#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 !

[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.

[simply-ivanka]

My Long Road From Truman to Trump

I’ve been a Democrat since 1948, when I was 10. But I can no longer abide what my old party has become.

By Bartle Bull Sr. -- Wall Street Journal

I’ve been an outspoken Democrat since 1948, when I was the only student in my fifth-grade class to “vote” for Harry Truman. It’s been astonishingly difficult to disclose that next month I will vote for Donald Trump.

Like many, I will be doing so in the European way, voting for a party and its issues, rather than in the American way of supporting someone I like. When I have expressed my views—on economics, security and cultural matters—long-time liberal friends have said, “You sound like Trump, or some uneducated hillbilly.” Ignoring my schooling at Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne, these friends sound like well-meaning dilettantes, otherwise described as self-righteous, useful idiots or bien-pensant.

Such responses prompt me to compare my own liberal credentials with theirs. This makes me a difficult adversary, as I have long been an extremely useful idiot, overloaded with liberal credentials.

To name a few: In 1956 I helped coordinate Harvard Freshmen for Adlai Stevenson. Ten years later, I was arrested as a civil-rights lawyer in Hattiesburg, Miss., where Vernon Dahmer, the local head of the NAACP, had been burned alive in his house. In the same state, I later campaigned for Charles Evers for governor.

In 1968 I quit my job as a Wall Street lawyer to serve as Robert F. Kennedy’s New York campaign coordinator. In 1972, I organized the New York Citizens Committee for McGovern-Shriver. During this period, I was publisher of the Village Voice, a left-wing Manhattan newspaper. In 1976 I worked as Jimmy Carter’s New York state campaign manager, and in 1978 in South Carolina to support Charles Ravenel’s challenge to Sen. Strom Thurmond. My last Democratic Party campaign was in Harlem, backing Craig Schley, a young black reformer, in a primary against Rep. Charles Rangel. In 2008 I was chairman of New York Democrats for John McCain for President.

At the international level, in 1993-94, I volunteered in Bosnia with the International Rescue Committee to help Muslim refugees, spending Christmas Eve with Bosnian soldiers in a bunker in the mountains. In 2010, at 72, I worked in Afghanistan with the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women, going on foot patrols to girls’ schools. The Biden administration later abandoned these courageous women to the Taliban.

For a long time, like an old locomotive, I have been building steam inside when liberal friends, with the certitude and arrogance of the righteous, decry me as a “right-winger.” In a Harvard class-reunion speech many years ago, I said that “Harvard should stand up to the tyrannies of the left today the way it stood up to the tyrannies of the right in the days of Joe McCarthy.” But the progressive agenda doesn’t seem to include what Truman and John F. Kennedy considered liberal values, such as true political tolerance.

Now, as a lifelong Democrat, I am voting Republican for policy reasons, not because I like Mr. Trump. I believe my old party, as it abuses the powers of office and threatens to pack the Supreme Court and end the filibuster, now supports a government that is far too strong at home and far too weak abroad.

Mr. Bull is a writer living in upstate New York. His latest novel is “We’ll Meet Again.”

[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!

[la-femme-au-collier-vert]

IWTV Season 2 Sources & References

Season 1 here (these lists are updated regularly)

Season 3 here

Cited by the Writer’s Room/Cast:

The Ethnic Avante-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution by Steven S. Lee

Paris Journal 1944-1955 by Janet Flanner (Genet)

The Vampire: A Casebook by Alan Dundes

Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles: An Alphabettery

The Fly cited by Jacob Anderson

King Lear by Shakespeare cited by Rolin Jones

The Third Man (1949) cited by Levan Akin

An American in Paris by George Gershwin (1928) cited by Daniel Hart

Giovanni’s Room cited by Jacob Anderson

References:

Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin

Sebastien Melmoth by Oscar Wilde

Ode to a Nightingale by Keats

Amadeus (1984)

The Lost Boys (1987)

Gaslight (1944)

Batman

Casablanca (1942)

Now, Voyager (1942)

Moulin Rouge (2001)

