#the writer soldier's journal

[imwall-e]

W&TWS || Doubts

Summary : He is a super-soldier of more than 100 year old, struggling to find a place in this new world. She is a young student of 23, struggling with life. But they know they can find comfort and help in each other.

Pairing : Bucky Barnes x Reader

Warnings : a bit of angst and anxiety, also fluff and always Bucky being the best

A/N : I am back to writing this fanfiction. It is more a journal to me, but it feels good to write like that and to share the story of Bucky and Willow. I hope you love it !

Series Masterlist

May 10th 2021

The exams had started the week of her birthday. Willow had barely revised, but was still doing her best to answer the questions and write good essays. She had a feeling, however, that it wouldn't be enough, but she was at peace with that. After all, this degree no longer suited her. All she had to do was make a decision: try her luck at the catch-up exams (because yes, she would definitely have to go), or give up altogether.

Strangely enough, her reflections led her to William. They had only been dating a few months, and she had taken just as long to get over what he had done to her. The wound still hadn't completely healed. A new question came to mind: was it a good idea to start a relationship with Bucky?

True, they had only exchanged a kiss, but perhaps everything was still moving too fast? Perhaps she needed to take her time? She wrote down all her anxieties on the paper she'd used for drafts, and promised herself she'd tell Bucky about them the next time they called.

He had gone back to New York a few weeks earlier, and it was difficult for them to communicate. She knew that a long-distance relationship wouldn't work in the long term. Especially in two different time zones.

She didn't want to get too attached like in her previous relationships. But Bucky seemed so kind. So thoughtful. However, bad times in the past forced her to be wary of many things, and many people. Even Bucky.

The teacher supervising the exam indicated that there was still an hour to go before the end of the exam. She glanced at her paper: barely four pages... She sighed, gathered her things, handed in her paper and went home.

The journey seemed long. Longer than usual. When she arrived, she was greeted only by her dog Dino. Her mother must still be at work. She took the opportunity to relax a little: take Dino for a walk, have something to eat, continue reading a book. Around 6pm, she took a shower and fell asleep a few minutes after getting into bed.

May 11th 2021

When she woke up, it was past midnight. The house was quiet. Her bedroom door was closed, probably by her mother who had preferred to let her sleep in. She reached for her phone and was blinded for several seconds by the brightness.

A few notifications from her group of friends told her that she wasn't the only one who had failed the exam. Dysariel's plan was holding up, which surprised none of them, after all he always got the best marks.

However, it was two other notifications that caught his attention. They were from Bucky:

Bucky Bear At 10.30pm: Hello Sunflower, I hope your day went well and that you managed to pass your mid-term. Give me your availability for tomorrow, I want to call you for your birthday. At 00:00: If my clock in New York is telling the right time for you, it's time for me to wish you a very happy birthday, my Sunflower. I haven't heard from you, so I assume you've fallen asleep. Thinking of you. PS: I also have a surprise for you that should arrive later today.   Sunflower At 00:15: Thank you, Bucky Bear! I'll be available from midday. I don't have any exams in the afternoon. Do I get a hint about my surprise? I'm thinking of you too. Bucky Bear  At 12:16am: Sorry, but if I tell you, it won't be a surprise! I've got to go to one last meeting. Go back to sleep, you need your rest. I can't wait to see you again.

His messages made her smile. He hadn't forgotten her birthday. He was going to surprise her. She had to concentrate on the positives. She wished she could go back to sleep now, but she knew she wouldn't be able to. So she grabbed her computer, plugged in her headphones and started watching videos. 

She was woken up by her seven o'clock alarm, just two hours after going back to sleep. She nearly fell asleep on the train journey to university. 

This morning she had an English grammar exam from nine to noon. However, she already knew that she would get out early because it was the subject she had mastered the most. Two or three exercises were more complicated and she could guess that she wouldn't get all the points. The most important thing was that she would at least pass the subject.

Zephyr, Dysariel, Axel and Ophélia went out more or less at the same time as her. They stayed another hour to eat together at one of the local fast-food restaurants. They talked about everything and anything. And Bucky.

"So," asked Dysariel, "how are things going with your handsome soldier?"

"Fine," replied Willow, blushing. I'm just a bit scared..."

"Of what?"

"That it's going too fast. Besides, the age difference is great, I mean he's over a century old."

They laughed together and all advised her the same thing: they were sure that what was between her and Bucky was special, but she had to take her time and think about her well-being.

Then came the time to go home. Zephyr went first, his parents being stricter about his going-out times. Then it was Ophélia's turn, as she had almost two hours by train to get home. Dysariel had things to do and wanted to revise for the hardest exam on Thursday: US history. Axel and Willow were the last to leave.

They had barely taken a few steps out of the main building when Axel remarked to Willow, "Look who's here." Indeed, Bucky was coming towards them, in a superb black suit. "I've got a train to catch and I think you deserve some time with him. Happy birthday again and see you on Thursday!" Before Willow could reply, Axel had already crossed the pedestrian crossing. When she turned her head towards Bucky, he was standing next to her, a bouquet of sunflowers in his hands.

"Happy birthday, Willow. I hope you don't mind that I came unannounced, I definitely wanted to surprise you." He looked tired but happy to see her again. As for her, she couldn't say a word because she was so surprised. She could only throw herself into his arms.

He held her close. Her long blonde hair smelt of monoi, the scent they both associated with summer. Bucky could already see himself taking her on holiday to the beach, or to New York to meet the people he considered to be his family.

Together they got into the car. "I was thinking we could go for lunch somewhere?" Bucky suggested.

"We've already eaten with the others. Maybe tonight?"

"Yes, of course. Say, I've booked a hotel room for the week, at the park where we spent our first date. We can also spend the day there tomorrow. Are you interested?

"Why not."

Bucky noticed that Willow didn't seem as cheerful as usual. He gently stopped the car at the side of the road, and turned to her, "Is everything all right?" Worry showed on his face and Willow couldn't help crying. There was the stress of the exams, the happiness of seeing Bucky again, the fears that were interfering with her thoughts.

So she told him about all the doubts she had about their relationship. She apologised several times. Bucky took her face in his hands: "Willow, look at me. It's all right, I'm not angry with you. Unless you never want to see me again, we'll take our time. We'll go at your pace. I promise you that. Now, I just want to know if we spend the afternoon and tomorrow together, or if I drop you off at your place?"

"I think I'm scared because of what happened with my old boyfriends."

"Willow, you don't have to tell me about it. Only do it if you want to or if you're ready."

"I am."

"Then we'll talk about it, but let me take you out for dessert. I know when you get really anxious and it calms down, you get hungry right after."

The fact that he remembered little details like this warmed her heart, and a big smile lit up her face. Bucky started the car again, one hand resting on Willow's thigh. Willow put her hand on his. She was already feeling a little lighter.

I hope you love this chapter, I'm writing the next one ! Do not hesitate to like, comment and reblog if you feel comfortable to do so !

[k1ngsl33p]

Frost - 5

Hydra wants to create a second Winter Solider

Part 1 Here

Part 2 Here

Part 3 Here

Part 4 Here

Dad!Bucky Barnes, Daughter OC!

Warnings: light signs of PTSD and depression

Story summary: Hydra has conducted countless experiments to recreate the serum they gave Bucky so they can continue to create more Winter Soldiers. All experiments thus far has been failures. What happens when they give one final hypothesis a shot.

Word Count: 1508

Present Day - Avengers Tower

The warm rays of the morning sun slowly make their way over the city skyline as dawn begins to break. As usual, Bucky is the first awake. His back pressed against the cold metal pillars connecting the floor-to-ceiling windows to the face of the building. There are plenty of chairs in the common room, but he prefers the ground. Getting himself as close to the window as possible, he looks down at the streets slowly coming to life. Being so high up makes the people below look like ants. Scurrying from one sidewalk to another. He pulls his knees into his chest. Crossing his arms over the top of his legs to create a pillow for him to rest his head on. His right arm always on top of the left; it’s warmer. Bucky’s ears perk up at the sound of faint footsteps coming in his direction. He feels no need to turn around and look, he knows who's approaching. It’s almost routine at this point. 

“Another rough night?” Sam says as he walks up to Bucky. Two steaming cups of coffee in hand. “Not as bad as yesterday. I was just restless. Or maybe my brain is now used to waking up before the sun does.” Bucky reaches out and grabs the warm mug that Sam is offering him, pulling the mug in close and taking a small sip. “Or maybe the sleep aid Banner concocted for you is working. This is good.” Sam says as he lowers himself to take a seat on the ground opposite Bucky. 

“Nothing about this feels good, Sam.”

“You need to have hope, Buck. I know it’s hard, but having a night that's better than lasts, it’s a good sign.”

“Don’t get your hopes too high… The terrors always come in waves.”

“If you’re not gonna have hope for yourself, then I’ll just have enough hope for the both of us. How bout that?”

“Fine by me.” A small chuckle falls from Bucky’s lips as he lifts the mug up for another sip. They sit in silence for a moment. Both looking out the window at the streets below. The hustle and bustle of people making their way to their morning shifts. “Ya know,” Sam speaks up, “one of these mornings I’m gonna startle you when I walk up.” Bucky lets out a soft chuckle, “That’s an impossible task. I hear everything.”

“Not me! I’m light on my feet.”

“Are you asking to lose?”

“Oh, so you’re throwing down some smack talk now?” Sam says with playful aggression.

Bucky laughs, “Are you not proposing a competition?”

“Ya know what? Yes, I am, and you don’t even know what you’re up against because up until this point I haven't even been trying to be sneaky.”

“That is such a lie!” Bucky laughs, “Fine, you’re on.”

“Let the startle competition commence!” Sam announces. He stands up, reaching a hand out to Bucky to help him up. “Come on, think Stark wanted to call a meeting bright and early.” Bucky takes Sam’s hand and lets Sam help pull him up. “Yeah, you’re right, let's go.”

The two go their separate ways to change before meeting up with everyone else in the meeting room. As Bucky closes his bedroom door behind himself, he takes a deep breath. In and out. His room feels heavy. The closed blinds blocked out any sliver of sun from entering. The blankets from his bed are strewn about the room. Stacks of cups are clustered on his bedside table. Papers and journals are scattered all over the floor. Even though he’s been free from Hydra for five years, he still feels like it was yesterday. Quickly, he freshens himself up and throws on a red henley, jeans, and some boots.

Bucky walks into the meeting room. Seeing that he is the last to arrive, Bucky shifts his gaze down and takes the open seat next to Sam. “Glad to see you could make it, Barnes,” Tony mutters under his breath with a scoff. “This meeting better be worth the early call time, Stark,” Natasha says. “Ya never were a morning person were ya Nat?” Tony jokes. Nat rolls her eyes. Tony clicks a button on the small remote he's holding in his hand. The shades on the large windows begin to close, and a large projection appears behind Tony. The projection is filled with images of recent news headlines. 

‘Breaking News! The CEO of Krona Inc. was assassinated in his New York City home, January 15th, 2024.’ 

‘Breaking News! Democratic candidate Liz Shultz shot at a recent speech in Chicago! Shultz was quickly escorted to emergency care and sadly passed later that night. March 2nd, 2024.’

Breaking News! A bomb was set off at Mayor Montgomery’s re-election celebration event. Many were harmed during the explosion, and many also tragically passed, including Mayor Lucas Montgumery, Riva CEO Nancy Picket, BFFA Nonprofit Executive Riley Limen, and Senator Sasha Grey. November 21st, 2024’

Roughly twenty headlines of similar titles graced the projection behind Tony. “I want you all to take a look at these headlines… One thing is for certain: the recent uptick in assassinations has been astounding. You all would agree, I would assume.” Tony takes a moment to look around before continuing. “What other two things do we know regarding these headlines? Anyone? Fine, I’ll tell you. For starters, all these victims are connected. All these politicians and all these ceo’s or charity people, they all work together… frequently… Any of you want to chime in here? I’m really doing all the heavy lifting.” 

“If all the victims are connected, then whoever is behind it is trying to wipe out that group's influence. Boom, that's detective 101 right there.” Sam adds, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms confidently over his chest. 

“Yes, but all of these cases went cold almost immediately. There were zero suspects and zero evidence left behind by the attackers.” Nat adds, leaning forward in her chair to rest her elbows on the table. Becoming ever more intrigued with what Tony is proposing to the group. “Stole the words right out of my mouth as that is the second piece tying all these cases together…the lack of evidence.”

“Please tell me there's a but,” Nat mutters. “But! That might all change today.” Tony says before clicking a button on his remote. The headlines all begin to fade away and be replaced by some of the lowest quality pictures of a person dressed in black that the group has ever seen. “You can’t be serious…” Sam says under his breath. “Tony… seriously! This is what you’ve gathered us all here for?” Nat says as she lets herself slump back into her chair. “Yes! Matter of fact, it is! Now, I know these pictures are only about hmm, give or take five pixels, but! Stick with me. These images are from various street cameras throughout all the major cities where these crimes happened. This person managed to avoid areas where they knew there would be better updated cameras… but they got caught by some long forgotten, poor, neglected cameras.” 

“And why should we believe this person has any relation to the various headlines you just presented us with?” Banner speaks up from a seat in the back. “Because! We’ve scrubbed the data off these various cameras going all the way back to 2016, and this person only appears on the days these crimes occurred. They even appear on dates corresponding to cold cases from 2018!” 

“That's a blob, Tony! I don’t care if that blob was there in 2018! That. Is. A. Blob!”  Banner exclaims back to Tony. Throwing his hands in the direction of the projection.

