#there's a lot of studies on how men who want to vietnam had the same mindset as kallus when it came to killing innocent people

[astheforcewillsit]

While I do agree to a point that some of what he does is indeed mental illness or a result of it, a lot of it also is very much a prejudice mindset specifically against Zeb. He "dehumanizes" Zeb in his actions, if not in his words. He fails to even call Zeb by his name, despite knowing it. He calls Ezra "Bridger" or Jedi, but always calls Zeb "Lasat". Kallus is very mentally ill, but he is also racist by Star Wars standards until he's asked to challenge his beliefs. I think those two can co-exist still.

Furthermore, the destruction of Lasan despite his own fears included children and families. He dehumanized them in order to participate in killing them. It is very much the same mindset that a lot of racist people use to go after certain groups because they have trauma with a few members of that group.

Like, he has PTSD. But it's also very racially motivated. I

To double down on that point, Kallus never actually says anything xenophobic about Zeb or the Lasat as a whole. (At least not that I can remember). He says “Lasat– never know when to give up,” but that’s not like… a crazy thing to say– in fact, in a fucked up sorta way, it almost sounds like a compliment???? Like, Kallus completely sees Zeb (and the Lasat in general) as equals, he’s not operating under the usual xenophobic imperial mindset that other species are lesser than. This weird obsession that he has in seasons 1 and 2 is just there because he wants to outwit and outfight Zeb (and the rest of the Ghost crew… but especially Zeb)

He doesn't have to do any of the above to prove he's xenophobic. His own trauma resulted in him wiping out their entire race based on his experience with one and gleefully taking credit. His actions speak louder than his words. He participated in an ethnic cleansing. He is very much both mentally ill and xenophobic.

And that's not a compliment, it's more of an insult.

There are taunts like that which people throw at people of color for "always trying to get our rights" are never knowing when to stop. It's insulting coming from Kallus.

Kallus' motivations are so interesting

I just need to get these thoughts out so I’m throwing this ramble here:

Now, this may totally just be me thinking too much (fork found in kitchen) but I feel like when it comes to how we tend to think about Kallus’ characterization, the implications of Kallus’ experience on Onderon are very overlooked. 

So he goes to Onderon with “the boys”-- which, the term “the boys” has its own set of implications about how Kallus must have really cared for those troopers under his command but I digress– and on a patrol they’re attacked, yada yada, we all know the story. 

But Kallus becomes fully paralyzed. He doesn’t describe the extent of his paralyzation but given that he had to watch as his squad was “finished off one by one” it’s pretty fair to assume that he could not move whatsoever. The fear that any person would experience in that situation is completely indescribable, that is genuinely some shit straight out of a night terror. 

He is– as we know– spared (albeit we don’t get exact details (did the merc try to kill him but reinforcements arrived before he could? Did the merc think that Kallus was already dead? Secret 3rd option?)) and he makes a full physical recovery, but there is no way in hell that he is not coming out of that encounter with some crazy PTSD. 

There’s not a whole lot of info on Imperial mental health services but I don’t think it’s a longshot to assume that they are probably close to nonexistent.

So the empire now has… an ISB agent with field experience… with untreated PTSD… where said PTSDs inciting incident pertained to a Lasat… and they’re looking to make an example out of Lasan……….. Are you picking up what I'm putting down here…...?

If you aren’t; it is BY NO MEANS a wild assumption to say that the Empire– essentially– weaponized Kallus’ PTSD, given that he would be less likely to question the moral atrocities happening on Lasan since he was already biased against Lasat as a whole. 

Now, we don’t really have a solid grasp on what Kallus’ exact role in Lasan was since he’s  kiiiiinnnd of an unreliable narrator– I mean we’re given the line in Droids in Distress where he takes credit for giving orders during the siege, but Kallus routinely just runs his mf mouth whenever he’s throwing hands so it’s like…  that could either be the truth or a crazy exaggeration, we as viewers have literally no idea what’s going on there– but it goes without saying that Kallus is obviously not excused from his participation just because of (likely) untreated mental illness, but that is literally like the whole point of his character so like we all knew that

Now, after Lasan, Kallus does something really bizarre for an imperial to do; he accepts the borifle given to him through the Boosan Keerah, and even though he doesn’t know about the cultural significance of that, he still takes it upon himself to learn how to use this weapon. I think that literally any other imperial would have tossed that shit out on sight, so I think it does kind of imply that Kallus did have a good deal of respect for Lasat culture.

Now we can all recall how Kallus is so annoying and also batshit insane whenever he fights Zeb for the first season and a half of rebels, and ME THINKS that this is because he wants to prove to himself that if he were not paralyzed on Onderon, he could have saved the members of his squad. He had to sit by and watch them die, and I think that he just wants the vindication; now you may be thinking, But Emma, he beat the Lasat who gave him his borifle, why would he still be obsessing over this– say it with me now– he is mentally ill. No victory will ever be enough to prove this to himself. Point blank period. 

To double down on that point, Kallus never actually says anything xenophobic about Zeb or the Lasat as a whole. (At least not that I can remember). He says “Lasat– never know when to give up,” but that’s not like… a crazy thing to say– in fact, in a fucked up sorta way, it almost sounds like a compliment???? Like, Kallus completely sees Zeb (and the Lasat in general) as equals, he’s not operating under the usual xenophobic imperial mindset that other species are lesser than. This weird obsession that he has in seasons 1 and 2 is just there because he wants to outwit and outfight Zeb (and the rest of the Ghost crew… but especially Zeb)

And after the Honorable Ones???? It’s literally never brought up again. He chills tf out so hard after that it is high key uncanny. And like, yes duh that is because– for writing purposes– that’s the beginning of his redemption and they want viewers to root for him as fulcrum, but it also implies that after finding common ground with Zeb, and understanding where he’s coming from and who Zeb is as a person, he realizes that he’s been CRASHING TF OUT for basically no reason. 

And he is SO QUICK to switch sides?? Like, he is fulcrum at least a decent time before the beginning of season three. The whole point is that the second he asks questions and delves deeper into what the Empires motivations are he is disgusted enough that he doesn’t just drop everything and disappear, no, he became a spy for the rebels because he wants to help. I feel like that just goes to show that, at his core, Kallus is a good person. A deeply confused, and hurt, and misguided person, but a good one. 

I dunno, this is just a really long winded way of saying that Kallus is the perfect example of an imperial pawn. Like the Empire is an incredibly effecient indoctrination machine that exploits people at every turn, especially their own soldiers, and I think that Kallus’ relationship with that indoctrination along with his own motivations is just super super interesting and I think about it literally all the time

[practically-an-x-man]

random question- do you headcanon any x-men characters as neurodivergent?

Oooooh man don't get me started-

The short version is, yes. I think there are a lot of characters that are coded as neurodiverse in some way or another, more characters where the manifestation of their mutations could be an allegory for neurodivergency, and even some "lighter" headcanons that I wouldn't want to see in canon but think have good storytelling potential outside of it.

It's a common headcanon that Scott is autistic, and I agree with it. I also think Hank is autistic, but it manifests differently in him than in Scott. I also headcanon that Scott gets chronic migraines, though I'm not sure whether that qualifies as neurodivergency or not.

Prodigy is AuDHD for sure, just by the nature of his powers - he collects skills, takes a new hobby and learns as much as he possibly can about it, masters it, then ends up dropping it and moving on to the next one? I know AuDHD is more than just that, but as someone who does the same thing, it definitely speaks to me and I think he's a good character to reflect that.

Peter Maximoff absolutely has ADHD, he's basically ADHD incarnate.

Erik has PTSD six ways from Sunday, I don't think that one even qualifies as a headcanon. Logan also has PTSD, along with Forge and most/all of the mutants who were drafted into the Vietnam War in DOFP (Alex Summers, Toad, etc.)

I do headcanon Dazzler as having some form, maybe multiple forms, of synesthesia. It could be comorbid with her mutation itself, given her abilities are to change one form of sensory input into a different form of sensory input, and that's effectively what synesthesia is within the brain. In general, I subscribe to the idea of superpowers that genuinely affect multiple aspects of a person's life - it's not just a press-a-button power to turn on, it's woven into their mind and body and genuinely affects how they interact with the world.

I also think any telepath would have to qualify as neurodivergent, given their view on the world is innately impacted by processing the thoughts of everyone around them. I don't know that there would be a specific "label" for what they experience, and I think it varies from person to person, but it's definitely a form of neurodivergency.

I also feel like clone characters are innately neurodivergent, especially in relation to developmental or age-related disorders. Studies of actual cloned animals tell us that they're more prone to neurological conditions and tend to develop age-related mental and physical disorders much earlier than they should, so I think there should be at least some sort of reflection in mutant clones like Laura Kinney. Healing factor of course would negate some of the effects, but I could see her with dyslexia or dyscalculia, or perhaps some form of memory disorder. And of course, in Logan (2017) she has a sort of selective mutism tied to trauma, which could be an neat thing to explore in writing her even outside the context of the movie.

I think there are a lot of characters that would be interesting to explore if they had some form of neurodivergency, even if it's not my headcanon for the canon character. These aren't necessarily what I'd want to see from canon, but I think it brings dimension to their stories and could be neat to explore how it interacts with their mutations.

I mean, it would be neat to see Husk with some form of sensory issues, since it would bind up with her mutation in an interesting way and could make for a cool plot. Take her mutation as a metaphor for dermatillomania, where picking at her skin becomes shedding her skin as her mutation manifests, which at best is unpleasant and at worst could be outright dangerous.

And it would be interesting to explore schizophrenia or psychosis in Magik, especially from a social perspective, since her manipulation of Limbo would no doubt be seen as a psychotic episode by others around her (angsty, but a strong metaphor for the hoops actual people with those conditions have to jump through to get recognized), and even from her own perspective it would be interesting to see how she learns to separate her actual, tangible mutation from the things she might experience with her neurological conditions.

[camnotes]

the supposed last days in england

16 july 2014

We do not have breakfast together today. You cycled to Will's to prepare for the busking festival in Edinburgh. I wanted to sleep a bit more but after replying to my friend's email about meeting up in Denmark, I was a quite awake. Felt a bit lonely, I opened Youtube watching videos about health and beauty care by a Canadian girl. Tried to check how much internet data I have left out of the 100MB but the password for the app did not work. Felt bad about lying in bed using the internet, though it is less than one hour. When I could hear some sounds from the birds, I decided to wake up. I peed, cleaned my tongue and washed my throat with warm salt water. Rinsed the kettle and put some cold water in the boil. We run out of lemon so I have artichoke herbal tea from Vietnam. Washed a pure light green granny smith's apple, put the red blanket over the table outside, I was happy to enjoy another breakfast outdoor since we moved here, in the sun, looking up to the sky.

Looking straight now is the fence that divides our small rented stoned garden and the big grass garden of the land-lord that we go to the end most of the time to stay on the wooden floor next to the little stream, my favourite plum tree, few other trees and Andrew's cabin. You said it was a very girl, which you actually mean 'woman', thing of Magaret to ask her husband to put up the fence that was not there. Magaret happens to be a white woman that can make me put her in the category of those irritated British women. One day she was on the phone with someone and all I could hear was a lot of 'She' - she was talking about some girl or woman; and a lot of 'She was ridiculous'. Though she did have a few words with her for a few times and did smile and ask me about our recent holiday in Budapest, all could be just 'diplomatic'. I have learned myself not to be close with housemates because it's easier like that so I should understand why she behaves so. Women are more possessive of their men because historically since there was no contraception, women could get pregnant when being with a guy so they have to be careful and cannot just play around with different girls like guys.

It's just a 'women' thing. They might have a period, they might have been wanted by any guy. You said guys go get the girls so all the girls have to try to attract guys, that's why girls are more jealous to each other.

I have learned myself that when a white person is not nice to someone, it's not always 'racism', it's more 'discrimination' most of the time that can happen not just between races but between the same race from different places in one country. The people from the capital take for granted that their accent is standard; the rest is 'countryside', 'southern', or 'northern' for the case of the U.K.

When I think about almost four years that I have lived in England, I think about the people I have encountered, the people who have made me smile, laugh, cry, and think.

The formal manager of the scholarship office of the university. Big size middle age English man, some white hair, big belly.

When I met him in Vietnam before applying for the scholarship for the second time, he was friendly, helpful, understanding with the situation in Vietnam, my family situation. He told me he helped an Indian girl from a slum to study in England. I told him Westminster had been ranked first in the UK for giving our scholarship to international student. He smiled quite proudly 'It's good to be first in something'. He ordered the second coffee when I asked him about his degree in Archaeology before. Looking at my CV, he asked me why I do not study Film.

He seems like a different man in England. When people live in their own country, they can be nationalist. In the first meeting with all the international scholarship students, after telling everyone about the bad stereotypes of each nationality that has scholarship students - now I can only remember he said Indians, don't be on the phone all the time. He then said 'York is the most English town in England' then smile proudly, 'Guess where I am from'. At the end of his speech when he said, 'Be careful with me. I'm the man with the money and power.' is when my tears rolled down and I could not stop it. I looked around, some African faces, some Indians, some Asians - all seem too nervous and worried to smile or laugh at his supposedly joke. No one applauded either.

7 September 2014

I feel a bit lost but a new life is waiting ahead. It is not as if I am suffering from cancer and dying, even if there might be a next life, who knows how it would be. In my case now, I know it would taste like heaven on earth when I have several kinds of Vietnamese food a day, long time no see friends and family and the weather would warm me up after four years of wind and cold, come and go sun in England.

The last 39 days with London, England and BB. More than a month of traveling in between will make it easier. I have not felt good from yesterday since you told me you are going to teach that woman today. It just sounds like a prostitute getting client from the street for what happened. You will be very mad if I tell you this comparison. In Vietnamese culture, being a musician or a typical performing 'artist' could be considered as one kind of 'prostitute' who pleases different people. That is why my mum would not want me to go into singing, learning music instrument or any other kind of art, besides the fact that we could not afford it. I was surprised to hear from the mixed Dutch and French woman that her Dutch father did not want her to pursue ballet because for him, it is like dancing naked in front of lots of people.

[diamond-coral]

The Heist- Part One

dark!Steve Rogers x Reader

You were just supposed to rob a government official’s apartment. Not Captain America’s. Right?

Series Warnings: Dark, Rape/Non-Con, kidnapping, strip club stuff, swearing

Chapter Warnings: Mentions of a strip club, swearing, committing crime ig, nothing much really.

You sure as hell weren’t a criminal. Well- your record would say otherwise, but it’s not like this was your dream profession. You wouldn’t call yourself a criminal. More of a Walmart Robin Hood; stealing from the rich and giving too...well...yourself. Fine. You were a criminal. But a girl had to pay the bills. At least you got to stick it to the man, right?

You let out a sigh while evaluating your life choices. It wasn’t every little girl’s dream to be breaking into houses and apartments for some cash or valuable possessions. Technically, you were an artist by day, going to art school in New York, living the aesthetically pleasing dream of student loans and a sky-high rent that your shifts at the strip club were hardly making a dent in. But hey, at least one time you got to dance for Captain America, even if he was reluctant and a bit shy. You were certain very few women could say the same.

And that’s how you found yourself in the elevator of a cozy apartment complex, traveling upward toward your new objective. Bella, your roommate, literal partner in crime, and the only good thing that came out of socializing with your coworkers at the club, had given you a new lead of a man who was supposedly loaded and yet lived in an accessible and modest living space. He was single, and worked some sort of political job that left his apartment constantly vacant, specifically on the day you planned for your heist. A perfect target. Some corrupt government worker who wanted to live a ‘low profile life’ yet was dumb enough to settle down in a complex who’s only security was a couple cameras and guards. Bella would easily be able to freeze the frames on the cameras for an hour, giving security the false pretense that the hallways were empty and giving you the perfect window to snatch some fancy watches and some cash.

