#the reason the numbers seem out of order is because those are our actual drill chart numbers (this year)

[ihavetoomuchhomeworkforthis]

so at the competition yesterday:

Mello 4: Ok guys, remember, Lana Del Rey is in the stands, she's gonna be watching our show, she's- we have to make it the BEST show ever ok?

[agreement from Mello 1]

Me (Mello 3) to Mello 2, quietly: "who's Lanna de re?"

Mello 2: *shrugs* "I dunno, a pop singer probably"

Mello 2: "Hey [Mello 4], Lanah de ray doesn't motivate either of us"

Mello 4: "Oh." *turns to me* "well, uh, Spock is in the stands"

[scripttorture]

Hello! I have a few questions related to your most recent post and the definition of torture. You said:

"A trained person who was never tortured will always out perform someone whose training involved torture."

According to everything else I have seen on your blog, this makes sense - the mental and physical trauma from being tortured have lasting effects which make certain tasks more difficult.

However, this seems to juxtapose certain tropes I've seen in US military training advertisements. For example, "Hell Week" in the Navy SEAL training seems like it would be torture if it was forced upon someone (like if the soldiers didn't sign up for it and didn't have the option to quit.). *Hell Week is when soldiers are training continuously for 5 days in freezing, wet conditions, with little more than 4 hours of sleep for the entire week, under insane amounts of physical and mental stress.

- If someone chose to be tested both mentally and physically, I feel like it wouldn't be torture. However, if the same exact conditions were forced upon someone else (testing their mental and physical limits without their consent or understanding), does your quote above mean that the person who did not have a choice would not reap the benefits of the training/testing? Or would the Navy SEALs be better soldiers if they didn't have to go through 'torturous conditions' during Hell Week, regardless of their choice to do so?

(I used Hell Week as an example, but I meant this question generally. I'm trying to figure out how to best train an elite soldier and avoid any harmful torture apologia tropes, while also making sure that they are able to handle insanely challenging situations)

- My other question has more to do with the definition of torture that you quoted from the UN in one of your master posts. If someone is being seriously injured (pulled fingernails, whipping, starvation etc), but not for the purposes of interrogation, punishment, or intimidation, is that still torture, or is that just abuse? And, regardless of what we call it, would the effects be the same as if it were torture for any of the three motives above?

Sorry if this is long and hard to understand, I can clarify if needed!

It’s not the longest I’ve gotten and it’s perfectly clear, duck*. :) Honestly this is a difficult topic with a lot of nuance, it’s better to take a longer and more thoughtful approach.

 From the stand point of the legal definition and what we study/understand as torture any consensual activity, however extreme, is not torture.

 But here’s where it gets interesting: consent and our attitude to an activity actually changes our response to pain. It may even change how much pain we feel.

 I’m going to take a slightly different example to yours. There are a lot of cultures globally that have practiced scarification, ritual cutting to deliberately form scars. And this can be done for a lot of reasons: membership of a family or clan, coming of age, traditional medicine, religion, you get the idea.

 A lot of people in these cultures describe their scars as incredibly important and the process of getting them as a moving, deep and positive process.

 This does not mean they wouldn’t be traumatised if they were attacked by someone with a knife.

 Being able to approach something painful and see it as positive really changes our perspective. It makes trauma and mental illness a lot less likely. And being able to back out, even if it’s just for a little while to take a breather, seems to make us able to withstand more pain then we would have otherwise.

 The simplest and most famous experiment that dealt with this relationship between our mindset and pain asked people to keep their hands in ice cold water. They timed how long people could do it when they were told to stay silent and how long they could do it when they were allowed to swear. If they swore they could hold their hands under for longer. An average of forty seconds longer.

 Looking back over O’Mara (Why Torture Doesn’t Work, a very good intro to how pain works and what it does to the brain) the way he describes it as by thinking of the experience of pain as a collection of three things. There’s the physical sensation itself, the nerves firing. But there’s also an affective component, how we feel emotionally about the experience and a cognitive component, how we think about it.

 Did you ever play that game as a kid where you stuff as many chilis as possible in your mouth to see who would spit them out first? I… might have done. And from what I remember it hurts an awful lot. But those memories to me are mostly about messing about with my friends, I remember trying to be stubborn about it and I remember us laughing at each other.

 This is a completely different experience to someone being held down and having chili stuff up their nose. But the difference isn’t necessarily in the physical damage done or the physical sensation of pain. It’s in the other components, the emotional response and the rationalisation.

 I also had a filling drilled in my tooth without painkillers as a kid. I don’t know how common this is in the West? It happened in Saudi. Honestly my biggest memory of it is the language barrier between myself and the dentist.

 These are anecdotes obviously but I’m trying to show that you probably also have experiences in your own life that back up the experiments too. The way we think about a painful experience really does make a huge amount of difference. And that means consent matters enormously.

 These soldiers are going into this experience knowing what to expect, how long it will last and that they can stop at any time. That makes a huge amount of difference. Those same factors have drastically increased the time volunteers will spend in solitary confinement for research. I’m pretty sure if I dug even a little I’d find pain studies with similar findings.

 Here’s the flip side: the physical factors are still in play.

 Sleep is an important physiological process that’s essential to normal functioning. Studies on consensual sleep deprivation have shown massive negative impacts on memory along with a host of other things that you can read about here.

 Let’s take a non torture example. A student who stays up all night cramming for an exam is not going to develop the symptoms of trauma that a torture survivors who was sleep deprived would. But the effect sleep deprivation has on memory is due to sleep playing an essential role in preserving memory (and learning more generally.) So they’re both likely to have difficulty remembering things in days just before and just after sleep deprivation. They’re also both more likely to have false memories and catch a bad cold.

 As a result of this memory impairment I question the educational value of anything involving sleep deprivation: you can’t learn while messing up the processes that let your brain remember things.

 There have been cases in the UK of people dying during training for the armed forces. Because while consent makes a huge difference, mindset makes a huge difference- our bodies still have limits. We can choose to push ourselves past those limits and, whatever our motivation or feelings, it can do real harm.

 Personally? I’m unsure of the benefit of these kinds of exercises. As in I’m unsure there is a benefit. Learning is going to be shot, chances of injury are going to be a lot higher- I don’t see anything that could be improved by these sorts of exercises.

 Anecdotally people do report feeling like a closer unit after going through these sorts of routines. That might be the benefit: moral and unit cohesion, possibly self-esteem too.

 If you’re making up something for your story I think it’d be helpful for me to mention a little statistical effect that gets used to justify punishment pretty regularly. Get some dice out if you’ve got them and roll one. Let’s say the number represents performance in some kind of test (because effort and learning matter but our performance also varies because of things we can’t control.) A roll of 1 gets punished, a roll of 6 gets praised.

 Now after you roll that first 1 statistically speaking the chances are your next roll will be better. And if you roll a 6 then statistically speaking the chances are your next roll will be worse. People observe this effect in real life and they often conclude that there’s no point in praising someone but that punishment leads to improvement. Really it’s just a statistical effect, after a particularly, noticeably bad day the chances are things will be better next and vice versa.

 This effect can make it difficult for people to recognise overall, long term progress. Which is the kind of progress you should be paying attention to when designing a training program.

 If you want good performance from people, whatever the metric, the most efficient thing to do is ensure that those people are; well fed, have access to clean water, get plenty of sleep, have breaks and have access to medical treatment when they need it.

 I’d say the main things to keep in mind when designing this fictional training regime are:

Being honest about the effects you describe, ie if they’re spending long periods without shelter are they at risk from exposure? If they’re standing in cold water are they going to get hypothermia?

Remember that even if something is damaging or causes lasting trauma it would not necessarily prevent someone from doing their job. Torture survivors have serious, lasting symptoms but many of them still work.

 I think I’m going to leave that there because I’m not an expert in militaries or training people. And keep in mind that I am a pacifist, read this with my biases in mind.

 Getting to the second question, there is a little more to the UN definition then that. The primary factor is still who the abuser is. For it to be torture (legally speaking) the abuser has to be (or be ordered by) an on-duty government employee, part of a group that controls territory (ie an occupying force). Some countries also count international organised criminal gangs in this definition.

 It’s also important to note that torture can be targetted at someone other then the victim. So if the police arrest the brother of a political opponent and beat him in order to intimidate the politician, that is still torture.

 Basically there are a lot of factors in the legal definition of torture and it’s that way by design. The hope is that you end up with a framework that captures as much government abuse as possible.

 But it also means that there’s a pretty high barrier when it comes to proving torture. Which means that things which are legally torture can be prosecuted as assault, bodily harm or equivalents to these, because it’s easier to get a conviction for those charges.

 Technically you are correct: if abuse done by a government official doesn’t have one of the four motivations in the legal definition (attempts to obtain information, forcing a confession, intimidation or punishment) then it doesn’t meet the definition.

 However in practice I’ve not heard of a case failing because of the motive.

 I’m not a lawyer and I’m not an expert in international law. I won’t say it’s never happened. But it’s much more common for cases to fail for other reasons. Off the top of my head I’d say the most common reason is difficulty proving the abuse took place.

 The most common types of torture today are ‘clean’, a term we use to indicate that they don’t leave obvious marks. If someone turns up with fingernails torn out or the skin of their back lacerated by a whip that is clear physical evidence of abuse. Nothing else causes similar injuries. But if someone turns up at a doctor’s with swollen feet or reddened skin, if they’ve lost a lot of weight or they’re so tired they’re struggling to stand… Well all of those things can be caused by common tortures. But they can also be caused by common illnesses.

 A lot of the deaths from torture today are similarly hard to prove. Beatings and stress positions ultimately cause death by kidney failure. Which can mean that prosecutors are asked to prove a victim didn’t have an underlying health condition. Or take drugs.

 Honestly my instinct is that the motive is the easiest thing to prove. It’s often harder to bring charges against people in positions of authority, regardless of the country we’re talking about. Bringing those charges, proving abuse took place and proving it was done by the person in question, those are usually the tricky parts.

 The difference between torture and abuse is scale. Torture is industrial scale abuse.

 The law doesn’t define that scale but that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about abuse from organised authority. Abusers might have dozens of victims. Torturers have thousands, tens of thousands.

 If you want to explore a different motivation in your story, something outside the legal framework, consider the scale at which this abuse is taking place. Consider how organised it is. If it’s organised and large scale, with multiple abusers, with no prior relationship between the abuser and victims then torture will probably be a better model then abuse. If it’s smaller scale with a more personal relationship and if it isn’t supported by a legal framework/organisation then abuse might be a better model.

 For victims and survivors the difference isn’t so much about the symptoms they personally experience as the… side effect of that scale. Abuse victims are often very isolated and may not know anyone who has had a similar experience. Torture implies a community of survivors and possibly generational trauma. There are also effects to do with access to support, access to medical care and how likely it is that someone will be believed.

 Torture survivors are often systematically disenfranchised in a way that abuse victims are not. Torture survivors are often forced to leave their home country. Anecdotally, based on what I’ve seen globally over the last few years, I think that struggling to get citizenship is increasingly an issue for torture survivors. And without citizenship there’s difficulty finding legal work, getting accommodation, accessing medical care, accessing the legal system etc.

 I do not know whether torture survivors are more or less likely to be believed by their community compared to survivors of abuse. I do not think any one has attempted a comparative study. I do know that the prevalence of clean torture means that many torture survivors are not believed and this puts up a further barrier, making it harder to access medical treatment and bring charges.

 Rejali’s book was published in 2009, so things may have changed a tad. At the time he was writing the average wait for a torture survivor to see a specialist doctor was about 10 years.

 Abuse is to torture what murder is to genocide. And there are difference on a wider social scale as a result.

 I mention all that because I feel it’s relevant but the impression I get is you’re mostly interested in the long term symptoms? In which case, yes the legal definition makes very little difference. The physical injuries caused by particular kinds of abuse don’t change depending on whether it’s a private individual or a police officer holding the Taser.

 The lasting psychological symptoms are not particular to torture; they’re what the human brain does when traumatised. The same symptoms can manifest in people who witness traumatic events but weren’t actually hurt themselves. They can manifest in people who were injured in accidents and they manifest in people who were neglected or abused. Hell, I have a couple of them, though no where near the severity a torture survivors would experience. A sufficient amount of stress is enough for these symptoms to start developing in anybody.

 You can find the general list of symptoms here. There’s also a post specifically about memory problems over here.

 The pattern I describe; that these symptoms are a list of possibilities not ‘every torture victim will get all of these’ holds true for trauma survivors generally. Anecdotally there is some variability with chronic pain being reported more often with some kinds of abuse. That might be because it can have physical causes, psychological causes or a mix of the two.

 Whether it’s torture or abuse there isn’t any way to predict a survivor’s symptoms in advance. Much of the advice I have about writing torture survivors and their symptoms holds true for trauma survivors generally. Which is why I’ll still take a crack at some questions that aren’t about torture.

 Pick the symptoms that you feel fit the character and serve the story. We can’t predict symptoms and that means that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t pick the things that appeal to you.

 And I think I’m going to leave it there. I hope that helps :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

*This is a weird English endearment. I had someone ask if this was me trying not to swear. 

[mediaevalmusereads]

A Duke, the Lady, and a Baby. By Vanessa Riley. New York: Zebra, 2020.

Rating: 2/5 stars

Genre: historical romance

Part of a Series? Yes, Rogues and Remarkable Women #1

Summary:   When headstrong West Indian heiress Patience Jordan questioned her English husband's mysterious suicide, she lost everything: her newborn son, Lionel, her fortune—and her freedom. Falsely imprisoned, she risks her life to be near her child—until The Widow's Grace gets her hired as her own son’s nanny. But working for his unsuspecting new guardian, Busick Strathmore, Duke of Repington, has perils of its own. Especially when Patience discovers his military strictness belies an ex-rake of unswerving honor—and unexpected passion . . . A wounded military hero, Busick is determined to resolve his dead cousin’s dangerous financial dealings for Lionel’s sake. But his investigation is a minor skirmish compared to dealing with the forthright, courageous, and alluring Patience. Somehow, she's breaking his rules, and sweeping past his defenses. Soon, between formidable enemies and obstacles, they form a fragile trust—but will it be enough to save the future they long to dare together?

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

Content Warnings: racism, blood, violence, allusions to suicide, imprisonment, and non-voluntary institutionalization

Overview: I first learned of Vanessa Riley while reading an article about women of color and historical romance, so when I finished a rather confusing (and depressing?) read, I decided to see which of Riley’s books my library had on offer. This novel originally caught my eye because of the marketing: a multi-cultural regency romance? Seems like just the thing I’m looking for! Unfortunately, the writing style just didn’t gel with me, so for that reason, I can’t give this book more than 2 stars.

Writing: While I can respect the easy-to-digest prose style of most romances, Riley’s style didn’t work for me for a number of reasons. First, I found the use of the first person jarring. If you know me, then you’ll know that first person narration feels unnatural to me (unless the book is self-conscious about the way perspective is being used). But I also found the first person strange because Riley’s book alternates between Patience’s POV (which is in first person) and Busick’s POV (which is in third person). While the shift in POV was a nice delineation between the two characters’ perspectives, I ultimately had some trouble losing myself in the story because there was such a marked shift. I found myself preferring Busick’s chapters over Patience’s because I found it easier to let the prose just kind of wash over me.

Riley’s prose style is also a bit too reliant on dialogue and rhetorical questions for my taste. A large portion of this book involves characters talking to one another, which would be fine except I felt like Riley used dialogue in order to tell readers things rather than show them. The dialogue would repeat certain ideas or events over and over again, and the flow of the conversations didn’t feel natural, as topics would change abruptly or characters would speak in ways that didn’t feel genuine. I did like moments when Patience and Busick would have a little tit-for-tat; Riley is strongest when writing Patience's witty comebacks to Busick’s insistence on military order.

But because there was so much dialogue, there wasn’t much room for anything else, and I felt like Riley wasn’t quite sure of how to create suspense without dialogue. As a result, there are a lot of rhetorical questions; “Was she a spy?” “Did he have some secret in his past?” and the like. I feel like these types of questions popped up every other page, and part of the reason they were relied on so much may have been because Riley had a tendency to tell rather than show. Riley would point blank tell us what her characters were thinking or feeling, as well as what actions they were taking, and as a result, the narrative (and characters) felt flat.

Structurally, I also think the book could have used some tweaking. Early on, I felt like Riley was using a lot of expositional dialogue to dump a lot of info on the reader, and Patience’s internal monologue would make allusions to characters or events in ways that felt awkward and/or not relevant in the moment. I even had some trouble determining what exactly was going on at first because the book starts out with an exciting scene, and the circumstances that created that scene were unclear (unless you read the book summary first). To help with this, it would have been beneficial to get some kind of prologue, and if Riley didn’t want a prologue that depicts Patience being separated from her son or being victimized by the antagonist, then maybe we can see her escaping Bedlam or joining the Widow’s Grace - anything to give the book the space to establish a setting.

Plot: This book primarily follows our heroine, Patience Jordan, as she tries to regain custody of her son, Lionel. Following her husband, Colin’s, suicide, his uncle Markham seized control of their estate at Hamlin and claimed guardianship over Lionel. The reason? To gain access to Patience’s father’s money. To cover up the truth, Markham had Patience committed to Bedlam, so now, Patience must find evidence that Markham fabricated this insidious plot - evidence that she thinks is contained in some legal documents hidden within the family home.

However, Lionel’s legal guardian is not Markham, but Busick Strathmore, Colin’s cousin. Wanting to do right by his family, Busick seizes control of Hamlin and establishes himself as Lionel’s adoptive father. Not sure if Busick can be trusted, Patience gets herself hired as a wet nurse for Lionel, and uses her knowledge of the house to look for the legal documents that will prove Markham’s guilt, thus preventing her from being separated from Lionel again.

On paper, this plot looked really intriguing, but in practice, not a whole lot happened. Most of our time is spent reading the dialogue between Patience and various other characters, and we don’t actually get to see much of her snooping around, risking getting caught, and so on. Events didn’t seem to build on one another, so I mostly felt like I was getting character snapshots rather than an actual narrative.

There’s also something of a side plot where a mysterious “ghost” causes some minor trouble around the house. Personally, I think this plot could have been more centralized; if Riley had gone full Gothic romance (I’m thinking Jane Eyre because Jane gets hired to care for a child and Thornfield is spooky), I think this book would have been a delight. But the existing tone is a little too light, so it didn’t quite achieve the desired effect.

I also think that the whole Widow’s Grace stuff removed a lot of agency from Patience. While I liked that Patience had friends - especially friends in high places that could wield social influence to help her - having an organized, underground band of women was a little much for me. I would have preferred to see Patience concoct plans and discover information on her own, rather than having the Widow’s Grace act as the architect.

Characters: Patience, our heroine, is fairly likeable in that she’s brave, determined, and fiercely loyal to the people she cares about. I really enjoyed following her as she tried to search for her legal papers, outsmart Busick, and bring her companions along for the ride. I also liked that she had a lot of complex emotions surrounding her husband’s death; while the marriage wasn’t happy (and she has a lot of feelings about being treated as an Other), she also feels guilty about potentially contributing to her husband’s depression and wonders what she is going to tell her son about his father. I liked seeing her try to work through all these emotions, all while remaining focused on her goals.