Bucky sits silently as he watches everyone else around him arguing. He begins to tune them all out as he feels his body tensing up, surely due to the arguing happening around him, but also something about these crimes doesn’t sit right with him… Years of cold cases with zero suspects that all seem to connect to serve a greater agenda… It’s all too familiar… Bucky tries to block those thoughts out of his head. The sounds of the voices around him slowly come back as he tries to become present again.

 “Fine! If you all don’t want to believe me or believe my leads, then that's… that’s fine.” Tony takes a moment to catch his breath. Placing his hands on his hips in clear frustration. “Just please, if you're out on a mission or hell even just out grabbing a sandwich around the corner, just please keep an eye out for anything.” Everyone settles down and begins to rise. Bucky quickly stands from his chair and makes his way out of the room. 

This can’t be happening. It’s impossible. Right? No, no, it’s all in my head. It’s all in my head. Bucky’s mind begins to race as he makes his way back to his room. He needs to be alone. He needs to think. 

[thankskenpenders]

Thoughts on two specific areas of the writing in Sonic X Shadow Generations

The best new 3D Sonic game in over a decade (or even two, depending on who you ask) dropped late last year. And I didn't write anything about it! Sometimes life happens. Well, I've finally sat down to finish Shadow Generations, and by now everyone has already been singing its praises for three months. This is the rare instance where the entire Sonic fandom, and even mainstream reviewers, are in agreement on something. The level design is the best it's been in a long, long time and the cool factor is off the charts, embracing Sonic's peak cringe era in an incredibly confident way. It's great. If you're even reading this post, you probably don't need me to tell you that. So I won't!

No, what I'm really interested in here is the writing. Because this is me we're talking about. But I actually don't want to talk about the main narrative of Shadow Generations, which is really solid little story about Black Doom trying to mold Shadow into his perfect soldier. No, I'd like to zero in on two other aspects of the writing here: the revisions made to Sonic Generations, and Gerald Robotnik's unlockable journal.

The updated Sonic Generations script

The new package mostly presents Sonic Generations how you remember it. There are some tweaks, but it's not a major overhaul. Graphically, I don't think the game has been touched much, if at all. I certainly can't notice any difference without a side-by-side comparison, despite playing it on a PS5. The most notable update is that the game's script has been rewritten by Ian Flynn.

Naturally, this caught my attention. Generations always had a nothingburger story, so with Ian rewriting Pontac and Graff's lame dialogue there was nowhere to go but up. (I don't like to pin the blame for those games' stories entirely on them, as a ton of it was dictated to them by Sonic Team, but, well, I don't think they're very good dialogue writers.) But it's less a complete rewrite and more like Ian was brought on as a script doctor for some minor touch ups here and there. Many lines of dialogue are completely identical to how they were originally written in 2011, and many others only have slight wording changes. Ian was clearly not allowed to request additional scenes or extend the ones that already existed. He has to match the original beat for beat so that they can reuse 99% of the cutscene animations. Don't expect it to be a whole new experience compared to the original.

Still, I think the new script is an improvement, albeit a minor one. Various things have been tweaked to maintain characterization consistency. Cream calls Sonic "Mr. Sonic" instead of just "Sonic." Instead of calling Sonic "buddy," Rouge uses the pet name "Blue," like she tends to do in things like the IDW comics. Espio doesn't have to remind you in the dialogue that he's a ninja, and he no longer has a line making it sound like he has some kind of soul reading power. I also like that Modern Sonic now actually has responses to what his friends say when he rescues them, rather than being silent like Classic Sonic. They won't blow you away, but they make Sonic feel a little more engaged with everything.

In general, the altered dialogue just seems tighter to me, and some of the more childish or trite wording of Pontac and Graff's script has been altered. Here, let's actually make a direct comparison, just because this stuff is interesting to me as a writer. Here's a couple lines from after the Egg Dragoon fight late in the game, in the original script:

Modern Eggman: Ooooh... I can't believe this! I was supposed to beat you this time. Modern Sonic: Aw, I'm sorry! I didn't get that memo. I beat you every time! [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat this guy every time. It's like it's our job or something!

This is a simple exchange. Eggman is mad that he lost. Sonic is unflappably confident because he always beats Eggman, and he explains this to his younger self. But the wording here isn't particularly good. Eggman's simple and direct wording makes him come off like a little kid who's mad because his older brother beat him at Mario Kart, rather than a mad scientist who just had his plans foiled. It's making light of the situation.

And I've never liked Sonic saying "It's like it's our job or something!" That doesn't feel like a thing Sonic would say, it feels like a thing an outside observer would say about Sonic. This is a frequent problem with so-called "MCU dialogue," where quips meant to echo the commentary of a casual, somewhat disinterested audience are inserted into the story itself so that the writers can be like "See? We get it. We're genre-savvy, too!" It also just reminds me of bad Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric lines like "Rings! It's like they're made for me!"

And then here's Ian's rewrite:

Modern Eggman: I recalibrated everything! This was supposed to be my time! Modern Sonic: Oh, please, keep dreamin', Egg-head. I beat you every time. [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat him every time. Our score card's flawless.

Eggman's still mad about his defeat, but the line "I recalibrated everything!" makes it more specific. He put all this work into the engineering side of his latest scheme and got tunnel vision, thinking if he got his creations just right there'd be no way he could lose. "This was supposed to be my time!" also turns it into a time travel pun, which is a bonus. He's still pitching a fit over losing, but it feels more like Eggman pitching a fit, rather than sounding childish.

And then instead of saying that beating Eggman is "like his job or something," Sonic says he's got a flawless score card against Eggman. He doesn't take Eggman seriously as a threat—at least, not to his face. He acts like it's all a game. But he conveys this in a way that feels truer to the character, rather than feeling like the words of a real world observer poking fun at the tropes of the Sonic series.

Is this amazing, A+ dialogue that blows me away? No. Again, it's not a completely different scene from the one we already had. Ian had to fit the beats of what was already there. He couldn't go all out and write an all new story confirming his longstanding headcanon that the Time Eater is a remnant of Solaris or whatever. But the wording here makes the existing story land a little better and feel truer to the characters in subtle ways.

But to me, the main change is that the Sonics and Tailses seem to have a more solid understanding of what's going on with the timeline and the Time Eater, compared to how idiotic they sometimes seemed in the original game. Which is good! No more standing outside Green Hill and wondering why it seems so familiar. Thank god. As part of this, yes, there are a few more references to past games in the dialogue, like Sonic briefly being confused about the fact that they're time traveling without the Time Stones, or South Island and Westside Island being acknowledged as the normal locations of Green Hill and Chemical Plant. Yes, ha ha, insert joke about how Ian loves references here. Look, it's Sonic fucking Generations. It's a game built entirely out of nostalgic references. Just own it! And, again, in this instance Sonic and Tails come off as less stupid when they make it clear that they do, in fact, remember their adventures from presumably less than a year ago in-universe.

Eggman, too, seems to have a better understanding of the powers he's toying with. Where in the original vesion his focus was simply on going back in time to undo his previous defeats and he seemed kind of oblivious to how much the Time Eater was actually fucking up the universe, here Eggman says he wants to use the Time Eater to give himself complete control over the entire timeline. Eggman also makes way fewer references to his own failures and shortcomings. Of course he won't admit that Sonic has defeated him time and time again. To him, he's never truly lost—Sonic just keeps delaying the inevitable total victory for the Eggman Empire.

So, yes. The new Sonic Generations script is better. It won't blow anyone away, but it's better than it was. It's been elevated from "kinda lame" to "fine." No, if you really wanna see Ian flex his ability to breathe new life into old Sonic stories, look no further than...

Gerald Robotnik's Journal

Hoo boy.

The story of what happened aboard the ARK has always been... a bit confusing, to say the least. Fans with encyclopedic knowledge of the script for every route of Shadow '05 may disagree, but it's the truth. We've had all the pieces to understand the story for a long time now, but that info was given to us out of order by a pair of unreliable narrators—Gerald, who became a vengeful lunatic shortly before his death, and Shadow, who was subjected to multiple rounds of amnesia and altered memories. Some of the ambiguity left by Sonic Adventure 2 was cleared up in Shadow '05, but that game also retconned in a bunch of new elements to Shadow's backstory (aliens!) that lead to further confusion. Not to mention the fact that that game had multiple routes and only revealed the truth about Shadow if you sat on the ultimate final boss battle for WAY longer than the fight would normally last. Or the fact that Sonic X made its own tweaks in its telling of the story. Or the fact that none of these things ever had the best English translations. I can't blame anyone who hasn't played those games in two decades for not remembering the truth about these characters and getting some details mixed up.

What we needed was something to piece together all of the info we have into one coherent backstory, told in chronological order. And thanks to Shadow Generations, we have that, in the form of an official journal tying together what we knew from Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow '05, and Sonic Battle into the tragic tale of Gerald's rise and fall.

Ian Flynn was the perfect man for the job here as the guy who started his career by tidying up the mess that was the first 159 issues if Archie Sonic. This is what he excels at: taking disparate bits of weird Sonic lore from multiple different sources, boiling them down to their most interesting elements, and connecting it together in a way that will make the audience see the dramatic potential he's always known was there. Rather than feeling like a cynical exercise in franchise building, going back and explaining things that never needed explaining so that people can add more bullet points to the wiki, he puts a new spin on things that retroactively enriches those past stories. The story here means something to the characters involved and gives us a better understanding of them as people, rather than as plot devices to motivate Shadow.

(And, of course, Ian didn't do this journal alone. He wrote the story, but I also have to give a huge shout out to Evan Stanley, who made the final product. All of her handwritten journal entries, sketches, and "photos" included throughout. The physical damage done to the journal over the course of 50 tumultuous years, passing from Gerald to Eggman to a certain special someone at GUN. The way Gerald's handwriting gets less and less legible as his mental state declines. So much love was put into what could have been a mere text dump in a menu, and it really elevates it to the next level. Congrats on officially getting hired by Sega, Evan, you've sure as hell earned it!)

The main idea the journal conveys is that Gerald was under a lot of pressure from a lot of different parties—GUN, the President, his colleagues aboard the ARK, Black Doom, even his own family—and boy did it get to him. The known incidents aboard the ARK mentioned in previous games are put together here to form a story where everything slowly spirals out of control as Gerald keeps compromising his morals to further his research, thinking he'll eventually find some way out of all this because he's a genius. I won't recap that whole story here (if you haven't already played the game and read the journal entries, I would highly recommend at least reading it on the Sonic wiki), but I'd like to highlight my favorite elements of the story, as Ian tells it here.

1) The Eclipse Cannon

Here's something that never quite made sense in Sonic Adventure 2: why does the ARK have a laser that can blow up the Earth built into it? It was supposed to be a peaceful research colony. Sure, Gerald went crazy and swore revenge on the Earth, but, like... when did he have an opportunity to go back up to the ARK and modify it? Did he have someone else do it? How? The ARK was raided by GUN and shut down! And then they arrested him, held him in prison for an unclear period of time, and executed him by firing squad when he was no longer useful! It doesn't add up. Shadow 'the Hedgehog '05 would give its own answer by introducing the Black Arms and saying that the Eclipse Cannon was always supposed to be a secret trump card against the Black Comet. But, like... we know that's kind of a bullshit answer, right? You don't need enough power to blow up a whole planet just to destroy a comet.

Well, the new journal retains what we already knew, but it paints a much more complete picture.

See, long before Gerald ever made a Faustian bargain with Black Doom, he had already made one with an even greater evil: the military. GUN gave Gerald much of the funding for the ARK, Gerald's personal utopian research station in space, but it didn't take long for GUN to start pressuring him to design them weapons. Gerald tried to get GUN off his back by personally contacting the President of the United Federation, and the President gave him an alternative: how about, instead, you just use your genius brain to figure out the secret to immortality for us, so our soldiers can be immortal? Gerald was initially sickened by the notion and found it completely absurd, like chasing a shadow... but given no other option, the sarcastically named Project Shadow soon began in earnest. (Maria would later put a more positive spin on the name after Shadow's awakening, pointing out that a Shadow can show us the direction of the light, like she says in the game itself.)

Of course, this search for the ultimate life form didn't go very well, and without any results on that front GUN kept hounding him for weapons. Gerald would throw them a bone here and there to get them off his back. His research on Chaos resulted in the Artifical Chaos prototypes, which he worried would be used for warfare but could at least theoretically be used for search and rescue missions in floods, in his mind. But that wasn't enough. So he gave them Chaos Drives to power their mechs. And that still wasn't enough. He's got Emerl. He'll give them Emerl. They're not impressed by Emerl. They'll shut the whole ARK down if Gerald doesn't give them something big.

Fine! GUN wants something big? Gerald builds a huge fucking laser cannon into the ARK. However, as a middle finger to GUN, Gerald makes it so powerful that it would destroy the Earth if it was ever fired at any target on its surface. In other words, GUN now has their ultimate weapon of mass destruction, fulfilling his contract, but they can never actually use it. Oh, the delicious irony. (And also Shadow will blow up the Black Comet with it in 50 years yada yada yada.) Is this perhaps extremely shortsighted and naive of Gerald, to believe that such a weapon would never actually be used just because of the risk? Of course. But hey, that's Gerald for you. And I love this as an answer.

(Also, this, uh, kinda echoes something from real life! Remember the bit in Oppenheimer where he says all nuclear war will become unthinkable, and Edward Teller responds "until somebody builds a bigger bomb"? Yeah, Teller went on to conceptualize a superweapon codenamed Project Sundial that would have been able to kill all life on the planet, as the ultimate deterrent for war. This was never made for obvious reasons, but hey, there's a basis for this sort of thinking outside of heightened sci-fi! There's a whole Kurzgesagt video about this if you're interested.)