The Phantom of the Opera

Les Vampires (1915)

Dracula (1931) credit to @vampchronicles_ on twt

Le Triomphe de L’amour by Pierre de Marivaux

Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean Paul Sartre

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Vampire’s Kiss (1988) credit to @talesfromthecrypts

Les Morts ont tous le Meme Peau by Boris Vian credit to @greedandenby

The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Barclay Beckett credit to @rorscachisgay on twt

An Enemy of the People by Ibsen

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Vie de Voltaire by Marquis Condorcet

Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction by Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook credit to @iwtvfanevents

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes credit to @iwtvfanevents

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Artists, Art, and Salons:

R-26

Palma Vecchio

Andre Fougeron

Elsa Triollet

Fred Stein

Lisette Model

Gordon Parks

Miguel Barcelo

Taxidermied Javelina by Chris Roberts-Antieau

Ai WeiWei (wallpaper)

David Hockney (Lemons)

Wols 

The Kiss of Judas by Jakob Smits

Salome by Louis Icart

Ophelia by John Everett Millais

Shelter by Peter Macon

The Kiss by Edvard Munch

The Vampire or Love and Pain by Edvard Munch credit @iwtvasart

Ruiter on Horse by Reiger Stolk credit @ iwtvasart

Portrait of Frank Burty Haviland by Modigliani credit @iwtvasart

Self-Seers II (Death and Man) by Egon Schiele credit to @90sgreggaraki

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Goya

Aicha by Felix Vallotton

Cariatide by Modigliani

Nature Morte Au Pain Et Au Cocteau by Louis Marcoussis

Untitled by Julio Gonzalez

Embrace by Mikulas Galanda

Trees on a Mountain Slope by Ernst Kirchner

Landscape Paris by Henry Lyman Sayen

Tabac 56 by Oscar Garcia

Spirituals by Lillian Richter Reynolds

Movie & Play Posters on set (in chronological order by year):

Tarzan and his Mate (1934)

Avec le Sourire (1936)

Les Deux Gosses (1936)

Le Jour Se Leve (1939) about a man who commits murder as a result of a love triangle and locks himself in his apartment recounting the details as the police attempt to arrest him. Credit to @laisofhyccara

Nuit de Décembre (1940)

Mademoiselle Swing (1942) about a girl who follows a troupe of swing musicians to Paris.

Les Enfents du Paradis (1945) about a woman with many suitors including an actor and an aristocrat.

Fantomas (1946) about a sadistic criminal mastermind. This version includes a hideout in the catacombs where he traps people.

Quai des Orfevres (1947) watch here

Monsieur Vincent (1947)

Le Cafe du Cadran (1947) about a wife’s affair with a violinist.

La Kermesse Rouge (1947) film about a jealous artist who locks up his younger wife and a fire breaks out while she’s trapped.

Morts Sans Sepulture by Jean-Paul Sartre (play) also published in English translations as “The Victors” or “Men Without Shadows” about resistance fighters captured by Vichy soldiers struggling not to give up information.

Mon Faust by Paul Valery (play)

Musical Influences:: @greedandenby collected all music used in Season 2 here.

Henry Cowell

Meredith Monk

Howling’ Wolf

Shirley Temple

Jason Lindner Big Band

The Teeth

Carlos Salzedo

Alice Coltrane

Thelonius Monk

David Lang

Caroline Shaw

Gadfly by Shostakovich (for Raglan James)

musical career of Martha Argerich

[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

[kesbeacon]

Reading your sock post, I realized you might just be the person to ask a question that a friend posted on FB: a knitting worldbuilding question!

In A Tale of Two Cities, Madame DeFarge knits the names of targets for the guillotine into her work. What was her coding scheme? The friend speculated that Dickens had met Charles Babbage at some point and was doing something with binary. After poking around a bit on the internet, I decided Dickens made it up, not knowing anything about knitting.

I did find schemes for encoding messages in two dimensions, possibly using colors. But such a scheme seems unlikely to encompass 26 letters and 5 accents in a way that can quickly encode a name (since there was a fair bit of volume to keep up with at the time).

