#the whole point is that not being like all other women was horribly socially punished

[aroaceleovaldez]

hey! hope this isn't weird but i wanted to know why you think artemis wasn't up to standards even in the original pjo series. you reblogged from me and so i had front row to your tags on the post about zeus jaja i've not seen people talk a lot about her and it got me interested as i'm a classics student!

- @zoebelladona 🌙

HELLO OH BOY okay so I have half a rant already about Artemis in terms of Rick and general aphobic tropes in the series. see: that open letter on twitter. i still need to transfer that to tumblr. fun fact: Rick replied to that post but deleted his reply at some point. probably because two replies after he replied to my post and word-of-god confirmed Reyna to be ace-coded he left social media for a bit.

Fun times! Anyways.

The thing I dislike about Artemis as she's depicted in the series, besides her constantly appearing as a teenager and the aphobic tropes with that [see: open letter linked above] - which on some level is slightly more excusable than other examples given she's a goddess of young women, but given how he writes Athena, Hestia, and the Hunt instead leaves a bad taste in my mouth - and other similar aphobic tropes with her, is her whole weird anti-men thing (which is also, in itself, also an aphobic trope in this particular circumstance). I understand TTC was written in 2007 so that flavor of radical feminism that Artemis and the Hunt is clearly supposed to be was only just coming into major public awareness and the flaws in the ideology (and the inherent bigotry, particularly transphobia and racism that often comes with it) weren't as well recognized at the time. But in hindsight it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth for obvious reasons and is one of the things from the first series that severely aged poorly in my opinion, and I greatly dislike that in every subsequent retcon of the Hunt for other reasons Rick more or less retains that aspect.

Secondly... it doesn't make sense from a mythological standpoint? Because there are multiple examples of men being Hunters in Artemis' retinue. Even ignoring Orion, no matter how you go about shaking that stick (which for the record I really dislike how Rick retconned him in the series/wrote him in HoO), Hippolytus is a very notable example. Literally his big whole original shtick was he joined the Hunt because he didn't like romance and Aphrodite got so pissed about him not needing her (romance) that she killed him. And even when Aphrodite was trying to ruin his life he held on to his virtues and vow to Artemis (refusing advances even when his life was on the line). He is otherwise totally chill and devoted to Artemis. Some versions of his myth has Artemis have him resurrected after he dies (by Asclepius, which is why Asclepius is punished for reviving the dead). This also obviously doesn't address the major glaring logical flaw in Artemis hating all men which is... Apollo. Especially within the series he seems to be an exception for no reason, despite Artemis also very overtly having a "brothers are not an exception to the no-men rule." And from a modern queer standpoint, it obviously begs the question of stuff like gender identity within the Hunt and if you bring back the radfem stuff it gets real bad vibes real fast. Which also sucks when you particularly look at historical/mythological descriptions of Apollo and Artemis and how they very poignantly encompass defying gender roles and expectations particularly within their cultural contexts.

And every time Rick tries to retcon the Hunt, he somehow manages to make it kind of worse, particularly with the oath. I have a whole personal thing for how I think to best rectify all that nonsense in a way that isn't horrible and is related to some of Artemis' aspects in a more sensible way (buried somewhere in this monster of a post. Honestly i'd just recommend ctrl + f search "Hunters" on that post and it should be somewhere near the first ping there). In there I also go into some of my other thoughts for the general meh way the Hunt is written in the series, mostly being aphobic tropes and random death fodder.

So yeah. Basically, tl;dr: I am personally not a huge fan of how Artemis in the series is halfway to being a terf and chock-full of aphobic tropes. And I need Rick to stop retconning things into the ground.

[persepholline]

I've read that article about the romanticization of the Darkling and while I absolutely understand people who are pissed off/sad and I agree that it's shitty, I find LB's attitude towards Darkles stans very funny in a "girl what are you doing" sort of way because it's so petty like I've never heard of a bestselling author writing a portion of their fans into their books as a crazy cult before, it clearly hit a nerve

I'm new to the fandom but the feeling I get is she wrote something problematic ten years ago and became very embarrassed about it afterwards so she turned on the fans that liked it as a way to absolve herself. Especially since fandoms in general have become a lot more focused on discussion of what constitutes healthy/acceptable relationships to write about. And in a way I get it I had a huge Twilight phase in high school and afterwards I was super embarassed about it because of how problematic and cringe it was. But now with distance and more maturity I'm able to both still see why it was problematic and also why I was drawn to it (mostly the very unhinged representation of female desire) and like...it's really not the end of the world and no it never made me believe that breaking into somebody's room at night to watch them sleep was actually ok in real life lmao. This feels so obvious to me but apparently it needs to be said.

(More under the break this is turning into an essay, I've been thinking of this a lot recently)

And of course it's good to have these discussions about how historically romance tropes have echoed social dynamics of men's shitty behavior being romanticized and excused. But these days they often are so simplistic and focused on chasing clout that they become this weird new puritanism and moral panic about oh now women are reading novels it's going to make them hysterical or something

So you have these weird assumptions that you can't like a character and also be critical of their actions, or enjoy certain parts of a character and not others, or wish they were written differently and like them more for their potential (which I'm sure stings a bit for an author lol) - it assumes that if you like a character it means you would approve of their actions in real life, or that people just stupidly reproduce whatever they see on TV. That tendency to treat fictional characters like real people is the thing that actually worries me, to be honest, because it indicates a lack of distance and critical capacities regarding how stories are used and received. But people - fans and authors - are so scared of being called out as problematic and harassed for it that they're going to shy away from any nuance.

And yeah I think that it's good that standards of what constitutes an ideal relationship are evolving and becoming more feminist and communicative and all that and we definitely need more of that. But not all fiction has to be aspirational! Sometimes you just want to read about fucked up shit, because it's cathartic or fascinating, even healing at times because with fiction you are absolutely in control and can choose when to close the book. Toxic relationships in fiction can have an appeal specifically because they go to extremes of feeling that we don't want to go to in reality, in exactly the same way as horror movies or very violent action movies - which I don't see a lot of people besides fundamentalist Christians argue that they turn you into violent psychopaths (and that feels very obviously sexist). And for women, who are often taught growing up that love is the purpose of life, the "saving someone with your ability to love" can be a power fantasy in the same way that being a buff superhero who saves the day with their capacity for incredible violence can be a power fantasy for men. Still doesn't mean those women are going to fall in love with actual murderers or that those men are going to start beating up people at night. And love is scary, and weird, and weirdly close to horror at times, with all the potential for loss of self and being vulnerable and overwhelming feelings and potential for being horribly hurt and it should be possible for stories to explore that without anybody screaming about how this is going to Corrupt the Youth or something

And I mean I get it LB wanted to write a cautionary tale for teenagers, but it just did not work for reasons a lot of people have already written about - the fact that the Darkling is the leader of an oppressed minority and is the only one with a real political agenda to end that oppression in the first trilogy, the fact that he helps Alina come into her own power while her endgame LI is someone she keeps herself small for, that she's shamed for wanting power after growing up without any, a generally very wonky conception of privilege, and a lot of other stuff with yucky regressive implications to the point where stanning the villain actually feels liberating and empowering which is a surefire sign that the narrative is broken (unless it's a villain focused story lmao). But of course that Fanside article makes almost no mention of the political dynamics, it's all about interpersonal stuff which is an annoying trend in YA, there are those massive events happening in the background but it's made all about the feelings of the hero(ine) ; war as a self-development quest (which is kind of gross). Helnik is kind of an example of this too - I like them, I think they're fun ! But Matthias spends a big part of the story wanting to brutally murder Nina and her kind, and he mostly changes his mind because he finds her hot. Like you don't feel there is some sort of big revelation that his entire moral system and political framework is completely rotten ; it's all better because of feelings now.

As a teenager that kind of sanctimonious bullshit would have annoyed the hell out of me ; I read those books in my early twenties and I found the ending so stupid I wouldn't have trusted any message or life lessons coming from them. And I liked reading/watching dark stuff as a teenager, as a way to deal with the very intense inner turmoil I was dealing with - and I turned out fine ! Meanwhile I've seen several times women in very shitty relationships being obsessed with positive energies and stories ; they were so terrified of their life not being perfectly wholesome they ended up being delusional about their own situations.

Like personally I think the Darkling is a compelling, interesting, alluring character and also a manipulative, murderous piece of shit and that Alina should get to punish him (like in a sexy way) - but he's also the end result of centuries of war, oppression and trauma and reducing that to "toxic wounded boy" feels kind of offensive ngl ESPECIALLY since the books don't offer any kind of systemic analysis or response to oppression beyond "the bad guy should die" and "now the king/queen is a good guy our problems are solved!!!!"

In Lives of the Saints, we see how Yuri is abused extremely badly and almost killed by his father, and so when his father dies when the Fold swallows Novokribirsk, he thinks the Starless Saint has saved him. Later in KoS/RoW he's turned into this fanatic who explains away all the Darkling's crimes. The other followers talk about how the Starless Saint will bring equality for all men. Then the Darkling comes back and actually thinks his followers are pathetic, which feels again like a very pointed message to his IRL stans. Which is absolutely hilarious to me. Like oh no, if he was real he would not like you and think you're pathetic ! Yeah ...but he's not. Real. Damn right he would not like the fics where Alina puts him on a leash. I'm still going to read them. What is he going to do about it, jump out of the page ? Jfjfjjdhfgfjfj

Anyway I think the intended message is "assholes will use noble political causes for their own gain and to manipulate people" and "being abused/oppressed is not an excuse to behave badly." Which. Sure. But that's kind of like...a tired take, honestly ? A big number of villains nowadays are like this ; either they've been bullied as kids, or they're part of an oppressed group, or they have "good ideals but too extreme". This is not surprising because a lot of mainstream heroic narratives present clinging to the status quo as Good and change as chaotic and dangerous. And like sure in real life people often do bad shit because they're wounded and in danger. But if you want to do a story like that, you have to do it with nuance, talk about cycles of violence, about how society creates vulnerable people to be exploited, about how privilege gives you more choices and the luxury of morals, etc. The Grishaverse does not have this level of nuance (maybe in SoC a little bit but definitely not in TGT). So it kind of comes off as "trauma makes you evil" and "egalitarianism is dangerous" and "if you're abused/oppressed you're not allowed to fight back". And ignores the fact that historically, evil generally comes from unchecked privilege.

I guess my point is that there are many things I like about LB's writing, she knows how to create these really exciting character dynamics, and the world she has created is fascinating. But these stories are not a great starting point for imparting moral lessons. And her best characters tend to be, at least in canon, the morally grey ones. I hope one day she'll be at peace with the fact that she wrote the Darkling the way she did and leave his fans alone but in the meantime I'm just not going to take this whole thing seriously I'm sorry

[twinkuraba]

I never even heard the word ‘transgender’ until I was about 16. Didn’t stop me from having the Trans Child experience. I just didn’t know that’s what it was at the time.

It’s a horrible feeling; not having the words to define why your body feels wrong. To not know how to express the mental flinch whenever you’d be socially punished for not performing your AGAB adequately. Being uncomfortable being grouped in with the girls but not being able to point to a reason why.

For thinking that you were the one doing something wrong, clearly. Adults knew everything and none of them were talking about anyone else who felt this way, your peers never talked about feeling this way, so clearly the issue was with you.

I was never a girly child, or even a tomboyish one. I was the ‘weirdo’ everyone avoided because I didn’t act like a ‘girl’ was supposed to but I wasn’t a tomboy. My peers were confused when instead of being excited about having ‘early beauty’ when I started puberty at 10, I felt disgusted and betrayed by my body, I felt like it wasn’t mine, like I was being controlled by it instead of the other way around.

I need to repeat; I had never heard about the concept of being trans at this point. I only vaguely even knew that being gay was a thing people could be. I went to a religious school so that’s likely part of it but no amount of ‘you are perfect just how you are’ could counter my revulsion of an afab body.

Cue high school where I met my first trans person; a friend of a friend. And it still didn’t click for me then because I was heavy in the ‘repress all the bad and everything will be fine’ method of coping with stress, self hatred, undiagnosed ADHD/Autism and depression/anxiety.

Unsurprisingly. I went to a very dark place where I couldn’t imagine myself having a future like this. I hated my body and what it stood for. What everyone else assumed of me when they saw a teen girl’s body, how I hated having to perform feminine and why did I want to be a boy so badly when I was supposed to be perfect how I was?

I got very close to attempting suicide twice in my life. Both times I was talked down by a queer friend because I was hiding my pain from my family, but after the second one I decided this couldn’t continue so I made the tough (at the time) decision to tell them what I’d been planning.

The rest of my life until I was well into my 20s was basically me moving through my life shrouded in fog. I wasn’t happy with who I was, but I knew suicide wasn’t the answer to how I was feeling. I tried to learn how to love myself again, and in little ways I did. I rediscovered my love for my artistic ability. My eye colour. My taste in music.

But I could never even begin to figure out how to feel about being a woman. Other women were amazing, I admired them for being so sure, so confident in themselves, so brave for living with what I was feeling was a personal hell.

Then I found out that actual women... like being women. They have their feelings about gender inequality or the societal expectations on AFAB people but on the whole they’d never ever been confused about who they were.

Then one day, talking to a friend. It clicked. All my feelings, my past experiences. I hadn’t had the words for it then, but I had been a trans boy trying to navigate a cis girl’s world blindfolded without even a map to help me find my way.

And according to everyone who knows me from then to now the change has been enormous lmao. I talk more with people, I have more pride in my appearance, more smiles and laughs, less self-hate.

I’m not 100% where I want to be yet, and I’m still bad at envisioning the future. But at least I know with certainty that I have one now.

[sleepless-in-starbucks]

Hi could you talk more about why youd recommend not watching ww84?

Sure!

warnings for under the cut: spoilers for WW84 and a bit of the first wonder woman; i only saw WW84 once a few days ago + it’s been a hot sec since i saw the original so if i get a few details wrong i apologize

tl;dr with no spoilers: WW84 is a poorly executed movie that insults its viewer with its messy and self-proud plot, bad character/relationship portrayals, and offers a personal slap in the face to a majority of its audience in their various discriminations, generalizations, and plot points.

the first point is the racism, made well by the post i reblogged here, (edit: found a second post that goes more in depth here) so i’d just suggest looking at that for that matter

next is just How they portray wonder woman in this one

i really appreciated the way the first movie portrayed diana because they did very well in keeping true to her Amazonian raising and life while still clearly showing she was a woman

when i say this i mean that a lot of media has a tendency to either make women who are very fem and keep to traditional gender roles or women who more or less shun femininity and attempt to largely fulfill only male gender roles

diana in the original is a warrior, strong and fierce, but still a woman, not trying to shun that or anything. she wears styles that suit her while still being woman’s styles (she doesn’t force her way into a suit), she talks of and addresses her womanhood proudly and without issue, etc

i want to note here i have no issue with female characters who act extremely masc and reject femininity- i love them tbh- but it’s important to remember that it’s not inherently against womanhood or anything to be a strong fighter who doesn’t stick to every stereotypical social gender norm

and the first wonder woman movie shows this very well

WW84... oh boy

first of all, wonder woman’s changing outfits every other scene. even between scenes where it makes no sense! i’m not saying she can only wear one set of clothes but Geez this was too much

not to mention an entire scene dedicated to her helping steve pick a fashion look? i understand this was to highlight the ‘80-ness of the movie, and it would’ve been fine if it seemed diana was helping him pick a period appropriate look, but it was clear she was trying to help him pick a ‘fashionable’ look which. wonder woman? from the island without a sense of popular outfits or fashion? what?

and the amount of focus on her wearing high heels.... ugh

i’m not saying you can’t have a badass woman who also likes social gender norm fem things but it felt clear that wasn’t what they were going for

wonder woman in the first movie liked practical fashion and not only were many of her outfits not that, her high heels? one hundred percent not practical

it didn’t fit her character and felt horribly out of place, clearly just the producers / directors / whoever going ‘oh, wonder woman is a woman how can we show this? fashion! high heels!’ and i hated it