2) The Biolizard

The Biolizard is, of course, brought up as the initial failed prototype of the ultimate life form, from before Gerald met Black Doom. We don't really learn all that much about it that we didn't already know, but I just love the way it's framed in the story.

As you can see above, we actually get to see a picture of Maria holding up the cute little salamander that would end up mutating into the Biolizard through Gerald's experiments. (Researchers want to figure out how to replicate salamanders' regenerative abilities for humans in real life, too, so this was a natural starting point for the project.) And then, after it grows to a monstrous size and goes out of control, Gerald has to lock it away in an unused sector of the ARK. He needs to keep the poor thing alive for his research into harnessing Chaos Energy, building life support systems directly into it, but he doesn't have the heart to tell Maria what happened. So it just becomes this first dark secret weighing on his conscience. The Biolizard becomes Gerald's Tell-Tale Heart beating beneath the floorboards of the ARK. I love that.

3) Lost Impact was the breaking point for the ARK

Remember the level Lost Impact in Shadow '05? The flashback level on the hero path where Shadow is running around fighting Artificial Chaos enemies on the ARK 50 years ago? Yeah, that wasn't just a random incident. That was important, as we now know due to its placement on the timeline.

See, Emerl's rampage aboard the ARK that was chronicled in Sonic Battle and Dark Beginnings set off a domino effect. Emerl riled up the Artificial Chaos, causing Gerald to lose control of them. They became violent, and so Shadow had to stop them, as depicted in Lost Impact. The thing is, that incident sent an SOS signal to GUN telling them that shit was going down on the ARK. Gerald didsn't fully understand the trouble he was in and assumed that he'd simply be reprimanded by the higher ups, or maybe face legal action. But, well... the next time he heard from GUN, armed troopers were raiding the ARK.

So Lost Impact was the straw that broke the camel's back. I just really like that detail.

4) Maria

And, of course, there's Maria herself. Maria has often been more of a symbol than a character, this perfect embodiment of everything that's good and pure in this world who gets killed to motivate Shadow and Gerald's revenge plots. But I really like the wrinkles this journal adds to her and Gerald's story, and their relationship. This is the most fleshed out they've ever felt.

For one, the journal leans into the idea of Maria's intellectual potential. The rest of the Robotnik family is all geniuses, after all, and she was proving to be a really bright kid. She excelled in her studies on the ARK, and she even helped design Shadow's jet skates and inhibitor rings. When Maria died, the world didn't just lose a symbolic personification of purity. She genuinely could have been a hugely influential scientist who did so much good for the world. That's what Gerald wanted for her. But we'll never know, because GUN killed her.

Speaking of her family, their presence isn't just mentioned for the sake of fleshing out the Robotnik family tree. It's mentioned that as Gerald struggled to find a cure for Maria's illness through his genetic research, he faced mounting pressure from his family. They didn't want Maria to be up on the ARK forever. They wanted Gerald to hurry up and find a damn cure, or otherwise just send her back home to Earth so she could be with her family again. She'd been up on the ARK for so long that Gerald's coworkers started thinking that she had been born up there. Eventually she gains a baby sister on Earth who she's never met. A rift forms between Gerald's two sons, and he's unable to really deal with it because he's so consumed by his work. There's this sense that the family is falling apart, and that everyone is dreading the possibility that Gerald will never find a cure and that Maria will just spend her final years up in space and die far away from her family, because Gerald just couldn't let go. If that happens, it'll break the whole family. But he can't stop now. So he just keeps working. Curing Maria is the only way to win his family back, in his eyes. It can't all be for nothing.

But my favorite detail regarding Maria is this one paragraph:

Maria is growing into a lovely young woman. It breaks my heart that someone as bright and energetic as her is diminished by disease. There are no visible effects, and I've caught my fellow researchers muttering to each other, doubting her illness. It is infuriating. I find all my reason and restraint vanishes when she's slighted.

This is SUCH a great addition to the story! It's always been true that Maria doesn't really seem all that ill, just looking at her in cutscenes. With this one little comment, Ian flips that issue on its head and turns it into a story about invisible disability. She doesn't act like she's in chronic pain, so she must not be, everyone thinks. And this really, really gets to Gerald, as does the pressure from his family. He's dedicating his whole LIFE to saving her, and they think she's faking it?! It's such a small addition, never referenced elsewhere in the journal, but it adds so much flavor to the story, as does the implied family drama. It grounds Gerald and Maria and makes them feel more like real human beings, rather than being pure archetypes. It's just enough info to let my imagination run wild filling in the blanks.

You also get the feeling that Maria being such a walking ray of sunshine was the only real source of joy Gerald had left in his life before Shadow was awakened, and the only thing keeping him from snapping under pressure sooner. All this stuff just keeps piling on, everything's spiraling out of control, but at least Maria is keeping her chin up, right? It makes so much sense that losing her would make him go off the deep end when it's framed like this.

It's just... man, I never thought I'd care so much about Gerald and Maria. But that's the Ian Flynn touch. After years of less than stellar Sonic writing that seemed to be embarrassed of itself, I'm so happy to have new games coming out that fully embrace the history of the series like this, making its world feel so rich and real instead of just serving as an excuse for a string of platforming levels. I don't even like Shadow '05, but I'll be damned if Ian and the rest of Sonic Team didn't make something amazing by "yes, and"-ing Shadow's cringe past here. Sonic has truly reached levels of "we're so back" never thought possible.

[balladofthe101st]

Buck Compton came back to see the Company to let us know that he was alright. He became a prosecutor in Los Angeles. He convicted Sirhan Sirhan in the murder of Robert Kennedy, and was later appointed to the California Court of Appeals. 

David Webster became a writer for the Saturday Evening Post and Wall Street Journal, and later wrote and book about sharks. In 1961, he went out on the ocean alone, and was never seen again.

Johnny Martin would return to his job at the railroad and then start his own construction company. He splits his time between Arizona and a place in Montana.

George Luz became a handyman in Providence, Rhode Island. As a testament to his character, sixteen hundred people attended his funeral in 1998.

Doc Roe died in Louisiana in 1998. He’d been a construction contractor.

Frank Perconte returned to Chicago and worked a postal route as a mailman.

Joe Liebgott returned to San Francisco and drove his cab.

Bull Randleman was one of the best soldiers I ever had. He went into the earth moving business in Arkansas. He’s still there.

Alton More returned to Wyoming with a unique souvenir: Hitler’s personal photo albums. He was killed in a car accident in 1958.

Floyd Talbert we all lost touch with in civilian life, until he showed up at a reunion just before his death in 1981.

Carwood Lipton became a glass making executive in charge of factories all over the world. He has a nice life in North Carolina.

Harry Welsh – he married Kitty Grogan. Became an administrator for the Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania school system.

Ronald Speirs stayed in the Army, served in Korea. In 1958, returned to Germany as Governor of Spandau Prison. He retired a Lieutenant Colonel.

Lewis Nixon had some tough times after the war. He was divorced a couple of times. Then in 1956, he married a woman named Grace and everything came together for him. He spent the rest of his life with her, travelling the world. My friend Lew died in 1995.

I took up his job offer and was a personnel manager at the Nixon Nitration Works, until I was called back into service in 1950 to train officers and rangers. I chose not to go to Korea. I’d had enough of war. I stayed around Hershey, Pennsylvania, finally finding a little farm. A little peaceful corner of the world, where I still live today. And there is not a day that goes by that I do not think of the men I served with who never got to enjoy the world without war.

[dragonnan]

More Hob Gadling headcanons:

He is fascinated by showers and when they first became a thing he'd indulge every day - sometimes a couple times a day.

He can't stand baths after the 1600's. He isn't hard triggered by them anymore and can tolerate them but they give him a twinge of unsettled if the water is too deep.

He loves learning languages and is fluent in Italian, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Russian, all Scandinavian, and Swahili to name several. He gets by with Arabic, Fasi, Chinese, Czech, Hindi, and Kurdish.

He's even more passionate about the written word and in additional to learning as many languages as possible is also a prolific writer. He has a vast collection of unpublished poetry kept in vaults around the world along with other important documents, gold, and other valuables.

He was the first in his community to buy a car and refuses to ride a horse unless absolutely critical.

He has tried everything from bungee jumping to sky diving. He's a massive adrenaline junkie.

He really really REALLY wants to explore diving to see all the pretty fish and corals but every time he's tried he's had a panic attack.

He's managed to develop himself as an artist. He tends to prefer watercolors and sketching in one of his many journals.

He can sing. Like REALLY well.

He doesn't like guns. He knows how to use them - has had to learn given the wars he's been in. But he finds them horrible and the wounds he's caused with them haunt him.

Digital photography was a lifesaver. He has so many physical photos of the most absolutely random shit - like a lizard he saw in the 40s and stray dog adopted by his fellow soldiers in Afghanistan.

He's been banned from Vegas 12 times.

He will never have children again.

[girlactionfigure]

He admitted he "was just a schmuck", a regular guy, who worked at his brother's liquor store in Southern California. He lived quietly and died on December 5, 2015 at the age of 86.

Not many knew that this same humble man, an immigrant, had "the remarkable courage and forbearance of a . . . American hero, a man who joined the United States Army to thank the nation and the troops that rescued him from the concentration camp where he had been imprisoned as a teenager, and for whom recognition was delayed for decades because he happened to be Jewish," according to the New York Times.

He said his mom taught him that "There is one God, and we are all brothers and sisters. You have to take care of your brothers, and save them."

"To her, to save somebody’s life is the greatest honor," he added. "And I did that.”

You probably never heard of him. His name was Tibor Rubin. He had to wait 55 years to receive the Medal of Honor he deserved. He was the only Holocaust survivor to receive the Medal of Honor.

He was born in 1929 in Hungary.

At the age of 14, "Tibor Rubin was . . . was deported in 1944 to Mauthausen, the Nazi concentration camp complex in Austria," according to the Washington Post. He never saw his parents nor his younger sister again.

A commandant told him that he would never get out alive.

After 14 months, according to writer Adam Bernstein, Rubin had become "a disease-ridden skeleton."

American troops liberated Mauthausen on May 5, 1945. He was so grateful that accoording to a 2013 documentary film, “Finnigan’s War,” about veterans of the Korean War, Corporal Rubin said in broken English, “I promised the good Lord that if I get out of here alive, I’d become a G.I. Joe, to give back something.”

It took him a while to get to America, but when he finally came to the United States in 1948, he kept his promise and tried to enlist. But, because his English wasn't good enough, he had to wait until 1950, when he literally "cheated his way into the Army, he said, by cribbing the entrance exam, according to the Washington Post.

Because he was not a citizen, he was told he didn't have to fight, but somehow made his way to the Korean front lines, when he said, remembering his mother's words - "Well, what about the others? I cannot leave my fellow brothers.”

His sergeant, according to Bernstein, was "a sadist and anti-Semite" who repeatedly "volunteered" Rubin "on seemingly certain-death assignments."

One of those missions had him "single-handedly [hold] off a wave of North Korean soldiers for 24 hours, securing for his own troops a safe route of retreat." That in itself should have earned him the Medal of Honor.

Corporal Rubin would also "spend 30 months as a prisoner of war in North Korea, where testimony from his fellow prisoners detailed his willingness to sacrifice for the good of others," according to the New York Times.

Because he was not a citizen, his captors offered to return him to Hungary, but he refused, deciding to stay in the isolated camp that the Americans called “Death Valley.” He would not forget his mother's words.

He would risk his life sneaking out of the camp, only to return after he foraged for food and and stole enemy supplies, to bring back "what he could to help nourish his comrades."

“Some of them gave up, and some of them prayed to be taken,” Mr. Rubin later told Soldiers magazine. He did his best to rally them, reminding them of relatives praying for their safe return home.

“He shared the food evenly among the G.I.’s,” Sgt. Leo A. Cormier Jr., a fellow prisoner, wrote in a statement, according to The Jewish Journal. “He also took care of us, nursed us, carried us to the latrine.” He added, “Helping his fellow men was the most important thing to him.”

The prison camp survivors remembered Rubin, crediting him with keeping them alive and saving at least 40 American soldiers.

Rubin received the Purple Heart with 1 bronze oak leaf cluster, but not the Medal of Honor.

He returned home, to the United States, where he would lead a quiet life, rarely talking of his war experience.

When he did talk of his war experience, he said he felt guilty, seeing the countless maimed and lifeless bodies and hearing the agonized screams in Korean from the wounded.

“I had the guilt feeling what I did here,” he later told an interviewer with the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center in Philadelphia. “I killed even the enemy but I killed somebody’s father, brother, and all that. . . . But then again, the truth is that if I don’t kill him, he kill me and vice versa. It’s war. War is hell.”

In the 1980s, he attended a reunion of veterans, where he learned that he had been nominated four times for the Medal of Honor by his grateful comrades, but the sergeant, who hated him for his religion, deliberately ignored the orders from his own superiors to prepare the appropriate paperwork.

In 2002, after Congress passed the Leonard Kravitz Jewish War Veterans Act, Rubin's records were reviewed and the affidavits recommending Rubin for the Medal of Honor were found.

He finally received his Medal of Honor at a 2005 White House ceremony.

“I waited 55 years,” he said. “Yesterday I was just a schmuck. Today, they call me, ‘Sir.’ . . . How I made it, the Lord don’t even know. I don’t even know because I was so many times supposed to die over there, but I’m still here.”

Rubin kept his promise to give back something to the country who saved him, and, in doing so, he also remembered his mother's words to consider everyone a brother and take care of them.

The Jon S. Randal Peace Page  ·

[knightsndaze]

As I'm writing I've realized how bad the dialogue is in FO4. Like it takes exposition and bashes your skull in with it. It takes all the fun out of exploring the wasteland and putting things together through journals/computer entries/holotapes/etc.

