#these fans are the equivalent of “I could fight a bear” men

[tetheredbysin]

the irony of people who have never sat in a single-seater calling F1 drivers with 10+ years worth of experience "shit drivers" is truly the peak example of human arrogance.

oh he's having a bad season? honey, he could drive blindfolded and get to the finish line. you won't make it out of the garage.

[reanimatedcourier]

How to Write Indigenous Characters Without Looking like a Jackass:

Update as of December 26th, 2020: I have added a couple new sections about naming and legal terms, as well as a bit of reading on the Cherokee Princess phenomenon.

Boozhoo (hello) Fallout fandom! I'm a card-carrying Anishinaabe delivering this rough guide about writing Indigenous characters because wow, do I see a lot of shit.

Let's get something out of the way first: Fallout's portrayal of Indigenous people is racist. From a vague definition of "tribal" to the claims of them being "savage" and "uncivilized" mirror real-world stereotypes used to dehumanize us. Fallout New Vegas' narrated intro has Ron Perlman saying Mr. House "rehabilitated" tribals to create New Vegas' Three Families. You know. Rehabilitate. As if we are animals. Top it off with an erasure of Indigenous people in the American Southwest and no real tribe names, and you've got some pretty shitty representation. The absence of Native American as a race option in the GECK isn't too great, given that two Native characters are marked "Caucasian" despite being brown. Butch Deloria is a pretty well-known example of this effect. (Addendum: Indigenous people can have any mix of dominant and recessive traits, as well as present different phenotypes. What bothers me is it doesn't accommodate us or mixed people, which is another post entirely.)

As a precautionary warning: this post and the sources linked will discuss racism and genocide. There will also be discussion of multiple kinds of abuse.

Now, your best approach will be to pick a nation or tribe and research them. However, what follows will be general references.

Terms that may come up in your research include Aboriginal/Native Canadian, American Indian/Native American, Inuit, Métis, and Mestizo. The latter two refer to cultural groups created after the discovery of the so-called New World. (Addendum made September 5th, 2020: Mestizo has negative connotations and originally meant "half breed" so stick with referring to your mixed Latine and Indigenous characters as mixed Indigenous or simply by the name of their people [Maya, Nahua].)

As a note, not every mixed person is Métis or Mestizo. If you are, say, Serbian and Anishinaabe, you would be mixed, but not Métis (the big M is important here, as it refers to a specific culture). Even the most liberal definition caps off at French and British ancestry alongside Indigenous (some say Scottish and English). Mestizo works the same, since it refers to descendants of Spanish conquistadors/settlers and Indigenous people.

Trouble figuring out whose land is where? No problem, check out this map.

Drawing

Don't draw us with red skin. It's offensive and stereotypical.

Tutorial for Native Skintones

Tutorial for Mixed Native Skintones

Why Many Natives Have Long Hair (this would technically fit better under another category, but give your Native men long hair!)

If You're Including Traditional Wear, Research! It's Out There

Languages

Remember, there are a variety of languages spoken by Indigenous people today. No two tribes will speak the same language, though there are some that are close and may have loan words from each other (Cree and Anishinaabemowin come to mind). Make sure your Diné (you may know them as Navajo) character doesn't start dropping Cree words.

Here's a Site With a Map and Voice Clips

Here's an Extensive List of Amerindian Languages

Keep in mind there are some sounds that have no direct English equivalents. But while we're at it, remember a lot of us speak English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The languages of the countries that colonized us.

Words in Amerindian languages tend to be longer than English ones and are in the format of prefix + verb + suffix to get concepts across. Gaawiin miskwaasinoon is a complete sentence in Anishinaabemowin, for example (it is not red).

Names

Surprisingly, we don't have names like Passing Dawn or Two-Bears-High-Fiving in real life. A lot of us have, for lack of better phrasing, white people names. We may have family traditions of passing a name down from generation to generation (I am the fourth person in my maternal line to have my middle name), but not everyone is going to do that. If you do opt for a name from a specific tribe, make sure you haven't chosen a last name from another tribe.

Baby name sites aren't reliable, because most of the names on there will be made up by people who aren't Indigenous. That site does list some notable exceptions and debunks misconceptions.

Here's a list of last names from the American census.

Indian Names

You may also hear "spirit names" because that's what they are for. You know the sort of mystical nature-related name getting slapped on an Indigenous character? Let's dive into that for a moment.

The concept of a spirit name seems to have gotten mistranslated at some point in time. It is the name Creator calls you throughout all your time both here and in the spirit world. These names are given (note the word usage) to you in a ceremony performed by an elder. This is not done lightly.

A lot of imitations of this end up sounding strange because they don't follow traditional guidelines. (I realize this has spread out of the original circle, but Fallout fans may recall other characters in Honest Hearts and mods that do this. They have really weird and racist results.)

If you're not Indigenous: don't try this. You will be wrong.

Legal Terms

Now, sometimes the legal term (or terms) for a tribe may not be what they refer to themselves as. A really great example of this would be the Oceti Sakowin and "Sioux". How did that happen, you might be wondering. Smoky Mountain News has an article about this word and others, including the history of these terms.

For the most accurate information, you are best off having your character refer to themselves by the name their nation uses outside of legislation. A band name would be pretty good for this (Oglala Lakota, for example). I personally refer to myself by my band.

Cowboys

And something the Fallout New Vegas fans might be interested in, cowboys! Here's a link to a post with several books about Black and Indigenous cowboys in the Wild West.