The elevator doors opened right as you received a text message from Bella.

Cameras taken care of. Now go pay our rent ;)

You exited the elevator only to collide with a blonde woman carrying a laundry basket.

“Oh god, I’m so clumsy I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed while bending down to pick up the clothes that had fallen out of the basket.

You bent down to help her collect her clothing. “No, I’m so sorry! That was completely my fault!” You offered a smile as you stood back up, but was met with a calculating gaze as she studied you.

“I’m sorry, are you new around here?” She seemed to catch herself and her demeanor changed. “It’s just, I’ve never seen you around here before.” She gave  a small smile.

“Oh ,I’m just a girlfriend!” you replied. “Just stopping by.”

“Are you Steve’s girlfriend?” she asked while gesturing to the door at the end of the hallway with her head. It was your target’s door. So the political scumbag’s name was Steve. Lovely. “I don’t think he’s home right now.”

Your brain churned out a fast response. “Yeah, I know. Unfortunately for me, he’s always working. I just left my purse, and he gave me his keys to stop by and pick it up.”

“Well I’m just glad he’s found someone with all his work. I know it’s been hard for him.”

The two of you exchanged one last goodbye smile before she stepped into the elevator.

“I’m Sharon by the way. And you are...?”

“Olivia,” you replied, the fake name came out as a second nature as the elevator doors closed.

You let out the breath you’d been holding. 

“Well that could’ve gone worse,” you mutter to yourself as you approach the door at the end of the hallway.

You slipped the lock picker out of your sleeve before checking your surroundings cautiously. A minute after proceeding to insert the pick into the lock, a soft click resounded from the wooden door, and it easily swung open with a turn of the knob.

As you entered through the doorway, you took into account the little bits of vintage decoration that was dispersed amongst more modern furniture. A small Uncle Sam poster, a couple of war antiques, and some old photos with figures that remained unrecognizable in the distance. This government official seemed to have fought either in World War II or Vietnam, probably making him old. You shuddered at the fact you’d called yourself his girlfriend, but Sharon hadn’t seemed to bat an eye. Either way, you didn’t care for antiques, as much as they would have sold for a hefty price. They were probably personal to him and as you walked around, you realized there were quite a few personal items that were no use for you. As you walked into the bedroom a glint from the dresser caught your eyes, and your chest filled with giddiness and excitement as you neared. Three beautiful watches were on display under the mirror that sat atop the dresser. A Cartier that would probably sell for 8,000, a Rolex that would go for 10,000 easily, and then a beautiful older Rolex. With careful hands you snatched up the two newer watches and placed them into the small knapsack you’d been carrying. After consideration, you decided to leave the older one as it probably held a sentimental value and wouldn’t give you as much money as the other two.

You walked around some more, occasionally picking up valuables like solid gold tie clips and little pieces of Stark technology, which you were surprised he had. You had to be filthy rich to support, much less afford, anything made by that war profiteer. You picked up stashes of cash lying around, which seemed to be a lot. This man definitely seemed to use cash more than credit card which wasn’t as common around people your age. As you were rummaging around his study for any pieces of fine art (which you had already gotten two of) or government documents you could sell on the black market, you knocked over a picture frame which had landed on a file that read CLASSIFIED in red letters...right under the six letters that spelled S.H.I.E.L.D. This fucker was a S.H.I.E.L.D official. You were gonna kill Bella for the vague intel.

“Shit I need to get out of here,” you mumbled. Senators and representatives were fine targets, all usually too old and skeevy for you to care about, but a S.H.I.E.L.D. official was dangerous and could get you somewhere worse than jail. Hell, you could’ve accidentally broken into Nick Fury’s place. You were screwed. So screwed. And you needed to get the hell out of this apartment. As you went to put the picture back, you glanced at it, before doing a double take and squinting at it in the dark room. Oh. This was much worse than accidentally breaking into Nick Fury’s place.

The two men laughing with an arm around each other in war uniforms with an arm around one another was innocent enough until you could finally make out their faces. Steve Rogers an easy enough one to make out, especially considering you were on his lap a couple weeks ago, and James Buchanan Barnes looked practically unrecognizable without a murderous glare on his face.

“No,” you muttered before quickly placing the picture back down. 

You once again assessed your surroundings. It all made sense. The subtle 1940’s vibe, the war antiques. Bella had said he did work for the government and that wasn’t a lie. In the corner of the room you spotted a large circular leather case that was partially unzipped. Through the slight opening of the brown leather, the red, blue, and glinting bright silver was unmistakable.

“No, no, no, fuck,” you muttered frantically as you checked your watch. You still had 38 minutes before the security cameras in the hall unfroze. That was enough time to put everything you stole back. You’d much rather work open to close shifts at the club every day for three months straight than get fucked over by Captain Fucking America. 

You scrambled out of the study, moving to the living room first to put back the authentic paintings. You grabbed a stool from the high bar counter in the kitchen so you could rehang the medium sized work of art. Your mind was racing. This had to be karma for all the horrible shit you’d done in the past. God decided he had enough of your delinquent shenanigans and set you marching straight into the arms of America’s righteous hero. As you finished hanging the painting you spun around on your heel, completely forgetting you were on a wobbly wooden stool. Your heart stopped for a moment before you regained your footing. Carefully climbing down the stool, you almost missed the subtle turn of a lock coming from the door.

Oh you were so done for. Your limbs flew everywhere as you scrambled to the bedroom, sliding under the bed right as you heard the door open. The rumble of Steve Roger’s voice was clear as he talked on the phone and it cut through the walls from the living room.

“Well yea Buck, obviously Tony’s gonna be a little cold toward you. Not that I blame him. I’m just thankful he didn’t start an entire civil war over it. I guess it’s just a good thing we’re not war criminals.” He let out a chuckle before pausing. “Hey Buck? Yeah. I’m gonna have to call you back.” Another pause and you heard some rummaging around. “Why? I think my apartment was just broken into. I gotta go down to security. Yeah, thanks bud.” 

Steve hung up and you heard some angry muttering as he walked into his room. From under the bed you saw his tennis shoes and dark jeans as he paced at the foot of the bed. You covered your mouth to stop your anxious breathing, afraid he’d hear you from your hiding spot. 

The few minutes he spent in his room felt like eternity before he stomped out and you heard the opening and closing of another door as he exited the apartment. You crawl out from under the bed, your head spinning as you attempted to think of a way out of your predicament.

The window.

Quickly and quietly, you stood up and made your way to his bedroom window, looking out for a fire escape and letting out an annoyed huff when you saw none.

‘Maybe there’s one for the living room window,’ your brain chimed.

You rushed to the living room, scooping up the two watches and your empty knapsack on your way, and almost screamed with joy at the sight of the fire escape next to the window. Your fingers curled around the bottom of it and give it a sharp tug up, opening it just enough for you to squeeze through. 

Just as you were about to lift your leg over the ledge and climb down the stairs to sweet sweet freedom, being able to forget about everything that ever happened tonight, a large hand wrapped around the back of your neck and wrenched you back with such force that you tumbled backwards and landed on your butt.

He was massive. Six feet of pure muscle towered over you as you trembled from your position on the floor. He squatted down, resting his elbows on his knees as he took you in, blue eyes practically cutting through the darkness, and you let out a small whimper.

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you stealing is wrong?”

[kaypeace21]

do you think it’s possible sarah (hoppers daughter) was an early-formed alter that went dormant before the events of season one? it’d make a lot of sense with how much of hoppers arc in season one was him mourning her and channeling that grief into protecting will (which would make sense since he seems like a protecter to both will and el). love your posts!☺️

Yep . :D

I already discussed all of this in the original did post - how sarah was a “little” (kid ) alter. And how hopper was a protector /introject alter. I also discussed her going dormant as a major possibility in my did theory. My assumption is she either (a) “became dormant” like some alters do- aka they are “gone” sometimes for many years but can return . And this can happen in a myriad of ways - sometimes alters go dormant after they had a simulated death in the inner world . theoretically sarah had such a Death. And so did El. Death isn’t really a permanent thing for alters ...they usually will come back or stay dormant - unless the body of the host dies (or they integrate) . They can’t really die . I think it’s very possible she comes back and Hopper while exploring the various innerworlds of Will’s minds (like the Russian one, the memory scapes , etc ) reunites/ finds her . look at the st s4 movie inspirations. In ‘what dreams may come”  a guy with the guidance of his dead kid explore a heaven like world influenced by a painter’s emotions.We also have the movie ‘inside out’ -which involves “memory islands” (distinct worlds based on a child’s memories) which are influenced negatively by the kid being depressed she moved to California. The characters traveling to these memory islands are constructs of  kid’s mind -and 1 of them also has a guide helping them explore the ‘memory islands’. in  Inception a guy says he’s a construct of a guy’s mind and needs to help him escape the many different Ievels of the dream worlds.The in inception who made the worlds- had dad issues. 'the cell’also had alternate dimensions of a man's mind that a cop explored ( the dimensions were created by a man who was ab*sed by his dad). Movies like inception, matrix, Truman show, total recall, the cell, enter the void, wizard of oz, Peter Pan, hellraiser 2, dream warriors, bill & ted’s bogus journey, and welcome to marwen  also allude to this: because they involve entering simulated abstract worlds usually created/based on happy& traumatic memories/fears.Cough s4 using the movie wizard of oz quote “we’re not in Hawkins (kansas) anymore.While truman show/matrix are more about realizing your reality isn’t real.in bladerunner 2044/total recall it has the theme of false implanted memories… probably relating to hopper realizing he’s an alter and not in “actual Russia.” Before seeing the other segments of the innerworlds with sarah. Like in total recall- the bad ass spy is told all his memories: his wife/ years of marriage,  , his name, are just implanted memories. And she says “you’re life is a dream.” 

In s2 Nancy asks Steve how his “grandpa’s time in the war is a metaphor for your life?” And steve compares the mf to the germans in the war. Dr owens mentions Will has ptsd like “ (vietnam) soldiers’, Hopper saying he had buddies like Will . “In the 70s there was a study that compared the post-traumatic stress symptoms in Vietnam veterans and adult survivors of childhood s**ual ab*se. The study revealed that childhood s**ual ab*se is traumatizing and can result in symptoms comparable to symptoms from war-related trauma.” Hopper isn’t actually in Russia -but in one of the innerworlds (after he jumped through the rift of the machine- into Will’s mind). We’ll see flashbacks but also present circumstances of his imprisonment echo Will’s past with Lonnie (if the movies indicate anything)- being starved, guards getting payed in order to let other prisoners  r*pe a gay prisoner (than claim incorrectly because of his sexuality he wanted it) , as well as a gang of sadist men who r**e others and a warden using that as a threat to be compliant , being thrown in a dark room of solitary confinement and starved when they didn’t obey the warden, the warden being religious, etc. And the Anerican soldiers (in Vietnam) in the movies aren’t much better and do similarly horrific acts to civilians like r**e and bragging/ happily k*lling women, children, and the elderly. The drill sergant in vietnam calling them homophobic slurs & women, and chocking one of the soldiers with one hand, slapping one for not believing in christianity. Tying up a soldier in a bed , gagging him, beating him and saying “remember it’s just a dream.” Only praising them when good in fire arms.(movies : fullmetal jacket, papillon, shawshank redemption, platoon, welcome to marwen, etc ) . My assumption is�� flashbacks of his life- will hint he’s an alter of Will’s-the boxes in the basement are “vietnam” ,“dad”, and “ny” (and these are the memories of his we’ll see). And some of the bad characters in said stories will also parallel Lonnie . For instance in s2, Jonathan mentions Indiana writer Vonnegut- In his book ‘slaughterhouse 5′- Vonnegut begins the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has “come unstuck in time”. It accounts of Billy Pilgrim's capture and incarceration by the Germans during the last years of World War II, and scattered throughout the narrative are episodes from Billy's life with his dad, and his own wife and kids.Billy is forced to be part of the war and similar things against his free will. The moments start from his childhood when his father throws him in the water to teach him how to swim. He was unwillingly drafted into the war. Later, he is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians  (aliens that are implied to be caused by his mental health issues/trauma) against his will. Therefore, he realizes that this concept is just an illusion.

  And some of the bad characters in said stories will also parallel Lonnie . Like how in ‘peterpan’- the young girl Wendy imagines netherland and the villain -captain hook- is based off her father ( in the movie they have the same voice actors/while in all stage productions the 2 characters are always played by the same actor). Similar to the other s4 film- ‘wizard of oz’ where the wicked witch of th west from the mythical land of Oz (is played by Dorothy’s real life mean neighbor in the real world/kansas). Or ‘in the cell’- every villain from the alternate-mind- dimensions is played by same actor in diff makeup. Not sure if they’d use Ross Patridge (actor of Lonnie) in this way . But it would be very interesting if (In makeup) Ross played many negative people in Hopper’s life/past -as a way to show Will’s past tr*uma.

Like also-look at Sarah’s tiger plushie! In chinese mythology/culture: “The tiger is personified by the constellation Orion (interesting given Sara’s interest in space/blackholes). The tiger represents protection over human life (hmm?). Tiger charms were used to keep away evil and disease (that’s awful ironic if she died in the manner she did). In Buddhism, wearing tiger skins during meditations was believed to bring protection from spiritual interference and potential harm while exploring astral dimensions.” HMMMMMMMMM  XD

Kali in the stranger things novel ‘Suspicious Minds’ says…

“I was named after a goddess. She wore a tiger skin and was fierce in battle.”

Then Kali says to Alice (a women who can see future visions): “I love you, Alice. We can be tigers together.”This parallel (in relation to Alice) is fascinating because Kali actually uses her powers to fake Alice’s death- and to trick Dr. Brenner, and allow Alice to escape. The allusion was so realistic, that Terry could even touch the ‘dead’ Alice.

So the tiger symbolism could be a HUGE hint- that Sarah’s death was simulated and she’ll come back and travel the innerworlds/alternate dimensions of Will’s mind (as Hopper’s guide). Hopper about sarah “galaxies the universe-she always understood that stuff.”

Another possibility (theory b) is she integrated with another alter or with Will (which means she can’t return) .Hopper saying about Sarah “the black hole it got her.” Could imply she integrated with the mf/shadow monster? And ,or maybe she will later ?

But... I lean heavily to theory (a) the most , though.

Obviously sarah has a lot of the connections to Will. will and Sarah both being into science, Sarah winning a spelling bee, Will winning the science fair, both being connected to tigers. Both hallucinating something no one else can see and people trying to snap the 2 out of what they’re viewing. Joyce saying as a witch she’ll eat Will. Parallels Hopper saying as an ogre he’ll eat sarah. Hopper, in s1, when seeing Will (with a vine in his mouth) has a flashback of Sarah on a mouth respirator. And he also has a flashback of Sarah when seeing Will’s lion plushie which resembled Sarah’s tiger plushie. And el also had a lion plushie-like Will’s in s1. Hopper monitored both Will and Sarah at the hospital when they were “dying”. Will has a fear of clowns- and Sarah’s hospital gown had clowns on them. All 3 kids draw.

Plus, we all know the parallels of Will to El (Hopper’s new daughter).