(warning: imma be jumping from thought to thought as they bump into each so uh... enjoy the train-of-thought style of flaw informing)

and starting at the beginning like.... wow that scene had no purpose

wonder woman cheats in a competition and is punished for this by losing it in the end. except. this is stupid for two reasons

as the audience is shown she didn’t cheat on purpose. she made a mistake, lost her horse, and made a strategy to get back into the race despite this. honestly? i thought the story was going to be a lesson in ingenuity in the worst looking situations. but it wasn’t, which is bad storytelling, because the lesson is then based on a point that isn’t even that true

it is literally Never important again later. unless you count what was going on with the wishstone as ‘cheating to victory’ which i dont. that’s not even what the villain did. he wanted to take over the world. there’s no victory there you get without cheating. wtf. why did that message even happen

going into the actual story we meet the cheetah pretty quick, when she’s still whatever-her-civilian-name-is

and the cheetah... she’s such a bad villain

she doesn’t have the same backstory as she does in the comics

in this one, she uses the wishstone- which is a whole ‘nother thing in and of itself- to wish to be like diana, because ig being smart as hell but social awkward as hell too is so bad you need to desperately wish to be someone else? i hate that trope, but onwards-

she gets that, but in exchange for not only diana’s likable personality she also gets her wonder woman powers (and she loses her glasses, because pretty and cool means no glasses, right? /s), she loses her kindness bc of the rules of the wishstone- in exchange for your wish, it takes smth u care about a lot from you; for her, it was her kindness

this makes her villain! just because she lost her kindness. yep. honestly not a good look regarding all those people out there who are low/no empathy and can still be wonderful nice people but i digress

at one point she complains about why she needs to keep her power rather than go back to being just Her and i fucking wanted to scream

she has like. half a dozen degrees, clearly a couple of friends even if she’s awkward, and she’s got a life that was perfectly okay before she made the wish. as someone who is also socially awkward as hell, it infuriated me to here her acting like it was the fucking end of the world she couldn’t be more extroverted or whatever. there are ways to work on that!!! the movie trying to convince the audience she had a legit reason to not un-wish her wish (for the good of the entire world) was stupid and insulting

also her transformation between ‘looks human, wearing cheetah-pattern clothing‘ to ‘humanoid with cheetah fur/skin/appearance’ literally just. happened. for no reason. that was stupid

y’know what else is stupid? the wishstone. it was clearly just a plot device, and a poorly executed one at that. it isn’t even consistent in how it works

and they did a whole side thing with like. how it had the language of the gods written on part of it and it appeared in random locations across history around the time of great tragedies and,,, that was it???

they never explored the divine connection??? who planted it or why??? how it location traveled or anything????

like i said. poor plot device

i move on now to steve

oh boy steve

he’s brought back to life by diana’s wish on the wishstone, but... it causes him to come back in someone else’s body, quantum leap style. this is. weird. and is never ever addressed by him or wonder woman except once in a throw away comment. like. diana and steve kiss and are implied to have sex while steve is in someone else’s body and neither of them seem to care. this is not good!!

and then his relationship with diana? HORRIBLE

in the first movie they were barely starting to fall in love, only barely a couple even if that. more importantly they were friends, and that night he died diana didn’t lose a potential lover so much as she lost her first non-Amazonian friend

but WW84 portrays their relationship as if they were not only already a couple, but one close enough that even after forty years since steve’s death diana is still completely and hopelessly in love with him to the point that she’s literally hanging off his arm as soon as he’s back and making love that very night

it plays again once more into the misrepresentation of wonder woman’s character (how stereotypically hollywood female to fall over herself at the sight of her love interest) and it wrecks their relationship, which had been a lovely friends-who-could-be-more

what they should’ve done was focus on that friendship, build it back up after the long gap for wonder woman, and then started to rebuild that possible romance (and tear it down at the perfect moment... right when steve had to go again... ah that would’ve been lovely)

but they wanted to go in full-haul on the romance and it just felt. wrong and weak to me. diana’s refusal to consider giving up her wish (to get her powers back and save the world) is bc she doesn’t want to let steve go again, which makes more sense in the context of a first and true friend rather than a hastily slapped together love interest

steve’s character was generally good tbh but the way he played into the story? bad

moving on... the main villain of the movie? sucks. he’s just. fucking awful

despite a motivation being given that he wants to have money, he launches into wanting to take over the world for no real reason. he takes advantage of people for this and almost destroys the world he wants to rule for it. the main reason he stops this is for his son, who up until now he largely ignored and didn’t seem to care that much for outside of basic obligations. and the movie dares try to make him sympathetic by throwing in the fact he grew up poor and was bullied and not liked which i HATE

lots of people are/have been poor. lots of people are/have been bullied (myself included). that does NOT justify them DESTROYING THE WORLD TRYING TO TAKE IT OVER. can it be used to show the audience why he does what he does? yes. but to use it and clearly try to make it a reason to hand-wave-away what he did? NO. FUCK NO

also fucking. y’know how wonder woman took down this villain? she talked to him and the world. she gave a stirring speech while she laid slumped against a wall, not injured, just too weak to beat a bit of wind. she talked and she looped her lasso around his leg so she could talk to the world to to convince them to give up their wishes

once again... the mischaracterization

in the first movie, wonder woman gives a stirring speech while fighting Areas. it’s done in her battle, beating the god of war up while reminding him of what she stood for, who she was, why she would keep fighting for a broken world

it was BEAUTIFUL. it was MEANINGFUL. it was BADASS but SINCERE

this was weak. and it clearly wanted to be more than it was

the whole movie wants to be more than it is- it wants to have an important meaningful message like the first movie, about wishes for the self and war and the world and whatever. and it wants it so badly it does it horribly

the message is ham-handed yet messy and unclear and not right. it doesn’t make sense, and it feels poorly plotted. the movie thinks it’s more than it is and that makes it very hard to watch

and to finish my rant off... WW84 lied to its audience

did you see any ads for WW84? i did. they were bright, vibrant, funky music, stunning moments, action and intrigue. i was thrilled for a movie like it

the actual movie isn’t that

it’s not nearly as action filled, it’s not as ‘80s-focused as it leads you to believe, some of the most prominently featured moments barely matter

the lightning swing? pointless, as at that point in the movie wonder woman’s learned how to fly and does it for no reason but the trailers

and that cool suit? introduced in a random myth for no reason halfway through the movie, brought in at random with no explanation, only there for show and the trailers

WW84 is not the movie is lead people to believe it was, and the movie it is is poorly executed and insulting to a variety of peopler/minorities

if you’re gonna watch it, pirate it. i can give you a link. just don’t give dc your money or your legit views for it

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Treat Your S(h)elf: The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

We’re going to survive - our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams - and in their worst nightmares too.

- Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“It’s always hard on women, when a city falls.” Briseis, former princess of the Trojan city of Lyrnessus, has been Achilles’s slave for several months when someone she knew in her old life says these words. From the ancient world to our modern world there is this ugly and unspoken line of rape as a weapon of war. History is replete with examples. In the 20th-century where Nazis raped Jewish women despite soldiers' concerns with "race defilement" and raped countless women in their path as they invaded the Soviet Union and then in Berlin 1945 Russians in turn went on a brutal raping spree to punish the Germans. In the bloody Balkan wars in the 1990s, Serbian forces tortured and summarily executed scores of Muslims and Croats. In the Iraq war and the many conflicts in Africa in the 21st Century, rape is systemically used to subdue a defeated enemy. History shows the ugly truth that women’s bodies have always been viewed as the spoils of conflicts waged primarily by men.

The issue of rape in war is something that has always sat uncomfortably with me ever since I did my stint as an army combat helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. From my high vantage point I felt a detachment from the electronic battlefield - for everything was viscerally seen from my helmeted eye patch visor lens and not the naked eye. I couldn’t look people in the eye as as soldier on for patrol would have. The fear and sweat is the same but the risk is different. Soldiers on patrol or on a mission risk the constant threat of ambush, sustained attack under mortar or fire fights as well as the ever present danger of being blown up by an IED by accident. Pilots risk being coming under attack too by being ambushed by RPG rocket fire or coming under fire from below. Worse, was to think if you got hit and you had to bail and you were all alone, survival and evasion from capture becomes fearfully paramount. Of course they train you for this until it hopefully becomes muscle memory in how to survive and take evasive action from being captured and resisting as long as you could under interrogation. But as a female pilot the unspoken fear that dare not speak its name was ever present: the fear of rape.

I’m not sure my brother officers - no matter how sincere and well intentioned they were because we were all fiercely protective of one another - really understood what the word ‘rape’ means for a woman. Indeed a male friend and ex-army colleague said to me in jest don’t ever kid a man about kicking him in the balls because it’s one thing every man can imagine feeling but would find it hard to explain the excruciating pain when a man does get his balls bashed in. I don’t think the two ‘experiences’ are the same obviously but I understand how hard it is to articulate what it might feel like. I never really allowed myself to be consumed by the fear of what might happen if I ever got shot down and was captured but instead I made sure to focus on my job. It never really became pressing issue for me throughout my time in on the battlefield. I was lucky I got out in one piece despite a few close scrapes along the way.

I did hear awful and terrible stories from my oldest brother who served in the Iraq War of the raping of Kurdish women by Iraqi forces. It sickened him and left him hollow the the things he witnessed first hand. Through the charitable work of ex-veterans I have come across refugee woman who shared their harrowing stories of how they were violently and systematically raped as war booty and as primal assertion of victor dominance and control.

I was thinking about all these things as I read Pat Barker’s novel about one of the most famous wars of all, telling the story of the siege of Troy from the point of view of the local Trojan women taken by the Greek forces. It’s The Iliad as seen through the eyes of 19-year-old Briseis, the Queen of Lyrnessus who’s taken as Achilles’s “bed-girl”, his “prize of honour” for mass slaughter.

Barker’s not the first to turn to the classics for inspiration. It’s popular practice these days. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Michael Hughes’ Country, for example, transpose classical stories onto contemporary settings.  The Silence of the Girls is yet another much welcomed book to offer a fresh perspective on Homeric women, following Madeleine Miller’s brilliant Circe. But while Miller’s reinvention of literature’s first witch brilliantly evoked a world of ancient magic in retelling The Odyssey from the witch’s point of view, not that of the warrior she waylays on his journey home, Barker’s story has its feet very firmly on the ground. Yes, the gods are still there – you can’t tell the story of the Trojan wars without them, after all. The gods remain mostly off stage but they are present in the background, magically restoring the mutilated dead body of Hector. The sea goddess Thetis, Achilles’ mother, is a briny, frightening presence, as are the dark shore and the waves by which the whole horrible story takes place. Apollo still sends a plague, Achilles is the son of a sea goddess who brings him divinely forged armour and Hector’s body is magically restored to freshness after being pulled behind Achilles’s chariot.

But what really stands out are not heavenly allusions but the dirt and filth and disease and sheer brutal physicality of the Greek army marauding everything that stands in their way to Troy - there’s no magic here to ease the pain and trauma of rape or murder or even to help exact revenge. And while Achilles’ divine mother makes an appearance, and Apollo is beckoned by Briseis to bring about a plague, the gods remain on the peripheries of this story. If Circe, which chronicles the life of its titular character, is very much about the gods and their egos, then The Silence of the Girls, however, is very much about humans, their egos and their wars - both personal and political.

In all this Barker gives female characters such as Circe and Briseis the voice they’ve traditionally been denied, readers glean a different version of events behind the Trojan War epic myth. “Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles…How the epithets pile up,” Briseis begins. “We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.”

In The Iliad, a poem about the terrible destruction caused by male aggression, the bodies and pretty faces of women are the objects through which men struggle with each other for status. The women are not entirely silent, and goddesses always have plenty to say, but mortal women speak primarily to lament. They grieve for their dead sons, dead fathers, dead husbands and dead protectors; for the city of Troy, soon to fall, and for their own freedom, taken by the victors of war. Andromache pleads with her Trojan husband Hector not to leave her and their infant son to go back to fight Achilles. She has already endured the sack of her home city by Achilles, and seen the slaughter of her father and seven brothers, and the enslavement of her mother. If Hector dies, their child will be hurled from the city walls, Troy will fall and Andromache will be made the concubine of the son of her husband’s killer. Hector knows this, but he insists that his own need to avoid social humiliation as a battle-shirker trumps it all: “I would be ashamed before the Trojan men and women,” he says. He hopes only to be dead before he has to hear her screams.

Barker’s absorbing prose puts the experience of women like Andromache at the heart of the story: the women who survive in slavery when men destroy their cities and kill their fathers, brothers and children. The central character is Briseis, the woman awarded to Achilles, the greatest Greek fighter, after his army sacks one of the towns neighbouring Troy. Agamemnon, the most powerful, although not the bravest, of the Greek warriors – a character whose downright nastiness comes across beautifully in Barker’s telling – has lost his own most recent female acquisition and seizes Briseis from Achilles. Achilles’ vengeful rage against Agamemnon and his own comrades, and the subsequent vast death toll of the Greeks and Trojans, is the central theme of The Iliad.

Homer’s poem ends by foreshadowing the fall of Troy in the death of its greatest fighter, Hector. Barker’s novel begins with the fall of another town: Lyrnessus, Briseis’ home, destroyed by Achilles and his men. We then see that the fall of a city is the end of a story only for the male warriors: some leave triumphant and others lie there dead. For the women, it is the start of new horrors.

Barker’s subject has long been gender relations during conflict, along with the machinations of trauma and memory, so she’s in her element here. Her blood-drenched battle scenes are up there with the best of them, and she shows a keen understanding of the “never-ending cycle of hatred and revenge” fuelling the violence. Her focus, however, is that which takes place off the battlefield, inflicted on the women in the “rape camps.”

Barker keeps the main bones of the Homeric poem in place, supplementing Homer at the end of the story with Euripides. His heartbreaking play The Trojan Women is, like Barker’s novel, a version of the story that shifts our attention from the angry, destructive, quick-footed, short-lived boys to the raped, enslaved, widowed women, who watch their city burn and, if they are lucky, get a moment to bury their slaughtered children and grandchildren before they are taken far away.

One of Barker’s most tear-jerking sequences is lifted straight from Euripides: the teenage daughter of Priam and Hecuba is gagged and killed as a “sacrifice” on the dead Achilles’ tomb, and then Hecuba is presented with the tiny corpse of her dead grandson, a toddler with his skull cracked open. The girl’s gagged mouth and the child’s gaping brains conjure a gruesome twinned image for the silenced voices that should tell of the horror and pity suffered by the victims of war.

For most of Barker’s novel, Briseis is the first-person narrator, but in the final part, the narrative is intercut with third-person chapters told from the point of view of Achilles. We never get as close to Achilles as we do to Briseis, but he is a compelling figure in his fascinating combination of brutality and civility. Like Siegfried Sassoon in Barker’s 1991 novel Regeneration, this Achilles has the soul of a poet as well as of a killer and hunter: he is a man whose physical courage and compulsion to fight sit uneasily with his clear, articulate awareness of the futility of war.

But Achilles, however fascinating he may be, is not then at the centre of this story. Still, the novel does provide a moving, thought-provoking version of what is perhaps the most famous moment of The Iliad: when the old king Priam makes his way, alone and unarmed, through the enemy camp, to plead with Achilles to give back the mutilated body of his son, Hector. Barker twice quotes Priam’s Homeric words to Achilles: “I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.” Barker lets us feel the pathos and pity of this moment, as well as the pathos of all the many young men who die violent deaths far from home. We glimpse, too, Achilles’ alienation from his own “terrible, man-killing hands”, which have caused so many deaths.

Briseis has a powerful riposte to Priam’s words, weighing this unique encounter between men against the myriad unremembered horrors suffered by women in war. “I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”

Reduced to objects, they’re catalysts for conflict – Barker’s Helen inspires ribaldry not worship, “The eyes, the hair, the tits, the lips/ That launched a thousand battleships...” chant the soldiers – blamed for inciting hatred between men. Or they’re regarded as the victor’s spoils, claimed along with cattle and gold.

Briseis is both. Taken as a slave, Achilles and Agamemnon then feud over her: “It doesn’t belong to him; he hasn’t earnt it,” fumes the former. Men - Greek and Trojan alike – are afforded the privilege of vocalising their pain and loss, while women have to repress their suffering. “Silence becomes a woman,” they’re told, even when they’re free.

No longer an issue of decorum, now it’s about staying alive. “I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son,” declares Priam when he prostrates himself before Achilles begging for Hector’s body. “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do, Briseis thinks bitterly, “I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”

Barker has a very clear feminist message about the struggle for women to extricate themselves from male-dominated narratives. In the hands of a lesser writer, it could have felt preachy and woke but she masterfully avoids that. The attempt to provide Briseis with a happy ending is thin, and sometimes the female characters’ legitimate outrage seems a bit predictable, as when we hear Helen thinking: “I’m here. Me. A person, not just an object to be looked at and fought over.”

The novel has some annoying anachronisms, such as a “weekend market” (there were no weekends in antiquity), and a reference to “half a crown”, as if we were in the same period as Barker’s first world war novels. One wonders if any woman in archaic Greece, even a former queen, would have quite the self-assurance of Barker’s Briseis. But, of course, there is no way to be sure: no words from women in this period survive but Barker is surely right to paint them as thoughtful, diverse, rounded human beings, whose humanity hardly ever dawns on their captors, owners and husbands. This central historical insight feels entirely truthful.

Barker has a quasi-Homeric gift for similes: “that shining moment, when the din of battle fades and your body’s a rod connecting earth and sky”, or Achilles’ friend Patroclus dying, “thrashing like a fish in a pool that’s drying out”. There is a Homeric simplicity and drive in some of the sentences: “Blood, shit and brains – and there he is, the son of Peleus, half beast, half god, driving on to glory.” She is Homeric, too, in her attentiveness to what happens between people, and to the details of the physical world: the food, the wine, the clothes, the noise and the feel of skin, blood, bones, crackling wounds and screams. Barker, like Homer, understands grief and loss, and sees how alone people can be even when they are crying together. Loneliness in community is one of the major themes of this book, as it is of The Iliad.