Representation: Stereotypes and Critical Thought

Now, you'll need to think critically about why you want to write your Indigenous character a certain way. Here is a comprehensive post about stereotypes versus nuance.

Familiarize yourself with tropes. The Magical Indian is a pretty prominent one, with lots of shaman-type characters in movies and television shows. This post touches on its sister tropes (The Magical Asian and The Magical Negro), but is primarily about the latter.

Say you want to write an Indigenous woman. Awesome! Characters I love to see. Just make sure you're aware of the stereotypes surrounding her and other Women of Color.

Word to the wise: do not make your Indigenous character an alcoholic. "What, so they can't even drink?" You might be asking. That is not what I'm saying. There is a pervasive stereotype about Drunk Indians, painting a reaction to trauma as an inherent genetic failing, as stated in this piece about Indigenous social worker Jessica Elm's research. The same goes for drugs. Ellen Deloria is an example of this stereotype.

Familiarize yourself with and avoid the Noble Savage trope. This was used to dehumanize us and paint us as "childlike" for the sake of a plot device. It unfortunately persists today.

Casinos are one of the few ways for tribes to make money so they can build homes and maintain roads. However, some are planning on diversifying into other business ventures.

There's a stereotype where we all live off government handouts. Buddy, some of these long-term boil water advisories have been in place for over twenty years. The funding allocated to us as a percentage is 0.39%: less than half a percent to fight the coronavirus. They don't give us money.

"But what about people claiming to be descended from a Cherokee princess?" Cherokee don't and never had anything resembling princesses. White southerners made that up prior to the Civil War. As the article mentions, they fancied themselves "defending their lands as the Indians did".

Also, don't make your Indigenous character a cannibal. Cannibalism is a serious taboo in a lot of our cultures, particularly northern ones.

Our lands are not cursed. We don't have a litany of curses to cast on white people in found footage films. Seriously. We have better things to be doing. Why on earth would our ancestors be haunting you when they could be with their families? Very egotistical assumption.

Indigenous Ties and Blood Quantum

Blood quantum is a colonial system that was initially designed to "breed out the Indian" in people. To dilute our bloodlines until we assimilated properly into white society. NPR has an article on it here.

However, this isn't how a vast majority of us define our identities. What makes us Indigenous is our connections (or reconnection) to our families, tribes, bands, clans, and communities.

Blood quantum has also historically been used to exclude Black Natives from tribal enrollment, given that it was first based on appearance. So, if you looked Black and not the image of "Indian" the white census taker had in his brain, you were excluded and so were your descendants.

Here are two tumblrs that talk about Black Indigenous issues and their perspectives. They also talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia.

However, if you aren't Indigenous, don't bring up blood quantum. Don't. This is an issue you should not be speaking about.

Cherokee Princess Myth

"Princess" was not a real position in any tribe. The European idea of monarchy did not suddenly manifest somewhere else. The closest probable approximation may have been the daughter of a chief or other politically prominent person. But princess? No.

Here is an article talking about possible origins of this myth. Several things are of note here: women from other tribes may have bee shoved under this label and the idea of a "Cherokee Princess" had been brought up to explain the sudden appearance of a brown-skinned (read: half Black) family member.

For a somewhat more in depth discussion of why, specifically, this myth gets touted around so often, Timeline has this piece.

Religion

Our religions are closed. We are not going to tell you how we worship. Mostly because every little bit we choose to share gets appropriated. Smudging is the most recent example. If you aren't Indigenous, that's smoke cleansing. Smudging is done in a specific way with ceremonies and prayers.

Now, a lot of us were forcibly converted. Every residential school was run by Christians. So plenty of us are Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, Lutheran, etc. Catholicism in Latin America also has influence from the Indigenous religions in that region.

Having your Indigenous character pray or carry rosaries wouldn't be a bad thing, if that religion was important to them. Even if they are atheist, if they lived outside of a reserve or other Indigenous communities, they might have Christian influences due to its domination of the Western world.

Settler Colonialism and the White Savior Trope

Now we've come to our most painful section yet. Fallout unintentionally has an excellent agent of settler-colonialism, in particular the Western Christian European variety, in Caesar's Legion and Joshua Graham.

(Addendum: Honest Hearts is extremely offensive in its portrayal of Indigenous people, and egregiously shows a white man needing to "civilize" tribals and having to teach them basic skills. These skills include cooking, finding safe water, and defending themselves from other tribes.)

Before we dive in, here is a post explaining the concept of cultural Christianity, if you are unfamiliar with it.

We also need to familiarize ourselves with The White Man's Burden. While the poem was written regarding the American-Philippine war, it still captures the attitudes toward Indigenous folks all over the world at the time.

As this article in Teen Vogue points out, white people like to believe they need to save People of Color. You don't need to. People of Color can save themselves.

Now, cultural Christianity isn't alone on this side of the pond. Writer Teju Cole authored a piece on the White Savior Industrial Complex to describe mission trips undertaken by white missionaries to Africa to feed their egos.

Colonialism has always been about the acquisition of wealth. To share a quote from this paper about the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples: "Negatively, [settler colonialism] strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some of them are more controversial in genocide studies than others." (Positive, here, is referring to "benefits" for the colonizers. Indigenous people don't consider colonization beneficial.)

An example of a non-benefit, the Church Rock disaster had Diné children playing in radioactive water so the company involved could avoid bad publicity.

Moving on, don't sterilize your Indigenous people. Sterilization, particularly when it is done without consent, has long been used as a tool by the white system to prevent "undesirables" (read, People of Color and disabled people) from having children. Somehow, as of 2018, it wasn't officially considered a crime.

