#there is no need for anything remotely human in AM's design. especially when AM literally hates humans.

[l0ve-letter-4-u]

dumping AM thoughts in tags

[south-sea]

∇ ∇ your AU Metal and Shadow??

YEEHAW

∇ - old age/aging headcanon

metal: ageless in a much more literal sense than even shadow. he doesn't factor in his "physical" age, and doesn't particularly "identify" with any number-age or specific category otherwise. he simply exists, and this does not change. the only thing that does change is his understanding of and relationship with the world around him, and that develops at such a breakneck pace it can't even really be equated to human development.

like in the span of two years, he goes from "rudimentary understanding of emotions to the point of being childish and otherwise acting on impulse" to "has made the decision himself to take on the role of an adult (who will act on impulse anyway if he lets himself/maybe still has Anger Issues)". this exceptionally responsible/mature demeanor is especially the case when in stardust neo form. if anything, that form is a shorthand for "i'm taking control of the situation and am making my status extremely clear".

he wasn't coded/designed to be a specific age like sage presumably was, so i'd liken him more to a typical self-learning AI that started with such restrictive protocols it made him hard to develop beyond "attack this, kill that, be violent". once those restrictions were lifted, though, he was free to figure out what he himself wanted to be. basically, metal is whatever the hell he establishes himself to be, and 2+ years out in the AU, that happens to be [nebulous concept of an adult]. i expect that to be the default going forward.

in terms of appearance/capabilities, that's sure to evolve over time with more upgrades and such, but right now he's pretty content with his current specs.

shadow: wibbly hand gestures. he seesaws between kid and adult early on, but by 1-2 years out in the AU, he's a lot more solidly in the "adult" category unless in specific company.

you could see it as code switching; with his close friend, he's more free to be "childish" (expressive, honest about emotions and needs, etc; i am not talking about straight up age regression). with strangers/colleagues/etc, he's much more "adult" (reserved, stone-faced, doesn't talk more than necessary, etc). with metal specifically, he's neither, but is naturally unguarded and honest.

in terms of appearance, the only major changes will be whenever he ends up with new scars, leading to more pale spots in his fur. by 2+ years later, literally all of his limbs have some level of discoloration, and the bottom half of his chest fluff is gone, so like, he's showing no signs of being any less reckless. the only thing remotely slowing him down is the occasional achy knees/hands, and the more he has to regenerate those joints, the achier he's going to get, so i could see him maybe properly slowing down in another ten or so years if he's still pushing it.

overall, similar to metal, he's whatever he establishes himself to be, but there's still no specific number-age he attributes to himself. if metal is ageless in mind, shadow is ageless in body, so he just exists in whatever capacity is comfortable at the time. neither of them use it as a "legal loophole", neither are claiming to be something they're not, and neither are going to "age" in any capacity beyond how they're perceiving the world. they are both inherently mature enough to navigate the world appropriately.

[darklordsauron]

I WATCHED THE FIRST EPISODE OF RINGS OF POWER (illegally) SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO:

I will list all the bad things and the good things of the first episode. Fair warning, I am right and those articles which calls this piece of steaming shit a masterpiece is wrong.

BAD THINGS-

The acting is sub par and so uncaring that it literally didn't feel like a real, just under a billion dollar, fantasy show based off of the legendary writing of J.R.R Tolkien.(Rest in peace, you deserve the world.)

Galadriel is a Mary-Sue (the perfect person. Everybody wants to be her, she is so 'cool' Rawr XD Uwu) and she is short despite being described in the books as taller than most elvish women and almost half of elvish men.

Elrond seems to have a crush on her and that just makes me nauseated.

Galadriel, if I should even call her that, wears the fëanorian star on every wardrobe item she owns it seems.

Actually, all the elves are the same height or even under it when compared to the humans.

The music sounds more like Game of Thrones than anything even remotely associated with LOTR.

The costume design in terrible. The material is cheap and plastic, they don't even try to conceal it. In one scene you can see that one of the background characters is wearing a black T-shirt underneath the clothes.

They barely say any of the characters' names (except Galadriel, which they repeat almost constantly). I had to google their names.

Brondir is the edgy warrior who is in love with the single mother (already forgot her name) who tries to help everyone around her.

The Harfoots, I also forgot all of their names, are the Hobbits of the second age and I hate the other main character whom comes from them. She is the relatable, clumsy character who is super curious. In other words, the most over used and predictable trope in all of film history.

They bring in new monsters/creatures that Tolkien never, ever wrote about. They probably needed these cliches to make the first episode more interesting.

The CGI sucks especially when Galadriel is climbing the glacier, icy, mounting thingy. The water is jelly and a piece of Valinor's sky literally clips out if you look really closely.

They jump locations every two minutes which gave me a headache and somehow the series is both fast and slow...AT THE SAME TIME!

There is really no heart in it. The entire thing was apathetic and simply lacked soul (because they sold their souls for money).

GOOD THINGS-

Gil-galad, his character actually looks canon and the actor is putting his heart into the performance thus making him the best.

The make-up of the orcs is simply beautiful. If only the rest of the series was.

Any scene with Sauron and the mentions of Morgoth is cool as it feels as if they have actual power in the otherwise boring show.

So far it sucks (no surprise there). I wanted to break my TV simply because their disrespect towards the source material is so obvious. Tomorrow my brain will have recovered enough to watch episode 2: Shit becomes shitier.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[tearlessrain]

Giant Masterlist of Cathar Facts (that I completely made up but nonetheless rigidly adhere to)

I am an unstoppable force and disney should have killed me when they had the chance (that chance was splash mountain when I was seven and as you can see I survived).

Under a break because it is way too long and covers really quite a lot, much of which I will probably never even need. But researching and writing this kind of thing is what I consider a fun afternoon so here we are.

General basic stuff

Cathar are basically felids evolved to fill a similar evolutionary niche to humans in the absence of any viable apelike species on their native planet, in the same way hyenas evolved to fill a niche normally occupied by canids. 

They are pursuit predators but not terribly efficient ones outside their home planet. In terms of both speed and strength they can outperform humans on average in the short term, but have noticeably less stamina especially when it comes to running or walking long distances. They greatly outmatch any quadrupedal felids for stamina, however. (Mandalorians are an invasive species)

They run hotter than humans, around 100-102F.

Though height varies quite a bit, cathar are taller on average than humans and build muscle easily, making them extremely formiddable opponents in hand-to-hand combat.

The average face/skull shape of cathar is largely based on assumptions that they evolved under weirdly similar conditions to humans evolving from early hominids, aka shortening of the face, larger cranium, smaller mouth, etc.

While they are obligate carnivores and do have elongated canines, their teeth are more even in size than wild felids, and while they do still have barbed tongues, the barbs are relatively small/soft and more similar to a housecat than anything of comparable size (aka they won’t literally take your skin off if they lick you).  They also have somewhat thinner skin than wild cats, though they are still more damage resistant than humans.

They do not have retractable claws because that’s not how fingers work, but they do have narrow, naturally pointed claws rather than humanlike fingernails. Many cathar choose to either dull them or file them down for convenience, but losing/damaging them, as per that one ambient dialogue on Dromund Kaas that I can never find when I need it, is extremely traumatic for them. 

They have tails because I want them to, used for both balance and communication. Cathar tails are approximately lion-like, thin with a coarse tuft at the end regardless of markings (ie. a cathar with stripes won’t have a tiger tail), with the tip the same shade or a few shades darker than the darkest part of their coats. occasionally those from colder regions will have longer fur over the whole tail, or look like they don’t have a tuft due to longer fur overall. 

Variation and a lot of bullshitting about genetics

Wookiepedia describes Cathar as “a planet of savannas and rough uplands” but I refuse to believe that all these habitable worlds are all one consistent climate/temperature across the whole globe. The weirdly ubiquitous infrastructure/cultural info I can kind of forgive since 90% of them were wiped out by Mandalorians and the rest left, and I’m charitably assuming there were a lot less than 7 billion cathar to begin with, so a lot of smaller or more isolated cultures across the planet were lost entirely. 

They have less sexual dimorphism than SWTOR implies, though females are a little smaller on average and tend to have shorter/finer manes that are closer to their base color. In terms of relative strength/mass the difference is minor and female cathar are still very capable of fucking you up (the conventional assumption in the Empire that females are weak/docile and males are too uncontrollable to enslave is not remotely true in either direction). 

Variation in fur/metabolism/ear and nose shape depends on which region/s of Cathar they come from (or their ancestors come from), but they don’t recognize different “races” the way humans do, particularly in the wake of the Battle of Cathar. 

On average, cathar originating closer to the equator have shorter, finer fur, larger and more tapered ears, a tendency toward slender, lanky builds, and coloration that leans more toward golds/reds and higher pigment density. whereas those closer to the poles are much stockier and can be extremely fluffy, sometimes with an undercoat, with paler colors and less vivid/extensive markings. None of the above is universally true and cathar didn’t necessarily always stay in the region where their ancestors come from (and thus sometimes you get people like Riska, who is all limbs but has fairly northern features and entirely too much fur)

Cathar mostly left their planet in groups, so in some parts of the galaxy you’ll run into whole colonies that originate mostly from one part of the planet and have distinct appearances/cultural idiosyncrasies from other colonies.

They mainly follow the same general rules that apply to most felids in terms of coloration/pattern.

Markings can be stripes, spots, or less commonly rosettes (definitely some version of Taqpep variants) and mostly lie along Blaschko’s Lines, though it’s more obvious on some individuals than others and it isn’t always perfectly precise. Even spotted individuals usually display some striping on the tail and around the eyes, though not always. 

“Default” coloration is black-based, with dark markings on a greyish or brownish base. 

Countershading falls pretty much along patterns you’d expect and usually lightens the chest/stomach, lower face, palms/soles, and inner thighs. Specific distribution and patterns vary quite a bit, and sometimes express in odd ways (hence whatever is going on with Khatte). Darkest points tend to be the tail tip, nose bridge, and mane.

Genetically solid cathar are incredibly uncommon; much more common are genes that affect the appearance/distribution of markings, sometimes rendering them almost invisible. Even ones who appear mostly solid (aka Khatte) usually still have some faint striping around the face and/or tail.

Khatte is basically some loose equivalent of ticked tabby, which mostly just looks like weird countershading but leaves some faint striping on his face and tail.

Jial-ro’s coloration is the result of a gene that suppresses all eumelanin production, and a sepia-like form of partial albinism. 

Riska has something similar, along with something that reduces the size/spread of spots.

Food 

They’re mainly carnivorous and have different nutritional requirements from humans (similar but not identical to those of a cat), which can be a problem in places like the military where standardized rations are the norm. In the Republic a cathar can usually put in a request for rations designed to accommodate carnivores (or supplements, failing that), though they might have some trouble on more isolated or undersupplied planets. The rare cathar in the Imperial military have to procure supplements out of pocket, though it’s technically possible to get reimbursed for it if they’re willing to wade through the bureaucracy.

Cathar are perfectly capable of eating raw meat with few to no ill effects, and have a subgenre of cuisine centered around it (and while they didn’t invent sushi, they have enthusiastically embraced the concept). They also have plenty of ways of cooking meat and readily adopt any new ones they come across. 

Their “natural” diet apart from meat mainly consists of fruit, root vegetables, and eggs, though the closer to the poles you get the less likely you are to encounter fruit in a dish. Cathar never cultivated grain and it holds no meaningful nutritional value for them, so bread, rice, and similar products simply do not appear in traditional cuisine. This does not stop some of them from eating grain products in small amounts, as they can still enjoy the taste, but it isn’t any healthier than processed sugar is to humans and they have a high rate of gluten intolerance as a species.

All cathar have a heightened and refined ability to detect savory/umami type flavors, but around 30-40% of cathar, and the vast majority of those from colder regions, have no taste receptors for sweetness at all. This has resulted in the cathar equivalent of the Cilantro Debate centering around desserts, even though they’re all perfectly aware that it’s genetic, and some who can’t taste sweetness still enjoy some desserts for the other flavors present. Those who do have sweet taste receptors are about as sensitive to it as humans, but it tends not to have the same addictive quality for them and a lot of them don’t like processed sugars in anything but small doses. They would appreciate a lightly sweet creme brulee but most of them would find soda absolutely disgusting.

Citrus is right out.

They suffer no more ill effects than humans from drinking alcohol, and due to generally having a fair amount of mass they can usually drink a lot of it.

Social minutiae

They use a fair amount of feline body language, particularly with others of their own species. While facial expressions play a part and they do smile, scowl, and generally express broad emotions, they have a reduced range of facial mobility compared to more humanoid species and no eyebrows to speak of, which leads to a lot of them having what humans perceive as resting bitchface. It also results in humans underestimating the range and depth of their emotions, and can be a problem in the medical field with human medics/doctors who haven’t been trained to work with less humanoid aliens and won’t necessarily recognize severe pain or distress.

Their ears are less articulated than a cat’s but still have some degree of mobility that serves more of a social function than a practical one. They also express a lot of emotion through their tails, to the point that it can be a detriment in some situations if they haven’t practiced consciously keeping control of it.

Bumping foreheads is a common way to express platonic/familial affection, or can be the equivalent of a chaste kiss between partners. They also squint and slow blink, though it doesn’t always translate clearly to other species.

They have a wider range of vocalization than humans; while their voices are often humanlike and they’re just as capable of articulate speech, they can also growl, purr, and make sounds outside human hearing range. Those raised among humans or near-humans tend to do this less, if at all, while cathar raised in more insular communities of their own kind can come off as very taciturn due to heavier reliance on nonverbal communication.

Sense of smell is much stronger and more refined than a human’s and plays a more significant role in how they perceive and navigate the galaxy. They can occasionally be mistaken for Force-sensitive by humans due to their knack for picking up on emotional distress or the presence of particular species/people by scent. This is more true with people they’re familiar with; they won’t pick out distinct members of the other species by default but will eventually be fairly reliable in identifying the scent of a friend or anyone else they spend a lot of time around.

The exception to the above is other cathar, who they can easily tell apart on an individual basis. They have scent glands around the jaw/neck that come into play for identification, conveying broad emotional states, in some situations can aid medical diagnoses, among other things. They also play a part in building connection and familiarity between friends, family, or romantic partners.

The ~horny section~

Cathar don’t really kiss the way humans do by default, but they can, and usually do so unless they’ve somehow had no contact with any near-human species at all. Their equivalent is gentle biting around the neck and jaw, which is another situations where the scent glands are relevant, and when aroused that whole area becomes an erogenous zone for the vast majority of cathar. 

Plenty of humans (particularly if they don’t encounter a lot of aliens day to day) will avoid kissing cathar anyway because they have sandpaper tongues and dry mouths and fangs, and it feels fucking weird if you aren’t prepared for that. 

They tend to be very bitey in general unless specifically asked not to. It only becomes a problem if the cathar in question is inexperienced with humanoids and hasn’t figured out how much bite force is acceptable for a species with thinner, more sensitive skin.

Their dicks are fairly humanoid in size and shape, though somewhat more conical at the head, but they do have a sheath rather than a foreskin. after maturity they don’t actually retract into the sheath more than about two inches when flaccid, and tend to be slightly less sensitive than the average human (same keritinization factor that affects circumcised humans). It also makes them more vulnerable to damage, but since it’s customary to wear pants on most civilized planets, that never really becomes a problem in the course of a normal day. The base of the shaft that’s usually covered has noticeably higher sensitivity. There are probably individual exceptions to most of the above.