Angry, thoughtful, sad, deeply humane and compulsively readable, The Silence of the Girls shows that Barker is a writer at the peak of her literary powers. You sense her only priority is to enlarge the story that we all know and she adds to it magnificently.

I have always enjoyed reading Pat Barker especially her enviable experience of writing about military life in her earlier novels and here in this book it shines through in the depiction of the Greek forces. The men are dehumanised by the wars they have created. This is primarily a book about what war does to women, but Barker examines what it does to men too. I was disturbed by the magnificently poignant final section which can’t help but make you reflect on the cultural underpinnings of male aggression, the women throughout history who have been told, by men, to forget their trauma. When Briseis is told to forget her past life, she immediately knows it is exactly what she must not, can not do: “So there was my duty laid out in front of me, as simple and clear as bowl of water: Remember.”

Briseis knows no one will want to record the reality of what went on during the war: “they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps?” But even so, Briseis, for all that she must bear, understands eventually that the women will leave behind a legacy, though not in the same vocal, violent way the men will.

“We’re going to survive,” she says, “our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams - and in their worst nightmares too.”

I felt disconcerted reading this and also very moved. As much as I love the Classics and firmly believe in it providing the foundational building blocks of our Western civilisation I also have to pause and remind myself that heroic behaviour, something the greatest of the Greeks are known for, isn’t anything admirable when viewed from the lens of the women they abuse. Heroism can be tainted by the dark side of one’s nature. However pure one soldier’s sacrifice for another can be, so there is the bestial side of us where the chains of civilised moral behaviour are unshackled and left to satiate our primal instinct for cruelty, conflict, and domination. Indeed what Barker does is be a much needed corrective because just as you think her perspective of the Greek heroes may be softening, she pulls back to remind you of Odysseus tossing Hector’s baby from the battlements, or Achilles’s casual butchery. “It’s the girls I remember most,” Briseis says. This then is a story about the very real cost of wars waged by men: “the brutal reality of conquest and slavery”.

In seeing a legend differently, Barker makes us rethink who gets to write history but also to remind us of our tainted human condition. There is no god in the machine to sort out most violent conflicts and situations with a thunderbolt here. There are only mortals, with all their flaws and ferocity and foolishness. And we all have to live with that but not I hope in silence.

[fragenherrdoktor]

Rip's backstory? Im gonna President's day this question, actually. Major's? Dok? Do you think Schrodinger is based (in universe) on a an actual Kid? (My Headcanon)

Whoa! Thanks for the questions! I’m going to break the answers up by character for length. I touched on some of these points in a past post, so I’ll expand on them. First up, Rip Van Winkle! 

Rip seems to be Zorin’s opposite; she’s the ‘Eva Braun’ to the latter’s ‘Brunhilde’. Zorin appears to represent the more agrarian population, while Rip is more the urban-dwelling socialite. She seems more refined in her style of dress and love of opera, so I would imagine she comes from a higher social class, possibly the daughter of an officer. That or she’s putting on airs to make one think she’s from a more affluent background than she really is.

I think Rip was likely born around the Rhineland, given her moniker is both Dutch and a literary reference to Irving's Rip Van Winkle because:

The Rhineland is closer to Holland than any other part of Germany. While the German ‘Von’ is more common in names, the Dutch ‘Van’ makes its way in there too: example Ludwig Van Beethoven who was originally from Bonn, Germany. So she might be of Dutch descent to some degree, too?

Irving’s novel takes place in the Hudson Valley, which Life magazine in 1939 called “America’s Rhineland” because they are a bit geographically similar.

I think Rip was born and raised on propaganda. In Dawn, her hair is braided similarly to girls and women in the BMD. She likely joined as a preteen and was active in it until her late teens or until 21. The BMD indoctrinated young women and taught a very romanticized version of German folklore and tradition coupled with the National Socialist system. That’s probably what lends to Rip’s more silly, girlish, and romantic personality and outlook on the events in Hellsing. A lot of the BMD’s teaching also focused on the “self-sacrifice’’ women should make to further the cause of the party, which seems to match her sacrificing herself to further Millennium's goals to keep Alucard stuck at sea for a bit to launch their attack.

She likely voluntarily joined the Aufseherin, too. I think Rip (and Zorin to an extent in terms of sheer brutality and rural upbringing) is based on Irma Grese the most. Grese is described as being beautiful, immaculately dressed, and one of the most sadistic female guards. That description seems to fit Rip and her gleeful enjoyment of Mill’s actions.

Given her entrance in Hellsing: The Dawn (she’s K.O.’d like immediately) and moniker, I think Rip is out cold for pretty much the entirety of the Hellsing Raid and misses the rest of WW2. In Irving’s novel, Rip Van Winkle falls asleep for 20 years and misses the American Revolution. This leads me to think that Hellsing Rip is out for an extended period as well due to the karate chop from Alu’s coffin to the back of her head.

I think the hit also caused some extensive head trauma and forced the Doktor to work on her shortly after the raid. In the opening of Dawn, Millennium is experimenting on POW’s and only seems to be able to create ghouls, not the more advanced bootleg vampires, yet. I think Rip was one of the first, if not the original successful FREAK. I also believe she fell flat on her face and chipped her teeth after being knocked out, and Dok filed them into points, giving Rip her signature smile.

Due to her unconsciousness and missing parts of the war, I think Mill’s higher-ups (namely Major) gave her the moniker Rip Van Winkle as a joke.

I believe the wack to the head messed with Rip’s memory too, possibly giving her amnesia, and is one of the reasons why she’s so attached to Der Freischütz. I think she always enjoyed opera. Those with amnesia, while they might forget past events, loved ones, have been known to have their musical memory still intact. I think this is one of the reasons she’s so obsessed with the opera and strongly relates to it; it’s one of the strongest things she can remember and thus relates to it waaay too hard. (Wouldn’t feel bad for her. The whole aftermath of the Hellsing Raid is pure speculation on my part. Rip’s scarily loyal to Mill, so she’s terrible through and through.)

Her being called Rip Van Winkle showcases how her, and by extent all of Millennium, are stuck in the past and are resistant to change. Irving’s story is a cautionary tale about wasting your life away, and Mill, well, they waste their lives trying to get revenge/overcome the supernatural/prove their superiority.

Her catchphrase “Tinker tailor soldier sailor, my bullet punishes all without distinction” is a reference to the old ‘Tinker, Tailor’ game/nursery rhyme children used to use to identify who was “it” in a game of tag. I think it highlights how childish Rip is, she views shooting someone kin to playing deadly tag.

In the novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, named after the same rhyme, British SIS agents track down a Soviet spy in their ranks. I think this also references how Rip got on the Eagle using British naval forces that betrayed the crown in return for vampirism.

I have no fucking idea where the hell she got the Jezail rifle from. They were really popular with Afghan troops, especially during the Anglo-Afghan war. I think it’s supposed to add insult to injury that she’s using a musket that devastated British forces in 1800′s before while also reinforcing how behind the times she is.

She seems to personally relate to Kaspar in Der Freischütz, who in the opera makes a deal with Samuel, an evil spirit/the devil known as Black Huntsman, for magic bullets. However Rip got her powers, I imagine it took her (with the help of Mill/Dok) summoning an evil spirit and making a deal with it that enabled her to shoot cursed bullets.

The fact that Rip and Zorin are a part of Mill highlights that they’re both highly effective soldiers. Their leadership roles are also one of the things that show how unorthodox Major is at running his organization. Women participated in military service, but it was very regimented because the Nazi’s were, in a word, conservative. Women served alongside men, but they could never give their male soldiers orders. Both Rip and Zorin are officers with troops under their command, so they must be good at what they do, even if Rip is a bit of a ditz at times.

Rip is the only one who is scared shitless of Alucard when she first sees him. She seems slightly more ‘realistic’ about her capabilities, but goes through with being bait, cementing her extreme loyalty to Mill’s cause. However, the way she talks about Alucard makes me wonder if she’s aware that they are truly fighting the actual Dracula. Rip seems to believe Alucard IS Samuel to some degree(???). The way Major builds up this idea in her flashback leads me to believe Major isn’t 100% truthful about what exactly Mill is fighting or their end goal (even to higher-ranking officers) and is fine letting his soldiers believe in whatever gets them to do what he wants (read: die horribly).

[meta-squash]

Brick Club 1.3.2 “Double Quartet”

According to wikipedia, a double quartet is a musical composition made for eight voices or instruments, or made up of two string quartets, that are often written in a call-and-response style. Also, I’m not quite sure if this is relevant, but wikipedia specifically mentions German composer Louis Spohr in the section on double quartets. Spohr wrote an opera in 1816 called Faust (which was drastically different from Goethe’s plays), to which wikipedia gives this synopsis:

Faust is torn between his love for the young Röschen and his desire for Kunigunde, the fiancée of Count Hugo. He makes a pact with the devil Mefistofeles which allows him to rescue Kunigunde from the clutches of the evil knight Gulf. Faust obtains a love potion from the witch Sycorax which he gives to Kunigunde during her wedding celebrations. Outraged at the sudden passion his bride shows for Faust, Count Hugo challenges him to a duel. Faust kills Hugo and flees. Meanwhile, Faust's first love, Röschen, drowns herself in despair. Mefistofeles seizes Faust and drags him down to Hell.

Again, I don’t know if that is relevant, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. Especially considering the “lover flees, young woman is ruined” motif. I have no idea if it was popular or even known in France at the time, but it was part of the Romantic movement, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was part of Hugo’s repertoire.

But it’s interesting that Hugo names this chapter after a call-and-response style of music. This chapter specifically is set up that way: we get information on the women, and then the men. Their affairs later on seem to also line up with this call-and-response, at least until the end of the dinner, when one half of the strings drop away and the other four are left on their own.

I don’t know enough about the different areas of France, so I’m wondering if where the men are from is at all important?

Also, who is the “Oscar” Hugo is comparing the group to?

Hugo establishes the men as “insignificant,” which I think is actually quite significant. To the other grisettes, and probably most other grisettes in their circle, these men are (as Hugo explains) common little flings. So to make someone who is insignificant to most, significant to Fantine is an interesting move. Hugo kind of does this with all his characters, on a larger scale. Aside from Valjean and Enjolras, who are exceptional, most of his other characters seem to be relatively normal people who aren’t necessarily special in a big way. The fact that he decides to focus in on them is what makes them special. And yet here it’s Tholomyes’ insignificance that highlights how unusual Fantine’s attachment to him is.

“...and in their souls that flower of purity which in a woman survives the first fall”. I don’t really know what to make of this line considering how a paragraph later he seems to insinuate that all but Fantine have already “fallen” due to their many affairs. (Which he then softens by blaming society for the women’s problems.)

“Poverty and coquetry are fatal counselors; the one scolds, the other flatters, and the beautiful daughters of the people have both of them whispering in their ears, one on each side. Their ill-guarded souls listen. Thence their fall, and the stones that are cast at them. The are overwhelmed with the splendor of all that is immaculate and inaccessible. Alas! Was the Jungfrau ever hungry?”

Hugo referencing the fall of man here, although this time it seems like only the women are punished, and not the men. Also, another Faustian reference, this time Marlowe, with the “good angel and bad angel” imagery. More references to life choices and the whole concept of having two potential paths and choosing the “wrong one.” Like with Valjean’s original crime, Hugo seems to criticize this behavior here while simultaneously pointing out the way that society demonizes these women and hurts them. I’d love to know why he uses the German “Jungfrau” here instead of just saying “maiden” or “virgin.”

We get a lot of information on Favourite in this chapter, and not that much on the other girls. She’s the eldest at 23, born out of wedlock, and has her own home. I love that she’s like Jehan--adding an extra letter to her name for the fanciness of it. We basically get an illustration of her as the sort of “leader” of the group, with everyone else looking up to her. She’s then contrasted with Tholomyes, the men’s “leader,” who is also the eldest of his group, I assume. Favourite seems closer to Bahorel’s “laughing mistress” or Musichetta than the other three; aside from her mother barging in on her life and being a nuisance, she seems much more stable than any of the others, financially (she’s been to England!) and emotionally/socially (her friends all look up to her). (I think it’s interesting that she’s not paired with Tholomyes, who seems to be her masculine counterpart?)

Fantine is “wise” while the other women are “philosophical.” Also, Hapgood translates “sage” as “good” instead of wise, for some odd reason. It seems as though Fantine is wise in the same way that Valjean has that divine element of goodness that can be kindled and relit. It’s something that she is not necessarily aware of. I’m also wondering how Hugo defines “wise” vs “philosophical.” I’m guessing that wisdom is closer to intrinsic, instinctual knowledge, while philosophy is more thought out and pondered upon. (Perhaps these definitions are based on a popular philosophy at the time? If so I have no idea which one.)

In any case, part of what makes Fantine wise is her capacity to passionately and loyally love. Which I think is an interesting move, to praise someone’s social (and possibly emotional) naivete as wise, only for her to be completely ruined because of the person she’s devoted to. Her capacity to love is also the vulnerability that manipulative men see as a good opportunity to latch on to and use her.

This “wisdom” thing is also a weird call considering Fantine’s utter lack of pretense. The other three grisette’s go by fake names, have had a number of affairs and seem more playful than thoughtful when it comes to the affairs with this group of men. Fantine is just...Fantine, and she’s the youngest, and she hasn’t had the experience the other girls have had, and she’s about to make a huge mistake (rather, by this time she already has, and Cosette is an infant). Presumably the other three women learned somehow that their affairs were just affairs, why didn’t they clue Fantine in on this game? Later on we see Favourite thinking that Fantine is “putting on airs;” but she’s also the only one tu’d instead of vous’d and they all know she’s the baby. Are the other three just wrapped up in their own stuff and too preoccupied to think that maybe Fantine doesn’t realize this isn’t a real, permanent thing? Or is this a situation of three older girls being latched onto by a younger one who doesn’t really know what to do, and aren’t really a fan of the burden of being teacher? She’s been in Paris at least 4 years and yet she’s never had friends like these grisettes? I don’t exactly know the social mores of back then, but I assume that having friends then was similar to having friends now: gossip and talk about relationships and flings and one night stands. Interesting that she either never really learned by inference that this might be that, or that perhaps she just blindly assumes that this isn’t like that because this is real.

And here we get Fantine’s backstory, and her symbolism as the Universal Grisette. So many of Hugo’s characters that are blatant “universal” symbols are either orphans or abandoned quite early in life. And so many we get a certain period of their life, then a jump, then more. What happened between infant-Fantine being found and her working on a farm? Hugo does this time-jump with Valjean and the Thenardiers, and Marius, too. I think Fantine’s about 19 when we’re first introduced to her, if my math is correct? Hugo also foreshadows the sale of her teeth and hair here.

“Fantine was beautiful and remained pure as long as she could.” An interesting callback to a few paragraphs ago. Hugo seems to imply that the other girls gave in to those “whispers” quite quickly, while Fantine did not. Part of her purity, too, is her trust and devotion to Tholomyes; she’s not giving in to promiscuity or shallow affairs like the other three, she is genuinely in love.

The way Hugo uses beauty and ugliness is so interesting. “Beautiful” Fantine paired with “ugly” Tholomyes, as with Enjolras and Grantaire, and even to some extent Cosette and Eponine.

What stands out to me is Tholomyes and Grantaire both specifically being characterized as “doubting” and also described as ugly. Grantaire gets the actual word “ugly” while Tholomyes gets this horrible description (weirdly tempered by the fact of his humor and gaiety). I know that technically Courfeyrac is paralleled with Tholomyes, but I always seem to see more similarities between him and Grantaire. The difference being that Grantaire changes and Tholomyes does not. There also seem to be bits of each of Les Amis in Tholomyes (Grantaire’s doubt and ugliness, Bossuet’s irony, Bahorel’s age, Courfeyrac’s womanizing ways, Joly’s illness, etc) but all from the negative.

Tholomyes is described in a really awful way. That “he had a play refused at Vaudeville” and “doubted everything with an air of superiority” always has me reading him as this MRA type loser who thinks he’s better than everyone else and that that’s why people hate him. He’s charismatic, but in a slimeball sort of way. Hugo tempers Tholomyes’ awfulness with gaiety and then immediately turns around ruins that “but he was funny!” by telling us this awful prank.

Oh, and then Hugo stops to interrupt himself with a question about linguistics regarding the word “irony” and whether it’s based on the English word “iron,” like, the metal. Which...???? I don’t really know what to make of? Is he trying to say something here, because if he is, I don’t get it.

“Saint January” is Januarius, the patron saint of Naples, whose “miracle” is the annual liquefying of the phial of his blood. Apparently people gather to witness this annual miracle three times a year (as well as during things like papal visits). Interesting that Tholomyes compares his rather unpredictable and cruel “surprise” with the predictable, annual miracle of the blood liquefying. It makes me wonder whether this is not the first time he has done this (he is 30, after all, and I assume has had many affairs), just with a different group of friends.

We are just as in the dark about the surprise as the women are. Hugo does the same thing here that he often does with Valjean’s thoughts. He remains an outsider to the thoughts of any of the characters in the scene, and remains in a specific location within the scene, so when the characters leave, any following dialogue or action or thought is obscured from him as a narrator.