Busick, our hero, is also fairly complex, but my appreciation for his complexity is dampened by some of the cheesiness that surrounds his military outlook on life. Busick is a former soldier who is working through his feelings about being injured in battle. Two years before the story begins, Busick loses his leg and must either use a prosthetic or a wheelchair, and he has a lot of issues with the perceptions surrounding his disability. As a result, he tries to hide the fact that he’s missing a leg; he never uses his wheelchair (except when alone) and plays it off like his leg just isn’t healing right. This kind of internalized ableism could have been really interesting to read about, especially since there was an opportunity for Busick to learn more about his value as something other than a soldier. However, Busick’s desperate desire to be useful to the war effort came off as fairly ridiculous; not only does he bring soldiers into his home and conduct drills in his yard (wouldn’t that be done at a camp or base?) but he tries to put Lionel on a strict military-style schedule and requires people to witness him as he rides a horse around the lawn (to prove his strength?). His past as a notorious rake isn’t really utilized effectively either; while we get allusions to his amorous activities, I didn’t really see how it was relevant. Did the military give him more discipline and now he’s reformed? Does he find himself slipping back into his old ways now that he can no longer fight on the battlefield? How does this situation with Patience and Lionel challenge all that? I think I would have liked to see Busick grow a little more, maybe by having him use his guardianship of Hamlin and Lionel as a way to “prove” that he’s changed from rake to responsible, disciplined adult (and his disability threatens that by making him seem incapable, so he has to deal with that as well). And while there were some hints at those kinds of things, they really weren’t central to his story.

Side characters were fairly enjoyable in that they had sweet relationships with the heroine or hero. I particularly enjoyed the relationship Patience had with Jemina - her fellow inmate at Bedlam who suffers from amnesia. I appreciated that Riley didn’t make Jemina seem “crazy,” but instead, she was a capable woman who demonstrates genuine affection and concern for her friend. I also liked that Busick had a similar support in Gantry, a viscount who is helping Busick with Hamlin (and with self-acceptance?) while also struggling with his own family issues. Lady Shrewsbury, the head of the Widow’s Grace, was interesting for the role she played in using her social power to get Patience into Hamlin, but otherwise, I didn’t really like the idea of the Widow’s Grace (because it removes some agency that could have been given to Patience instead).

Markham, our antagonist, is barely present, so I don’t really have many thoughts on him. While his actions were sneaky and abhorrent, and I appreciated that Riley didn’t use him to showcase a bunch of on-page misery, I also thought he was underutilized.

Romance: I hate to say it, but I think Patience and Busick lacked chemistry. I couldn’t quite see how each character enriched each other’s emotional lives; Patience seemed to like Busick because he was fatherly towards Lionel and because he was kind, while Busick seemed to like Patience because she was pretty and defiant. I wish Riley had done a little more to make them feel made for one another; maybe Patience challenges Busick’s rigid outlook on life and shows him that he has value beyond just being a soldier. Maybe Busick shows Patience that she matters as a person - something that was lacking in her marriage to Colin - or that she doesn’t have to take on all her burdens herself. There were hints of some of these things, but because of the writing style, I thought we were told rather than shown that the two characters had feelings for one another.

I also think the romance lacked heat and longing. While not every romance has to be sexy and steamy, I do think that there should be some element of longing that plays out in how the characters interact physically. One place where Riley actually does this pretty well is when Patience discusses how well she works with Busick while taking care of Lionel at night - the two hand him over to one another and move around the room as if doing a “dance,” and they brush against one another and smell each other’s scent. But other than that, it felt like I was smacked in the face with statements like “I noticed his mouth and wondered what it would be like to kiss it” or “Didn’t you notice? He follows you with his eyes!” I personally like these physical moments to be a little more subtle and for them to build on one another without the author having to spell out what they mean for me.

TL;DR: A Duke, the Lady, and a Baby has an intriguing premise and good characters, but ultimately lacks a strong plot, gripping prose style, or steamy romantic chemistry. Most of what holds this book back is the overuse of dialogue and rhetorical questions to create suspense, as well as the tendency to tell not show. While I would love to rate this book higher, the prose just isn’t there.

[dwellordream]

“...What about the personal relationships that are formed in the context of conflict? Surely, the ‘band of brothers’ is a truly universal experience, right...? Surely the social bonds that held Easy-Company together in 1944 and 1945 are the same as those from 1415? Or 415? Well, no. Not quite.

We can approach this question through the idea of cohesion – the moral force that holds a group of combatants together on the battlefield under the intense emotional stresses of combat. The intense bonds that soldiers form in modern armies (particularly those in the European pattern) are not an accident, but a core part of how those armies, institutionally, seek to build cohesion.

Going back to last week, we discussed briefly the emergence of the extensively drilled and disciplined ‘mechanical’ soldier of Early Modern Europe, noting that this approach wasn’t necessary for the effective use of firearms (the Ottoman Janissaries, for instance, were quite good with firearms, but were not trained and organized in this way), but rather was a product of elite aristocratic (read: officer) disdain for their up-jumped peasant soldiers and thus the assumption by those aristocrats that the only way to get such men to fight effectively was to relentlessly drill them.

Now the funny thing about this system is that it clearly worked, but not for the reasons its aristocratic pioneers believed. ...What emerged quite clearly was that it wasn’t ‘the cause’ or patriotism that held troops together under fire, but group cohesion born out of an intense need not to let fellow soldiers in the unit down. In short, what held units together and made them fight more effectively was (in part, there are many conclusions in Men Against Fire) the strong social bonds between comrades.

And, in fact, the drill and discipline of early modern European armies unintentionally did quite a lot of cohesion building things. Soldiers were removed from civilian society (isolation from larger groups builds unit cohesion), split into very small groups (keeping the core group that coheres below Dunbar’s number aids in group cohesion; thus why the platoon is a natural unit size) and then pushed through difficult and unpleasant training (that drill and discipline) creating a sense of unique shared experience and sacrifice. All of which doesn’t render men machines, but it does create strong social bonds within the units that will keep the men fighting even when they care little for their cause (which they generally did in this period; one does not find a super-abundance of patriotism among, say, the Army of Flanders).

And there is a tendency to point to this cohesion, its modern source in ‘toughening’ boot camp and to say, ‘aha! That is the true universal about effective soldier-warriors!’ Except – and you knew there was going to be an except – except it isn’t. Systems built on the use of drill and discipline for the development of unit cohesion through social bonds are actually, historically speaking, quite rare.

We see systems like that in use by the Romans from the Middle Republic forward (but significantly faded by the end of late antiquity; the Byzantine army doesn’t seem to function this way), in China from the Han Dynasty onward, in Japan for the ashigaru infantry from the Sengoku period, and in Europe from the Early Modern period. That sounds like a lot, but that is relatively small minority of the historical period and even then in a relatively small minority of places. It is, for instance, a period that only covers about half of the historical period in Western Europe, the place most often associated with this very system of organization (though that association is perhaps unfair to East Asia).

Instead, most societies relied on existing social bonds formed outside of the experience of war for cohesion. Greek hoplite armies, for instance, generally formed up by polis (read: city) and then within those blocks by still smaller and smaller social divisions, so that family and neighbors would be standing shoulder to shoulder in the battle line (Sparta does this through the system of communal messes, the syssitia, but the idea that you fought alongside the men you dined with socially – your neighbors, generally – was perfectly normal in most Greek cities).

That was intentional – it allowed the phalanx to cohere through the social pressure not to be seen as a coward before the men who meant the most to you, whose shaming gaze you would have to endure in civilian life. The same pressures, by the well, held together the (mostly volunteer) armies of the American Civil War (on this, see, McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1997)).

By contrast, ‘warrior’ classes often rely on a sort of class solidarity along with the demand of an individual military aristocrat to be individually militarily excellent. Richard Kaeuper quips of the literature of the medieval knightly class that it was filled with “utterly tireless, almost obsessional emphasis placed on personal prowess” (R.W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999)). We’ve talked a fair bit about the values of mounted aristocrats, both in their role as combatants and in their roles as generals and those values are relatively disconnected from discipline-induced forms of buddy-cohesion.

Of course exactly what ‘good generalship’ or ‘good officership’ looks like varies wildly from place to place – Alexander was expected to command his cavalry from the front; Roman emperors rarely took the battlefield and when they did they commanded from the rear since it would be foolish to risk the ‘brain’ of the army in personal combat and in any event someone at the front of a cavalry charge can hardly direct the rest of the army.

One of the things I find most striking about the ‘warrior ethos’ advanced by writers like Pressfield is that it accepts as normal the unique nature of the bonds that hold soldiers together in battle, assuming this bond and its shared sacrifice to be at once unique to combat and also transcendent to all combatants. But one of the key points made very well in Sebastian Junger’s War (2010) and later Tribe (2016) is just how strange that experience is, historically.

Junger notes that in earlier societies, soldiers would have returned from war into communities (often small, agricultural communities or tribal communities) every bit as close-knit as the infantry platoon – and indeed, often involving literally the same people as the infantry platoon. Instead, the intense feeling of uniqueness that modern soldiers feel about the bonds of combat is because of the historically unusual deracination produced by modern societies by the industrial revolution and the post-industrial period.

And Junger’s point is born out quite clearly when looking at the myriad of historical societies where those non-combat social bonds were the basis of the principles of military cohesion, be it the small-town cohesion of the hoplite phalanx or the class-based-expectation cohesion of a group of knights, or (for that matter) later modern regimental-system armies that recruited on the basis of states and towns precisely to get this kind of cohesion (something that comes out quite clearly in McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1998) of regiments in the American Civil War, but was also a factor in the British regimental system as late as World War I).

In short, the singularity of those bonds is by no means historically universal, but in many societies would have instead been paired with equally strong and demanding bonds based on family, clan, neighborhood, village or patronage – merely one thread in a web of many threads. Assuming that such bonds extend infinitely back into the past of war means treating as normal a facet of modern society which is both unusual and possibly maladaptive.

At which point it seems useful to note that all of our examples so far are from within the second or third system of war, where there is considerable focus in holding ground in conventional engagements and thus a need to condition combatants to do something very unnatural – to hold their position and fight even when directly threatened and at a very high risk of death. But what about the first system of war, which generally does not demand combatants to stand in rigid order under fire or to resist mass enemy charges, but is instead focused on a ‘pounce and flee’ system of raids and ambushes only resorting to open battle (itself almost never decisive) when those fail?

For a first system force, the very thing all of this cohesion is trying to produce – to get men to stick together when the going gets tough, is entirely counter-productive; instead, if the situation is disadvantageous, the best response is often ‘scatter and regroup.’ As we’ve discussed before, these societies often have low populations which simply could not sustain high-lethality pitched battles. Consequently, societies in the first system tend to only engage when conditions are very advantageous (a raid, an ambush) or when they have no choice (being raided or ambushed).

This is, of course, not to say that such forces lacked what we might term combat motivation; these are still humans and so human psychology matters. But such motivation was organic to the community structure (ties of kinship and bonds within the village or tribal grouping), individual rather than group-based (one was not holding a position as a group but making an individual assessment of stand vs. flee) and finally was not predicated on one’s willingness to hold in a disadvantageous position.

...In short, such systems of war make little effort to build the sort of cohesion seen in second and third system armies because such cohesion is maladaptive to their combat style (and consequently, lacking the social-value framework that supports such cohesion, it can be difficult to train members of such societies to fight like second or third system soldiers, something readily apparent by the repeated difficulties of building ‘western’-style armies in countries without traditions of cohesion).

What does that leave us with? The systems to build cohesion – and indeed, cohesion itself – turn out not to be universal at all, but quite subjective to specific cultures and places. I’ve actually sold short just how many different systems and methods are used to build cohesion, but in practice every society’s mix for doing this is unique. Moreover, some societies, because of their style of warfare are largely uninterested in developing much cohesion at all and are instead focused on other forms of combat motivation.

Beyond the banal observations that humans are social animals that build relationships with each other and that humans tend to bond in conditions of shared adversary, there is nothing here. Those same conclusions might as well be marshaled to support the ‘universal graduate student’ or the ‘universal video-game crunch developer.’ The observation that the bonds of fellow soldiers are singularly stronger than any other sort of bond only seems to hold for modern deracinated post-industrial societies that have (often for good reasons, like liberating individuals) steadily weakened all of the other social bonds.

One only needs to look, for instance, at the failure of these intense bonds to hold primacy over the bonds of family, class or tribe when efforts are made to train ‘western’-style armies in non-western countries to see that the primacy of ‘comrades’ is socially contingent. Once again, the idea of the universal soldier indulges in the classic error of historical thinking whereby a distinctly contingent and modern experience is anachronistically retrojected into the past; the foolishness of the ‘universal soldier’ is the circularity of the argument where by this anachronistic retrojection is treated as the evidence of its own existence.”

- Bret Devereaux, “The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot.”

[everwitch-magiks]

dance with somebody (ch. 19)

start from ch. 1 | back to ch. 18

Dex drives him to the airport.

Even though it's still too fucking early o'clock, Whiskey feels wide awake. He didn’t think he would – it’s not exactly like he got an abundance of sleep, last night. He’s supposed to be joining the Aeros for their practice, right after lunch, and unfortunately, he highly doubts this nervous energy is going to last him until then.

Whiskey closes his eyes, breathes in and out. It’s fine. It will be fine. Somehow.

"Hey," Dex says carefully.

"I'm okay." Whiskey forces his eyes back open. "Thank you for doing this. I’m so sorry it had to be this fucking early."

"No problem," Dex tells him firmly. "Just remember – if you need to get out of there, for any reason, don’t hesitate to call. Alright? I promise I’ll drive right down and rescue you.”

Somehow, that actually makes Whiskey smile.

"Sure. It's literally on the other side of the country, but sure."

"Just a few hours behind the wheel," Dex replies decisively, almost like it could truly be that simple. Like he actually means it. "Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask. Have you talked to Jack, yet?"

Wait. What?

"Zimmermann?" Whiskey asks doubtfully, and watches in disbelief as Dex nods. "Why would I… Dex, I don't actually know Jack Zimmermann. I've spoken to him once, maybe twice in my life."

“He’s Samwell Men’s Hockey alumni, isn’t he?” Dex points out. “And obviously, he knows more about these things than any of us. He could definitely help you get some perspective.”

“Maybe, but I can’t just… It’s not like I’ve even got his number.”

“Do you mind if I talk to him, then?” Dex suggests. “I’m sure he’d have your back, Whiskey. And if there’s ever a time when you should rely on all of your support systems, I think it’s probably now.”

“I suppose it can’t hurt,” Whiskey agrees, somewhat tersely. It goes without saying that talking to Jack equals getting Bitty in the loop, and Whiskey’s not sure if he’s completely ready for that, just yet. “You know, it’s really okay if… I mean, Jack Zimmermann is probably very busy.”

“Just leave it to me.” If Dex picks up on Whiskey’s discomfort on the subject, he doesn’t show it. “We should probably also consider how much I should tell the team, while you’re away? They’re bound to have some questions.”

Whiskey closes his eyes again, just briefly. Fuck. The team. Tango and Ford. Louis, Hops and Bully. Chowder and Nursey. Joyo and Jader. Pips. God fucking damnit.

“Tango and Ford already know,” Whiskey says, as evenly as he can manage. “As for the rest, could you just… Try to say as little as possible? At least for now.”

Dex takes a moment before he replies.

“They’re all going to be happy for you,” he says carefully. “You know that, right? Sad, too, and in some cases pretty fucking devastated. But happy, ultimately.”

“Maybe, yeah.” Whiskey attempts a casual shrug that he knows Dex will see right through. “I just think, if I’m really doing this, then I’m going to need to tell them all myself. So for now, just say that something came up and that I will be back on Saturday.”

“Alright,” Dex agrees. His tone is a lot gentler than before. “Sounds good.”

Whiskey nods, once.

They don’t talk much more for the rest of the drive.

Emily has booked Whiskey a first-class ticket, and that should be exciting or at least somewhat distracting, but it’s not. Whiskey barely takes in his surroundings as he moves through priority boarding and fully reclines in his very spacious seat. He manages to sleep a little on the plane, so at least that’s something.

A bored-looking driver collects Whiskey from the airport, and then they’re off straight towards the rink. Whiskey grits his teeth as he steps out of the car. This is it. This is actually fucking it.

Someone is waiting for him by the entrance. It’s one of the players Whiskey certainly knew by name even before he obsessively googled the Aeros’s current roster, the night before. Walt ‘Mickey’ Davis, team captain of the Aeros and one of the highest ranked defensemen in professional hockey.

Whiskey takes a breath. No big deal. Absolutely no big deal at all.

“I hear you’ve had a bit of a whirlwind, these past twelve hours,” Walt greets him. His handshake is firm, and Whiskey immediately likes the steady way he meets Whiskey’s eyes. If Walt Davis is at all concerned with the fact that two of his best forwards are out due to a broken collarbone and a torn meniscus, respectively, he certainly doesn’t show it. “It’s Connor Whisk, right? Let’s see what we can do with that. I go by Mickey.”

“I know,” Whiskey says, only to immediately feel stupid. Which, in itself, is stupid – the only reason he’s here is because he’s been explicitly asked to come, so if he somehow makes an utter fool of himself it’s actually kind of on them. Besides, all of this is just more hockey, isn’t it? Whiskey knows hockey. How fucking hard can it be? “It’s very nice to meet you. I’m really looking forward to getting on the ice with you guys.”

“Polite, eh?” Mickey smiles. “Come on. Let’s get you settled in as best as we can, before practice. I have to warn you, though – Ducky has this slight obsession with the Samwell NCAA team. He might have one or two questions. Just let me know if you ever need him to back off.”

Whiskey blinks. Right. What’s one more utterly baffling thing to navigate.

Ducky, it turns out, has a lot more than two questions. He instantly reminds Whiskey of Tango in the best way possible, which unfortunately makes Whiskey feel nauseous all over again – what the fuck is he even doing here – but he kind of also reminds Whiskey of Bitty in a way that calms him slightly, and of Chowder in a way that almost makes him smile.

“So obviously, there’s been a lot of talk,” Ducky says, after Whiskey has apparently satisfied his curiosity on Samwell’s defensive strategy during last season’s playoffs, “About Eric Bittle. You played with him, right?”

Whiskey stills.

“Uh, yeah. For two years.”

“That long, huh.” Ducky grins. “So, like, is there any chance you’ve got some intel on the whole jam situation?”

“Ducky,” Mickey says, somewhat warningly.

“No, I swear, it’s a whole thing!” Ducky insists. “I used to play with Poots on the Falconers, okay, and I’m telling you, Poots won’t fucking shut up about it!”

Slowly, Whiskey exhales.

“The jam is a whole thing,” he offers tentatively. “But, it’s not... I mean, Bitty’s jam is the greatest, yes, Poots is absolutely onto something there. It’s just, did he really not mention the pies?”

Ducky’s eyes widen.

“Oh my God. There’s pies, too?”

“Dude,” Whiskey says. He actually smiles. “The pies are where it’s really at.”

“Our nutritionist is gonna be all over this,” someone chirps – Lacer, if Whiskey’s not entirely mistaken. God, he’s gonna need fucking flashcards. "Are we talking, like, blueberry or apple, here? Or is there any chance for apricots?"

Somehow, inexplicably, the conversation about pie lasts all the way until they're lacing up their skates. It's only then that Whiskey realises they've talked a lot about Bitty, and at one point little about Jack, but not for one single second about Bitty and Jack. It just hasn't come up, even once. Whiskey's not entirely sure if that should make him feel relieved, or concerned.

Stepping onto the ice is like a breath of fresh air. Whiskey skates a lap, and then another, and it’s like he finally relaxes for the first time since last night. Pretty soon, Mickey calls them to order, and suddenly it’s all starting, but Whiskey still feels like he’s got a decent grip on himself. He’s got this. He can do this.

They run a bunch of drills focused on puck control, at first, and then split up into pairs to work on passing and receiving. And somehow, it all feels achingly familiar. It’s almost like Tango is right there next to Whiskey as he shoots the puck to Ducky over and over again – Whiskey gets the timing exactly right every time, but that's only because he and Tango spent all those hours fucking nailing their passes, last season. And later, when Whiskey races Mickey up the ice in a speed exercise that has him high on adrenaline, it’s almost like Pips skates furiously beside him, like always, pushing and pushing and pushing until Whiskey is giving it everything he’s got and then just a little bit more. It’s weirdly grounding, how every member of the Samwell team seems to manifest themselves through his playing, a constant reminder of how far they’ve all helped him come.

They play something of a mock-game towards the end of it, and Mickey has them changing up the lines again and again. By the time they’re wrapping things up, Whiskey thinks he’s played alongside each of the other forwards at least once.