There are glimpses of a compelling story hidden in the game but the factions are reskinned ripoffs of FNV (old world style govt/fascists/technologically advanced) where the political complexity of those factions clashing is completely pushed aside for another goddamn finding Nemo story.

The player characters were given back stories which COULD have had interesting implications (disregarding the supposed rpg elements of the fallout games) such as a soldier coming to terms with his actions in service and the effects the govt he fought for had on the world. Or a lawyer who had never dealt directly with the horrors of war suddenly being thrust into a world where she had to fight to survive. Like yeah it gets mentioned here and there but there's no emotional exploration bc Bethesda fucked themselves with player dialogue being yes/no/sarcastic/maybe(come back later)

The gunners, raiders, and super mutants are just shooting targets that have absolutely no effect on the story. The railroad is underdeveloped, the institute is cartoonish, the minutemen are radiant quest simulator 2000, and the brotherhood is just there so Bethesda can say look at the cool guys with power armor (don't worry about the fascistic undertones of their leadership that won't be addressed at all)

Diamond City doesn't feel like a city cowering in fear of the institute. It's like the writers were too afraid of going into the dark elements of the fallout story. Like they took the edge and whacked it against a cinder block until it was dull enough to market to 5 year olds. It's supposed to be gritty, it's supposed to be the darkest parts of humanity spread bare because that's where the hope comes from. It comes from persevering despite the world trying to beat you down. Because war never changes, but people do

Also I wanna be able to fuck Deacon

[writing-with-sophia]

How to get into the mind of a character? Honestly this can be for your OWN character or a fictional character. I'm wanting to write for characters- headcanons and fanfictions- and I'm so afraid I'll write them so uncanny to how they actually are.

How to get into the mind of a character?

To get into the mind of a character, you have to understand that character, believe in that character, and even "live" the character's life. But we all know each individual is different, and we cannot live different lives. A normal person who grew up in peacetime cannot fully understand the hardships of a warrior, and a doctor cannot know the thoughts of a mafia boss.

So, how can writers create believable characters? How can they possibly offer a believable soldier, cop, detective, alcoholic, or any given character type if they themselves haven't lived as them? How can they possibly offer a believable character in a situation that they've never been in?

Here are some tips you can use to get into the minds of characters:

Tip 1: Observe real-life people

To create well-rounded characters, observe real people around you. Pay attention to their behaviors, mannerisms, speech patterns, and thought processes. Take note of how they express emotions, handle conflicts, and make decisions. Drawing from real-life observations can add depth and authenticity to your characters. You can also search for novels and movies with different themes, study how characters with different pasts, biographies, occupations, and personalities act, behave, gesture, and speak. The best way is to prepare a small notebook and a pen so you can carry it with you wherever you go.

Tip 2: Create a detailed character profile

Develop a detailed character profile that includes information such as their age, background, beliefs, values, goals, and fears. Consider their relationships with other characters and how these dynamics influence their thoughts and actions. Delve into the character's past and explore significant events that have shaped them. Consider their upbringing, traumas, successes, and failures. These can provide you with a roadmap for understanding the character's mindset.

Tip 3: Use internal monologues and journaling

Imagine the character's internal thoughts and dialogues with themselves. Consider what they might be thinking in different situations, their hopes, dreams, and fears. (And why do they dream of that? Why are they afraid of that thing? What in the past made them afraid? Always asking questions.) Writing internal monologues or journal entries from the character's perspective can help you delve into their mindset and gain insight into their unique voice.

Tip 4: Consider their external influences

Characters are influenced by their environment, culture, and society. Reflect on how external factors such as family, friends, societal norms, or even the story's setting impact their thoughts and behaviors. This will help you portray their worldview more accurately.

Tip 5: Study the source material

If you're writing about an existing character from a book, TV show, or movie, immerse yourself in the source material. Pay attention to their dialogue, actions, and interactions with other characters. Take note of their personality traits, motivations, and backstory. This will help you develop a strong foundation for understanding the character. For example, recently I suddenly became interested in Nightwing (do you know him? Nightwing from the Batman series!), and I wanted to write a few short stories about him. So I found all the comics and movies that featured Nightwing and watched them one by one. I don't take notes because I have a pretty good memory (especially for characters I like), but I still recommend taking notes on special things to note.

Tip 6: Practice free writing

Set aside time for free writing exercises where you write from the character's point of view. Allow your thoughts to flow without judgment or editing. Just write, write, and write. You can reread and make corrections after you're done. Remember to gather your posts in one place; otherwise, you'll lose or forget them (like me!).

Getting into the mind of a character is an ongoing process that requires continuous exploration and refinement. The more you invest in understanding your character's thoughts, feelings, and motivations, the more compelling and authentic your writing will become.

Additionally, you can read my articles on how to write an effective character here:

How to create a superbad villain

How to make a villain's appearance memorable

Basic questions for your character

Describing a villain's appearance in a natural way

Create an effectively past for character

Common character motivations

How to create a good main character

How to avoid the instance where a secondary character stands out more/ is more lovable?

Character flaws

Writing a good Anti-Hero

Character positive traits

How to write an elderly main character?

Protagonist who is a ballerina

How to write a believeable egotistical character

[camisoledadparis]

HIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … January 1

I hope you are enjoying This Day in Gay History. It was started out as a reposting of White Crane's daily newsletters in early 2011 has gained a life of its own and grown out in many directions, in particular, gaining a international identity. The postings now come from many sources, some of them credited in the masthead, but also from tips and suggestions from members. As we move into a new year, you will find you have seen many of the postings before, but always check them out, because there will always be something new, especially as so many public figures are now coming out of the closet. Your Admin

1533 – Italy: Michelangelo writes a love letter to Tommaso de Cavalieri, devoting "the present and the time to come that remain to me."

Rare snapshot of Charles Kains Jackson

1857 – Charles Kains Jackson (d.1933) was an English poet closely associated with the Uranian school.

Beginning in 1888, in addition to a career as a lawyer, he served as editor for the periodical the Artist and Journal of Home Culture, which became something of an official periodical for the movement. In it, he praised such artists as Henry Scott Tuke (to whom he dedicated a sonnet) and Henry Oliver Walker. He also befriended such similar-minded contemporaries as Frederick William Rolfe, Lord Alfred Douglas and John Addington Symonds.The homosexual and pederastic aspects of the Artist declined after the replacement of Kains Jackson as an editor in 1894. The final issue edited by Kains Jackson included his essay, 'The New Chivalry', an argument for the moral and societal benefits of pederasty and erotic male friendship on the grounds of both Platonism and Social Darwinism. According to Kains Jackson, the New Chivalry would promote 'the youthful masculine ideal' over the Old Chivalry's emphasis on the feminine. Jackson's volumes of poetry include Finibus Cantat Amor (1922) and Lysis (1924).

Kains Jackson was a member of the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society for homosexuals founded in 1897 by George Ives, which was named after the location of the battle where the Sacred Band of Thebes was finally annihilated in 338 BC. Other members included Samuel Ellworth Cottam, Montague Summers, and John Gambril Nicholson.

1879 – E.M. Forster (d.1970) was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society.

Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family in London. England. He attended the famous public school Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy. The theatre at the school is named after him, and later studied at King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901.

After leaving university he travelled in continental Europe with his mother. He visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1914. By that time, Forster had written all but one of his novels. In the First World War, as a conscientious objector, he volunteered for the International Red Cross, travelling to Alexandria, Egypt.

Why didn't EM Forster write much of anything in the second half of his life? According to a new biographer, Wendy Moffat, who has had access to Forster's private papers, what knocked him off track was losing his virginity in his late 30s.

He slept with a wounded soldier in Egypt, in 1917 - "losing R [respectability]" he called it in his private diary. After that, he set about making up for lost time. "I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more," he later explained, "but sex prevented the latter."

Back in England Forster divided his time between his mother in the Home Counties and gay friends and bisexual boys in his London flat. Homosexuality in Britain was aggressively persecuted then and Forster wisely centred his affairs on officers from Hammersmith police station.

One of them, Bob Buckingham, became the love of Forster's life. Bob was bisexual and soon married, however, he never abandoned Forster. As for writing novels that stopped with the development of his homosexual life.

Forster developed a long-term loving relationship with Bob Buckingham, and his wife, and included the couple in his circle, which also included the writer and arts editor of The Listener, J.R. Ackerley, the psychologist W.J.H. Sprott, and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.

In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio. He was a humanist, homosexual, and lifelong bachelor.

Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice appeared shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. A seventh novel, Arctic Summer, was never finished. The earlier novels are Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howards End (1910).

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves.

Maurice (1971) - his one novel to deal head-on with homosexuality - was written some years previously, though it was published only after his death. His posthumously-published novel tells of the coming of age of an explicitly Gay male character.

Maurice is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's sexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality, even his personal activities, influenced his writing.

Forster's two best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works, and it has been argued that a general shift from heterosexual love to homosexual love can be detected over the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his own homosexuality, while similar issues are explored in several volumes of homosexually-charged short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short-story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.

Forster died of a stroke in Coventry on 7 June 1970 at the age of 91. at the home of his policeman friend and his wife, the Buckinghams.

1895 – Although never elected to any office, J. Edgar Hoover (d.1972) wielded tremendous political power in the United States government for almost five decades, and through eight presidencies, as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Under his leadership, the Bureau developed from a weak and ineffectual collection of political appointees into one of the most efficient police agencies in the world.

It also developed into an undercover secret police that frequently used illegal means to gather damaging information, not only on criminals and political dissidents, but also on political leaders as well. Although Hoover was always in the front lines of government attempts to harass homosexual liberation movements, rumors that he himself was gay followed him throughout his career.

Hoover went to work for the Justice Department in 1917 as a clerk, but moved up quickly by virtue of his efficiency and his vigorous action against Communists and radicals during the late 1910s and 1920s. He supervised the deportation of foreign-born radicals in the great strike wave of 1919.

In 1924, he was appointed head of the Bureau of Investigation of the Justice Department (renamed Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935). Hoover immediately began to tighten up the slack Bureau. New agents were hired and promoted based on merit and strict performance reviews. He used his library experience to re-organize records and files, and he began amassing his famous "secret files," confidential information, often illegally obtained, which he kept to use against anyone who might threaten his power or tenure.

Hoover soon became both famous and feared for his zealous campaigns against such criminal and "subversive" groups as the Communist Party and the Ku Klux Klan. During the prohibition era, his "G-men" hunted down and caught many prominent gangsters, such as Al Capone and John Dillinger.

During the 1950s, he participated fully in the McCarthy witch hunts, zealously seeking out Communists and fellow-travelers.

Along with pursuing Communist sympathizers, Hoover also led a campaign of harassment directed at the new "homophile" groups such as the Mattachine Society, which sprang up to protest mistreatment of gay men and lesbians. F.B.I. agents took pictures and license plate numbers at demonstrations and infiltrated meetings and conferences of the fledgling homophile groups.

Many believe that Hoover took this anti-gay stance to cover his own homosexuality. Although he constantly (and violently) denied it, whispers about his sexuality followed Hoover throughout his career. For example, a 1943 internal F.B.I. memo reported claims that the director was homosexual.

Hoover's lifestyle fit many gay stereotypes: he was a sharp, dandified dresser, known for his white linen suits and silk handkerchiefs, who collected antiques and lived with his mother until her death when he was 42. He was never known to have even one date with a woman, yet he had several intimate relationships with men, notably a more than forty-year relationship with the handsome Clyde Tolson, his second-in-command at the F.B.I.

Hoover and Tolson rode to work together, ate lunch and dinner together most days, and took vacations together. Many observers described their relationship as marriage-like. Although some commentators believe that Hoover's rigid morality and strict religious beliefs would not have permitted him to have a physical relationship with a man, the rumors of his homosexuality were accelerated by the appearance, after their deaths, of photographs of Hoover and Tolson in drag, photographs that were allegedly Mafia blackmail pictures.

If Hoover and Tolson were homosexual, as seems more and more likely, their roles as persecutors of other homosexuals casts into bold relief the nightmare-like quality of the McCarthy era's war on homosexuality.

Hoover remained in charge of the F.B.I. until his death from a heart attack on May 2, 1972.

1927 – Maurice Béjart (d.2007) was a French born, Swiss choreographer who ran the Béjart Ballet Lausanne in Switzerland. He was the son of the French philosopher Gaston Berger.

Perhaps the preeminent descendant of Sergei Diaghilev and Serge Lifar, Maurice Béjart was a significant presence in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century dance as an innovator with a radical vision. Central to his reinvigoration of classical ballet was his creation of palpably homoerotic dances that celebrate male beauty.

After studying with Léo Staats, Lubov Egorova, and Madama Rousanne (Sarkissian) in Paris, he performed with Mona Inglesby's International Ballet and the Royal Swedish Ballet and sealed his reputation as industrious and disciplined before creating dances for his own path-breaking companies.

Symphonie pour un homme seul (1955, with a score by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry), featuring the first electronic score to accompany ballet, established Béjart as an innovator with a radical vision.

After presenting an electrifying interpretation of The Rite of Spring (set to the classic Igor Stravinsky score) informed by myth, sexual heat, and stage flash in 1959 at the Théâtre Royale de la Monnaie in Brussels, he founded The Ballet of the Twentieth Century, a company that had a major influence on the European Dance Theatre movement.

Nijinsky: Clown of God (1971, set to a score combining music by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky and Pierre Henry), a dreamlike meditation on Vaslav Nijinsky and his legacy, is only one prominent example of Béjart's personal identification and connection with his choreographic subjects.