[walaw717]

Since I have backed away from  spending much time  using social media,  I have been able to reflect on the last few years, especially the last year and ask myself a simple question – where did I go off the tracks?

 I realize that  even knowing better, in the last year especially, I allowed fear to turn into anger and in the process become entangled in thoughts words and actions which were harsh to others and supportive of  positions I do not fully hold. 

In this last month of returning to journaling and stepping away from the one line meme bumper sticker world  of social media I realized that  once again I had substituted many things into my life to replace a relationship with God I have nurtured since childhood. It embarrasses me to say this and it embarrasses me to admit that I find my need for that relationship so powerful in my life.  I find I am embarrassed because a well educated and intellectual person is supposed to be beyond such  “nonsense”. Also, I find myself often embarrassed by  how often people publicly do so many cruel and horrible things with the word god on their lips, especially the televangelists and  just as often the mainstream religious leaders who have often been an embarrassment,  frustration and disappointment for me. It seems to me at times that to speak of God and one’s relationship and need of God is almost itself sacrilegious - but I know that feeling for me is  so strong  because throughout history God has been used as a cudgel for fear, punishment and obedience more than a center of real relationships. Or we often find that the love coming from the lips of the speakers about God is hollow and meaningless.  

However, in my work as a therapist and counselor over thirty years I know that  the best work that has occurred in my office is when God has been in the room – verbally acknowledge or not. God is in action in this world – the living force of all relationship and that relationship is not simply restricted to man.  Last year I witnessed the ancient willow in my yard lift a frond and embrace a planter of new flowers we had just placed on the balcony rail.

So, what happened for me?  To me? How did I get so far removed from that  which has been my center and sustained me? 

A man, a minister, a priest whom I thought was my friend ignored my grief and pain when I lost my mother. I should not have been surprised, I had seen him do this before, rushing away from a funeral service and leaving the widow to mourn alone because he had a new baby that was more important for him to see than to see the need of comfort she required. And in that same year I spoke to a Bishop at the end of my year of  discernment to become a priest and  in our conversation he did not acknowledge me as a person in conversation but focused on administrative things. Although neither should have shaken my faith in God, it shook my faith in the church and I mistakenly  thought the church was God. From that point I slid into a slow burn in life because I disconnected from the very thing that had sustained me through a difficult childhood and then through most of my adult life.  I think this is a common mistake – to conflate god with the church and the people of the church. And then expect them to be perfect for us in representing God. 

It is occurring to me however that no person can ever be that perfection and that is why the essence of God in the world is grace – the ability to understand the violence, the suffering and pain that  life manifests and forgive it all. Why the world,  why the universe is made this way is beyond my understanding, but it is, and we need the grace of forgiveness of others and ourselves to survive. How do we become vessels for such grace? And more importantly we need to ask how we isolate ourselves from such grace. 

A few days ago, I spoke to  a small group of nursing students about  the role of Behavioral Health where I work.  They introduced themselves by name and pronoun and I was struck by  how young they were and  how sad that the best they could offer as a personal introduction was their name and preferred pronouns. If I had had time, I would have redone introductions and had them tell me something more personal about who they were.  I spoke about the need of presence and kindness in the work of a nurse and/or counselor at the bed side. The people need that presence. At the end one very androgynous young women asked me about the issue of how to deal with the inequity and lack of “social” justice in the world. I think that is the question in some way we all deal with in our lives.

My answer to her was to be present with individuals, to be kind and to be aware of the person in front of us.  In my better moments that is how I have helped people.  No such thing exists in the social media driven by the speeches of politicians, the memes of hate and dis-ease or the private  manufactured lives of celebrities. It surely does not act in the crowd shouting for change. Social justice is individual justice. I wish that act of presence and awareness had been present in the priest I knew and the Bishop I spoke to – but they too are human and just like you and I are inclined to  get lost in self directed moments. We all do.

It is in our relationship with God that we are at our best.  When we are present with  “him” that we are most present with others.  When we are present with  “him” we lose our concerns and fears and can be there in the moments when life around us is suffering because when “he” is present we have a strength and peace that is beyond words. We can hope that others can offer that to us in our moments of pain and need and that they too have the experience of that presence. God is always there but  it is in our relationship with another “His” power is most noticeable. In those moments too we learn that love is not some sexually driven frenzy of our DNA but it is simply being and is just there in that intimate moment. 

Our relationship with the presence of God is vital. And it is  when we are in that relationship, we create the church, the community of God and can then be life-giving and life-affirming. 

And We can know that in our not being God and having moments of weakness that God will be there through another – because we will have moments of being distracted and be selfish and inward. 

Our relationship with God is what gives us purpose and the center of our being.

When we let our relationship with God slide, an emptiness sets in. I have seen that in my own life in the last few years. Sometimes we try to fill that hole with various things, politics, social media,  a multitude of things but those things don’t quite fit. None of those things makes us whole. What makes us whole is our presence in the moment of another’s greatest need. 

Real love wants us to experience that life-giving relationship. Real love is willing to share the experience of the presence God within us with others. In that sharing is our act of presence and kindness.

Here's where our hope is: when we are  in right relationship with God, we can be in a right relationship with each other, and those relationships help build each other, not tear each other down. If often feels like our society has lost sight of this – especially the intellectually driven and self-conscious academic life that has come to dominate us  though our universities and our obsession with self-esteem. We have lost the knowledge that esteem is how we are held  by others by our presence and actions. And of course, where there is too much self – there is too little room for the presence of others and God. 

There are many things that can try and keep us from having that closeness with God. Sometimes those things come from our family members, especially those who do not want us to make room in our hearts for anyone else. Mostly though the thing that most keep us from that relationship with God and keeps us from that relationship each other is distraction with how we feel. That was my priest friend’s failure toward me and in turn my failure toward him. 

For me over the last few years social media has been a distraction, I find all too often the people  I meet there have more of a relationship of talking at each other and not really sharing with each other. The one’s I have really connected with share themselves, which is quite risky in the public  forums of social media. Being an administrator has also  been a distraction – I miss sitting and being present with others – not to solve their problems but to be there and maybe offer some direction and comfort if I am able.  

And my hurt over the loss of my mother, my very deep hurt that a friend forgot my suffering became the greatest distraction to me.  I simply decided that all the talk was “bullshit” and no one really meant it. It was after that my private practice began also to deteriorate as I focused on things other than the presence of those coming to meet with me. 

I became the very thing that had hurt me.I no longer blame my priest, but I do allow that to be a reminder of the importance of being present in each moment with people and to make sure to not allow my fear and anger pain to turn to anger. This is something I have always known but in the knowing I forgot to live and that forgetting was directly tied to  dismissing  God from my life. 

Now I am doing the hardest thing any human can do for another person- find and offer forgiveness for him being as human as I . 

And all of this has come to me because I divorced myself from social media for twenty-eight days.   

I just realized  that without awareness I gave up social media for lent and in going to the desert of my own soul I found a relationship with God again. 

This is a further offering of peace to all of you I have been unkind too over the last few years, especially over the last year regarding  politics.  

If there is a hell, and I believe there is and there are many gates to hell, the distraction  and cruelty of social media is the one most crowded now.

[serpentsapple]

(This post includes major spoilers for The Grisha Trilogy and the Shades of Magic series.)

@dykeblight replied to our introductory post with the following:

alright bud since u decided to put this in the main tags of the books ur critiquing ur ready to hear my take on this. first of all the wording in this post is pretentious as hell and it bothered me all thru out reading it. second of all, let’s lay some shit down: the only books ive read discussed in this post are adsom and tgt, and while i agree that tgt isn’t the most radically feminist book series out there, i have to ask: why are u focused on women writing this? why is this post generalizing

horrible male authors but name dropping female ones? alinas journey was largely about her realizing that she could make her own choices. about her not needing to be queen or supreme ruler or some shit. about how she could literally settle down with the worlds most boring dude and still be happy. anyways, beyond that: adsom. first of all, whenever someone pulls the “not like other girls” card for lila, i have to pull the “she’s genderfluid” card. it wasn’t Explicitly stated in the series, and v

has expressed regret for that, so it’s probably going to be more obvious in the next series. also, adsom is very much a period piece. you couldn’t be a woman in the early nineteenth century doing what lila did without like, yknow, *not being a woman.* the threat she got on that first ship— a period piece! if it was a male author, then that’s gross. but it’s not, a woman wrote it! lila also proceeded to burn the whole goddamn ship down. sometimes authors don’t want to write traditionally feminine

characters!!! sometimes women want to write about what THEY can relate to! and ve schwab, as a queer woman, probably did that. so now we come back to the question of WHY are you calling out only female authors for this? you could have accomplished the same goal by just including books and authors that you deemed Respectable. not to be that bitch, but there was literally no reason for you to post this lmfao. i think we should first tackle the issue that is men having access to keyboards, and

maybe then we can broaden our horizons by critiquing everything women do thats decidedly not perfect.                            

We created this blog to discuss these topics, so we welcome other opinions and interpretations!

To reiterate our goal and perhaps clarify... male authors already receive enough publicity and analysis - to the point they eclipse, at times, their female peers, even when it comes to writing female characters. How wonderful of them to treat fictional women as fellow human beings! (How shameless of others to treat them as their personal sexual fantasy!) Yet we would like to hear what women have to say about themselves. It is why we focus exclusively on their works.

Furthermore, we believe these works as worthy of analysis as any text written by a man. And it is precisely because of this conviction - their books potentially as grandiose, as mediocre as any man’s - that we will not refrain from criticising them. To treat them differently would be implicitly agreeing with the notion they aren’t as intellectually engaging as men’s writings.

Moreover, we are not advocating for “feminist” books from women. In fact, we dislike this qualifier: too often misattributed, rarely useful, always commercial. We desire convincing female characters, as talented as they are flawed, as just as they can be immoral. Thus, while we have grown tired of uncreative, unnecessary sexism in fantasy, we are not expecting perfect little militants in every story. We expect to be moved and stunned, to be left inspired or reflecting on what we read.

I hope this has cleared up our intent with the blog. Now, for the specific series discussed...

While I could see this be Bardugo’s aim for Alina’s journey, I disagree with it being well executed. Narratively speaking, I do not think Alina was treated fairly and was able to make true choices. Throughout all three books, Alina remained unobservant and somewhat self-centered, never challenging the affirmations of others and instead regarding them as truth. Let’s take the example of the Darkling: she accepts his supposed initial good intentions and views him, to the very end, as some kind of lost and anguished “boy”. Yet that isn’t what the text shows - on the contrary, the Darkling is a hollow character that spent centuries sitting on his behind, doing nothing for his fellow Grisha. Alina is never given the chance to realise this and reevalute what happened to her.

Beyond this, I feel like Alina’s journey was contrived from the start. Bardugo does not allow her to see beyond the words of others, nor does she allow her to actually grow. Alina’s crush on Mal and her fixation on remaining with him - despite him disliking what she is! - stems from a child’s anxiety and solitude. Instead of becoming her own woman, making her own choices and yes, having to face losing relationships, Alina regresses to the safety of her childhood, powerless and normal, just like Mal. Let us remember that, to remain with him, she sealed her powers within herself, endangering her health! So symbolically, it is a slap in the face: just when she embraced her powers - meaning letting go of her fears, of Mal -, she loses it all and go back to square one.

This is why I don’t find Alina’s journey satisfying. Even if it hurts, I wish to see female characters confronted to their fears and their flaws, and grow from them*. That is not what we witnessed with Alina. And: why is it that female characters must be “depowered”? Why does the Darkling (and Ilya Morozova) get to keep his immense powers, must live with his guilt, yet Alina loses every and any scrap of magic? Why is she punished for her greed so much, when she hardly is the greediest? (This echoes also Genya’s “punishment”, so heavily tied to her being a beautiful woman and beauty being, in Bardugo’s world, a key quality for women. Nikolai’s monstruous transformation is cruel but never specifically targeted at his sex.)

Why is it female characters only whose “happy” ending involve going back to their boyfriend’s house, complete with potential children? In a fantasy world, is it the best we can offer to these characters? Why does “making her own choice” usually involve them being unambitious and - I am barely caricaturing - happy housewives? Where are the female characters being greedy, powerful to the point of madness, and fascinatingly ruthless? Where are the genius, the good but scheming inventors and princesses? Where are the female Darklings and the female Nikolais?

Yes, it may not be Alina’s story and that’s alright. But reading the story she received, I could not help wondering: is it truly her story, or is it her story in a narrative unfair to women?

As for Lila... what Schwab stated confusingly in interviews or twitter threads cannot be used to analyse the text itself, though it may help. In this case, it holds a very different perspective from what she may affirm outside of it, so let’s keep close to what she wrote.

I disagree that it is a period piece. Her series is firmly set in a fantasy version of our world, with four alternate but equally real Londons, and with interactions between them that differentiate her England from ours. She chose to keep this England similar to ours, so the departure from it could be obvious; she chose, again, to have Lila threatened with rape by sailors even in Red London, her full invention. She chose, still, to never mention the miserable reality of lots of poor women like Lila in our England - namely, prostitution. She picked what suited her, as authors do, yet could not come up with any other plot than sexual assault. That she is a woman does not excuse her utter lack of imagination on that front! I find the notion that female characters are condemned to sexual threats depressing, on top of insulting towards authors who still strive to be creative.

And this is all ignoring what Schwab forced her other female characters to endure, which is sexual slavery, somewhat coerced pregnancies and social isolation, plus being sexist caricatures and butchered so men could be sad about it. In that context, what is Schwab exactly saying about women, if even her heroine is misogynistic and desperately trying to escape this reality? If Lila isn’t a woman - which she is in the text, she never denies being one, she only affirms being different, meaning a full human being! -, does that mean women’s place is in caricature and distress and death? If she is, then must they reject their womanhood and deride other women to be in the spotlight?

And this is all, again, ignoring that Schwab who, yes, admitted wanting to write a female character she wished to see in fiction, that resembled her... had Lila’s whole development derailed in favour of male characters. Lila’s ambition and excessiveness vanished in a third book dedicated to temptation! Lila’s anger and recklessness receded in front of Holland, all so we could learn about his sad backstory. Which involved, as salt to the wound, the stereotypes of a greedy girlfriend and the ever failing mother Schwab is so fond of.

Our post never suggested that women should not write non traditionally feminine women. Rather, that would be quite refreshing! I would love to read about these women that we hardly see.

Is it what Schwab wrote, though? Lila indeed crossdresses and appears androgynous enough to sometimes pass as a man (not always, in a manner that is most convenient to the author). Yet: she constantly mocks other women for being vapid, gossiping, feminine, in a word weak. Yet: Schwab has her, in the second book, attend a ball dressed femininely and feeling insecure about it, all to state she is - quoting! - “not most girls” and have Kell, her love interest, compliments her. She has the happy tomboy reaffirmed as able to be feminine and beautiful that way! How is that not depressing for every woman and girl who never want to be feminine? Why did Schwab choose to have her in a dress instead of a suit, like Lila would probably have preferred? Why did Schwab choose to strictly divide women and men into two categories, dress-wearing and not-dress-wearing? Why is Lila alone in her plight as an androgynous woman? Why didn’t this fantasy world have women and men dressed in a way they felt comfortable with?

This isn’t a period piece. Schwab was free to make that choice... and she did not. I would add, too, that women in real life have always struggled and fought against misogyny. They were women and they were still complex human beings and they still tried to live as comfortably as they could. Sometimes they failed, yes, because society wouldn’t want them to. But women like Lila have existed, and behaved like her, and dressed like her, and dreamed as big as her. Why should not we expect as much of fiction, then?

Sidenote: I am especially critical of that awful “tomboy turns into a lady” trope that fandom will seize it and run. It is disheartening to see countless edits and fanarts of Lila depicting her as feminine instead of androgynous as she was written, and often in feminine clothing at that. So if even the narrative later ends up confirming it...

*Or perhaps spiral down, willingfully blind. Alina’s story isn’t supposed to be a tragedy, however, so this does not apply here.

(If you don’t mind, I would like to hear why you found the post’s wording pretentious?)

[ladyoflightandreason]

The War on Drugs is a Failure

In US history the two largest spikes in the murder rate have happened during eras of drug prohibition. The first spike occurred from 1920 to 1933 during the prohibition of alcohol. The second from 1970-1990 when Nixon declared the war on drugs. From the very start, the war on drugs has been about suppressing the poor and the marginalized. And, even if it was about eliminating drug use and all the horrible issues related to it; such as addiction, mental health disease, poverty, and violence, it has proven a failure in stopping those as well. Instead, the war on drugs has worsened these problems causing more chaos, pain, addiction, and death. The war on drugs and drug prohibition as a whole has been completely ineffective at reaching its goals of eliminating drug use and the negative effects associated with it. 