They’re all good. They’re all really fucking good.

Mickey claps a hand on his back as they’re stepping back into the locker room.

“Not bad,” he says. “You’re fast.”

Not as fast as Pips, Whiskey doesn’t tell him. And neither are you.

“I try to be,” he says instead, and Mickey grins.

“You’ll catch up to an old man like me in no time,” he chirps kindly. “Now, I think Larsen wants to get hold of you sooner rather than later. Let’s try not keep her any longer, eh?”

Unsurprisingly, Emily Larsen is waiting for him when he steps out of the locker room.

“There you are,” she says brightly. “Welcome to Houston, Connor. We’re so happy to have you here at such short notice.”

He’s ushered off to something that turns out to be a meeting. There’s at least three different people who shake his hand on the way there – one of them is the nutritionist, who has somehow already heard rumours about baked goods. 

Emily promises not to keep him for too long, but she does have a few things that apparently can’t wait. She goes over the draft of his contract, aided by someone from the legal department who is able to answer some of Whiskey’s questions, which is good. Or well, it’s at least informative. Then there’s the question of housing options, which Whiskey decides to postpone until all of this is actually completely settled. He’s in a hotel, for now, which is perfectly fine. Finally, Emily runs through a brief power-point presentation on the Aeros, their history, and some aspects of life in Houston. Which isn’t uninteresting, exactly, but Whiskey is sort of more fucking exhausted than he remembers being in last year’s playoffs.

“Almost done,” Emily reassures him as she changes yet another slide.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the next headline captures Whiskey’s full attention. Outreach Activities – You Can Play & The Rainbow Puck Foundation. Our values and vision.

“Well,” Emily says. She looks at the screen, her expression almost a little confused. “This is, you know. What we stand for, and all of that.”

And just like that, she’s moved on to the next slide.

Right.

Whiskey checks into his hotel room, puts his suitcase down, makes it to the bed and sleeps for three hours.

When he wakes up, he’s got seven missed calls and more than twenty texts.

Most of the texts are from Miguel. Whiskey smiles softly while he scrolls through Miguel's more than familiar stream-of-consciousness. It's perhaps a little more chipper than usually, almost as if Miguel is making an effort to sound nothing but cheerful. Whiskey's heart aches desperately as he types up a few lines in response. got here okay. practice was fine. will call you tonight. I miss you so fucking much.

The calls are from Dex, Chowder, Louis and Pips. Pips has called twice, Dex thrice. Dex has also sent him five texts.

The last one contains Jack Zimmermann’s phone number.

call Jack, okay? he’d really like to hear from you. Bitty says hi, by the way.

Whiskey plugs in his phone, and gets up. If he’s going to have a heart to heart with one of the most high-profile players in the league, he’s going to take another shower, first, and his phone is going to have more than six percent battery.

About half an hour later, he’s put on pajamas, because fuck it, and settled into an armchair by the window with his hair still damp. His hands barely shake as he carefully types in the number.

Jack Zimmermann doesn’t pick up until the seventh ring.

“Connor?” he asks by way of greeting.

“Yeah.” Whiskey pulls his knees up to his chest and fiddles with the hem of his pajama pants. “Hi.”

“Give me just one second.” There’s a bustling noise, the sound of a door closing and then quiet. “There. It’s nice to talk to you again.”

“You, too.” God, Whiskey has no idea how the fuck he’s supposed to navigate this. “I hope this isn’t a bad time?”

“Not at all,” Jack reassures him. “How are you?”

“Um.” Whiskey grimaces. “Tired?”

“I can imagine,” Jack says, his voice surprisingly warm. “Dex filled me in a little bit, this morning. You’re already in Houston, right?”

“That’s right, yeah.”

“How are things, so far?”

“Not bad,” Whiskey decides, after a moment’s consideration. “I don’t really… I mean, I’ve actually barely had time to think about it.”

Jack hums.

“How long do you have, before you need to give them a definite answer?”

“Until Sunday.”

“Sunday. Okay.” Jack pauses momentarily. “That’s not unreasonable, on their part. Sometimes these things happen really fast.”

“Right. Okay.”

“Can I ask… Do you have an agent?”

“No, actually.” Whiskey runs a hand through his hair. “I haven’t really... I mean, I’ve basically been thinking that there would still be time before I’d need to consider these things more seriously. This opportunity was very unexpected.”

“Okay.” There’s another moment of silence before Jack speaks again. “Look, I’m just going to be very blunt about this. How much are these guys offering you?”

“Ah,” Whiskey says. He tries to remember – there’s been numbers mentioned, several of them, something about a signing bonus and a monthly salary and Whiskey’s barely registered anything beyond how that’s a lot of digits, holy cow. “I haven’t… Honestly, the financial aspect has sort of been the last thing on my mind.”

“Okay,” Jack says again, and there’s something of a smile in his voice. “I understand that, I really do. There are a lot of other important factors. It’s just, you should definitely think about getting an agent.”

“No, I know,” Whiskey agrees readily. “I, uh. This has all just happened really fast.”

“I’m getting that.” There’s no judgement in Jack’s tone. “But you haven’t actually signed anything yet, right? Not even some non-disclosure formality?"

“No, nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Then you’ve got the ball in your corner, still,” Jack says encouragingly. “Or, you know. The puck. This is all going to play out the way you decide is best, in the end.”

“... Right.” Suddenly, Whiskey wants to laugh. Fuck, he’s so tired. “The thing is, I’ve honestly got no clue how I’m supposed to figure that out. There’s no telling if I’ll ever get a better offer than this, and that’s...  A major concern for me. This is what I want to do, and I don’t know if I can afford to pass up on this chance. But I never imagined that I would need to be ready to take this step so soon, and I… I just don’t know if I’m going to be.” 

“Okay,” Jack says. And this time, he doesn’t need to pause and consider before he responds. “Look. The only thing you need to do, here, is make sure that you do right by yourself and what it is that you need. Okay? I know the Aeros are in a bit of a hurry, at the moment – I’ve heard all about those injuries and the estimated recovery times. They’re going to have several key players out for the rest of the season, and that’s certainly an urgent situation for them. Now, I’ve seen the way you play, Connor, and I’m more than familiar with your statistics. You’re good. Clearly, this is a move that makes complete sense for the Houston Aeros. The real question is, is it something that’s going to make complete sense for you?”

Whiskey closes his eyes for a moment. He exhales, and feels his shoulders relax a bit. Huh. When he opens his eyes again, looking out over the unfamiliar city outside his window, it’s like he finally has a moment of clarity.

“I don’t know,” he says, almost steadily. “I thought it might.”

“Well,” says Jack Zimmermann. He sounds almost fond, which is of course completely ridiculous. Clearly, Whiskey is having some sort of sleep-deprived hallucination. “Maybe don't rule it out after your very first day. But you might want to give that some serious thought, during the rest of this week.”

“Yeah.” Whiskey inhales, then exhales. “I guess that’s what I’ll have to do.”

Their conversation continues for a little while longer. Jack inquires about some of the Samwell team members, and coach Hall and Murray, and Whiskey finds himself surprisingly at ease as they take turns sharing a few personal anecdotes about Faber, and the Haus. It's never quite struck him, before, how much of a shared history he has with the generations of Samwell team members that came before him.

"I'd really like to stay in touch," Jack says before they hang up. Surprisingly, he tacks on something of a chirp. "If you're going to be my new competition, I'd like to know what I'm up against."

"I don't think I could give you competition," Whiskey tells him honestly, and if that reveals just a little more of Whiskey's deep and genuine admiration for Jack than he had maybe intended to show, well, so be it.

"Don't be so sure," Jack says plainly. "Take care out there, Connor. I'll talk to you soon."

ch. 20

[muesliforbreakfast]

Fabian Tactics

Part 1?

This one got a bit of traction on the sub, but is actually more of a salvage job of stuff I’ve had written down for YEARS but couldn’t get to work.

What are they running? Picture the Frontier Buccaneers by Johnsonting except with like a thick mesh cape type thing, and the rifle looks kinda like an RM277.

This doesn’t really matter, but I did a bunch of worldbuilding I’ll probably never get to use :’(

On an unrelated note - Look at this one by the same artist. If this dude had an EF88 I would actually lose my shit.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Cadet Ralek was the only one in his company behaving himself before the lecture. He came from a military family. Growing up he was steeped in discipline and tradition. But that wasn't his only reason for attentiveness. This weeks modules were focused on counterinsurgency, and todays lecture on the greatest insurgency of all, on that Ralek's uncle had been on the losing side of nearly two hundred years before. The Terran insurgency.

“HOLD FAST!” An NCO called, at the front of the lecture theater. The hall, full of chattering cadets fell silent as they all braced their upper limbs on their desks, whilst some officers went through their rituals, transferring command of the cadets over to the officer, who introduced himself.

“I am Second Lieutenant Orion, of the Federation Marine Corps. As part of today's module we have a very special presenter – Corporal Felix, of the Terran Heer.”

The class perked up at that – Terrans no longer had an army of their own; they hadn't had one for one hundred and seventy four years. The exact date that every race had been accepted into the Galactic Federation had been drilled into each and every one of them. They watched as an old, frail man was wheeled into the lecture theatre, ashy, paper thin skin hanging from his face. Civilian clothes in the Terran style, with several medals pinned on the left of his chest.

O1 Orion bowed politely and they whispered to each other. Then he pinned a microphone to Felix' lapel. He began to speak, with the thin, frail voice of a man nearing the end of his twilight years.

“Good evening cadets. I'm getting straight to the point because there's just one thing the Armed Forces of the Federation want you to learn from me. And because I want to deliver it to you. Before I drop dead.” The old man struggled to get enough air between his words.

The class laughed nervously. The old man gathered his strength, eyes closed, breathing slowly.

“We Terrans had inferior numbers and technology, and we were fighting a war of extermination, but we still beat the Empire. How did we do it? You.” Felix pointed at a cadet in the fourth row, with a bony, wavering finger. A Kelress, who looked like a four foot red panda.

“Sir, because humans are physically tough and aggressive apex predators, sir.”

Only the Ji Te who were in the theatre laughed at that. Only some of them. And only a little.

“Don't fucking swear at me, cadet. I'm a corporal, and I'm retired,” The whole class giggled that time, “You. You think that's funny. What do you think?” He said, as his frail finger pointed at one of the closer Ji Te, a hulking reptiloid in the second row.

“Because humans are sly, intelligent and patient, mister Felix. Your kind came up with tactics we simply couldn't counter. Over time frames we didn't anticipate.

“You could and you duh...did, cadet....... The empire was fighting a war of extermination; they blocked out our sun. And it only took us three years.”

The class had no answers to that. Felix pointed at another of the Isae in the room.

“You. Have you got answers for me?”

“I agree with the other cadets, Mister. But I would like to add, humans are willing to do anything to survive. Uh. Mister Felix,” The Isae replied.

“Mmmmm... A better answer. Maybe I should ask someone who knows,” The old man pointed at one of the Terran cadets scattered throughout the lecture theater, “You, young lady. What do you think?”

“Mister Felix,” she began, “In guerilla warfare and insurgency operations, all you need to win is to not lose. Classic Fabian tactics that go as far back as the Punic wars. Classic Maoist tactics of the 20th century. Deny the enemy resources and deny them battle unless it's at a time and place of your choosing. As long as someone survives, you haven't lost. Mister Felix.” The old retired corporal seemed to relax somewhat. He paused for a long while. His threat of dropping dead seemed like less of a joke by the minute.

“Straight from the pam. Good drills cadet.” He finally said, before pausing again.

“I was barely nineteen when the empire invaded. I was fresh out of basic training when the sun shield went up... I was lucky... I was evacuated by arkship less than a year later. By then we had been on less than starvation rations for months.”

The class exchanged looks. They were all thinking of the human reputation.

“What do we taste like?” Cadet Ralek couldn't help but ask.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Private Felix' section was running Personal Radios and Line of Sight communicators but for now they were doing it old school. Hand signals. They were patrolling their sunless planet, towards the location where the latest enemy incursion had been reported. As point man he was the first to see the glow of the enemy in the distance.

>Take cover

>Enemy contact front

>Enemy Squad 8-2-0m North North East

>Come here

His squad slowly lowered themselves to cover, and his squad leader made his way over to him.

“What do you see?”

“One of those wide slow walkers, being protected by a team of hunter-killers, I count 9. They're using spotlights and floodlights, they may not have optics.”

“They might have a team on overwatch that does”

“What do you think they're doing?”

“Science or harvesting, or drawing attention...” His section commander paused for a moment, “This kind of walker goes back to their smaller bases with a load, drops it off then leaves again... Stay here on overwatch, radio silence. Wait out for further instructions.”

His squad leader flashed hand signals, and left two of his squadmates with him, while they watched and waited.

Around half an hour later they had their orders.

Recon. Then kill them all, destroy the walker. Booby trap the bodies, hide and observe. Develop the situation.

His section commander flashed the hand signals for their orders. The squad took their positions across the walker and they awaited the signal.

A purple beam silently lanced from the squad commander's Modular Infantry Laser Rifle; the beam both squealed and thudded as it burst through one of the hunter-killer robot's bodies. The robot had barely begun to fall when each of the squad members rifle also lanced a robot body with their own beams. The robot corpses clattered and rattled lifelessly to the ground. The squad's aim then played across the legs of the walker where they attached to its thorax. It dropped to the ground with a prolonged thud, and then silence aside from the hydraulics within the walker trying in vain to move its legs. The squad took an all round defensive position around the area while the squad commander finished off the walker, his rifle punching a hole through the side for him to throw a plasma-grenade into. That done, they placed trip bombs under the HK bodies, accounted for everyone then moved off to their predetermined form up point less than half a kilometer away.

The whine of a dropship's engines steadily increased in volume over their whispers – the HK team's backup had arrived, in the form of another sixteen HK's, one of the nine foot tall crocs and a twelve foot tall mechsuit. The croc and the mechsuit was a lot of firepower. The squad quietly deployed from their form up point, crawling low and slow through the withered scrub towards the site of their previous victory. It had become easy to move quietly in the sunless dirt with the plants long dead. Their Matte Adaptive Camouflage absorbed a variable amount of light from the EM spectrum, from low energy IR to high energy UV. On their sunless planet, they were basically invisible.

A sharp crack filled the dark, and the croc dropped to the ground, briefly flailing in the dirt.

<honorless/shameless><brutes/thugs> have trapped bodies leave bodies be, take positions, bring <leaders>

The HK team had positioned itself in a perimiter around the fallen walker, the mech-suit stood lifelessly by it, and a pair of the three foot slugs were sliding towards the wreckage. One began to cut into the side of the walker with a plasma torch, while the other examined the legs that had been sheared off by laser beams. Not even the robots attended to the croc, which seemed to have bled out.

Felix looked to his squadmates and commander for orders.

>Squad rifles target HK's on my signal fire at will

>Squad heavy weapons target Mech on my signal three high impact rounds

>Extended File 10m spacing

Felix took his position in the formation and they began to close in on the invaders.

The squad commander's beam lanced out across the battlefield, scorching a hole through a robot body, and the squad unleashed a controlled burst of hellfire. In less than four seconds the hunter-killer team had been annihilated. Four seconds after that the mech-suit had been shorn it half at the waist by repeated high impact lasers.

The squad closed in on their hapless victims.

“Felix! Ballistic rounds on the slugs, fire at will! Heavy Weapons! Peel that Mech, kill the pilot! Alpha! Suppress! Bravo! Security!” The Squad commander was yelling now.

“Ten four!” He acknowledged his order, then drew his vintage Browning GP-35 as he closed in on the invaders.

mercy <owner/master/ruler> mercy let me live mercy

His universal translator filled his helmet with the slug's pleas for mercy. He sauntered to their cowering forms, their desperate clicking and screeching audible over the translation of their words.

He pumped three rounds into each.

“We eat tonight.”

At the mech, his squad had used their lasrifles to shear off the mechs arms and an ablative armour panel. A feeble, raccoon like creature about four feet tall had sprayed out the viewport with its small kinetic machine gun, but Zahn had responded with a short squirt of pepper spray. When the spray of kinetic fire stopped he simply reached in and dragged it out by the throat, its soft velvet fur ripped out through its ruined uniform as it raked past the broken viewport. Its screeching and whining unintelligible even to the universal translators. He drew his clearing knife and sliced across its throat, before driving its head against a corner of the broken mech once. Then twice. It fell limp, as if deflated, with the last sound it heard being Zahn's voice echoing into the dark “We eat tonight!!”

The Squad regrouped at the edge of a re-entrant, in the shallow valley the walker had been traversing.

The Commander quietly addressed the squad.

“I've called it in – we won't be rationed in for another week. Their reinforcements will be here within two hours, probably less, so we need to hustle. Zahn, Vorhut, store the badger and slugs. Forget the croc it's ruined.” The members of the squad fell out as they received their orders. “Kaiser, Ulan, Water and ammo. Felix, Erik. One AA mine and AP mines on that ridge there. The rest of you all round security. Ten minutes, Then we move.”

Felix and Erik both clambered up the hill with a sense of urgency, uncomfortably warm in their heat and light absorbing camouflage armour, despite the temperature being close to zero. They both hadn't eaten in days. Despite the bitter, earthy taste and the slimy, gelatinous yet tough texture, Felix was looking forward to his share of slug.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“You Isae taste absolutely vuh... vile...” He stammered out, then pointed at the Ji Te, “But you... You taste like salmon.”

[arcticdementor]

The massacres at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area this week, leaving eight human beings dead, others injured, and their families scarred, were horrifying. Read this deeply moving story about the son of one of the women killed to remind yourself of this. It’s brutal. The grief will spread and resonate some more.

But this story has also been deeply instructive about our national discourse and the state of the American mainstream and elite media. This story’s coverage is proof, it seems to me, that American journalists have officially abandoned the habit of attempting any kind of “objectivity” in reporting these stories. We are now in the enlightened social justice world of “moral clarity” and “narrative-shaping.”

…

We should not take the killer’s confession as definitive, of course. But we can probe it — and indeed, his story is backed up by acquaintances and friends and family. The New York Times originally ran one piece reporting this out. The Washington Post also followed up, with one piece citing contemporaneous evidence of the man’s “religious mania” and sexual compulsion. It appears that the man frequented at least two of the spas he attacked. He chose the spas, his ex roommates said, because he thought they were safer than other ways to get easy sex. Just this morning, the NYT ran a second piece which confirms that the killer had indeed been in rehab for sexual impulses, was a religious fanatic, and his next target was going to be “a business tied to the pornography industry.”

We have yet to find any credible evidence of anti-Asian hatred or bigotry in this man’s history. Maybe we will. We can’t rule it out. But we do know that his roommates say they once asked him if he picked the spas for sex because the women were Asian. And they say he denied it, saying he thought those spas were just the safest way to have quick sex. That needs to be checked out more. But the only piece of evidence about possible anti-Asian bias points away, not toward it.

And yet. Well, you know what’s coming. Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the “real” motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are.

…

And on and on. It was almost as if they had a pre-existing script to read, whatever the facts of the case! Nikole Hannah-Jones, the most powerful journalist at the New York Times, took to Twitter in the early morning of March 17 to pronounce: “Last night’s shooting and the appalling rise in anti-Asian violence stem from a sick society where nationalism has been stoked and normalized.” Ibram Kendi tweeted: “Locking arms with Asian Americans facing this lethal wave of anti-Asian terror. Their struggle is my struggle. Our struggle is against racism and White Supremacist domestic terror.”

When the cops reported the killer’s actual confession, left-Twitter went nuts. One gender studies professor recited the litany: “The refusal to name anti-Asianess [sic], racism, white supremacy, misogyny, or class in this is whiteness doing what it always does around justifying its death-dealing … To ignore the deeply racist and misogynistic history of hypersexualization of Asian women in this ‘explication’ from law enforcement of what emboldened this killer is also a willful erasure.”

In The Root, the real reason for the murders was detailed: “White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it.”