What do you think? Is there a plausible scheme today? And would such a scheme have a chance of being available at the close of the 18th century?

So, I'm not an expert on this either! But I'll give it a go.

The first thing I remembered was that this has been done, albeit long after Dickens' day. I have seen videos and posts in which people talk about knitting as spycraft during the world wars. The challenge I then had was 'is this all just a giant game of internet telephone?'

And, my friend, this led me down a rabbit hole. I’ll get to your question in a bit, I just need to go on a detour about checking your sources. Because most of what I could find online was from sites with names like ilikeknitting500 dot com or girlbosshistory dot net (not real examples), all with the same vague story – in Belgium, the resistance would have people sitting by trainyards knitting, and they would drop a stitch for one kind of train, and purl for another, and so on and so forth. As a result, the government banned exporting knitting patterns! But they can’t even agree on what world war it was or which government banned it.

So where does this claim come from?

It took me a little while to find real articles with sources. What I eventually came away with was an Atlas Obscura article that has citations. One citation was a book I can't access by someone who, while I can't find any evidence she's a historian herself, has been endorsed by at least a couple. The link did give me an excerpt about a woman who would use her knitting to cover for tapping information about troop movements in code to her children below, who would write it instead of doing their schoolwork. In a similar vein, I could find information on people who used knitting to hide their spy work, as in the case of Phyllis Latour.

The other relevant citation was to a journal article in a (student-run, admittedly, but in some fields this isn't abnormal) peer-reviewed Open Access journal by an Jacqueline Witkowski, who is now an Associate Professor of Art, even if she wasn't then. This was the best of the bunch, because this cited a BBC Radio 4 program on the history of MI6. I thought this was going to be the end of the road for me, but then I realised you don’t need a TV licence to listen to the radio and that I do have a BBC account, so I logged in and listened to it and – bingo.

Alan Judd, a writer and ‘former soldier and diplomat’ according to Wikipedia, is the biographer of Mansfield Cumming, the original head of MI6, and he tells us about Belgian professionals recruiting little old ladies to go sit by train stations and knit, with the dropped and purled stitches. (He mentions nothing about banning sending knitting patterns.) Crucially, this is definitely during the First World War. I can’t access the book (and certainly can’t be bothered), but I would call this reasonably credible – it’s not as good as something from an actual archive, and I don’t automatically trust the BBC, but this radio series seems serious and also has the involvement of Actual MI6. So I think this is about as good as I’m going to get in a single evening.

We still don’t have the other half of the claim, the censorship. Witkowski says, “This [...] led to the Office of Censorship’s ban on posted knitting patterns in the Second World War, in case they contained coded messages.” There is a citation. But the citation is a Telegraph column by people involved in QI. QI, or Quite Interesting, is a British comedy panel show that I would place in the ‘edutainment’ category – it is an endless source of weird little facts, some of which are even true. Wikipedia has a section on mistakes and fact correction, and I can tell you from having watched the programme that it is usually correct on a surface level, but if you know anything about the relevant topic you’ll immediately start going ‘well, it’s actually more complicated than that…’

The QI column says, “During the Second World War the Office of Censorship banned people from posting knitting patterns abroad in case they contained coded messages,” and gives no sources. On historyhub.history.gov, someone has asked if there are any primary sources for this claim. Textual Reference Archives II Branch (RR2RA) replies that ‘some articles specify that this was a practice by the British government, whereas others attribute it to the United States,’ and gives the asker links to the records of the American Office of Censorship, and where they can learn more about British censorship. There are no more replies. I would hazard a guess that QI meant the Americans; UK censorship was handled by the Ministry of Information, which is common knowledge here and not something they would fuck up.

I originally was going to wash my hands of it, but then I thought… just one primary source? Just try? So I looked at a US government printout of their censorship regulations from 1943. No mention of knitting patterns, but all printed matter is banned for export to Europe, which would presumably encompass commercial knitting patterns by default.