As ingrained as drug laws seem today, it was only in 1875 when San Francisco passed the nation’s first anti-drug law. The law wanted to stop the spread of opium dens and banned the practice of smoking opium. A federal law accompanied the San Francisco law, banning anyone of “Chinese origin” to bring opium into the country. The racist excuses didn’t end, the targeting of cocaine followed suit in 1909 when rumors began to spread that black men were getting high on cocaine and as a result were raping white women. These rumors allowed a mass hysteria to sweep the nation and anti-cocaine laws followed suit. Five years later in 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Act passed. While the HNA didn’t outright ban drugs such as cocaine, cannabis, and heroin, it expanded the government's ability to tax and regulate them. The goal being to tax drugs to the point of nonexistence. However, despite the HNA, cannabis still remained popular especially among the jazz and swing scene in the 1920s and 30s. At this point, Harry Anslinger, head of the Bureau of Narcotics and notorious for being racist even in the 1930s steps in. Anslinger warned the nation that jazz and marijuana created an opportunity for blacks to rise above the rest; and that it induced madness in Hispanic immigrants leading them to commit violence against whites. Then in 1937, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act for the purposes of raising the prices of marijuana making it even more inaccessible. The same trends of reactionary backlash are shown in the 1960s and 1970s, amidst a variety of social movements but mainly the civil rights, and anti-war movement. These movements caused the rightwing who were unwilling to acquiesce to any of the demands to crack down on drugs which they knew would harm those communities. John Erlichman an assistant to the Nixon administration, even admitted in 2016 in an article by Dan Baum for Harper’s Magazine that racism and suppression of opposition to the Nixon administration was the reason why they further agitated the war on drugs. Stating,  “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities….Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.” From the very beginning, drug prohibition existed to suppress a society’s underclass. While there are numerous supporters with good intentions the unpleasant roots do not simply disappear. Thus, supporting prohibition ignores the history of ruthless attacks against minorities and contradicts America’s values such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Racist origins and intentions aside, even if the war on drugs started out by attempting to lower drug use and by extension to create a healthier society, it still would have resulted in a massive disaster. Simply banning drugs doesn’t stop people from using them. The perfect example of this is alcohol prohibition. While it is true that alcohol consumption dropped significantly in 1921 from about 0.8 gallons to 0.2 gallons, the rate sharply rose in 1922 to 0.8 gallons and continued on an increasing trend through the 1920s. Prohibition failed at lowering alcohol consumption for most of its duration and made the alcohol more potent. This is due to the Iron Law of Prohibition by Richard Cohen which states that the more strict the law enforcement, the more potent a substance becomes. Prior to prohibition Americans spent a falling share of their income on alcohol and purchased higher quality and weaker drinks. They also spent similar amounts of money on both beer and spirits. However, after Prohibition spirits replaced beer as the drink of choice for almost all consumption and production of alcohol. Hard liquor and spirits are more potent than beer and wine which made it easier to hide and transport. Liquor and spirits could also be sold to greater amounts of people. The largest cost in selling an illegal good is avoiding detection by the authorities. Weaker products like beer were too bulky and indiscrete. As a result of the law, the prices of beer rose more drastically than that of brandy and spirits (700, 433, and 270 percent respectively). Beer consumption and production all but disappeared with the exception of homemade beers. However, after prohibition was repealed total expenditure on distilled spirits as a percentage of total alcohol sales severely dropped and people returned to drinking beer and other milder forms of alcohol. The lesson gleaned from this experiment gone wrong is that prohibition is completely ineffective at reducing drug abuse and addiction. Prohibition is completely counterintuitive because rather than stopping people from using drugs it makes drugs more potent and more addictive which increases drug use. 

Black markets are like all markets, the profit motive is king, which means drug dealers want the biggest bang for their buck. Especially when the largest cost of buying and selling drugs on the black market are the social and legal consequences. In order to get the best deal, drug dealers must satisfy the demand of as many consumers and create new ones without getting caught. This means that they have a financial incentive to increase the potency of the drugs because stronger drugs are easier to hide and transport thus lowering the social and legal risks. Along with lowering the costs, more potent drugs are able to meet the demand of more consumers than weaker drugs. Take the example of alcohol, while a gallon of beer can only be sold to two people, a gallon of spirits can be sold to ten people. The seller makes more money selling spirits to ten people than only selling beer to two people. In the situation of transporting the drugs since beer is bulkier and satisfies less demand, there is more of a legal and social incentive to produce and distribute spirits. However, the Iron Law of Prohibition doesn’t only apply to distributors it also applies to the consumer. Take the example of a college football game, stadiums typically ban alcohol, as a result in order college students who are typically beer drinkers now become hard-liquor drinkers. Since it's easier to sneak in liquor in a flask than it is beer bottles which are heavier and less discrete. While there certainly is a problem with drinking and alcoholism in the US, prohibition is simply not the solution. Drug Prohibition forces drug use and distribution to occur under a black market which creates more addictive and potent drugs. The results of Prohibition merely exacerbate the overdose crisis and line the pockets of drug lords. 

The War on Drugs is perhaps one of the largest scams in US history. According to the Center for American Progress, the federal government has spent an estimated 1 trillion dollars on the war on drugs, increasing every day since the 1970s. From 2015 the government has spent more than 9.2 million dollars every day to incarcerate people with drug offenses alone. The federal government isn’t the only party that spends outlandish amounts of money on drug enforcement. In 2015 alone states spent about 7 billion dollars on incarcerating people on drug-related charges. Georgia spent about 78.6 million dollars just to incarcerate people of color on drug charges, an amount that is 1.6 times more than the amount it spent on treatment services for drug use. However, enforcement isn’t the only cost, what happens once the person convicted of drug charges gets released? Their employment and economic prospects are ruined. For example, the Cato Institute estimated that the cost of the diminished employment aspects of felons ranges from about 78-87 billion dollars. In total the war on drugs costs the US about 51 billion dollars annually. That is 51 billion dollars every year for a crusade that has done nothing but destroy the lives of millions, rob Americans of their freedom, and create countless unproductive members of society. Bear in mind that there are many better alternatives to using 51 billion dollars for a racist witch hunt, a great alternative would be ending homelessness which would only cost about 20 billion dollars. Having access to a shelter would make it easier for people to get a job since most job applications require an address. Having a home would also encourage people to live in a stable supportive community where there would be support for them to go to rehab. In an era with greater wealth inequality and a growing deficit, hunting people down for doing what they want with their bodies should be the last thing on the mind of the state. Especially a state that is well known for committing horrible atrocities to minorities and reinforcing institutions such as Jim Crow and slavery which continue to leave a lasting scar on millions of people. 

Aside from taking away the right of every American the liberty to do whatever they want with their body, the war on drugs also punishes thousands if not millions by locking them up in a cage if even caught with a single trace of a drug, even something as innocuous as weed. In 2018 the U.S arrested more than 1.6 million people for drug-related charges, of those arrested more than 1.4 million were for possession only, and of those arrested for possession about 608,000 of them were for marijuana possession. However, the penalties are almost never distributed evenly, despite making up only about 13% of America’s population, blacks make up about 27% of drug arrests. Nearly 80% of people arrested for drug-related charges in federal prisons and 60% in state prisons are black or Latino. Prosecutors were also more likely to pursue mandatory minimum sentences for blacks than whites. In 2011 of those who received a mandatory minimum, 38% were black and 31% were Latino. However, despite unequal enforcement blacks and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates yet black people face harsher punishments if caught using drugs. The war on drugs is nothing more than an excuse to deny America’s problem with systemic bigotry. Rather than solving the problems arising from systemic racism, the war on drugs associated minority communities with drugs and poor behavior instead of actually solving these problems at their root cause. 

However, has locking up people for drug offenses actually reduced drug use and crime? The answer is no, drug overdoses have skyrocketed since the 1980s. The drug abuse rate has remained stagnant since the 1970s at 1.3 percent despite US spending on drug control significantly increasing since the 70s. The Center for American Progress adds that incarceration has shown to have had a negligible impact on drug abuse rates and in fact are linked with higher rates of overdose and mortality. Prisoners in the first two weeks upon release faced a mortality rate that was 13 times higher than the general population. The leading cause of death among these people is overdose. Incarceration is a traumatic experience for most people. In prison, violence is a constant presence by both inmates and guards. Solitary confinement a punishment so torturous that it’s been called out by the UN, and has been proven to induce a variety of mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, psychosis, self-harm, and suicide. Upon release, all opportunities for decent employment are nonexistent, as are paths to being able to enroll in higher education, and not being able to live in public housing or to be able to buy a home. All of these factors create the perfect conditions for addiction and drug use. Contrary to popular opinion the substance itself only plays about a 20% role in addiction. The Office of the Surgeon General found that only 17.7% of nicotine patch wearers stopped smoking. While 20% is still significant it nonetheless shows that chemical hooks aren’t the overwhelming reason why people are addicted and that there are greater causes of addiction outside pharmacology. In regards, of the 80% gap the psychological state of the user is perhaps more influential than the chemical hooks. According to a study conducted by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente called the “Adverse Childhood Experiences Study” the scientists looked at ten different traumatic events that could happen to a child such as physical and sexual abuse to the death of a parent. Discovering that for each traumatic event the child’s chances of becoming an addicted adult increased 2-4 fold. They also found that nearly two-thirds of injection drug use was the result of childhood trauma. Addiction isn’t the result of bad morals it’s the result of pain. Of course people with pain will try to numb it whether it's as simple as taking an aspirin for a headache, drinking after work after a rough day, or injecting heroin to forget about a traumatic event. The only difference is that society condones the first two while tossing the third one in jail. By criminalizing people with substance abuse disorders society is criminalizing mental illness rather than treating it. Therefore, when society throws these people who already deal with unbearable amounts of pain and which resort to self-medication with illicit drugs, they are not getting rid of the problem, they are aggregating it by creating more suffering for the person who is already in pain. 

The War on Drugs has been a disaster of epic proportions from locking up millions of people and ostracizing drug users, to stripping Americans of their liberty to do as they please with their body. The War on Drugs dehumanizes drug addicts who most likely faced some sort of traumatic event in their life and further exacerbates the problem by adding more trauma via incarceration and the denial of support upon release. All of this added pain makes the susceptible person more likely to self-medicate. Since safe versions of the drugs are gone because of prohibition they have to rely on shady dealers peddling products with questionable quality and deadly potency as a result of the Iron Law of Prohibition. And if they get caught with the substance they’re thrown into prison which creates a downward spiral. Prohibition regards drug users as below human and only worthy of contempt. It is only with care and community that help people get over their problems. Thus, repealing drug prohibition would stop the stream of both non-problematic drug users and drug addicts being imprisoned. Thus encouraging people to seek medical help for their problems without the fear of law enforcement and it would leave the non problematic users in peace. While there certainly are many ways to go about the problem of drug abuse and the negative effects associated with it, prohibition is simply ineffective at reducing both and will continue to harm millions of people until society finally realizes the error of their ways. 

Bibliography

About the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study |Violence Prevention|Injury Center|CDCMinusSASstats. 3 Sept. 2020, cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/about.html.

“Against Drug Prohibition.” American Civil Liberties Union, aclu.org/other/against-drug-prohibition#:~:text=Drug%20Prohibition%20Creates%20More%20Problems%20Than%20It%20Solves,other%20serious%20social%20problems.%20Caught%20in%20the%20crossfire.

 Biedermann, Nils. How Prohibition Makes Drugs More Potent and Deadly | Nils Biedermann. 9 June 2017, fee.org/articles/how-prohibition-makes-drugs-more-potent-and-deadly/.

 Black News and Current Events from  African American Organizations, DogonVillage.Com. dogonvillage.com/african_american_news/Articles/00000901.html.

 Burrus, Trevor. “The Hidden Costs of Drug Prohibition.” Cato Institute, 19 Mar. 2019, cato.org/publications/commentary/hidden-costs-drug-prohibition.

 Coyne, Christopher J., and Abigail R. Hall. “Four Decades and Counting: The Continued Failure of the War on Drugs.” Cato Institute, 22 Sept. 2020, cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/four-decades-counting-continued-failure-war-drugs.

Dai, Serena. “A Chart That Says the War on Drugs Isn’t Working.” The Atlantic, 30 Oct. 2013, theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/chart-says-war-drugs-isnt-working/322592/.

 “Drug War Statistics.” Drug Policy Alliance, 2 Dec. 2020, drugpolicy.org/issues/drug-war-statistics.

 Elflein, John. “Deaths by Drug Overdose U.S. 1950-2017 | Statista.” Statista, 6 Nov. 2019, statista.com/statistics/184603/deaths-by-unintentional-poisoning-in-the-us-since-1950/.

 “End the War on Drugs.” American Civil Liberties Union, 9 July 2018, aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/sentencing-reform/end-war-drugs.

 Goldstein, Diane. “The Mischaracterized Relationship Between Drug Use and Homelessness.” Filter, 22 May 2020, filtermag.org/drugs-homelessness/.

 Hari, Johann. Chasing the Scream. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2015.

 “Housing First - National Alliance to End Homelessness.” National Alliance to End Homelessness, 24 Aug. 2020, endhomelessness.org/resource/housing-first/.

John Ehrlichman - Wikipedia. 26 Nov. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#:~:text=Drug%20war%20quote,-In%202016%2C%20a&text=You%20understand%20what%20I’m,we%20could%20disrupt%20those%20communities.

 Lopez, German. “How America Became the World’s Leader in Incarceration, in 22 Maps and Charts.” Vox, 11 Oct. 2016, vox.com/2015/7/13/8913297/mass-incarceration-maps-charts.

 Pearl, Betsy. “Ending the War on Drugs: By the Numbers - Center for American Progress.” Center for American Progress, 27 June 2018, americanprogress.org/issues/criminal-justice/reports/2018/06/27/452819/ending-war-drugs-numbers/#:~:text=Economic%20impact,more%20than%20%243.3%20billion%20annually.

 “Ending the War on Drugs: By the Numbers - Center for American Progress.” Center for American Progress, 27 June 2018, americanprogress.org/issues/criminal-justice/reports/2018/06/27/452819/ending-war-drugs-numbers/.

 “Race and the Drug War.” Drug Policy Alliance, 23 Sept. 2020, drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war.

 Rates of Drug Use and Sales, by Race; Rates of Drug Related Criminal Justice Measures, by Race | The Hamilton Project. 8 Oct. 2020, hamiltonproject.org/charts/rates_of_drug_use_and_sales_by_race_rates_of_drug_related_criminal_justice.

 Roberts, TJ. “Iron Law of Prohibition: The Case Against All Drug Laws.” The Advocates for Self-Government, 29 Oct. 2019, theadvocates.org/2019/05/iron-law-of-prohibition-the-case-against-all-drug-laws/.

 Staffing and BudgetLock. dea.gov/staffing-and-budget.

 Szalavitz, Maia. “Street Opioids Are Getting Deadlier. Overseeing Drug Use Can Reduce Deaths | Maia Szalavitz.” The Guardian, 3 June 2016, theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/26/street-opioids-use-deaths-perscription-drugs-fentanyl.

 “The State of Opioids.” Vera, 2 Dec. 2020, vera.org/state-of-justice-reform/2017/the-state-of-opioids.

 Thornton, Mark. “Alcohol Prohibition Was a Failure.” Cato Institute, 22 Sept. 2020, cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/alcohol-prohibition-was-failure.

[lowkeyassgard]

DAY 10 OF LOKI VS. EARTH: CONCERTS

Day 10 of Loki vs. Earth series and today Loki is very pissed off by attending a country concert.

One shot summary: After bailing Loki out of some serious trouble, Thor asks Loki to attend a concert with him.

Quarantine series summary:It’s going to be a series of fun and light hearted one shots to help readers and other writers get through this hard time. I made a a03 collection and a tumblr tag. To join just write a fun, soft, and/or light hearted one shot and post it to the collection @Quarantine_Series or tag it on tumblr as #quarantine series.

Word count: 900 words

Loki didn’t care much for music, He never understood why Midgardians would spend their time blasting loud obnoxious noises into their ears. Also, didn’t understand how they enjoyed it. He didn’t like it but since permanently residing on Midgard his brother Thor had found a love for it. He blasted it through their home and would dance around like a psycho. Loki thought Thor a fool for it.

Thor had been pestering Loki to attend a concert for the last few months. Loki had repeatedly said no but knew he would no longer be able to decline the offer. Loki had recently run into some trouble leading Thor to bailing him out. Literally. Loki was arrested for assault. He did nothing of the sort, but the police officer insisted that Loki had come at it. What had actually happened was that one-day Loki was walking down the road flipping his favorite blue knife and a police officer had stopped to question him. Loki was not a fan of this man tone and pointed his knife at the officer. Loki wasn’t going to stab him, but the officer said that he had to jump back to avoid being plunged in the gut. What a liar. Upon Loki’s arrest they confiscated the knives on him and threw him in a dirty dark cell.

He spent two whole days in the jail because the police department had no clue who Loki was and how to contact someone to bail him out, Loki wasn’t from Earth, so he did not have a fingerprint on file or even a social security card. The entire police department was perplexed by his existence because to their computer system Loki simply did not exist. Yet he did and he like all others will have to serve the time for his crime. On the second night of his confinement Loki astray projected to New Asgard and pleaded with his brother to free him. Sure, thing the next morning there Thor was with a big wad of cash to free him and recover his prized knives.