Conventional understanding is that cathar don’t have barbs, which is true the vast majority of the time, though about 60% of them have some amount of vestigial non-keratinous bumps over their head that have no noticeable affect on anything aside from occasional increased sensitivity in that area. Rarely an individual might develop a few actual barbs at the onset of puberty, but they have no practical function and pose a risk of discomfort and injury, and can easily be removed via a fast and mostly painless medical procedure, so the number of adults who have them is close to zero.

Females do have (mild, easy to suppress if desired, and mainly not at all disruptive) heat cycles. Other cathar can generally tell by scent, but not to a distracting degree, and it’s considered rude and inappropriate to point it out with anyone but a close friend or partner. It should go without saying that males don’t have heat cycles, but I’ve gotten enough weird DMs about this to know that I need to say it. Unless said male is trans, and not on any sort of HRT, that’s not how that works. 

They kind of have breasts but unless actively nursing they’re barely noticeable if at all, especially under clothing. Cathar have much fewer hangups about going topless regardless of gender than certain human cultures do.

[ieattaperecorders]

Notes on Causality - Chapter 3: Motherfucking Jurgen Leitner

Oh yeah, that guy. Whatever happened to him?

Epilogue for Something's Different About You Lately is coming, will be posted either sometime tonight or tomorrow! In the meantime here's the Jurgen Leitner centered chapter literally no one asked for.

Read on Ao3

---

"You were ready to do it for Gertrude!"

"Gertrude made arrangements to smuggle me to a secure location outside the country. Arrangements which are now long expired . . . and I was afraid of her."

The Archivist laughed, a wry, empty sound. "Hmn. You're in good company there, at least."

"Please understand, I have no place to go. None of my safehouses are left anymore . . . I'm entirely willing to help thwart Jonah's plans, but you have to allow me something . . . ."

Frustration seemed to overtake the Archivist for a moment, then he sighed heavily. He tore a page from the notebook he'd been carrying and scribbled down an address, then took a ring of keys from his pocket and held the two of them out.

"It's not exactly a safehouse, but it's a place to stay. Some of Gertrude's things are there, there's basic amenities and several locks on the doors and windows. It's . . . better than nothing," he said. "Not as if I'll be needing it anymore."

---

Jurgen sighed with relief as warmth ran down his scalp. It had been a while since he'd had the luxury of a proper shower with hot, running water. It might be his last for a while as well, so he imagined he ought to enjoy it.

After several minutes under the spray, he turned off the water, dried off and dressed in his old clothes. As an afterthought, he swiped the towel across the floor, sopping up the water he'd dripped, and tossed it into the laundry hamper. He might as well go through the motions of being a considerate houseguest, though he wasn't quite sure 'houseguest' was an accurate description of his situation.

He doubted that Gertrude's successor would be amenable to his presence in this apartment for long, now that he planned to continue living in it. But it wasn't as if there'd been a wealth of options left to him. With the tunnels gone, coming here had seemed favorable to standing in the London Streets and waiting to be killed.

In the kitchen he made himself tea, then returned to the sofa to drink it. He tried not to be nosy about the various personal items strewn haphazardly around the place, though his gaze did linger over a bookcase. Nothing of his, fortunately. Just some record books, popular nonfiction and a number of cheap, shoddily bound journals that –after carefully glancing over them to confirm that none were supernatural– he didn't examine the contents of.

He knew he would have to leave sooner rather than later. The possibility of a former Archivist returning to throw him out was the least of his concerns. He'd had to travel out in the open to get here, and even behind four walls he felt exposed.

It was possible he still had allies in Spain and Russia. Not the sort he could really depend on, but some that might still do him a kindness out of pity, or for old time's sake. There were a few he suspected might even help out of a grim sense of reciprocity, since the horrors they'd unearthed or meddled with had been forever branded with the name Leitner, and thus washed clean of any association with them.

But to reach any of them he'd need to travel. He had no money left, few resources, and by design no identification. Getting across London without attracting attention was daunting enough, how could he expect to manage international travel? Even then, anyone he reached might have moved on, or died, or might simply close their doors in his face. And then what would he do?

Ruminating on his meager chances, he almost didn't hear the door opening behind him. Almost.

"The infamous Jurgen Lietner . . ." the voice scraped at the back of his mind like teeth on glass. "Rather unimpressive when seen in person, aren't you? But I suppose that's only to be expected. . . ."

He turned to look, standing and taking a step back. The Distortion had taken a new face, he noticed, a woman he didn't recognize. Not that it especially mattered what it looked like. The core of it didn't change.

Jurgen turned to run, but stopped immediately when he saw what should have been the front door. It opened just enough for a glimpse of the smiling face behind it, before one twisted hand slipped out mischievously to curl around the frame, and the part of it that looked human stepped out.

"After all," it continued as if it hadn't been interrupted, "when someone's reputation is so horrific, such a litany of ruined lives, when one's name is all but synonymous with evil, well! That's got to be hard to live up to for anyone, hasn't it?" It smiled broadly, and Jurgen felt his heart sink.

". . . I'm not going to be escaping this time, am I?" he asked rhetorically.

"Oh, but you've got me all wrong!" It placed a palm against its chest in a theatrical gesture of offense. "An escape is exactly what I'm here for. You need a way to travel discreetly, and it just so happens that's a service I offer. No need to thank me, just happy to help a pitiful soul in need."

It patted the frame of the door, smiling. He wondered if he had the courage in him to leap from the window. It might be an easier end than wandering through dizzying hallways until he was consumed.

"No, thank you," he said. It was worth a try. "I'm fine on my own."

It began walking casually around the room, and Jurgen tried to resist the urge to follow its movements. The more he looked at it, the more it blurred and twisted before his eyes, making him feel unsteady. But when he looked away its voice felt like it was coming from just behind him, and that was worse.

"A lovely thought," it said with predatory affection. "But we both know that's a lie, don't we? How many enemies did you make back in your glory days? All those nasty little cultists whose precious tomes you stole, only a matter of time before one of them finds you've emerged. It's going to be quite the race to catch you, isn't it? But there won't be much fun in watching if you're caught too soon. You ought to have a sporting chance. A head start, at least."

He closed his eyes, trying to keep himself from nausea, and reluctantly considered the possibility that it might be offering a genuine escape. Not a safe escape, he imagined, nor remotely ideal. Possibly it would deposit him just a few paces ahead of his enemies, or in other inhospitable conditions to see how he fared. Or it might let him wander for days, leaving him half-alive and out of his senses by the time it released him. But any of those fates might still be better than what he had at the moment.

There was a kind of honesty, after all, in something that only ever harmed you. It was predictable, you knew where you stood with it, and that wasn't what the Distortion was. It was entirely possible the creature in front of him was in fact his best chance to survive. Or he might be deluding himself out of desperation, and if he walked through its door it would do nothing but swallow him whole. Perhaps that uncertainty was the entire point.

"I suppose you don't trust me," it grinned. "But you don't really have much in the way of options, do you? Take up my generous offer or sit here in this sad, uninteresting little flat and wait for someone to kill you."

He looked at the dark yellow wood of the door, considering his miserable options.

". . . Am I permitted at least to ask where I'll be taken? Or request a destination?"

"Oh, Jurgen, dearest! You can ask for anything," it laughed, and he felt acid rise in his throat. "I don't know why you'd think it would make a difference, though.

He paused, regarding the creature's stolen face with unease. A police siren sounded in the distance outside . . . not a strange thing to hear in any city, likely nothing related to him. But the sound cut through him all the same, and a harried, hunted part of his being twisted itself closer to panic.

He opened the door.

---

The two of them eventually formed a wacky sitcom spinoff, Worst Friends Forever: Jurgen and Helen’s Bogus Journey. /j

[qqueenofhades]

If Cursed had asked you, a medieval historian, what to do, what would you have told them?

Ahaha. Ahaha. Hah. Full disclosure, I know/knew absolutely nothing about the show apart from reading this horrible article, but methinks, enough to get a sense of it. And even without the author of this article wildly making up their Blackadder version of history (as my dearest and oh so correct @oldshrewsburyian​ put it yesterday), the quotes from the actors/producers/etc are just... they are just.... SO BAD.

Starring:

"But when we got into filming and the brutality, the mud, the bugs and the blood, I thought, 'I'm not sure I could handle this in reality'.

"I have a feeling I'd get sick and die pretty quick."

"I'd be dead," adds Frank Miller, very matter of fact.

"I mean it was a time of wild plagues and disease and they didn't have much use for people who do the kind of stuff I do."

Ah yes, medieval life. Mud, blood, bugs, and death. “Times of wild plague and disease,” unlike today, where we never have a problem with plague at all. And I’m sorry, the medieval world had no use for artists??? What are you even SMOKING MY DUDE MY BRO MY PAL (and if you don’t know this, WHY ARE YOU MAKING A MEDIEVAL SHOW SUPPOSED TO BE “ACCURATE?”) Have you LOOKED at ONE SINGLE MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT? HAVE YOU WALKED INTO A MEDIEVAL CATHEDRAL AND LOOKED AT THE STAINED GLASS WINDOWS? LOOKED AT ANY JEWELRY? ANYTHING?????

(Okay I gotta pace myself, there’s a lot to yell at here and it’ll take a while.)

"If I was living in that time, I think I would want to be a witch but you would stink," Devon Terrell, who's taking on the role, laughs.

As would most people, with a lack of basic sanitation and plumbing which meant human waste was often thrown out close to where you lived.

"And I like a good fairy tale but I wouldn't say I was longing for a time that was much less scientific. I'd probably get killed for heresy or something. I'm not great with authority or religious oppression and that sort of stuff. So, yeah, I don't think I'd fare too well."

There’s just... I don’t know where to even.... /SCREAMS

(And I even cut out the especially face-palming quote from the article about “thousands of people burning for heresy” in the 11th/12th century. “Much less scientific,” well, Roger Bacon’s brazen head just called AND IT THINKS YOU’RE A MORON, DEVON.)

The woman playing Morgana Le Fay talks about your life being “very short” and getting drowned as a witch and whatever Bad Guy Du Jour talks about having no dentists or medical care. We get the picture: they.... really did not do their homework. I’m not sure they even touched Google. So basically, we’d need to start by burning everything down and then asking if really, truly, do we NEED to make this adaptation. There are EIGHT THOUSAND MILLION GODFORSAKEN RETELLINGS OF ARTHUR/THE ROUNDTABLE RIGHT NOW. NOBODY NEEDS ANOTHER ONE! EVEN FOR WHATEVER PSEUDO-FEMINIST TAKE YOU SEEM TO BE TRYING TO PUT ON THIS ONE! ENOUGH! ENOOOOUGH! THINK OF SOMETHING DIFFERENT! THERE ARE SO MANY MEDIEVAL ROMANCES OUT THERE THAT DON’T GET MADE!!!

For example, you know what I would suggest? Bisclavret. Where is my lavish beautifully designed historical-medieval-fantasy queer werewolf romance, I ask you? (Answer: just like that novel I stumbled upon yesterday that decided to make some random Vatican maidservant into Cesare Borgia’s ~truest and purest love~, y’all are too cowardly to do it right.) YOU KNOW WHO WOULD LOVE THIS? THE GAYS! THE GAYS WOULD LOVE IT, PATRICIA! We have a central queer love story (Bisclavret and the king). We have a distinct physical and geographical setting (12th-century France). THE GODDAMN THING WAS WRITTEN BY A WOMAN! (Marie de France.) We could develop the character of Bisclavret’s wife and give her backstory and into a sympathetic and complicated but ultimately redeemed antiheroine, blackmailed by the male/patriarchal/heterosexual villains of the establishment, if y’all REALLY want to get into some subversive queerfem medievalism and not your little weaksauce Nimue in her polyester corset. We could LITERALLY MAKE A QUEER MEDIEVAL WEREWOLF ROMANCE WRITTEN BY A WOMAN!!! HOW ABOUT THAT YOU DINGDONGS?!!

You could decorate the sets beautifully by, I don���t know, LOOKING AT THOSE MEDIEVAL ARTISTS WHO SUPPOSEDLY DIDN’T EXIST. You could bring in other medieval monsters, such as walking corpses, and have brawny young men beating them to death with shovels (as various medieval chroniclers matter-of-factly report on). You could do something besides the TIRED ASS “superstitious peasants think woman with vague evidence of a personality must be a witch!!” You could ground your story in the vivid and colorful politics of 12th-century France and the underground queer life for people in Paris (MAKE PETER THE CHANTER THE FROLLO-ESQUE VILLAIN, I’M JUST SAYING!) EXPLORE THE METAPHOR OF QUEERNESS VIS A VIS MONSTROSITY WITH BISCLAVRET THE WEREWOLF! You could STOP ACTING LIKE GAME OF THRONES IS HISTORY AND “DIRTY PEOPLE IN TUNICS GETTING KILLED MEANS IT’S MEDIEVAL!!!”

/takes a deep breath

But alas. As established, they are Cowards. So, if we absolutely HAD to be lumbered with another goddamn Arthur adaptation:

STOP ACTING LIKE SOME RANDOM VAGUELY 12TH-CENTURY SETTING IS ~tHE hISToriCAl ArThUr!!~ IF HE EXISTED IT WAS IN LIKE 5TH-CENTURY POST ROMAN BRITAIN AND A) WE ALREADY HAD THE TEDIOUS BIG BUDGET “ACCURATE KING ARTHUR” WITH KEIRA KNIGHTLEY DRESSED IN WHATEVER THAT WAS, I’M GAY SO I’M NOT COMPLAINING THAT MUCH BUT ALSO ACCURATE MY CYNICAL LESBIAN BACKSIDE!

....where was I...

Ah yes. Post-Roman 5th-century Britain is A VERY DIFFERENT SETTING from the random-ass mishmash of “medieval” tropes you people seem to want to throw in. Or ANOTHER IDEA: junk the idea that “King Arthur” is ever going to be a remotely accurately represented historical concept, and just make it lavish, fantastic, magical, dark, and compelling without yoking yourself to the fuckin’ BORING ASS “must add mud and blood and suffering and misogyny for More Realism!” It’s FANTASY, TREAT IT LIKE FANTASY AND NOT HISTORY LIKE “A FAIRYTALE!” HOW ABOUT THAT IDEA?!?! AND MAYBE STOP ACTING LIKE YOU HAVE PRETENSIONS TO “tHe wAy it ReALLy wAs” because we have established YOU DO NOT!!!

(God Game of Thrones is the WORST, and you KNOW they’re doing this trying to be GoT-lite, and I.... /mutters incoherently)

OR MAKE ANY OTHER OF THE ARTHURIAN ROMANCES IF YOU REALLY HAVE TO DO A CAMELOT STORY! THERE ARE LIKE EIGHTY MILLION OF THEM! PICK A SIDE ONE WITH CHARACTERS THAT YOU CAN DO FRESH RATHER THAN THE ARCHETYPES THAT HAVE BEEN DONE TO DEATH!!! ACTUALLY ASK A MEDIEVAL LITERATURE EXPERT AND A MEDIEVAL HISTORIAN FOR ADVICE BEFORE YOU GET THIS FAR AND EMBARRASS YOURSELVES!!! (OR MAYBE SEVERAL OF THEM!!) ACTUALLY ACT LIKE REPRESENTING THE PAST AS A FULL AND COMPLEX AND BEAUTIFUL PLACE AS WELL AS A DARK AND DANGEROUS ONE CAN STRENGTHEN YOUR STORY AND DISPLAY HUMAN EXPERIENCE MORE ACCURATELY! RATHER THAN “HURR DURR DARK AGES” BECAUSE I AM TIRED!!!

TIRED!!!!

...Anyway. I clearly handled this well. Whew.

[xenteaart]

Diplomacy Failure

Summary: The Master and you have an established friendship, a bromance - you’re basically partners in crime. One day the Master comes up with this grand robbery scheme but it takes him months to plan the whole thing out properly, and by the end of it - he’s getting way too impatient and reckless. That’s where you step in.