The goal of colonization was to eliminate us entirely. Millions died because of exposure to European diseases. Settlers used to and still do separate our children from us for reasons so small as having a dirty dish in the sink. You read that right, a single dirty dish in your kitchen sink was enough to get your children taken and adopted out to white families. This information was told to me by an Indigenous social work student whose name I will keep anonymous.

It wasn't until recently they made amendments to the Indian Act that wouldn't automatically render Indigenous women non-status if they married someone not Indigenous. It also took much too long for Indigenous families to take priority in child placement over white ones. Canada used to adopt Indigenous out to white American families. The source for that statement is further down, but adoption has been used as a tool to destroy cultures.

I am also begging you to cast aside whatever colonialist systems have told you about us. We are alive. People with a past, not people of the past, which was wonderfully said here by Frank Waln.

Topics to Avoid if You Aren't Indigenous

Child Separation. Just don't. We deserve to remain with our families and our communities. Let us stay together and be happy that way.

Assimilation schools. Do not bring up a tool for cultural genocide that has left lasting trauma in our communities.

W/ndigos. I don't care that they're in Fallout 76. They shouldn't be. Besides, you never get them right anyway.

Sk/nwalkers. Absolutely do not. Diné stories are not your playthings either.

I've already talked about drugs and alcohol. Do your research with compassion and empathy in mind. Indigenous people have a lot of pain and generational trauma. You will need to be extremely careful having your Indigenous characters use drugs and alcohol. If your character can be reduced to their (possible) substance abuse issues, you need to step back and rework it. As mentioned in Jessica Elm's research, remember that it isn't inherent to us.

For our final note: remember that we're complex, autonomous human beings. Don't use our deaths to further the stories of your white characters. Don't reduce us to some childlike thing that needs to be raised and civilized by white characters. We interact with society a little differently than you do, but we interact nonetheless.

Meegwetch (thank you) for reading! Remember to do your research and portray us well, but also back off when you are told by an Indigenous person.

This may be updated in the future, it depends on what information I come across or, if other Indigenous people are so inclined, what is added to this post.

[scrawnytreedemon]

Victor Frankenstein and Frustration: a Not-Essay, because I can’t structure for shit.

Alright, I’ll try to keep it as clean and concise as I can, but at the end of the day this is a sorta-heat-in-the-moment thing I’m writing while all the ideas and motivation are in me yet. I will be jumping around alot of topics, as this covers alot of ground, but I can’t say I’ll do it with grace: for this, I apologise.

I’ve noticed a trend in online lit fandom, not just on Tumblr, to condense Victor’s character to something roughly following “arrogant, ineffectual and selfish weenie who failed horribly at parenting, who ought not to be taken seriously in any significant way, largely in-due to his constant whining“ --In other words, a right twat.

And here’s the thing: largely, I agree.

However, what I take issue with, I suppose, is largely how this is all framed.

See, fandom has a tendency to sort characters into boxes, and then pick favourites or bête noires from that selection; this is helpful for the largely memetic(as in, shareable,) nature of online spaces; but where I think this thinking falls short is that it tends to divide casts into More Good or More Evil, with little room for nuance.

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Victor Frankenstein, by all accounts, is an incredibly frustrating character to witness; he gets way in over his head, isolates himself from his loved ones, leaving them worried, deems those ambitions failed, hides from them, then when shit starts hitting the fan, he takes initial actions to try and mitigate the consequence, hits a roadblock, either stops their or chooses an even worse option, someone else gets hurt, he whines, rinse and repeat until the final act of the book, as the stakes get higher and higher and his mental state deteriorates more, and more, and more. If you look at this entirely from an outsiders’ perspective, as you, the audience, being subjected to his moaning time and time again, it can wear on you and your sympathies-- Needless to say, I Get It™.

I think, however, it needs be remarked that Victor is also just some guy. 

What I feel is often missed, is that even before Victor goes to university, he has just suffered the loss of his mother, with little time to recover, and that all of this is being told in hindsight, on his deathbed.

When Victor took on, all by himself, at twenty-two years old, not even letting anyone else know what he was up to, the monumental task of creating life, and then finding that life horribly botched, he did not have the perspective that what he created was equivalent to a newborn child-- For all he knew, he might have animated an actual demon. It isn’t until two years later, after the death of his little brother at the hands of said demon, the he’s even remotely made aware of this.

Victor had worn himself out over the course of several months, physically and mentally, to this one task. He was not equipped to deal witht he consequences. I do not say this to downplay the weight of his actions, or the horrible mess of events that come afterwards, but to state perspective. Victor does not have the hindsight we have at the time of this act. I cannot stress this enough. As much as I enjoy Deadbeat Dad Vick jokes, I get the feeling many people actually view the story from this lens, and hold Victor up to that standard.

Then there’s the trial of Justine: a horrible, useless, unneeded and avoidable affair that ends in even more senseless death. This is where alot of people’s sympathy for Victor runs out-- For more than understandable reasons. He failed to act accordingly, to share the information he had, deeming it to be either dismissed instantly or for himself to be put under scrutiny; it’s clear he’s passionate about Justine’s innocence, but he cannot push himself past his fear and doubt, and ultimately, it ends in her death.

It is a horrible, horrible moment, and one that cements the tone of the story from there on out.

These are two key events that largely colour this image of Victor so prevelant online; and it certainly doesn’t help, what with fandom being almost aggressively left-leaning at times, that Victor comes from a place of privilege; he is almost tailor-made to push all the buttons of fandom sensitivities.