With that situation in mind Loki knew the next time Thor asked he would have to go. He did in fact owe his brother and how horrible could a concert be.

The dreaded ask came two days later. Loki was in his bed reading a book over astronomy. It was a calm and bright day. He was in a pleasant mood. He was until Thor came waltzing into his singing one of those songs he was always blasting.

“Oh brother! Do you recall when I got you out of that sticky situation?

“How could I forget brother. It has only been a week.”

“Oh, how time flies when you are having fun. Speaking of fun how about you and me go to a concert tonight. There will be alcohol.” Thor emphasized the last part. Loki wasn’t fond of Midgardian alcohol, but something was better than nothing. Since Loki didn’t have any form of identification he could not lawfully buy alcohol even he was thousands of years past the required age. The people would just not believe it. So, the only time he received alcohol was when he stole it, much frowned about by Thor and Valkyrie, and when he went to an event that served it to all guests.

“Ah yes brother. I do owe you so just this time I will join you.”

“YES!” Thor practically jumped with joy. Loki knew that Thor loved hanging out with him, but they just didn’t like the same things. Loki liked raves and clubs meanwhile Thor loved campfires and concerts. They were like polar opposites and yet they still loved each other dearly. When Loki had no one, he had Thor. Thor was the only one that gave him chance after chance and saw the good in him. So even though he knew he would hate every minute of it if this concert would make his brother happy he would attend.

“Alright Loki. Be ready by six and where something that isn’t black.”

At a quarter to six Loki walked out of his bedroom in a olive green shirt and grey denim jeans. It was the only thing he owned that wasn’t black or Asgardian custom clothes. He felt like a teenager that was trying to be cool. He wasn’t going to impress anyone, so he swallowed his pride and put on a smile for his brother.

Thor on the other hand was absolutely ecstatic. He was in a plaid button up shirt blue denim jeans and boots. He was grinning ear to ear. The minute Loki came out Thor gave a big holler of excitement and practically dragged Loki out of their home to take a truck into the city.

They arrived at the concert venue within the next forty five minutes and immediately Loki wished he had said no. Just from the look of the people entering the venue he would be miserable. Everyone entering was dressed in cowboy hats and boot. The men and the women were plaid shirts and both were equally acting loud and obnoxious.

As Loki walked with Thor toward the entrance Loki groaned. The person taking the tickets was a blonde chick with a plaid shirt tied at her breast level. She was in cutoff denim shorts that showed the bottom of her undergarments. She was loud. Too loud. Loki wanted to throw his ticket at her and tell her to shut up before she found her mouth bound. Instead he calmly watched as Thor handed the tickets to her.

“HOWDY THERE BOYS. YALL READY FOR SOME FUN”

“No.” Loki simply said. Thor was beside him talking about how excited he was and had been looking forward to this all day.

Loki left his brother at the ticket stand to push his way into the venue. He thought maybe it would be better once inside, but it was not,

Thor had left out the part that this was a hillbilly concert. Loki wasn’t even trying to be offensive. A person that walked by him held a sign promptly stating that it was a hillbilly concert. The sign read “Hillbillies get down too.”

Everyone I mean everyone looked like they should be in the wild west. Loki didn’t usually complain about humans showing off a little skin but now he was. Their attire and the way they presented themselves repulsed Loki.

He pushed himself thought the crowd of sweaty exposed bodies to find the bar. Once there he was even more repulsed. They just had beer. Cheap piss. This was their suck ass excuse for alcohol. The whole reason why he was here. Loki remembering, he was doing for this Thor laid down a few bills and took one of the beers. He took one swig of the beer and spit it out on the ground.

“Real men drink beer.” A woman sitting at the bar scorned at him. He reached for his knives to realize he left them at home.

‘Real women know not to pester a man that could easily destroy them.” Loki spat at her. Pardon his language but fuck her. If he had his knives he would hold them at her throat until she cried out in mercy. He might not want to take over the world anymore, but he would not be disrespected.

Not being able to stand the taste of this piss he threw the half full can on the ground and removed the lighter from his pocket and set it on fire.

“Oh, brother there you are!” Thor said before realizing that Loki had set a can of beer on fire and had attracted a crowd.

“Please excuse my brother. Its not a concert without a little spilt beer am I right?” Thor said before grabbing Loki by the arm and dragging him to the other side of the room.

“Loki, what did I tell you about burning things?”

“Do not belittle me brother. That Midgardian piss made a fool out of me and I smite its existence as punishment.”

“Just stand here and have some fun. The concert is starting soon.” Thor said before taking a swig out of his own can of fermented piss.

The concert did start but Loki did not have fun.

The music was horrendous. It was loud. Obnoxious loud. The people let out yeehaws like they were farm animals. At one point the man beside Loki made the comment that he loved this music which Loki returned by screaming “THIS IS NOT MUSIC.”

Worse than the music was the dancing that followed. The dancing looked like an exorcism ritual. The people shook their bodies and bent them in ways that should mot be normal. They thrashed against each other and yet out shared simultaneous hollers. Loki felt as though he was watching a whole crowd of people possessed by a spirit and this country music was expelling them of their farm demon.

As the night went on the crowd got worse. Even his brother began to thrash around and swing his beer in the air. Later Loki would ask what happened and Thor would just say he was overcome by the music. Overcome by the music? The only thing Loki was overcome by was the urgent need to bleach his eyes and wipe his memories of this event.

When the crowd began to sway, Loki let out a groan. The people around him assumed he was joining them in their pleasure but he was not. Every time their shoulder pressed into his body he had to stop himself from grabbing them and snapping them in half.

At one point the stranger beside him bumped a little too hard into Loki taking him by surprise and knocking him to the concrete floor. That was loki last straw.

“I do not know what kind of hoe down throw down you people think this is hit if you so ever even think about touching my godly skin I will remove your bones from your body one by one.”

The people around him just stopped. They stopped dancing. The must stopped playing. The people all stopped to look at Loki.

“I am a god and I will not be disrespected and touched by you distasteful rowdy animals.”

Thor just watched in disbelief as his dear brother screamed at a venue of people.

“ I did my best to enjoy this time for the sake of my brother but you farm animals sad are just not worthy of my company.” With that Loki felt arms reach around him and he was picked up. A very large human carried him outside the venue and threw him on to the ground.

“Do you know who I am?” Loki screamed at the man.

“No and I do not care. Move another inch and I’m calling the cops.”

Loki was absolutely appalled that he was thrown out. He was even more appalled that Thor did not quickly come out to him. Instead loki spent the next 2 hours on the ground outside of the venue. When Thor finally came out he was completely hammered. . He was smiling and laughing to himself

“Brother. You are such a pain. Kicked out of a concert. If only mother and father could see this. They would laugh so hard they wept.”

Needless to say that Loki never attended a concert after that.

[plus-size-reader]

The Deal pt 2

King Alfred x Plus size!reader

Word Count: 1950 words

Warnings:none

Summary: Reader agrees to meet with the King of Wessex, under the condition that if she doesn’t like him, Bjorn will take her back home to Kattegat? But what will King Ivar think of that?

———————————————————————————————————

The evening itself wasn’t meant to be a punishment, though as Lagertha finished lacing the back of this stupid dress, you felt as though you may die. 

Never in your life had you worn a garment so constricting and infuriating. 

It was torture. 

You were a warrior, a fighter that needed as much range of motion as possible and yet, here you were in a corset with a skirt down to the floor. It just wasn’t practical for the life that you led. 

However, you assumed that good christian woman rarely engaged in battle the way that you did, so they didn’t need to be able to actually move. 

For whatever reason. 

“This is all idiotic” you bellowed, huffing as she finished tying the strings. Lagertha laughed, taking in your words with as much grace as she could, though the idea of what you were going through made her physically ill. 

Never in her life could she imagine a daughter of Ragnar Lothbrok, married off to some puny king in england. It was insulting to his image. 

For a moment, she considered Gyda, her darling daughter who had been taken from her way before her time. 

She would have never allowed her to be married off to some christian, far away from her home and her family. 

Still, it wasn’t her call to make. Ubbe had made a deal in order to get what he wanted, and nothing was going to change that...not even as much begging as you’d been doing since you found out. 

“I agree, but you know your brother, he can be so stubborn” she teased, earning a laugh from you. It was likely one of the last times she would hear it, but she enjoyed it all the same. 

The two of you’d had an interesting relationship since the death of your mother. For a while, you shared in Ivar’s opinion of wanting to kill her to get revenge for your mother’s murder but the more time you spent together, the more you understood. 

If you were in the position Lagertha was, you would have done the same thing. 

You had come to terms with it, but this was something else entirely. 

You were talking about giving up your freedom, your identity, and your life. 

For the first time in a long time, you wanted Ivar to be here so that he could talk some sense into them, or fight for you. There was no way he would ever make a deal like this with the saxon’s. 

Especially not one that forced you to give up the gods. 

“Unfortunately, he’s a lot like Ragnar in that way” you agreed, thinking about your father as you looked in the mirror, admiring the features you shared with him, as well as the ones you got from your mother. 

You could see his face, shining in your eyes, and that was all you needed to give you the strength to get through this. 

If all went well tonight, you’d be on a ship with Bjorn, headed back to Kattegat with all this at your back. 

You just had to survive tonight. 

~ 

Your footsteps made funny sounds as you walked down the corridor toward the dining hall. The shoes you had on were far too tight on your feet and made your toes feel odd, not to mention the fact that you hardly knew how to walk in them. 

Your dress about got caught under your feet with each unsure step, and you had already tripped against Bjorn three times as he led you toward where the king was waiting. 

He had graciously agreed to escort you, so that you didn’t actually die on your way there. 

Heels just weren’t something your people ever had the misfortune of wearing and right now, you would kill for your boots. 

“Just breath, smile, and be nice” he whispered, opening the door for you. 

You turned to reply but found him stopped at the door...leaving you to walk the rest of the way on your own. 

The idea frightened you, but you weren’t going to let the saxon king know that. Instead, you picked your head up and walked forward with as much grace as you could muster, which wasn’t much at all. 

In fact, you made it about a foot before your dress got caught under your foot and you fell to the ground in a mess of limbs and fabric.

Everyone in the room was unsure of what to do for a moment as you tried to gather yourself. There wasn’t really protocal for something like this, and Alfred, for one was lost. 

It wasn’t until his mother urged him to help you that he stepped down from the throne and offered you a hand. 

“Are you okay, M’lady?” he asked, shocked further still when you ignored him, your attention focused on your feet. 

Without missing a beat, you plucked the offensive article from your foot and tossed it across the room, followed by the other one. The action left you barefoot, and allowed for you to stand on your own. 

“I’m not a lady, call me Y/N, or nothing” you ordered, standing without hesitance and taking the hand he offered you. You shook it once, then dropped it to his side. 

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that Bjorn was laughing behind you. 

Everyone was understandably shocked by your behavior, but said nothing. 

“Alright Y/N, thank you for joining me. Are you alright? That was quite the fall” He commented, trying to check on you, though you found insult in his word. 

You had lived through much worse than a little fall. This king really must have been even weaker than you thought. He was pathetic. 

“That was nothing, and I wouldn’t have done it, had it not been for those horrible things they put on my feet” You grumbled, taking in the faces of all the people around you. 

Their jaws were practically hanging open as they studied you. They thought you were closer to a wild animal than a human, you bet. You could see it on all their stupid, smug faces. 

They thought they were so much better than you and your people. How were you supposed to rule them if they wouldn’t even look at you without sneering. 

What kind of King would want a savage bride anyway? They must have thought he was out of his mind. 

“I do apologize for that, it’s tradition is all” he reasoned, as if that was supposed to somehow make it better. If you were following your traditions in courting a potential husband, there would have been a feast and a sacrifice…

Yet, there was no goat to be found? 

Why did you have to follow their silly traditions if they had no care for yours? It didn’t make any sense to you. 

“I understand, but I will not ever wear them again” you shrugged, as if it was as simple as breathing. Alfred knew one thing, you weren’t accustomed to being told what to do. 

Which was going to make this whole thing a lot more difficult for him. 

“And what if I could promise that you do not have to? Would you agree to have a meal with me then?” he asked, understanding that he was going to have to take a unique approach to this whole thing. 

Alfred already had enough trouble as it was talking to women, led alone women who didn’t understand half of what he was saying, and already didn’t like him. 

At least in Wessex he was the king, so there were certain elements of respect that had to be given to him at all times. But he wasn’t your king, and you didn’t revear him as such, so that respect wasn’t there. 

“I would agree, but only if there’s ale” you countered, a slight smile perking up around the corners of your mouth. 

It wasn’t much, but it was a start and Alfred could work with that. After all, this whole thing was just as new for him as it was for you and it would take some getting used to for both of you. 

~ 

You recognized a lot of the food at the table where you sat, and didn’t hesitate to fill a goblet full of wine as you waited for Alfred to talk to you about whatever it was he wanted to. 

That was the main difference between him and the viking. Viking men didn’t feel the need to fill the empty space ever time it presented itself. Instead, they allowed comfortable silence. 

Silence seemed to make the boy king anxious, as if it meant something bad was about to happen. He couldn’t just enjoy the peace that came with long radiating silence. 

He constantly insisted on talking. 

“So, how are you finding wessex so far?” he wondered, cutting a bit of veal on his plate, his attention focused there, though he occasionally looked up at you as he waited for you to answer. 

You weren’t a hundred percent sure how to answer his question, mostly because it was a stupid question. Wessex was nothing like what you were comfortable with, or where you were raised. 

The people were cold toward you and treated you like an outsider, and even still, you couldn’t leave. 

“I do not like it” you answered finally, just as blunt as the first time you spoke. 

It was amazing to him that you didn’t even hesitate when saying something like that. You acted as if it was always better to say what you were thinking, rather than what the socially acceptable answer was. 

In some ways, he envied that about you. 

“No? And why is that?” he wondered, his meal long forgotten as he focused more and more as the words that fell from your lips. 

Again, a stupid question on his part. 

“It is not my home. Just as if I was to take you across the sea to Kattegat. You would not like it because it is not your home” you reasoned, getting bored of talking about yourself. 

You found that men were most happy when they could talk about themselves and their accomplishment. If there was anything you wanted to get out of this conversation sooner, it would be for the king to be happy. 

Though...making him unhappy could result in him taking back his foolish deal with your brother, which would make you happy. 

If you could make him not want to marry you, the problem would solve itself. 

“Your people think you’re stupid, have you noticed that?” you asked, out of the blue. Your question shocked him, but all Alfred could do was nod. You had a point.

For quite some time, his people had seen him as nothing more than a boy, incapable of ruling over a body of people such as themselves. They thought he was a fool, an imbecile, and even you’d noticed. 

“Don’t feel bad, you’re only a boy...it isn’t their fault that you aren’t stronger, smarter or more intimidating” you continued, the insults springing from your tongue without issue. 

You weren’t worried about any sort of punishment or repercussion. As far as you were concerned, being forced to marry the man in front of you was the worst thing that could happen. 

“You’re right, All the things you’re saying about me are true” he started, momentarily shocking you before he continued. Of all the ways to react, this certainly was a choice. 

“That is why I need a strong, capable queen like yourself” he grinned...this was going to be a lot harder than you thought. 

[wolfpawn]

Life is a Game of Risks, Chapter 29

Chapter Summary - Tom begins his Christmas shopping before having Alexianna and Lily over for the evening.

TRIGGERS - Past domestic abuse, Past emotional abuse, Past sexual abuse.

Previous Chapter

Tags: @damalseer @hiddlesbitch1 @winterisakiller @theoneanna

Request if you wish to be tagged

Tom made sure no one of note saw him as he went into the toy store to get what was needed. He was present when Lily made her “Santa list” as well as other items that were shortlisted but scrapped as Alexianna had a firm rule, Lily could only ask Santa for three things. As a result, he knew what other things were on the list, Alexianna had said what was going to be from her, Daniel had given her money to get one from him as he would be working on the rig for Christmas, leaving Tom with the idea to get her the other item on the list.

It was the most expensive of the items on the list, but it was still extremely reasonably priced at a meagre sixty pounds, so he saw no issue. He ensured it was adequately concealed on his departure for fear that he was seen and Lily would find out what it was before Christmas.

He was right to be cautious, as there was indeed a few fans asking for photos as he made his way through the street back to his car, Lily’s present in hand. One or two made comments about the big Paw Patrol present bag, saying their kids/nieces/nephews were the same, others seemed less than impressed, but said nothing regards it.

With that done, he went about getting something for Alexianna. He wanted to get her something fancy or even extravagant. She was working hard, juggling their relationship, being a mother to Lily, her job and her schooling in some miraculous way. Tom often found himself wondering how she did it all. She assisted Lily with her learning to read and write, while also doing work and her own schooling. He sat watching as she had Lily on her lap colouring while she wrote a shopping list to get on the way home from work before collecting Lily from school the next day. She never put pressure on him, respecting his need to work and often space to deal with it. He knew she wore little jewellery, only a necklace she had gotten herself after Lily was born to signify the two of them, nothing else and he did not want to infringe on that. Then he considered a weekend away, just them, but he also knew she would be frantic about Lily, so he contacted Daniel to ask him when he would be back their direction, since he was certain the only one that she would permit take Lily for a night was her brother, but sadly, there was no way for him to tell just yet, as he had his own life in Scotland now, leaving Tom to try and figure out something. He thought of a gift voucher somewhere, but he was worried she would take that as a suggestion that what she had was not good enough. It was a minefield, and he was terrified of insulting her in one manner or another.