Warnings: none, pure fluff again

Pairing: Dhawan!Master x Reader

Note: This was supposed to be a short thing so I decided not to create a whole ass backstory around it. The main reason why I wanted to write this was because I usually see MC being mostly submissive in fics (not that there’s anything wrong with it whatsoever) and I craved some diversity so here it goesss. 

Huge thanks and lots of love to my incredible beta @wonders-of-the-multiverse​ i love you to bits <3

The last few months have been hard to say the least. After years of knowing the Master you’d grown accustomed to his severe mood swings, but this was something else. 

Most of the time you never really bothered to get to know all the details of his typically complex and intricate schemes. You simply trusted him with those and did what he asked you to do, not taking any liberty to make your own decisions because he did know better. He was the one spending restless days and nights planning everything out after all, so you never really questioned anything. Until today. 

He was getting impatient and it wasn’t a good thing at all. 

The Master had an impressive set of skills, the ability to wait and execute slow-burn plans exceptionally well being one of them. However this time, he got way too invested in what he was doing, his near obsession leading you to believe it had something to do with the Doctor in the long run.

As for now, he needed to get his hands on something “very valuable and very important” and he was planning to steal it, of course. It was no common robbery though, the ship you were now finding yourselves on was huge. No, massive, so simply threatening a few creatures with his TCE and acquiring the object wasn’t a viable option. The ship’s obscenely advanced security systems were not working in your favor either.

The two of you were pretending to be a regular married couple, mere visitors to the event and so painfully ordinary in your nature as to not draw any attention. Keeping a low profile was essential.

The Master called from somewhere below the console where corridors led to the wardrobe room, and since you weren’t occupied with anything even remotely important you joined him right away. You were happy to merely see him and talk to him considering he now preferred the company of a thousand papers with all sorts of layouts, schemes, his own scribbles and something else in Gallifreyan that you had no way of understanding. 

“What’s that?” you asked, a little taken aback by his excessively fancy suit. 

“Your dress is right there, try it on and see if it fits,” he said casually as he looked in the mirror, ignoring your question and waving his hand at the sophisticated purple dress that was laid out on a nearby sofa. 

Ah. Matching outfits. He could never resist the drama of it.

You looked at the dress, the decoration on it exquisite and lavish. A quiet sigh escaped your lips as you tried not to laugh too loudly.

“If that’s for tomorrow, we’re not wearing that.” you uttered, not even trying to hide your amused grin at this point.

“What? Why?”

“Because we need to be wearing this,” you pointed at a horrendous blue suit and a dress of the matching color, the shade and design of both so ugly and simplistic that the clothing wouldn’t look good on either of you. 

A displeased frown flitted across the Master’s features.

“Come on, we need to look pitiful. Men of wealth love playing charity and chatting with lower class people, helping them out with whatever. It makes them feel better about themselves, boosts their ego.” you elaborated, your words heavily accompanied by expressive hand waving and vocal shifts.

He blinked a couple of times and looked at himself in the mirror again, trying to make peace with the idea of this fashion crime you were both about to commit.

The first step of his plan was relatively easy - he was doing the networking and you were doing the smiling as the two of you were slowly getting closer and closer to higher rank guests that were usually a little too drunk and clueless to not accidentally give away the information you needed most, that being - where the security control room was located. Getting a sample of some rich and wasted guest’s DNA was also part of the job since they all had unlimited access to all parts of this ship. As of now, you were getting a feeling you were never even going to make it to that point. 

The Master wasn’t very good at tolerating stupidity, especially when nobody knew and feared who he was. To all of these arrogant and self-absorbed upper class assholes, he was literally a peasant. Little did they know. 

You could see his hand playing with the TCE in his pocket as he was seriously considering whether to take it out and end this shitshow here and now. That would probably feel really good for a couple of minutes but then both of you would be captured and very likely executed on the spot because no matter how intimidating and dangerous the Master was - the quantity of creatures on the ship would be an undeniable advantage on their side. Plus, he’d spent so much time on plan A, there wasn’t any room for plan B, you figured.

Granted, dying wasn’t something the Master was ever afraid of. But you were human with no spare lives, so his impatience would mean very bad news for you.

“Don’t you want to take a break from this?” you asked timidly, standing in the doorway and not daring to let yourself into the Master’s working space just yet since knocking on the door did nothing to catch his attention. 

He was rapidly glancing all over the papers, his mind being evidently busy with something of more significance than your presence. 

“I can get you some coffee if you like? Or... anything at all, really,” you made another attempt at starting a conversation but it was met with silence once again, except this time you noticed hints of irritation in the way he was making notes and moving things around his table, mercilessly digging his pen into his notebook and purposely making a lot more noise while searching for something buried under these piles of paper.

“Yeah, no worries then.” you sighed as you saw yourself out of the room. 

You were getting fed up with this.

As you were standing next to him and contemplating your options, you felt the air around you change a little. It was an insignificant shift but you were particularly sensitive to emotional fields people and other creatures tended to create, and right now the atmosphere did not feel friendly.

You looked at the Master and then back at the greenish humanoid looking creature he was talking to. The conflict was clearly starting to develop, filling the space around you with tension and unease. 

You were so close to the control room, you couldn’t let that happen. There were only a few more floors you had to pass in order to get to the royalty hall where your main mission would be taking place. 

“For Christ’s sake.” you thought to yourself, recognizing the familiar burning anger in the Master’s eyes as he was slowly losing his already weak grasp on his temper and reaching for his pocket, his actions now fuelled with proper intention of making the man pay for his disrespect and bad manners.

The problem with the Master was - no matter how brilliant and clever his ideas were, his emotions and temper would always get in the way. You had to learn it the hard way by nearly getting killed a couple of times because of it in the past. But pissing off a few soldiers and running away was one thing, and acting hostile on a space station sized ship with no quick way out was a completely different story. 

“I am so sorry, sir, my husband suffers from this terrible condition,” you spoke as you looked at the Master intensely, doing your best to wordlessly communicate with him and beg him to stay silent, “where he gets unreasonably aggressive when he’s upset.”

The man’s expression was now plagued with confusion but it was a good sign, you thought. He was paying attention.

“He’s just frustrated we can’t yet afford to lead a life like yours, sir. Isn’t that right, darling?” you patted the Master on the back, your voice now so sugary sweet it made you want to vomit, but you were committed to your little act and nothing could stop you.

“Please forgive our jealousy, we simply wish to be more like you but it pains us to realize we’re a long way away from that,” saying this made your skin itch, and you were pretty sure the Master’s eye was twitching a little. You looked at him briefly and noted he was indeed… puzzled. 

Your flattery seemed to work wonders on the man’s self esteem, though, his facial expression momentarily switching to pity and its default arrogance mixed with pride. 

You tried not to make eye contact with the Master as you were escorting him away, your hand wrapped around his elbow. Your heart was beating a little too fast for your liking, and your main concern for now was peacefully leaving the floor and avoiding any more fuss on the way because, honestly, you were getting angry yourself.

---

“What the hell was that?” was the first thing he asked you as soon as you both entered the TARDIS safely, the two of you still slightly out of breath from your usual cardio on your way back; the desired object sitting securely in the Master’s pocket.

“I was actually going to ask you this exact same question, how convenient.” you snapped, kicking off your heels and making your way to the console barefoot, the cold metal floor having a soothing effect on your aching feet.

The Master gave you a grim look as he took off his ridiculous and evidently uncomfortable jacket, and swiftly marched towards you. His intimidating aura rarely had any impact on you and you didn’t even flinch at his intrusion of your personal space. You knew all too well he would never hurt you deliberately. 

“I did not allow you to intervene.” 

“You should have seen your face, darling,” you said mockingly, maintaining intense eye contact as if it was a competition on who looks away first. 

“You should have heard your voice, such sweetness and flattery I was worried you were gonna kiss his ring at the end of your speech or something,” he spat out his words with grimaced disgust. 

The two of you stared at each other in complete silence for about half a minute, and your facade dropped first. You burst into laughter, giggling obnoxiously at the memory of the Master’s pure and sincere confusion. You’d never seen him so baffled and mad, the funniest thing of it all being the fact that he had to comply and play along. It made you a little proud of yourself.

The corner of the Master’s lips twitched, his stubbornness and denial still fighting his urge to crack up, but a couple of moments later he finally joined you. Any trace of annoyance was long gone, and a wide smile took over his person as he laughed out loud with you. 

“Idiot.” he commented, still chuckling and grinning while also unbuttoning his lousy shirt. You both wanted to get out of those trashy clothes as soon as possible. 

You suddenly went quiet. With no further talking you simply stepped forwards and hugged the Master tightly, burying your nose in the crook of his neck.

“I’ve missed you.”

He hugged you back, resting one of his hands on your head and ruffling your hair, so very aware of how much you hated it. 

“Missed you too, fool.”

[embeanwrites]

Finding Home Gavin Reed x Reader

Chapter 8

Masterlist

We pulled back into dad’s house. Walking back inside I immediately noticed Sumo was laying down with the old blanket dad was talking about earlier. He perked up the moment we walked in and started wagging his tail.

“He kept crying after you left, he’s a big softie.” My dad said through a mouthful of noodles. I smiled and walked over to pet Sumo and gave him a kiss on the top of his head.

“I’m not going anywhere, Sumo.” I said softly into his fur. I looked at the blanket. It was a faded blue and a lot smaller than I remembered it. Or maybe I was just a lot smaller in my memories with it. Sumo had chewed a few holes in it from carrying it around. After all these years, he hadn’t forgotten about me. I wondered if my dad ever took the blanket and thought about me. I sat next to my dad on the couch, grabbing a pair of chopsticks and stealing the container of noodles from him.

“Hey!” He yelled through a mouthful of food. I smiled.

“So, what are we watching?”

“You’re the guest, you pick.”

“Hmmm…Connor have you seen the original Muppet movie?” My dad laughed.

“That movie is older than me, (Y/n)!”

“I have not seen anything about ‘Muppets’.” Connor responded sitting down on the floor with Sumo. It was interesting, even though there was plenty of room on the couch he still chose to sit on the floor with Sumo.

“Then that’s what we’re watching. Everyone needs to watch the Muppets. If I could find a way to show it in my class, I totally would. Hey! Connor you could analyze it and see if there’s any way I could connect it to humans and androids or sociology!”

“Oh, your students must love having to watch old movies.” My dad snorted.

“Hey! I showed my class at (dream/school) ‘The Iron Giant’ and they loved it!”

“How on earth did you connect that?”

“Dad, it’s about a giant robot and people immediately assuming he was going to kill everyone, and, in the end, he was the hero. It’s literally perfect.” I laughed, grabbing the remote from the table and found the movie. I took my phone out of my pocket and placed it face down, so I wouldn’t get distracted. Clicking play I snuggled into the couch and continued eating.

“I'm Statler.

I'm Waldorf.

We're here to heckle

The Muppet Movie.”

“Why are some puppets and others human?” Connor asked, I looked over at him. He once again had tilted his head.

“They’re Muppets, Connor. And I wouldn’t question it too much, in the next movie they say a bear and a frog are twin brothers.” He furrowed his brow and kept his eyes intently on the movie.

As the movie went on, I couldn’t help but hum along to the songs. Muppets always felt like home. When I was younger, me, dad, and mom had a Muppet movie marathon on my birthday. I don’t remember much about what else we did, but I remember watching the movie and laughing with them. It was right before they got divorced. It was the last happy memory of all three of us I had.

Through the corner of my eye, I watched my dad move his foot to the music and laugh at the funny parts. I wondered if he remembered the last time we watched this together. I wondered if he ever watched them with Cole.

When the movie ended, I got up and stretched. Looking at the clock, I noticed it was only 7 pm.

“I’m going to change into my pajamas.” I said while picking up my backpack. “What room should I use?”

“You can use mine, it’s the one at the end of the hallway.” Connor said. I nodded and walked in.

The room had sparse decorations, which wasn’t too surprising. I could tell by what was on the walls that this must have been Cole’s room. I changed into sweatpants and a giant t-shirt, putting my dirty clothes in the bottom of my bag. I walked back out to find Connor putting a leash on Sumo and my dad cleaning up from dinner.

“Dang, Connor. If you had told me you were going to go walk Sumo I would’ve waited to change, so I could go with you!”

“I’m just taking him out for a couple of minutes. I will let you know the next time I plan on walking him. Come on, Sumo.” I smiled and walked over to my dad.

“Gun to my head, if you were to ask me if Hank Anderson would ever let an android live with him, I would say no way in a heartbeat.” My dad chuckled.

“Before Connor, I would’ve agreed.”

“What changed?”

“When we were hunting deviants, it was clear that they all just…wanted to be free. There were two girls that seemed to be truly in love. Connor’s mission was to bring in the deviants, but he had a gun trained on them and he let them go. I guess I just realized that humans and androids aren’t that much different.” I nodded as I kept my eyes on the front door.

“If you had read my articles you would’ve learned that sooner.” I said with a laugh.

“How did you know so early on?” I shuffled uncomfortably.

“I’m not really sure. It wasn’t one moment that made me realize. In undergrad I took a lot of sociology and history classes and I just kept seeing the same issues repeating over and over again. Humans have always had an “us vs them” mentality, so it was just the same thing we’ve seen since the earliest civilization.” My dad hummed.

“I don’t know how you got so smart. You certainly didn’t get that from me.” I laughed.

“I studied really hard and never stopped. Going into college I didn’t even know I was going to go to grad school and get my PhD. I just started learning and I never wanted to stop. Especially after I read about how some androids were being treated. I wanted to make a difference.” I sighed. “I’d like to think I’ve gotten most of my students outside their comfort zones and got them to accept androids as free beings, but I have a feeling that may be harder in Detroit.”

“Well, I’ve never seen you teach, but just by that statement I can tell you really care. Your students will see that too and that’ll get them to listen. There’s a reason everyone hates math, no one could be passionate about that.” I laughed. Connor walked back in with Sumo. The moment he unhooked his leash he came bounding over to me. “Man, he’s going to attack you every time he sees you.” I got on my knees and started petting him.

“Good, because I’ve missed him.” I scratched behind his ear and he thumbed his back leg. I got up and walked back over to the couch and stretched my legs out. Sumo followed me and laid down on the floor next to me, I reached over and grabbed my phone off the table. I checked my messages. A couple from friends back home. I bit my lip, debating if I should text Gavin. In the end I decided I had bothered him enough for one day.

“(Y/n), when did you want to go walk the rescue dogs?” Connor asked sitting next to my feet on the couch.

“Do you work tomorrow?”

“He doesn’t, but I have too.” My dad grunted coming back to the living room.

“Why?” My dad shook his head.

“Captain Fowler is having the Lieutenant take some refresher classes and some of the detectives are getting together to discuss how android crime cases should be handled from now on.”  I sat up.

“Is it an open meeting?” I asked my dad quickly.

“Not that I know of.” He answered.

“Hm…ask the Captain if I could possibly assist you guys with that. I know I’m not a police officer, but I understand a lot about androids and humans. I even minored in forensics in undergrad, but that was a while ago.”

“I’ll ask him, I think it’s a good idea. It wouldn’t hurt to get more opinions on how to handle it. The government is sure taking their sweet time coming up with laws covering everything.” I nodded in agreement. “Well, I’m gonna head to bed, read your book a little before sleeping. See you guys tomorrow.”

“Good night!” Me and Connor said at the same time. My dad kept walking and waved a little before going to his room and shutting the door. Still sitting up I looked at Connor. His LED was blue and looking at my backpack.