Many times that connection, as in Nijinsky: Clown of God, was palpably homoerotic. In addition to reimagining Ballets Russes classics such as The Firebird (to the original Stravinsky score), Pétrouchka (to the Stravinsky score) and The Specter of the Rose (to a score of a piano piece by Carl Maria von Weber, orchestrated by Hector Berlioz) to spectacular effect, he also derived inspiration from such gay icons as Prometheus, Dionysus, Orpheus, and Saint Sebastian.

Collaborating closely with many extraordinarily handsome men (Argentine Jorge Donn and Italian Paolo Bortoluzzi among them), Béjart consistently created dances celebrating male beauty and eroticism, not the least of which was the all-male variant of his Boléro (1960, to the throbbing score by Maurice Ravel).

Audiences and critics were either enthralled or enraged by later offerings such as the celebratory Ballet for Life (1997, set to a score combining classical Mozart with pop-rock Queen), in response to the AIDS-related deaths of his friends Jorge Donn and Freddie Mercury of the rock group Queen; and Bolero for Gianni (1999, set to his all-time-favorite Ravel score), a tribute to the murdered Gianni Versace, who had designed the eye-popping costumes for that 1997 dance.

Although beset by kidney problems and other illnesses in his final years, Béjart continued working until the very end of his life. He died on November 22, 2007.

1944 – Eloy de la Iglesia (d.2006) was a Spanish screenwriter and film director.

De la Iglesia was an outspoken gay socialist filmmaker who is relatively unknown outside Spain despite a prolific and successful career in his native country. He is best remembered for having portrayed urban marginality and the world of drugs and juvenile delinquency in the early 1980s. Many of his films also deal with the theme of homosexuality.

Born in Zarauz, Guipúzcoa into a wealthy Basque family, he grew up in Madrid. He attended courses at the prestigious Parisian Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, but he could not enter Spain’s national Film School because he wasn't yet 21, the minimum age required for admission. Instead, he began to study philosophy and literature at the Complutense University of Madrid, but on his third year he abandoned it to direct children’s theater. By age twenty he had already written and directed many works for television sharpening his narrative skills. He established himself as a writer of children's television programs for Radiotelevisíon Española in Barcelona.

De la Iglesia made his debut as film director when he was only twenty-two years old with Fantasia 3 (Fantasy 3) (1966), adapting three children’s stories: The Maid of the Sea, The three hairs from the devil and The Wizard of Oz. While doing mandatory military service, he wrote the script of his second film, Algo Amargo en la Boca (Something Bitter Tasting) (1968). Algo Amargo en la boca, a sordid melodrama, and de la Iglesia’s next film, Cuadrilatero (Boxing Ring) (1969), a boxing story, faced problems with the Francoist censors and failed at the box office. His films did not attract widespread notice until his fourth effort, the critically acclaimed thriller El Techo de Cristal (The Glass Ceiling) (1970).

The dismantling of the Francoist censorship allowed Eloy de la Iglesia to increase sexually charged tones in his works. This approach became apparent in his films: Juego de amor prohibido (Games of Forbbiden Love) (1975) and La otra alcoba (The other bedroom) (1976). In the late 1970s Eloy de la Iglesia, associated with journalist and screen writer Gonzalo Goicoechea, tackled former taboo subjects in Spanish Cinema. Los placeres ocultos (Hidden Pleasures ) (1977) focused on homosexuality. El diputado (Confessions of a Congressman) (1979), follows the story of a politician who is blackmailed due to his secret homosexuality and El sacerdote (The Priest ), also released in 1979, deals with a conservative catholic priest whose sexual obsessions leads him to self-mutilation.

Like many of the young protagonists of his films, Eloy de la iglesia became addicted to drugs such as heroin and he stopped making films for fifteen years. Claiming that his addiction to cinema was stronger than his drug problems, de la Iglesia eventually kicked his habit and resumed his career making Los novios bulgaros (The Bulgarian Lovers) (2003), a film based on the novel of the same title written by Eduardo Mendicutti.

Stricken with kidney cancer, he died on March 24, 2006, age sixty two, after surgery to remove a malignant tumor.

1959 – Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba after leading a revolution that drove out dictator Fulgencio Batista. Castro then established a Communist dictatorship. Although homosexuality was illegal under the Batista government the laws were largely ignored in fun loving Cuba. Since Castro, tens of thousands of gays have been rounded up and imprisoned.

1967 – The Los Angeles Police Department raid the New Year’s Eve parties at two gay bars, the Black Cat Tavern and New Faces. Several patrons were injured and a bartender was hospitalized with a fractured skull. Several hundred people spontaneously demonstrate on Sunset Boulevard and picket outside the Black Cat. The raids prompted a series of protests that began on 5 January 1967, organized by P.R.I.D.E. (Personal Rights in Defense and Education). It’s the first use of the term "Pride" that came to be associated with LGBT rights and fuels the formation of gay rights groups in California, well before the Stonewall Riot.

The popular notion that the Stonewall Riots marked the very first time that LGBT folks "fought back instead of passively enduring humiliating treatment,” is false. Other critical moments in LGBT History that pre-date Stonewall include:

New Year's Ball Raid in San Francisco (1965)

Gene Compton’s Cafeteria Riot (1966)

Cooper Do-Nuts Riot (1959)

1968 – Joey Stefano (d.1994) was an American pornographic actor who appeared in gay adult films. Born Nicholas Anthony Iacona, Jr., Stefano grew up in the Philadelphia area (Chester, Pennsylvania). His father died when he was 15. After several years of prostitution and hard-core drug use in New York City, Stefano moved to Los Angeles and quickly became a star in gay pornography. In addition to his good looks, his persona as a "hungry bottom" (sexually submissive but verbally demanding) contributed to his popularity.

His image and success caught the attention of Madonna, who used him as a model in her 1992 book Sex.

During his lifetime, he was the subject of rumors (some of them spread by himself) regarding his relationships with prominent entertainment industry figures who were known to be gay. At a May 1990 dinner and interview with Jess Cagle (Entertainment Weekly) and Rick X (Manhattan Cable TV's The Closet Case Show), Stefano discussed an alleged series of "dates" with David Geffen, who at one point implored Stefano to quit using drugs. After the videotaped interview appeared on Rick X's show, OutWeek Magazine "outed" Geffen, who went on to announce his homosexuality at an AIDS fundraiser.

He was HIV positive. According to a subsequent biography Stefano died of speedball overdose (cocaine, morphine, heroin, and ketamine) at age 26 in the shower of a motel on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. His body was taken back to Pennsylvania where he was buried next to his father.

Stefano's life is chronicled in the book, Wonder Bread and Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano by Charles Isherwood. His life is also the subject of a one-man-play, Homme Fatale: The Fast Life and Slow Death of Joey Stefano, by Australian playwright Barry Lowe.

1976 – (Daniel L.) Dan Kloeffler is an American television journalist. Since 2010, he is an anchor of ABC News Now, a cable-news channel of the ABC broadcasting network.

He worked at WSTM-TV - an NBC-affiliated television station in Syracuse, New York - prior to joining MSNBC, a cable-news channel. While at MSNBC, he anchored overnight MSNBC Now news updates as well as MSNBC's First Look and broadcast network NBC's Early Today, both early-morning news programs; Kloeffler left MSNBC in 2009. In 2010, he became a freelance anchor and correspondent for ABC News, where he anchors on its ABC News Now channel.In response to the news that actor Zachary Quinto had come out as gay, Kloeffler publicly came out on the air in October 2011.

In a statement on the ABC News website, he wrote that a series of suicides by gay youth also led him to hope his being publicly out would help encourage young gay people struggling to accept themselves.

2008 – Queen Elizabeth II makes actor Ian Mckellen a Companion of Honor, one of only 65.

[thelaurenshippen]

How much of an impact has writing and consuming fanfiction had in your writing career?

I ask about fanfiction specifically because it's such an open communication sort of media, it's so easy for author and reader to interact. Do you think you'd write differently if you'd never been in the Fanfiction community? What do you think has carried over from those works and interactions into your current works?

ooh, such a fun question! I've never really thought about this before!

so I will admit, while I have been reading fanfiction since 2006, I never actually wrote fanfiction until 2018 (and then didn't share any of it until 2021). so I think those specific relationships affected my writing in very specific ways.

from a reading perspective, I think fanfic really showed me that a story can be anything, told in a million different kinds of ways. the two fandoms that I was deeply entrenched in/reading fic in were sherlock (lol) and the winter soldier (I stand by it). both of those fandoms - TWS especially - did a lot of very interesting stuff when it came to story structure, multimedia storytelling, etc. while of course there's great published fiction that does the same (I've been a huge David Mitchell stan since I was 20, I read House of Leaves for the first time a few years ago, A Series of Unfortunate Events is such a great example of this tbh), I think there's a lot of freewheeling experimentation in fanfiction that encouraged me to do things like write Some Faraway Place as a mix of journal entries, reddit posts, letters, and tumblr posts.

it's also interesting to me that you bring up the author/reader interaction, because you're right, it is such a huge part of fanfic and a part I rarely thought about for a looooong time. I'm a socially anxious lurker by nature, so I would leave comments (show your local fanfic writer some love!) and I would follow a lot of those writers, but I'd never, like, interact with them directly. and my comments were usually along the lines of "I'M FLINGING MYSELF DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN" rather than openings to conversations lol.

but that changed significantly when I started writing fic. the first fandom I wrote for was SO small and the ship I was writing for even smaller (I'm responsible for over half the fics in that tag), so there wasn't really any interaction there. but then I started writing in a different fandom - still small but much more active - and joined a discord and everything. I'm not really active anymore, but I met someone who now has become one of my best friends and who is a huge reason why Desperate Hollow, my queer outlaw novel, finally got fucking finished.

so being in fanfic really affected my writing in the sense that I found a writer friend who - like a lot of other writing friends - has had a profound affect on me as an artist. but more broadly, writing fic for that fandom - about 200k words of it in eight months - taught me some very important things:

how to write a lot of words very, very quickly

how to let go of something being perfect - no one knows who I am on ao3 and people are just happy to have fic for a small fandom, so it doesn't have to be GOOD

how to write physicality - this is very hard for me, even now. I'm an audio first person, I rarely think about what people look like, how they move their bodies, etc. writing fic is so helpful, because if you're using canon scenes, you don't have to come up with the blocking, you just have to figure out how to describe it.

dialogue/character voice - learning how to mimic a writer's style is good from two perspectives: one, you learn more about style and voice by having to unpack someone else's. two, as a writer working in a scripted medium, you often are trying to write to an established style, because you might be in a writer's room for a world that you didn't create.

this is a less tangible effect, but writing mature works for a fandom that has mostly morally gray characters helped me get more comfortable with being bolder in my own work. Desperate Hollow is about two men in the wild west, one of whom has killed a lot of people, and both of whom are career criminals. the show I'm working on currently has the messiest found family dynamic and it will only get messier. I think in the course of writing TBS, I sometimes got scared of doing the wrong thing, or of leaning too hard into the darker parts of the story, and I'm trying to let my characters and stories be deeply imperfect now.

I hope that answers your questions!

[nesiacha]

Personality Traits of Gracchus Babeuf part I

As usual, I am not infallible, so please feel free to criticize me. Additionally, my text is not very fluid because I’ve been very exhausted these days, but I couldn’t risk losing it due to issues with my computer.

In the first part, we saw here https://www.tumblr.com/nesiacha/775869258936860672/physical-appearance-of-gracchus-babeuf?source=share what Gracchus Babeuf looked like. Here, we will discuss his personality. In this part we will see Babeuf's positive personality traits then in a third part his faults (thanks to the word limit on Tumblr)

Gracchus Babeuf was known to be a very sensitive person, as confirmed by his friend Buonarroti. His gaze also revealed his frankness.

As a fervent revolutionary, he was strongly opposed to some of the massacres during the Revolution, such as the drownings ordered by Carrier and the assassination of Foulon during the storming of the Bastille. You can see more on this topic in the links here: Gracchus Babeuf’s Opinion on the Storming of the Bastille and Message to de Villiers and Sécher-Chaunu, which also demonstrate that Babeuf was fully committed to republican ideals. These sources counter the arguments of some « historians » like Sécher, who wrongly claim that Babeuf's writings condemning the violence in Vendée support the absurd thesis that the French Revolution was a model of totalitarianism.

Babeuf was also known for his sense of humor, which he often used, whether with his family (as seen in an excerpt from his correspondence with them here) or with his colleagues and in his journal. Jean-Marc Schiappa mentions: "He also speaks of the Fates who eliminated his predecessors when he applied for a feudist position and notes that his health is good."

Another excerpt from Jean-Marc Schiappa’s book shows Babeuf's humor when he was pursued by the police for the umpteenth time: "Babeuf's account, published in issue 36 of the journal dated 20 Frimaire, is delightful. He recounts putting into practice the principle of 'resistance to oppression' and, with a powerful punch, strikes the 'alzaguil' (a reminiscence of Marat, who used the term in support of Babeuf in 1790, although Babeuf had already used it himself in Year III). After escaping, he is pursued by an agent shouting 'Thief!' Even in this situation, Babeuf maintains his humor and dignity: he must look like a thief since he lost his cravat. Three times he was stopped by the crowd 'at the corner of Rue Honoré, across from the Assumption. But three times it was enough to say my name for the people to release me. The brave workers of the Hall, employed at the provisions store, were the last to stop me.' However, 'as soon as they knew who I was, they protected my retreat.'"