So that’s that tangent, I wrote, thinking this was over. Because Charles Dickens died in 1870 and published ToTC in 1859, long before ANY of this happened! Also, Madame DeFarge’s code is far more sophisticated than any of this stuff. So let’s get back on track.

Your friend is not the only person to have speculated on the Babbage connection – Paul Curzon of Queen Mary University London also raises the possibility that Dickens was thinking of Babbage and Lovelace’s work –

Wait. Is that… I thought I’d escaped my tangent! But Curzon has dragged me back in! He adds an interesting note at the end of the article, though he doesn’t cite it - “In the Second World War, the United States censors held on to a letter that contained a knitting pattern so they could knit the jumper in case it did contain a message. Ultimately they banned people from posting knitting patterns overseas at all (along with playing chess by post) in case people were hiding messages in them.” I wish he’d cited it, but this is at least a real academic – a little more credible than QI! I hoped that this would be the source of the QI claim, but unfortunately I think it post-dates the QI article – it’s hard to tell. But QI could easily have got hold of that censorship decision.

YANKS SELF BACK WITH THE BIG HOOK.

Dickens was, in short, probably making an almost science-fictional prediction. He moved in the Babbage/Lovelace circle and would have known about their work. What Curzon does not say is that this is also the age of Morse code, which came into use in the 1840s, and the beginning of Boolean algebra! It’s easy to imagine him taking these ideas, along with any knitting knowledge he may have had, and coming up with the concept. Madame DeFarge is ahead of her time, but not too far ahead of Dickens's.

Now, I’m not a Dickens scholar, but I happen to be friends with someone who is and is also a knitter. So I’ve asked her if he might’ve known diddly squat about knitting, and we’ll see what she says.

…

How might it have worked? Well, knitting is versatile. You can, for instance, knit Doom. But Doom is already binary, because we have established systems of binary coding. DeFarge does not, and it wouldn’t be intuitive to convert these into names, especially before Boolean algebra. She might’ve had a Morse code-like framework. Morse code isn’t actually binary – it’s sort of trinary, because you need to space the letters. This isn’t necessarily a problem; you can use a yarnover (followed by knitting/purling two together, obv) to separate the letters, with, say, knit being dot and purl being dash. If you’re experienced, you might be able to read it as fabric, but it would be easiest to read it back in reverse as you unravel it.

Knitting this would likely be pretty quick. She can’t be using actual Morse code for the very simple reason that she pre-dates Mr Morse, and I also don’t know how actual Morse code handles French diacritics, but it took me, a person who has never done this before and doesn't understand Morse and had to make some modifications on the fly, about quarter of an hour to knit the Morse code alphabet (minus Z bc I reached the end of a row and got bored). It would be easier if you were using colours; you could have one colour for dot, one for dash, and use purl stitches to mark the ends of words. I cba to do that right now though.

In summary, clearly Madame DeFarge is an extremely adept code-maker of a kind that is… easier to have in fiction than in real life. She's ahead of her time and in some ways ahead of twentieth-century spycraft, but not implausibly ahead of Dickens's. And I’m a fucking nerd.

And @ the internet at large, generalised-you should check your fucking sources.

[electricneonvalkyrie]

Hey friends! Hope you’re all doing okay out there. Sometimes, I wish we could just pile into a cozy gaming den, sink into bean bag chairs, and play TLOU all night. Imagine trading stories, laughing at our bad stealth moves (I'm actually really good at this game, but I can pretend.) It’d be such a cool way to spend some time. Just a bunch of nerdy gays looking out for each other.

Take care of yourselves out there. I know the world is a tough place to be sometimes.

Okay, so Abby is 100% a note writer, and I’m crazy about the idea. She writes letters to her deceased friends and family in the game, and that’s spun into this whole headcanon for me where she’s constantly leaving notes. Lipstick on mirrors, scribbles on torn-up envelopes, walls, ammo boxes... anything she can find.

And, of course, her journal is full of these big, emotional entries. Honestly, she’d be the most wonderful pen pal. Like, I’m talking deep, heartfelt letters that you’d reread a million times.