“I brought a scrapbook if you’d like me to show it to you.” I said gently, grabbing my bag.

“Will it cause you more emotional distress to look at it tonight?” He asked softly, causing me to laugh.

“No, Connor. This is filled with good memories.” I got the book out and moved closer to him, so the book sat on both of our legs. “This is me with my freshman orientation group. I was so scared that day. The campus felt so much bigger when I started living on it, but over time it felt smaller.” I kept flipping the pages stopping to explain some pictures.

“That is Officer Chen.” Connor said pointing to an old picture of me and Tina painting each other’s toenails. I smiled.

“Me and Tina have been friends for a long time, before she went to the police academy, she would come to my dorm room to crash.” I grabbed my phone and snapped a picture and sent it to Tina.

 Look at these babies!

 “Officer Chen is on duty right now. She may not respond right away.” I sat my phone down.

“I know, but she’ll see it eventually.” I flipped a couple more pages. There were pictures of graduation and friends.

“Who’s that?” Connor asked pointing to a picture of me with a KL900.

“Oh, during my research I interviewed some androids. She was designed for social work. It’s been so long, but I think her name is Lucy.” Connor’s LED flashed yellow.

“She died during the revolution.” I looked intently at the picture, remembering how kind she was.

“She was a really good person.” I clenched the book a little tighter. “I wish I could have done more during the revolution. I helped a couple of androids, but if I had been in Detroit maybe I could’ve done more.” Connor awkwardly patted my shoulder.

“You were safer outside of the city. Hank would be upset if you had gotten hurt.” I nodded, closing the book.

“Could we look at the rest some other time? There’s a few more androids and I’m not sure if I’m ready to hear about their fate.”

“Of course. Are you going to bed?” I looked at my phone.

“Nah, it’s only 8. If I sleep now, I’ll mess up my sleep schedule even more and wake up at like 4 am. What do you want to do?”

“Would you like to watch the second Muppets movie?” I smiled.

“So, you liked the movie?” Connor smiled back.

“It was interesting. I enjoyed the fact that they knew it was a movie.”

“Well, the next one is ‘The Great Caper’, but that one’s probably my least favorite.”

“Is it essential to watch them in order?” Connor asked, tilting his head.

“God no, they’re a mess. Some of the ones that were made later have an order, but for the most part you can watch them in any order.”

“You can pick which one next.” I smiled widely.

“’The Muppets take Manhattan’, it is then!” I found the movie on the tv but waited to press play. “Hey, Connor. Sometimes you tilt your head a little. Is that in your programming or did you pick that up somewhere?”

“I was programmed to blend in with humans, it’s one of the few ‘quirks’ Cyberlife gave me, why?” I watched him, he looked as if he was about to tilt his head again but stopped himself causing me to chuckle.

“I’ve noticed you do it a lot and when Nines was in my office, he did it a couple times. I was wondering if you both were programmed to do that or if he picked it up from you.”

“I believe it is in both of our programming.” I nodded and clicked play on the movie. I patted the couch and Sumo jumped up next to me. “Sumo is not allowed on the couch.”

“It’s a special occasion, one night won’t hurt, Connor.” He frowned as his LED flashed yellow.

“It’s Friday night, there is no holiday today.”

“Exactly.” I said, turning my eyes to the movie. His LED changed back to blue as he sighed. He glanced at Sumo one more time, before finally starting to watch the movie.

 “Together again

Gee, it's good

to be together again

I just can't imagine that

you've ever been gone

It's not starting over 

It's just going on

Together again…”

[tinycartridge]

Approaching Infinity ⊟

[Guest writer Caroline Delbert brings us a fully unexpected article that manages to be both philosophical exploration and interview-based journalism, at the same time. I couldn’t be happier to share this piece! Find more from Caroline at her Twitter and Medium. -jc]

We live in a golden age of computing power. Our games are filled with giant procgen worlds and RNGs and thousands of ticking background variables. The math is surpassing human ability far faster than we can grasp, and we’ve, I think correctly, put it to work making the grass in Stardew Valley so fun to swoosh through with a sword. But the idea of infinity horrifies people more than almost anything else and remains as confusing and terrifying as ever. As our games get closer to endlessly detailed, I chose four designers who’ve worked on four of my favorite games of the last few years, all with totally different ways of using space, time, and more to give the feeling of an infinite playspace. I’ve also been spelunking the idea of infinity itself and why it makes us feel so uncomfortable and intrigued.

We Contain Multitudes

What is infinity? We aren’t born with an understanding of the idea of something that never ends. Psychology researcher Ruma Falk put together existing studies about infinity. “[C]hildren of ages 8-9 and on seem to understand that numbers do not end, but it takes quite a few more years to fully conceive, not only the infinity of numbers, but also the infinite difference between the set of numbers and any finite set.” You could spend your entire life counting out loud and get to 2 billion. But in calculus, which is all about approaching infinity, a billion is rounded down to zero. An average 2019 computer could count to a billion in about two seconds, depending on the code you wrote. That’s how tiny a billion still is. Falk calls the distance between our human billions and the idea of infinity an “abyssal gap.”

When I talked with Immortal Rogue developer Kyle Barrett about this project, he mentioned Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story “The Library of Babel.” Borges imagined an infinite-seeming library of books filled with random combinations of letters and punctuation. He sets out 25 total characters and 410 pages. I averaged a few lines from David Foster Wallace’s primer on infinity, Everything and More, which had 57.5 characters per line. For just two lines of, say, 50 characters each, there are over six googol possible versions: that’s a 6 with 100 zeroes after it, for just two lines of a book of 410 pages. The largest math Excel let me do was for about four lines total, which became 3 with 300 zeroes after it.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has spent decades writing about how humans think about problems and ideas. His 2013 book Intuition Pumps is filled with helpful analogies, including a spin on the Library of Babel. “Since it is estimated that there are only 10040 particles in the region of the universe we can observe, the Library of Babel is not remotely a physically possible object,” Dennett explained. But despite containing far more books than the possible volume of our entire region of space, that number of books is still a real number, not infinite! The takeaway from all this, and then I swear I’ll stop talking about math, is that nothing we can measure in real life is truly infinite. Infinity is a pure concept reserved for mathematicians and philosophers.

Playing with Time: Immortal Rogue

In Kyle Barrett’s 2019 mobile game Immortal Rogue, you begin in prehistory and fight your way through progressive eras in chunks of 100 years. But time is a flat circle, and eventually your progress is bombed back into preagricultural oblivion. The mechanics of Barrett’s game are fun and satisfying and I can’t recommend Immortal Rogue strongly enough, but the framework of endless time is what got my attention.

“It’s not really infinite,” Barrett explained. “It’s a matrix that loops every time you reach the end of it. There’s an x-axis that’s based on time, basically—it goes from agricultural to pre-industrial to the industrial era to the computational era and space age, so time based on human technological development, and if you get too far into the space era you’re gonna destroy the world and go back to the preagricultural era. Then there’s a y-axis that is based on authoritarian control in the world, so at the bottom you have anarchy, at the top you have fascism, and if you go too far into fascism you’ll get anarchy because people will rebel.”

I said I wouldn’t talk about math again, but Barrett brought it up this time. A matrix is just a grid. The Matrix is something else, but if you’ve ever done a “Sally has a blue hat and wasn’t born in March”-style logic puzzle, you’ve used a matrix. There’s also a proper math definition of a matrix and a whole field of operations we do to those matrices, collectively called abstract algebra.

Barrett’s matrix of time and authority determines the overall feel of the levels, but each one is procedurally generated after that. His day job is in mainstream game development, and he originally shopped the idea for Immortal Rogue as the system to power an AAA game. “You can imagine any AAA game with that kind of variety in environment would cost just too much money to make,” Barrett says. “It was a game concept that I had pitched to studios earlier as a sort of introduction piece—not necessarily to make the game, because I know that doesn’t happen, but as far as getting into the industry.”

The way Barrett combined his basic variables means Immortal Rogue does feel endless. My longest life so far is 800 years, and Barrett says a complete cycle in which you beat the game can take anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000 years. I’d love to tell you I believe I’ll beat the game at some point and see that full cycle. I’ll keep trying, at least.

Immortality and Endless Time

Would you want to live forever? This is one of the major philosophical questions that underpins western thought and especially the Christian form of the afterlife. Heaven and hell are each presented as an eternity, but again we run into Dr. Ruma Falk’s findings about how humans conceive of an infinite period of time. “One does not get closer to infinity by advancing the counting sequence because there is no way to approach infinity. Nowhere does the very big merge into the infinite.” If the lifetime of the planet Earth were condensed to one year, humans have lived for less than 30 minutes. We balk at the length of lives of record-setting elders who were born just a few years after the 19th century: imagine living that entire time and then living it again and again for literally forever. Our earthly understanding of time, and how our earthly brains process information, just isn’t compatible with thinking about living forever.

For many people, God or another higher power is the only way that infinity can make sense. In turn, a much longer afterlife helps to also make sense of how tiny and fleeting our earthly lives can feel. In the potentially infinite scale of time, our lives are the meager billions. They round down to zero, and it definitely feels that way sometimes. Falk cites 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal, himself a late-in-life convert to Christianity and the trope namer of Pascal’s Wager. During Pascal’s lifetime, infinity was still a scandalous idea and a wedge issue for mathematicians and theologians. “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified,” Pascal wrote. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

In her memoir Living with a Wild God, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich describes grappling with the same problems as an isolated teenager in the 1950s. “I didn’t think much about the future when I was a child—who does?” she writes. “But to the extent that I did imagine a future, it held an ever-widening range for my explorations—more hills and valleys, shorelines and dunes. […] The idea that there might be a limit to my explorations, a natural cutoff in the form of death, was slow to dawn on me.”

Randomizing Infinity: Alphabear & Alphabear 2

Game designer Pat Kemp worked on both 2015’s Alphabear and 2018’s Alphabear 2 at Spry Fox. Both have the same core word game, a fresh take on the classic Bookworm where you have to spell words from rapidly deteriorating letter tiles. Unlike in Scrabble and its knockoffs, rare letters don’t have higher point values. And into the mix you throw dozens of different collectible bears, each with a total score multiplier and a specific boost like a bonus for 5-letter words or preventing all Xs and Zs. Both games are free to play with in-app purchases. In Alphabear 2, Spry Fox took the mechanic of the first game and added a linear story, multiple difficulty levels, and a host of other features. Playing the game feels like getting an upgrade at the rental-car place and realizing you have heated side mirrors. I didn’t ask for them, but I love them and now I need them. But why did the second Alphabear get so much bigger?

“I hope this answer isn’t disappointing to you, but the first Alphabear, although it’s a lovely game we’re very proud of and was critically well received and we got lots of features and good reviews, wasn’t much of a financial success for us,” Kemp told me. So Spry Fox went into development of Alphabear 2 with goals to convert more users into purchasers and more purchasers into multiple-purchasers. “The decision-making around making it into a world, and a linear campaign, and building out all the different features […] was creating this rich, interwoven progression system that players can feel invested in and value. Basically how you monetize a free-to-play game is, people play your game for weeks and months and come to really value things in the game.”

In the first Alphabear, each chapter had a set of collectible bears that quickly eclipsed the power of the previous chapter’s bears. “And you would almost never go back and use bears from earlier chapters, just because of the way it was set up,” Kemp says. “So you had this weird ‘disposable’ feel to bears. It was cool when you unlocked them, but the game was telling you, ‘You’re done with that bear, here’s some new bears.’” Now, the bears accumulate over time as one big group, and you can continue to level them up as high as you want, but your progress is paced by how quickly you regenerate in-game energy in the form of honey.

After a certain chapter in the Normal campaign, players can begin again on Hard mode, and then after a later chapter, they can begin Master mode. I don’t know the full length of the basic campaign, but I’m probably 100 levels in and somewhere in chapter 9 on Normal mode. The scope of the whole thing including all three difficulties is staggering, and the game had been out for just seven months when I talked with Kemp. “Have people finished the amount of content you’ve made so far?” I asked. “We know of at least one person who’s completed the master-level campaign,” he said. When I said I was surprised, Kemp said, “Every game developer I know has this experience where they’re surprised by some small portion of their fanbase that is just so into it that it defies all expectations.”

In this case, the fastest player ended up lapping the development team. “It was so far off that we had planned to build whatever happened when you did that later on,” Kemp said. “They sent us a picture of their screen of the campaign board, and all it was was just a black screen, because it was trying to load the next campaign board, which doesn’t exist. We were like, ‘Oh my god, we didn’t even put anything in there, and it looks kinda like you’re in purgatory or something.’” Spry Fox plans to replace the Sopranos non-ending.

Purgatory or Something

Earlier this year, I talked with my friend Tristan about his existential dread. He’s pretty fresh out of college and still figuring it all out. “I was going to write about games,” he said, “and as I entered my last year or so, I was going to write about movies. I don’t know if I’m still going to do that, so that’s a large part of the dread. Not knowing what I was actually doing.” Humans can’t conceive of infinity using numbers, but we can use our pessimistic imaginations. Our set of plausible options is no match for what we dream or panic about.

Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard wrote about dread and fear of the unknown in his 1844 book The Concept of Anxiety, where the Danish word angest could be translated as “anxiety” or “dread”. Using the story of Adam and Eve, Kierkegaard posits that anxiety dates back to a fraction of a second after original sin. “The terror here is simply anxiety,” Kierkegaard writes, “since Adam has not understood what was said.” In other words, like a pet in trouble, Adam didn’t know what was being told to him, but he understood it was bad from the tone of voice.

“Anxiety can be compared with dizziness,” Kierkegaard goes on. “He whose eye happens to look into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason? It is just as much his own eye as the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down.” Those who think about Dr. Ruma Falk’s “abyssal gap” between the finite and infinity may be dizzy forever with the uncertainty of what they’re pondering. “A persistent pursuit of the infinite may bring the individual to a blind alley, both emotionally and intellectually,” Falk writes. His analogy isn’t an accident. A blind alley is like another famous philosophical idea, Schrodinger’s cat: without shining a light, we can never know if the alley is empty or full, terrible or fine. And we can never shine that light.

Infinite Reality: Telling Lies & Her Story

At 2018’s E3 conference, Sam Barlow appeared on a panel about the future of narrative. “People will write to me and say, ‘I haven’t played a game in twenty years, and I played Her Story,’” Barlow said. “Or ‘My daughter installed it on my iPhone for me.’” It makes sense: Her Story’s core mechanic is as simple as a YouTube search, and the game is set in 1994, with a Windows 3.1 aesthetic to match. The game also fits with Barlow’s career arc. His 1999 XYZZY-winning interactive fiction Aisle gives players just one chance to type any command before reaching one of the game’s dozens of endings, placing players in a finite setting that even feels claustrophobic, but setting before them seemingly limitless possibilities. He was a natural fit to lead two Silent Hill games after that, and he views Her Story as the surprisingly successful “one chance” he had to make a successful indie game.

“This is something I’ve pitched so many times to publishers, with the rationale that in every other medium, crime fiction, police procedurals, murder mysteries, detective stories—if you have a TV channel and a film company, you’re gonna have a few stories in that world because it consistently works,” Barlow told me. “Games publishers were never into the idea. They felt like the things that sold in video games were power fantasies and superhero stories.” Barlow chose to home in on the interrogation room both as a convenient single setting and the place where his interest in crime stories was naturally drawn. “I wasn’t trying to do the police chases and locations and all those elements which would be expensive, but also, I was zooming in on the dialogue and the interactions and the human side of it,” he said, citing the groundbreaking ‘90s show Homicide: Life on the Street and its Emmy-winning bottle episode “Three Men and Adena.”