Trevor Noah insisted that the killer’s confession was self-evidently false: “You killed six Asian people. Specifically, you went there. Your murders speak louder than your words. What makes it even more painful is that we saw it coming. We see these things happening. People have been warning, people in the Asian communities have been tweeting, they’ve been saying, ‘Please help us. We’re getting punched in the street. We’re getting slurs written on our doors.’” Noah knew the killer’s motive more surely than the killer himself.

None of them mentioned that he killed two white people as well — a weird thing for a white supremacist to do — and injured a Latino. None pointed out that the connection between the spas was that the killer had visited them. None explained why, if he were associating Asian people with Covid19, he would nonetheless expose himself to the virus by having sex with them, or regard these spas as “safer” than other ways to have quick sex.

They didn’t because, in their worldview, they didn’t need to. What you see here is social justice ideology insisting, as Dean Baquet temporarily explained, that intent doesn’t matter. What matters is impact. The individual killer is in some ways irrelevant. His intentions are not material. He is merely a vehicle for the structural oppressive forces critical theorists believe in. And this “story” is what the media elites decided to concentrate on: the thing that, so far as we know, didn’t happen.

…

But notice how CRT operates. The only evidence it needs it already has. Check out the identity of the victim or victims, check out the identity of the culprit, and it’s all you need to know. If the victims are white, they don’t really count. Everything in America is driven by white supremacist hate of some sort or other. You can jam any fact, any phenomenon, into this rubric in order to explain it.

The only complexity the CRT crowd will admit is multiple, “intersectional” forms of oppression: so this case is about misogyny and white supremacy. The one thing they cannot see are unique individual human beings, driven by a vast range of human emotions, committing crimes with distinctive psychological profiles, from a variety of motives, including prejudices, but far, far more complicated than that.

There’s a reason for this shift. Treating the individual as unique, granting him or her rights, defending the presumption of innocence, relying on provable, objective evidence: these core liberal principles are precisely what critical theory aims to deconstruct. And the elite media is in the vanguard of this war on liberalism.

…

The more Asian-Americans succeed, the deeper the envy and hostility that can be directed toward them. The National Crime Victimization Survey notes that “the rate of violent crime committed against Asians increased from 8.2 to 16.2 per 1000 persons age 12 or older from 2015 to 2018.” Hate crimes? “Hate crime incidents against Asian Americans had an annual rate of increase of approximately 12% from 2012 to 2014. Although there was a temporary decrease from 2014 to 2015, anti-Asian bias crimes had increased again from 2015 to 2018.”

Asians are different from other groups in this respect. “Comparing with Black and Hispanic victims, Asian Americans have relatively higher chance to be victimized by non-White offenders (25.5% vs. 1.0% for African Americans and 18.9% for Hispanics). … Asian Americans have higher risk to be persecuted by strangers … are less likely to be offended in their residence … and are more likely to be targeted at school/college.” Of those committing violence against Asians, you discover that 24 percent such attacks are committed by whites; 24 percent are committed by fellow Asians; 7 percent by Hispanics; and 27.5 percent by African-Americans. Do the Kendi math, and you can see why Kendi’s “White Supremacist domestic terror” is not that useful a term for describing anti-Asian violence.

But what about hate crimes specifically? In general, the group disproportionately most likely to commit hate crimes in the US are African-Americans. At 13 percent of the population, African Americans commit 23.9 percent of hate crimes. But hate specifically against Asian-Americans in the era of Trump and Covid? Solid numbers are not yet available for 2020, which is the year that matters here. There’s data, from 1994 to 2014, that finds little racial skew among those committing anti-Asian hate crimes. Hostility comes from every other community pretty equally.

The best data I’ve found for 2020, the salient period for this discussion, are provisional data on complaints and arrests for hate crimes against Asians in New York City, one of two cities which seem to have been most affected. They record 20 such arrests in 2020. Of those 20 offenders, 11 were African-American, two Black-Hispanic, two white, and five white Hispanics. Of the black offenders, a majority were women. The bulk happened last March, and they petered out soon after. If you drill down on some recent incidents in the news in California, and get past the media gloss to the actual mugshots, you also find as many black as white offenders.

…

The media is supposed to subject easy, convenient rush-to-judgment narratives to ruthless empirical testing. Now, for purely ideological reasons, they are rushing to promote ready-made narratives, which actually point away from the empirical facts. To run sixteen separate pieces on anti-Asian white supremacist misogynist hate based on one possibly completely unrelated incident is not journalism. It’s fanning irrational fear in the cause of ideological indoctrination. And it appears to be where all elite media is headed.

[rasoir-national]

That time smart people found the dumbest reason to oppose gay marriage

Ah, I remember, when gay marriage was voted in France... I was such a fresh young face, nursing my burgeoning depression while going through prep school.. The minister of justice sponsoring the bill happened to be a black woman, so catholics would protest in white togas by throwing banana peels everywhere, weird guys were distributing pamphlets preaching virginity outside high schools... At that time, I honestly believed that anyone who opposed gay marriage was either too dumb or too bigoted to make a convincing argument.

But then, I grew up, I switched from business to law, and then I discovered something : you could be extremely “smart”, and still be bigoted as fuck and make an extremely unconvincing argument that just happened to sound smart if you didn’t think about it for more than 0.3 seconds.

So today, as a special treat to celebrate the end of my exams, let me take you on a magical journey to that one time supposedly the smartest people found the dumbest argument against gay marriage.

So, it wouldn’t be a RazRant (patent pending) if it didn’t start in an unexpected place, right ? This time, we start in the wonderful world of Civil Registration.

What is civil registration ? Well, it’s that thing that keeps track of the population. Here in “developed” countries, it’s a completely integrated part of society : you are born, you marry, you have children, you die, all of this is recorded in the civil registry. In general, cities are in charge of those, and you’ve probably been there at least once if you’ve ever been in a city hall.

But if you’re reading me, you’ve most likely been gravitating around the frev fandom, so you know it’s taken a long time to arrive here : it was only toward the end of the middle ages that churches started being able to somewhat faithfully keep track of their flock. It wasn’t rare for entire archives to be lost or destroyed, and there are entire parts of history that we won’t be able to recover due to this loss.

Pretty much since it was created, modern administration has been paranoid about losing documents, especially those that help keep track of the population. For that reason, civil registration has long worked a certain way : by changing and destroying as little as humanly possible. When something changes in someone’s life, you don’t scratch it or make a new document. You make a note in the margin. Nothing must be erased, or modified so you can’t keep track of what happened. Even nowadays, the only legal case in which a document is “erased” is when a child gets a full adoption (one of the two types of adoptions in french law) : in that case, they get a new civil statute with their new name on it. And EVEN THEN they don’t destroy the old civil statute. They just put a black cross on it like it’s got the plague or something.

New times brought new mentalities : after the second world war, the question of the difference between “legitimate” and “natural” child started garnering attention. Jean Carbonnier, hallowed be his name, who was tasked with rewriting the Civil code, and happened to be a protestant - the reason i’m specifying this is not clear to me, but it seemed very important to every teacher i’ve ever had so - therefore tried to think of ways you could minimize the number of natural children. Let’s be clear, that meant minimizing the ways men could avoid recognizing children. His big idea was this : we need a way we can presume a child is yours, and it’ll be up to you to prove it’s not. Thus was born the presumption of paternity : what it means is that if a woman is married, her husband is presumed to be the father of her child. If he wants to prove otherwise, then he has to obtain a DNA test, instead of the woman having to prove that he is indeed the father. This way, children were more likely to be born with two legal parents instead of one, which meant more rights and more protection.

And all of this went on to be recorded in the civil registry, because that’s really what’s important : to keep track of it all.

Fast forward to a few years ago, the idea of gay marriage is starting to gain traction. Most of the people opposing it are weirdly ultra-religious weirdoes or just bigoted for the sake of it. But wait ! For on the horizon, new heroes appear ! And they’ve brought logic and legal theory with them ! And some of them are my future teachers !

And so they go on to make their own version of THINK OF THE CHILDREN ! Get this : if we let people of the same sex (gender was barely a thing at the time) marry, then what happens to our beautiful presumption of paternity ? How are we supposed to deduce who fathered who, when these two people couldn’t possibly have produced a child together ! [side-note : yeah, i know it’s false, trans people are real*, suck it terfs, unfollow me, yada yada, you know the drill]

Calm down, said, well, everyone. No one is thinking the presumption is going to be destroyed. No one is being delusional : when people of the same gender have a child, the parent(s) who did not give birth to the child will just recognize them (NB: if you’re the birth parent, recognition is pretty much automatic, you have to really go out of your way to remain anonymous). Simple, right ?

“Noooo, that won’t do” said the very smart people.

“Why ?” asked everyone, bemused.

“BECAUSE IT WON’T MAKE SENSE ON THE REGISTRY !”

Yes, believe it or not, this wasn’t so much about thinking of the children than it was thinking of the registry. That poor piece of paper. If we let something that doesn’t make “biological sense” get on the registry, then how is any family going to make sense ? How is a child going to know their origin ? How will people even know if they are related ?? (Fun fact : such a registry exists in Iceland, because the population pool is so small you legitimately have to check that you’re not related to someone before getting with them)

So, because things would be harder to track on paper, people of the same gender shouldn’t be allowed to marry. That was a real argument some real people actually made.

Let’s pretend for a minute this “argument” isn’t bigotry masquerading as concern trolling rolled in bad faith for a moment and explain why this is bullshit.

First of all, I know it may be hard to understand for some people, but the world has changed. We are not at risk at losing the entire department archives if a church burns anymore. Everything is on multiple servers on top of the paper version. Even if we have to modify, rectify or re-do a civil statute, it doesn’t mean a person is suddenly going to be legally erased.

Second of all, and this is really what gets me, the very point of a civil registry is to serve the people. Not the other way around. That goes for all of law and that’s something I see my teachers and fellow students routinely forget : law is not a given truth, it is not “logic”, or “common sense”, it’s a system, a way of framing the world, in order to solve problems. Rules exist not because they are self-evident, but because they serve a purpose. The minute we forget that and think the rules we created should command the way we live simply because they are rules, it’s gone horribly wrong. The way the world and mores change doesn’t and shouldn’t be constricted by the logic of what a law can envision. The fate of every law is to eventually be obsolete. Even incredibly evident, intemporal rules have to be rewritten to fit the times. So what if the way we see parentality is now incompatible with our way of tracking population changes ? It’s that way that has to change, not us. We build laws to structure the world, the same way a house needs solid foundations, but if the family gets too big for your house, you don’t cut your children in half : you rebuild the house.

Law is fascinating. Despite how frustrating it can be, I hope it comes across in those long posts of mine how much I love what I do and how much I believe in what law can do for people. But ultimately, law is a tool. It doesn’t control us. Falling in love with the beauty of law for the sake of itself is a dangerous thing. A theory can just as much be a prison if you spend too much time inside to remember that it’s, in the end, just a construction of the mind. Justified only by its usefulness for enforcing what a society may consider “good” and “reasonable”. I’ve seen some beautiful theories get utterly destroyed by one new jurisprudence, and it’s devastating, because you know you’ve just lost a powerful way to make sense of the world. But the law is not made to be a theory set in stone ; it’s made to be the changing mirror of ourselves, both the idealized and the guiding image of what society aspires to be. So it comes down to this : ultimately, what do you want to preserve ? The rights of a couple and their child ? Or the rights of a piece of paper ?

*if you’re the speculating type, yes, you are correct, the registry argument is the exact same one that they opposed to trans people who wanted to change their birth marker on their civil statute - especially since in France, a potential employer can ask for a copy of it. The way it works is that the correct gender is noted in the margin so the original mention remains untouched. And yes, you are right again : it’s complete bullshit. And a great example of how legal pearl-clutching has very immediate and real consequences on people’s safety.

[travllingbunny]

The 100 6x04 The Face Behind the Glass

It’s an understatement to say that I’m late with this review, simply for having had no time to write it before, but here am I, trying to post it at the last moment, before the next episode airs tonight (or is it already airing in US? I will only be able to watch it tomorrow). In the meantime, the fandom has discussed a bunch of different theories, made all sorts of speculations, and I’ve participated in that, a lot.

I didn’t expect this episode to have quite this effect on me and many other fans who have guessed the big twist of this episode way ahead. But while it didn’t come as a surprise, it still hit hard, because the episode was, for the most part, well done, with important character moments for our protagonists, combined with further world-building and fleshing out of the new characters and communities..

And even though I always expected the „peaceful“ society from Sanctum to villains, but this show has achieved something I never expected: introducing villains who match or are, arguably, be even more evil than the leadership of Mount Weather.

I won’t discuss various theories, but I will mention what my favorite theories are, and touch on what I think may happen and what storylines I think could come out of this.

While it is perfectly understandable that the characters still haven’t realized it – because they don’t have the information we have as viewers, and don’t think of everything in terms of storytelling – as a viewer, it wasn’t difficult to guess from the start that something was very wrong with this „peaceful“ society, especially since everything was just too happy, shiny and too good to be true. This episode played on that in particular: there was a ceremony where Russell said all the right things about making peace with your loved ones, and making amends for the wrongs you’ve done – apparently, a traditional custom in Sanctum. (The level of hypocrisy is really high.) Russell himself apologize to Kaylee for closing the Sanctum door on her and her family when they found themselves on the outside and he had to protect the entire community. (This story must have resonated with some people in the audience, Bellamy in particular. Maybe it would have with Raven, too, but she wasn’t there.)  The people in Sanctum were all happy and smiling. Each one of our adult protagonists who does not already have a romantic partner either met a potential love interest, or had fun with a sex interest, or both. There was a party in a club, with music and dancing. And most alarmingly, delicious cookies were served – which brings back memories of the chocolate cake in Mount Weather.

Now, to make it clear, the Sanctum people are not a rehash of Mount Weather. They are very different from the Mountain Men, and in fact, they also have some of the worst characteristics of the Grounder culture – very hierarchical structure and religious worship of people with „special“ (black) blood who have computer chips with stored minds in their heads - only in a much more disturbing way. Whatever one may think of the Flame, it works very differently from these mind drives, and was created for a very different reason: the host retains agency, personality and full control over their body, and the dead people’s „spirits“ are there to help and guide the host with their knowledge and experience. (At least that’s the idea – how helpful it seems to have been to Grounders, is debatable.) These mind drives, however, were apparently modified so that they can store an entire consciousness, which then overtakes the hosts’ body completely. Essentially, it’s body-snatching – it helps the Primes extend their natural lifespans indefinitely, at the expense of the „disposable“ people – and in their minds, everyone is disposable, except them.

And this is what the Primes have in common with the Mountain Men. Mountain Men were horribly evil. They thought they were superior and entitled to live at the expense of everyone else, to put people in cages, drain/drill,  kill them horrifically, throw them away like garbage, turn them into slave monsters they’ll use against their people It was an incredibly evil society. And yet the Primes manage are arguably even more selfish and awful. At least the Mountain Men were doing it for their community, and had the excuse that they had all grown up and been raised to be like that, learning it from their parents,

The Primes, on the other hand, are those same people who started it all, 236 years ago. They’re the ones who have been stealing other people’s bodies to make themselves and their family members live forever, and who have brainwashed their entire community to worship them as gods and be OK with it.They have been stealing bodies to make themselves live forever. And they’ve brainwashed their entire community to be OK with it, worship them as deities and give them people willingly as sacrifice. While most of the Mount Weather community was complicit, actively or passively, in the crimes because it benefited them, the Sanctum community has been brainwashed to support and be complicit in the crimes that benefit no one other than the Primes. If they were to rise against the Primes, the Primes would have no chance. They don’t have the enormous technologically advanced weaponry of Mount Weather, they don’t even have too many guards to keep order – they instead function as a cult and keep everybody down through religion and belief.

In the end, maybe they are similarly horrible, but different types of evil. The allusions to Nazism were pretty obvious in season 2, from the way the Mountain Men would drain or drill people and then throw their bodies like garbage, to the guards going through people’s living quarters and murdering all the „traitors“ who were hiding the Delinquents to save their lives (though, to be fair to the Mountain Men, at least they had a legitimate motivation – needing to survive – while the actual Nazis were just a bunch of racist, ableist idiots). On the other hand, season 6 has had many more religious references. Gods, devils, Lucifer („light-bringer“ – Lightbourne), Gabriel, Gospel of Josephine (the name of the next episode), The magical number 12 (plus the rogue/special 13) appears again. We had the ill-fated 13th station, Sky people/Arkers as the 13th Clan, and now Dr Gabriel Santiago aka „the Old Man“ (he hasn’t explicitly been identified, but does anyone doubt it is him?) as the 13th Prime. In the eyes of the people in Sanctum, Russell and the other Primes are 12 gods, and Gabriel is a demon – like Lucifer, the fallen angel who was banished from the paradise. To us, however, it is the Primes who seem like the devils.

It’s as if we are going back in time to meet the same people who were a part of the elite that destroyed the world 229 years before. These people did not participate directly in the destruction of the Earth, but were closely connected to those who did.  These guys aren’t the descendants, but the same people we saw in the flashback at the start of 6x02 Red Sun Rising. But the things that didn’t seem as sinister then seem so much more disturbing when you pay attention and look back on it with what we know now. At first, I didn’t even notice that Josephine was a sociopath  - but what else would you call someone who test possibly poisonous plants on children and then laughs about it. Russell is a megalomaniac, as his wife noted. The eclipse psychosis brings out, in the most disturbing and exaggerated manner, what is already there inside the person, and for Russell, it was megalomania and desire to be in control: „Sanctum is mine!“ is what he was shouting as he went and killed almost everyone in the mission.

From the info we have gotten so far, the Primes that Sanctum worships are the 12 out of 13 people who were members of the original Eligius 3 colonizing mission, most of whom ended up killed by Russell. Apart from Gabriel, there were four families: Russell, Simone and Josephine Lightbourne (Russell was the astronomer and team leader, Josephine a taxonomist); Priya and her teenage son Ryker; Kaylee’s family – which consisted of mom, dad, and two children - son and daughter; and Miranda’s family – presumably Miranda, her husband and daughter. Out of these, we have seen 10, and 3 got killed by Diyoza and Madi while hijacking the ship, so 7 are still alive in host bodies. Russell said that Josephine was 3rd on the waiting list for a new host – the first two must be Miranda’s daughter (who was supposed to be put in Rose’s body) and husband. She is not going to be happy if/when she finds out Russell and Simone broke their rules and skipped the line for their daughter. There will probably be conflict within the Primes themselves.

But even though these characters and their histories are interesting, out actual protagonists interest me much more.

Unlike the Primes, the Children of Gabriel are actually morally grey. Compared to the Primes, they are definitely the good guys, and their goal to bring them down is definitely good – but they have a bit of ’end justifies the means“ going on, and the execution leaves a lot to be desires. (More on that later.) If they believe that the hosts are really dead once the Prime bodysnatches them, their willingness to kill hosts before they are bodysnatched is more understandable. Or maybe they are just prioritizing the death of the Primes over saving individual hosts. But the majority of their guerrilla fighters in the woods are a bit too into killing – in particular, the woman that got killed by Octavia seemed to love killing as much as Octavia does. The exception is Xavier, who seems to be a major new character this season, who is trying to hold on to a moral code of avoiding murder. He even deliberately let Octavia „get away“ so his people wouldn’t murder her, even though she killed several of the CoG (although I’m not sure that, if you want to minimize murder, letting Octavia in her current psychological be free is a good idea). She doesn’t seem to have understood that, since she is currently swearing to kill Xavier. Gratitude problem, indeed. If that’s really what she wants to do.

I’m curious to find out more about the role of the bodyguard (?) and the future hosts. Who were Rose’s parents? Why was Jade the only one who seemed to take care of her? Did she care for her as Rose, or as a future host for a Prime?

Octavia has been getting moments this season that parallel her brother’s in season 1 – first she stowed away on the dropship, and now she bonded with and tried to protect a child, showing her more humane side that’s still there, hidden beneath all the violence, and giving her the same „fear is a demon“ advice that she and Bellamy both heard from their mother. And she lost Rose, just like Bellamy lost Charlotte.