Let me elaborate.

A key feature of Victor’s character is his complete and utter inability to ask for help; no matter how dire the situation. Victor feels, that, despite and even because of his incompetence, that it is his cross and his cross alone to bear. Any inolvement from others, such as Clerval when he heads to England, is hesitant and highly discouraged, even when he wants nothing more than to partake in the company of his loved ones, after all he’s been through. While it is also heavily coloured by the anguished sentiment that borders on self-absorption so much of the time, I think it is also worthy to examine this too.

Victor’s tendency to indulge in self-pity and self-loathing is nigh, if not entirely, all-consuming; it pervades the narrative to a painful degree, particularly as it comes from his recollections; it is often exhausting to read through, and nigh unbearable if you already hold a disdane from his previous actions; but here’s the thing I think most people miss,

Victor is depressed.

I don’t mean “ooh, he’s so sad, leave him alone 🥺,“ I mean the guy is fucking depressed, stuck in a constant cycle of attempting to make do but failing, hating himself even more, letting it consume him because he at once feels like he deserves to be consumed and it’s the only thing he can do then and there to soothe to pain as shit gets worse and worse.

Victor Frankenstein’s internal monolgue is a prime example of deep-seated, far-gone depression, and I say this because I myself have experienced and do experience this. Depression is fucking soul-sucking, man; it turns you in on yourself, makes you feel entirely undeserving of love and compassion, leaves you feeling like you must, have to, deal with this entirely by yourself because it is your cross to bear.

Depression is so often self-flagellating and pointless, leaving the subject drained and often largely unable to experience the world outside their own miserable little bubble.

Victor is so wrapped up in this soul-sucking guilt, attempting to fight his own ineffectuality and in doing so only furthering his own ineffectuality, refusing to ask for help, that he ends up putting the ones he’s trying to protect in further danger as he tries to scramble a hodge-podge solution to the problem he created and couldn’t have even begun to forsee its consequences at twenty-two years old. It is a painful, painful example of how if only he reached out, if only he told someone, was honest, all of this could have been avoided, or at least mitigated.

And I think that’s the thing with Victor.

He’s a kind of banal evil-- If such continuous stumbling can even be considered so --He is an example of every day self-isolation and refusal to let anyone else in ballooning to such a degree it ends in distaster.

People are far, far more willing to forgive Adam for his transgressions-- And I say this as someone far more sympathetic to his plight, what with the absolute abandonment he faced at the hands of humanity --Despite their far more horrific consequences; in many ways, they’re attributed to Victor’s failing; which isn’t entirely untrue,

But I have to wonder, if alot of this also comes down to the fact that Victor’s wrongdoings are so human; leaving someone in your care behind; not speaking up in cases of injustice; being self-involved; again, the constant whining. In a way, it’s the sentiment that in stories a horrible person is often far more bearable than an annoying one.

That doesn’t even begin to touch on how much of the bemoaning might largely be and often is directly post-hoc regret colouring all his previous actions. This, above all else, is a cautionary tale to a fellow idealist in the hopes that Robert Walton doesn’t Fuck Up the way he did. Victor stresses his regret and his failings and his misery time and time again because he wants to protect Robert from a similar fate; a fate that ultimately ends in his death.

Victor Frankenstein is a study in frustration; in audience frustration, self-frustration, narrative frustration; it seeps into every corner of the story.

I am not trying to defend Victor Frankenstein as a person; he is flawed; and he’s meant to be flawed. Victor, at the end of the day, is a deconstruction of the Byronic hero-- Of Great and Powerful Men on the Fronteers of History™-- And most importantly, I think, a deconstruction he himself undergoes. Victor eventually alerts someone, a Genevan magistrate, is doubted just as he feared, and then runs off to take revenge into his own hands.

It takes the death of Elizabeth Lavenza to do so.

Victor is a flawed, miserable man, but not an evil one. That doesn’t mean he deserved to have his life crumble around him.

He could have done better. Should have done better.

And he knows this.

His entire arc is about how he knows this.

Victor dies knowing this.

Him being unlikable doesn’t make him a bad character. Him being unlikable is part of the character; and in a meaningful way.

God, I don’t know how to end this. I’ll probably come back and edit this many, many times.

I guess I’m just tired of people flattening characters just because they’re not particularly endearing.

[aion-rsa]

Marvel’s Loki Episode 5: MCU Easter Eggs and References

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains Loki episode 5 spoilers.

Marvel’s Loki episode 5 is a big one. Yes, we know…last week felt like that. And the one before it, too. But this one really IS, with the entire episode taking place (as DoG’s Kayti Burt put it) on top of a literal “trash pile of MCU and Marvel Comics Easter eggs.”

With that in mind, let’s have some fun with all the incredible Marvel references they managed to sneak into Loki episode 5.

Journey Into Mystery

You probably already know this, but Journey Into Mystery was the book that first introduced the Marvel Comics version of Thor, with Loki following shortly after. The title eventually was just renamed Thor since the Asgardians had become the primary focus of the book for years by that point. However, Journey Into Mystery was revived a few years back, with its primary focus being on the adventures of Kid Loki this time around.

Thanos Copter

The Lokis pass a helicopter with “THANOS” on the side. This is a reference to Spidey Super Stories #39 from 1979. The all-ages comic featured a story of Spider-Man and the Cat (Hellcat) taking on Thanos, who was on the hunt for the Cosmic Cube. He flew around New York City in his own helicopter with his name on the side. The reference comes up as a joke here and there, including an issue of Deadpool. Even Thanos’ giant two-sided blade weapon from Avengers: Endgame has been considered by many to be a sly reference to the Thanos Copter.