One thing Tom noticed was the sheer amount of women that now made up the inner circle of his life. Between his mother, his sisters, his niece, Alexianna and Lily, he was utterly surrounded. He had a few good male friends, but it was funny all the same how many women he had around him. As he bought the rest of his presents, he felt more confident of what to get her and proceeded to do so.

By the time he got everything done, he checked his watch and realised he was late getting home, having asked Alexianna and Lily over for the evening for dinner, with no time to cook, he thought it best to arrange a takeaway when he got there and texted Alexianna to tell her he was slightly delayed.

When he got to the house, he was smiling, having just passed Alexianna and Lily, who were a mere few houses away making their way to his home. ‘Good evening, ladies.’

‘Hi, Tom.’ Lily giggled. ‘You’re so silly.’

‘Good, that means I am making you laugh.’ Tom smiled, cuddling her as she rushed to him. When she pulled back, her mother came into his view more. ‘Hi.’ He looked at her in concern. ‘Are you…?’

‘I’m fine.’ She dismissed, though it was clear something was bothering her. He had spoken to her earlier in the day and everything seemed fine, so whatever it was more than likely occurred in the afternoon sometime. But he knew she never wanted to share her worries too much, be it because she was scared that she would frighten him off or because she did not want to let Lily realise something was bothering her, but either way, she was refusing to say anymore. ‘Good afternoon?’

‘Busy, I had to get a few things sorted.’ He smiled, his glance going to the car or a moment. ‘I did not get a chance to cook, so what about a pizza for dinner?’

‘Can you have one?’ Alexianna asked worriedly, knowing that Tom’s diet was restricted by his job.

‘So long as I do not stuff myself to beyond normal.’ He smiled, putting his arm around her and giving her a small kiss.

In the time since their trip to Suffolk, Alexianna had become slightly more lenient with what Lily saw between them. She had seemingly watched Jack and Emma’s interactions, as well as Sarah and Yakov’s around Lily and indeed Sophie to gauge what would be deemed an acceptable level of interaction between adults in a relationship. It was hard for her because part of her was saying it was not right. There had been an argument as a result of her shying away from Tom with Lily present. Tom stating that such actions implied to Lily that there was a reason for Alexianna to shy away from him and in turn, that he was someone to worry about. Alexianna was forced to concede that it was true and allowed some contact, a kiss or a hug be visible in front of Lily, something Tom and Emma on another occasion, insisted would teach Lily what healthy and good adult relationships looked like, and would set her up with what to expect when she was older. Though Alexianna was none too pleased at considering her daughter as a teenager with a partner, she accepted it was true and that she needed to be more understanding of it.

‘When she is gone to bed, will you tell me what is bothering you?’

‘I am just tired, Tom.’ She dismissed again.

‘Lexi?’ She could not look him in the eye for a moment, and when she did, he could see there was indeed something bothering her. ‘Please.’

‘I just am worn out today, and then someone made a stupid comment.’ She explained.

‘Okay, thank you, Darling.’ He kissed her again. ‘We will talk more later, alright?’

She nodded slightly. ‘So long as I do not render unconscious after my food.’ She smiled. ‘Where will we order from?’ She smiled, feeling somewhat better having confessed some of her woes to Tom, and wanting to be happy around Lily.

Grateful to have gotten her to open up slightly, Tom smiled too, amazed at the lengths Alexianna was willing to go to to ensure Lily had a happy home environment, even if all she wanted to do was crawl in a corner and remain there. ‘Dominos?’

Alexianna scoffed slightly, ‘That is hardly fine dining.’

‘I never said we were going to do such.’ Tom grinned. ‘Are you against it?’

‘Hell, no. I am all for it.’

‘Then don’t complain about a delicious dinner,’ He chuckled.

‘Meateor for me please, tomato base, not barbeque.’ Alexianna asked. ‘And Madame will have some of mine.’

‘Okay, and sides?’ Tom took note.

‘As long as there are wedges, we’re happy.’

‘I will organise that, you get Lily sorted.’ Tom gently rubbed her arm in a show of affection before Alexianna did as he suggested.

With the food eaten and Tom brought up to date on Lily’s life, courtesy of an enthusiastic Lily, she was finally ushered to bed, with Tom as her storyteller, as often happened when they stayed at his before Alexianna and Tom were left to an evening to themselves again.

‘How about we sit down and watch a film?’ Tom suggested as he wrapped his arms around her waist as Alexianna dried the last of the dishes.

‘In a minute, I just want to sort these.’ She leant into his embrace.

‘What’s wrong, tell me.’ He pleased, wanting her to feel better.

She considered not telling him for a moment before conceding that he would probably badger her until she told him. ‘I am getting comments, at work, and at college.’

‘About us?’ She nodded. ‘And?’

‘I knew it would happen, but what they are saying, who thinks it’s okay to go up to a person and say these things? Do you remember when we were growing up, you never dared to speak to people like that?’

‘It is the modern-day, people overuse social media and hide behind little icons on a screen and say all sorts of things that they always thought but knew to never say in public, or else they enjoy the reaction and attention they get from saying these horrible things and then forget that they are no longer behind the onscreen persona, or indeed forget that this not acceptable human interaction or that their right to say what they want excuses them from ramifications.’ Tom explained, pulling her close to him. ‘So, what are they jabbering about. You sleeping with me to get ahead? You’re using me in some other way.’

‘Among other things. I think the words “Sugar Daddy” were used at some point.’

Tom shook his head with a look of distaste on his face. ‘It makes me sound old.’

‘The other is that Lily is yours.’

‘We had those accusations a few times now, that is hardly the most insulting, is it?’ He was unsure whether or not he should be insulted

‘No, that one doesn’t tend to bother me, I mean,’ She smiled slightly. ‘Of all the men to be her father, I wish you were a candidate.’

‘Then what about it?’ She looked at her hands. ‘Lexi?’

‘Apparently, I am punishing you, for the whole Taylor Swift thing, and you are being forced to take me back and I am holding you to ransom with our daughter. I should just stop being vindictive, that you deserve a decent woman, that I was jealous of Swift and that is why I forced your break up.’ She stated, her voice low as she recalled the nasty words she had been forced to listen to. ‘I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, but...she was actually an employee there, and if I went off on her….’

‘You look bad and get punished,’ Tom nodded, understandingly. ‘I am so sorry, Lexi.’

‘You did nothing wrong.’

‘No, but you are working so hard, for you and Lily and my part in this is why people are being like this to you, you don’t deserve it.’

‘It’s just hard because to give the same back, I am bringing myself, and in turn us down.’

‘“Us”?’

‘Well, yes. I mean, it doesn’t say much for us if I am acting like someone from Shameless, screaming at people like trash.’

‘No,’ Tom agreed, kissing the top of her head. ‘Thank you for keeping your cool.’

‘Well, I would be trying for the wrong career if I could not keep my cool.’ She laughed.

Tom chuckled. ‘That’s true.’ He kissed her again. ‘I got Lily’s Christmas present today.’

‘Tom, don’t be worrying about things like that.’

‘Hey, you said I am allowed get her something at Christmas. I love spoiling Sophie and I want to spoil Lily when I am allowed to, so please.’

‘I just don’t want you to feel like we want things from you.’

‘I don’t think that. I think you both deserve nice things.’

‘Please Tom, I don’t want anything off you.’

‘I know, that is why I want to give you something because you don’t expect it. You were always like that, I remember you giving out to Emma.’

‘Those were Spice Girls tickets, completely over the top.’

‘You went though.’

‘It was the Spice Girls, of course, I went, I am not an idiot.’ Alexianna laughed before smiling at the memory. ‘It was so much fun.’

‘I still cannot Mum let Sarah take you both.’

‘We were eleven and Sarah was eighteen and we were well behaved. You on the other hand….’

‘We won’t talk about me.’

‘And your little stunt with the Drama club and getting drunk when….’

‘You know way too much.’ Tom commented.

‘Sounds like a threat when you say it like that.’ Alexianna laughed.

‘Come on, let’s relax.’

[alexdanversfbi]

Supergirl, Sanvers Fandom and LGBTQ - in response to Twitter Posts.

I’m making a post to try & clarify some things since I made a post, & subsequent issues that have arisen from it. Forewarning, this is going to be quite lengthy but I hope you will read it carefully and fully.

Firstly, I’m a transgender man. I’m in my early 50’s. I’m happily married.

My wife (who now ID’s as bi, but for a long time until my transition, was lesbian, as I had lived as well), quite honestly have been involved in the LGBT community & push for representation and law changes longer than many Sanvers fans have been alive.

I say this to make the point, not to say it makes us better at it, or everyone needs to listen only to us - but that to say we’ve seen no representation, to poor & patchy representation, to representation starting to improve.

Both in laws of the land & on screen.

We’ve faced homophobia & seen transphobia up front and personal since childhood. My in-laws were a staunch allies for lgbt people. My mother in law was a beard to a friend of hers, as they went to underground parties simply so he could date another man. Sadly, my own family were less supportive, & while I wasn’t kicked out of my home, I didn’t get unconditional love & support either. While my father is now dead, I’m still facing it today with a mother who is terrible at acknowledging transgender me.

It all has a long way to go - and it might seem glacial to some, but in the decades we’ve seen it going on, there is far more good than there ever was. It’s still mixed in with the bad though. But more on that later.

I got into the SG fandom late.

Really late!

As late as about 3 months ago, because as a surprise for my wife, I bought her tickets for Ultimates specifically to see Flo as an early wedding anniversary present (it’s in May). She had watched the show (although had stopped before the end of S3 after the debacle of Sanvers and the ridiculous storylines being assigned to Alex). I hadn’t even done that.

However, she still talked about it, but because of what happened with Sanvers had said it wasn’t worth me watching it (she had watched it separately from me for a number of different reasons), because of how bad it was.

So I didn’t bother. Why watch something that was going to destroy any good it gave.

My wife though did say how there were (up until the shitstorm of S3) parallels to Maggie’s (& to Alex’s) stories to another program we did watch on UK TV Bad Girls, and Nikki Wade with Helen Stewart. Nikki was kicked out of the family home for being gay at 16. Was an out lesbian. Helen had only been with men, met Nikki, questioned her relationships - and eventually, unlike SG, they gave them the happy ending.

She also remarked how Flo had left for good reasons because of the way Maggie was written beyond the arc of girlfriend to Alex.

Remember, I wasn’t around the fandom, and to be honest, although my wife is a fan of Sanvers & Flo - she wasn’t really around social media either, particularly at the time Flo left. She hadn’t followed any Sanvers fans at that point.

So neither of us had seen the Flo hate. We’ve heard about it - but since neither of us were active at that time, we simply haven’t seen it.

It does not mean for one split second we condone stuff like that, any more than we condone hate sent to any actor or actress, regardless of the circumstances.

So I’m nipping in the bud any accusations of Flo hate from me now. It couldn’t be further from the truth.

We did see some Flo hate on Instagram as S2 of The punisher started and my wife went in on occasion to defend her.

I could do it - but I have crippling anxiety. Even writing this is because of the support of my wife.

It does mean I find it hard - extremely hard - to go in unannounced to people I don’t know to say anything.

My wife does though stand up if she sees anything. It’s just her online time is often restricted.

Back to SG now - we weren’t watching, even though Nicole Maines was cast, but because I was late to watching SG, it really wasn’t something I was aware of.

I will add, my main social media presence until the last couple of months was Facebook or Instagram. So it did pass me by.

Both of us actually, as my wife - due to disability - isn’t always the most active either. She had heard of it, but we often have other stuff in real life going on (hospital & doctor appointments etc), and that was one of those times, so it was there, but not up front & centre for us.

Now this might not seem like a big deal to some or a good enough reason to watch, but to me this is my Maggie moment when I did realise what was going on fully.

As a Transgender man, to see a transgender superhero finally being cast - that was great news.

What wasn’t so great - it was via SG. A program that had shown demonstratively poor judgement & queer baiting since the loss of Flo.

Were we worried that Nicole’s character would get the same treatment?

Absolutely we were.

However, coupled with having bought my wife tickets for Ultimates to meet Flo, I decided to watch SG, since it meant I had an idea about who we’d be meeting.

Then Nicole was added as a guest and that was it. Tough as it might be, we had two reasons to watch.

My wife warned me what was to come. How Sanvers broke up. How poor the writing became (not just Sanvers, but Alex, Mon-El and far more than I can get into here). Despite being warned, I loved the start. I loved (& still love Sanvers). I get why it became so important for a lot of viewers.

I hate how it was dealt with on screen at the end.

Utterly despise it in fact.

But remember, I only came into this recently, so I have no history of how it played out in real time on social media.

I’d become a huge Chyler fan (but I enjoyed her as Lexie) as I loved Alex, the wife is still a huge Flo fan.

Sanvers even had me drawing again for the 1st time in 15 years (see my pinned Tweet as it’s a Sanvers kiss).

But Ultimates was booked.

Then Nicole came along.

So we both grit our teeth and started watching the rest of S3, and what had already been shown of S4 (to show you how late this was, it was already to episode 13 of S4 when we started it).

Season 3 and the first 10 or 11 episodes of S4 are ….. at best badly written. Poor storylines, plot holes you could drive a bus through … but despite all this, we took what we could because the Nia storyline was being handled fairly well.

Now we could argue why settle for something so poor? Why not push for better representation.

I cannot stress enough (and honestly, the whole thing I was trying to put in a 240 character Tweet that has resulted in all this), that for us the show had now put in representation & produced something we’d not seen until now.

The show has moved on, and goodness me, if you truly think I expect people to move on, then it isn’t the case. I was merely trying to explain, that even previously staunch Sanvers fans might well now watch for completely different reasons.

It doesn’t mean there are other staunch Sanvers fans who should move on. You are just as valid in what you want.

It doesn’t even mean the fight for Sanvers as endgame should stop, and people of differing views can still want that to happen.

It was definitely not to bash Maggie (or Flo), particularly as it was Flo who was the reason we are attending Ultimates.

For me the reason I now watch is because of Nia and Alex.

My wife because of Nia.

As difficult as it is to palate for a lot of you (understandably), there are also going to be those who’ll watch the new LI because it’s another area of representation in having a gay black woman on screen.

We’ve (wife & myself) been around long enough to know what poor & good representation looks like. Heck, good representation is nigh on impossible to find - I can say Helen & Nikki were one of the lucky ones. In the 20 years since that’s happened, I’m struggling to find many others. They are out there, but when it’s only a dozen or so at best, it’s tough.

As my wife remarked the other week; when Jes MacCallan wears a t-shirt at Clexacon that lists wlw and it’s barely enough to be on the front of said t-shirt - that shows how poor it’s been. And then most didn’t have a happily ever after. Sure it’s not a comprehensive list, but it does help prove how poor it’s been.

But also remember as poor as that has been, there are some (like trans or gay men or black women) who’ve had even less. They deserve more, & sometimes that starting point is horribly bad.

We’ve also been around long enough to know it isn’t black & white. It isn’t linear.

Just like coming out, you constantly have to do it. That sometimes means taking what is the worst outcome, but using it to steadily push for the better ones. It sometimes means you might have to take that step backwards to move forwards.

It can also feel unsavoury to do that.

A prime example I can think of here in the UK is we remember when people first started touting same sex marriage - and at that point, they were in process of changing the law on same sex adoption.

For those not aware of the UK law that was - it allowed single gay people to adopt, but not couples .... so stupidly a gay person could adopt if single, and then become involved with someone else, but if you were in a committed relationship no go - anyway, from that law the discussion to get marriage in place started. Gay men were openly likened to those opposing the law change to peodophiles, as sadly still happens to gay men today.

That change in adoption law was a big step forward in getting the laws on marriage here changed.

Then came civil partnership. So many people were angry it wasn’t enough and many said it was in fact a step back. Yet, for us it was a huge step forward. I kept trying to explain then, you often have to take the least favourable option to keep pushing for the best outcome. That marriage could happen, but don’t dismiss what was occurring simply because it wasn’t good enough for you.

It is an exhausting situation, to constantly push for better representation. This is a process. Occasionally that process will force steps back - but as long as the overall push is bigger than that, it will carry on.

For me, I do think that Alex is slowly getting a better deal as a character and I’ve enjoyed the latter part of her story arc in S4.

Does it mean it’s as good as it was or could be?

No, it doesn’t. But it also doesn’t mean - and this is my opinion, and believe it or not I’m okay if people watching don’t agree - pretty much all of S3 (honestly that is a clusterfuck of epic proportions) and the first half of S4 are about as bad as it can be.

Nicole has also had good representation though. There is a lot that resonates for me. A lot I wish I could’ve seen as a child growing up, not in my early 50’s.