In addition to his humor, Gracchus Babeuf had a remarkable talent for writing, which made him an excellent journalist. His father, a former soldier, provided him with an education despite their limited means, in a manner that deeply traumatized young Gracchus. He wrote: "The education cost my shoulders dearly, as it was taught roughly, and I vividly remember the soldierly tone and the terribly blunt gestures with which they... not brutalized, but atrociously tortured my childhood." Babeuf had to work very early, like many poor children at the time, starting as a laborer. Some say he was self-taught, while others disagree. In any case, even in prison, and until the end, he continued his journalistic work. Bouis had good reason to believe that Babeuf was also the writer of an article published by his friend Hésine in support of the accused.

While Babeuf was warm, open, and friendly, he could also have a hot temper, as noted by his lawyer, Réal, which was confirmed by various actions in his life. He did not hesitate to insult the concierge of the Besse detention house during one of his many stays, calling him "a vile devil, a low servant, etc." He also refused to respond to Jean Almain, the head of the interrogation office, saying that he only wanted to be questioned by a representative of the people.

During his last stay in prison in Vendôme, Babeuf exhibited an even more explosive temperament alongside a prominent Babouvist, Blondeau, who had become a police officer. An excerpt from Régis Bouis states: "Among the prisoners in Vendôme, it was Babeuf, who, aside from his role in their common defense, committed the most acts of violence toward the guards, particularly the cooks." Jean-Marc Schiappa adds: "On 20 Brumaire, Babeuf did not hesitate to threaten him. On 30 Frimaire, 'the dishes were broken, and the uproar became considerable.' On 11 Nivôse, Babeuf 'struck the cook with two kicks to the ribs.' On 15 Pluviôse, 'the medical officer was mistreated by Babeuf and Blondeau.'" One incident was recounted by an indirect witness, the former royal cook Mignot Warnié, who had also worked for Babeuf during his final prison stay: "The custom of the house was to serve each prisoner one soup bowl and two plates for the stew and entrée. On 22 Pluviôse, several prisoners, including Babeuf, were only given one plate. Babeuf protested to the cook about the impossibility of receiving all three items in one vessel for his meal." Babeuf raised his voice, as did his interlocutor. Gracchus then broke the plates, and the meal was served in a chamber pot, which Babeuf, justly outraged, threw across the legs of the two servants, though he did not hit them. He was subsequently placed in solitary confinement.

However, Jean-Marc Schiappa notes that although Babeuf was known for his sometimes explosive temper, it had never been as intense as during his time in Vendôme. Why? This was part of his "defensive strategy of rupture," rejecting any authority to awaken public opinion, which would be necessary for the "rescue" of the accused.

Babeuf was also furious when, for the umpteenth time, the judges attempted to defame him as a royalist and claimed that the Conspiracy aimed to restore the monarchy. They showed one of the words his 11-year-old son had said about his father, calling him Gracchus I, as though it were a royalist title, when it was, in fact, an expression of admiration from a son to his father. Babeuf grew angry and pointed out the author of the word, his son, now 12 years old, to thwart the futile attempt to pit father against son. Babeuf's outbursts, therefore, could be both genuine and understandable, especially when his family was attacked, but also entirely calculated, such as in his defensive strategy of rupture. He also used this text about the suffering his wife and children had to endure, which continued even after his death.

Contrary to many misconceptions (I have Zweig in my sights), Gracchus was an intelligent man, not a fool. Here is one of the many proofs that illustrate Babeuf's astute mind, according to Jean-Marc Schiappa: "Let the Nazarene god have no more privileges than others, and let him remain confined to temples." Babeuf preferred to emphasize the issue of education. For a revolution, Babeuf wanted it to occur "on a day when the Decadi coincided with a Sunday, to more easily unite workers still attached to Christian practices and those who had already renounced them," demonstrating great intelligence. (Where I disagree with Schiappa is when he suggests that Babeuf was aligned with Robespierre in laying the foundations for a secular tradition and rejecting persecution. It is not the latter part that I disagree with, but rather the idea that Babeuf was on the same wavelength as Robespierre, given that Babeuf disapproved of the "Supreme Being" cult. To be fair to Schiappa, he notes a page earlier that Babeuf criticized Robespierre's religious policy.)

As you may have seen in the post explaining the relationship between Jean-Paul Marat and Gracchus Babeuf, Gracchus was right on certain points compared to Marat. Link to the post. Here’s an excerpt: "While Marat constantly attacked Necker, he was also opposed to the maximum and the establishment of stable prices in February 1793, according to Daline (a policy favored by the Hébertists, close to Babeuf, such as Chaumette), while Babeuf, according to Daline's excerpt, believed that the only way to solve the supply difficulties was 'taxation,' the establishment of stable prices. In his correspondence, he wrote: 'Until we come to more decisive taxation, we will always be at risk of shortages, and no committee of provisions will stop us from suffering hunger.' The unfinished manuscript also contains interesting observations by Babeuf about the grain market of Santerre in Picardy, France, as he tried to understand why the grain coming from there to Paris was not reaching the capital." So, Babeuf wanted to go beyond Marat and sought to better understand economic problems.

Gracchus also predicted the rise of Bonaparte, like many other revolutionaries, as you can see here: Link to the post. Let’s not forget that he successfully evaded authorities multiple times and led a long clandestine life, which requires a certain level of cunning and intelligence. Though sometimes known for his overflowing enthusiasm, to the point of having feverish fits according to some sources, he wasn’t constantly exalted, as Jean-Marc Schiappa explained. He also calmed the impatient in issue number 41 of his journal. He often had to outsmart opponents, including during his trial, when he knew the atmosphere was shifting in their favor. He was even willing to negotiate with the Directoire, as shown in some of his letters. Contrary to some misconceptions I’ve seen (not here on Tumblr, but in other forums), Gracchus Babeuf didn’t dream of dying as a martyr for his cause. He wanted to live as long as possible, especially for his family. He himself said that he "contemplated the future of his wife and children" (according to Schiappa). However, if faced with betraying his beliefs and friends or death, he chose death, fully aware that it would be the necessary path, as he said: "one must pay the toll."

Gracchus was a man who believed in equality between men and women, as seen here: Link to the post. He was a truly incorruptible man. Despite constant poverty, he refused to be bought by his enemies, even after the death of his daughter due to malnutrition. Even in adversity and the most difficult trials, he did not give up, demonstrating great courage and integrity. Honestly, after everything he had suffered, especially after the death of his second daughter, I wouldn’t have blamed him for at least trying to secure better income to survive, even if it meant accepting offers from corrupt men. But he refused, which once again demonstrates great courage and extraordinary fighting spirit

In this first post, you can see some of the hardships Gracchus faced through excerpts from his writings: Link to the post, and in the second one, the bribery offer Fouché made to Gracchus (perhaps coming from Barras), which he rejected, marking the final break between Fouché and Babeuf: Link to the post.

Babeuf was a man who believed in the equality of men and women, as seen in this post: Link to the post. There were several important women among the Babouvists, who deserve further research. These included Marie-Adelaide Lambert, Sophie Lapierre, and perhaps even Elisabeth Lebon, widow of Joseph Lebon. This woman, while in the Arras prison, formed links with future important Babouvists (such as Charles Germain), and said: "Here, all the friends are in continuous meeting with Babeuf." Other important women in history supported the Babouvists (notably Eleonore Duplay, with her political connection to Buonarroti). It would be worthwhile to find the correspondence Babeuf had with the widow Chaumette to understand if it was political or simply about helping a widow of a man executed without being rehabilitated (especially since Babeuf seemed close to Chaumette, calling him his friend).

Babeuf supported the full participation of women in political clubs. Gracchus said of women: "The advice you give us on the role that women can play is sensible and judicious; we will take advantage of it. We know the influence this interesting sex can have, who, like us, cannot endure the yoke of tyranny and who are no less courageous when it comes to breaking it." Therefore, he approved of women's full participation in the conspiracy.

Babeuf's wife, Marie-Anne, was politically instrumental to him. Very involved in the press, in subscription numbers, and in efforts to have him freed, she was much more than just a political partner. In their correspondence, beyond the tender and affectionate words Gracchus sent her, showing a deep love, he also shared his political opinions and treated her as an equal. He listened to her advice when she told him to be clever during his imprisonment in Year III. She seemed very intelligent and managed clandestine communications under the guise of being a mother (she took good care of her children). This shows she was a trusted figure within the Babouvist circle, capable of deceiving the police and demonstrating initiative and intelligence, as Jean-Marc Schiappa noted.

Gracchus said his wife was as virtuous and republican as he was. She played an important role in the Babouvist conspiracy. When the police arrested her and placed her in the Petite-Force prison for three weeks, hoping she would abandon her husband and reveal his whereabouts, she refused to abandon him and showed a character that would exasperate the policeman Lamoignière, as seen here: Link to the post. Upon his death, Gracchus even left her certain documents. It is highly likely that, even after Gracchus’s death, Marie-Anne never abandoned her militant activities, given her resilient character and the fact she was targeted twice by the Napoleonic police (she was also a victim of a police procedure in Year VII, according to Jean-Marc Schiappa). There was certainly an equality dimension in their relationship.

Jean-Marc Schiappa also states that initially, Emile Babeuf was not supposed to be Gracchus's "main political heir," but rather their first child, Catherine-Adélaïde-Sophie, born in 1783 and died in 1797 from a scalding water accident. She was the object of much paternal affection and political ambition (in the sense of activism and revolutionary spirit). After her death, Emile, the second eldest of the Babeuf children, became the political heir. This again highlights how much Gracchus valued the importance of women in political affairs.

Gracchus was also a firm believer in egalitarian politics. When Darthé and Debon proposed dictatorship (likely in the Roman sense), as the head of the Conspiracy, he rejected it. He was also against slavery, stating: "It is large property that creates oppressors and the oppressed; the vain idlers and the slaves bent, crushed under the weight of excessive labor. It is this that, in the colonies, gives the negroes on our plantations more lashes than pieces of bread." He was also very tolerant, saying about Jews: "It is high time to abandon the fanatical prejudices that for so long made this peaceful people the unfortunate victims of all sectarian persecutions."

He knew how to form alliances with left-wing political factions, such as when he created links with Robert Lindet, Jean-Paul Marat and his family (Simone Evrard, and especially Albertine Marat), the Enragés (Gracchus was a friend of Varlet), and the prominent Hébertists (Chaumette, Joseph Bodson, Rossignol, Clémence, Marchand, Jean Nicolas Pache). He also maintained political ties until the end of his life with the Robespierrists (Didier, the Duplay family, and especially Buonarroti, his lifelong friend whom he held in high regard since 1789).

I have the impression that Gracchus, despite not being forgiving, could spare criticism for someone if they were truly working for the Republic. The proof being that, until the end, he refused to lump Carnot, one of the architects of the repression against the Babouvists, in the same category as Barras, Cochon, and others (Gracchus criticized Carnot but not as harshly). You can see that here: Link to the post. Of course, it’s possible that Gracchus had some recognition from Carnot for protecting some of his friends, including Felix Le Peletier: Link to the post.

Gracchus was also a man who adored his children. He never recovered from the loss of his two daughters. He felt immense tenderness for his children, a great affection for them, and considered them partners, but he also didn’t hesitate to reprimand them when they acted on their own. Sometimes he would wake up in tears in prison, imagining that his son Emile had fallen ill. When he was placed in an iron cage with other prisoners of the Conspiracy to be transported to Vendôme, Gracchus told his wife and children that he was well-treated. However, Buonarroti claimed they were subjected to harsh treatment by the chief of the gendarmes escorting them. If Babeuf lied, it shows how much he wanted to protect his loved ones. Even in prison, Babeuf continued to focus on his son Emile’s education. The parents even considered having Emile join his father in prison, but they abandoned the idea. They continued to correspond, and Gracchus saw his wife and sons when they were on a neighboring hill. According to Charles Germain and Buonarroti, his last words were for his children.

[dimsilver]

looooong get-to-know-me tag game

thanks for the tag @gailyinthedark!

Origin of your blog title: a line of writing I once came up with and liked. very Lewis inspired. it's in my bio

OTPs: Eowyn/Faramir, Lucy/Lockwood, Peggy/Sousa, Katniss/Peeta, Puck/Sean...idk, that's a start

Favorite game: that's very hard. I'll say ultimate frisbee and Scrabble

Favorite color: light turquoise/ice blue, but dark forest green is a very close second

What song is currently stuck inside your head? Man of Sorrows by Steffany Gretzinger. I heard it for the first time this week as an interlude in a Last Supper play I'm in, and my friend sings it very well

Weirdest habit: taking absolutely forever to get ready for bed whenever I'm tired

Hobbies: I think it's easier to list the ones I don't have, but the main ones are acting, swing dancing, reading, and gouache painting (and writing I promise I'm a writer I definitely write)

What's your profession? journalist

Dream job? Christian summer camp leadership. Or something similar. Summers spent doing physical labor and discipleship and Bible teaching and archery class and lifeguarding and leading teams of staffers were truly the most fulfilling thing I've known. But journalism is pretty good. I'd also love to teach something like literature, history (esp art history!), or theology to high schoolers but I don't have the expertise. Good thing I want to homeschool.

Something you're good at: Stage management and adjacent things - details, people, moving some furniture etc

Something you're bad at: going to bed on time and drinking water :((

Something you love: See above comments about camp. Also my people, sunsets, and rain

Something you could talk about for hours off the cuff: Biblical symbolism/themes or Renaissance art or the larp event I go to

Something you hate: when people make everything a joke and can't be sincere or handle deep conversation

Something you forget: languages as soon as I stop working on them. rip to Koine Greek especially

Something you collect: books :)

Love language: physical touch with words of affirmation and quality time tied for second. also shared passions!!

Favorite movie: really depends but Captain America: Winter Soldier is one of my most watched

Favorite food: very hard choice but Thai food probably. My family always got a bunch of dishes and shared family-style so I can't pick a favorite dish

Favorite animal: horse. yes I was a horse girl

What were you like as a child? Introverted until I was 12, very introspective, a bit pedantic, voracious reader, big people pleaser, gave everyone art I made, big fan of little siblings

Favorite subject at school: I liked nearly everything. history, literature, Latin, journalism, chorale...