“I did a ton of research, reading the interrogation manuals for detectives, academic studies and pieces about the psychology of the interview room, a ton of crime books, movies with notable interrogation scenes and police interviews. This was slightly ahead of the true crime wave that we’ve had since, so I was discovering there’s so much footage online of real-life interviews and interrogations that has been released or leaked,” Barlow told me. “One day, as these things do, I woke up and went for a walk, and my subconscious—which is far cleverer than I am—put all the pieces and all the research I’d been doing together. [T]he detective’s sat at a computer, and there’s always the twist where they stay up all night sat at the computer and then they find that one little bit of information or the one piece of evidence that will break the case.”

Her Story is made of hundreds of discrete video clips, divided into main character Hannah Smith’s answers to an unseen detective’s questions. For his upcoming game Telling Lies, Barlow brought the setting forward into the Skype era and is introducing new mechanical twists to match. “To some extent Her Story was about giving you the writer’s perspective into a story, and here it’s giving you some of that editing room insight, where you spend so much time with the footage, choosing whether to cut out on this frame or that frame,” Barlow said. Instead of separate clips, Telling Lies gives you long, uncut videos that show both sides of a Skype call that you can scrub through—meaning drag the progress bar searching for highlights. “Not only are you coming at these stories in a nonlinear way, but also within a given scene you might end up watching it backwards.”

The text side of searching has also evolved. Because the videos aren’t separated into clips, searching for a specific word drops you into a video at that exact place. “Those conversations are split into two parts, so you can only see one side of a conversation at a time. You have the full seven minutes in front of you and you get dropped in to the point where someone says the word [or] phrase you've searched for,” Barlow said. “So early on, if you search for the word ‘love,’ you get dropped into a moment when Kerry [Bishé’s] character says, ‘Love you!’ and hangs up.”

Including Her Story and now Telling Lies in a group of very big-feeling games runs into a funny obstacle, because they’re both made of a very finite number of minutes of video. Her Story even has Steam achievements linked with what percentage of the total clips you’ve discovered and watched. “Something like 20% of people 100%-ed it. For most games you’re lucky if 20% of people finish the game. It had a display that showed you all the clips you hadn’t seen—that was an incentive and somewhat maddening if you could see there were clips you hadn’t seen. My approach with Telling Lies was to make it so big and huge and messy and colorful that it would feel less like something you could 100%, because I really wanted people to lose themselves in just the joy of exploring these characters’ lives.”

Just Out of Reach

Even with the incentive to find all the clips, in Her Story I found myself revisiting clips I’d already seen as I tried to find new keywords or listen for clues, and I maxed out just past the 75% achievement. The rest eluded me. With Telling Lies, this one kind of mystery will be removed, and that’s a blow against infinitude. In the perfect world of pure mathematics, having one more item just out of reach is one of the fundamental ways we can make proofs of infinite ideas. This structured approach also helps us turn the overwhelming idea of infinity into, at least right now, the one step in front of us. It’s infinity in the form of a child asking a parent for just five more minutes of sleep, then asking for five more, for eternity.

In Daniel Dennett’s book Intuition Pumps he uses this idea as an illustration for why infinity just can’t exist in real life. If every animal evolved from another animal, then there are infinity animals stretching back into infinity long ago, always with one preceding. We know that’s just not true. On the other hand, a study of how children process infinity showed that knowing the names of some large numbers made children think those were the largest numbers. Learning named ideas pushed out the very idea of having unnamed ideas, which makes sense given how large and robust our language brains are. Being strong, clear communicators has shaped our brains and the societies we form as humans. If we all became existentially troubled abstraction peddlers, I don’t think that would necessarily be a step forward.

To consider infinity with a finite mind is a paradox, and as Dr. Ruma Falk explains, “Mathematicians and philosophers are often no less addicted to resolving these paradoxes than some adolescents are to experiencing the limits of existence.” Like the Library of Babel, an infinite world is made mostly of incoherent and random nonsense, compared with a human mind that can only remember its own history in cohesive story form. My friend Martin has a rich life and a beautiful family, and he told me, “My personal greatest fear is probably losing my mind. The idea of being unable to make sense of the world is horrifying.” In fact, studies show that we’re more able to tune out conversations we can overhear both sides of than those where we can hear just one side—this is how deep our need for clear narratives runs, and it’s why we’re not made for an infinite world.

Infinite Liminal: Sunless Sea & Cultist Simulator

In February of 2019, Alexis Kennedy addressed something that had grown beyond his reach, and his post was the catalyst for what eventually became this essay. On the Weather Factory blog, where the developer typically shares updates to 2018’s Cultist Simulator, Kennedy described an alternate reality game (ARG) called Enigma that he’s built into his work—not just Cultist Simulator but 2015’s Sunless Sea and even 2009’s Fallen London. In the Enigma post, he sums up the appeal this mystery seems to have to fans: “If you’re working through things and looking for meaning in your life, then all the hidden meanings in this project may look like they add up to something more important than they actually do.”

I love Kennedy’s work—if we’re friends, you’ve probably heard me talk about it—and while I’ve never mistaken him for a guru, his games have affected and stayed with me more than anything else I’ve ever played. He’s gifted with language, stuffing his work with plausible and evocative neologisms or uncommon historical terms. But his more powerful gift lies in what he chooses to reveal and how long you must wait for it. I’ve thought often of something my friend Diana said nearly twenty years ago, about traveling with other people and seeing their luggage: “They wonder what I’m taking, but I wonder what they’re leaving behind.” I constantly wonder what Alexis Kennedy is leaving behind.

“Gamers tend to be—to borrow a phrase of Mike Laidlaw's—more like dogs than cats in the way they consume content. If the core loop is even moderately compelling, they'll gorge on content and rush through it,” Kennedy told me via email. “As soon as players are doing that, they'll skim text, and if they're going to skim text, text had better not be your A feature. I constantly skim quest text in games, and I'm a narrative junkie. So pacing is a way of saying: hold on, appreciate this, take your time with it.” In both Fallen London and Sunless Sea, one variable shuffles what day it is, so you receive different flavor text or events even when you’re repeating actions or storylines. “I don't think I ever quite recovered from the initial terror, back in 2009, of seeing players consume Fallen London content literally ten times as fast as I expected,” Kennedy says.

Like Sam Barlow, Kennedy reached for inspiration outside of what’s traditionally in the purview of a video game. I asked how he chooses end goals in games with such wide-open mechanics—Cultist Simulator is even more open than Sunless Sea in some ways. “I come at those stopping points from two directions. One is 'what sort of emotions and experiences are we aiming for?' The other is 'what sort of activities would a character in a novel, not just in a game, do in this setting?' So in Sunless Sea, we want people to be thinking about loneliness and survival and discovery, and we also want people to be aiming for the kind of things they'd aim for in Moby-Dick or Voyage of the Dawn Treader or HMS Surprise.” The only ending I’ve reached in Sunless Sea is the most basic one, where you amass some money and retire. In Cultist Simulator, I’ve managed to live a normal working life and then retire, which is considered a minor victory. And still, the game wonders what I’m taking, while I wonder what it’s leaving behind.

Pure Abstraction

“The study of infinity stretches human abstract thinking to some of its loftiest possibilities,” Dr. Ruma Falk writes. “By definition, it calls for modes of reasoning that transcend concrete representation.” What I’ve found most interesting as I researched this piece and talked with these gifted game designers is how thoughtfully they’d constructed gameplay loops that continue to feel fresh and challenging. The games themselves couldn’t be more different in terms of genre or lack thereof, revenue models, or mechanics, but all feel large and immersive inside to an extent that I instinctively ignored whatever seams I might end up seeing.

I asked each designer to share a game that felt infinite to them as players. Sam Barlow answered the question before I even asked it, though. He described wanting Telling Lies to feel like a huge place to explore. “My only go-to reference, which is somewhat ambitious, is the way I felt when I was playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the way that Nintendo made me feel, where I could just go off and explore in any direction and I could let my curiosity guide me and I would always enjoy myself. I would always find something interesting.” He called this kind of freedom a form of magic. “To some extent, Her Story was me trying to get some of the magic and—again, this wasn’t a conscious thing—some of the magic of the old text parser games.”

Pat Kemp also chose Breath of the Wild. “The world feels huge and dense in a kind of unusual way even amongst all the other open-world AAA experiences that are out there. There’s this big mountain and you climb up it, and on the way up you encounter two or three little unique-feeling things, and you make your way down and encounter a bunch of other little things, and they’re all handmade little surprises. It feels like the world is just brimming with delightful little nuggets of story or interesting challenges or encounters. It’s really a remarkable achievement and it’s also one of those things where, as a game developer, I can recognize what a monumental task it must have been to create that world,” Kemp said. “Every inch of it feels handcrafted by someone who cares about that itch, which is just incredibly daunting. It must have been so expensive to do.”

Alexis Kennedy chose Elite: Dangerous, and I enjoyed how his answer mirrored how I feel about his games, where some amount of suggestion makes it easy and fun to project the rest with your imagination. “I put a hundred-plus hours into Elite: Dangerous because I so enjoyed the sense of jumping through galactic-size simulated space. I knew perfectly well that the procgen systems were largely identical in all meaningful ways, I knew the space between star systems isn't simulated and you're just jumping between skyboxed instances, but I've spent 47 years learning how space works IRL and I still carry over those assumptions if the sense of resource cost lets me.  I need to feel like I'm working to cross the space and have something that will run out or need balancing.”

Kyle Barrett pointed out that, infamously now, No Man’s Sky sold itself as an infinite game. “The game definitely feels infinite. It also has the effect of what infinity would feel like, which is empty after a while. It teaches people that lesson,” Barrett says. It brought back to mind something he told me before about deciding how much to procedurally generate within Immortal Rogue: “If it’s pure random, I think it normally fails. That’s something designers find pretty quick. So it’s like, what’s the right amount of random and what’s the skeleton that can make the random meaningful?” He mentioned Dwarf Fortress as a game with infinite-feeling possibilities, and Minecraft as something that marries the two. “It feels infinite in scope and the amount of possibility feels infinite, which is why it’s probably one of the best games ever,” he said.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support itself.” The games we love might feel infinite, but we only hang around in them long enough to realize this because of the hard work of building structures and feedback loops that make games fun to play. We study infinite math from the security of offices with comfortable temperatures and lighting. As Alexis Kennedy put it, “So it is a design choice, but there's a reason I made that one design choice rather than a million others.”

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[maverick-werewolf]

Random Werewolf Fact #35 - The Beast of Gevaudan, and What Isn’t a Werewolf Legend

The Beast of Gevaudan is easily one of the most popular werewolf legends. Movies, TV shows, books - tons of things are based on it, and new ones pop up every few years.

But here’s the problem - it isn’t really a werewolf legend at all.

(MTV’s Teen Wolf series certainly had a take on the Beast of Gevaudan)

Before we dive into why it isn’t, let’s first look at what exactly the legend is. In brief, because going into too much detail would make this even longer than it already is, and that’d be totally unpalatable.

In 1764-1765 in France, a creature called the Wild Beast of Gevaudan “ravaged several districts,” hunted by a detachment of dragoons, with a bounty of a thousand crowns for its death. It was said to,

[H]ave devoured more than a hundred persons. Not merely solitary wayfarers were attacked by it, but even larger companies traveling in coaches and armed. (Summers 235)

A lot of what we have today about the Beast of Gevaudan comes from extrapolations of the legend, misinformation, and retroactive changes to it based on the modern miscategorization of it as a werewolf legend.

So why am I saying it isn’t a werewolf legend?

Firstly, the beast is only ever described as some kind of unknown creature.

Secondly, and very importantly, it never changes shape beyond speculation.

There were claims made, either then or recently, that the creature was a “warlock, who had shifted his shape” (Summers 236), and one account from a supposed eyewitness who heard it speaking.

There is no particular reason or purpose behind this creature being a wolf - because it was not a wolf. It simply has absolutely no hallmarks of a proper werewolf legend, beyond the fact that the beast is shown to be intelligent (”With mysterious skill the beast baffled and even spurned its pursuers” [Summers 235]).

The Beast of Gevaudan was physically described by various historical sources, and speculated to be any of the following things:

A “panther”

A “hyena”

“the offspring of a tiger and a lioness” (and we know those are possible!)

It was described as having “most formidable” teeth, which is wolflike. But it was also described as using its tail to fight. “With its immense tail it could deal swindging blows.” Along with being able to jump to tremendous heights and run with “supernatural speed,” it is described as stinking. “The stench of the brute was beyond description” (Summers 235). Yeah, wolves aren’t skunks, so I think we can write another point off toward “was it a wolf?”

There were other instances of people speculating it was a werewolf later in the legend’s history, so not actually at the time when these things were happening. An anonymous writer not even from the time period (great source, right? Very reliable) made some random claim off the top of his head that it must’ve been a werewolf because he once saw an engraving where it was eating a girl, and werewolves likey the girl flesh (this guy must’ve read a very limited range of werewolf legends, though).

But the thing ate everyone regardless of age, sex, or what-have-you, and we have multiple accounts of it eating all kinds of people, so that’s about as helpful or likely to hold up as a bucket with holes in it.

And then we can turn to the illustrations...

(18th-century engraving of the Beast of Gevaudan, now called Lycopardus Parthenophagus, or basically “panther-wolf”)

Oh yeah I see wolves and werewolves that look like that all the time!

Does that remotely resemble a wolf to you? (note: don’t ask that to people designing stylized wolf models for video games, especially WoW, or most people who design werewolves in Hollywood)

Look, I get it. The medievals were super terrible at artistically portraying basically anything. Pick up 90% of bestiaries and they’re full of laughs.

(Cutout from a bestiary entry on wolves. But at least these weird little cuties kind of resemble wolves, you know, in the smallest amount?)

Here’s another Beast of Gevaudan...

(So is she saving herself from getting her hair licked or from getting mauled? More at 11)

Arguably a little more wolfish by medieval standards? Still not doing it for me.

So what’s the problem here?

For a long time, scholars got triggerhappy categorizing things as werewolf legends, vampire legends, dragon legends, etc. - trying to find a way to fit everything into a certain category, because humans seem to have an irresistible need to categorize everything (just look at TV Tropes).

But not all of these categorizations are true. That, and they were trying to make these fields into a thing, trying to prove there was enough material for something like “werewolf studies” to exist, so they got pretty ridiculous about it.

Before someone jumps in with “but Mav, Jean Chastel killed it with a silver bullet!” I’m going to cut you off at the pass, because we have no actual reliable source stating that this is true.

And also other sources say one Monsieur Antoine killed the beast, not some guy named Jean Chastel, so we have conflicting sources about this legend absolutely everywhere.

About the “silver bullet” thing: Until I am given a small mountain (or honestly at least 2-3) of verifiable sources from the actual time period, I 100% stand by that this was retroactively inserted into the Beast of Gevaudan legend by someone who watched The Wolf Man movie, and then the completely fake “source” was made and thrown out there because some scholar wanted to be the first one to find it (i.e., make it up).

And even if it was true, you know what? That wouldn’t make it more of a werewolf legend. Because guess what? Werewolves in literally every other legend ever, everywhere on the face of planet earth, aren’t sensitive to silver like that.

So, no, that is not a property of folkloric werewolves and if true (which I still hold that it is not), does absolutely nothing to nudge the Beast of Gevaudan closer to the “werewolf legends” category.

Because the Beast of Gevaudan is not a werewolf legend. It meets not even a single requirement necessary to be called one. It’s a cool legend, sure, and people have a relatively easy (arguably; I’m not a huge fan of a lot of the media, but some of it is alright) time turning it into a werewolf story, but that doesn’t make the historical legend about a werewolf. Any werewolf media that uses it needs to be aware of that.