I discussed in my did theory that Hopper (as an adult alter) is a form of protector to all the kid alters - el, Sarah, and Will (host/core). And Hopper as an introject-alter (who are alters based on a person the child knows ) are usually put in the system cause the kid assumes that person could protect them . And since original-Hopper was a police man (a little kid could easily assume that). Although, because he’s a “father figure” for the system he has some of Lonnie’s traits- which are reflected in other perpetrator alters/ bad npcs in the system- Brenner, Neil, Billy, the evil’s Russians,etc . So sometimes he acts similar to a Perpetrator alter too . And I listed those examples/bad parallels extensively in the original did post (linked in the beginning).

And I used these quotes from psych papers in my original did post to pretty much sum up Hopper’s use in Will’s system .

“Introjects can also be based off of  figures that the dissociative child found strong, courageous, heroic, or otherwise worthy of being emulated and internalized and could theoretically protect them.”

“Older adult alters are created to serve a nurturing or parenting role, thus serving as a protector. (*protecting Will/el) . However, sometimes their older age is related to taking on the identification of the ab*ser and can therefore take on any of the other more hostile roles too ... Introjects which are mimicking ab*sers are trying to "keep you inline" in order to protect you from external ab*sers. They are copying behaviors shown to them by bad people, not harboring the intent, s*dism or imm*rality of the actual perpetrators.”

I think it pretty much sums up the nuances and motivations of Hopper’s character.

Thanks for the ask, anon :)

[gemma-lemma]

Cloudy Days - JJ Maybank x Male OC

Chapter 2.3 – Redfield

Soon after, the friends were in the twinkie, on the way to Redfield lighthouse. Everything seemed to have returned to normal, but Parker could still see the shadow that lingered over JJ’s eyes clear as day.

He wasn’t paying any attention to how John B tried to explain to his friends how the lighthouse was the right answer, and just studied the Maybank boy’s face.

“Bro, you know how I process my sad feels?” JJ suddenly asked into the room. “Dank nugs and the stickiest of ickies, that’s how I do it.”

Even though what JJ had just said was slightly gross, the others didn’t seem to pay his words any mind. Merely Parker raised a brow, and JJ just shrugged in response. They were in the back together with Pope, who was leaned forward between the two front seats to talk to Kiara and JB. JJ sat right behind him, while Parker was sprawled over the bench on the passenger side.

He raised his foot to nudge him in the side, but JJ slapped it away with a scowl. Parker took it as a challenge, and tried to nudge him again, but he just grabbed him by the ankle and held him still mid-air. Parker tried to wriggle his foot free, and almost would have been successful, but then JJ pressed it down on his thigh and got a secure hold on it like that.

Parker grinned at him, knowing the confident look in his eyes would confuse JJ.

“If it helps you believe, John B.” Kiara tried to reassure John B about the lighthouse in a soft voice.  

“Look, I- I don’t need a therapy session, okay?” John B defended. “I’m not trippin’ out.”

“It’s okay to trip, bro, but-“ JJ tried to calm him, but was cut off.

“Look, my dad’s missing, okay? Missing. You don’t know what it’s like to have the person closest to you vanish and then have no idea what happened.” John B said, and Parker looked out the window. Not, he did not know how it was if they were missing. Only if they died in front of your eyes. JJ squeezed his ankle and shot him a questioning look. He didn’t answer.

Pope and JJ suggested that Big John might have been kidnapped. Maybe he was in Vietnam, getting interrogated by the KGB, or even in Atlantis. Parker didn’t really pay attention to the conversation anymore. All he could see was the smile on his mother’s face when she closed her eyes for the last time, finally succumbing to her illness, and the blood dyeing Billy’s t-shirt dark red.

After what seemed like an endless ride, they arrived at the lighthouse, which, according to John B, was Big John’s favourite place.

The friends got out of the van, but Parker decided stay inside another few seconds, trying to regain his calm.

He jumped out just in time to hear Pope talking about variables and JJ yelling at him to shut up. It made Parker think about how his friend Alice had always suffered through the maths lessons at school as if she were being tortured. Nobody understood maths less than Alice, Parker was sure of it.

“Listen to me for a second, just listen!” John B interrupted JJ and looked at Parker. “Parker and Pope are gonna stay on lookout with JJ, alright? If we get split up, we meet back at JJ’s house.” He decided, and Kiara agreed.

Parker raised his brows at the retreating figures of his friends.

“Yeah, I’mma work on my merit scholarship essay, and I can’t be involved in a felony.” Pope ranted, snatched the ball JJ was playing with and kicked it around himself. He didn’t pay any mind to the incredulous look the Maybank boy shot him but was out of earshot soon enough.

Parker watched JJ a worriedly.

“How’re ya doin’?”

“Great, thanks.”

“Try again, I don’t believe you.”

“Why wouldn’t you believe me?” JJ snapped and glared at him. The second he saw the look in Parker’s eyes he knew that he had just given himself away.

“Because you just killed the rooster John B said you loved. Have you ever killed anything before?”

JJ scoffed. “Of course I have, don’t be stupid.”

“Insects don’t count.”

“Well, if you’re already all about going Dr. Phil on me, why don’t we ask you a few things too, then, huh? What was that, back at the Château? Since you arrived here you have been a literal wreck, and now you’re suddenly all gangster and bossy? You have too many loose ends, man!” JJ probably hadn’t even realized that he had backed Parker up against a tree until he hit it with his back. He didn’t back down, though.

“That’s how you wanna play this?” Parker laughed, realizing that JJ wouldn’t give him anything for free. “A truth for a truth, then. The first time I ever shot at someone with a gun, was to protect my friends. He would have hurt them, and I couldn’t let that happen, no matter how frightened I was. Same thing happened back at the Château. You guys were in danger, and I had to get my shit together and protect you.” He said with a dangerous smile. “That’s how things work where I come from. The law of the jungle allows no weakness.”

But JJ didn’t seem satisfied with the answer. “We were in danger also when the cops almost found us in the motel room. We were in danger when those guys shot at us or when they wrecked Ms. Lana’s hut. Where were your balls of steel then, huh?”

“Something happened, before I came here. Something bad, that really shook me. I’m still not over it, so don’t get surprised when I suddenly relapse. But today was a closer call than those before, and the situation reminded me specifically of back then, so I managed.”

“What happened?”

“Nuh-uh. That’s not how a truth for a truth works. It’s your turn, now. How are you?”

JJ started backing off, but Parker was faster. He grabbed him by the collar and spun them around, so that now JJ was pressed up against the tree. He struggled to get free at first, but then gave up and stared right into Parker’s eyes, challenging him. When he realized that Parker wouldn’t even accept the challenge, he sighed and averted his eyes again.

“I can’t really understand that I killed the rooster yet, I guess. It doesn’t feel like sadness, or remorse, it just feels bad, and I hate it. That was a living being – an animal that was dear to me. How can I not feel sorry for killing it?”  He said quietly, and Parker could hear the pain in his words. He softened his grip on JJ’s shoulders.

“The sorry will come later.” He explained softly. “But if that’s what you’re worried about, I can reassure you. This bad feeling that you’ve got? The one that seems to be eating away at your insides and making you sick to the stomach? That’s what you got for taking a life. It’s gonna feel bad for a while, and at some point remorse will crush you. Maybe you’re lucky and it won’t be that bad because it was just an animal, but it will still hurt. And then you have to feel the pain. It’s like in that John Green novel: pain demands to be felt. That’s the only way you can get over it.”

JJ nodded, deep in thought. Parker’s words seemed to soothe his raging mind a little, but he was still perturbed, so he added: “And if you ever need someone to talk to during that time, or someone to sit beside you while you work things out by yourself, I will be there for you.”

Again, JJ nodded, then his eyes widened as if suddenly realizing something. He looked back into Parker’s face and grabbed his wrists in an iron hold, securing them mercilessly ion his shoulders. “’Maybe you’re lucky and it won’t be that bad because it was just an animal’” He repeated Parker’s words and suddenly he knew that he had made a mistake. “What have you killed, Parker?”

As JJ had expected, Parker tried to rip free, but he wouldn’t let him. He stared at him urgently, waiting for an answer.

The sound of approaching sirens saved Parker from having to answer and they sprinted towards the twinkie. Pope jumped in the driver’s seat, and off they went towards JJ’s house.

 They hung out there a while, waiting, but when neither John B nor Kiara showed up Parker decided to drive the twinkie back to the Château. He had ignored any try from JJ’s side to pry any information out of him, not just yet ready to tell him about the men he’d killed to save himself or his friends.

When he parked the car, he was met by John B cleaning up his home and throwing pizza cartons away.

“Hey man, what happened? Weren’t we supposed to meet up at JJ’s?” He greeted, and immediately felt the sour mood his cousin sported.

“You want the long version or short?” He responded and proceeded to put empty glass bottles into a box.

“Medium rare.” Parker answered, just to mess a little. John B actually chuckled quietly. Bingo.

“I kissed Kiara. She pushed me away.” He began and went still, waiting for Parker’s reaction.

“Told you so.” Was all he said, not really surprised that his cousin had tried it after the conversation they’d had on the way to Ms. Lana’s house with JJ.

“I apologized, but she said it was okay.”

“I think nobody cares about you the way Kiara does. She’s doing her best to be a good friend and make it as easy on you as possible. I understand where your confusion is coming from, but I think you should try and take care of her a little better, too. Especially now that this misunderstanding is out of the way.”

John B shrugged in a way that said: You’re right, but I don’t really know what to say now. So he just proceeded with his story. “Then we were arrested because I hurt the lighthouse guy. Peterkin told me that she knew about the compass, I denied having it, Kiara’s dad got us out. I think he hates us. The square groupers chased me through the streets, Peterkin saved me, I gave her the compass, and Ward Cameron fired me because he found out about the scuba gear we took.”

Parker raised his eyebrows, trying to process what John B had just said. “Nice afternoon, man.”

“Yeah, right?”

Parker looked out to the scoop, suddenly remembering something.

“Is that damn turkey still in there?” He asked, and John B nodded.

“Should we bury it or burn it?” He asked, the question directed almost more to himself than to John, and watched him stack a lot of old stuff he recognized from his father’s office and from around the house on a pile.

“If you wanna burn it get it now, because I’m gonna burn all this junk here right now.” He said, taking out a box of matches.

Parker frowned. “You sure you wanna destroy all this?”

“Yeah, pretty.” John B lit the pile on fire and poured gasoline into the flames. They both watched at them in awe for a bit, but then Parker snapped out of it, grabbed an empty box and went to put the dead rooster inside.

“Rest in peace, or something.” He murmured, staring into the creepily open eyes of the animal. “I hope rooster heaven’s nicer than North Carolina.”

Then he closed the lid and crawled out of the scoop, just in time too see John B grab something from out of the fire and stomp on it to stop the flames.

“What the hell are you doing, man?”

But John didn’t answer, he just stared at the pin board he had just saved, as if it held the answers to all of his questions.

Then he looked up. “I think I know what Redfield means.”

[thebiblesalesman]

Right now I think there's a missed opportunity to work backwards from the Ayutthaya map and add a larger Thailand map and a Thai hero. I say "work backwards" because usually FFA maps like Necropolis or Kanezaka are based off an existing regular map and reuse assets from that map, but at the moment Ayutthaya is sort of standalone.

So a Thai hero or another hero from a SE Asian country are pretty high on my personal wishlist. I think SE Asia is outside the comfort zone for the US gaming industry, but Blizzard has the resources to pull it off- and they've even mentioned a character from Vietnam! And...he's in Talon... So how about someone who's not in Talon, but aside from that please go for it.

I can tell you from experience that it is not a burden to make a global cast. It is a joy, a learning experience, and an asset to the creative process. And if you take time to actually invite people from the population you are representing into the conversation, you end up with rich, convincing characters for people around the world to find themselves in.

Sometimes it's not a clean split like people from the US identify with the US characters or every Japanese person loves Genji (definitely not true), but authentically conveying someone's country invokes pride and love and familiarity, like Sigma's voiceline about stroopwafels or his spray where he eats salted herring. They also did a good job with Echo, except Echo is a robot so who cares lol.

I'm biased here- Genji is my favorite hero. I spent 3 years making up Shimada lore because I couldn't get enough of it. Yet even with that, I'm not completely sold on another Japanese hero that is part of the Shimada. I don't know that we need another hero to continue telling Genji and Hanzo's story, and my worry is that this person will be another anachronistic "I don't know what a gun is" caricature like the brothers (and like a lot of Japanese characters across all media).

It might be even worse than that. Genji and Hanzo bear a resemblance to a theatric character in kabuki called a hitogami ("man-god"), a warrior who grants possession of their body to a guardian deity. The presence of a dragon spirit connected to an elite family relates to a similar concept called ujigami. Hitogami tend to be protagonists in kabuki, and ujigami is also a positive concept.

But while foxes in Japan can be revered as messengers of the divine, they also have shades of trickery and possession by a fox is associated with witchcraft. There are also stories about foxes transforming into beautiful women and seducing men so that they can cause mischief. From the GameInformer silhouettes article, it seems likely that this new Shimada hero is female, and the "messenger of the divine" from Japanese Inari worship probably translates more to "servant of the Shimada" in Overwatchverse Japan.

So this female character would be a servant or assassin of the Shimada, who probably ran into Genji when he was on his "destroy the Shimada Clan" mission, and whose history is now tied to the brothers instead of being allowed to introduce new ideas.

And that's the real reason I think you'd want to add a new character from the same country- to show us new things about the culture, to explain that not everyone in Japan owns a katana, stuff like that. Sombra's initial concept was a Japanese hero named Omniblade whose theme was street fashion- I think that would be an awesome hero!

And I'm not trying to say you can't have a Japanese female hero associated with foxes. In fact I really like folktales about foxes (try watching the first 12 minutes of Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams", though tw for a suicide mention).

Rather, in this case it's the combination of factors that are setting off some alarm bells in my head right now. There are even things that aren't even from Blizzard that I think about, like the "Good Hunting" short from Netflix's Love Death + Robots last year, which is about the Chinese hulijing (fox spirit from which the Japanese kitsune inherited a lot of its more negative traits) and contains a ton of misogyny and sexual violence. Basically, I've seen this subject mishandled before.

It's also because I know Blizzard has in the past Google-translated Japanese on Hanzo's skins/the infamous Hanamura map scroll, which suggests to me that there aren't any Japanese people working on these Japanese characters. To be fair I think it's gotten a lot better in recent years- the Tengu skins, for example, are awesome. Hanzo's dance is awesome (I'm a real sucker for anything involving dancing or food). Weirdly enough, although Hanzo's skins have been the butt of jokes, Genji's Oni skin from 2017 not only had appropriate translations but really cool connections to actual figures from Japanese history.

And getting translations and cultural points right is a big deal. People can tell if you're a white person trying to write a Japanese person's story without study or visiting the country. If you have the resources, you absolutely should have cultural consultants and sensitivity readers, or even people from other countries directly on your dev team!

Like I mentioned Sigma, who was developed with the help of Dutch staff, but did you know that this year Blizzard shut down their office in The Hague? It was not a dev office, but if you're shutting down your links to a community, how are you going to make heroes that connect to that community? In a similar vein, the person who added an explicitly SE Asian character to an Overwatch story was of Filipino & Chinese descent herself, but now she's left the company. And Michael Chu, who for better or worse has been considered the face of Overwatch's story, has also left.

I don't know enough about this hero to comment further, but those are my current thoughts. I'm real interested to see the starting line-up for Overwatch 2. At the moment I think this hero, Sojourn, Mauga, and Junkerqueen are guaranteed. It would be cool if they added Asian heroes outside of Japan/China/Korea, but I would still appreciate another MEKA pilot or another Japanese hero too, so long as they are showcasing something different.