It will be interesting to see the team-up of two two „snakes“, „devils“ from season 5, as they are both good at fighting and killing, but are such a contrast to each other  – Octavia, impulsive, broken, and emotional disturbed, and Diyoza, rational, good at strategy, cool and snarky, and heavily pregnant. As Diyoza said, snarkily quoting Casablanca: „This is a start of a beautiful friendship“

Ironically, Diyoza thinks they can become heroes of the new planet by killing the Children of Gabriel – not realizing yet who the real villains are. But they should eventually learn the truth. For that to happen, however, Octavia first has to learn not to attack first. If she achieves something good and important by listening to people and saving people instead of going for the kill, that will show a real character development and positive change.

A character who fleshed out a lot this episode is Jordan. His romance with Delilah was fast and simple, but still cute – he is emotionally a teenager, living his first love, and she had the chance to live her last one, before handing over her life to someone else. But is also was a chance to see Jordan opening up to someone about what his life had been like on the ship. Before this, Jordan only seemed like a sweet and optimistic, smiling guy, but now we’ve seen his sadness and longing and his feelings of guilt, too. His description of his life on the ship was the best piece of dialogue in the episode. Monty and Harper may have gotten their happy ending, but they also sacrificed a lot – by removing themselves from the lives of their friends, and by putting their adult son back in cryo – and Monty eventually had to live all alone for quite some time, after Harper’s death. But they also put their son in a difficult position – of growing up with no one except his parents, without any people his age, or any other people in general – only seeing them as „faces behind the glass“, friends he could never have, a life that he couldn’t lead. Of course he wanted to be cryo frozen so he could once have that life, and of course his parents let him – because it would have been monstruous if they had been selfish and decided to prioritize their needs to have their son in their lives over his chance at life. And it’s sad that Jordan feels guilty for going into cryo-sleep, leaving his parents and becoming a „face behind the glass“ for them – someone they could only long for and never have again. But it shows his empathy and compassionate nature that his parents’ feelings are still so much on his mind and that he feels guilty for making them prioritize their child’s needs over theirs, even though that’s a normal thing for a parent to do.

Clarke spent a lot of the episode trying to apologize and make amends to her friends– and those interactions had to happen at this point, before Clarke gets bodysnatched. Each of her last (as in, latest) interactions with her loved ones – her words to Madi, where she accepted her role as a Commander but also told her she may remove the Flame and be a regular kid if she decides to; her apology to Raven, which Raven did not accept, but instead was very harsh with her, and the message Clarke gave her from Shaw, that she deserves to be happy; and her tender moment with Bellamy, where she apologized and told him how much he means to her, and her apology was fully accepted – is going to get so much more weight in these people’s minds after they find out what happened to her.

The scene between Clarke and Raven was a bit frustrating. I’m sure that the reason why we’ve had so many scenes of various people bashing Clarke is exactly because of what happens at the end of this episode. And don’t get me wrong: Raven and others (Murphy, Emori…) have very good reasons to feel angry over Clarke’s betrayal in S5, which happened so recently from their POV. It makes sense that they’re angry over that, and they are not obliged to forgive Clarke immediately. I was all for them hashing things out. However, the way they’ve done it and the things they’ve said is… weird. Because both Murphy and Raven keep talking as if Clarke has been doing awful things to them and betraying them for years, and that’s definitely not the case, quite the opposite – she was a hero and did things to save them a lot of times, and while she had to go to lengths to do it and kill people to save those she cares about, they’ve also done the same and participated in some of those same things, if they were not those that needed to be saved. The last time they saw Clarke before they went to space, she made it possible for them to go to space in the first place, and was left behind to be all alone for 6 years, except for a child.  It’s like the two of them have retconed the events of seasons 1-4 in some weird way. When Raven says that Clarke says sorry and then does HORRIBLE things AGAIN, I’m like… what horrible things? Clarke deciding to go save Raven instead of staying in the bunker, and ending up almost dying and all alone f(except for a child) for 6 years on a deserted planet? Clarke trying everything to save everyone from Praimfaya, including volunteering to be tested in the radiation chamber, risking a horrible painful death? Clarke making the list of 100 people to survive, after Raven told her she had to do it, bashing her at the same time (“I’m in charge of rationing, but deciding who lives or dies is your specialty”? ) Clarke going to the City of Light to save everyone? Clarke doing everything to save Raven from ALIE? Clarke saving Raven’s and everyone else is life from being horribly murdered by the Mountain Men? Clarke mercy killing Finn to spare him the torture - and do what is best for everyone? Yes, indeed Clarke had  "impossible choices". Which Raven never took responsibility for - she always expected Clarke to make them. Even demanded. She asked for the list to be made and ordered Clarke to do it, but Clarke got blamed for it. Not to mention all the times that Raven participated in the same things Clarke did to defend themselves or saved their people- like torturing Lincoln, blowing up the bridge in S1, facilitating the Ring of Fire etc. She was bashing Clarke for not telling the full truth to the people in Arkadia about their low chances of survival in season 4 - when she could have told them the truth herself and didn’t. Raven stood and gave moralistic criticisms about the plan to test someone in the radiation chamber, but Clarke was the one who injected herself with Nightblood and volunteered to get tested. Not to mention all the times when Raven did have to make terrible and impossible choices, but she seems to forget about it. Like leaving Clarke behind to die. She was also ready to leave Bellamy, Monty, Murphy and Emori to die in the season 5 finale, and was hurrying Clarke to pull a lever and leave them. And then there are times when she did or try to do awful things just to protect someone she loved. Remember when she wanted to give Murphy to the Grounders to be tortured and horrifically murdered for something he didn’t do? Murphy did murder others and cripple her, but Finn was guilty of that crime - which was a murder of a bunch of civilians for no reason. But Raven never blamed Finn. Then she wanted Clarke to kill the Grounder Commander and start a war, and probably get killed, just to save Finn, a murderer. And punched Clarke and called her names when she didn’t do it.

And Raven’s comment that the only difference between Clarke and Octavia is that Octavia „doesn’t pretend to feel bad about it“ shows how little she understands both of them: Clarke is feeling deeply guilty and has even tried suicide during her eclipse psychosis. And the difference between Clarke and Octavia is not that Octavia is not pretending to feel bad about it, the difference is Octavia is pretending to not feel bad about it. She feels awful inside, because she wanted to die, but instead of saying sorry and trying to do better, like Clarke, Octavia can’t bring herself to admit mistakes but instead antagonizes everyone, tries to make people kill her, or kills people for little reason – because she doesn’t know how to deal with her gult and self-loathing in another way. It’s the worst possible way to deal with guilt.

My rewatch of the show has reminded me that this is not the first time Raven has been judgmental, self-righteous and hypocritical to Clarke, but the reason why it didn’t stick out so much before is because she had other interesting storylines. Could the writers give her something else to do? Being mean to Clarke for several episodes in a row and doing little else – except have a brief romance – is getting old.

Raven did get to meet a new character – Ryker, who seems on the surface to be another in the series of apparently perfect love interests for her. Now, I’m usually not the one to jump to conclusions that every single new character is someone’s love interest, but they seem to be setting Ryker up that way – especially with the fact that Clarke told Raven Shaw’s message that she deserves to be happy, in the same episode where she meets this new guy. It seems a bit early to give another romance for Raven so soon after Shaw’s death. However, I don’t think Raven/Ryker is going to work – because, likable as he may seem, he is a 250 year old Prime, who may have been a teenager when it all started, but now he’s lived several lives taking other people’s bodies. And I think he’ll have to die at the end of the season. But this is why I think Ryker being some kind of a love interest for Raven may actually give her a really good storyline. (See further below under Predictions/Speculation.)

Ryker doesn’t seem to be all that into the whole Prime thing – he was late to the ceremony even though it was his own mother, Priya, who was coming back in poor Delilah’s body. Jordan, Clarke and the others used to think the „Naming“ was just some ceremonial thing with giving people names after celebrated ancestors – but they are going to start realizing something is up now, after Jordan experienced his first romantic heartbreak, by seeing Delilah come back as a literally different person, with a much colder demeanor, someone who doesn’t even recognize him – but who went straight up to Ryker and hugged him as her son, even though he is in a body that’s older than hers. „My beautiful baby boy“. That was one weird AF mother-son reunion.

BTW, fandom conversations about race regarding the new Sanctum characters are going to be so confusing because of the bodysnatching. Some of the Primes (Russell, Josephine) are in bodies of hosts who are the same race as their originally were, but others are not (Simone, Priya/Delilah, Ryker, Kaylee…).

Clarke continued her apology tour with the most important conversation – with Bellamy. Leaving him in Polis for his sister to throw him into the fighting pit, is what Clarke personally regrets the most and considers her biggest sin, because of what he means to her. Even though he has been very supportive of her, unlike the others from the Spacekru, she still seemed afraid of how he is going to react and if he was going to accept her apology and her assurances that he is a part of her ’family“ still and incredibly important to her. This warm and vulnerable moment – including another obligatory Bellarke hug, intense and intimate as their hugs and touches always are- between the two of them needed to happen before they are separated again – and before someone else tries to take Clarke’s place and impersonate her. So far, they have been having important conversations and moments, rebuilding their relationship after the awful conflict and misunderstandings from season 5: they have addressed Clarke leaving Bellamy, they have addressed her radio calls, they have not directly addressed Bellamy’s betrayal – from Clarke’s POV – but she showed trust in him to take care of Madi in 6x03 and repaid it. But I’m sure that this is not the last time they  talk about either of these things (and not just because we know from the trailer that there’s at least one other conversation coming up in S6 about the radio calls and leaving Bellamy in Polis). These things are ongoing plot points that are given a lot of weight – and the issues have not been fully cleared. Clarke still hasn’t addressed the fact that she didn’t just forget that Bellamy was also her „family“, she was angry and heartbroken  when she felt that Bellamy betrayed her, and when she thought he had told her she wasn’t a part of his „family“ anymore. And Bellamy hasn’t told her that one of the main reasons he did it, and the main or most immediate reason that pushed him to poison Octavia, was to protect Clarke („another traitor you love“). But once they are able to talk about all of it, I’m sure this will lead to other admissions they are not ready for right now. In 6x01, Clarke was scared of talking about the radio calls and her feelings, and now it was Bellamy trying to avoid the conversation. At this point, Clarke seems to have made peace with the fact that she can’t hope for anything else from Bellamy but rebuilding of the relationship they used to have, because he’s with someone else and doesn’t feel that way about her (or so she thinks), while Bellamy seems unsure about many things and trying to figure them out, but is unable to face those issues right now.

We also got the confirmation that Bellamy finds it easier to forgive Clarke because he understood and related to her protectiveness of Madi, as he used to be the same with Octavia, his sister/pseudo-child. But his line „I know what it’s like to risk everything for one person“ may also be foreshadowing. And so is Clarke’s assurance that she will never forget that Bellamy is a part of her family.

After unburdening herself emotionally like that, Clarke tried to do something she very rarely does: relax and have a good time, including dressing up, dancing and flirting in the club with the random good-looking person (specifically, tall, dark dude with facial hair) she had known for very little time, and have a hot one-night stand, after spending 6 years in forced celibacy. (Which is, BTW, only the 5th time she’s had sex in her life, as far as we are aware.) I like the fact that the show doesn’t subscribe to the idea that sex must always mean love – sometimes it has insta-romances, but this is one of those times when it’s really not about love or special bond, just having fun and taking your mind off the misery that’s the rest of your life.

Now, while I liked the fact that Clarke got to just have a one-night stand that didn’t mean anything but a bit of fun, which wasn’t presented as her doing something bad, hat I like a lot less is what happened right after – when the one-night stand led to Clarke being paralyzed, kidnapped and bodysnatched. This feels too much like the trope of punishing people (women especially) for sex, even if that was not th idea.

The doc was a Child of Gabriel, so one of the good guys, so to speak – but oh boy, did he screw things up. Why wouldn’t he have told her the truth (do CoG not understand that normal people are not like the brainwashed Sanctum residents and would freak out and turn against the Primes if they knew they were going to be bodysnatched?), instead of deceiving her, and then trying to explain when it was too late, then paralyzing her and trying to kill her so she wouldn’t be used as host, then committing suicide? Congratulations, dumbass, you just got the exact opposite result of what you planned and were supposed to do!

While Clarke was dancing with the doc, the camera made sure to show that Bellamy was watching them, and the song had very fitting lyrics:

Seaside

I’m running around looking for peace of mind

So come out and change me

You were always around to make me smile

 Stuck underwater

I’m stuck underwater

I just need some space

My friend

It’s not what you wanted

It’s not what you wanted

But I just need a change

Again

 And then when the camera panned to Bellamy:

 Help me out before I die

Save me now before I give up

Help me out before I drown

There has been some debate over whether Bellamy looked jealous (enough) – and while his expression wasn’t the obvious heartbreak on Clarke’s face when she was watching him kiss Echo in S5, he looked sad, wistful and lost in thoughts. Maybe some people expected a stronger, angrier reaction – but I always hated that idea: it would be OOC, he was never possessive of Clarke that way, and it would make him a jerk if he acted that way while he is in a serious relationship with someone else.

Then Echo arrived – which was a bit odd: unlike Jordan and Delilah, who came as a couple, Bellamy and Echo didn’t dress up or come together. Bellamy was still distracted, looking back to the dance floor, when she asked him if he was fine, and he claimed to be upset because he remembered Octavia’s arrest at the party on the Ark (which he described as the last party he was to before one – even though that’s not true. The last party he was at was in Arkadia in S4, a few days before Praimfaya, when he drank with Jasper and others and probably had a one-night stand with Bree, and then later left when he learned about the bunker, while the others from that party, minus Harper and Niylah, decided to stay and commit suicide.) Bellamy indeed looked very sad in this episode – in contrast to his livelier and more hopeful demeanor in the previous episodes – presumably because of what a huge moment and huge loss it was for him to decide to leave Octavia behind and definitely cut her off from his life. But when he immediately started to criticize Echo for not being emotionally open enough, (like Clarke?) it felt like this either came out of the blue, or was very much connected to the fact that Bellamy had that emotionally intimate moment with Clarke, and was just watching Clarke acting fin and sensual with someone else. I’m usually not too impressed with Tasya Teles’ acting, but Echo’s silent hurt in this scene is one of her best acting moments so far.

Bellamy then realized he had just acted like a jerk and took out his issues on her, so he and Echo had an emotional conversation, where Echo ended up telling him the story about losing her parents, when Queen Nia’s army took their land. But this scene was weird in some ways. Bellamy said that Echo told him before that she didn’t remember her parents. This is the first time she has told him the true story. Which is quite surprising - since they spent 6 years is close proximity, probably without much else to do but talk, and (while we don’t know how long they’ve been dating), have been at least friends for 3 years out of that time (since it took him 3 years to forgive her).  This may be a sign that she never really opened up and that they never really got that close as you’d expect. The conversation did start with Bellamy criticising Echo for not being emotionally open as he would like – but he said that the Echo he knew on the ring was more open. However, the dialogue went on to prove him wrong - since it turned out she hadn’t ble to talk about her parents for 6 years, and had lied about it to avoid conversation, and he never noticed.

So, this is either bad writing - or it is good writing that is intentionally meant to convey the lack of real intimacy in their relationship on the ring, and that Bellamy simply didn’t notice it because..? Maybe he didn’t want to? Or he didn’t have anything to compare it with, as his relationships with Raven, Murphy, Monty, Harper and Emori were not more emotionally intimate? It’s difficult to judge what “the time on the ring” was like, when we never saw any flashbacks, and the little info we got is contradictory. We hear that Echo proved herself there, or showed feelings when loved ones were in danger, but other times they talk about it as if nothing was happening and they were just bored and worried about not being able to get to Earth?

It’s also a little odd that Echo says that her emotional repression is because she was fighting for survival all her life - when that is also true of Bellamy. He had a huge secret to hide since he was 6, so you would expect him to be completely closed-off, and he is certainly not. A much better explanation would be Echo’s specific spy training, which we got a glimpse of in her hallucination in 6x02. That was IMO a much stronger character scene for Echo (and that episode was full of great character moments for everyone). If this scene in 6x04 is meant to be a full explanation of her personality, it’s not satisfactory. If it is meant as one of the setups for her to start struggling with her identity and get development in future episodes, I will like it better. 

 And finally, that ending. Even though the twist had been foreshadowed a lot and was expected by quite a few fans, me included, at least since 6x03 or not before, the scene where Russell and Simone decided to wipe Clarke’s mind and put their daughter’s into her body, was incredibly creepy and chilling, especially since we were practically in the POV of the paralyzed Clarke, who saw and heard everything but couldn’t move or do a thing. The dark room, the skeletons of previous hosts, all the way back to the original bodies of the Primes, all contributed to how disturbing it all felt – and so did the fact that Russell and Simone came off very human while incredibly monstrous at the same time. Russell is sad about doing evil, but then he does evil anyway and continues doing so, and he had some very hypocritical lines where he told Clarke she was giving them a „gift“ and that she can now „be at peace“. That’s not what she meant, Russell! Russell and Simone are convinced that they are killing Clarke – and the released script itself and Jason Rothenberg in the Inside the episode video confirmed that Clarke Griffin is indeed dead and gone…

Yeah, it’s pretty funny that they’re trying to sell this even for a moment. Of course, if it were true, it would be one of the stupidest, most pointless and offensive ways to kil off your protagonist, but we all know that’s not the case. The question is just, what exactly will be the condition of Clarke’s mind during the time Josephine is in control of her body, and how and when she will be brought back/freed. And most importantly, this plotline should give both Clarke and her loved ones a lot of great character moments and an exploration of their feelings. It should also propel the entire season’s plot, because our protagonists now have a personal stake in dismantling this awful society and putting the stop to the horrible practice that has been going on for 236 years.

Predictions/speculation

Out of the theories circling around, the one  I like the minds of the hosts are not really erased; they are just dormant because the Prime mind is written on top of them and dominant. After all, why would we assume that Russell and the other Primes know the truth about how the process works? They. wouldn’t really know, or care, if the hosts’ minds are gone or just trapped and unable to do anything as the Primes’ minds are in control – which, in many ways, is even more disturbing than a simple death of the host would be. But the hosts before Clarke have been willing (as far as we know), and might not have had anyone determined to bring them back (the Children of Gabriel are content to just kill the hosts if that’s the only way to stop the process). The Flame will no doubt come into play, but not the way some people think. As confirmed by Jason Rothenberg in his recent Twitter Q&A, the „mind drives“ are a version of Becca’s original technology, modified in order to store an entire consciousness. The Flame is a more developed version of Becca’s original design, and might help someone – probably Raven - figure out how to erase the process in the mind drives. The fact that Madi has Becca’s „spirit“ in her head could also play a role. I’m sure it won’t be easy, though, and a lot of other things will probably also be needed, including input from Gabriel himself.

What would be really interesting is to see what this does for Clarke’s character arc. We will see Josephine pretending to be Clarke, but I wonder if we will also see Clarke pretending to be Josephine pretending to be Clarke, Josephine fighting with Clarke, Clarke trapped inside her own brain and fighting with her demons… 

It will also be interesting to see how the loss of Clarke affects her friends and family. They have never before dealt with a situation Clarke is the one who needs saving for any longer period of time, and where everyone has to work together to save her. This should help show everyone’s real feelings for her. After all the bitterness and anger that some of them have shown (Raven in particular), her disappearance/“death“ will probably make them remember all the times that she did heroic things and saved them and others, and a comparison with a selfish, spoiled sociopath like Josephine should make them see what a real „bad guy“ in Clarke’s body would be like.