Ecto-Cooler

While the Lokis are all drinking wine, Kid Loki is shown drinking Hi-C Ecto Cooler. The Slimer-based citrus drink was a tie-in to The Real Ghostbusters cartoon of the 1980s and lasted into 2001 due to its popularity. Afterwards, it became a fondly-remembered relic to time. Ecto Cooler made a brief return in 2016 to coincide with the Ghostbusters reboot. Sadly, there’s no news of it coming back for the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife movie.

Speaking of Kid Loki…

Kid Loki

Kid Loki seems to be wielding a flaming sword, which looks an awful lot like Laevateinn, the sword he wielded in the Loki: Agent of Asgard comics.

Polybius

In the background of the Lokis’ lair, we see a Polybius arcade machine. Polybius is a long-running urban legend. Supposedly, back in 1981, an arcade machine was set up in Portland, Oregon, watched over by various men in black. The game was so addicting that it caused fights to break out and horrible side-effects to its players. We wrote more about the decades-old mystery of Polybius right here.

Pretty sure there’s an old Williams Space Pinball machine in there, too but that’s not as wild as Polybius.

The Void

Fittingly, the realm where all the pruned victims end up is called the Void. In the comics, the Void is a dark, inexplicable, and possibly biblical entity that acts as the evil side to the Sentry. During the storyline Siege, the Void murdered Loki, which facilitated his rebirth as Kid Loki.

Alioth

Alioth first appeared in Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective #1, the same 1993 comic that also introduced Ravonna Renslayer to the world…and one that features Kang as its central villain. Hmmmm…

Oh, and Alioth was co-created by Mobius M. Mobius inspiration/model Mark Gruenwald, who gets another shout later in the episode.

Vote Loki

The “politician Loki” who we see leading (inasumuch as they can/want to be led) the loose coalition of Variant Lokis is modeled almost exactly on the version of Loki from Marvel’s Vote Loki story by Christopher Hastings, Langdon Foss, and Paul McCaffery. In it, Loki ends up running for President, with his ridiculous campaign built on the “honest” deception of openly lying to the American people inadvertently aided by a credulous news media. It’s a good read and you should check it out.

This episode also engages in the old MCU/Star Wars tradition of someone getting a hand cut off…in this case it’s our pal, “Vote Loki.”

Frog Thor

A frog resembling Thor is shown in a jar labeled “T365.” Wouldn’t you know it, Thor #365 is the issue where Loki transforms Thor into a frog. Yes, it was a whole thing. Walt Simonson’s run on the Thor comics is really spectacular.

“Frog Thor” also got a mention in Thor: Ragnarok, during the “play within the movie” seen as “Loki” apologized to “Thor” for turning him into a frog.

You know, there’s even an independent wrestler with a Thor Frog gimmick. Life is beautiful sometimes.

Classic Loki

So it appears that Classic Loki is basically what would have happened if “our” Loki survived the opening of Avengers: Infinity War, which he did by allowing Thanos to kill a duplicate while he disguised himself as some debris. Classic Loki went into hiding and developed a taste for brighter greens and yellows, and aged into Richard E. Grant, before he was pruned by the TVA and found himself here in the Void.

Classic Loki’s line about “the god of outcasts” comes from 2019’s Loki #5, by Daniel Kibblesmith and Andy McDonald:

“I am Loki. God of outcasts. They see themselves in me. And I in them. All of us, alone together. It’s why my stories always end with someone trying to put me in a box. And begin with my spectacular escape.”

Later in the episode, Classic Loki and Kid Loki literally “exit stage right,” in what feels like a very deliberately “stagey” moment that plays on the Shakespearean overtones of all of this.

The Living Tribunal

On the ground in the Void there’s a large severed head…and it’s that of The Living Tribunal, a cosmic entity created by Stan Lee and Marie Severin back in 1967. The presence of a Living Tribunal (even one who is dead at this present time), whose entire purpose for being is predicated on the existence of a multiverse, means that the TVA is trying very hard to cut all ties and any evidence of the fact that the multiverse is already out there.

U.S.S. Eldridge

The USS Eldridge was a real Cannon-class destroyer in the U.S. Navy in use from 1943 to 1992. It was supposedly sold for scrap after it was decommissioned but Loki posits that perhaps it was an unwanted Variant in the Sacred Timeline. Perhaps this is because the ship was rumored to be subjected to the “Philadelphia Experiment” that was supposed to render it invisible to the human eye. The story is sadly probably a hoax.

There’s a not exactly great 1984 movie called The Philadelphia Experiment which adds time travel to the equation, making this little callback even more Loki appropriate.

Is That Stan Lee?

At about 9:38 there’s a mural in the TVA headquarters. On the right there’s a guy in prescription shades, with a familiar moustache and salt-and-pepper hair. We’re not saying that’s Stan Lee, but…

The Castle

Yes, we know, that ominous castle sure looks like Doctor Doom’s  home of Doomstadt, but…it’s probably not (or is it?). More likely, this is Castle Limbo, home of Kang the Conqueror (or…is it?).

We unpacked these possibilities some more here.

The Music

The “heroic Loki” theme at the end sounds like it’s about to break into Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Speaking of, the regular Loki theme is very similar to the part of the Delfonics “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love)” that was sampled for Missy Elliott’s “Sock It To Me.” The original (also sampled for the Fugees’ “Ready or Not” and Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.”) was about the inevitability of love, and Missy’s song was about sneaking into somebody’s house to get your back blown out, so basically the same thing. Could have some bearing on Loki and Sylvie’s story.