[knives-out20]

Magnetic Push - Erik Lehnsherr x Male!OC - Part 1

Fandom: X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014)

Pairing: Karmel Rosenstein (OC) x Erik Lehnsherr

Warnings: Swearing, Spoilers for Days Of Future Past, Magnetic Pull spoilers,

Notes: Hi! Welcome to the sequel of Magnetic Pull, titled ‘Magnetic Push’, it is advised you DO NOT READ this if you have NOT finished Magnetic Pull. But that is an obvious given. Grimm, as you all may remember, is an OC of mine. Enjoy!

Logan and Hank sat in front of Charles' desk in his office.

Charles bent over sluggishly, looking at Logan under a big desk lamp. "So, you're saying...that they took Raven's power, and, what? They weaponized it?"

"Yep." Logan nodded.

"She is unique" Hank commented.

"Yea, she is, Hank" Charles agreed, standing up properly.

"In the beginning, Sentinels were just targeting mutants. Then they began to identify the genetics in non-mutants, who would eventually have mutant children, and grandchildren" Logan explained, watching Charles walk over to sit on a big couch at the side of the room. "Many of the humans tried to help us, but it was a slaughter. Leaving only the worst of humanity in charge. I've been in a lot of wars...I've never seen anything like this. And it all starts with her."

"Now, let's just say that, for the sake of...the sake, that I- I choose to believe you, that I choose to help you, Raven won't listen to me" Charles sighed, smiling sadly. "Her soul belongs to someone else, now. Hers isn't the only one."

"I know" Logan admitted, standing up. "That's why we're gonna need Magneto, too. And Climber."

Hank looked up, as if he hadn't heard those names in ages. "Erik? A-And Karmel? You do know where they are?"

"Yea."

Charles grinned in disbelief, laughing to himself. "Could you give me that one more time, please?" He rhetorically asked.

"You heard me" Logan replied, promptly standing his ground.

Charles continued to laugh as he stood up. "He's where he belongs. Him and Karmel both" he told, facial expression rapidly changing to one of disdain as he passed by Logan.

"Well, that's it? You're just gonna walk out?"

"Ooh, top marks" Charles raised his eyebrows, sassing Logan. "Like I said, you are perceptive" he pointed at Logan, walking backwards towards the staircase.

"The Professor I know would never turn his back on someone who lost their path" Hank noted, watching Charles walk away. "Especially someone he loved."

Charles stopped at the foot of the stairs. He took a step back, then one more before speaking again. "You know...I think I do remember you now" Charles said, walking back over to Logan. "Yea. Tall, angry fellow with the contentious hair. We came to you a long time ago, Erik, Karmel, and I, seeking your help. And I'm gonna say to you, what you said to us then..." he leaned in, getting right up in Logan's face. "'Go fuck yourself'."

"Listen to me, you little shit" Logan growled, grabbing Charles' shirt. "I've come a long way, and I've watched a lot of people die. Good people. Friends. If you're gonna wallow in self-pity and do nothing, then you're gonna watch the same thing, you understand?"

Charles searched Logan's eyes, confused at the audacity this man had.

Logan let go of Charles.

"We all have to die sometime" Charles walked away, for real this time.

"I told you there was no professor here" Hank reminded.

"What the hell happened to him?" Logan asked, turning around.

"He lost everything. Erik, Karmel, Raven, his legs" Hank sighed. "We built the school, the labs, this whole place, then, just after the first semester, the war in Vietnam got worse. Many of the teachers and older students were drafted. It broke him. He retreated into himself, I...I wanted to help, do something, so I designed a serum to treat his spine, derived from the same formula that helps me control my mutation" he shook his head. "I take just enough to keep myself balanced, but...he takes too much. I tried easing him back, as did Grimm, but he just couldn't bear the pain. The voices. Grimm tried countless times to- to help Charles, to slow him down to the dosage I take, but like I said, Charles, he...couldn't be helped."

"Grimm, uh...blue-haired guy, talks to and controls the dead?" Logan arched a brow.

"Yea. Grimm didn't want to waste away trying to help someone who couldn't be helped, so, he broke it off with Charles, and thus, Charles lost him. The treatment gives Charles his legs, but it's not enough. He's...He's just lost too much" Hank concluded.

Charles lay on his bed, eyes shining on the brink of tears. He looked over at his bedside table, specifically at a framed photo of Raven. Charles' chest went up and down with his restrained breathing, thinking back to the first time Raven and him met, as kids. His vision glided over the photo of Raven, to a tie. Not any tie of his own, or Hank's, but...an old friend's tie. 

Karmel's tie. He had forgotten it at the X-Mansion back when he resided in it, and Charles kept it with the underlying hope of seeing Karmel again and returning it to him.

Charles knew how much Karmel's ties meant to him, and why they meant to much to him; all of Karmel's ties belonged to his father. He groaned softy, thinking back to when he first met Karmel.

"Uh, Karmel" Karmel repeated, outstretching his hand, "Karmel Rosenstein."

"Charles Xavier. Friend of Moira's?"

Karmel shrugged.

"Acquaintances, actually? Mutual friend" Charles corrected.

Karmel furrowed his eyebrows. "Yea...How did you- never mind- you?"

"Very recently acquainted. She brought me here to meet you."

Karmel's eyes went wide. "Uh- w-why? Why'd you need to meet me? What's happening? Moira, I- I don't like boys, but it's fine if you do Charles, but I-"

Moira raised a hand, putting back the book she was holding and cutting Karmel short. "I didn't bring Charles here to set him up with you, I know you like girls. I brought him here because I feel that you both have something in common."

"An obvious interest in girls?" Karmel insisted, hands on his hips.

Charles held back a chuckle. He knew Karmel had been locked up in Erik's heart for the past ten years or so- and vice versa. Charles thought that surely, today, Karmel was more embracing of his sexuality than he had been back then, when he used to live in fear of it.

"Karmel, Karmel-" Charles called, putting a hand on Karmel's shoulder. "It's okay."

Karmel slowly dropped his hands, raising an eyebrow. His vine art of Erik grew purple flowers, which bloomed quickly. Karmel's breath hitched at that.

"It's okay now, remember? I know, you know, we both know here. And I'm a hundred percent okay with what I know. As of our quick trip to Russia, so are you. It's okay, you're safe here. You can be who you truly are."

Karmel took slow, deep breaths, nodding. "Yea, I- I just...I guess I'm gonna forget sometimes, that it's okay. But it's hard to forget that on a scale of one to ten, he's a certified twenty. I'm...I love Erik, man."

"Which is okay" Charles cracked a comforting smile. "I'll be around to remind you. It's a slow process."

Charles could still vividly remember the way Karmel's vines looped around the wall of the mansion to form Erik's face, the pure detail of it all- Karmel had Erik's entire being memorized. He moaned in annoyance, getting out of bed and passing right by the tie and framed photo.

Back downstairs, Hank was organizing the study while Logan tried thinking of what to do next.

"I'll help you get her" Charles stood right outside the study. "Not for any of your future shite, but for her."

"Fair enough" Logan quickly replied.

"But I'll tell you this, you don't know Erik, and you definitely don’t know Karmel. No one knows them like they know each other. Karmel follows in Erik’s footsteps, his pain and anger pushing him to go faster and faster. Erik, that man is a monster, a murderer. You think you can convince Raven to change? To come home? That's splendid. But what makes you think you can change him?" Charles scowled.

"Because you and Erik sent me back here, together."

Charles stared deep into Logan's eyes, determined. "And- And what about Karmel, huh?"

"Listen, Professor. What Karmel does or doesn't do in the future isn't important. What's important is that we can change Erik, and that means him, too. Y'just gotta believe me."

***

"The room they're holding Erik and Karmel in was built during the Second World War, when there was a shortage of steel. So the foundation is pure concrete and sand. No metal. The walls are too thick for Karmel to grow vines out of, and the glass ceiling, he isn't strong enough to break his vines through" Hank described.

"They're being held a hundred floors beneath the most heavily-guarded building on the planet" Charles added, the three men looking over an aerial map of the Pentagon.

"Why are they in there?" Logan inquired.

Charles looked up at Hank, then over at Logan. "What, Erik forgot to mention?" He snickered.

"Uh, JFK" Hank timidly answered.

"...They killed-" Charles cut Logan off.

"What else explains a bullet miraculously curving through the air? At the perfect level from around some trees? Erik's always had a way with guns, and Karmel's always had a way, for the way Erik has a way with guns" Charles chuckled.

"Or just, Karmel's always had a way with Erik" Hank shortened what Charles said, down to its bare minimum.

"Are you sure you want to carry on with this?"

"This is your plan, not mine" Logan reminded.

"We don't have any resources to get us in" Hank complained, Charles chiming in by chirping "or out. It's just me and Hank."

"I knew a guy. Yea, he'd be a young man now. Grew up outside of DC" Logan giggled, shaking his head. "He could get into anywhere, I just don't know how the hell we're gonna find him."

Hank tore his gaze from Logan, to Charles. "Is Cerebro out of the question?" He whispered, Charles silently hanging his head as an answer.

"If only you guys had internet."

Charles looked up at Logan, eyebrows raised in interest.

"What's 'internet'?" Hank furrowed his eyebrows.

Logan sighed, shifting where he stood and turning back down to the map.

"We have a phone book" Hank then suggested.

[qqueenofhades]

I have a question about your opinion as a historian about how to deal with problematic past. I am French, not American, so not quite as aware of what is happening right now in the US regarding statues as I probably should. My question is the following: many of the politicians who promoted (admittedly white) social equality in France, worked on reforming labor laws, etc, in the 19th / 20th century were certainly not anti-colonialist. How to deal with this "mixed legacy" today? Best wishes to you!

First off, I am honoured that you would ask me this question. Disclaimer, my work in French history is largely focused on the medieval era, rather than modern France, and while I have studied and traveled in France, and read and (adequately?) speak French, I am not French myself. So this should be viewed as the perspective of a friendly and reasonably well-informed outsider, but not somebody from France themselves, and therefore subject to possible errors or otherwise inaccurate statements. But this is my perception as I see it, so hopefully it will be helpful for you.

(By the way if you’re interested, my post on the American statue controversy and the “preserving history!” argument is here. I originally wrote it in 2017, when the subject of removing racist monuments first arose, and then took another look at it in light of recent events and was like “WELP”.)

There’s actually a whole lot to say about the current crisis of public history in a French context, so let me see if I can think where to start. First, my chief impression is that nobody really associates France with its historical empire, the same way everyone still has either a positive or negative impression of the British Empire and its real-world effects. The main international image of France (one carefully cultivated by France itself) is that of the French Revolution: storming the Bastille, guillotining aristocrats, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, a secular republic overcoming old constraints of a hidebound Catholic aristocracy and reinventing itself as a Modern Nation. Of course, less than a generation after the Revolution (and this has always amused/puzzled me) France swung straight back into autocratic expansionist empire under Napoleon, and its colonialism efforts continued vigorously alongside its European counterparts throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. France has never really reckoned with its colonialist legacy either, not least because of a tendency in French public life for a) strong centralization, and b) a national identity that doesn’t really allow for a hyphen. What I mean by that is that while you can be almost anything before “American,” ie. African-American, Latino-American, Jewish-American, Muslim-American, etc, you are (at least in my experience) expected to only be “French.” There is a strong nationalistic identity primarily fueled by language, values, and lifestyle, and the French view anyone who does not take part in it very dimly. That’s why we have the law banning the burka and arguments that it “inhibits” Muslim women from visually and/or emotionally assimilating into French culture. There is a very strong pressure for centralization and conformity, and that is not flexible.

Additionally, the aforementioned French lifestyle identity involves cafe culture, smoking, and drinking alcohol -- all things that, say, a devout Muslim is unlikely to take part in. The secularism of French political culture is another factor, along with the strict bureaucracy and interventionist government system. France narrowly dodged getting swept up in the right-wing populist craze when it elected Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen (and it’s my impression that the FN still remains relatively popular) but it also has a deep-grained xenophobia. I’m sure you remember “French Spiderman,” the 22-year-old man from Mali who climbed four stories of a building in Paris to rescue a toddler in 2018. He was immediately hailed as a hero and allowed to apply for French citizenship, but critics complained about him arriving in France illegally in the first place, and it happened alongside accelerated efforts to deny asylum seekers, clear out the Calais migrant camp, and otherwise maintain a hostile environment. The terror attacks in France, such as 2015 in Paris and the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice, have also stiffened public opinion against any kind of accommodation or consideration of non-French (and by implication, non-white) Frenchpeople. The Académie Française is obviously also a very strong linguistic force (arguably even more so than the English-only movement in America) that excludes people from “pure” French cultural status until they meet its criteria. There really is no French identity or civic pride without the French language, so that is also something to take into consideration.

France also has a strong anti-authority and labor rights movement that America does not have (at least the latter). When I was in France, the joke was about the “annual strike” of students and railway workers, which was happening while I was trying to study, and we saw that with the yellow jacket protests as well. Working-class France is used to making a stink when it feels that it’s being disrespected, and while I can’t comment in detail on how the racial element affects that, I know there has been tension and discontent from working-class, racial-minority neighborhoods in Paris about how they’ve been treated (and during the recent French police brutality protests, the police chief rejected any idea that the police were racist, despite similar deaths in custody of black men including another French Malian, Adama Traoré.) All of this adds up to an atmosphere in which race relations, and their impact on French history, is a very fraught subject in which discussions are likely to get heated (as discussions of race relations with Europeans and white people tend to get, but especially so). The French want to be French, and feel very strongly that everyone else in the country should be French as well, which can encompass a certain race-blindness, but not a cultural toleration. There’s French culture, the end, and there isn’t really an accommodation for hybrid or immigrant French cultures. Once again, this is again my impression and experience.

The blind spot of 19th-century French social reformers to colonialism is not unlike Cold War-era America positioning itself as the guarantor of “freedom and liberation” in the world, while horrendously oppressing its black citizens (which did come in for sustained international criticism at the time). Likewise with the American founding fathers including soaring rhetoric about the freedom and equality of all (white) men in the Constitution, while owning slaves. The efforts of (white) social reformers and political activists have refused to see black and brown people as human, and therefore worthy of meriting the same struggle for liberation, for... well, almost forever, and where those views did change, it had to come about as a process and was almost never there to start with. “Scientific” white supremacy was especially the rage in the nineteenth century, where racist and imperialist European intellectuals enjoyed a never-ending supply of “scientific” literature explaining how black, brown, and other men of color were naturally inferior to white men and they had a “duty” to civilize the helpless people of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and so on, who just couldn’t aspire to do it themselves. (This is where we get the odious “white man’s burden” phrase. How noble of them.) So the nineteenth-century social reformers were, in their minds, just doing what science told them to do; slavery abolitionists and other relief societies for black and brown people were often motivated by deeply racist “assimilationist” ideas about making these poor helpless people “fit” for white civilization, at which point racial prejudice would magically end. This might have been more “benevolent” than outright slave-owning racism, but it was no less damaging and paternalistic.