Will they also be able to save Delilah and the other hosts? Some people think that would be too „fairy-tale“ like, aka too good to be true – but, whatever Delilah meant by it, I think that her line “Don’t let me be a face behind the glass” (which compares the hosts to people in cryo-sleep) either hints at or foreshadows that the hosts can be saved. And I also think that the stakes will be higher if the hosts can be saved (or at least some of them – since some of the Primes may get killed in their hosts’ bodies before the end of this season), which would mean that the storyline must end with the final deaths of all the Primes – the destruction of their mind drives. If the hosts were really gone (and for some reason, only Clarke could be brought back), it would feel wrong to kill the Primes once they stop posing direct danger, and if there is another way to make sure they stop stealing other people’s bodies, especially if some of them end up helping put an end to the Prime rule and the bodysnatching practice.

But if the hosts can be saved, and given a chance at a real life that was taken from them at the age of 21, and if they can only be saved by destroying the Primes, who have already lived over 250 years at the expense of others… then this is a choice that will have to be made: the right choice, but maybe not an easy one. Especially if Ryker really ends up being Raven’s new love interest, and if ends up really not being fully bad and helping our heroes, we may end up being season 6 Maya, and at the same time, it could put Raven, for once, to be the one who makes the decisions who lives and who dies and has to stand by it, and – what would be even more interesting – to be the one who „kills“ her love interest for the greater good and what is right, this time, essentially going through Clarke’s season 2 role. Ryker’s line about about raven as an omen of death sounds like foreshadowing.

Rating: 8/10

[osakaso5]

Ryunosuke Tsunashi 12 SONGS GIFT Rabbit Chat Part 4: Tell Us, All Stars! 2

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 5

Tsumugi: Has everyone returned?

Riku: We're all here! We decided to gather in the living room after all that happened!

Tsumugi: I see!

Tamaki: Nagicchi didn't get anything good

Nagi: :-(

Tenn: We're more or less together, too.

Gaku: We've only got one gas burner, after all. Whenever we get in the mood for coffee, we just end up in the same room.

Momo: And I'm at Yuki's place right now!

Tsumugi: What a coincidence! I'm also at the office with Banri-san!

Rinto: Huh..? Everyone seems to be having fun. Perhaps we should meet up too, Anesagi-san.

Kaoru: No. I've already taken my makeup off.

Riku: We were talking about Tsunashi-san's question, and how we probably wouldn't have met if we weren't idols.

Iori: We have surprisingly little in common, after all. Yotsuba-san and I would probably have gone to different schools.

Tamaki: And I don't think So-chan or Nagicchi would go to the kinda places I do.

Nagi: I wonder. We might have met at a comics shop.

Riku: I might've met Mitsuki or Sogo-san at a TRIGGER live!

Ryunosuke: These really have all been once-in-a- lifetime meetings. I'm glad I got to know you like this!

Tsumugi: Right... Well then, now that everyone has returned, let's continue!

Tsumugi: We'll start with Yamato-san!

Yamato: Gotcha.

Yamato: I've thought about this a few times now, but Tsunashi-san's the type that I'd probably keep at a polite distance.

Ryunosuke: Huh!? Really!?

Yamato: Not because I don't like you or anything! You're just so dazzling (lol) Mitsu and Momo-san are that type, too.

Mitsuki: Don't say things that'll make me feel lonely, Yamato-san!

Momo: Be friendly!!

Yamato: I am being friendly!! But I still think there'd be some boundaries. That's why I think Tsunashi-san would probably be a popular senpai from university, who I'd be watching from the sidelines (lol)

Ryunosuke: I'm sure you'd be plenty popular yourself, Yamato-kun. I'd probably try to make friends with you!

Yamato: Thank you. Maybe you're someone I could open up to (lol)

Yuki: You're so tough to crack that I wouldn't want you to open up so easily, though.

Yamato: I'm not tough to crack! Besides, aren't you a lot more antisocial than me!? Banri-san told me all about it!

Yuki: Did he, now? Tell me more.

Banri: It's just that it was such an embarrassing story. I couldn't help telling him.

Rinto: You were quite difficult yourself, Ogami-san. Especially for two busy celebrities to find. I'll be more than happy to give you the full details of it later.

Banri: Please don't (lol)

Tsumugi: Thank you, Yamato-san! Yaotome-san, you're next!

Gaku: If me and Ryu hadn't met through idol work, huh. It might as well be some kind of fated meeting, then.

Ryunosuke: Like what?

Gaku: Either I save your life, or you save mine.

Tenn: You always did have a flair for the dramatic, Gaku.

Ryunosuke: Saving Gaku's life, huh. That would be a really serious responsibility!

Gaku: Actually, it's probably better if I save you. I could be a detective, and you my client. Or maybe you could even be the culprit I've been trying to catch the whole time.

Tenn: So you're enemies now?

Tsumugi: Both of them would make great first meetings! I'd love to be a fly on the wall during either one!

Gaku: In any case, I want our meeting to be like something you'd see in a drama. I don't want us to just be acquaintances, I want us to change each other's lives. 

Ryunosuke: Gaku... I'm so touched... I want to change your life too, no matter how we meet.

Gaku: Thought so.

Kaoru: Then meet in a more peaceful way, so your lives aren't in danger. Though I suppose this is typical, coming from you boys.

Gaku: 

Ryunosuke: 

Mitsuki: You've gotta start saying this kind of stuff too, Leader.

Yamato: It took a lot of courage just to give my own, honest answer, y'know.

Yamato: What about our manager here? If you didn't work this job, what do you think you'd be doing?

Tsumugi: Me?

Ryunosuke: I'm curious, too. Tell us, Tsumugi-chan!

Tsumugi: Let's see. If I wasn't in this line of work...

Choices/outcomes:

1. I might be in higher education?

Ryunosuke: I'm sure you'd have made a cute university student. But you're just as cute now, obviously!

2. Maybe I'd be working an office job?

Ryunosuke: You're really efficient, so it'd probably suit you. Maybe we'd meet while you're on a company retreat to Okinawa?

3. Perhaps I'd be working in customer service?

Ryunosuke: I think you'd be good at it, since you're so friendly! Maybe I'd end up being one of your customers!

Tsumugi: Or something like that..? As Tsunashi-san   said, I'd want to meet all of  you even if I was working a different job!

Ryunosuke: Right! I'd want to meet everyone, even in a totally different  kind of world!

Tsumugi: I'm glad you feel that way! Mitsuki-san, you're next!

Mitsuki: Yeah!

Mitsuki: I thought about this pretty hard, and I think we'd make fast friends no matter how we met.

Ryunosuke: That makes me really happy! I think so, too!

Ryunosuke: 

Mitsuki: So, I think we'd hit it off at the gym, meet through a friend, or maybe get to know each other while I'm on a trip in Okinawa. Either way, as soon as we meet, I'm sure we'd end up in the kind of relationship we have now!

Mitsuki: At least, I hope so!

Ryunosuke: I think I'd always want to be  your friend, no matter  how many times I'm reborn!

Iori: Suddenly, this discussion is about reincarnation.

Tsumugi: Thank you, Mitsuki-san! Sogo-san, go ahead!

Sogo: This might be a bit too similar to Mitsuki-san's, but Tsunashi-san is such a wonderful person that I think he'd leave a lasting impression no matter where we'd meet.

Sogo: So, I think maybe I'd see him having tea at a café, and approach him to ask for his number.

Tamaki: That's flirting...

Tenn: That's flirting, isn't it.

Yamato: Spoken like a true rich kid.

Yuki: That's what you do when you want someone to end up at your place later that night.

Sogo: Huh!? I didn't mean to...

Ryunosuke:

Ryunosuke: So you'd approach me! I'd be really happy to have someone as polite as you come talk to me.

Sogo: Yes. You're very kind, so I feel like I could gather the courage to approach you.

Ryunosuke: That would be a nice way for us to meet.

Tsumugi: Sogo-san, thank you! Nagi-san, you're next!

Nagi: Indeed. In order for myself and Tsunashi-shi to meet while we are not idols, we would have to raise Tsunashi-shi's specs.

Ryunosuke: Ah, you mean by having me graduate a top university, or work for a top-notch corporation..?

Nagi: Basically, you would have to expand your knowledge of anime.

Ryunosuke: Oh, you meant those kind of specs?

Nagi: There would be an anime event in Okinawa that you would have a ticket for, we would get in contact over the internet, and while waiting in line for the event, we would have a passionate discussion about anime, and become ocean-crossed soulmates.

Ryunosuke: O-okay. I'll try my best to get that ticket for you!

Tsumugi: Thank you, Nagi-san! Riku-san, go ahead!

Riku: I wonder what I would've done if I wasn't an idol? Maybe I'd just have gone to university, like everyone else?

Riku: If I graduated universtiy, got a job, and started earning money, I could reopen my parents' club. In that case, I'd hire Tsunashi-san as one of our dancers!

Ryunosuke: You'd be the manager? And you'd scout me?

Riku: Yes! I'm sure the club would be a huge success if you worked there!

Ryunosuke: Thank you! I'm glad to hear that!

Tsumugi: Riku-san, thank you! Kujo-san, you're next!

Tenn: I have a hard time picturing myself as anything other than an idol, too.

Ryunosuke: It's pretty hard to imagine you doing something else. I think that applies more  to you than anyone else here.

Tenn: I consider that a compliment.

Tenn: Going off the top of my head, we might meet in a hospital waiting room. We'd get to know each other while talking about our families.

Gaku: Why a hospital? Are you sick or something?

Riku: Is it because you used to come see me in the hospital a lot? Is that what you meant?

Tenn: That's right.

Riku: I like that I'd be the reason you meet.

Ryunosuke: That's kind of a tender first meeting. It's totally different from Gaku's dramatic scenario, but they both really suit you two.

Tsumugi: Kujo-san, thank you! Iori-san, you're next!

Iori: Understood. Unfortunately, my scenario is also a bit silly.

Ryunosuke: It's rare for you to act silly, Iori-kun!

Iori: I said my scenario was silly, not me.

Ryunosuke: S-sorry.

Mitsuki: Iori, don't get mad, lol

Iori: Please excuse me... Tsunashi-san seems like he'd love animals, so I might meet him on my way home from school, while he's walking a dog. And sometimes he'll let me pet the dog.

Ryunosuke: Walking a dog, huh! I'd like to do that, it sounds nice. Do you like dogs, Iori-kun?

Iori: No. At most, I can acknowledge their existence.

Riku: Oh, reeeally?

Iori: But, seeing how close you are to your dog would be so wonderful that it would give me the slightest urge to get my down dog. That's about it.

Ryunosuke: Thank you! I'm glad your scenario was so heartwarming!

Tsumugi: Iori-san, thank you! Tamaki-san, you're the last one left!

Tamaki: This is something I could imagine, or more like wish for.

Tamaki: Ryu-aniki would be a dentist.

Tamaki: And I'd be a patient.

Ryunosuke: You wish I was a dentist?

Tamaki: I don't wanna go to the dentist!!!

Tamaki: Is what I'd think, but then I'd be all relieved when you turn out to be my dentist. Like, "this guy seems nice", or whatever.

Ryunosuke: I see! I'd do my best to help you relax.

Gaku: As long as we're talking about dentists, who wouldn't you want as yours?

Tamaki: So-chan. He'd be scary with a drill.

Sogo: I'm confident that I could do my job properly and give you the right treatment, though.

Tamaki: Even if you could give me the right treatment, you'd still make it seem like it'd hurt and be scary. Ryu-aniki and So-chan, you should both try saying something you'd say to a patient.

Tamaki: Go.

Ryunosuke: It'll be okay. This will be over soon, so just hang in there.

Sogo: This may  hurt a bit, but it's a necessary procedure, so try to bear with it.

Momo: lololololol

Mitsuki: You really showed your true natures here, lol

Tamaki: I'd sooo go to Ryu-aniki for the dentist

Tenn: I'd prefer a dentist like Sogo Osaka, though.

Riku: I'm sure you wouldn't hurt me, Sogo-san!

Sogo: Thank you. If I ever become a dentist, I'll work hard to meet both your expectations.

Tsumugi: I'm glad this turned into such a fun chat! lol Thank you, everyone!

Mitsuki: Happy birthday, Tsunashi-san!

Momo: Ryu-chan, congrats~!!

Ryunosuke: Thank you, everyone! I'm happy that you took the time to get together like this!

Ryunosuke: I look forward to working with you for another year!

Sogo: As do we.

Riku: Congratulations, Tsunashi-san!

Tsumugi: Tsunashi-san, do your best at your 12  SONGS GIFT event!

Ryunosuke: Yeah, I will!

Ryunosuke: I can't wait to spend my birthday with my fans!

[desroundtree]

This Administration

It is interesting to watch what we have become under this presidency.  The modernity of this country seems to slip from our grasp, little by little, then all at the same time.   We seem to be fighting things that we never thought we would have to again, rights that we have earned are up for grabs in a fight no normal person feels like they could win.  From a mental health standpoint, it is exhausting and sometimes anxiety-inducing.  Never mind the other mental health issues people are battling because of not only the things inside them but the things outside them too.

We are sitting in a place which feels like waiting, for every bit of breaking news that seems to attack the citizens of this country, as well as the people trying to come here for a break from what seems like the worst things that could ever happen to them, but just beyond those gates exists a different kind of hell. 

Americans struggle to battle some of the worst things we have seen in a long time.  The things some of us have experienced is mind-blowing.  Things that were once forced to be kept in the dark have been given a spotlight, and every ugly face grins into it.  Confederate flags fly in the wind with pride.  Bumper stickers in support of a man who doesn’t believe in a woman’s right to choose, in the right to seek asylum, in the responsibility to pay taxes, in common sense gun laws, or even in the Constitution.  I think it is hard to swallow seeing people pledging love for America but not what America stands for, or did stand for at one time.  We have taken giant leaps backward, and it seems like it’s ok to some but damning to most.  The part that feels the worst is the helplessness in it all, and the allowance of fear and anger to enter our daily lives.

I feel sorry for what our children are seeing every day, what they have experienced already at such young ages.  The drills that they have been taught to survive a day in school if something horrible happens, and how we as parents have lost the ability to feel like we can protect our children, and like school is a safe place to be.  They believed that for a long time, and so did we.  Now, we worry about their lives more than we already had to.

My daughter already knows more about loss than any child should.  Her friends have lost their grandparents, some have lost their parents to these horrible laws that have deported them and sent them back to countries that persecute them, abuse them and violate their human rights.  Even as people seek a path to legal citizenship, that is still not enough.  

She knows about children being torn from their parent's arms and sleeping in cages. Not because I told her (a soft talk was given but worrying a child that already exhibits anxious tendencies is not something any parent wants to do).  She is aware and understands the world around her.  Children talk to one another, and I don’t think as adults give them as much credit as maybe we should.  Being open with your children is important, but what they see right now is chaos even we don’t understand.  Some things I feel like even I can’t explain.

There are days I think I want to try to understand what is happening and why people feel the way they feel.  It makes me curious because I don’t share the same morals or values and maybe that’s where the block is. I know people who believe in him, in what he has done and what he claims to be doing.  Hell, they voted for him.  They believe in his tweets, his blasphemous nonsense, his inability to see something other than his base.  They want his wall, to keep out people who work hard in this country and only want a chance.  They believe what he spews on a daily basis.  It has become something the whole World must deal with and something Americans see as their real life.  

The truth is this makes me not want to understand.  It makes a lot of people feel like they have to approach people as they approach them, and they have to respond accordingly.  It is hard to understand racism when you aren’t racist, just like it is hard to accept racism as a way of life that is acceptable for anyone when you are not racist.  You can refuse to be subjected to someone’s behavior, and they can do the same, but having to prove every day that this is not normal or acceptable or even legal to someone that doesn’t care is exhausting.  

It is also unnecessary.  Or rather it should be.

What this administration has taught me is to try let go. It is teaching me not to ingest everything and to really understand what issues bother me and stay focused on those for now, and even though this post many issues we face, we need to concentrate and unite in order to get the things we not only want but need.  

We can’t take on every battle at once, and I am not the only person that has to learn that.  

Some people will hold on to an idea like a starving dog eating a t-bone steak.  There is no reasoning with someone who believes abortion is wrong, or child abuse as someone told me, or infanticide.  Religion should not play a part in women’s healthcare, but it seems as though separation of Church and State is something that has gone down the drain like other things that make America the country it is.  

The idea that such misinformation is actually being repeated by this administration is not only scary, but it is dangerous.  Instead of thinking of controlling women, this administration should think about the doctors, nurses, and caregivers it has put in danger on a daily basis.  It stops their ability to perform necessary healthcare procedures.  People who go to work every day to help women choose what is right for them, who sit with them before every procedure and explain what is going to happen, and who allow them to change their minds if they wish.  The decision is hard for some, and necessary for others.  I am sure there are women who abuse this right, but I am also sure this number is much less than women that are in need of the help and services these places offer.  These are important decisions that should be made by women on a case by case basis and passing sweeping laws in states to outlaw, or make this procedure more difficult than it already is heartless and cruel.

During this administration, I have learned now more than ever that it is a man’s world.  Men are still controlling the blood, sweat and tears of women, we are still viewed as lesser and treated as such no matter how much we fight.  We can march, we can scream, we can petition, we can sit in, play dead, and raise our fists and voices.  We can vote, but that doesn’t seem to work for women because we did that and ended up in this situation anyway.  Still we marched, because at times it’s hard to understand that there really is no way out of the situation. We are pretty much useless unless we try again.  

It’s hard to convince women of color that they need to, that we need them to come out in full force for a candidate they might not agree with or support.  But the truth is, in order not to be the subject of more repeals of women’s rights, more human rights violations, more attacks on our planet - we need to do it all over again.  It’s hard for some to agree with, and to swallow.

Finding a way through this has been difficult, not arguing your way through is even more of a task.  We are still fighting - organizations are taking on cases I am sure they never thought they would prosecute.  Suing an administration for the rights of immigrants, women and even children, fighting against the poison water they expect people to drink, and working to secure the correct amount of funding to repair the devastation of an island filled with American citizens.  It begins to feel like we are constantly fighting.

I hope we have the strength to continue.  

There has to be a way to end this administration’s ridiculous show of power, and its grab at something America never needed until he sat in the office.  We were diplomatic and almost regal in the eyes of most, and now, we aren’t and it is apparently clear.  I hope we can find our place back there, where women had the right to choose, and children aren’t separated from their parents.  I hope we can find our way back to an administration that cares about the wants and needs of all, not just some.  I hope for our future, for our children, that we are able to move on from this, and back toward something we can all be proud of.  I hope we can still make changes for the better of everyone, and to understand the disparity that still exists.  I hope we change it - and I hope we do it soon.

[codbo3]

How to pick best surveillance cameras

Should you be wanting to purchase a surveillance camera, the options can be mind-boggling. Here are some tips to aid you. There is lots to consider as far as home security camera functions, specs and also standard tech is going. The primary difference from the web cam and a true home security camera certainly one important variation. Web cams will often be lumped underneath the surveillance camera class because a lot of them offer many safety features, but I would debate that they can be quite limited in case your main priority is going to be security. Go ahead and take Smonet Security Camera as well as Lorex Security Camera as samples. Either enable you to view a live video feed in ones smartphone when you have an connection to the internet, however Nest cam indoor won't warn you every time a possible security and safety concern arises (for instance once the built-in detectors recognize action, etc.), whilst the View offers a large number of customizability in order to obtain status updates whenever an issue occurs, if that is what you look for. This could seem to be a tiny distinction, but if you 're going the actual stand alone Do-it-yourself security camera option, some of those messages would be the very best to estimated real-time monitoring (not including checking out the live stream all the time). Do-it-yourself also often shows that, contrary to Scout and also other agencies, there isn't any qualified professional monitoring service behind your current home security camera. This means, for much better or even worse, it's going to be your responsibility to consult the police if you see someone breaking in to your residence. If you can't get the alternative to acquire a notice when a safety circumstance happens, you can without difficulty overlook the only one time frame that a thief steal that high priced piece of earrings. That does not mean that there is no room for web cams as security measures supplements, but they're actually very best reserved for looking in for a doggie in daytime to make sure your favorite jacket hasn't changed into a chew up doll.