And when Abby is struggling? Best believe she picks up a pen, and she writes to her father.

Dad,

For as long as I can remember, I’ve carried the weight of everything alone. The memories haunt me like ghosts I can’t seem to shake. It’s the trauma, I know, but some days, it feels like more than that. Like it’s shaped who I am in ways I don’t know how to undo.

I've built walls, Dad. Walls so high and so thick that not even the people closest to me have seen me truly break. Not even my squad, the ones who trust me to lead and protect them, see anything more than the version of me I’ve carefully put together. And you know what? I'm really tired of hiding.

You always told me strength wasn’t just about surviving... it was about living, about finding a way to keep going even when it felt impossible. But lately, I’ve been wondering if I’ve taken that lesson the wrong way. I thought that holding everything inside made me strong. That showing the pain, the fear, and the fucking panic would make me weak. Now I’m not so sure.

The truth is, I’m scared. Scared to let anyone get close. Scared to show them the parts of me I’ve hidden for so long. But this year, I want to change that.

I want to stop believing that what I’ve been through makes me broken. I want to stop convincing myself that letting someone in will make me vulnerable in a way I can’t recover from. I want to let go of the fear that my scars make me unworthy of love.

You always believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself. And I think that’s why I’m writing this. Because I want to honor what you taught me. I want to find the courage to let someone see me... not the soldier, not Isaac’s top dog, but me.

I know it won’t be easy. Opening up feels like the hardest fight I’ve ever faced. But I can’t keep living behind this armor. I can’t keep suffocating under the weight of my pain. This year, I’m going to try.

I miss you every day. I hope you’d be proud of me, of who I’m trying to become.

Love,

Abby

[lycheesodas]

a place where both our hearts may rest | A @tolkienrsb collaboration between @maironsbigboobs and yours truly! This is the first of two art pieces I submitted this year :3

Summary: He remembered how they had once desired glory. How they had once wanted to take part in great deeds. And how that battle had ended in nothing but betrayal and bloodshed. No, Mablung did not wish to be a warrior any longer – he longed for his books and journals, for the comfort of song and the company of friends. Beleg exhaled deeply. “We will not be soldiers again; not captains, not lords, only Beleg and Mablung.” - Beleg and Mablung survived the First Age. In search of a better future, they set off on an exploration of Eriador, but peace is not always easy to find. Word Count: 16,831 Rating: E Characters: Beleg Cúthalion, Mablung of Doriath Relationships: Beleg Cúthalion/Mablung of Doriath Additional Tags: Second Age Road Trip Memory, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of canon events and deaths

I will never skip out on an opportunity to draw Beleg and Mablung, my best boys and OTP 😌💕 I've always wondered how things might turn out for them had they survived.. And Heather my fellow Beleg enjoyer (some might say THE Beleg enjoyer) was the perfect writer for this!! They're living their best cottagecore life in this fic, while interacting with a charming cast of character both familiar and original :D

Thank you so much for putting up with my silly little requests throughout the process 🥺 I hope you enjoyed writing for them as much as I did drawing this. And dear (future) readers, I hope you enjoy reading this, too! 💐🌸🌱

Plus, look out for extra doodles from me soon 👀

🌷 commission info | shop

Credits: Paper texture

Textless version under the cut:

[venus-of-the-hrdsell]

I want to get into Zatanna comics but I’m not sure where to start. What series do you recommend?

Hello! Don't worry, I can give you a short starting guide + some recommendations on this post so you can read without having to dive fully into thousands of issues (unless you want a detailed guide of more appearances).

The usual go to for any beginner is Zatanna (2010) by Paul Dini. It's her longest solo comic (16 issues) and it fits as a stand alone.

If you are interested, I'm currently working in a masterlist reading guide of her appearances. Zatanna is a very old character, so a lot of her appearances are scattered as cameo and team books, so often finding what to read is hard. If you want to get a little further into her character, these options I'm about to mention are good as well. More under the cut because this is a long post.