If you’re interested in reading about French colonialism and postcolonialism from a Black French perspective, I recommend Frantz Fanon (who you may have already heard of) and his 1961 magnum opus The Wretched of the Earth/ Les Damnés de la Terre. (There is also his 1952 work, Black Skin, White Masks.) Fanon was born in Martinique, served in World War II, and was part of the struggle for Algerian liberation from France. He was a highly influential and controversial postcolonial theorist, not least for his belief that decolonialization would never be achieved without violence (which, to say the least, unnerved genteel white society). I feel as if France in general needs to have a process of deep soul-searching about its relationship to race and its own imperial history (French Indochina/Vietnam being another obvious example with recent geopolitical implications), because it’s happy to let Britain take the flak for its unexamined and triumphalist imperial nostalgia. (One may remark that of course France is happy to let Britain make a fool of itself and hope that nobody notices its similar sins....) This is, however, currently unlikely to happen on a broad scale for the social and historical reasons that I discussed above, so I really applaud you for taking the initiative in starting that conversation and reaching out for resources to help you in doing it. Hopefully it will help you put the legacy of these particular social reformers in context and offer you talking points both for what they did well and where their philosophy fell short.

If there does come a point of a heightened racial conversation and reckoning in France (and there have been Black Lives Matter protests there in the last few weeks, so it’s not impossible) I would be curious to see what it looks like. It’s arguably one of the Western countries that has least dealt with its racial issues while making itself into the standard-bearer for secular Western liberalism. France has also enthusiastically joined in the EU, whereas Britain has (rather notoriously....) separated from all that, which makes Britain look provincial and isolated while France can position itself as a global leader with a more internationalist outlook. Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are currently leading the effort for the $500 billion coronavirus rescue package for the EU, which gives it a sense of statesmanship and stature. It will be interesting to see how that continues to change and develop vis-a-vis race, or if it does.

Thanks so much for such an interesting question, and I hope that helped!

[blog-cosmosuniverse1]

Joseph R. Biden was just inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States yesterday. I have nothing further to say about this historical event attended primarily by 26,000 National Guard Troops, FBI, NSA, CIA Operatives.

What Have We Done? By E.P. Unum January 21, 2021

Joseph R. Biden was just inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States yesterday. I have nothing further to say about this historical event attended primarily by 26,000 National Guard Troops, FBI, NSA, CIA Operatives. That fact alone is a very telling story. Apparently, additional security was deemed necessary for a President-Elect who received allegedly 80 million votes, more than any other person in the history of our country. All of the “peaceful riots” throughout the summer and Fall, where stores and businesses were looted and destroyed, monuments toppled and police and citizens were killed, did not require the assistance of armed troops to quell these “activities”. I also will not comment on the 17 Executive Actions signed by our new President on his first afternoon in office. None of these offer any hope or unity nor are they of any benefit to the American people or to America. Indeed, they will drive us further downward. But here are some lessons we can learn from the new change in leadership to the America we know: Perhaps now you understand why there was never any action against the Clintons or Obama, how they destroyed emails and evidence and phones and servers, how they spied and wiretapped, how they lied to the FISA Court, had conversations on the tarmac, sent emails to cover their rears after key meetings, how Comey and Brennan and Clapper never were brought to any justice, how the FBI and CIA lied, how the Steele Dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton, was passed along, how phones got factory reset, how leak after leak to an accomplice corrupt media went unchecked, why George Soros is always in the shadows, why Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and George Bush and John McCain were all involved, why they screamed Russia and pushed a sham impeachment, why no one ever goes to jail, why no one is ever charged, why nothing ever happens.

Perhaps now you know why there was no wrongdoing in the falsification of the FISA Warrants, why the Durham Report was delayed, why Hunter Biden has not been charged, why the FBI sat on his laptop for almost a year while Trump was being impeached on fictitious charges, why the Bidens' connection to China was overlooked as was unleashed the perfect weapon, a virus that was weaponized politically to bring down the greatest ever economy known to man and at the same time usher in an unverifiable and unnecessary system of mail-in voting that corrupted the very foundation of our democracy. Maybe now you can understand why the media is 24/7 propaganda and lies, why up is down and down is up, right is wrong and wrong is right, why social media can now silence the First Amendment and speak over the President of the United States. This has been the plan by the Deep State all along. They didn’t expect Trump to win in 2016. He messed up their plans, and delayed them a little….four years to be exact. They weren’t about to let it happen again. Covid was like manna from heaven for democrats and the socialist left, it was a tool to inject fear into all Americans and it was weaponized Governors who shut down their states and crumbled their economies out of fear. The media, never to let a good crisis go to waste, helped shame and kill the economy, and the super lucky unverifiable mail-in ballots were just the trick to make sure the 47-year career politician, allegedly with hands in Chinese payrolls, the man that couldn’t finish a sentence or collect a crowd, miraculously became the most popular vote recipient of all time. You have just witnessed a silent, bloodless coup, the overthrow of the US free election system, the end of our Constitutional Republic, and the beginning of the downward slide of capitalism and the free enterprise system into the abyss of socialism and communism. What a remarkable achievement! We have sacrificed the greatest engine of freedom, growth, and prosperity known to man on the altar of ignorance and totalitarianism. What will happen next?  Well, here's a brief list: ·     Expect the borders to open up. Increased immigration. ·     Expect agencies like CBP and INS and Homeland Security to be muzzled or even deleted. ·     Law enforcement will see continued defunding. ·     Elimination of the electoral college will be attempted. ·     History as we know it will be erased. Our children will no longer study the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, II, Korea or Vietnam. These will be replaced with classes on “white priviledge”, “how American racism stole lands from native Indians” and the “need for racial equity” because America is a terrible nation. ·     The Supreme Court will be packed with liberal judges. ·     Your 2nd Amendment will be attacked and there may be a gun confiscation or gun buyback programs enacted and you will find it difficult to own a weapon…and ammunition of any kind. ·     If you have a manufacturing job or oil industry job, get ready to be unemployed. ·     If you own and run a business, brace for the impact of higher taxes and more governmental regulations. ·     Maybe you’ll be on the hook for slavery reparations, or have your suburbs turned into Section 8 housing. ·     Your taxes are going to increase dramatically and businesses will pay more. ·     We will be paying more for gasoline at the pump and we will soon find ourselves once again dependent on foreign oil.

President Trump made us energy independent. For the first time in our history, the USA became an oil-exporting nation. Biden’s illogical and corrupt dismantling of the Keystone Pipeline not only displaced 42,000 high-paying union jobs but now Canada will sell the oil in Alberta BC to China while we search for new supplies at higher prices. Well done Joe! In a couple of years, we will see the onslaught of inflation, high unemployment, less productivity as more and more people become dependent on the government for subsistence, all of which is the natural course of socialist economies The dollar will no longer be the world’s reserve currency and America will no longer be the bastion of freedom it once was. America will be overtaken by China as the largest economy in the world and, because we have become so complacent, we will find ourselves in the middle of great turmoil and upheaval with lots of civil strife that will make 2020 look like a walk in the park. I could go on and on. There is no real recovery from this. The national elections from here on will be decided by New York City, Chicago, and California. The Constitutional Republic we created will be dead. Mob rule and appeasement will run rampant. The candidate who offers the most from the Treasury will get the most votes. But the votes cast won’t matter, just the ones received and counted. That precedent has been set. Benjamin Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?’” Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Ladies and gentlemen, we have now lost the Republic our forefathers bequeathed to us, the Republic we fought and bled for these past two hundred and forty-five years.  Some of you are wondering how this came to pass. The answers are indeed quite simple. We did it to ourselves: ·     We turned from God. We erased God from our halls of Justice and the Town Square. ·     We turned from family. ·     We turned from our country, our Flag, our Monuments to our leaders who paved the way. We denigrated all of these with revisionist history and the tearing down of monuments to our civilization and way of life. ·     We replaced achievement and recognition by embracing “participation trophies” so that our children can all feel a sense of accomplishment even when there was none. ·     We embraced degeneracy culture, inviting pornography into our laptops and living rooms. ·     We became some infatuated with technology that we lost the human touch…we found it easier to send emails or Facebook or twitter posts to a friend or co-worker ten feet away from us rather than walking over to chat with them. We have, in essence, become too high tech and low touch. It sort of begs the question…what does it matter if we wire the entire world if we lose our immortal souls? ·     We celebrated and looked to fools as our heroes, comedians whose idea of a joke is holding up a bloody head of our President. That’s not funny. It’s sad. ·     We worshipped ourselves selfishly and took for granted what brave men and women fought and died to give us. Their sacrifices are no longer valued, replaced instead with scorn because they may have committed “transgressions measured by today’s standards, not theirs”.

We disregarded history and all it teaches. On our watch, America just died a little. It’s likely she’ll never be the same again. Not until the 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump stand up and shout “we will no longer tolerate this and we want our country back” and do something about it

For starters, get off Twitter and Facebook and refuse to be a part of their efforts to disrespect the First Amendment. I did. And I don’t miss it at all. If companies want to insult all the people who supported President Trump by denying them jobs, fight back. Don’t buy their products. Shun them. Until we take those steps, they will continue to wield their power, but the ultimate power is in your hands…the power of the consumer. We did this to ourselves. We made our bed, now we have to sleep in it….until we get off our asses and remake it. Some of you have no idea what you’ve done. You know now. It is time to do something about it. Sadly, some of you do know what you have done. To them, I say…if you kick a dog long enough, pretty soon he’s gonna bite. I am tired of being kicked and insulted and disregarded as if I don’t matter. We do matter. We are Americans

[marvelsbestsuperheroine]

New York is a Lonely Place

Prompt: I don’t know if you’re writing Ironwidow any longer but I realllyyy wanted to read a period drama with Tony Nat in the 60s or 70s? Or something along that line. Thanks in advance

A/N: Hello, there! I’m so sorry this took me so long. I went on vacation and then I got sick and then I had to catch up with life and then I had to do research because I don’t know much about those decades. This takes place in the early 60s. I hope you like it and apologies once again.

New York City was a lonely place. So many people who didn’t care enough about others to even glance their way, too focused on their own downtrodden-ness. It was the perfect place for a Russian spy to go about her business and follow everyone else’s. 

During the war, Natalia Romanova had not felt the loneliness that others had described in overheard conversations and intercepted communications. She had been in her element, focused, single-minded, content. But then she had come to America. Then something had gone horribly wrong in her mother country. She lost all contact with her superior officer, waited for days, weeks, months. She never heard from him again.

Stranded in a foreign country with no new orders, Natalia continued with her routine. She observed, she followed, she took notes. She filed away all the information she could on her target, waited for the day to be given permission to finish it.

The papers piled up. She bought more filing cabinets. She rented a new apartment. She bought a big storage locker. 

She had been following genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist Tony Stark for 15 years before he finally caught her. And that was only because she let him, so tired was she of this stupid game, of her stupid fixation. She was meant to kill him but she never received the order. She’d been waiting for the right moment, holding out for the faintest sign of Russia trying to contact her. She told herself that that was the reason she had never taken initiative.

But she had always prided herself on not being just a cog in a machine. She wasn’t the machine. She was the whole damn gun and she would fire when it suited her best. Her S.O. had known and understood that. She wondered vaguely what happened to him.

So why was Mr. Stark still alive? She asked herself this question as she stared him right in the eyes, his knife pressed gently against her throat, her back bent over a table in his spacious loft.

“Who are you?” He asked, brows furrowed in confusion and anger. The hand that held the knife was unsteady. She could feel the vibrations against her skin. His other hand had one of her wrists pinned to the table, as if that could stop her. Even that hand was delicate, avoiding putting too much pressure.

“I’m a Russian spy,” she said, plain and simple, in perfect English. No Russian accent.

Stark blinked. “You- you are? I mean- why are you following me?”

Natalia blinked calmly back. “I was waiting for the right moment to kill you. But that moment never came. I have been following you for 15 years. The war is over. We are at peace. You Americans have your own troubles, of course. The drugs, the protests, the conflict in Vietnam. I was supposed to receive an order but something went wrong back home and I lost all communication. The order never came. So I never killed you. But I kept observing, kept waiting. Fifteen years and now we are old and I am tired of waiting.”

Stark blinked again. His skin seemed to drain of colour, his hands shook even more harshly. “Fifteen years... Why so long?”

Natalia shrugged, unconcerned by the knife ready to pierce her veins. “I am a patient woman, Mr. Stark. And besides. I like New York. It is lovely at night. But it is, as they say, a lonely place.”

She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark of night but she could feel the way he shifted his stance, the way his grip on her loosened. “What did you mean to do, when you came into my apartment just now?”

In the adjacent bedroom, the television was still playing, casting its flickering white light and broadcasting static-y music. The Beatles, Natalia figured. She glanced at the doorway. Inside, the large bed was illuminated by the television, glowing like an invitation.

“I came to meet the man I know everything about but have never spoken to,” she replied honestly. “I did not come to kill you, Mr. Stark. I came to you because I have no mission anymore. I have nothing. And as I said: New York is a lonely place.”

Her heartbeat never wavered, never skipped. It pulsed beneath the dull edge of metal twice, thrice, four times. He let go and pulled back, stepped back some more. He looked so awkward, dressed in his pajamas and holding a clean kitchen knife. She almost wished he was still on top of her, still pinning her down.

He set the knife on the counter in the kitchenette, just across the way from her, and turned on the lights. They were bright and harsh. Obviously he did not feel the same.

“Would you... Can I offer you a drink?” His hands fidgeted perpetually, twitching and rubbing and tapping.

She hopped onto one of the bar stools at the island. “Vodka. Please.”

He hesitated, whispered “fuck it” and then proceeded to grab two glasses from the shelf. “Can I at least know your name?”

Now it was her turn to hesitate, but only for half a second. “Natasha. Romanoff.”

If he noticed that her name wasn’t Russian, he didn’t mention it, for which she was grateful. 

“And you know my name.” He popped open a bottle of vodka and poured. “Apparently.” He screwed the lid back on. “So why not kill me? You must’ve had the opportunity sometime in the last 15 years.” He slid a glass to her and then came around the island to sit on the stool beside her.

She shrugged. “I did not see a need to. I know everything about you. Your public face, your private face, your interests, your hobbies, your secrets. I know you fund charities anonymously, which ones and how much. I know you tinker with cars in your many garages. I know exactly how much money you have at the bank, how much you’ve taken out, what you’ve spent it on. I know you see lots of women in lots of places but you are always courteous. I know how good you are in bed, how often you think about sex. I know that despite everything, despite my mission to kill you and despite my breaking into your home, you are thinking about taking me right now, on this counter.”

She watched his adam’s apple bob up and down, heard the squeak of leather beneath his bum as he squirmed beneath her penetrating stare. She watched him throw back his drink, shake his head, sigh, then reach for the bottle to pour a second glass. Natalia downed hers as well and held out her own for a refill.

He obliged. “How did you get in here?”

Avoiding the topic. Alright. She would humour him. For a little while. She had waited this long, what was a little longer?

“Through the window.”

“We’re on the top floor.”

“And?” Now she smirked at him over the rim. When she set the cup down again, it was empty and stained with bright red lipstick.

He eyed it thirstily. “I need better security.”

“You do,” she agreed and poured herself a third.

Not to be outdone by a woman, he chugged his as well.

“If you know me so well then you know my vices,” he said. “My weaknesses.”

“I do.”

“Be honest with me. Did you poison this somehow?”

She chuckled. “No, Mr. Stark. If I were here to kill you, it would be much quicker than that. And less terrifying. For you.”

“Right. Great. Fucking fantastic.” He polished off his third. Or was he on his fourth now? He was losing track.

“I know so much about you,” Natalia continued. “It’s only fair that you know things about me.”

His eyebrows raised and he turned to face her fully. He gestured for her to go on.

“I was born in Stalingrad in 1930. In 1931, my parents died in a house fire. I was given to my uncle, a high-up director in the KGB. He raised me to be the perfect spy, put me through a rigorous training program called The Red Room. I was taught how to manipulate, how to lie, how to kill. At 16 I was the best in the school. They graduated me early and put me in the field. My English was the best so they sent me to America undercover. You were my first and last assignment. I had only been watching you a few weeks when everything went dark. I had no more communication with Russia, not even my uncle. Everything I tried failed. There wasn’t even anything in the news to tell me what might have happened.