This applies to a lot of other “werewolf legends,” too, such as the trial of Peter Stubbe, for a whole lot of reasons. It’s simply a miscategorization. A mistake. And it is one that needs to stop being further solidified, despite being a pretty literal error, in the scholarly world.

Don’t get me wrong, though, the legend itself is pretty hardcore (and horrible, because those people did actually die, you know). It’s just not a werewolf legend.

Note: All quotes in this article are from The Werewolf by Montague Summers, cross-examined with various other sources. But any actual quotes are from that book.

(If you like my werewolf blog, be sure to check out my other stuff!

Patreon --- YouTube --- Wulfgard --- Werewolf Fact Masterlist --- Twitter)

[paulisweeabootrash]

First Impression: Neon Genesis Evangelion

Get in your robots, audience, it's time for Paul is Weeaboo Trash!  And today, I'm finally watching a show it seems like everyone just... assumes I must've seen:

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)

Episodes watched: 8

Platform: Netflix

The idea of something being a "classic" may be in decline in the anime fandom, or at least be getting very specialized, since "anime" no longer implies a narrow interest in specific sci-fi and fantasy subgenres like it used to, but certain shows still manage to pervade the pop culture indirectly.  Neon Genesis Evangelion is one such show, enduring in the modern fandom and general internet culture because of its status as one of those old sci-fi anime classics.  It has contributed memes — not just as in image macros or running jokes, but as in units of culture in the form of iconic quotes or character designs or elements of the plot — to the point that you have certainly been in some way exposed to them without any knowledge of the source material.  But despite its reputation as a must-see cultural touchstone, it has been out of print in America for years.  Used copies of the DVDs sell for absurd prices, and I don't think I knew anyone who owned it when I was a young weeb in the mid-2000s.  I'm fairly sure my family did not have cable during the one specific season it was on Adult Swim, and there's no chance I would have been up at 12:30AM on Thursdays to watch it anyway.  I am not much of a fan of media piracy and wasn't even aware of that option when it was apparently everyone else's favorite pastime to ruin their computers with sketchy torrents.  So there was never a reasonable way for me to watch it, only for me to be dimly aware that this was An Important Show I Need To See.  Until now.  Because it's on Netflix.  As if I hadn't already been awaiting it, I was aggressively reminded of it, because social media and geeky news outlets were soon blowing up with retrospectives and Very Serious Analyses — and fans of the old ADV translation were offering hot takes on how Netflix's release compares.  So let me finally check this out for myself.

We start out in the distant future of... 2015, where UN forces are defending Tokyo-3 ("Old Tokyo" is mentioned and depicted later; no mention yet of Tokyo-2 unless I somehow already forgot it) against an attacking "angel", an immensely powerful alien with barely-comprehensible powers.  Meanwhile, an officer of a UN agency called NERV, Misato Katsuragi, brings our main character, 14-year-old Shinji Ikari, to an underground NERV base under Tokyo-3 on the instructions of Shinji's father Gendo, who runs a secret research project.  Shinji has been brought there to pilot an Evangelion, or Eva for short, a giant robot operated by some sort of neural interface.  In combat.  With no training.  He is, understandably, not happy about this.  After seeing how badly injured the other available pilot, Rei Ayanami, is, however, he agrees to do it — and it works far better than he or anyone else expected.  He apparently has an innately great ability to "sync" with however exactly the Eva's interface works.  But this only gets him as far as starting the thing up.  When he actually engages the angel, he has trouble just getting the Eva to walk, and he feels the pain of the Eva taking damage once attacked, a frankly horrifying feature of the interface.  We cut to him waking up in a hospital, but having surprisingly won because his Eva "went berserk", operating on its own.  A flashback later shows what happened when he lost control of the Eva: it fought the angel by itself, but also took heavy damage, and we see its visor? faceplate? sōmen? of the Eva's armor come off to reveal a fleshy-looking face and a very biological-looking eye.  At this point Shinji blacked out, which is really the only reasonable response to this situation.

Over the next several weeks (the time scale is vague, but since Rei apparently fully recovers from the injuries she had when we first saw her before the time she and Shinji are both deployed, it must be at least 3 weeks between eps. 1 and 5), more angels appear, to the surprise of civilians and UN forces alike.  The Evas continue to be excellent weapons against them (though Shinji himself is still, uh, not great at using them), but despite having now killed several angels, the Evas are considered a ridiculous boondoggle by personnel of other UN branches, and Gendo's sinister superiors seem to be losing patience with his project.  In the words of... uh... that UN navy guy in ep. 8, "Shit!  A bunch of kids are supposed to save the world?"  The alternatives are wildly ineffective conventional weapons and a remote-controlled nuclear-powered giant robot that almost had a literal Chernobyl-style meltdown, which was averted by Misato and Shinji.  Although repairs are expensive, injuries common, and pilots in short supply, Evas indeed seem to be the only effective weapon against the invading cosmic horror, the barely-comprehensible aliens that are impervious to ordinary human technology and also don't fit our concepts of life or... uh... possibly physics.  So, instead, in the words of Misato later in the same episode, "This plan may be insane, but I don't think it's impossible."

While this is going on, Shinji has been adjusting to this new life poorly and slowly.  Despite being a pilot, he is still after all a 14-year-old, so he is enrolled into the same class as Rei at a local school whose student body has dwindled as more people evacuate over the initial angel attack.  He also needs somewhere to live, so Misato arranges for him to move into her apartment.  Some of Shinji's classmates think he's incredibly lucky to live with her, and spend a good deal of their screen time drooling over her, but Shinji is highly uncomfortable around her not just because Captain Katsuragi is his commanding officer, but also because she has a tendency to not wear much clothing around the house and is, er, a bit of a drunk and a slob.  Oh, and she has an inexplicable, clawed, beer-drinking penguin.  You know, all stuff that would make a nervous, lonely, scared 14-year-old completely at home.

Neither NERV training nor school guarantee a community, though, and Shinji, isolated and confused, could sure use one right about now.  He seems quite likely traumatized from the first battle.  He keeps ending up in situations that make him wildly uncomfortable while other characters take them in stride.  He repeatedly attempts to quit NERV or at least defy orders before backing out (or... backing back in?) at the last moment.  It would frankly be bizarre that they accept him doing this, except that (1) nobody really seems to take Shinji that seriously anyway, (2) he's the boss's kid, and (3) most importantly, it seems that only a small number of pilots, all the same age as Shinji and Rei, are even capable of using Evas.  (Wife and I are starting to suspect reasons why this might be, especially given the whole cyborgs with neural interfaces thing, but... uh... let's not embarrass ourselves with public speculations about the plot of a ridiculously famous show almost as old as we are.)  He only slowly gains any support or comfort from his new classmates and colleagues.  They don't reach out to him, and he certainly doesn't reach out to them, because who is he supposed to talk to?  His roommate/commanding officer who is twice his age?  His classmates who treat him as a celebrity, not a person, once they find out he's an Eva pilot?  Even if his default state since the very first episode hadn't been basically imploding into despair with no idea how to communicate that anything's wrong, there's nobody that really makes sense for him to try to communicate it to.  Except one person: Rei.  He notices that she's also isolated at school, and especially after seeing her dark, miserable, unmaintained apartment, he attempts to be friendly towards her.  I thought this might be a hint of growth indicating that he understands she is possibly the only person more isolated than him and the only one who might be able to relate to him, but then the next time he threatens to quit NERV after that conversation, he explicitly claims she doesn't know what he's going though, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe he just has bad social skills.

Sigh.

Shinji does start to make friends with Aida and Suzuhara, two of his classmates, though.  And it's interesting because they contrast against him in their reactions to the conflict outside.  Aida roleplays being in the military and finds Shinji's role as an Eva pilot glorious and enviable.  Suzuhara is initially furious at Shinji because his sister was collateral damage — she was injured when Shinji fought the angel — and his mind is changed only after Shinji rescues him (and Aida) from an angel.  Shinji, though, having been thrust into a role he doesn't even understand and about which he is ambivalent and unstable, lacks Aida's optimistic admiration of his role and a full appreciation of either Suzuhara's resentment or gratitude.  He not only rejects their praise, he calls himself a coward during (sigh) one of his attempts to quit NERV.  It occurs to me that this could be seen as indicating different perspectives about the military (ask any American vet who's sick of being "thanked for their service"), or even different perspectives about adulthood itself — I'll bet any millennial who did not achieve their dreams can recognize Aida's "wow this is amazing I can't wait to be a grownup too" roleplaying vs. Shinji's "I am doomed and isolated by the responsibility that has been thrown at me" actual experience in NERV.

Also thanks to the school scenes, we start to learn some backstory, including the famous "Second Impact".  A catastrophic asteroid impact in 2000 melted Antarctica's glaciers, which led to unprecedentedly rapid sea level rise, leading to mass extinction, including that of half of humanity through not only direct climate change impacts like displaced populations and crop failures but also conflict stemming from it.  Or so the official story goes.  It is later revealed that the Second Impact actually involved somehow the previous arrival of angels on Earth, although this has yet to be explained in detail.  (Actually, I accidentally saw spoilers about more detail about this while revising this review, because I went to sanity-check myself about some other detail on one of the fan wikis, so I know part of where this is going, but only part.)

Over the first eight episodes, which must be several weeks at least after the start of the show given that Rei has recovered from her initial injuries (although the time scale is very vague), Shinji fights four angels total and gradually improves, but the biggest improvement comes not from him being an individual hero but from finally working well with others.  For example, the octahedral angel that drills into NERV's base has incredible abilities to detect and counter incoming attacks.  It kicks Shinji's ass on the first attempt, because duh.  But Misato devises a plan to test its abilities and concentrate the power of... uh... Japan's entire electrical grid(?!) at it from a safe distance, and the plan succeeds only because of Rei giving Shinji cover.  An angel attacks a UN ship convoy transporting the third pilot, Asuka Langley Soryu, and her Eva, and she and Shinji fight the angel together in a ludicrous fight that involves both cramming in to pilot the same Eva together (which, interestingly, requires them to give it the same, or maybe just compatible, instructions together in the same language for it to work... yay neural interfaces).  So maybe/hopefully the direction this is going is "the chosen one is a stupid idea and even talented people need both training and cooperation to not suck at things"?

Episode 8 leaves off with Asuka joining Shinji and Rei's school class, and with the dramatic and creepy reveal of an embryo encased in bakelite which is described by Gendo as "Adam, the first human"...  Well.  That comes off as the kind of thing that would drive the future plot, and hopefully all the Biblical imagery will finally start to converge into something coherent instead of just sort of serving to draw extra attention to the fact that the humans refer to the aliens as "angels".  I've been wondering about that since the beginning.  There's the title, of course, but also the sefirot in the opening and on Gendo's office ceiling, the first angel's attacks using what appears to be a directed energy weapon which invariably forms glowing crosses, and the fact that most of the angels themselves are wildly non-humanoid (a choice which echoes the rather... eldritch... classical depictions of angels — see also the seraph in the opening).  NERV's motto is even explicitly, well, monotheistic at least, if not sectarian: "God's in his heaven.  All's right with the world!", which is counterintuitive at best with the idea of calling the alien invaders "angels".

Well.  I'll find out, and I plan to write a followup like I did with Re:ZERO, going into the broad swaths of the rest of the plot and my overall impressions of how they handled things.  Especially given that this show has a famously-controversial ending.  I jumped into this determined to watch the whole series, so I'm not backing out.

I'll just threaten to quit repeatedly then almost immediately come back.

-----

W/A/S: 4 / 3 / I feel kinda bad about this but 4?

Weeb: I mean, anything with giant robots fighting giant monsters deserves a few points just for that, right?  I don't think this requires much by way of Japanese cultural references or assumptions to watch, though.

Ass: Nudity so far has been brief, partial, censored by convenient angles and object placement, and not remotely sexy.  Thanks to another contextless spoiler I happen to have picked up, I expect an infamous later scene that is clearly supposed to be sad and disturbing in context, which is, again, not the kind of thing this scale was originally designed to describe.

Shit (writing): Even though I tend to overall like their plots, I always sort of sigh and eyeroll at the "let's put children/teens in combat and/or experiment on and/or just plain torture them to force them to become powerful" storyline formula that’s been semi-popular for the last few decades, and Evangelion is definitely in that category.  Friends have said the story is confusing or poorly-paced, and I kind of agree but also think some of the confusion is warranted by the choice to enter the story in media res in order to reveal what's going on to the audience at about the same time it's revealed to Shinji.  As for the tendency to have some long shots where literally nothing happens, that does get annoying, and I suspect its primary motivation was to save money, but I think it also usually emphasizes how lonely the whole situation is, at least before Shinji starts to warm up to Misato and Rei to Shinji in the last couple of episodes I've watched so far (which have, appropriately, had much more action and interaction).  Mainly, my writing complaints are actually about translation, because there are some noticeable and consequential differences between translations for the sub and dub.  Yeah, yeah, I've heard of the love vs. like thing everyone on the internet is already upset about, but I haven't gotten to that episode yet.  I'm talking about things like Misato saying "it will work!" in the sub vs. just "okay!" in the dub when Shinji is first able to control his Eva, a choice which suggests very different things about both her level of knowledge of the project and why Shinji has been called on for it at all.  The new dub also feels... uh... too at home as a dub of a '90s anime, as it prioritizes matching lip flaps over flowing like believable speech.  Having not seen the old dub, of course, I can't make any kind of judgement about whether this is a step up, down, or sideways from how ADV did it.  And the sub has many on-screen captions in Japanese are left untranslated — not things like signs in the background, but actual captions the audience is meant to get information from.

Shit (other): Maybe we're spoiled in this age of computer-aided art, but i's surprising to see a show with such limited animation — speech conveyed only with lip flaps, obviously reused shots within the same episode, foreground objects gracelessly sliding against a background to indicate movement — and so I'm willing to give the show a pass on most of that, especially since the characters are distinctive and the setting and aliens and robots so interesting.  Much of the limited animation actually serves to show the vast scale of NERV's facilities and the Evas vs. the humans and/or to emphasize loneliness like the pacing.  But there really are some painful mistakes from time to time in the art: objects and faces that look utterly wrong, like the artists just did not successfully figure out how to draw that particular character or vehicle from that particular angle.  The legendary opening theme is certainly catchy — it’s been stuck in my head almost continuously for the past week — but I just don’t think I enjoy it as much as other people do.  Some of the immediate complaints that were apparently worthy of news media attention were about the replacement of Fly Me to the Moon with a piece from the show's soundtrack as the ending theme.  I understand why people would be upset by that kind of change, but I am willing to take the controversial stand that it's not a bad change.  The piece they chose as a replacement is haunting and tense, which fits in with the mood of most of the episodes so far, while Fly Me to the Moon feels to me like an inappropriate mood change from that.

Content: Actually among the least graphic of the various shows I've covered involving violent or horrifying elements.

-----

Stray observations:

- God it was weird to write this by constantly abbreviating “Evangelion” as “Eva”, considering that Wife's name is Eva.

- A lot of people seem to hate Shinji as a character, but I find him understandable in a way that probably implies uncomfortable things about my own sanity.  I just... I understand that sheer degree of doom and misery and indecision and inability to articulate any of those.  Man.  Ugh.

- I don't know if you've ever seen an undisguised angel, but trust me: they're horrifying.  (link NSFW)

[script-a-world]

My world has mermaids, but one thing that myths and even the fictional scientific discoveries on them by other authors never seem to address this one issue. Water pressure. Mermaids look exactly like a woman torso up especially the ears. Is it possible that the complete insides change even though they look like a woman.