Benefits of security camera systems

DETER Criminal offenses

This is actually biggest as well as the most noticeable benefit from putting in video cameras. When they are put, it will be possible to experience their unique effects on individuals shortly. Although they are installed discreetly, you can begin feeling a feeling of home security, which can be priceless. Do not ever make someone and anything suspicious through your eyesight with security camera systems. And while our recommendation is that anyone stay clear of getting dummy surveillance cameras, we cannot really pressure enough on the need for correcting authentic security camera systems as a reliable security measure. Thieves are sharp and dummy video security cameras give by themselves away, therefore there’s really no reason in having them. Find Proof Putting security cameras positioned in ideal places comes in handy when you'd like to check activities and also words and phrases of folks and / or throughout an event. Modern-day security camera systems aren't just backed up with superior quality film features, but audio as well. The sharp pictures along with impressive sounds makes them more practical than ever at saving a number of situations. This is particularly beneficial when handling a legitimate case, in which the eye witness often have ignored a unique important information or may perhaps be offering having an precise account of the things truly took place. Using a surveillance camera, a legalised authorities can observe any series of activities while they truly unfolded.

>How Much Should You Really Spend on a Home Security Camera?

These days, security equipment can be found in numerous choices and prices to give a feeling of safety and security to a number of property owners. The normal cost of a security system as well as installment is $1,000. As a result variances with kinds and excellence of surveillance cameras, installing the device commonly varies in between $550 and $2,000. Hard-wired products are less costly just for parts but far more for set up, with $145-$180 each security camera, in comparison to their wi-fi alternatives. The excellent news: investing in some kind of system can save expenses for house insurance. There's two main options to make: wi-fi or hard wired along with IP or CCTV. Having said that, a number of other things give rise to the final setup. Many products contain a number of cameras along with perhaps on-site or cloud storage space. In some cases they will contain actions detectors, advanced screen resolution, expert tracking, along with night vision functions. Greater alternatives result in greater sophistication, along with more price ranges. At some point, your needs and needs and wants must determine the last bill. Year after year, surveillance camera prices have plummeted, driving them to be a reasonably-priced need. A typical home security system set up will cost roughly $1500. Although the cost for professional installing could vary substantially dependent on solution model plus quantity of cameras. On the top of equipment fees, each camera equipment will probably cover anything from $75 to $220 just for expert design and installation. A device developed for Build-it-yourself installing costs nothing but time, if you have the specific tools. Regardless of whether you wind up heading all the DIY road or possibly working with a guru, an original assessment can help you fully grasp a person's accurate requires using the requirements of your home. A session is frequently zero cost. The scale and type would be determined by numerous reasons.

Hard-wired IP camera

Though the installing costs higher than wifi calculating about $160 to $220 per security camera, the components involving hard wired products are usually more low-priced. Because holes are going to be drilled, cable connections added, and conduit implemented, employing a service provider is generally required. Right after up front costs, the actual negative aspect is fixed locations. The advantages can outweigh the disadvantages. Cabled models shouldn't be broken into remotely, jammed, and still have electric power built-in ? normally with battery power back ups intended for energy blackouts. Wireless surveillance camera Wireless systems are really easy to install, driving them to be the options intended for Build it yourself projects. A DIY install can cost you $0 along with qualified work only about $80 per camera. They may be also easy to relocate and typically provide you with remote control accessibility. Negative aspects consist of simply no special source of energy and has to be installed in your house's wi-fi range to operate efficiently. They generally possess lower picture resolution compared with hard-wired counterparts and can be broken into remotely. Cord less devices can also be be subject to signal disturbance.

[moved--to-mysticandskepticmuses]

GRAPHICS!

The background, ads, icons & banners etc. for this blog are made by me. Please do not take things that I have made for this blog – they match the aesthetic and I would prefer to keep them only for my use. If you would like the bases for the icons you can feel free to ask me and I will be happy to send them to you and if you would like them personalized, I am usually very happy to do so, though it might take me a few days / week or two (sometimes more) to actually get any graphic requests done depending on life!

MY ACTIVITY!

If you’ve ever written with me before then you know the drill. My real life is absolutely crazy between three kids (each in a different school with different after school activities) and my numerous health concerns which tend to keep me away from rp sometimes just because of sheer pain levels or sometimes because of frequent doctors visits etc.  If I feel pressured or if I start to get anxious about not being able to keep up activity then I tend to panic and just push the whole blog away for a while. Not the best coping mechanism, but it is what it is and this is above all else FOR FUN.

YOUR ACTIVITY!

I will never pressure you for replies, though I may bombard your inbox with memes and poke you to plot or chat but never ever feel obligated to reply to anything, be it posts or memes or chats etc. if you aren’t up for it or just aren’t feeling it.  Do always feel free to let me know if you start a new character or blog and would like to plot something with me, I can almost guarantee if we already write together (or have in the past) and you go somewhere new I will be happy to write with you! And, as a side note, I don’t care if you take an hour or a year to reply, I will always be happy to see you & it!

FORMATTING.

My preference is some very light formatting and icons (of a consistent size - I might, at most, bounce between 100x100 and 200x100 depending on my mood). I don’t care if you format a lot or only a little.

NSFW & TRIGGERING CONTENT.

I will straight up warn everyone now, I love writing dark themes, horror, murder, torture, graphic violence and angsty smut are all like my favorite things ever. However, I am WELL aware that not everyone shares those interests so please note that I will be tagging pretty much anything that I think might bother someone with the simple ‘tw triggernamehere’ tags. Self-harm, drug use, potential noncon/dubcon, mind control, alcoholism, domestic abuse, so on and so forth are likely to appear here. NSFW will always be tagged with just the simple 'nsfw’.

GODMODDING.

This one is pretty simple. No godmodding. Don’t write for my characters. Even if you are writing a god, writing someone with the ability to control and puppet others, if you are attacking my character with a miniature nuke and they are standing there in their birthday suit with no way to defend themselves and you know they’re going to be annihilated … you still don’t get to write my character. You write what your intentions are, what you command them to do, how you are influencing them to do something, how you are manipulating their emotions, etc. but I will handle writing the effects of that in my reply! 

DRAMA.

Flat out simple: keep it in character. I have been roleplaying for 20 odd years now. I promise you I’ve seen it all and I have always had zero interest in being involved in it. You can always come talk to me if you are experiencing a problem, ic or ooc, with me or someone else, in the sense of I will be happy to try and offer you advice, but in general I can promise you I will not be inclined to throw myself into the middle of anything going on on the dash etc. Please do not assume that this means I don’t care about you at all, I will discuss matters privately when possible, but what it all boils down to is that I am here to have fun and I don’t like poking bears with sticks, pointy or otherwise. Confrontation makes me literally ill, and if this blog becomes a not safe place then no one gets to have fun with it … especially me.

SMUT!

As I said a little bit ago, I love writing smut. It is not however the only reason I am here though, at times I’m sure the blog might seem to disagree. I get in moods where it’s all I want to write and then other times I’m just EH SURE. All of that aside, I will not, have not, will never write smut with anyone that is under the age of 18. I understand different states and countries have different age limits where that is concerned but my state / country dictates 18 is the age of consent and there is no smut in the world that is worth the potential and genuine risk of legal actions up to the possibility of incarceration for engaging in sexual content with a minor. Please, please, please do not send me NSFW related asks if you are under 18. Do not like my NSFW starter calls if you are under 18. If we are in a thread that is leading towards potential smut, I will ask you if you are 18. Please do not lie. Legally speaking, it doesn’t matter if you tell me that you are 18 and you aren’t, I am still responsible and they can still prosecute - just like with physical interactions. They really do take this stuff seriously guys and so do I, for a number of reasons, and not just legal concerns!

If you ARE 18+ and would like to do something smut related with me, by all means, let me know. Even if it’s the first interaction, I don’t care. And don’t feel like you can’t make a suggestion regarding kink or interactions out of fear of kinkshaming or anything of the sort. I will write pretty much anything except for pedophilia (again for a number of reasons) and anything involving washroom related functions. Of course, anything NSFW / triggering / explicit etc. WILL be tagged!

GENERAL.

Please do not reblog my rp posts if you are not my rp partner in that thread. If you want to promote me you can reblog my promos etc., but please don’t reblog my in character interactions, headcanons etc.. Please CUT your posts. Two or three replies at most are all that’s needed to keep the feel of a thread / interaction going.  Each person will have their own tag. This will be simply your URL (minus any dashes) so that you can search my page by /tagged/url for our interactions. (If you want to read someone’s interactions in order, just add /chrono to the end of any tag search!)

[killjoy-loveit]

Hack This Part 9

A/N: You may or may not know the drill by now, but here it is anyways: this is in 1st POV (like my other stuff), I hope it will be 10 parts (if it isn’t I will make it very clear), and I would also like to clarify that everything written in this story is complete fiction. When mature content starts it will be denoted with ***

Summary: Reina almost loses hope for receiving the file, and her feelings are laid bare.

Word Count: 2,175

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 10

Bonus Scene

Profanity/MATURE CONTENT Warning!

***Do NOT read if you are uncomfortable with sexual content!

    I didn’t hear from Noah for two weeks. Two weeks. The only option was to assume she got caught and for some reason that left my stomach in knots. My one chance of getting Z’s file was obliterated, just like that, and it was killing me. Now I would have to find some other way to get to it, if there even was a way and this wasn’t just some hopeless fools errand. I think I might have to get Z involved, it might be the only way now, as much as it pains me to admit.

    “Z?” I call out, stepping into the living room.

    “Yeah?” He answers back, sticking his head out from the archway of the kitchen.

    “I need to talk to you.”

    Z moves out of the kitchen hesitantly. “This doesn’t sound like a good thing. Did I do something wrong?”

    “No, no. Nothing like that, Z. It’s- it’s something I did. Something I need your help with.”

    A frown replaces the unease on his face as he makes his way over to me, taking my hands in his. “What is it?”

    “I--.” I get cut off by the abrupt ringing of my phone. Pulling it out of my pocket, completely prepared to silence it, or shut it off entirely, but the name lighting up the screen made me freeze. In that moment I forgot about Z’s presence, hurriedly answering the phone and pressing it to my ear. “Noah?”

    “Thought I was dead didn’t you?” Her snarky tone came across the line.

    “Yes, actually.” I murmur, looking up at Z’s face at the squeeze from his hands.

    “I got the file. It took longer than I thought it would. I slipped into the mailbox of your apartment ten minutes ago. That’s it, the life debt has been repaid.”

    I whisper into the phone. “Thank you.” The line went dead.

    “Why was Noah calling you?” Z questioned, tilting his head.

    “She-she was doing me a favor, I guess.”

    “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “So, um, what were you gonna tell me?”

    “It can wait, there’s something I need to do now.” I say, slipping my hand from his and rushing out of the apartment.

    The file had everything. Everything. Names, numbers, amounts, locations, how much of the debt has been paid off, how much is left, and every job Z has ever worked. It was a crazy amount now, that much was for sure, what with the interest rates being extremely high. The time it would take to gather the amount to cover this debt would be a while, especially if I didn’t want to draw any attention to us. I would need at least three weeks to accomplish this, and that infuriated me because I just wanted this over and done with.

    For the past week and a half I barely left my room, only leaving to get food and energy drinks. And then I was right back at the computer, coding until my vision swam. I couldn’t think, couldn’t focus on anything but finally getting this done. The relief it would be, how amazing to be free once again. For him at least, there was no way I’d be let go without a fight, they’d probably rather kill me first. This was the one thing I could do for him though, give him freedom from this life, the freedom to live how he wanted now.

      I was about halfway through hacking into a very-well off businessman’s bank account- he wouldn’t miss a couple million dollars, not with how much he had stored away. When the door to my room burst open, revealing Z who looked quite frustrated about something. He stood there for a second, his eyes locked onto mine, and appeared quite domineering in the small doorway. Then he moved forward until he was right in front of where I sat, towering over me.

     “I got a call from Noah.” He finally said after what felt like hours.

      Panic rose in my chest, she wouldn’t tell him about what I’d asked her to do would she? As if he could sense my thoughts, Z laughed, nodding his head lightly.

     “She asked me if that file had been able to help with my situation. I didn’t know what she was talking about at first, but then she kindly explained it to me.” Z turned, his feet carrying him across my room. He kept going like that, pacing in order to piece together his thoughts so he could form a coherent sentence. “You had her risk her life to get my damn file. Why? Why was it so important, Reina?”

     I froze in my seat. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Z this upset about something I’ve done before. “I-I needed the file, Z. Your file is practically your life, and she said you saved Jongup’s life and for that she owed you. A life for a life!” I cry out in a weak attempt at an explanation for my actions.

     His head snapped towards me, and he stalked forward, his stare burning holes into my skull. “A life for a life? This isn’t 17th century B.C.E, normal people don’t live by those rules anymore! She could have died, Reina! Do you understand that?” Z shouted, the veins in his throat making an appearance and letting me know just how upset he was.

     By this point I was getting frustrated, tears had welled up in my eyes due to this frustration. “I know what could have happened! I’m not an idiot, Z. But when it comes down to it, the question to me was who is more important? Some girl I don’t know, or the guy who saved my life? It’s a no-brainer! Not when the guy in that question makes me feel safe, and makes me feel happy for the first time I can remember in years! To me, your life was more important, can’t you see that?” Tears streamed down my face as I spoke, the internal dam I built keeping them at bay having broke at his crushing words.

      Z froze, my words sending him into a stupor. “Wait, wait. What? Could you please repeat that?”

     “Which part? The part where I said you make me feel safe and happy? Or the fact that I find your life is more important?”

     The anger faded from his face, a small smile appearing. “That’s it. The part where I make you feel safe and happy. Really?”

     I let out a short laugh, choking softly on my tears. “How many times will I have to repeat myself? Yes, you make me feel safe, and happier than I have been in years. You-it’s so stupid, but you’ve become my sense of security, and you make me feel at ease, comfortable. I trust you. God, I’m such an idiot for admitting this.”

      I spin the chair around, not wanting to face him after baring my feelings like that. Hands on the back of the chair spun it back around to face him. His eyes were intense with some unknown emotion, it was a fire burning deep in them, seeming like it might jump out and swallow me whole. I kind of wanted that, for the fire in him to burn me up. What would it be like to be consumed like that? Would I cease to exist the second the fire’s put out? Or would I emerge a new person, a phoenix from the ashes?

     Z reached down, pulling me to my feet. “I can’t believe you feel that way.” He breathed out. “Because, damn, you make me feel almost the exact same way. You made me realize that I am not who this life made me become, you help me with that every day. Just with a smile or your snippy comments. Fuck, you make me so happy.”

     Without any warning his lips were pressed against mine the second he stopped talking. The kiss started slowly, a gentle pressure against my lips. Then it turned heated, his tongue slipping into my mouth to deepen the kiss, his hands gripped my hips, pulling me closer to him. A soft sigh escaped me when he finally broke from the kiss to take a breath, but he didn’t pause long, his lips went right to my neck not a few seconds later. My hands lifted up to thread through his hair, bringing his face back to mine. Our eyes met and I felt that connection I already had with him get stronger, pulling us closer together.

     “Take your shirt off.” I whispered, a faint blush rising to my cheeks.

***

     There was no hesitation from him as he yanked his shirt over his head, but then he smirked at me, giving me a heated look. I knew what he wanted- my shirt off as well. That was something I could do, the material slipped over my shoulders, leaving me in my bra and jeans. Then just like that we were once more attached at the mouth in a heated kiss. There was no real battle for dominance in this, just a sense of the two of us working in tandem. I was becoming impatient though, the fire boiling in my veins and pooling in my nether regions making me needy.

      My hand slid down his torso, coming to rest on his crotch, giving it a quick rub to which he bucked his hips in response. With that simple action, everything seemed to fast forward. One minute we were standing there making out with our shirts off, and the next we were both stripped naked laying haphazardly on the bed. His hands were exploring my body, squeezing, pinching and caressing, while his mouth made its own exploration with licks and bites. Of course I was going through the exact same exploration process with him, I wanted to know what made him tick. No, I needed to know what made him tick.

     With a particularly harsh pull of his erection, he let out a hiss, hips bucking up into my hand. “I need to know how far you want to take this… I don’t know how much more I can take.” Z grunted, his lips leaving my neck.

     I released his cock, my hands coming up to cup his face, making him look at me. “I want you. All of you. Right now.”

      All trepidation of this situation left him, and warmth filled my chest at his worry for me. Though that warmth soon disappeared as his fingers circled my clit, and one pumped inside me. A moan slipped from my throat at his ministrations. After the addition of a few more fingers, he determined I was ready. As he hovered over me, lining himself up with my wet heat, a look passed over his face. One that showed concern, happiness, and, I think, serenity. It was brief and quickly replaced once again by lust, but I knew what I’d seen.

     I cried out at his first thrust, hands clutching his shoulders desperately, willing myself to adjust quickly. “Move.” I panted out after a minute passed of him keeping still as a statue. Just like that the spell was broken, and Z began fucking me in earnest. His hips snapping into mine, driving me deeper into the mattress. Breathless moans were all I could manage at this point, with my head tossed back on the pillows, eyes half-lidded as I kept my gaze locked on his face. An assortment of grunts, groans and curses left him as he sped up, pounding harder and deeper into me.

     “F-Fuck! Right there!” I cry out as he hits my g-spot.

     He continues to fuck into me, hitting that one spot just as I asked, causing my orgasm to come crashing down on me without warning. My body quivers and shakes, muscles clenching around him as he continued to buck into me, trying to find his release. It didn’t take long either, not with the added constriction of my orgasm urging him on. Z shifted over so he was lying next to me, the sounds of our heavy breathing being the only things to fill the silence.

      My eyes shut instinctively as exhaustion washed over me. I hadn’t been taking proper care of myself recently, too focused on fixing Z’s situation. Sleep would be really good right now, and I had almost completely drifted off when I felt a cool, wet cloth on my body. I opened my eyes in irritation, upset that such beautiful sleep had been taken from me. But I couldn’t really be mad at him, he was just helping, trying to make me feel more comfortable.

     “Come on, let’s go to sleep.” He murmured after he put the cloth back into my bathroom, crawling into bed beside me. His arm wrapped around me, pulling me to his chest, and I knew then, I would have no trouble staying asleep. I nuzzled my head into his chest, letting his warmth envelope me, and promptly fell asleep. 

[arcticdementor]

People capable of feeling shame would not have immediately followed up the Russiagate hoax fiasco with another transparently phony—and in “substance” nearly identical—attempt to remove President Trump from office, overturn the 2016 election, and shower deplorable-Americans with contempt and hatred. But our ruling elites have no shame.

That is not to say, however, that they are entirely cynical. The means by which they’ve so far tried to crush the Trump presidency may be nasty and illegitimate, but our overlords are 100% convinced of the righteousness of their cause, and of themselves. Hence they do not even need recourse to the cliché that the ends justify the means. The means are good because the end is sacred; they cannot countenance even the thought that the means might be suspect or (ahem) trumped up.

Near the beginning of his epic history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides distinguishes the “publicly voiced” causes of that conflict from the war’s “truest cause, though least in speech.” We may—indeed, must—subject the “impeachment” coup to the same bifurcated analysis.

…

But let’s drill down a bit. If we are to take the current “publicly voiced” cause at face value, then we may say that the entire Washington establishment, plus most of the country’s elites, are trying to remove the president from office on the basis of an anonymous individual’s private opinion of the content of one phone call he heard about second or possibly even thirdhand. A phone call, let’s remember, of which we have extensive notes that almost, but not quite, constitute a transcript—in other words, whose content everyone in the country can examine for himself.

…

Back to the Ukraine call. The second question President Trump asked the Ukrainian president is another “publicly voiced” cause to seek his removal. That question regarded a specific instance of a well-known Washington-insider phenomenon. It is a measure of how insouciantly our elites accept and even welcome the immense corruption of our government that they raise not a single eyebrow at the phenomenon that underlay the president’s question: exactly how is it that well-connected Americans with no particular or relevant skill sets can “earn” enormous sums of money for doing, essentially, nothing?