“I was a skilled girl but young and naive and without direction. When I wasn’t watching you I was studying you. When I wasn’t studying you I was sleeping. Eventually I knew everything there was to know. That’s when I got sloppy. I ate out. I drank out. I danced. But I never formed connections, never made any commitments. I moved from place to place, worked where I could, stole where I couldn’t. I was never tied down to anything in case I heard word, in case I got the order, in case I needed to go back.

“I have been living in fear of going back, I realize now. I enjoy your music, your fashion, your ways of life. Women are demanding more rights. Men are more carefree. Americans are open-minded, they are passionate, they fight for their rights and the rights of others. I have been following the news and I am most impressed by some of the more political figures. And your sports are enjoyable. And I can watch them on the television. Your country focuses too much on money and is very rowdy, but you are also free in many ways. Emotionally, physically, sexually.”

She placed a hand on his thigh and slid upward. He had been drinking all through her story. She knew he could hold his alcohol but she wondered if he would even be conscious for what happened next.

“I have wanted you for so long.” She climbed into his lap. He did not stop her. Instead, he grabbed her waist and held her there, as if afraid she would fall off, as if afraid for her safety.

“In the Red Room, they also taught us how to please, how to tease, how to make the most of everything. I can make you feel things none of those other women have.” Her voice was a whisper now, a breath on his neck before she placed gentle kisses along the tendons. His head fell back, his mouth fell open. “Would you like that?”

“Y-yeah,” he could only stutter.

She pressed the lightest of kisses at the corner of his mouth. He was still as a statue.

“I will hold you to that.” Then she stepped off of him and back. “Thank you for the drinks.” She left out the front door this time, figuring he wouldn’t make her go out the window.

Tony Stark blinked and she was gone, melted into the shadows and the sound of her heels against his wooden floors echoing in his head.

New York was a lonely place indeed.

[inversenova]

Tales from the Cyrpt (2)

It is unsurprising that, when recalling memories of my past, the memories filled with the most unease, the most fear, and the most helplessness are the ones I remember most vividly. Although I am only just beginning my foray into the study of traumatic memories, I know enough from my very recent time in school that this is a relatively normal experience for those who experienced trauma, whether as a child or as an adult. Perhaps the hardest part of all of this, even just the idea of cataloguing and sharing my experiences seems...silly? Pointless? Was my childhood really that bad? There are others, people even that I know, who have been through events similar to my own, and even more who have gone through worse things, harder things, and yet they appear to have processed their traumas more effectively, more wholly, than I have. It is something that I continue to struggle with, these feelings that “It wasn’t THAT bad” or “There are people who are living in war zones and who don’t have any food to eat and here you are complaining because of bullshit!”

Despite these feelings, at the very least I know that I need to get these things OUT, even if they turn out to be “not that bad.”

It has been years since I’ve needed to recall anything and, as such, I find it difficult to remember if my parents fought often amongst themselves. Eventually, perhaps when I’ve worked on processing these things a little more, I’ll be able to speak to my mom about some of it, if only to try and clear up a little bit of the fog, although even she may struggle with remembering some of it. I say that because last year she commented on how, when I was in high school, she was worried I might have an eating disorder. I asked her why she had thought that, and she recalled that I used to worry about every bite of food, every sip of soda, that I would ingest to the point where she worried I might be anorexic. This came as a shock to me and resulted in confusion; I have no recollection of acting in this manner and, when I asked Leigh, a friend I was close with in high school if this sounded familiar to her, my friend Leigh was equally confused, as she did not remember this at all. I wonder, now, if my mother confused my fear of existing in the kitchen or around the rest of the family as me being “peckish” about my food? I used to have a large Ziploc bag with dry ramen and other canned foods that I would take from the pantry at night or when my parents weren’t around (at least, when we moved to Texas I did). What I do remember, however, was how much my mother HATED Bob.

Bob had always been possessive and over bearing towards my mother; I see it more now, as an adult, than I did when we were kids. My hatred of Bob came from the things he did to Aaron and me and the vitriolic, often infuriated, words from my mother who would often confide in me as one would a friend, despite me being her child and often too young to fully understand what was happening. I loved my mother fiercely and tried to be as protective of her as I could, even when all I could do was listen to her tell me what Bob was like and try to make her feel better. As an adult and interacting with a Bob who fought in Vietnam and who has been to, and continues to go to, therapy on a weekly basis I am able to gather more about what he was like when I was younger. My mother has always been, and probably always will be, the most important person in his life. He tries, now, to engage with me and be more open and welcoming when I am around, but even now I find it difficult to get alone time with my mother or to interact with him without her there as a “buffer.”

When we lived in California, Bob worried constantly about my mother cheating on him. He would stalk her, dragging me and my friend or my brother to sit in the van parked outside of where she worked (once she found a job outside of their joint business), where we would sit for hours upon hours so that he could watch the entrance and see if she went straight to her car or not. My mother, a strong woman who, much like myself, did not like to be blamed for things she was not doing, and who had not been cheating on him when she started her new job, eventually did, although I’m unsure of where she met the man she had an affair with. She told me, once she was in the thick of it, that she hadn’t even truly felt anything for the man, but that she’d been so tired of being accused of cheating that she decided that if she was going to be accused of it she may as well do it. I can recall, with a twisting sensation in my stomach, how she described her final meeting with him when he “asked to make love with her one more time” and how he cried or teared up and how...derisive my mom seemed about it all. Her words were contemptuous and she seemed to be making fun of him, but this was likely sometime in junior high and I was the opposite of knowledgeable about sex and love and so her words just confused me.

I’m not entirely sure how long her affair lasted, or when it really began, but I remember the man. I remember how kind he was, how generous and giving towards me and (I think?) my brother. I remember that he found out I was obsessed with Legolas from The Lord of the Rings films and promptly bought and framed a photo of him as a gift to me. I spent at least one weekend or one evening having a sleepover with this two daughters, both of whom were sweet and took to me quickly, playing with me even though we had never met before. This was significant to me, as I’d already begun having trouble with bullies, something that would get worse until my trouble with them peaked in junior high. I also remember strange things about the man and her affair, like that he once drove up to my grandparents house when my mother and I were visiting them so that he could see her, and I think he may have come to the hotel room on the night Bob found out about him; I remember all three of us curled up on a bed while he whispered encouraging and thoughtful things to my mother while we cried. Of course, this may have just been my imagination because my mother had supposedly ended things with him shortly before Bob found out.

The night that Bob found out has haunted me for a long time. My timeline is still off but I feel that this happened at some point during my time in junior high but I’m unsure of what year. I am also aware that all of this happened in the same day, but the order in which it happened is fuzzy at best. The screaming began before sundown, perhaps a couple hours of sunlight were left at most. Doors were slammed and I could tell that, while my parents had had blowouts before, this was something...new, something different. Mostly I knew this because, hours and hours before, sometime in the early afternoon, my father found out. I’m not entirely sure how, whether he’d done his own detective work or if someone else had told him

When he found out, Bob stumbled through the house, wailing and sobbing, louder and more emotional than I had ever seen him before in my life. Crying was not something men did, as far I had learned and been taught and told, and so to see my father in that state set me and my brother off quickly. To this day, I struggle with seeing men be openly emotional, not because “only GIRLS cry!” or anything so pedantic, but because the only time I ever saw a man cry was in my childhood and it was...bad. I only remember feeling fear, although I’m sure I cried, but I can remember my brother, Aaron, two and a half years younger than me, quickly caught up in Bob’s breakdown and sobbing along with him although he didn’t quite understand what was happening. At some point during this, Bob curled up in his closet in the master bedroom, holding a gun and cradling Aaron to him, inconsolable and unreachable no matter how much I screamed or cried for him to stop. Eventually, I found the phone number for some of the other employees that he had working in their store who I knew my dad felt close to and called them. I know that they must have come, and maybe even they took us all away so we  could all collectively try and calm down, but I have no memory of anything else in that day until my mother came home that evening. This was when the screaming, as mentioned above, really started.

Knowing that whatever was going to happen was going to be bad, and I mean BAD, I quickly gathered my brother and our dog (a beautiful German Shepard mix), threw some snacks and water into a small backpack, and set out, leaving behind the fight that was only just beginning. This, of course, was before cell phones were common place and I certainly didn’t have one until high school, after we had moved to Texas. While it may have made more sense for me to have called for help as I’d done before, I don’t remember if that thought ever crossed my mind. At the time, I only remember knowing with absolute certainty that I didn’t want to be there, and that I didn’t want my brother or our dog to be there either. I don’t remember having a destination in mind, but eventually we found our way to a parking lot a couple blocks from my school where some construction company had started to dig a large pit for some reason. I set my brother and the dog free at the pit and watched them, chewing on my lip and pulling out my eyebrows and eyelashes, until the sun had gone down and what meager food and water supplies I had grabbed were gone. Nobody had come looking for us, or at least nobody had found us yet, but knowing that there was nothing else I could do, no one else I could turn to in that moment (stranger danger was always a worry and none of my friends lived within walking distance of my house or where we were at the time), I knew we had to go home.

We returned to our house amidst a few departing police cars and it did not take long for my mother to scoop me up and drive us to a motel. She left Aaron, I think because Bob would not let her take him (although at the time I was upset and did not want to leave him or the dog behind), and I still feel anger over that decision. How could she leave him there? Surely she’d known of the frightening display earlier that very day where Bob had held a gun so close to Aaron’s face? Didn’t she love Aaron?

She explained in the car that we couldn’t take Aaron for the aforementioned Bob reasons but that continues to not sit right with me, even years later. She went on to say that, yes, Bob had found out about the other man. When he had, and when she’d come home, he’d screamed and screamed and screamed and demanded that she tell him who the man was. Before that, however, Bob had tossed our rooms, both Aaron’s and mine, where he found a small cream my mother had given me that was supposed to encourage breast growth (I’d been super small, skinny, slim and without any curves or breasts which had caused a wide variety of bullying which I’ll talk about later), and he’d freaked out, thinking she’d given me some kind of “sex thing.” I’m not sure if he ever found out who the other man was, or that I had been as involved with him as I had been, but at some point my mother had locked herself in the guest bedroom and Bob had taken an electric drill to the door, destroying the lock to get inside. At the time I’d never really been worried that he would hurt her, which I think was why I’d mostly been concerned with getting us out. I’d never seen him hit my mother but I’d seen him hit my brother enough to be more scared for Aaron than for my mom. Eventually, at some point during their fight, Bob had called the police and tried to “turn her in” for the small amount of weed that she’d had stored. One way or another the cops had come out and left without arresting or citing anyone for anything, although my mother was furious that the dogs had been set loose in their bedroom where both the dogs and officers went through her clothing and tossed the room, leaving everything disheveled and some things broken in the mess. I remember going to the motel, and then little else beyond the other man maybe coming over to comfort my mother.

Unlike other things I’ll write about, I did not feel that this was my fault, or that I could have stopped it. Yes, I’d known that what my mother was doing was inherently wrong but... I had felt that this other man might grow to love me and, if he had, maybe he could be my father instead. Among the array of gifts he’d given me, the other man also found out that I loved to write and he’d purchased a small, faux-leather bound journal... Not once, even now, has Bob ever expressed such an interest in my hobbies or what I love. My mother tries, and usually she’s pretty aware, but the subtle encouragement that came with the gift of a notebook was something else entirely, something new and sweet and something I hadn’t even realized I’d been missing until I’d experienced it.

I still sometimes remember the sound of Bob’s wailing, his heart-wrenching cries of despair in our beautiful California home, and I shudder and clench my teeth and wait for the sound and all that it is connected to, to pass.

[back-and-totheleft]

The Vietnam Odyssey of Oliver Stone

The soldier trained his rifle at the ground in front of the feet of the unarmed Vietnamese villager and fired away, yelling "Dance. Dance. Dance." The old man hopped from one foot to the other.

"I wanted to kill him," recalled Oliver Stone. "I hated him. I crossed over into being a monster."

The above incident is depicted in "Platoon," written and directed by Stone, a Vietnam veteran. It and the other events shown actually happened, according to Stone. He's not proud of it. But he owns up to it. "Platoon" is Oliver Stone's atonement. Moreover, it's our atonement, too. "Platoon" is the first Hollywood movie to take the redemptive power of cinema and focus it on the Vietnam War.

If you think Vietnam was John Wayne in "The Green Berets," Robert DeNiro in "The Deer Hunter" or Marlon Brando in "Apocalypse Now," think again. "Platoon" is about the bugs and rain and the jungle and the pain. It's about the unseen enemy, rice paddy stashes and gun caches in thatched-hut villages. It's about boredom, fear, friendship, rage, loyalty, humor and choices - right and wrong. Like the phrase from the comic strip Pogo, "We have met the enemy and they is us," that's what "Platoon" is all about.

Why is "Platoon" drawing critical raves, Oscar talk and large numbers at the box office? Why is it being called the most important movie about Vietnam, or perhaps the most important war movie ever made? Why, 20 years after the war's escalation, are we seeing images of a Vietnam movie on the cover of Time magazine and in the media across the nation?

Oliver Stone has a few theories. The Academy-award-winning writer ("Midnight Express") and acclaimed writer-director ("Salvador") says it took 20 years for the nation to heal its wounds, for historic perspective to settle in and allow Americans to understand Vietnam and welcome home its legacy - the Vietnam Vet. It took the Vietnam monument in Washington, D.C., and, yes, Bruce Springsteen's misunderstood "Born in the U.S." ("Got in a little hometown jam/So they put a rifle in my hand/Send me off to a foreign land/Go and kill the yellow man.") It was an educational process, Stone told a recent gathering of the media in New York.

"We thought the war was over, when in fact it was just beginning," Stone recalled of his return after 15 months with the 25th Infantry Division near the Cambodian border. Stone, wounded twice, was awarded the Bronze Star for combat gallantry and a Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster. He was later transferred to the First Cavalry Division. Of his return home, he says, "There was total indifference. The war happened at 7:15 each night on the news."

Stone, 40, is a bear of a man with a boyish face. He's a very forceful individual who speaks in bursts of words which tumble forth. At the same time, the writer in him is ever observant. He seems impatient, as if he can't wait to get back to the word processor.

Ten days after his return in November 1968, Stone found himself in prison, arrested on a marijuana charge. Adjusting to civilian life for him and some 2 million other Vietnam servicemen would not be easy. But Stone managed to tough it out. What was his salvation? The cinema. Stone studied screenwriting and directing with Martin Scorsese at New York University Film School, receiving a BFA in 1971.

A Canadian firm bought a screenplay, "Seizure," and allowed him to direct the low-budget film. In 1976, Stone moved to Hollywood. Two years later, he won an Academy Award for his screenplay, "Midnight Express," which also brought him the Writers Guild of America Award. Stone also directed another low budget film, "The Hand," and co-authored the script for "Conan the Barbarian" and wrote the screenplay for "Scarface."

It was 10 years ago, during America's Bicentennial, that Stone wrote the script for "Platoon." He says every studio in Hollywood turned it down, telling him nobody wanted to see a movie about the Vietnam War. "It was considered too gruesome, too realistic."

"Platoon" is a Vietnam movie from the grunt's point of view. We see the war through the eyes of Charlie Sheen, who plays Chris, a young recruit (based on Stone), and hear it through his words in letters he writes to his grandmother back home.