Saphira: This is an interesting oversight. Stopping to think about it, I genuinely have no idea how fish hear things. We know sound travels through water well, so Merfolk might be accustomed to stellar hearing, except when they get on land and the air is just... completely unsatisfactory.

I believe that the Humanoid Bits of merfolk were designed to decieve those at sea, and we stuck with it. It might be that the ears we see on a mermaid are vestigial, or even entirely false. I personally would make ears function like blowholes, from which they breathe instead of sensitive receptors for sound, then sit down with a cup of tea and research how different aquatic creatures utilize sound.

Huh. I wonder if the difference in quality for sound "on land" would make them hard of hearing, or deaf? That would be interesting.

Tex: @scriptveterinarian has a post https://scriptveterinarian.tumblr.com/post/156075203539/mermaid-biology on mermaid biology that should cover this, as well as answers about other similar technical questions about mermaids.

Feral: So the mermaids that we tend to think of today are based in myths like those of sirens, selkies, and merrows, which have a couple notable features that may make them less susceptible to the problems you're raising.

First of all, all three of these examples of mermaid type creatures are known best for hanging out near land or the surface of the water, not ridiculously deep in the ocean (possible exception being the merrow, but more on that in a moment).

Mermaids might be closer to amphibians than fish, and certainly a genetic comparison may be drawn between mermaids and whales, the creature that evolved out of the ocean to live on land and then just decided "nah" and went back in.

Second, selkies and sirens are shape shifting creatures - selkies have their seal skins and sirens are actually disguised carnivorous birds or bird-women hybrids, so perhaps the human part of the mermaid only appears when she breaches and not when she's completely under.

Merrow do not transform, as far as I am aware, and they are noted for imprisoning the souls of sailors in jars at the very bottom of the sea; however, they are also the least human looking in most descriptions, having green fish-like skin and seaweed for hair.

Brainstormed: Are mermaids mammals? Fish? A magical hybrid? There's hundreds of interpretations of merfolk, some are done literally, and some are done from a biologically sound standpoint. I've seen a lot where the human-looking part isn't truly functional like an actual human, more like extreme mimicry to lure in prey (men) for consumption. Mimicry like that could make a lot of humanish body parts unnecessary and it's doubtful their organs would be even remotely similar, so your question about the exterior looking the same while the interior is completely different is perfectly plausible, if that's the direction you want to take it. Because I love the science behind fantasy creatures, I usually start from a real creature and warp it from there, so merfolk I've designed in the past are more like seals or dolphins, with tiny flaps for ears, the need to breathe every fifteen minutes or so, and a definite depth limit that would prevent them from diving deep. If you want to adhere to the fish-human combo, then feel free! You aren't limited by anything but your own imagination. If you want mermaids to look exactly like humans from the waist up but have organs that are adapted to the water pressure, feel free. I'm sure what you design will be fascinating, and your audience will probably enjoy your rendition of merfolk.

[allthefilmsiveseenforfree]

Vice

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought, “This is gonna be an amazing story told at the worst time possible.” I know it’s hard to hearken back to the halcyon days of the early 2000s when there was a sociopath in the White House, our money was on fire, and leafy green vegetables were being recalled left and right, but Adam McKay takes us there using his particular brand of sly, can-you-believe-this-fucking-happened direction that he debuted in 2015′s The Big Short. So what do you get when Christian Bale (under layers of latex and makeup) gets a chance to embody Dick Cheney - one of the most secretive, manipulative, power-hungry men that has ever risen through the ranks of the American democracy - during a time when the idea of a functioning American democracy is, itself, a farce? Well...

It's not subtle, but then again, most things in 2019 aren’t. I personally don’t mind McKay’s smug way of speaking truth to power, because it doesn’t bother me when someone is acting like they’re smarter than I am, especially when they’re armed with as much research and due diligence as they can muster. Vice does as good a job as possible of asking the two most important questions about Dick Cheney’s legacy: “Where did this guy come from?” and “How did we end up here?”

The film is told Tarantino-style, jumping forwards and backwards in time to explore particular themes or revisit significant moments. From the beginning, we are presented with the two people who shaped Cheney the most - his wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), and his political inspiration, Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell). There’s some fourth-wall-breaking, some narrative fake-outs, and even a Shakespearean interlude - much like an episode of SNL, some of these “sketches” work better than others - but the real strength of the film lies in Bale’s performance, and the slow, methodical untangling of the puzzle that is Dick Cheney’s rise to power. 

Some thoughts:

I find it amusing that most of the other reviews I’ve read think the film either goes too far (it’s all liberal propaganda and character assassination) or not far enough (it’s too meta, too scattershot, and doesn’t castigate Cheney strongly enough for the results of his actions as VP). Perhaps it’s impossible for anyone to make anything even remotely political without this type of division of opinion, because I’m not sure why the reviews are so polemically divided based on the merits of the film alone.

Do I even need to say that Christian Bale is a literal goddamn chameleon? He’s flawless in every way. His mannerisms, his blinks, the way he breathes for fuck’s sake - he just disappears and makes someone who on the surface is SO BORING into a fascinating figure to watch and try to dissect. Much like the fly fishing Cheney is so passionate about, Bale’s performance is one that rewards patience and attention to even the tiniest details, and he knocks it out of the park. 

I wish I could say the same for the rest of the cast. Sam Rockwell is a hell of a lot of fun as George W. Bush, and I appreciate that he doesn’t stoop to a cartoonish level. He’s not splashing around in the parody pool, which would be so easy to do. But he’s honestly not in the movie that much, so it’s hard to call him a standout. 

Amy Adams is my everything, but this isn’t her best, unfortunately, mainly due to Lynne’s one-note personality. 

Steve Carell is probably the closest thing to a runner-up to Bale, because his Donald Rumsfeld steals every scene he’s in, but he also plays a bit one-note, and doesn’t have much to do for long stretches of the film. No, this is Bale’s world and we’re all just living in it, which fits pretty well given the character he’s playing.

The moments in which the films feels the most human and the least stylized revolve around Cheney’s daughter, Mary (Alison Pill), a lesbian who Cheney refuses to use as a political pawn or punching bag. When she comes out to her parents, Dick embraces her and says “It doesn’t matter, we love you no matter what” and you think you see a glimpse of the man behind the monster. But in 2014, when his eldest daughter Liz (Lily Rabe) is running for Senator in Wyoming, Cheney blesses - nay, encourages - her decision to disavow gay marriage and therefore, her own sister’s marriage. It’s a devastating scene, and one that undercuts any possible reading of Cheney as an antihero. He’s not the amoral career man who is just trying to do whatever it takes to protect his family. He’s ruthless, calculating, and convinced of his own divine right to seize power at all costs. In other words, he’s a mediocre white male politician living in a country that’s basically designed to be DisneyWorld for mediocre white male politicians.

For anyone who lived through the GWB presidency, Vice may not offer a lot of information that is new or unfamiliar. But for those of us who were maybe a bit too young to be glued to the news constantly, this film offers a glimpse into the machinations of a man who seeks the power to govern by any means necessary. The ultimate lesson is to beware the man imbued with too much singular power. Regulations, checks and balances, and transparency are the only ways to thwart them, and if we don’t, the consequences will be felt for generations to come. 

[storyunrelated]

Downward Trend - William Bosworth Has An Idea

Actually, let's do this.

I'm going to put the whole first bit of Downward Trend here.

I mean, why not? This is my blog, after all. I can do what I like. And this way all can marvel and laugh at what I consider an opening.

Beginnings are my weak point. Followed closely my middles. And endings. And writing in general, really. But that's life!

And I'm putting a break here but I bet you - I fucking bet you! - Tumblr breaks it and the whole text just dumps across your dash and makes you hate my filthy filthy guts. For which I am sorry.

Though not so sorry I won't risk it.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

One: William Bosworth Has An Idea

William ‘Billy’ Bosworth - the billionaire tyrant and horrifyingly influential media mogul - was looking up. Figuratively and literally.

You wouldn’t have thought ‘billionaire’ from looking at Billy. Your first impressions would likely be of a man who would have a very intense conversation with you about his new petrol lawnmower. Or maybe about which route he’d taken down the motorway to get to you and what the traffic had been like. He just had that look about him. Hard to put your finger on.

But no. Instead he was one of the most powerful men in the world. A pioneer of technology, a shrewd businessman and also an eccentric.

He was an eccentric because while he had unusual habits that some might have scoffed at had he not had money he did, in fact, have money. Lots and lots and lots of money. So he wasn’t weird. He was eccentric.

If anyone else eschewed beds at night because ‘lying down was for corpses and I’m not a corpse’ then you’d laugh at them and point and call them names to their face. But since Billy was very successful and slept upright tied to a post in his office then clearly it must have been a good thing to do. Because he was rich.

So he wasn’t weird. He was eccentric.

“Sally. Sally come in here,” he said, waving a hand in the vague direction of his secretary. He’d had no reason to raise his voice given that every inch of his office had been hooked up with top-of-the-range microphones to record his every murmur on the off-chance it was groundbreaking and brilliant. Like that time he’d come up with the idea of the having customers pay to not have to view incredibly offensive adverts.

Really, deeply offensive. They’d employed only the vilest of bigots to ensure that no-one could tolerate the adverts. It had been inspired.

But he raised his voice to get Sally’s attention anyway, because that was just how he operated. Sally came rushing in moments later looked haggard. As she worked for Billy Bosworth, Sally always looked haggard. It was unavoidable.

“Yes, sir?” She asked, only mildly breathless. Her response time was still the best of any secretary he’d ever had. Even better than that former Olympic sprinter he’d hired a few years back. That lad had had a very poor work ethic. Couldn’t stick it out for the distance, it seemed. Should have seen it coming.

That, and he’d just kept talking about his bloody medal. ‘We get it’ Billy had said ‘You ran very fast in a straight line. Get over it’. There followed a rather heated argument and from that point their professional relationship had taken something of a dip.

Hence, out with the athlete and in with Sally, who actually had secretarial experience and actually knew how to do her job. In retrospect the better approach.

“Do you know why I took off the roof of this building, Sally?” Billy asked, gesturing upwards to where the ceiling was missing and, more generally, to the sky beyond. Sally looked up and blinked. There was nothing there that gave her even anything approaching a clue.

“No, sir,” she said. An honest answer. She really had no idea why anyone would willingly do that to a building they owned.

It hadn’t even been a proper job, he had literally just paid a group of men to come and cut the top off the building. The structural damage had been significant and none of the air conditioning worked any more. Or the satellite links. Or the insulation.

And the building also now leaked when it rained. There was also that.

“Well I can’t tell you. You’re not important enough, I’m afraid, Sally. Send in Vlad.”

Sally - who wasn’t especially fussed about not being told, in all honesty - left the room as quickly as she’d arrived and lunged to her desk to ring down for Vlad, who could have been anywhere. Thankfully Vlad had chosen this time in the morning to sit and have a biscuit and so was at least within easy reach.

Minutes later a man who looked rather like someone had poured eighteen stone’s worth of beef into a suit before balancing a potato on top emerged from the lift on Billy’s floor and came striding on into Billy’s office without even pausing to knock.

Vlad was possibly the only person in the world who had standing permission to do this. This was because Vlad was the sort of person who urinates without lifting the seat up first, doesn’t flush and then dumps the paper handtowels into the toilet even though it’s made very clear you’re not supposed to, specifically to block it for whoever followed.

A monster, basically. But Billy’s personal go-to monster, so a monster with considerable latitude.

“Vlad. Do you know why I took the roof off this building?” Billy asked, not looking. Vlad was the sort of man you could hear coming. Feel coming, too. The air got out of his way in a very particular, noticeable fashion that you could tune into.

“Uh, no. Sir,” Vlad said. He, like Sally, also had no idea. He had worked with Billy long enough to not only learn that questioning his decisions was a bad career move but that even thinking about them too much wasn’t such a great move either.

Billy turned his head slightly, peering out of the corner of his eye.

“Sally shut the door. This is still too important for you,” he said. Sally obliged, leaving the two men alone in Billy’s roofless office. Whether Sally would be able to hear them talking anyway because of, you know, the lack of roof was not something that had apparently crossed Billy’s mind.

“Look up there, Vlad. What do you see?” Billy asked. Vlad looked. He saw pretty much exactly the same thing as Sally had seen. Sky.

“Sky?” He asked, hopefully, tentatively.

“I meant beyond that, Vlad. Look deeper. Expand your vision!”

Vlad had no idea what this meant. He just squinted harder. The sky remained sky. A distant plane crawled across it, glinting. A single cloud meandered. Vlad saw nothing of any particular significance.

“Uh…” he said, hesitating. Billy rolled his eyes. Vlad was a wonderful henchman in many ways but he was rubbish when you needed someone to bounce ideas and notions off of.

“Possibilities, Vlad!” Billy said with exasperation, raising an arm and pointing to one specific patch of sky. “You see there?”

“Yes,” Vlad lied.

“Up there - in that very patch of sky! - lurks a group of stars. Very far away of course and you can’t see them right now because it’s daytime and we’re in London anyway, but I assure you they are there. A glittering cluster of stars! Around which spin and twirl scores of worlds!”

At this point Billy finally stopped craning his neck upwards and turned to face Vlad properly. As he had been standing looking at the sky for some hours now this produced the most horrendous cracking sound. Not that Billy seemed the least bit concerned.

“I posit that these worlds contain life. Life, Vlad! And what does life mean?”

Billy did not wait for Vlad to take a stab at an answer to this one, for which Vlad was profoundly grateful.

“Customers, Vlad! Potential customers! People I have yet to reach! Did you know that my services, my products and my presence reaches out in one shape or form to about ninety-nine percent of all available humans on this planet?”

This was true. Ludicrous sounding, but true.

If people weren’t watching a programme that had received some level of investment from one of the many, many (many) companies that Billy had a finger in then they were watching it on a television or device made by one of his companies or containing one of the revolutionary components he himself had designed.

Or they were watching a film backed by one of his production companies (or one of his production company’s subsidiaries companies).

Or they were booking tickets to see one of these films on their phone made by a company he owned or designed by him.

Or both. At the same time.

But what of those people way out in remote regions? Tribes deep in the jungle that had no real awareness of the world beyond? Those who deliberately sought to avoid any and all human contact? Billy had those poor souls covered, too.

Personally owning a good chunk of the planet’s satellite infrastructure (and having designed some proprietary parts that showed up in all the places he didn’t own) Billy ensured that - floating around up there - were several specialised satellites which lovingly beamed down carefully modulated signals on all the more isolated parts of the globe.

These signals didn’t translate to anything a normal receiver would have been able to pick up. After all what would have been the point? These poor souls had - either by choice or by unfortunate twist of circumstance - no access to such devices.

Rather, these signals were of the cutting-edge, experimental type that only the human brain could pick up. A biological antenna, as Billy had so gleefully said at the time. Those in the affected areas could enjoy quality, Bosworth-created content every night when they went to sleep.

Unavoidably. Constantly. Every night. With adverts. For products they’d never heard of and had no way of purchasing. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to reach those formerly thought unreachable. And this had been achieved.

Billy’s influence was everywhere.

And did he expect thanks for his kindness? Plaudits? Awards? Of course not! People gave him those things anyway. What Billy did was for the betterment and benefit of mankind!

And now the betterment and benefit of whatever beings lurked out there among the stars, too. His magnaminty knew no bounds, least of all earthly ones.

Assuming these alien beings were there, of course. Which Billy was fairly certain they were.

Mostly certain, edging towards totally certain. Adamant, really. On most days. Some days he experienced flickers of what normal people might call doubt, but the rest of the time he was the bastion of certainty. Those extra-terrestrial customers were out there waiting for him. He’d put money on it.

“Customers?” Vlad asked, slowly, still peering at the sky. It just looked blue to him.