The music that plays during the “Loki brawl” is this show’s equivalent of Scooby-Doo chase music. That’s a good thing, by the way.

Pixar, is that you?

Was that the Pizza Planet truck? Mobius’s ride, a station wagon with a slice of pizza on top, immediately brought to mind the popular Pixar easter egg/elaborate timeline mcguffin that has appeared in every Pixar movie to date. Also, very nice touch having Lightning McQueen himself drive it.

An even nicer touch is the license plate on the car Mobius is driving: GRN W1D. As in “Gruenwald.” As in (say it with us, kids!) Mark Gruenwald, the Marvel writer and editor who Mobius is based on.

Ant-Man

At one point on the ground in the Void we can spot a gigantic Yellowjacket helmet. Yellowjacket is the codename for several size-shifting superheroes in the Marvel Comics, but is best known to MCU fans as Corey Stoll’s Darren Cross from the first Ant-Man flick. 

Guardians of the Galaxy

There’s lots of crashed spacecraft, one of which kind of looks like the Dark Aster (Ronan the Accuser’s ship in Guardians of the Galaxy), and there may be a Helicarrier hanging around. There’s also a flying saucer that vaguely resembles the ship from John Carpenter’s The Thing, and a pirate ship that if Doctor Doom were actually the villain of this show (he isn’t…or…is he?) would make us think of that character’s very first appearance in Fantastic Four comics, where he sent Ben Grimm back in time to become Blackbeard. No, really.

Miscellaneous Time Variants

The fate of the Lokis is reminiscent of What If? #12, otherwise known as What If the X-Men Had Stayed in Asgard? At the end of the story, after tasting defeat yet again, Loki begged Those Who Sit Above in Shadow to allow him to rule Asgard. They agreed by sending him far into the future at the end of time. As reality started to break down, Loki went out laughing in the face of oblivion.

The bus ad at the beginning is for Calum Ross, who is an editor on the show. 

The shot of all the Lokis walking as the camera swoops overhead is very much reminiscent of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies.

Loki and Sylvie are cold in The Void. But wait a minute, aren’t they both Frost Giants? Why then would Loki conjure a green blanket? Unless he wants a convenient excuse to cuddle up with his Variant…

Loki is drinking “RoxxiWine” pinot noir…out of a box…which is a nice touch.

Is that weird, very large plant in the bowling alley hideout supposed to be a Variant Yggdrasil? Or wait…what if that’s Plant Loki?!? He’s green, isn’t he?

Next to Alligator Loki’s kiddie pool there’s a copy of The Mystery and Lore of Monsters, a 1930 book by Charles J.S. Thompson.

The tower we all keep thinking is Avengers Tower is in fact Qeng Tower, the headquarters of Qeng Enterprises, the company that Tony Stark (mistakenly) sold the old Avengers tower to in the comics.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Spot anything we missed? (Probably, right?) Let us know in the comments!

The post Marvel’s Loki Episode 5: MCU Easter Eggs and References appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[sciencespies]

Looking Back at the Legacy of 'The Great White Hope' and Boxer Jack Johnson

https://sciencespies.com/history/looking-back-at-the-legacy-of-the-great-white-hope-and-boxer-jack-johnson/

Looking Back at the Legacy of 'The Great White Hope' and Boxer Jack Johnson

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | Feb. 25, 2021, 8 a.m.

“There’s nothing you need to make up about Jack Johnson.”

Documentarian Ken Burns would know. His 2005 series “Unforgivable Blackness,” based on the book of the same name by historian Geoffrey C. Ward, brought the true story of the life and career of Jack Johnson, the black boxer who fought his way up through the pugilism ranks to become the world heavyweight champion, to television.

But before Burns, those who weren’t around for the so-called “Fight of the Century” that saw Johnson outslug James J. Jeffries in 1910, would have known Jackson’s story through the play and movie The Great White Hope. That work of historical fiction, by playwright Howard Sackler, perhaps reveals more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set.

The play’s message about the nature of racism and racial conflict succeeded in providing audiences with an opportunity to better understand different perspectives through the prism of its characters, but the film adaptation failed to deliver the same powerhouse impact. That said, both served to launch the careers of two actors on the rise and brought to the public a poignant story of interracial romance and the struggle for interracial couples to find acceptance in America.

Alexander and Jones in a publicity still from the 1970 film

(Photo by Afro American Newspapers / Gado / Getty Images)

Sackler’s much-lauded play arrived in 1967, as the civil rights movement’s struggles were at last bearing fruit. In The Great White Hope, black boxer Jack Jefferson—a name change borne out of legal concerns—becomes so successful that a fight is set up between Jefferson and the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, a white man. In addition to developing a story which focused on an equivalent of the Johnson-Jeffries fight, Sackler constructed a storyline based on the relationship between Johnson and his first wife, a white woman named, Etta Terry Duryea, represented in the play by the character of Eleanor Bachman. In addition to mirroring the tensions Johnson and Duryea endured in pursuing an interracial relationship during the early 20th century, Eleanor’s ultimate fate mirrors that of Duryea, who died by suicide in 1912.

The play’s title came from the descriptor assigned decades earlier to any white boxer who stepped into the ring to challenge Johnson, although it was most famously used to describe Jeffries, who had retired from the ring more than five years before the landmark fight. Upon being wooed into returning to the ring, Jeffries made his reasons perfectly clear, publicly announcing, “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.”