The movie depicts a night watch in the jungle turned into an ambush by the North Vietnamese Army, contrasts the boozers (those who drank beer and alcohol off-duty) and the heads (those who used marijuana and other drugs back at base camp), shows a My Lai type scourging of a village by American soldiers and the conflict between a gung-ho, out-to-kill lifer Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger), and a mild-mannered eager-to-get-o ut-alive Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe). The movie does not paint a glorious picture of the American presence in Vietnam.

" 'Apocalypse Now' was about everyday life in Vietnam. It was more Joseph Conrad mythology," said Stone. " 'The Deer Hunter' was more about Pennsylvania and Meryl Streep than Vietnam."

The characters in "Platoon" are based on real people who existed in three different combat units in Vietnam. The characters and events are composites, but based on reality, Stone said. "My hypothesis was: 'What would happen if the three were in the same Platoon?' "

I asked Stone how accurate the scenes were depicting drug use in Vietnam. Many Vietnam soldiers were introduced to drugs in Vietnam and returned with drug habits. "Not in the field," said Stone. "A lot of us did it in the base camp - mostly marijuana, some heroin."

The tone of "Platoon" is not one of condemnation, but rather understanding - a knowledge that the roots of war are in all of us. Stone called war "one of the greatest highs. There's an adrenaline that flows. Life freezes down to a minute."

As you might expect, the violence in "Platoon" is graphic. But it is not gratuitous. "TV violence is obscene," said Stone of small-screen images of crashing cars, shootouts and fistfights where the participants seem to always mend by next week's episode. "It ignores reality, the real pain, shock and loss. It (violence) has to be done explicitly. Otherwise, you'll deceive the public."

Stone found a willing backer for "Platoon" in England. John Daly and Derek Gibson, owners of Hemdale Film Corp. arranged financing and brought in producer Arnold Kopelson. "Platoon" was brought in for $6 million, a low figure in today's Hollywood where a $15-million budget is average. Orion Pictures is distributing the movie.

Hemdale had produced Stone's "Salvador." Other noteworthy Hemdale movies include "The Falcon and the Snowman," "At Close Range," "River's Edge," "The Terminator" and "Hoosiers." They'll team again with Stone for his upcoming "Tom Mix and Pancho Villa.'

"Platoon" was described "as the flipside of 'Top Gun.' "

" 'Top Gun' was totally irresponsible, really," said Daly. "My friend's son, 12, saw 'Top Gun' and wanted to sign up. I said, 'Wait to sign-up until he sees 'Platoon.' "

To heighten authenticity, Stone and the producers brought the cast to the Philippines prior to shooting for two weeks of "basic training." Sheen, Berenger, Dafoe and the rest were given a shovel, told to dig their home, taken on hikes and climbs, given night guard duty and handed Army rations. Capt. Dale Dye, a retired Marine officer and Vietnam veteran, was in charge.

Dye, who has a consulting firm, Warriors Inc., which advises film-makers on military accuracy, contacted Stone, telling him, "You understand that this is as significant for the Vietnam veteran as anything is going to be. Let's do it right."

Dye was a sergeant in Vietnam where he was wounded in action three times during 31 major combat operations including the battle for Hue City and Khe Sanh during the Tet Offensive in 1968. Later, as a master sergeant he was active in the evacuation of Saigon and Phom Penh.

" 'Apocalypse Now' and 'The Deer Hunter' are war films," said Dye, "but have nothing to do with Vietnam. They are allegorical in nature, but don't reflect the agony and ecstasy of young men who went to fight in that very difficult war."

Dye now has no illusions about war: "I went into it with grand delusions of flashing sabers and lovely ladies on my arm. When I got down to the mud and the blood, I found that to be hollow."

Stone was similarly gung-ho. A son of a stockbroker who met his wife in Paris during World War II, Stone attended the Hill School, Pottstown, before entertaining Yale University. He studied there for one year. In 1965, he got a job with the Free Pacific Institute, teaching Vietnamese-Chinese students in the Cholon district of Saigon. Then, he got a job on an American merchant ship. Two years later, at 21, he was back in Vietnam.

Has "Platoon" helped Stone put Vietnam behind him? Yes, he says. "I was totally warped and twisted by Vietnam. I got rid of all my demons."

-Paul Willistein, “The Vietnam Odyssey of Oliver Stone,” The Morning Call, Feb 1 1987 [x]

[janiedean]

After joining tumblr, my dream of becoming a published writer is forever broken and ruined. It may be drastic but I cannot imagine a future in which I'm a happy writer, knowing that what a large amount of people think is that you can't write about a gay character if you're not gay yourself, you cannot have a poc character if you're not poc yourself etc. It's frustrating and sad. That's what tumblr taught, along with simultaneously complaining all the day about the lack of rep

anon, let me tell you something first and foremost: tumblr is not a good audience when it comes to original fiction and if that’s what you want to do, delete tumblr from your perspectives.

now, I’ll go and say a lot of unpopular things before addressing your concerns, but here we go:

people on tumblr don’t read. or better: either they read fanfic which then they decide to consider the same thing as published writing, and like... while there’s a lot of fic that’s better than some published writing technically, the fact that they say it about classics or stuff they’re supposed to study in school shows that they have no idea of the basic difference in between the two media... or they read YA that gets hailed as the Next Best Thing In Literature when at most it’s a good YA and at worst it’s mediocre stuff that looks revolutionary because they haven’t read the fifteen other things that YA has taken inspiration from. at most they read harry potter when they were kids and never moved on from it, as showed by the fact that it’s 2019 and I still have to see people arguing about sn/ape being BAD OR GOOD when he’s the standard gray archetype, and if you can only think of sn/ape when you think about a gray character and you still haven’t made sense of his moralities or lack thereof, then you haven’t read anything else; (never mind that once I read writing advice like SORT YOUR CHARACTERS INTO HOGWARTS HOUSES LIKE FFS SOME OF US HAVEN’T READ HP THAT’S NOT A UNIVERSAL ADVICE FOR CREATING A CHARACTER’S BACKGROUND)

as people on tumblr don’t read, their understanding of how you write or anything else related to the craft is pretty much useless - like, the only thing each single writing manual agrees on is that if you want to be a writer you have to read a lot, because how are you going to deconstruct tropes (to say one) if you don’t know how those tropes work? or how are you going to play into them if you don’t know how they work regardless? I can’t write a tolkien deconstruction if I haven’t read all of tolkien’s writings back to back ten times at least, I can’t write a good novel about vietnam veterans in the early eighties if I don’t read all the history books on the topic I can find and at least ten tomes about how war-related ptsd in veterans works and possibly a lot of books written by vets themselves. I can’t write a stephen king deconstruction if I haven’t read stephen king back to back ten times either. which shows they think original novels are like fanfic - like, I personally have researched the shit out of things for fanfic, but I wouldn’t ask anyone to do it for a thing they do for free. like, if I see badly researched italian reinassance AU fic I won’t gaf if the author just wrote it based on the anglosaxon tv shows about the borgias around because I can’t expect them to read ten books about the topic to write a thing they don’t get paid for and that just people in fandom most likely will touch, but if it’s a published author that gets paid for it I’ll expect that at least they’ll do some research if they want to write stuff somewhat realistically. people on tumblr think that writing a novel requires the same effort as fanfic, as in, not much when it comes to background work, which is ridiculous, because that’s the difference - with fanfic, unless I write a detailed AU or smth, the author already did that work for me. I just have to expand on it and trying to understand the characters. like, it’s nowhere near the same thing;

which means that people have gone with this concept that ‘you can’t write X if you’re not X’, which is honestly ridiculous and counter-productive because it shoots down any chance that you, as an author, might actually understand what people who aren’t from your background feel like. also, I personally think that if you want to do that and you want to be good at it you need to a) find a way to relate to your characters that goes beyond your differences, b) talk to people from the category you don’t belong to. now, if I had to write a 50k short romance novel about two guys falling for each other at a record shop without too much drama happening, I’d probably just write it myself, some people who are actually guys into guys, ask them to read it, tell me if I fucked it up, get them to explain me how I fucked it up and run it by them until I’m done, but admittedly I don’t need research to find out how people run a record shop. if I had to write a story set in europe but idk there’s a zombie plague and one of the protagonists is a black american tourist I’d go ask someone who is black and american and possibly from the area I decided that person is from to give me background info on how I could write this person etc. and then run it by them after I’m done. if another of the protagonists is idk polish (because there’s not many polish people in mainstream european fiction outside of polish authors), I’d find a polish person to do the same thing and run it by them etc., because I’m not a black american nor a polish person but I still want to write those characters etc. but I mean, let’s say it’s the zombie apocalypse - can I make sure people connect with both of them because they’re surrounded by zombies and as all human beings in existence they don’t want to die? most likely I can. meanwhile I’ll have learned a lot of things about both categories because I talked to people belonging to them;

or, let’s say I want to write some story with a large cast where I decide that for the purposes of it straight character falls for a trans character and it ends well because fuck that I want people to be happy. I’m not trans, but I do know people who are. I’ll definitely talk to them running stuff and ask if thing X is offensive or not etc. because of course I’m not so I can’t know for sure, maybe I’ll stick with the straight POV or maybe not but I’ll definitely run it by them to make sure the thing is actually well-planned/not in poor taste, and meanwhile I’ll have learned a lot about the topic that I might not have known before, which is good because it means I know more about experiences I don’t have which is, guess what, how the entire point of writing stories is. you want people to empathize and feel for characters that might be not the same as them, that’s exactly your damned job, but if you don’t do it yourself first how do you assume others will?

all these people who think you can’t write a gay character if you’re not gay are the same people who think that if you’re a straight woman you can’t write about two men being in love/fucking but you should be able to do it about f/f pairings because since you’re a woman then you have to guess how that works out of that, which shows that they have no idea of how anything works - like I argued with half of tumblr on this topic so whatever, but as a straight woman I think I have more aesthetic tastes in common with a gay man since we both want to fuck men and we both are familiar with handling that equipment, so I’d find it easier to write about that rather than about the contrary as I don’t generally find women attractive in that sense except for like two very specific people who are not a very common aesthetic in general. but like, assuming that in virtue of being a woman then you have to know how it feels to be attracted to women while you can’t possibly do 2+2 about how gay men are into each other when technically you’re into men yourself shows exactly how these people have No Idea Whatsoever of how attraction works, never mind how empathizing with someone else works, never mind of how writing things with research behind it goes;

also, assuming that if you’re X then you can’t understand Y is extremely damaging because it means you can never understand other people’s struggles and that’s......... worrying? I mean, it’s an incredibly dangerous (and calvinist) position to say that if someone is X and so doesn’t know how it feels to have a specific kind of issue then they can’t get it not even intellectually. idk, I’m straight so I can’t possibly understand or relate to why would lgbt+ people want to marry and adopt kids/have their children recognized/have the same rights as I do? are we serious? so if idk I wanted to try and change some bigot’s mind about it when I see that they’re just parroting bullshit and they haven’t thought about it I shouldn’t even try because they’re a bigot and they’ll never understand or change their mind? so people who used to be bigots, then found out their kids or their kids’s friends were lgbt+, listened to them, realized they were bigots and are now allies/supporters couldn’t have done that because at some point they used to be bigots? how the hell do you want people to change or to be an activist or change the world if you don’t believe that people can change themselves or worse that you don’t believe that people coming from any background can’t understand people coming from another background? that’s not how it works. I mean guys ffs I read a bunch of nonfiction lately about endemic poverty in the center of the US out of personal interest and I’m as far from the US and any of those situations as it goes (I’m not a veteran, I never was not taught to read and write even if I finished high school, I never lost 90% of what I had after getting sick, I never needed to hop on a train illegally to go places, I never had to sell my own plasma to buy lunch, I never needed to live in a tent when I was going to middle school after my parents had to move to a totally different state and I never had to go live in a trailer after my house was sold by a bank before I couldn’t pay off my loan, I don’t have a five year old child that won’t be insured because she was born with a pre-existing medical condition), and like... I cried while reading some of them? because I could envision it and I felt like the system failed them and I hate reading about people being failed by a system that should support them, and I swear I’m not a US person who comes from that background whatsoever. I could probably write you a full novel about how immigrants in Italy have it like shit whether they’re legal or not because I worked in the field for two years and one of my oldest friends has immigrant parents and she was born here and she can’t use her ID to travel in europe only because she still doesn’t have a citizenship and she’s been waiting for years to get it. I’m not an immigrant in italy but I’ve known enough, seen enough and heard enough from them that I could most likely do it and it wouldn’t be badly researched. like, you can’t tell people to not tell stories if they want to do it with respect and not wanting to make it about themselves only. that’s bad writing. but if you care about the people you’re giving rep to then you should try imvho;

now: I suppose that you’re belonging to categories that are Not Minorities given how the ask is worded. (same as me more or less unless you consider atheists a minority but nvm that.) there’s a lot of writers around that are Not Minorities and most get published more than people who are actually minorities. people saying that you can’t write X if you’re not X and X = minority are pretty much telling you that you shouldn’t use your spotlight to give people rep when you could and you could do it reasonably well if you do your research and talk to those minorities. so they’re basically going against everyone’s interests because you could learn things and become a better person and make sure your readers empathize with your characters and more rep is always good esp. if well-done. I personally think that people should write about what they want - there’s topics I wouldn’t feel comfortable touching because idk if I could do that well and things I really wouldn’t want to write about so I most likely never will -, but that they should also go for what they want if it’s what they believe they can do. so if you feel like you want to write gay characters or whatever go for it and then find yourself a sensitivity reader or ten before you send your book around instead of worrying about what kids on tumblr who are still arguing about snape’s morality and think that writing the divine comedy is the same as self-insert fanfic think, because they will never create shit for anyone, you might. and you’ll have automatically done more than people who complain about everything but wouldn’t produce one single piece of fiction themselves and wouldn’t most likely waste ten minutes of their life researching the fiction they want to write.

tldr: if you want to write professionally, influence people and give the world good stories, don’t give a fuck about what tumblr says because it’s people who most likely will never read your books anyway unless you want to write the next YA saga that has the same six archetypes of characters in which then the only slightly problematic white cishet dude will be without further ado compared to sn/ape and everyone is going to get sorted into hogwarts houses and people will fight about that rather than giving a damn about whatever message you wanted to pass. don’t give a damn about tumblr and do your thing anon, no one deserves to have any perspective ruined because of this hellsite’s opinions on anything. ;) 

[nerdygaymormon]

Elders Quorum Lesson - Truth & the Plan by Elder Oaks

First, let me give kudos to the instructor. Several days beforehand he asked if I would share some thoughts on this talk with him. And he began the lesson by saying this is a sensitive topic and there are people who have strong feelings about it. 

I didn’t know what to say, I couldn’t ask that he leave out all the main points of the talk, so I didn’t respond to his request. 

What I wish I had asked is that when he introduced the lesson, that he mention this is not “us” versus “them.” LGBTQ people are part of this church and our ward. All should feel loved and welcomed and we should each commit to speak sensitively about this topic. 

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There was very much a split in comments between those saying this is the way it is and anything different or wishy-washy is going against God. And others who would say we need to love as Christ loved, view others as Christ views people, and leave judging to God.