Least favorite subject: calculus. I was pretty good at math and enjoyed it until then

Best character trait? I'm not sure - maybe that delight and thankfulness come easily to me and I'm told it's infectious

Worst character trait: I have a really hard time making needed changes to my habits that affect only me

If you could change any detail of your life right now, what would it be? not be chronically ill/have a severe and still unidentified skin condition

If you could travel in time, who would you meet? Jesus? I'm serious. Can't imagine anything more satisfying and world-shaking than that. but if it was someone else, maybe Rich Mullins or George Herbert. I love them both for their poetry and raw honest devotion

I tag anyone who also loves forest green :)

[copingchaos]

The dehumanization of Arab men in a nutshell. This woman explicitly mentions it's Gazan men who are being violated. Simple human beings, not soldiers or criminals. And she still has the gall to wonder why it's upsetting to see these men half naked, on their knees, blindfolded and bound by restraints.

The kicker? This person is a reporter/writer for the Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel. What an asset to journalism...

[djuvlipen]

Tera Fabianova

Tera Fabiánová (née Kurinová, 15 October 1930, Žihárec, Šaľa district - 23 March 2007, Prague) was a prominent Romani writer. When she was four years old, her family moved them to her mother's native village of Vlčany (Šaľa district), where they built a house of unfired bricks. Because of the war, Tera completed only three grades of primary school, which became the subject of one of her best-known stories, Sar me phiravas andre škola (How I Went to School). After the war, the Kurins went to Moravia to work, where Tera worked in agriculture at the age of sixteen and later in Prague on construction sites or as a maid.

She met her husband Vojta Fabián, a professional soldier originally from the village of Kurima (Bardějov district), at the age of eighteen. They had four children, one of whom, a son, died while he was young; the Fabiáns divorced after forty years of marriage. Vojta Fabián[1] did not have much sympathy for his emancipated wife, which is why the position and role of the Roma woman became a frequent subject of her texts. Tera Fabiánová worked for thirty-five years as a crane operator at ČKD Praha, retiring from there on a disability pension due to impaired health.

She was fluent in four languages and began writing in the 1960s – originally in Hungarian, but soon switching to Romani. Her output includes short stories, poems, fairy tales and feuilletons; it deals with the position of the Roma in society, the emancipation of women in the Roma family, violence in marriage and the friendship between humans and animals. Tera Fabiánová's poems – such as those in the anthology Romane giľa (Romany Songs, 1979) – mainly express feelings of loneliness, disappointment, and nostalgia for her Slovak home. In the early 1970s, she published in the magazine Romano ľil (Romany Journal), which was published by the Union of Gypsies-Roma as the first Romani periodical in Czechoslovakia. Her essay promoting the self-esteem of Romani women became the first piece written in Romani in this magazine. As a pioneer of writing in Romani, she became a role model for future generations of Romani women writers, despite the regime’s disapproval and limited publishing opportunities.

[zepskies]

Why We Love the Boys

As promised, here is my review of Supes Ain’t Always Heroes. I actually used to write book reviews in my high school journalism days, so here we go!  

What this book is: A masterful deep dive. A study on character psychology, the source of the comic and show’s inspiration, and the narrative themes illustrated in The Boys that parallel American culture and our real lives.

It includes interviews from one of the comic’s creators, Darick Robertson, The Krip himself (Eric Kripke), and actors Jim Beaver (Robert Singer), Aya Cash (Stormfront), Chace Crawford (The Deep), Jessie T. Usher (A-Train), Nathan Mitchell (Black Noir), and of course, Jensen Ackles (Soldier Boy).

It also includes a small but significant ode to the creativity of fans and fandom (with a mention of fanfic writers)!

I’ll admit, I felt seen. 😊

Who wrote it: Psychologists Lynn S. Zubernis and Matthew Snyder, among several other contributors. Zubernis is a self-proclaimed fangirl of not only this show, but also of Supernatural and Eric Kripke in general. (That aspect definitely comes through in her writing.)

She is also editor of Family Don’t End with Blood: Cast and Fans on How Supernatural Changes Lives and There’ll Be Peace When you Are Done: Actors and Fans Celebrate the Legacy of Supernatural—both of which I now want to read.

As I mentioned, several other authors also contributed to this book, as their expertise and backgrounds lend to the subjects they’re covering, such as racism, sexism, the entertainment industry, the comic’s inception, and more.

Who wants to read this book: Anyone who enjoys learning about what makes characters tick. What drives their choices, their sense of morality and justice, and their trauma and strife that lead them to do heinous things. This book will help you better understand your favorite characters (and how to write about them).

Perhaps most importantly, this book is for anyone who wants to read it put into words, why many of us love The Boys, as well as Supernatural.

In a way, the latter is more escapism entertainment than The Boys. Because in this show, there isn’t much, if any escape.

Despite this being a “superhero show,” as we all know, it’s so much more than that. It’s a mirror held directly into our own faces: about why we enjoy heroes and antiheroes, and excuse the “bad behavior” of the ones we like.

About mental health, grief and loss, nature and nurture, coping mechanisms and the importance of choice in dealing with trauma; of racism, sexism, misogyny, weaponized social media, politics, corporate greed, and the power (and cruelty) of good marketing.

This book explores the true villain of the story...and it ain’t Homelander.

I’m going to get into my favorite aspects of this book—as well as an amazing chapter on Soldier Boy’s character study (and why we love him, perhaps too much).

There was also one small, but key thing I would add to that argument. But first...

The Mirror of The Boys on Screen

This world is a gritty, bloody, and at times all-too realistic take on how superheroes would be if they lived in our world.

They are the worst of celebrities, professional athletes, and politicians all rolled into one. They are the shiny products of a company and are marketed as such—and worst of all, they often buy into their own hype.

Some of my favorite quotes on this topic:

“The Boys often reflects darkness in our real world that is uncomfortable to watch. While we go through the tedium of our daily lives, trying to get by and using television or comics as an escape, it can feel difficult and overwhelming to confront the very real and insidious sources of authoritarianism, nationalism, and corporatism that are not just part of a story. “This show holds up a mirror and forces us to catch a glimpse of things we need to question, and asks us why we so easily believe the talking points of systems with marketing departments and press flacks behind them that carefully massage every word in order to get us to feel enamored with their product or policy.” (p. 227-228)

“The Boys works to reveal the nonaltruistic, sociopathic nature of contemporary US corporate culture. In a sense, The Boys uses the behavior of its characters to diagnose not an individual, but a culture.” (255)

In studying narrative I’ve learned that the best fiction and art serve to reflect the human experience. In this case, it’s something The Boys does expertly, even though it’s packaged in extreme, shocking, and often uncomfortable ways. But also in brutal, hilarious satire that’s fun to watch.

It “exposes real-world abuses, revealing many” of our own frustrations in American culture and in life in general (267).

Major Themes & Questions Explored

Several Boys themes are explored from a psychological, cultural, and narrative point of view, as I mentioned earlier. These are some of my favorite segments:

Toxic Masculinity & Narcissism

A whopper in The Boys, and the main theme of season 3. This book defines clearly what both of these words actually mean from a psychological point of view.

It also takes the bad taste out of your mouth that you might get from just hearing the words “toxic masculinity,” as it’s a phrase that can be carelessly thrown around to describe men and character traits that aren’t truly toxic...

How being emotionally available to your loved ones and not repressive of your feelings doesn’t make you weak, or less of a man. And how “being strong” doesn’t mean being physically violent and domineering. (AKA: the Big Swinging Dick™️ in the room.)

Narcissism is explored in a very interesting way. The book gives a diagram of different aspects of narcissists and how each character (Soldier Boy, Homelander, Butcher, and the Deep) falls into them.

Soldier Boy, for example, is classified as a “Classic Narcissist,” while Homelander a “Malignant Narcissist.” <- This will play into Soldier Boy’s character study, and the main difference between Soldier Boy and Homelander.

Butcher, however, displays narcissistic tendencies but is not, in fact, a narcissist. (More of an antisocial sociopath. Yay for him.)

Misogyny & Sexism

The classic superhero world of comics dates back to the 1930s and ‘40s. It has been, and in many respects still is a (White) male-dominated industry, where in narrative, female superheroes typically work under a male leading the team, as in Justice League, Teen Titans, and the Avengers.

As much as I love DC and Marvel comics, female characters have also been depicted wildly sexual for male readers and the male gaze, and non-supe characters have been written primarily as love interests and damsels for the hero to save. (Think Lois Lane, Lana Lang, and Mary Jane.)

Modern adaptions have given female characters more agency, but their foundations were rooted in underlying sexism and the mythic hero—an Odysseus-type with certain characteristics of male strength and heroism; and that goes all the way back to classic literature, like The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In The Boys, the female supes go through the same issues as their comic counterparts. They are treated how women are treated in the real world—marketable as sexual objects. Starlight’s forced costume change is a prime example.

Author Danielle Turchiano argues in the book that the women in power at Vought (Madelyn Stillwell, later Ashley) are given only so much power as men like Stan Edgar and Homelander give to them.

Stillwell, Ashley, and even Stormfront “drink the Kool Aid” of the misogynistic infrastructure of Vought, but they’re not truly “powerful” in and of themselves (112).

I would add that the only female characters that have or find true agency are Grace Mallory, Annie January/Starlight, and Maggie Shaw/Queen Maeve. Even Victoria Neuman is trying to work the political schematic and Vought by operating within the system Vought has created.

Mental Health, Trauma & Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms

This is a huge section, and rightly so. It kind of spans throughout the book, really, because all of these characters have traumas that inform who they are as adults making the (often grotesque) choices they make.

For many of these characters, it stems from their upbringing and fraught relationships with their parents, whether explicitly or implicitly explored in the show.

Butcher: Is an antisocial sociopath with narcissistic tendencies. Arrogant, emotionally manipulative, violent, and obsessive. He was also physically and emotionally abused by his father, led to use drinking and violence as a means to cope and express himself. His rage is so deep under his skin—he loathes himself for it (and his father), but struggles immensely to escape it.

Homelander (John): A malignant narcissist, the height of arrogance, and emotionally manipulative. He lacks empathy for others' pain, and in fact enjoys inflicting it. Yet according to Jonah Vogelbaum, "John" was a sensitive, gentle child who only wanted connection and love. Vogelbaum raised him like a lab rat and fostered him in a cold, detached cell. He was raised to be entitled and to believe he was an all-powerful god, the lord of his own kingdom within his mind, excused from the responsibility of his actions.

Soldier Boy (Ben): Also a narcissist; violent, arrogant, misogynistic, and often indifferent to the damage he causes, emotional or physical. Yet he was also emotionally abused by his father, who set high and exacting standards for what it meant to be a man. It drives Ben to try and prove his worth to his father, though he’s never able to. It fosters the lack of self-worth he probably feels as he seeks validation through fame, and what he believes power to be.

These three characters have many similarities, but also notable differences that set them apart from one another. And both Butcher and Soldier Boy use substances like drugs and alcohol to cope with their traumas—ones that their forced stoicism and sense of manhood won’t allow them to easily express.

“We see Soldier Boy use substances almost continuously in season three to deal with his PTSD from the childhood emotional abuse he received from his father, the betrayal and assault from his team, and the torture he endured from the Russian scientists.

“In the short term, the use of drugs and alcohol to avoid thoughts and feelings about traumatic experiences can be felt as helpful, but in the long term, it hinders one’s ability to process emotions and can cause a deeper depression from the guilt and shame of both avoidance and substance abuse.” (27)

Heroes, Antiheroes & Villains

This book explores two key questions that the show encourages you to think about:

Who the hell is the hero of this story?

And who is the villain?

The surface-level answer is that Homelander and other supes like him are the villains, and Butcher and his band of bros are the heroes (or antiheroes). But they commit just as questionable, sketchy, and downright murderous acts as the supes they’re trying to take down.

“Butcher is not really a good guy. He’s manipulative and self-centered. His reasons for wanting to take down Homelander are utterly personal. That it serves the greater good is almost a coincidence.” (9)

And if Butcher is not a hero, but a vengeful vigilante, then why do we root for him so much?

Well, we see his incredible flaws, of course, but I sympathize with his struggle in losing his wife and the life he could've continued to have with her. I root for the underdog going against the hydra head of Vought and the psychopathic Homelander.

I see in Butcher, as I also do with Homelander and Soldier Boy, their traumas and their internal conflicts, their deep-rooted self-loathing, and a desire, deep, deep down…to be loved.

(And to foster connection with others, even if they’re unable to sustain them.)

On the flipside, we have antagonists in this show who do truly heinous things. What makes them compelling even sympathetic at times, yet again, are their painful upbringings that have shaped them to be who they are. The supes of this show are byproducts of being treated like products.

Like the saying goes: Villains aren’t born, they’re made.

That’s why the real villain of this story is Vought International. It’s an allegory, and an indictment of the ruthless corporate greed that pervades American culture—and much of the world.

It’s why Stan Edgar is sometimes scarier to me than even Homelander (and was the true villain of my story, Break Me Down), if far more insidious.

Speaking of BMD, let’s get to it, shall we?

Here’s a (lot) bit about the Soldier Boy section of the book.

Soldier Boy: Why We Can’t Hate Him

I had to laugh out loud at the title of Soldier Boy’s chapter:

Loving the Villain: The Confusing Case of Soldier Boy

I’m not gonna lie. I felt called out. 😂

It is a confusing dichotomy. Soldier Boy is an absolute asshole. Misogynistic, narcissistic, arrogant, callous, violent…

But also deeply traumatized, a man-out-of-time, emotionally abused, a byproduct of the historically and culturally different time he was raised in, a man who just doesn’t get it…

And also charming, adorably grumpy, and undoubtedly attractive.