As history reveals, Jeffries proved no such thing: not only did Johnson win the fight by a technical knockout in round 15, but as fellow boxer John L. Sullivan told the New York Times, “Scarcely has there ever been a championship contest that was so one-sided.”

Sackler drew inspiration from these events, seeing in Johnson an opportunity to tell a story about a man who becomes a hero but is nonetheless destined for a downfall, someone who many—including the play’s director, Ed Sherin—likened to the titular character in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. “It’s about a man who essentially moves out of his tribe and gets clobbered,” Sherin told The American Theatre in 2000. “And in [Sackler’s] mind, it wasn’t about black-white. The historical circumstances made that the paramount issue in the play. But it’s not. And it taps off white guilt about the way the black man was dealt with, but that was not [Sackkler’s] position at all. He wrote a play about a tragic hero, somebody who oversteps himself—as Coriolanus did.”

***********

The Great White Hope began with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to Arena Stage, a Washington, D.C. theater, which at the time was best known for being the first integrated theater in the city. To find the right man for Jefferson, Sackler reached out to actor James Earl Jones, an established performer was working in Europe.

“Howard suggested that I start getting into shape, which was really important—the man was a boxer—but which I was not and am not and will never be!” says Jones, laughing. “In fact, the young man who was my understudy onstage, Yaphet Kotto, resembled Jack much more than I did.”

James Earl Jones looks at his reflection in a Broadway dressing room mirror on December 10, 1968.

(Photo by Harry Benson / Daily Express / Getty Images)

For the role of Bachman, Sherin went with an existing member of the Arena Stage company: actress Jane Alexander, who would later become Sherin’s wife. Despite the racially charged subject matter, Alexander had no hesitation about diving headlong into the material.

“I really looked forward to doing things like that,” says Alexander. “Of course, civil rights were very high at that time in the ’60s, and we did not shy away from controversy at Arena Stage. We did quite a lot of things, tackling the Vietnam War and racism and so on, so I didn’t have any problem with the subject matter.”

Alexander also politely disagrees with her co-star’s self-assessment. “[James] is a big man—he certainly looks like a heavyweight champion!—and he got in such great shape,” she says. “He was just gorgeous-looking at the time. But he was formidable…and when he gets that look in his eyes, he’s scary!“

The Great White Hope only played for a few weeks at Arena before its success catapulted it to Broadway. Although the audiences were initially almost entirely white, Alexander says that the number of black theatergoers began to increase steadily as the play received more acclaim, hitting the 50/50 mark by the end of the first year. As a result, she also began to notice that black audiences reacted differently to the play than white audiences.

“They didn’t like my character at all…and who could blame them?” concedes Alexander. “I was causing him all these problems! So they would sometimes cheer or laugh at my death…and that was not easy for James Earl, because [he] looked at it as a love story. He had a very difficult scene to perform over my dead body, and they were sometimes not happy with him being emotional about me.”

Even worse, Alexander also began receiving hate mail. “Sometimes they were just disgusting letters from white bigots, male and female. Really awful letters. But I got a couple of death threats. That’s when I said to my stage manager, ‘I can’t open my mail.’”

Jones, for the record, didn’t receive any such threats, but the fact that his co-star did receive them, he says, “sort of measured the height of the bull****.”

Both Alexander and Jones received Tony Awards for their work in The Great White Hope.

(Photo by NBCU Photo Bank / NBC Universal via Getty Images)

Muhammad Ali at a November 12, 1968, performance of The Great White Hope on Broadway

(Photo by Tom Wargacki / WireImage)

Fortunately, those who appreciated The Great White Hope far outweighed those who didn’t, and one of the play’s biggest fans was one of the most famous men in the world: Muhammad Ali, who understandably saw some parallels between himself and Jones’s character. (“What Ali actually said was, ‘This is my play, except for the white chick,’” recalls Alexander, laughing.)

“Muhammad Ali had just done a Broadway play himself—or, rather, a musical—called Buck White, where he played kind of an activist,” recalls Jones. “He considered himself a stage actor, I think, so he’d come back and wanted to talk actor to actor about my work. When the audience left the theater, he used to love going up on the stage and say, ‘Watch this!’ And he’d take a crack at a scene, and then he’d say, ‘And that’s the way that ought to be done!’ I loved it. And the way he’d interpret it? He wasn’t always wrong!”

Ali was also responsible for one of Alexander’s most cherished memories from the Broadway run of The Great White Hope, during the third of his backstage visits.

While the film version of The Great White Hope received its fair share of critical acclaim, with both Jones and Alexander—in her film debut—earning Oscar nominations for their work, few would disagree that it’s a lesser work than the play. The first sign that Hollywood had done some major streamlining: the play originally ran for three-and-a-half hours, whereas the film version clocks in at a streamlined 103 minutes.

“I missed some of the lyricism in the beautiful long monologues—or soliloquies, if you will—that some of the actors had, specifically [James],��� says Alexander. “They were cut, a lot of them. “

Jones pulls no punches when offering his take on the play’s cinematic adaptation. “I apologize for the film, because it wasn’t right,” he says. “The big mistake happened when the decision was made not to have Ed Sherin direct the film. It was a big investment on the part of 20th Century Fox, and they made an attempt to work around the cost of filmmaking. They decided to make it… I wouldn’t say ‘cheap,’ but they thought they couldn’t afford to take a gamble on [a first-time film director].”