We all know how, of course. They’re not, exactly, doing “nothing.” They’re providing access—in some instances directly, in others prospectively. When a company or bank or hedge fund or real estate developer or foreign government slides big payments over to someone close to someone who might soon be president, they know what they’re doing, and they know—from experience—that the investment is sound. Tom Wolfe coined the term “favor bank” to explain how “the law” really works in the Bronx County criminal justice system. You do favors expecting to have favors done in return. There are no written contracts or enforcement mechanisms, but the system “works” because people know it’s in their interest to honor it. In modern international politics, to pay someone a few million to do “nothing” is to expect to be paid back somehow. The payees know this, and endeavor to make good, lest they risk future payments.

Understand this plainly: Trump may well be impeached, ostensibly, for asking about this corrupt arrangement. But no one is ever impeached for engaging in it. Nor can our elites, who almost all benefit from this system one way or another, muster the integrity to do, or even say, anything against it.

…

Another, deeper cause for the current show trial is less “publicly voiced” than beclouded with pretentious misdirection, because the president’s enemies know that, were they to state it clearly, the American people would scoff in their faces. Our foreign policy priesthood is 100% certain that the United States must take the side of Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. President Trump has expressed skepticism about the wisdom of such a commitment. He wonders why the conflict is our problem, when a not-inconsiderable number of European countries closer to the issue demand action from us but do very little themselves. He worries about the possibility of the United States getting drawn into war with Russia. And he’s concerned that, given historic corruption in Ukraine, American aid there may not be well spent.

…

This may be true, though—nothing against Ukraine—I don’t think so. The country just isn’t that important to us for the same reason that Canada and Mexico are not that important to Russia. But even if I’m wrong about that, the above statement is still fundamentally an opinion—the opinion of someone not entitled to make policy. He is surely welcome to state his opinion, when appropriate to do so as part of his official duties and within the chain of command, but that’s it as far as his opinion goes. Actual policy—the question of whether “a strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security interests”—is well above his paygrade, properly decided by the president, his cabinet and senior advisors, and members of the Senate who advise and consent on cabinet secretaries and treaties. At least, that’s how the parchment on which the charter of our liberties is written says it’s supposed to work.

…

What on earth is “[t]he U.S. government policy community”? This is not made clear in the statement, but from the context it would appear to be something like the “deep state” we are elsewhere told does not exist except in the minds of fevered “conspiracy theorists.” Elite conventional wisdom appears to have evolved into: “The deep state is not a thing—and thank God it’s there to save our democracy!”

…

But whether epistemologically unassailable or complete madness (in the real world, it’s more likely than not to be incoherent mush), “interagency consensus” is not policy—or at least it’s not supposed to be. It may help inform policy, but elected and appointed officials—and in a unitary executive, that ultimately means the president—alone get to make policy. The presupposition of our country director—and his like-minded peers in the deep state—is the opposite: policy is made in and by the “interagency,” whose decrees are holy writ that it is illegitimate for the president to challenge.

…

If this isn’t proof positive that the “deep state” is real, then what would be? Here we have an unelected cabal trying to take down the elected president, ostensibly over an issue that the American people have never voted on and don’t care about but which the “the U.S. government policy community” insists is so important that a democratic election must be overturned for its sake. Actually, to the extent that the American people have voted on this issue, in electing a man who very clearly promised to reduce American commitments abroad, they voted against the  “U.S. government policy community consensus.”

Yet the “interagency” somehow believes that its decrees are democracy and that it’s somehow “undemocratic” to question them. This is how it’s possible for so many of Trump’s enemies to impugn him as an enemy of “democracy,” sanctify their patently undemocratic attempts to unseat him, and portray themselves as democracy’s saviors. As Christopher Caldwell put it recently in these pages, according to this understanding

democracy [is] a set of progressive outcomes that democracies tend to choose, and may even have chosen at some time in the past. If a progressive law or judicial ruling or executive order coincides with the “values” of experts, a kind of mystical ratification results, and the outcome is what the builders of the European Union call an acquis—something permanent, unassailable, and constitutional-seeming. [“What Is Populism?” Fall 2018]

Aid to Ukraine has been decided! Debate over! No more votes and no changes! That would be “undemocratic”!

…

It is no accident or coincidence that the only three presidents who have fundamentally challenged the administrative state—and questioned its song sheet, the “U.S. government policy community consensus”—have been dogged by “scandal” and threatened with impeachment: Richard Nixon by Watergate, Ronald Reagan by Iran Contra, and now Trump. (Whatever you think of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, it was emphatically not driven or supported by the administrative state, which protected him at every turn.) Trump would likely take this as small consolation, but it’s a measure of how much he’s feared that his enemies are running this play against him now, rather than simply trying to defeat him next year. Which more than suggests they doubt they can.

Simply based on what we know so far, the whole thing looks engineered, like those “lawfare” cases in which clever lawyers and activists find sympathetic plaintiffs, carefully choose friendly venues, and file lawsuits not to redress specific, genuine injustices but to force changes in policy—anti-democratically, it goes without saying. That’s the real reason nobody with firsthand knowledge came forward but left it to a distant “whistleblower” to get this train started: because those driving it understand that, by pitching the matter out to an agency covered by a whistleblower statute, with a formal whistleblower process, they could begin the transformation of this inherently political process into a technical, legal matter. This supposition only gains support from reports of “collusion” (what else can one call it?) between the “whistleblower” and Democratic congressional staff. The parade of witnesses in secret testimony also looks carefully orchestrated.

The secrecy has partly ended—but only after the Democrats gathered its fruits and shaped them into a “narrative” to spoon-feed to the public. The playbook is the same one that failed with the Russia hoax: selectively leak to create a fog, a miasma of vaguely negative-sounding “facts” or allegations that seem ominous but also too complex and in-the-weeds for ordinary folk to follow. Then publicly “confirm” those leaks as the authoritative account of the “scandal.” None of the actual facts adds up to any actual wrongdoing, but the hope is that regular people won’t notice and won’t listen to those who do. Leave it to us experts: we know wrongdoing when we see it! If the actual specifics of what we’re alleging don’t actually appear to you to amount to “treason, bribery, [or] other high crimes and misdemeanors,” as the Constitution’s Article II, section 4 requires, that’s only because you’re not an expert.

…

It worked against Nixon. It almost worked against Reagan. But let’s be clear: if it works this time, there are only three possible outcomes:

First, deplorable-Americans will meekly accept President Trump’s removal, in which case the country as a self-governing republic will be finished; the elite coup will have succeeded, their grip on power cemented. With all due respect to the vice president, this is not the way—these are not the people on the backs of whom—he should wish to enter the Oval Office. And I am confident he will not.

Second, deplorable-Americans will revolt at the ballot box and punish the elites in a series of elections that put in power serious statesmen intent on rooting out corruption and reestablishing democratic accountability.

Or, third, deplorable-Americans’ attempt to set their government aright via ballots will not avail, as it has not so often in the past; they will realize that it has not, conclude that it never will, and resolve by any means necessary to get out from under the thumbs of people who so obviously hate them and wish to rule them without their consent.

Only one of these possibilities is healthy for the continued survival of republican government as currently constituted.

Oh, and let’s also be clear about something else: if the Republicans “collude” with this sham and force the removal of a president whose approval rating within his party hovers north of 90%, and whose voters scarcely understand—much less agree with—the “case” against him, they will destroy the party forever. I don’t often make predictions, because I’m not good at it, but this one is easy. They will have removed all doubt that they are anything but ruling class apparatchiks, adjuncts, and flunkies of the administrative state from which they take orders.

[pomegranate-salad]

Seeds of thoughts : Wicdiv #36

Hello everyone ! Sorry for the lack of SOT last month. What happened was… I didn’t know what to say about the issue that hadn’t already been said. Sorry. Happens to the best of us. Anyway, we’re back with an issue that’s practically begging to be analysed, so that’s good. And just a reminder, if you’d like to help me not be broke, you can make a small donation here.

Thoughts and spoilers under the cut, you know the drill.

THROUGH METICULOUS ANALYSIS OF HISTORY

 As expected of our wonderful fandom, some of my fellow bloggers (hi, @twatd and @myfirstsearchengine) have already started doing god’s work and untangle the absolute deluge of information we get in this issue. Bless their souls. But for me as always, especially when it comes to formalist devices, I find myself more interested in how things feel than what they say. That doesn’t mean we should bypass the analysis of the construction to get directly to a resulting, all-encompassing feel of the issue (otherwise, what would be the point of these posts ?) but I think it’s always a good start, especially with information-rich issues like this, to wonder what may be the big picture that’s so painstakingly painted through this abundance of individual elements.

So, how do we emerge from this issue ? Of course, everyone’s feel will be different here, but I think one popular realization will be just how fucking long six millennia actually is. On first read, as I flipped through the first half of the issue with increasing speed, I kept reading dates so far away from anything I could conceptualize they meant nothing to me until we thankfully reached the Anno Domini part of the program and I regained footing in time. Add to that the fact that I would be unable to point on a map to a good dozen of the places mentioned and you get… a recipe for emotional detachment. Of course, one of the joys of this issue is to go back and pick out the multiple details hidden in each panel, to cheer every time Persephone retaliates, to unravel patterns, to marvel at the outfit design and background changes, all these elements that actually allow us to connect with what’s going on. But as always, the interface between a reader and an issue is its whole and not a sum of its parts. Our emotions express themselves faster than our thoughts, meaning when we go back to identifying those parts, our connexion to the issue is already formed. As it happens, this connexion is to a gallery of nameless, often headless figures that have nothing in common if not for the pattern they’re repeating, and not to the individuals that form this pattern. A state of mind that’s probably very similar to the one Ananke entertains during all those recurrences.  A state of mind she HAS to keep in order to maintain her own pattern.

 Is the message this repetition has to impart us just that, a form of numbness to these killings, the taste of an endless battle and the suspected pointlessness of it all ? I think there’s a bit more going on here. Let’s try to connect the first half of the book with the second one. A priori, they seem disconnected. But the fact that Mothering Invention’s device seems to be the juxtaposition of past and present storylines means the creators are trying to establish some sort of echo between the two. In issue #34, the creation of the head sacrifice is paired with its discovery by the main characters in present time. Issue #35 is a study of two Minervas, and the circle of plotting and murder they’re trapped in. Issue #36 is the study of two monsters.

Is the wheel page in the middle of the issue describing Ananke or Baal ? The ambiguity is definitely not accidental. And if the construction of the two halves seem to be complete opposite, that probably not a coincidence either. The most obvious mirroring are the red pages, an entire page for a death, compared to the first half which crams six or more deaths per page. But really, that’s just the beginning of the parallels. The first half is made of a regular grids of small panels in which you can barely distinguish faces, while panel disposition in the second half is as irregular as they come, but focus on large, detailed panels, with Baal’s figure in particular blown out and dominating each page. The first half is all variety of colours and tones, while the second one is painted in an overpowering red. In the vast majority of panels, Ananke is depicted from the side, entirely focused on her task, while Baal is always facing the reader, sometimes almost as if he was addressing us directly instead of Persephone. But the most textual opposition is of course how much justification and explanation there is on Baal’s part, while Ananke, past the first page, doesn’t say a word. In his first apparition, Baal is even doing the Hamlet routine of holding a skull before starting his monologue. These two characters seem like they couldn’t be more different, yet the comic links them through this middle wheel page. Baal is all justification and self-aggrandizing, Ananke seems content with her selfish motivation. Baal gives an entire page to the weight of taking each life, while Ananke rarely expresses anything. Which is better ? It doesn’t matter, I think is the takeaway here : they’re both killers. And if you peel off the surface, they’re both exactly as selfish, cruel and inexcusable.

 This doesn’t say great things about Baal. But I don’t think it says great things about Ananke either. Baal is arguably being manipulated into killing – does anyone buy the reality of the Great Darkness at this point ? – and is not nearly as jaded as Ananke is after six millennia. Is the only thing separating them time and experience ? If we come back to this first half, many people have noticed that Ananke seems to be consolidating some techniques and get more efficient overtime. But is that really true ? I’ve pulled the numbers : in the first third of her career, Ananke screws up about 13% of the time ; in the second third, 18% ; and in the last third, 9%. Those are remarkably similar odds. Can we even say she’s getting better at this ? Even if that’s true, the present recurrence seems to demonstrate that she’s never safe from a major setback. Nothing separates her from junior murderer Baal. She would have Minerva – and so, herself – believe that it will always be okay. That she’ll always win, in the end, even when she fails. But that’s simply not true. When she’ll fail for good, she’ll be done, just like Baal. And then these millennia of deaths, hers and Persephone’s, will mean nothing.

 It’s remarkable that both Ananke and the comic would have us looking for more than there is in this litany of murders ; dumping truckloads of apparent information on us and inviting us to raid them for parts. And there is a part of me that definitely wants to do that. Because information and particularity gives meaning, it hints at more explanations, as a way to make sense of it all. But deep down I know that there will never be enough meaning in those panels for me to be satisfied.

Through this issue, it’s as if the comic is pulling all the stops on itself : it doesn’t matter how much it goes back in time and gives us fragments of this “big mystery” it’s set over the course of the previous arcs. Because it can give us everything, every recurrence there ever was, and all those murders will never mean more than what they are : murders. It doesn’t matter if it’s your first, your tenth or your sixty-fifth. It doesn’t matter if it takes you a whole empty page or get crammed into one-sixth of one. It’s still murder and you are still a murderer. And when you fuck up, everyone will cheer. And if you know it, that doesn’t make you nobler or more experienced, it just makes you an even bigger asshole.

I said one thing about this issue was how much it gives us ; yet, at the same time, it’s the comic’s admission that it gives us nothing, or at the very least not what we’d really want, because it doesn’t exist. What we see is all there is. The only thing separating Baal from Ananke is that they are fooling themselves in a different way. And again, there’s a part of me that’d really want to fool myself with them. With almost ten issues of Wicdiv remaining, I feel bad for giving it an early conclusion, but here it is : whatever is “really” going on, whatever the bottom line is, it doesn’t matter and never has. All there ever was is a desperately, cruelly simple tale of scared people. It doesn’t make them excusable. But it certainly makes them human.

  WHAT I THOUGHT OF THE ISSUE

 As I said, this issue stands out by how rich and poor in content it simultaneously is. As is often true of high concept issues, in terms of analysis, it immediately gives you something to discuss, but it doesn’t necessarily give you much more than what you first saw. What’s good about this issue is also what limits it, and makes it a nice, but also kind of one-note experience. As such, it compares unfavourably to other highly formalist issues like issues #14, #23 and especially #27, all of which were more evenly structured and solid in concept. I almost wish this issue had taken its premise further, and given us a cover-to-cover wall of Persephones. The parallel with the Baal scene is thematically rich, but it does give the feeling that the main storyline is stumping a little bit, and that the main reason we’re getting all those flashbacks is to artificially lengthen the comic.

That said, I’m not particularly disappointed by this issue either. It always takes a Wicdiv arc a bit of time to find its footing, and with the high concept flashback out of the way, the rest of the arc should set about its cruising speed. Plus, you can absolutely feel the amount of work that went into those pages, and while the result should be able to stand on its own, I really don’t feel like badgering on what was clearly hell on earth to build. Yes, it’s a borderline masturbatory nerdfest that saw the point of diminishing returns and blew it at full speed while laughing maniacally, but I think we can allow at least one of those in the Wicdiv run. It’s the kind of issue that I don’t see myself forming a strong attachment to, but I’m still glad it exists. And for what I’ve seen, aside from isolated opinions, that seems to be the general wisdom.

 So let’s turn to the one part of the issue that DID attract the wrath of the Tumblrdom : Laura’s pregnancy. Boy, did you kick the hornet’s nest with this one, guys. I find it funny that as the fandom’s resident grump, the first big outcry we get about the Wicdiv run is one in which I find myself standing firmly with the creators. And since it seems I’m kind of alone on this one, allow me to make the case that as a story development, Laura’s pregnancy is… OKAY.

 Let me first be clear : I’m not saying I’m happy with this development. Until we get the full picture of how it’s been handled, I’ll really have no opinion on the matter. What I do believe is that at this point, there is no reason to condemn Laura’s pregnancy as an inherently wrong move for the comic. I absolutely get why there was such a knee-jerk reaction from the fandom : it’s so, so very rare for a pregnancy storyline to be well done, to say nothing of a teen pregnancy storyline. For every one of us, the very mention of peeing on a stick is enough to bring back to mind dozens of female characters ruined by such a creative decision. So I get why people are being cautious ; I am too. But on the other hand, I find it really premature to set ourselves for outrage and disappointment.

From what I can tell, a lot of “oh HELL NO” reactions are rooted in the belief that this twist diminishes Laura’s characterization and strips her of agency. But personally, I see this development as completely in line with her character as previously established, and I don’t think she’s less of a subject for it.

For a start, we have to consider how much has been going in Laura’s life aside from her pregnancy. We don’t know how long she’s known about it, but reasonably it should have been around the end of January. She did a LOT of shit in-between, and none of it played as a direct consequence of her being pregnant. The way she describes her state is almost tangential, a Colombo-esque “oh, and one more thing”. Rereading her actions in light of her pregnancy doesn’t mean we should interpret it all as revolving around it ; if we do that, we are the ones stripping her of agency.

@immoralitea made another interesting argument : that the pregnancy was cheap cope-out to Laura’s suicidal behaviour by giving her a reason to live, thus derailing her entire battle with depression that’s been established as key to her character ever since the first act. That’s a compelling point, but I read Laura’s pregnancy completely differently : as another profoundly self-destructive behaviour. And I don’t know if that’s controversial to say, but in my opinion many storylines would benefit from addressing head-on how much self-destructive tendencies are a component of teen pregnancy. Pregnancy will put your body through the grinder, alter the course of your life, and alienate you from many people. And that’s if you’re lucky. If you aren’t, it’s also going to saddle you with an abusive partner or make you dependent on exterior resources for many more years. The last thing to get you through a depression is pregnancy. Of course all of this would be moot if the author didn’t realize it, but I think he does : nothing in Laura’s behaviour indicates she’s willing to change it for the sake of her potential child. On the contrary, she’s endangering it and herself by engaging in more self-destructive behaviour. That’s also why I think the “some of you will hate me for it too” line that also got some readers upset shouldn’t be read as the author’s opinion that Laura is to be shamed for her pregnancy ; for me, it reads as Laura’s opinion about a behaviour she sees for what it is : another way to destroy and hate herself. And just like she said before, she wants people to hate her ; it validates her suicidal behaviour. She’s doing everything she can so we will hate her, including getting pregnant.

Another clue in that direction is the way she discloses her state to Baal : when she says she “wants to live” it isn’t because she’s pregnant, but because every person battling with depression is torn between compulsions of life and death. And I may be mistaken, but I don’t think she wished to reveal her pregnancy to Baal at all ; I think she’s simply appealing to his “man of the house” self-image in order to be spared. From beginning to end, this is about her. Hell, she still has over two months to decide if she wants the baby at all.

Now I’m not going to lie, I’m not a fan of the over-symbolism of the goddess of death and rebirth being both suicidal and pregnant. And yes, if you ask me, I’d much rather have Laura get an abortion, because I don’t see how carrying her pregnancy to terms would benefit her in any way. But if Laura’s previous characterization taught us something, it’s that characters in Wicdiv rarely do what we want them to do and what’s objectively better for them. The gods have made the wrong decisions on drugs, cheating, dating, killing, trusting, overworking, and everything else under the sun, and we went with it, even if we weren’t happy about it. As I see it, pregnancy shouldn’t be over the line just because so many hacks have poisoned the well.

Again, maybe this storyline will develop for the worst and all I’ve said here will read as ridiculous wishful thinking in hindsight. But as of now, this plot development is simply this : a plot development, one that’s believable, in character, potentially interesting, and I think we should give it a chance. And if I end up being wrong… I promise I’ll write the mother of all takedowns.