- Secret Origins (1988) (volume 2) #27

Offers a summary about of Zatanna's origin in the DC universe. A bit old, so the scans can be blurry, but still a nice read.

- Zatanna Special (1987) by Gerry Conway & Gray Morrow

Zatanna gets contacted by the ghost of her mother Sindella, which leads her to travel to secret city of the Homo Magi with her manager. A lot of details about her background are revealed her, it's one of my favourite comics for her.

Zatanna: Come Together (1993) by Lee Mars & Esteban Maroto

Four issue mini in which Zatanna tries to get a fresh new start in San Francisco, temporally retiring from her superhero career. Unfortunately, she doesn't expect to find her stay disrupted by a supernatural threat infesting the city. Still one of my favourite comics of her and the art is amazing too. It also explores her background from her mother's side of the family, which is always good and underrated.

Zatanna: Everyday Magic (2003) by Paul Dini & Rick Mays (one shot)

We see Zatanna in her best moment as a famous stage magician in a long tour. She seems to be doing great, but she still fights to have an ordinary personal life. Things get complicated when her former partner, John Constantine, shows up on her life once again.

This is a fun story! It's Zatanna only Vertigo solo book. There are some poorly aged jokes and the art is not everyone's cup of tea, but it's a fun light hearted read for everyone.

Zatanna: Seven Soldiers (2007) by Grant Morrison & Ryan Sook

Zatanna attends a superhero support group. Her powers are weak and she finds herself in a low spot in her life, but the arrival of a mysterious girl pushes her to go on a tripe to find her father's missing journals.

This mini series is part of a bigger event written by Morrison called Seven Soldiers of Victory, but it can be read as a stand alone. If you want further context, I recommend reading the event, though.

I really like this comic, though. I wish we got to see more of Zatanna's mentorship role.

Black Canary & Zatanna: Bloodspell (2015) by Paul Dini & Joe Quinones.

A fun team up comic! It's an original graphic novel. I love Zee and Dinah's friendship.

Wonder Woman: Agent of Peace (2020) #15

A fun team up issue with Diana and Zee spending quality time together.

Justice League Dark (2011) (New52) & Justice League Dark (2018) (Rebirth)

Now, to clarify. I don't necessarily recommend the Justice League Dark books, but I'm incluiding them since most of Zee post new 52 appearances are in these two books which are...a mixed bag. Justice League Dark (new 52) wasn't of my liking with the exception of the last third of the whole book (Dematteis did a good job, probably the best out of the three writers heading the book). Earlier writers didn't know how to handle Zatanna, her personality is very watered down just as well as her abilities, and she isn't really given spotlight, leadership and full potential of her abilities until Dematteis takes the pen. I also don't enjoy how off was the characterisation of other characters of the book and the overall writing quality and pace, but that's a story for another post.

Justice League Dark (Rebirth) is a step up in quality from New52, but unfortunately it continues with the weird personality shift in Zatanna's personality and the a lackuster character design. As much as I love Diana, who is part of this team line up, I think Zatanna should have been given the leader role and the spotlight. Out of this book, I sincerely enjoyed Ram V's stage on the later half on this run, who deserved to stay longer on this title.

That said, you can take a look on these titles, but you know, at least you know what to expect.

Bonus: Graphic novels, webtoons and stand alone stories

DC's new talent showcase (2018)

Truth and Justice (2020) #7 - 9

Zatannna & the Ripper (Available for Free in Webtoon, still ongoing)

Zatannna & House of Secrets (Kids graphic novel)

Batman: Urban Legends (#11-16)

Johnny Constantine & Mystery of the Meanest Teacher (she's a co protagonist here)

[themathomhouse]

I haven't seen this posted about here but it's going round Twitter and tiktok, and I'm so beyond angry I can't let it go.