It’s hard to indict “Ben” as an unredeemable villain in the same way I do Homelander, the psychologist-labelled Malignant Narcissist.

Therein lies the main difference between Soldier Boy and Homelander: Soldier Boy doesn’t seem to take joy in harming others the way Homelander does...but, Soldier Boy still harms people, whether he means to or not. He is arrogant and callous, deeply traumatized and vengful.

Zubernis confirms many of my own conclusions and ideas about Soldier Boy, and why I still rooted for him to be better, and didn’t want him to die at the end of season 3.

As Zubernis rightly exclaimed during her own watch of the finale: “Noooo, don’t kill the Danger Grandpa Baby Murder Kitten!” (175)

Because Jensen did what he does best in his roles: He made us feel Ben’s pain.

“What’s funny is, in regard to Jensen playing Soldier Boy, you know he’s fucking fantastic, he’s just so good at bringing the audience, and it’s almost like—what I laugh about is, he was probably a little too good at his job!” Kripke said. (180)

And he continues, “In part it’s because of the fandom. So many people took his side in the finale, they’re like, Were’s on his side, fuck everyone! And you’re like, but he’s the bad guy and he’s trying to kill a ten-year-old.”

Were there fans who held this viewpoint? I’m sure. There are some radicals who don’t care about the humanity of characters or story and will side with their favorites, come whatever. But while I can’t speak for others, that’s not how I interpreted that moment in the season 3 finale when I watched it for the first, second, and even third time.

Yes, I think Soldier Boy was wrongfully willing to fight Ryan after cruelly batting him away. Do I think he would’ve killed him? I’m not sure. I think he would’ve continued to do what he had to do to get Ryan out of his way in his fight with Homelander. Maybe he would’ve been more violent than he intended, in the callous collateral damage he’d shown throughout the season. Maybe he would've held back at the last second. Or maybe he would’ve gone that far, if provoked.

It’s a tough call, as I think this character can go one way or the other in terms of his “villain” nature. We just haven’t seen enough of him in the series yet for me to make that conclusion on the canon-version of Soldier Boy. (In fanfic, I’ve explored my own interpretation.)

But overall, I think The Krip underestimated the power of Jensen’s acting.

…And the ardent nature of his mostly female fanbase. 😂

Why We Love Soldier Boy

The author cites multiple reasons for why we love Ben more than we probably should:

It’s Jensen Ackles: Fair enough. His talent speaks for itself.

Soldier Boy’s backstory: He was emotionally abused by his father and as a result, he has a complex regarding his self-worth, “something to prove,” and I would imagine a secret need for attention, validation, and praise.

He has trauma and PTSD: He is displaced from what is familiar to him and confused when the boys find him, and that is the least of it. He’s been tortured for 40 years. Can you even wrap your mind around that? (*cough cough Dean Winchester in Hell cough*)

He’s charming: In a sexy grandpa, adorably grumpy, lovable asshole kind of way.

We’re drawn to danger: Dangerous “edgy” types are fun, especially when you’re physically attracted to the character.

He has his moments of vulnerability: Jensen’s ability to play the nuance in the character is the ultimate draw. I felt his pain, could see his torture, and his resulting PTSD. He even admits that he longs for a family, even if his ability to bring up those children is questionable at best. 😅

But I think the one aspect that can also be considered is the character’s capacity for change.

Soldier Boy’s Potential

Again, I don’t think you can write off Soldier Boy’s potential for positive character development the same way you can Homelander, or even Butcher.

For one thing, we just haven’t spent enough time with the character. In season 3, a lot of his collateral damage after he escapes imprisonment has been accidental, or PTSD-induced. Though we can’t discount how he murdered M.M.’s grandfather via collateral damage (and was callous about it).

I think this is what drew me to write about Soldier Boy. For all his arrogance, his chauvinism, his massive ego and general bastardry, there’s still humanity in Ben.

In the book, Nathan Mitchell says something amazing about his own character (Black Noir) that resonated with me about Soldier Boy as well:

"One of the ingredients of a compelling character is contradiction. How does one aspect of our personality contradict with one another? [...] Who is he underneath? How might his true nature contrast with the demands of his job?"

Or coded for Soldier Boy/Ben: The pressures he puts on himself to be the type of man he thought his father wanted him to be.

Again, his sexist, misogynistic ideals are shaped by the time he was raised in, by being a product of Vought, and of his father’s emotionally abusive upbringing. Does this excuse or justify all of his behavior? Of course not.

But I do think those 40 years in captivity changed him from the careless alpha dog we saw in 1984 Nicaragua…

He admits to Crimson Countess, with tears in his eyes, that he’d loved her. That he waited for her and his team—arguably the only social system he had in his life—to save him. He’s gutted to realize that not only did she and the rest of the team never love him, they hated him. They traded him for nothing. Just to get him out of their lives.

For all he claims to be afraid of nothing, tough as shit, he is afraid when he goes to face Mindstorm. He knows what the supe is capable of, and he visibly takes a shaky breath and tries to steel himself.

For a moment, he drops the “Soldier Boy” persona that he wears like that fine tailored suit, and he tells Butcher that the backstory Vought created for him was a lie; he grew up a rich kid who got sent to boarding school, but flunked out, because "he was a fuck up." And his father couldn’t be bothered to lay a hand on him, implying he didn’t care enough about his own son to "discipline" him.

He is reluctant to kill Homelander when he finds out he’s Ben’s son (sort of). He even claims that he would’ve been willing to share the spotlight “with his own son.” — Something I doubt even Homelander would do.

Ben even seems to be fighting tears when he levies the same vitriol at Homelander that his own father did at him:

Homelander: “Weak? I’m you.” Soldier Boy: “I know. You’re a fucking disappointment.”

Let me be clear. I don’t think it’s up to someone to change him (like a love interest). I don’t subscribe to that thinking, that a woman can “change” a man.

For example: In season 2, Butcher tells Becca, “Who was I before you? Nothing.”

And yet, she tells him that he put her on an unrealistic and unsustainable pedestal, in which she felt like she wasn’t allowed to fully be herself, unable to keep him from flying off the handle in rage. That kind of relationship (where one is dependent on the other to “keep them in check”) doesn’t work as a lasting, satisfying redemption arc, and it often doesn’t work in real life either.

I do think, however, that a person is capable of change if they’re broken down enough (pun intended), and if they themselves have a desire to change. Someone they encounter can inspire them to be better, like Butcher with Hughie. That person can help support the other.

At the end of the day, however, it’s Ben that has to want to change.

If he wants love and connection, he’ll have to somehow want it, and try (and sometimes fail) to get it, thereby giving him agency and a redemptive character arc.

Now, obviously, it’s up to The Krip where Ben goes from here. He seems to have a more indicting vision of the character than I do (at least, so far). But we’ll see! The fan demand to bring back the character has already had Kripke confirming that Soldier Boy will be back.

Maybe it will encourage him to give the character a more satisfying ending than Dean Winchester got in Supernatural. Though granted, that one wasn’t his doing, apparently he was in favor of that ending, which ultimately culminated 15 years of monster slaying and broments under Baby's roof.

Comparing Dean & Ben

In his interview segment, Jensen talks about what, if any, are the comparisons between Dean Winchester and Soldier Boy. AKA: Wanting a father’s approval, and an undercurrent of “John Wayne”-esque masculinity in John Winchester that Dean sought to emulate.

Jensen also talks about where he drew from to not only embody the character of Soldier Boy, but bring nuance to him—and show the peeks of vulnerability under the bravado and stoicism.

“He’s so fragile and his ego is fragile. Just like Homelander. These bigger-than-life powerful heroes really have a glass jaw… “And everyone walks on eggshells around him [Soldier Boy], and they tell him that they love him, and it’s the same with Homelander. Then when all of a sudden he faces his old team and Crimson Countess says we never loved you, we hated you—that’s a gut punch for him. Because even though on some level he may have known that, he never thought he would hear it. “And he probably propped himself up around trying to believe otherwise, because how can you walk around knowing everyone you’ve ever cared about hates you? It’s too painful.” (191)

It really is. I inherently felt this about Soldier Boy (Ben) when I watched season 3 for the first time. That’s exactly what I got from his performance and thought, there’s more to this guy than the toxic masculinity he represents.

This guy just wants to be loved, like everyone else. He wants to feel important, and even after his father’s dead, “show him” that Ben is the man his father wanted him to be. And so, he bought into the illusion Vought painstakingly crafted for him.

Whether he can come back from that remains to be seen, but I choose to be optimistic until evidence points to the contrary. 😅 (Maybe we’ll see in season 4!)

So that’s my personal take on Soldier Boy and this awesome book. 💚 Thank you again @kaleldobrev for recommending it to me! I hope you all enjoyed my long-winded review and want to check this out.

And if you do read it, let me know! I hope to read your thoughts as well!

Tagging people who said they wanted to read my review on this book: @venus-haze @jessjad @kristophalis @sl33pylilbunny

[thornebelrose]

I started writing games recently! Here's what I've learned so far!

Hi! I'm a physical game writer! In December, I started writing my first game, Along the Open Road, a Road Trip Storytelling TTRPG for 3-5 people. After I started my fishing minigame Bluesky account, I got to follow a bunch of cool indie devs, and one of them just so happened to be hosting the Road Trip Game Jam, which allowed physical entries, so I made a start on making my first game!

Since then, I've written two more games: two solo journaling RPGs involving cards and dice.

The first is called Aqueous Planet Biological Discovery, a solo journaling game about being an astronomical marine biologist discovering new species on an aqueous planet and letting an earth company know if the planet is safe to live on.

The second is called The Empire Needs Men! and it's a solo journaling RPG about playing a boy (because I refuse to call a 16-19 year old a man) who has enlisted as a soldier in World War 1. You journal about the memories you make and the people you meet, good and bad. And I wanted the story to essentially be that the bad is big and in your face and the good is subtle things people won't remember when you're dead.

When I started, I was expecting it to be kinda easy? Like, I've been running D&D games for 10+ years now, it can't be that different, right? And, boy, was I wrong.

Thing number 1 I learned: Don't underestimate the challenge that you've given yourself!

When I started writing Along the Open Road, I challenged myself to get it done in a month. I wanted to make a whole new system (which I dubbed the Open Roads system), create a whole new concept for a game, try to get better at art so I could add my own art to the game, spend ages coming up with a unique skill system-

It was a lot. I wanted to make a game that was open and rules-light, but I'd set myself so many responsibilities and it really took a toll on me with how much time I was working on the game. I would spend my entire lunch in work just working on writing the rulebook and making character sheets and making sure everything was perfect.

I didn't allow myself to take time and learn. And, sure, I love what I made, but I went far too hard on myself for a game that's completely free and was never really going to kick off with how niche of an idea it is.

That's why, with my next few niche games, I focused more on simple ideas that I cared a lot about. An adoration of Fishing Minigames is my core personality trait and so making a fishing game was a no brainer. And then making a war game with a story I'd wanted to tell for so long made sense too.

Which brings me onto - thing number two I learned: success isn't guaranteed!

The fishing minigame account has over 800 followers, which I've amassed over the course of five months. This is huge to me. I've never had that many people really care about something I've done before? And there was a part of me that thought, if I share this game to my 800 followers, they'll share it with their friends and the cycle will continue and ATOR will be a huge thing in the tabletop community!

45 downloads. The game, since almost 2 months ago, has gotten 45 downloads, with most of those coming in the first three days.

Which is a huge amount of people for a first game! I was so excited by how many people cared! And then people stopped caring and I got bummed out because the fall from a huge number of downloads to radio silence was so sudden.

I released APBD about a week ago. 28 downloads. But because the first game got 45, it hit me hard, thinking it wasn't good enough. TENM released yesterday and has half of that with 14 downloads. But this time, I didn't feel as bad. Just today, three people have contacted me to show me their journals for both games. And that's when I realised...

Thing number three I learned: It doesn't matter how many people have downloaded your game. Appreciate the people who have and the memories they're making with it.

At the end of ATOR, I wrote a thank you to a bunch of people and said to tag me on Bluesky with the memories you've made. And I heard nothing. For the past two months, nothing. And it made me wonder if any of the people who had downloaded the game had played it, without me realising that, with the way I'd laid the game out, it's 5-8 sessions, and that's not guaranteed to be weekly like I'd usually run.

I did the same for APBD and, again, nothing, other than one post on Bluesky saying they'd tried it and had fun. That one post made me smile, sure, but I still wasn't appreciating the time people were putting into the game, just the number of people who had downloaded it.

TENM had the same. I wrote a little thing at the end being like "let me know your favourite memories you've made or story moments" or something like that but it wasn't quite pandering the way I had before. I sent it to a group of friends before I published it. And then one of them went out of their way to tea stain an entire journal and, today, sent me a picture of their first entry in their journal that they had made for my game.

Not long later, I was tagged in a Bluesky post of someone who had fun playing APBD, and wanted to share their discovery.

I stopped caring about numbers then, I think. I sent a screenshot to my fiancé, showing him the one person who had shown me their journal page with their little diagram of the creature they'd found and I was saying about how excited I was that someone was sharing that enjoyment of fishing and I stopped caring about numbers.

I'd like to consider my three games so far a success. I took time making them, finished making them, and published them to the world. And people have played them and made memories.

So here's to more games to come. Here's to more passion projects. And here's to more memories to be made.

Go make a game. Even if you don't think you can, make a game. And send it to me, please. Let's make memories together.