his violent and combative aspects, understandable since he was a god of war, to create a god that has been utilised as a villain by many world builders and writers. But this focus on violence I would argue has skewed our view against him to the point of being reductionist.

  Ares has been present in most films and popular series’ that involve classical mythology. And most of them he is if not a total villain, a horrendous bully. In Clash of the Titans (2010) he betrays Zeus alongside Hades (a god who has also been misrepresented in contemporary media), in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief he is manipulated by Kronos to hold Zeus’ Master Bolt and most importantly is a total jerk to our nominal protagonist who eventually defeats him in single combat. While in Wonder Woman (2017) he is the antagonist who supposedly brings out the violent and bloodthirsty sides of mankind during the First World War, plus he is portrayed as attempting again to overthrow Zeus. Lastly in God of War Ares is responsible for all manner of injustices towards Kratos…again for the purposes of overthrowing Zeus. Seriously where did this idea that Ares wanted to overthrow Zeus come from?

  Ares slaughters his Olympian brethren. Wonder Woman (2016)

  The most positive depictions of Ares in modern media have been Immortals (2011) when he helped Theseus against his father’s wishes, and Disney’s Hercules (1997) which by far portrayed him most kindly as he barely got any screen time. So why do we villainize Ares? I would argue that as he was solely the god of war, he didn’t have any extra domains such as weaving, metalwork or music, he could only be seen as destructive. We can get a sense of this in his portrayal in the Iliad when Zeus rebukes him for returning to him in tears after being lanced by the mortal hero Diomedes:

  “Sit thou not in any wise by me and whine, thou renegade. Most hateful to me art thou of all gods that hold Olympus, for ever is strife dear to thee and wars and fighting. Thou hast the unbearable, unyielding spirit of thy mother, even of Hera; her can I scarce control by my words. Wherefore it is by her promptings, I think, that you suffer this. But I will no longer endure you in pain, for you are my offspring, and it was to me that thy mother bare you; but were you born of any other god, as the pestilence you are, then long ere this hadst thou been lower than the sons of heaven.”

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  We also find very few cults worshipping Ares in Greek cities. The reason for which has been speculated that the Greeks did not wish to openly worship violence. The most accounted for place of Ares worship was Sparta which kept a statue of the god chained so he would never desert them (Pausanias 3.15.7). This has given the impression that Spartans were somehow more violent and warmongering than their fellow Greeks – an assertion difficult to support with historiography. Sparta if anything was cautious to war lest their Helots revolt in their army’s absence. Also, by the time of Pausanias they had shrines to Athena, Zeus, Artemis and Aphrodite. While our modern reception has taken this perception of Ares and combined it with a contemporary dread and condemnation of all violence and war on the collected experience of two world wars and the more visibly accessible carnage of the 21st century . So was Ares just pure unadulterated violence?

  Ares the antagonist of God of War (2005)

  The Homeric Hymn to Ares would certainly disagree with that assessment, Ares is paid such complements as: ‘exceeding in strength’, ‘doughty in heart’, ‘Saviour of cities’, ‘unwearying’, ‘defence of Olympus’, ‘father of warlike Victory’, ‘ally of Justice’, ‘leader of righteous men’, ‘sceptred King of manliness’ (1-6). Much more than an aggressive force of violence, Ares is warfare done in defence of the city and a paragon of aristocratic masculinity. He is associated with the qualities that make a city successful and harmonious: strength, victory and justice. We might associate him with warmongering, but he could just as much be invoked by a soldier defending his home. The Hymn goes on:

  ‘Shed down a kindly ray from above upon my life, and strength of war, that I may be able to drive away bitter cowardice from my head and crush down the deceitful impulses of my soul. Restrain also the keen fury of my heart which provokes me to tread the ways of blood-curdling strife.’

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  Ares appears to be a god that inspires courage as well as (uncharacteristic) discipline. From the hymn the god gave the soldier his will to keep down both his dread to go into battle and possibly die as well as his urge to commit violence against his fellow citizens. I would therefore argue that Ares represents not the violence and warfare, but its primal emotional aspect: its courage, urge to defend one’s home and the discipline required to overcome fear. Thus, the Spartans didn’t keep Ares chained as a means to ensure perpetual brutality, but so that the values of bravery and discipline would never desert them in battle. And it is these realms that pop culture has failed to recognise and so has resulted in the demonization of Ares’ persona.

    Greek and Roman depictions of Ares

  If the qualities of bravery and discipline seem remote to the god of war’s character because you’ve astutely noticed that the former Iliad passage was from Ares fleeing a battle, or you’ve heard of the story when he was overpowered by two giants and kept in a jar, then that is understandable. Ares can also be argued to have been a negatively perceived god because of the company he kept: Deimos (Dread) and Phobos (Fear) were his charioteers so that didn’t exactly help with PR. However, bear in mind that Athena was also present at the same battle as Ares in the Iliad and was also one of the gods that allegedly temporarily overthrew Zeus, while Ares wasn’t even named in masterminding the plot (Homer, Iliad 5.840-6 ; 1.399-406); and pop culture doesn’t nearly give her the same amount of negativity. Moreover, terror was not a domain particular to Ares. The satyr god Pan is the origin for the English word ‘Panic’ and Dionysus was actually also attributed the fear of men turning tail and fleeing battle as a form of madness (Euripides, Bacchae 302-6). Regarding his lacklustre performance against Otus and Ephialtes (Homer, Iliad 5.385-92), bear in mind that Zeus, the King of Olympus, had his tendons ripped out by the monster Typhon, and that Ares fighting them in the first place was by definition doing his job as defending Olympus. We should also give him some credit for defeating the serpent footed giant Echidnades who was a son of Echidna, the mother of monsters and whom Kronos used to confront Zeus’ thunderbolts (Nonnus, Dionysiaca 18. 274).

  Thus, the popular view of Ares as the embodiment of human violence and warmongering is simply reductionist. Since mainstream reception has assumed that Ares is bad by definition because aggression and violence are such, the god of war has been villainised and implicated in strangely consistent plots where he overthrows his own father Zeus. On this, Zeus was actually paranoid that Athene was the one to defeat him, hence why he ate her and her mother Metis which resulted with Athena’s birth as she sprang forth from Zeus’ head. This singular interpretation has left out key evidence of Ares’ wider significance and characterisation which should be considered when we think of portraying him responsibly to public audiences to get a better impression of the Greeks’ god of war.

  Dan Tang

The Athenian Inspector

  If you want to learn about the Romans, check out: https://romanimperium.wordpress.com/

Rehabilitating Ares in Pop Culture Contemporary portrayals of Ares, the god of war (not Kratos), have not been kind. A fair amount of emphasis has been placed on his violent and combative aspects, understandable since he was a god of war, to create a god that has been utilised as a villain by many world builders and writers.