The UK imprint of Simon and Schuster have announced a history of Gaza is forthcoming from writer and academic Dr Anne Irfan. She's a professor at UCL specialising in Palestinian refugees and their treatment under the UNRWA. She's done extensive work and volunteering in refugee camps, advocates for Palestinians in the UK directly to government, works with a number of projects including in asylum applications, and writes articles both in academic journals and in newspapers about Palestine. Whilst studying for her thesis, she was denied entry into Palestine by Israel.

Sounds like a highly qualified person to write a history of Gaza, right?

WRONG!

According to activists on social media - all of whom have comparable work backgrounds and experience I'm sure - it's completely unacceptable for her to write this book!!! Some of which is due to her being a white woman (we'll get to that), and some is due to her husband being a soldier in the IDF and clapping for genocide (we'll get to that too).

The vitriol and backlash has been awful, and I haven't seen many takedowns so under the cut I will dissect the issues here.

1) she's not Palestinian.

This one seems to be true, and I do think that it's important that we allow people from a region to tell their own stories. This isn't the worst criticism, however given the other problems people have I think it's being brought up disengenuously.

She is an expert though, and I am deeply concerned about this progression to an idea that we should only learn about or discuss our own cultures. Palestinian voices not being elevated is a systemic issue, not the fault of one woman who we can at least say possesses the requisite expertise to write a history book.

She's actually already written one book - Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the international refugee system.

Here's a list of recent news articles she's written.

2) she's white.

This one I can't verify. There are claims from people purporting to be former students of hers who say she's Jordanian and has family in Palestine. Certainly her surname is Arabic and she's listed as being fluent in Arabic on her academic profiles, so I'm not willing to assume from the single photograph I've seen that she's white.

We have also seen from the rise in antisemitism recently that whiteness is entirely conditional, and I think in this case it's being thrust upon her to justify saying she has no business writing a book. I think this is trying to get at systemic issues with publishing, but without any of the facts.

Source:

3) her husband is an IDF soldier.

Her partner (not husband as far as I can tell) tweeted out the book announcement. He's a fucking marketing data guy who works for Twitter. He's not in the IDF. He's just Israeli and so probably did national service, but that's an assumption as he lives in London.

Source:

I can't add his LinkedIn or other profiles as they've all been deleted, likely due to this shit. This will have to do.

4) he supports genocide.

No.

He had a take that I don't personally agree with - saying Israel shouldn't agree to a ceasefire until the hostages have been returned - but that is an extremely far cry from any kind of support for genocide. His Twitter has been deleted so I've only seen screenshots, possibly someone made this claim but failed to procure the correct evidence; but that seems extremely unlikely.

Even the original person who tweeted about this has tried to walk it back (not the husband part but some of the other stuff).

There were no receipts by the way, possibly due to a change of heart.

Babe you called it coloniser apologia and attacked her personally as well as her partner, you're kind of the one who made it personal. Feel bad all you want but this is just you being defensive.

What now?

If you are going to make claims about someone supporting genocide or any of this shit, be really fucking sure before you throw a Molotov cocktail into the dumpster fire of this discourse. The publisher, an unrelated book news website, her editor (who's made her account private after being @ed in the comments), and she and her partner (both deleted Twitter) have been inundated with tweets and videos on tiktok yelling about it - most of which has been at best unhelpful, but comes from a place of xenophobia and an entirely misapplied desire to crusade for justice - and I'm being generous calling it that.

Has this helped? Has it? Did posting her university email and calling for people to call her a fascist in her work inbox manifest some Palestinian writers? Has tweeting shit like this helped?

Getting rid of academia is definitely A Good Take and not the step authoritarians take.

I've personally written to the publisher to express my sadness at this whole thing, agreeing that Palestinian voices are extremely important to uplift but also saying that Dr Irfan is clearly more than qualified to write this book. I admire all of the work she has already done spending more than a decade working with Palestinian refugees, and I hope very much that everyone involved is doing okay.

I don't know what else to do. All I can do is once again say that people need to really, properly fact-check before you post. This woman is actually doing the activism. She's an historian, yes; but also does work directly in camps and with the preservation of archives. Her crime seems to me to be that her partner is Israeli, and if that's where we're at then I don't even want to know where we're going.