“Yes Vlad. Very far away though, like I say. Getting to them is going to be a bit tricky. But I have a plan!”

Billy turned on his heel and marched to another part of his sprawling office, Vlad following close behind. Both men stopped when they reached something wide draped with a white cloth. Billy whipped this cloth aside with theatrical flair, an act he had spent some previous weeks practising. Vlad gasped appreciatively as a meticulously hand-made model was revealed. It had little people and everything.

“This is the phase-array transmitter that will broadcast my new extraterrestrial channel to my new customers! Isn’t it cool?” Billy asked. Vlad was circling the model, bending down to get an eye-level look and taking in the detail.

“Very cool,” he said, nodding. He liked the miniature chain-link fences and outbuildings and pylons and substations. And the array itself, of course - a deeply impressive and monolithic building of truly intimidating size. Even built to scale it was a bit daunting. Probably the fact that it was flat-black and studded with glowering red lights had something to do with it. And the group of tiny people modeled to have collapsed on their knees in awe and terror clustered around the base.

Really the attention to detail on the model was astounding.

“This whole thing has been something of a pet project of mine but it is finally nearing completion. I have the spot picked out for this. It’s a very precise spot. It can only be this spot. It’s this spot or nowhere. This is where the problems start, Vlad. Do I like problems?”

This was an easy question, Vlad’s favourite type.

“No you don’t,” he said.

“That’s right, I don’t. The problem here is that the spot where I need to put my fantastic and cool array is presently occupied. I’ve been patiently working on strangling the life out of the area for months now - buying land out from under people, raising rents and that sort of thing - and I’m all poised to start! But there’s a holdout.”

With the flick of a button the whole model inverted. This seemed like a feature that would have required a lot of work, but the effect was certainly something to see. Where before there had been the clean, wonderful phased-array complex there was now several streets, some wasteland, some shops and general urban blight.

“This is the area as it is now. Ugly, isn’t it? Look at these shops. What does this one sell? Kebabs? Poor souls. Anyway. I own this land here,” Billy said, indicating in turn each stretch of blank wasteland. “These buildings are all unoccupied. They were set to be developed but not now. These shops are all set to close in a month or so because I’ve bribed them. So far so good.”

This left one quite obvious exceptions. A single house, sat on its own. Vlad looked at it. Billy glared at it and, slowly, unfurled a finger to pointing accusingly down at the model house.

“This,” he hissed. “This thing right here. Holdout. Nail house. The lady who owns it really owns it. Owns the building, owns the land under it. Refused my bribes, my generous bribes and even my staggeringly generous bribes. Money is apparently not something she’s interested in! I can respect that, but it’s annoying.”

“What’s her deal?” Vlad asked. Businesslike now, he could start to see the shape of the issue forming up in front of him. Billy wouldn’t have called him in here just to show the model off, after all. Vlad was there to solve problems. That was why Billy kept him around.

“Oh, landlady or something. Has lodgers. Likes talking to people. I don’t know, I haven’t looked into it - that’ll be your job.”

Billy waved aside such concerns. As far as he saw it he’d already done more than enough himself by personally organising his gaggle of assistants to go and pay out those bribes and telling Sally to tell his real estate division to buy up all that land. It had been exhausting. Having to deal with a principled lady keen to cling onto her house was something he simply didn’t have the energy for.

Besides, that was why he had Vlad.

“Want me to get rid of her?” Vlad asked, eyebrows waggling euphemistically. It took Billy a second or so to decode this gesture. Vlad was heavily implying murder. This was what Vlad tended to go to first whenever Billy came to him with anything but Billy still hadn’t picked up on this. For all his faults, Billy was still at least vaguely innocent and well-meaning.

Careless and myopic, but not actively malicious. He’d reverse over your foot in his car, but not try to hit you with it. If you follow.

“Heavens no! No no,” he said, flipping the model the right way round again and moving back towards his desk, which was the size of a normal person’s kitchen (in width and depth if not in height - it did also have a sink). “Nothing so crude or, ahem, obviously legally dubious as that.”

As powerful as Billy was, even he knew better than to have a known employee actively murder someone. That sort of thing was just unnecessary work. That and, you know, murder was wrong. Billy remembered that. Someone had told him once.

“What am I doing then?” Vlad asked, settling into the chair on the opposite side of the desk as Billy sat in his. Billy’s chair was a luxurious high-backed leather number that cost an amount to make most people wince. Vlad’s was from Ikea and could not properly support his weight.

“You are going to go to the site and help them oversee the demolition of what’s presently there. And at the same time - you know, if you find occasion - you might possibly see that life for this lady and her lodgers becomes more…”

Billy fished his hands through the air, searching for the right word.

“Unpleasant.”

Vlad grinned. He understood this. He had experience with unpleasant.

“If I find occasion,” he said.

“If you find occasion,” Billy said. Billy was grinning too.

He was thinking about what he was going to have for dinner later. There was a microwave curry in his fridge with his name on it. Literally. He’d written it on there. Not because he was afraid anyone else would take it. It was just so his dinner had his name on it.

He was going to see if he could have a drone feed it to him. Just for kicks. It sounded like a lark. Just tape a spoon onto one of its runners and see how things went.

What an age to be alive.

[boothanita]

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[wingheadshellhead]

Hi, I love your blog! So I've been reading a lot of 616 stevetony lately, and I've noticed that in both canon and in a lot of fiction, Steve seems to really dislike Extremis (even before superior iron man). Why do you think that is? Even without looking at this with shipper goggles (which I always am), I think it's really strange that Steve has so much disdain for something that essentially saved one of his best friend's lives.

(THIS HAS TAKEN ME 5 BILLION YEARS BUT HERE IT IS FINALLY)

i used to be in the same boat and automatically assumed steve’s dislike of extremis was one of those fandom headcanon things that was so commonly accepted it’d basically become fact, but it’s really, actually, all 100% canon. but the comics that deal with it happen right before civil war so i think many ppl have simply forgotten or skipped over that part of tony’s timeline.

execute program is the 6-issue arc that comes right after extremis and it’s the main thing i tell everyone they have to read if they’re putting themselves thru the ringer that is 616′s civil war. it is so so important to understanding tony’s headspace and where he’s at before the events of civil war occur. 

READ EXECUTE PROGRAM. a) bc it’s absolutely crucial to tony’s side of civil war, b) the follow-through from the extremis arc is just… amazing, virtuosic. i really genuinely think it is a fascinating, excellently-written arc, c) when it gets gay it gets very gay. truST ME you do not need your shipper goggles for this at all bc guess which of the following things are canon: the sound of steve saying his voice being the only thing that snaps tony out of (likely a dissociative episode) trying to murder a villain that nearly kills peter, dyeing his hair blond when he’s going on the run, tony stopping his heart to save steve’s life. all of them !!! all canon !!!!!! 

extremis is, basically, terrifying. to the average human being, hell even the average superhuman. it’s p much unfathomable the sheer level/magnitude/scope of extremis. extremis allows tony to access and control any piece of technology on earth and even in earth’s atmosphere, he can hear satellites. it’s like having the singularity as a superpower. 

so part 1, iron man vol. 4 #7 (2006), opening issue and we have tony stopping a villain with lethal force, all while counting down the milliseconds and bidding on priceless artefacts.

now, avengers don’t kill. and tony doesn’t, he stops the man’s heart, then restarts it, basically performing defibrillation. 

and then we get this conversation: 

and after tony jets off leaving the new avengers to sort out the aftermath, we get this disturbing reminder:

a proper reread might prove me wrong but i don’t think the writers ever clarify whether this transformation in tony’s personality is due to extremis or outside manipulation (which is the culmination of execute program’s arc as i’ll go into in a bit). but when your brain is literally a machine and you Have Become more machine than human, this is the natural progression of tony’s humanity – the aspects of compassion, empathy, etc. – fading into the background to accomodate for extremis. 

extremis brings out everything about tony that steve (and possibly the world) fears most. it makes him cold and calculating, and with a brain like tony stark’s elevated by the superhuman capacity to think and react at the speed of a machine, he’s unstopppable.

part 2, iron man vol. 4 #8, we have tony nearly straight up burning a man alive for almost killing peter and laughing about it. 

he’s so deep in Destroy Mode that he doesn’t even register steve’s warning, and here i think he acts entirely out of instinct –– like extremis is thinking for him rather than his brain prompting him to do this. 

extremis is also the cause of tension between tony and the newly-formed new avengers (one of my favorite line-ups!!), he almost gets into a fight with logan and jessica has to break them up. it turns out tony is missing time in his memory, which is extremely worrying for someone w/ his level of power…

what’s so fascinating about extremis, and why we have so much to thank warren ellis for (the writer of the extremis arc), is that it is the perfect and the most logical climax of the modern iron man story. tony’s worst villain, as we’ve known since the very beginning really, has never been anyone else but himself. and in the case of extremis, it’s a highly technologically advanced version of himself that can do and be everything he’s ever dreamed of being able to achieve vs. him. 

the question extremis asks is at what cost? at what cost does technological advancement, bleeding-edge breakthroughs, and the spirit of human innovation come at? how far would tony go to become the Ideal version of himself that he sees as superior in every way? what would he sacrifice for that?

extremis represents basically the pinnacle of sci-fi tech in iron man comics, it’s why even god awful superior iron man used a 3.0 version of it as the foundation for tony’s sins. it’s the farthest point he’s ever reached, and it’s also the lowest in terms of the damage and fallout that comes from it. because ofc, tony stark can’t have nice things like this, but also bc the hubris + nature of extremis allowing its host to play god can’t exist without there being negative consequences. really b ad consequences. 

huge respect to danial & charles knauf, the authors of execute program, too, because they find a way to perfectly bring the arc full circle as ellis did with his extremis. the central villain plot revolves around ho yinsen’s son. the kid hacks extremis and uses it to control tony, sending him to subconsciously assassinate a bunch of people on his kill list, i.e. a list of all the men involved in yinsen’s death. i mean like, HOLY SHIT, an iron man plot where a literal ghost from tony’s past – a direct victim of events tony was involved in, the son of the man that sacrificed his life so iron man could be born and so tony stark could live – shows up, weaponises tony’s own body + technology and uses him to murder people who are scheduled to participate in a peace summit despite the blood on their hands and the human cost of their involvement in the weapons industry.

DRAWING PARALLELS BETWEEN YINSEN’S LIFE’S WORK AND TONY’S LIKE DEATH AND DYING WOULD BE KINDER. again bc of my memory or even regardless due to constant retcons + reruns of the iron man origin story, i don’t know if it’s ever been explicitly stated before that yinsen also got into the weapons industry in order to get the funding necessary to support his other revolutionary work. but his son literally conflates yinsen with tony here, blending them into one + the same with that final panel and it becomes very obvious that at least a small part of him blames father for entering into weapons design. if he hadn’t, he might never have been captured by the the terrorist group that wanted him and tony to build them missiles. 

also, yinsen + villains involving yinsen are a recurring theme in iron man history but can we talk abt the fact that tony has never ever let himself forget the man bc jesus christ

yinsen’s kid is killed by a SHIELD sniper, activating the dead man’s switch and unleashing all the peackeeping units tony built that are now compromised. now, tony’s no jean grey or wanda maximoff but if this arc shows anything it’s not to underestimate him bc intentional or not (lmao) if he put his mind to it there’s literally no limit to the damage he could do. 

we see various heroes fighting off the peacekeeping units, and the new avengers are at the peace summit fighting a hulkbuster. 

and here it is people !!! the 23989485th time tony kills himself so steve can live. 

JUST. THE LOOK ON HIS FACE. AND THEN THIS ABSOLUTE LACK OF HESITATION:

so, yes. extremis was traumatising for pretty much every single person involved. steve has extremely good reasons for HATING extremis, even in the early stages or even if a fic is taking place before the events of execute program.

if you read the full arc, you’ll see tony running himself into the ground with his new abilities (world’s greatest multitasker can now multitask 192483958 things at once? ofc he’s going to use and abuse and exploit that), you see him spiralling and losing his grip on reality (mainly because he’s actually having dissociative episodes and losing time due to being remotely controlled to assassinate ppl but also bc of the Effect extremis is having on him). i brought up wanda and jean earlier as a casual reference but like, to put it in that kind of perspective, people just weren’t made to have this much power.

on a smaller scale, apart from eating up all of tony’s time and attention and mental health in a really bad way, it just Distances him from everyone. especially from the team. it’s Isolating, having this much going on in his brain and no one else in the world to fully understand it. 

and on steve’s side, you also have the fact that tony’s genius is both one of the things he loves and lowkey resents most about him. he has this deep-set anxiety about tony with all his brilliance and intelligence leaving him behind in the dust, or worse, laughing at him and how outdated and dim-witted he is in comparison. this is steve’s version of tony’s “i’m never going to be good enough for him”, a sentiment summed up in a quote from him as early as tales of suspense vol. 2 (1995): “yes, tony stark, a man of today and tomorrow is the man i’ll never be.” he’s so afraid of being abandoned + alienated by tony’s mind and the future that tony’s worked so tirelessly to build that might render him irrelevant. he’s scared of a future where he has no purpose, but more or just as importantly, he’s scared of becoming obsolete in tony’s life, of not being needed by tony anymore. one of the things that endeared him so much to tony, and which laid the foundations of their lifelong friendship, was the fact that from Day One (1), tony made him feel At Home. he never let him feel ashamed or isolated as The Man Out Of Time, he actively worked to make steve feel comfortable and to give him the things he needed to acclimatise and to fit himself into this brave new world. 

extremis undoes all of that. it propels tony so far and so fast into the future that it makes tony untouchable to steve. all of the ‘i can hear satellites’ stuff renders steve helpless and even more out of his depth than usual. it presses all of steve’s secret buttons and then some.

to sum this all up, and to finish my extra rambling abt tony bc u asked me about extremis and i couldn’t not finish with this:

here we have, ladies and gentlemen, everything u need to understand abt tony going into civil war. and it’s not on any of the official civil war fucking reading lists which really pisses me off because whether or not they did it on purpose the knaufs basically wrote all of execute program as the perfect precursor and characterisation groundwork for an antebellum tony stark. 

a tony stark who was just very recently manipulated against his will into assassinating people and causing a world-threatening incident that could have resulted in the deaths of thousands, including his own friends and teammates (and the love of his life), is a very different tony stark to the one ppl see in civil war #1.

what happens in stamford was an accident, too. no one meant for that to happen. tony knows first fucking hand what that means and what it feels like to carry that responsibility and guilt. his position in civil war supporting the SHRA is not only to protect the potential lives that could be lost in another stamford incident but also to protect superhumans and superheroes from ever being exploited against their will by villains to kill and hurt and destroy. 

superheroes are inherently susceptible to being used, it’s just part of the narrative convention –– a superhero is brainwashed or mind controlled or otherwise forced against their will to do something awful. and even if it’s not their fault there needs to be  accountability  for the victims. both the victims that suffer directly because of superhuman incidents but also the superheroes that become victims of ppl who abuse their powers. it’s abt protecting superheroes not just from civilians but from themselves. and if u’ve read a single comic u kno that this kinda shit happens way too often and way too easily.

sO YE S T hIS iS W HY. AND IT Ex PL AINS SO MUC H AND i j UST WISH P PL WOULD GODDAMN REA D THIS. LIKE EVERYONE WHO EVER WANTS TO SAY ANOTHER A GODDAMN THING ABOUT TONY STARK IN CIVIL WAR NEEDS TO FIRST READ EXECUTE PROGRAM FIRST OR PAY ME $10

anyway…………… one last time, i’m so so so sorry this took forever to get to. hope the wait was worth it!