Think about that.

I’m finally seeing good representation in my 50’s for the first time.

Albeit in a program that has far from stellar representation for a long time.

This isn’t the 2nd, or 3rd or however many times it has gone on for lesbian couples on TV.

That for me is a huge deal. Huge!

Like a black gay woman is going to be huge for some others.

However, it also means if the LI for Alex gets storylines that Flo deserved I won’t be pissed.

You can bet I will be. As will my wife.

We’ll undoubtedly rip apart the producers for it at home, as we’ve done so many times. Just because people haven’t seen it, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been said.

I guess what I’m trying to say in all this rambling is I truly have no quarrel with people wanting to stay solely as Sanvers fans. I just want to be allowed to go beyond that (and I would love nothing more than Sanvers endgame), even if that seems counterintuitive to some of you.

I’ve never posted anything with ulterior motives to attack any group of fans. It might have appeared that way for some - but truly I simply posted something on my timeline as a general observation. It was not directed at anyone per se.

I’ve realised that it’s been construed as such, but those who do know me also know I will never disparage others intentionally. If it comes across as such, it was - believe it not - unintentionally done. If you don’t want to believe that, I can’t change that, but I do ask you don’t keep saying stuff about it to me.

I’ve not seen much beyond interacting with some mutuals on Twitter.

It appears there is a far greater history going on than I could have ever imagined between some people.

So for now - I’m going to post my usual things but to try to avoid posting directly to followers except family & friends away from the fandom.

To make it absolutely clear I never intend or intended to get pulled into a war of words with anyone.

I just want to enjoy Sanvers - and for me personally, go beyond that.

It’s just I’ve seen so much progress for the LGBT community, even if it could be faster.

I saw lesbian activists disrupting the BBC news in protest to the government of the time and Clause 28.

I saw the news report of the bomb that went off in a gay Soho nightclub.

I watched friends become stigmatised for being gay men at the start of the AIDS crisis.

I saw people fighting HIV & later AIDS & some dying as a result.

I’ve seen this and far more. I’ve actively campaigned on issues ranging from animal rights to LGBT rights, when the T wasn’t even part of the acronym, to nuclear disarmament and far more.

I’ve seen more positives finally coming about in the last 18 years than anything that’s gone before it.

We’ll face steps backwards. Some will be greater than others, but make no mistake, the strides forward are bigger.

Activism for better representation isn’t just something to hinge on one TV storyline or show - it can just be about that of course - but life is messy. It takes steps in many different directions for many different people.  

If people were offended, then I am saying sorry.

It has though been difficult to become embroiled in something that is far further reaching than I had any idea about.

One of the perils of being so new to the fandom I guess.

And now I’m off to cuddle one of our cats.

[frillyfacefics]

A New Purpose (Ronan/Yon-Rogg) - Chapter 2

Chapter 1

There was a smile on the face of Ronan the Accuser, and it was possibly the most frightening thing Yon-Rogg had ever seen.

It only lasted a moment, but it had been enough to suddenly make Yon-Rogg, who had tried to shield his mind from reality for the past days, hyper-aware of his surroundings. These were living-quarters, he suddenly realised; absurdly large living quarters, but since Ronan’s rank was so much above even what he had been before his punishment, their size might be appropriate for their inhabitant. Just from the corner of his eyes he could make out several control panels, and through the doorway Ronan had come through he could see something that might have been the corner of a bed.

“Ronan…” He hadn’t used his voice since his communication with the Supreme Intelligence, and he was surprised to find that it sounded as rough and rasping as if he had been crying.

It was unnerving to be in the same room as the Accuser. He was used to Ronan being a tiny hologram, but now he was towering over him, easily a head and a half taller than him, his full uniform making his body look broad and massive and making Yon-Rogg feel small like a child in comparison. If he had been wearing his Starforce uniform, it might have been bearable, but as he was clad only in formless scrubs, a nobody looking like a nobody, he wished a wormhole would open up and swallow him whole.

“From now on, you will call me ‘Master’, Yon-Rogg,” Ronan said. The smile had gone, though he could still see traces of it in his eyes. “I have requested for you to be apprenticed to my valet. It is a slightly unusual iteration for the training of a servant, but since I know how our soldiers are trained, I believe you still ought to have the discipline and ability to follow orders I would expect from any soldier. There is no reason to waste your time on theoretical training. You ought to be of use right away.”

Yon-Rogg had always been grudgingly impressed by the dark, vibrant quality of Ronan’s voice, but just as with his physical presence, there was no comparison between the way he sounded as a hologram and how he sounded in real life. His voice boomed through the vaulted room; it seemed to seep into Yon-Rogg’s bones, make them vibrate until his flesh felt warm with it.

He’d stood a little straighter when Ronan had mentioned his basic combat training. It had been a while, that was true, but he guessed that both soldiers and servants were trained to uphold some of the same values - discipline, obedience, duty. Pride in what you did, no matter how small a part it played in the bigger picture.

He wondered how Ronan’s valet would think about having to train somebody who wasn’t even from his own class, and who hadn’t gone through whatever training they surely went through before they were sent into the field, so to speak.

“Yes, Master,” he rasped.

Ronan’s purple eyes slowly looked him over, then he walked to one of the walls of the room, motioning Yon-Rogg to follow. He activated a control panel and then opened it with his palm-print. “While we are on the Dark Aster, you will sleep in here.”

Yon-Rogg stepped forward and took a look into the room he had opened. He was surprised to find that it was a single room - only one bed and a washing console, with a small panel on the wall that would likely open some storage space. He hadn’t had a lot of social contact with the servant class, but he had seen enough blueprints in his life that he knew that most servant quarters, both on ships and in private households, were communal.

He felt strangely relieved. Even if he would have to work with people who would likely see his punishment as a personal attack on their professional honor, there would at least be one place where he’d be able to just be alone. He wouldn’t have thought that Ronan would be so considerate.

“Your livery is in the storage closet,” Ronan said. “My valet will come to you soon. I believe your first task will be to help cleaning.” He motioned Yon-Rogg into the room. Obediently, he stepped inside. He turned around to see Ronan nod at him, a strangely satisfied look on his face. The he put his hand on the console again, and the door closed between them.

Even though he could have opened it at any time from the inside, Yon-Rogg still felt as if he had been put into a jail cell. He took a deep breath to push down the confusion and loss he was feeling, then he put his hand on the panel in the wall. A door opened, revealing a set of shelves and a rail with several livery jackets and pants hanging on it. He found a stack of shirts, a stack of underwear and a stack of sleeping clothes, as well as three pairs of soft slippers with thick soles that would likely allow him to move around as silently as it was proper for a servant who was not supposed to be seen. They were a long shot from the sturdy boots he had been wearing most of his life…

All of his new clothes were dark grey, like the walls of the ship itself. The fabric wasn’t unlike that of his old training clothes, though the sleeves were long and the collars high. He took off his blue scrubs, and since he didn’t know what else to do with them, he chucked them into the laundry chute at the back of his closet. They didn’t have any identifying tags, so he was pretty sure that would be the last he’d see of them, and he couldn’t say that he would miss them.

He always thought that new underwear felt horribly awkward. It was the only really new piece of clothing given to all Kree when they were given a new rank or a new position; everything else had more likely than not been worn by somebody else before them. The fabrics they used were of such a high quality that most clothes didn’t have to be replaced any more often than once in a decade or so. As he closed the jacket, he wondered who had been wearing this livery before him. It had definitely been somebody who had been on this career track since they had been a teenager; somebody who had known that they were going to spend their life invisible, doing work that would never be attributed to them. As a soldier, even as a common one, it had always mattered who Yon-Rogg was. It had mattered how he got along with his fellow soldiers, how his superiors had seen him. It had mattered who his parents were, who his brother was.

It would likely still matter who he was, for the people he was going to work with. But everything he was now seemed to stand against him. He knew how to clean a room, how to scrub floors, how to clean his uniform and his weapons. Before he had become a captain, these things had been part of his every-day tasks, and even afterwards, he had kept cleaning his own weapons. But the common barracks of a military base was something very different from the private quarters of an Accuser, or any other member of the higher classes, for that matter. And he hadn’t even touched a scouring pad in what, more than ten years?

He was going to be an apprentice, of all things, and one without the natural adaptability of youth. He couldn’t even imagine the humiliation he was about to experience.

The valet opened the door to his room without so much as buzzing. He was old and bald, and he only spoke when it was absolutely necessary. Yon-Rogg spent the next few hours scrubbing floors - with too much pressure and too little soap, according to his mentor. He cleaned about ten wall-panels with a special kind of spray and a soft piece of fabric - apparently the circles he made were too big, and too much of the spray ended up on the walls beside the panels. Yon-Rogg accepted the short, pointed criticism of his work with gritted teeth, extremely aware of the looks of the other three servants who were working on shining up Ronan’s quarters. At one point, one of the two women laughed when he forgot to dry one of the panels after he had cleaned it, and he had to fight to push the wave of anger down.

He realised that objectively, they were treating him very civilly, if cooly; but apparently his failure hadn’t managed to completely shatter his pride, and just the fact that he had to listen to the instructions of an old man who hadn’t done anything more dangerous in his life than use caustic cleaning solutions to get rid of some stubborn stains was painfully gnawing on his ego. He could ignore the disdainful looks the other servants were giving him - the valet just looked bored and annoyed, most of the time - but he couldn’t ignore the feeling that he was being treated like a not especially bright fifteen-year-old.

At the end of his day, his shoulder was aching again, and his knees had started to hurt from all the kneeling - even though his pants did have sown-in knee-pads, which he had to admit was quite ingenious. He wasn’t as worn as he would have been after a day of training, but he still felt incredibly relieved when the door of his room slid closed behind him.

He had been shown the panel that let him access the servants’ dormitory and to the communal showers, but he didn’t feel like seeing anymore of the other servants again that day, so instead he opened the small washing console in his own room and stripped down to his underpants to give himself a quick wash, using one of the two towels he had found in the small cupboard that had appeared together with the console when he had pressed the right button on the panel controlling his closet. There were still vivid bruises all around his shoulder, and a few others on his back, his right arm, his legs. Vers really had done a number on him.

He gritted his teeth and rubbed the make-shift washcloth over his bruised skin harder than he necessarily had to. This was what he deserved. The sneers, the cold irreverence, the humiliating admonishing. He would have deserved worse.

He was bent over, angrily rubbing his right shin, when the noise of the opening door made him freeze in position. A very unfortunate position, as he realised when he heard Ronan’s deep, rumbling voice.

“Now that is not exactly a view I thought I would get today.”

Blood shot into Yon-Rogg’s face as he jerked upright. Shame about being caught in his underwear warred with confusion in his mind - had Ronan the Accuser just made a… a joke?

Slowly he turned around and looked up at Ronan’s towering form. He was filling most of the entrance to his room with his bulk, which at least meant that it was unlikely anybody else would see him in this unfortunate position.

Ronan closed the door behind him with a quick tap to the control panel, then he started to come closer. The room suddenly felt horribly small, and only long years of training made Yon-Rogg able to stand at attention, not budging an inch as Ronan invaded his personal space.

The Accuser’s eyes roamed over Yon-Rogg’s body, down once, then up again, finally lingering on his bruised-up shoulder.

“It’s a shame you didn’t manage to keep such a magnificent weapon under your control,” he rumbled, then he touched his knuckle to the darkest bruise with a gentleness Yon-Rogg wouldn’t have thought him capable of. “But then, if the Supreme Intelligence had known that she was so powerful, so extraordinary, I don’t think it would have left her in your hands. You were a soldier, and you were a good one, too… But you need more than a solid head for battle tactics to bind somebody to you completely and totally…”

‘If the Supreme Intelligence had known…’ For a second, Yon-Rogg balked so strongly at the… the blasphemy of implying that the Supreme Intelligence had not known something that he didn’t even realise what else Ronan was saying. Only when he was already pulling away his hand did those words register, but still it was hard to quite understand them. Had Ronan paid him a compliment? He had said he had been a good soldier, that he had a solid head for battle tactics…

A strange warmth rose in Yon-Rogg’s chest, a warmth that had nothing to do with the shameful position he was in right now. He kept staring straight ahead, at the space between the two side-parts of Ronan’s armor, so he didn’t know whether Ronan reacted to the flush in his cheeks in any way. They only stood like this for a moment, but that moment seemed to drag on for half an eternity, before Ronan finally took a step back.

A heavy thump made Yon-Rogg’s eyes dart to the floor next to the Accuser.

Ronan’s boots were lying on his floor, next to something he could remember very well from his time as a Starforce Lieutenant - an armor cleaning kit.

“I want them clean and polished next to the door of my sleeping quarters by tomorrow morning,” Ronan said, then he turned around and tapped the door panel again. “I believe you remember how to do that.”

“Yes, Ro-” He quickly cleared his throat, embarrassed that he had forgotten the first instruction Ronan had given him. “Yes, Master.”

As he stepped through the door, Ronan cast him a last look over his shoulder. “Good night.”

Then the door slid close behind him.

[thoughtfulpaperback]

Showing two sides to an arguement. !!(CHARMED SPOILERS)!!

Can I say this without sounding mean. I'm gonna try. So one, not really an arguement per se, against the Charmed (reboot) is that it is to aggressive/on the nose with its feminist messages and doesnt really explore different sides to the argument. My grandmother said this to me today when I started another rewatch of the show right now and I have seen things on tumblr and on the charmed Facebook page.

I'm sorry but is there a valid arguement about what is or isnt consent from what the show gives us? Like to the line "I can withdraw my consent at any time!" What discussion can we have about that where one of us doesnt sound like a rapist and/or victim blamer?

The Medusa storyline, what debate can we have about a woman who was punished for being raped and then cursed into silence (not being seen) seeking retribution against men who sexually harrass and blackmail teenagers (18-19)? What is there to discuss? Are there multiple versions of the Medusa myth? Yes and she wasnt raped in all of them . The show went with this version. They didn't reinterpret it drastically except for making Medusa a witch. This was a message about how rape victims should be seen and how we should stand up when we see women being shamed and silenced. What is the counter arguement??

Mel protesting sexual harassment and never giving up on a frightened Angela Wu (victim of sexual harrassment). How do we turn these things into a debate where we arent validating the abuse of others?

Does this show have a message. Yes. And why should they have to sugar coat it. Kids shows have messages and dont have debates about why sharing maybe the best thing or why we should be nice to one another. Well their kids shows! ...So what? Does that mean you can't have people with opposing view points (check out Steven Universe, the Rugrats, Boy Meets World)? Shows have had messages. I don't believe Consent, rape, and sexual harrasment are abstract concepts the same way justice or a social contract are. This isnt Captain America: Civil War. We arent debating utilitarianism or whether or not heros should have oversight. These things we can debate and both sides will likely have valid arguements.

But when we are talking about rape and consent... those seem like they should be Pretty straight forward lessons the way Be kind and dont judge a book by its cover have been.

If you arent bothered when children shows or even adult shows send those messages (Be kind, spend time with the ones you love, dont hurt others) with out discussion or debate, but some how are irked or uncomfortable when Charmed pushes messages about consent and rape. Maybe we should really examine ourselves here.

Dont get me wrong! Is it always preferable when a show can provoke debate and show different sides to an argument? Yes, especially on topics which affect how we view the world and how we interact with others in it: nature vs. Nurture, large government vs. Small government, the "common good". But I'm sorry there are somethings that are not up for debate imo.

Including things in the definitions or rape and consent sure we can discuss that. But What am I going to say? Oh you want to say that rape can happen in a marriage? Let's debate that! Oh you think men and women can not consent when drunk or under the influence of any type of decision inhibiting/effecting substances? Let's have a whole episode where we decided if our character was raped or this was just a "drunken mistake". Listen people have these discussion I know, but usually the other side brings up specific scenarios which usually dont match whatever the actual case is.

And granted if the show was going there and making the terms ambiguous then it would be totally valid to have a debate or conversation about it on screen. Like the way they portray vigilantism and talk about the greater good in the show.

If you uncomfortable maybe its they way you view consent or rape not necessarily the way the show is presenting a message. I am not saying you view consent differently than the show! I am talking about how you view consent and rape as subjects versus the show. You may see them like nature vs nurture, consent vs.....whatever you think is a valid defensible opposite of that, so therefore there should be a conversation with an opposing view, but the show views and deals with interacting with rape victims the way a show would view and deal with Kindness: here it is, see it's good, go do it like that.

This is not intended to be a call out post to accuse anyone of anything. This is 100% my opinion on how I think the show writers view consent and rape. I am defending the shows decisions and how they presented thier message, not saying that those who do not are rapists, or do not understand what consent is, or whatever horrible thing you can say about someone. That isnt it at all. And I am sorry if at some point in my mobile phone rant it came off as such. Unless what someone one is saying is pretty much screaming rape apologist, I will not make that accusation.

This is what I think and why I dont think the show could be anything less than on the nose about it. Yall are free to suggest ways they could have been less on the nose and still clear in the message. I'm always willing to listen and eager to discuss ways the show can be improved upon.