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Worst comments from today: (my commentary in parentheses)

Changing the law isn’t going to make it go away. Changing the law may make some people happy for a short period of time until they become aware of the consequences and they’ll want to change those, too. (changing an unjust law also involves changing the consequences) 

A man told a story of soldiers in Vietnam & Korea who were charged with felonies for marijuana possession and shipped home, but today some states are legalizing marijuana. How are these men who have this lifelong record supposed to feel about it now being condoned? If it was wrong then, it’s wrong now. (perpetuating a wrong doesn’t make it right, perhaps a retroactive pardon of some sort should be considered) 

If somebody wants you to recognize somebody who is gay, liberal or homosexual, lesbian or whatever, have courage to stand up for what is right. Have courage enough to stand up for what God has told you and the Holy Ghost testifies to you that is right. (I’m sincerely curious if this man has earnestly studied this topic and asked the Holy Spirit to confirm that gays & liberals are in the wrong) 

I happen to know a brother who has a son who ended up to be gay. The parents did not raise the kid to be gay. And suddenly despite everything the church has given the family to raise the kid, the kid took a totally different route. (newsflash, his son was gay the whole time. Instead of thinking, “with all the church resources his parents had, how could he turn out gay?” ask “what was it like to be a gay child in this family where he didn’t feel safe enough to tell them until he moved out”)

From the beginning of this world I’ve never seen God say that I’m going to give you another man as a companion. I never saw that he ever said I’m going to give you another women as a companion. Whatever happens is because of you, you decided. If I want to become a gay, I don’t have to blame my wife, that’s my fault. (😂🤣😂, this guy really doesn’t get how it works)

A guy parked illegally in the handicap parking space may not know the law, but it’s still the law and the police officer will enforce it. (God is going to punish people who are gay or trans who have a different understanding? How is this just?)

Best comments from today: (my commentary in parentheses)

Recognize Jesus taught about love for all people, his love was outstretched more to those on the margins. (I testify this is still true today)  

I think the issue becomes when we as individuals interpret something and say it came from the Bible when it really didn’t come from the Bible. Who made the decision? God didn’t make the decision. We misinterpret and force that onto other people. (Particularly on LGBTQ topics, the Bible doesn’t say what a lot of people think it does) 

We are fortunate to be in a church that teaches that we don’t abandon our family. (Say it louder for the people in the back of the room!)

There’s no way that we, not having God’s vision of everything, can say this person is better than that person, that person is wrong. We have to love all and try to see them as God would see them because it is only in seeing in the way that God sees them that we have that love for them. As we seek to love as God, then we seek to serve as God. They may not have the same light (knowledge) as us, but for them that light may be sufficient. It is not our place to judge anyone and it is our place to love everyone. (💖 Also, maybe they have different light. Be their friend and listen to their stories, you may find you have things to learn)

We have to do more walking than talking. You can have knowledge and spew it out but it’s not going to touch their hearts. Jesus walked the earth and loved everyone. Start with love first, walk with them where they are, understand them. (chances are if you spend time with us that you’ll get to love your LGBTQ brothers & sisters and see things from our perspective) 

—————————————————————

I had intended to speak up in the meeting, but as those first comments were spoken, my social anxiety kicked in. I didn’t want to cause harsh attention to turn to me by saying, “hey, big fat gay guy here and that talk hurt me and made me feel like I am not welcome in this church because I am a distraction from its purpose as stated by Elder Oaks.”

Plus my dad was there. 😕 He usually attends another ward, but in my stake this was fast Sunday and the high council attend their home ward. My dad wishes he forced me to go to conversion therapy and is convinced I was molested or somebody pushed me into being gay. You know, he doesn’t understand. So with him there, I lost my courage to say anything. 

—————————————————————

I wish I didn’t attend EQ today, I felt awful as I walked out. I don’t think the way many in the room view LGBTQ people is how Heavenly Father sees us. I hope they aren’t judged as harshly as many seemed ready to judge people like me.

————————————————————— 

Partway into the lesson, the bishop pulled me out. A young man had asked if I would stand in the circle as he was ordained to a priesthood office. It was as though Heavenly Father rescued me. It was like God was saying, “here’s your place in my kingdom, you have an impact on these teens and they love you.” 

I think I missed the worst part of the comments & I’m glad for that. 

—————————————————————

Just an observation, many people vehemently condemn sins they can’t commit, like straight people attacking gay marriage, or men denouncing abortion? I think it maximizes feelings of superiority and minimizes the uncomfortable feelings that come with humble introspection.   

[gemma-lemma]

Cloudy Days - JJ Maybank x Male OC

Chapter 2.2 – JJ loves the rooster.

Parker was seated comfortably in the chair behind Kiara, braiding and styling her hair like a three-year-old, while JJ and John B told her and Pope about the Ms. Lana incident.

“And all we hear is just ‘Bam! Bam! Bam!’” JJ explained very vividly, walking up and down the porch.

Parker, having lived through it, didn’t pay much attention to what the blond boy was saying. He only looked up from the crooked braid when JJ stood in front of Kiara and shook the paint out of his hair.

“That’s dandruff, that’s disgusting.” She murmured and tried to get away from him, which lead to her just pushing further into Parker.

“Uff, calm down Kiki. You’re gonna squish me.” Parker huffed and looked up to seeing JJ crack a devious grin at him.

“That’s paint.” JJ corrected Kiara. “At that point, I’m just like…I’m waiting for death. And Parker almost had another panic attack.”

At that he shot him a dark scowl, but he couldn’t hold it for long because Kiara turned around to him worriedly. “What do you mean another? You’ve had panic attacks since you got here?”

“No, I didn’t. I just got wobbly knees when we were shot at, that’s all. And I already told JJ at Ms. Lana’s house that I was angry, not scared.” He tried to reassure her but Kiara didn’t buy it.

“No, no. You got almost sick when Shoupe found us out in the marsh. That wasn’t just wobbly knees.”

“Who’s Shoupe?” He tried to distract not very successfully.

“One of the cops on the boat. Parker, are you alright?”

“Yes, Kiara, I am.”

“No! No, you’re not.” JJ corrected almost desperately. Parker couldn’t grasp where that new tone was coming from, but he looked at JJ even darker than before. “You’re obviously not, and it’s dangerous. What if there’s no one there to help you out next time?”

“Keep your fucking nose out of my stuff, alright?” Parker growled so viciously that Kiara scooted away from him a few centimetres.

“Hey, calm down. JJ’s just tryna help.” John B tried to mediate.

“Nobody asked him to.” Parker replied and he and JJ proceeded to glare at each other.

“Okay, so you saw the guys that shot at us?” Pope tried to get back to the topic. Parker had lost any interest in the conversation and just re-braided Kiara’s hair when JJ turned away to answer.

When they started talking about Pablo Escobar square groupers and King Pin movies he climbed out of the seat and went inside to help himself to a beer. The air outside smelled sweet because of JJ’s JUUL and he couldn’t bear it at the moment.

With a sigh he opened the can and looked around the living room. On the sofa he slept on he saw his book and made a mental note to pick up reading it again the next time he got a couple of free minutes.

He looked towards the door when JJ’s voice suddenly vanished. Just a couple of seconds later John B entered, the others trailing after him. “…always kept the office locked because he was worried about his competitors stealing his Royal Merchant research.” The Routledge boy mumbled and walked past Parker towards a locked door.

Parker shot a questioning look at Pope, who was standing right beside him. “What’s a Royal Merchant?”

“A ship that went down with a bunch of gold somewhere around here. Nobody’s been able to find the gold yet.”

“Ah.”

“We used to laugh at him all the time like he was actually gonna find it.” John B said and looked for the keys. “But now that he’s gone I’ve just kinda – I left it as he kept it.”

“Yeah, for when he gets back.” Kiara was quick to encourage, and Parker went to stand beside her.

When John B opened the door, everyone looked around the office curiously. It was packed with all kinds of books and pictures and folders, and quite messy too.

“I’ve slept over here like 600 times, and I’ve never seen this door opened.” Pope said and Kiara hummed in agreeing.

John B laid a pin board on a stack of books on a table right in the middle of the room and pointed at a picture. “Here, look. This is the original owner, right here.” Intrigued by the thought of finding out something more about his own family history as well Parker scooted closer.

“Okay. Robert Q. Routledge, 1880 to 1920.” Kiara read aloud. “There’s the lucky compass, right there.”

“Actually, uhm, he was shot after he bought it.” John B explained, then went on. “Then the compass was shipped back to Henry, who was killed in a crop-dusting accident when he had the compass. After he died, the compass was given to Stephen. Stephen had the compass with him when he died in Vietnam.”

“Let me guess, he died in action, right?” JJ interrupted.

“Sort of. Uh, actually he was killed by a banana truck. In country.” John B said and Parker stifled a laugh. “Anyways, after that Stephen passed the compass down to him, my dad.” John pointed at a picture of his dad and what must have been himself as a little boy.

“Hm, sounds like there’s a reoccurring theme here.” JJ put in.

“Yeah, uhm, you have a death compass.” Pope agreed, and John B tried to argue that he had not.

“Really, dude, get rid of it. It’s cursed, and it’s made its way back to you.” JJ said, and Parker made a mental note to throw that thing in the ocean should it ever be passed on to him.

“Look, my father used to talk about this compartment in here. Soldiers used it to hide secret messages.” He explained, sat down and started to try and pry it open.

When he finally got the lid off, a carving appeared. “What’s that?” Kiara asked.

“That wasn’t there before.” JB said in awe, and then looked up at his friends. “This is my dad’s handwriting.”

Parker leaned over to get a better look at the carving, too, when Pope asked about how he would know that. “Because he does these weird R’s.” Parker answered in his cousin’s stead. “I do them the same way, because he taught me when I came over last time.”

“Can I see it?” JJ asked and tried to decipher the word. “Red- no Rout- wait, that’s definitely an A.”

“It says Redfield.” Kiara interrupted.

“Well, what’s Redfield?” Parker asked and looked around.

“Besides the most common name in the county?” Pope answered, and John B suggested that it might be a clue. A clue, Parker thought, and turned his attention towards the rest of the room. If it was a clue, someone would have to decipher it, and he wasn’t really a deciphering type of guy.

He kept on studying the books and papers lying around in a gorgeous mess all over the place while the others were talking about codes and anagrams.

“How can you concentrate with that thing constantly crowing at you?” Pope’s voice reached his ears at some point, and Parker looked up in confusion. What thing?

“JJ loves the rooster.” John B defended, and only then did Parker take in the crowing of the animal that came from the outside. How could he have not noticed until now?

“I love the rooster.” Kiara agreed and Parker shot them an amused look. JJ winked in response.

Parker turned away and looked outside the window just in time to see a black jeep pulling up in front of the house. Feeling his blood run cold, he just stared outside and tried to get his friends’ attention with a croaky voice. “Guys.”

They didn’t seem to hear him, so he tried it with more force this time. “Guys! Somebody’s here!”

Finally, they looked at him, and then right past him out of the window.  Two men got out of the van and started walking towards the house.

“Guys, guys, is that them?” Kiara asked worriedly.

“No, no, no.” John B panicked, and JJ ran a hand through his hair.

“John B, I told you.” JJ mumbled. “Why does it always-“

Parker grabbed his shoulders and turned the two of them around. “JJ, hey. Look at me.” He slammed the frightened boy harder against the wall than planned. “Where’s the gun?”

“Gun? I, uh, I can’t-“ He stuttered and closed his eyes trying hardly to remember.

“Now you don’t have the gun, the one time we need the gun?” Kiara asked, and from the sound of her voice she was close to tears. Parker cursed silently and grabbed JJ tighter.

“It was in my backpack, my backpack, and then-“

“Your backpack’s on the porch.” Parker growled, and suddenly JJ opened his eyes.

“Yeah, mine is, but yours is in the bathroom right across.” At the confused look on Parker’s face JJ grabbed his wrists. His face lightened up in hope. “You got a gun in there, don’t you?”

Parker frowned, but then remembered when JJ confronted him about his bandage and money right before Agatha. He wanted to facepalm.

“You have a gun, too?” Pope asked incredulously.

“That was a bluff, goddammit. I didn’t bring a gun here, just a real lot of money, that I needed you to stay away from. Go get your damn backpack!” He growled and JJ started out the door.

He quickly turned around, though, slipping and almost falling, when a booming voice yelled: “John Routledge!”

“Guys!” Kiara wailed, and Parker hushed JJ back into the room, slamming the door behind him and fidgeting for the key to turn around.

Holding their breaths, Parker and JJ pressed their ears to the door and listened for anything that could give something about the men away.

“They’re on the front porch, guys!” JJ whispered, and Parker nodded sternly. Yeah, front porch, and by the slamming sound that followed JJ’s words probably even already inside the house. The only escape route left were the windows.

“Where is the compass?” One of the men yelled. “Where you at, boy?” According to the noise that came from the other side of the door, those two were wreaking havoc at the Château.

“We gotta leave!” Pope stated desperately and Parker motioned towards the windows.

“Windows, through the damn windows and don’t you dare make a sound!” He commanded and earned a few startled looks for the sudden change in mood. And yeah, maybe Parker had been a wreck since Billy’s death, but the first time he ever shot a gun at someone was to protect his friends. So, if to protect his friends now he had to shove the panic that was rising from the depth of his chest so far back down that his racist as fuck grandfather Robert would choke on it in hell, then so be it. “Now!”

JJ and Pope rushed towards the windows, trying to pry one open, while Parker turned Big John’s office upside down on the look for something that could be used as a weapon.

“What is taking so long?” Kiara asked when the windows didn’t budge.

“They won’t open, they’re painted shut, okay?” JJ pressed, while one of the men yelled that he would check the kitchen.

Parker shot a quick look at John B, who was pressed against the door in order to block it, then finally found a letter opener. He gave it to Kiara and turned her back around toward the window by the shoulders. “Here, that should help.”

“Where the hell is that damn compass?” Yelled one, and the other answered: “I’ll check the back rooms.”

While Kiara tried to cut the paint open, JJ and Pope went to stand beside John B to help and block the door. Parker on the other hand kept looking for weapon material, but all he found was an iron statue of a Greek looking woman about as tall as a beer bottle. That kind of crap might have been useful in a direct fight, but right now it was just junk.

The man started banging on the door. “You better not be in there!” He growled and kicked the wood so hard that it splintered. Parker rushed towards Kiara and helped her cut the last bit, before taking the opener out of her hands and shoving her through the window. “To the chicken scoop!”

When she started running, he turned around and ushered the guys out, too. JJ, who went last, waited out for him and practically dragged him towards the scoop. He almost stumbled when a shot rang out, but JJ held his arm in an iron grip.

They crawled in there just in time for the man to break the door open.

While John B tried to get a look at what the men were doing, Parker tried to calm Kiara down by hugging her tightly to his chest. The damn rooster, though, just didn’t want to shut up.

“Do something, Pope. Just shut him up!” JJ snapped, but Pope was just as clueless as him.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know, pet it or something! Talk to it, I don’t know.” Kiara whimpered, and Parker hugged her tighter. She grabbed the fabric of his shirt tightly.

John B turned around and pressed his back against the wall as the rooster began flapping around.

“You do something!” Pope whispered frantically, and JJ jumped after the rooster and caught it in the air. Parker’s heart skipped a beat, and he pressed Kiara’s head into his chest, so she didn’t have to see what JJ was doing.

When he snatched the animal’s neck, a shudder ran down Parker’s spine. He watched in worry as the expression in JJ’s eyes changed, and softly let go of Kiara. Out of the corner of his eye he saw John B grabbing her hand, but he wasn’t too focused on it. Faintly he could hear the men yelling something and getting into their car, but for now he just focused on gently taking the dead animal out of JJ’s hands and laying it aside.

He put a hand on his shoulder and searched for his eyes. “Hey, JJ. It’s okay, alright? It’s okay.” He whispered, and though he still couldn’t look him in the eyes, JJ nodded.

When the car had finally pulled away, the only sound left was Kiara’s soft sobbing.