“They made a decision to shorten it by using a formula which… Well, I won’t try to define it, but they wanted to make it a romance,” says Jones. “Which it was in real life, but it was a mistake to try and ignore all the dynamic stuff going on in that man’s life in favor of trying to make it a love story of this poor black guy and this poor white girl who wanted to be together in life. But America just didn’t let them do it.”

Jones’s description of the film’s romantic plotline is dripping with sardonic wit, something which becomes evident when he abruptly begins chuckling.

“The truth is, I think Ken Burns’ documentary is more important than the film or the play we did,” says Jones. “I thought there was no way you could capture all the dynamics of that man’s life, all the gorgeousness and physical beauty, the human beauty of the man called Jack Johnson. But Burns captured it. Whether you’re a boxing fan or not, whether you have any corner of the race issue you want to explore, it’s something everybody should see.”

Jack Johnson (right) defeated Jim Jeffries in a 1910 boxing showdown.

(Photo by PA Images via Getty Images)

“He stuck around late enough that the stage manager had already put the ghost light onstage. Only the doorman was left, and I was in the wings. And Muhammad Ali walked out in that dark theater and turned to a naked, empty house, and he reprised the last line of the second act: ‘I is here! I is here! I is here!’ It was amazing. And nobody ever witnessed that but me. “

**********

The success of The Great White Hope soon led to conversations about adapting the play into a film, but those conversations didn’t include Alexander until after the show swept the Tony Awards, winning Best Play and earning Jones and Alexander trophies for their roles, too. The acclaim even extended beyond the traditional theater community, with the play winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well.

“I was told that [film director] Martin Ritt offered it first to Joanne Woodward,” says Alexander. “She turned it down, saying, ‘You should get that girl who did it on Broadway.’ And then he went to Faye Dunaway, and Faye turned it down! And then what happened after Faye turned it down? The Tony Awards happened. And the next day, I got the offer.”

Burns, who interviewed Jones for “Unforgivable Blackness,” believes the problem with the film adaptation extends well beyond trying to force it into being a love story.

“The much more important thing is something that you find throughout well-intentioned history and art about African-Americans, which is that somehow they always need to have a white person around to justify them,” says Burns. “In The Great White Hope, here’s this incredibly talented physical specimen who plays in all these incredibly dangerous tropes about black people, and yet somehow you need well-intentioned white handlers in whatever form—romantically or fight-wise—to sort of nudge you to the right direction, as if they’re unaccompanied minors who need to be accompanied.

Adds Burns about the real story he found while making the documentary, “What’s so important about Jack Johnson is that he defies all conventions we want a heroic black man to be in. He doesn’t want the job of hero. Somehow we want our African Americans to conform to some version of our idea of an acceptable black person. Jack Johnson just takes dynamite and pushes the plunger on that.”

“I admire the play, and I admire the movie, and it’s heart is in the right place, and it’s intentions are good, but it’s in a narrow bandwidth that doesn’t permit the full scope of Jack Johnson, good, bad, and otherwise,” concludes Burns. “It constrains him with narrative devices that aren’t needed.”

Boxer Jack Johnson

(Photo by Sean Sexton / Getty Images)

Jones in boxing attire

(Bettman via Getty Images)

Even with its flaws, there’s no question that The Great White Hope made an impact on those who saw it, on stage or screen.

“I remember walking down the streets of New York for the next decade, and black men would just come up and say, ‘Hey, Jane, how are ya?’ or something like that,” says Alexander. “I remember once I was in an airport, and Snoop Dogg yells across the terminal, ‘Jane!’ I recognized that he was a big music star, but I didn’t know who it was, so I just sort of inched over a little bit…and he just said, ‘Hey!’ That’s all! But I felt very warm inside that black men recognized me, seemed understanding and supportive, and… I think they were saying that they knew that it was a difficult role.

“It was surprising to me the number of white people who wondered why I had done the film. There were a lot of firsts there. The racism was not as overt as it is today, but it was there, and I was surprised it was there in my parents’ friends, who would just question me and say, ‘Why did you have to do that for your first film?’ I was thrilled! Race relations were different at that time. We didn’t march in the same way. If you look at the marches in Selma, Alabama, you won’t see a lot of white people. But I was part of the Poor People’s March in Washington (in 1968), and I went and listened to Martin Luther King speak. But now we have Black Lives Matter, and there are a lot of white people and black people walking side by side. That’s progress.”

#History

[connorssock]

Any character, any format. Someone is revealed to be alot smarter than anyone ever though? I doesn't have to be genious level (it can but doesnt have to) competence works too. -fan

My gut instinct was to write about Gavin here because he seems like the classic underdog who keeps getting taken for some dumb idiot. But then I wanted to mix it up a bit, see what happens when it’s not Gavin but rather Hank who is overlooked. Then this happened, hope you like it!

With These Hands

It had started off with small things. Connor taking a knock during a training exercise and landing a little funny. He’d brushed it off at the time but his systems kept insisting that a plate was out of alignment, that his chassis was no longer water tight.

“I’m afraid I will need to take some time off to visit CyberLife,” he informed Hank who cocked an eyebrow at him. “I have a mild malfunction I cannot correct myself.”

Because of course the plating had to be the one on his back, covering his equivalent of a shoulder blade which was just out of reach. It was something that someone else was going to have to help him with.

“What’s the matter?” Hank asked. Explaining it took less than a minute, during which Hank nodded, mouth pressed into a line. “Okay,” he’d said once Connor had finished, “let me have a look.”

There was no logical reason to deny him and they made their way to the men’s bathroom where they were at least afforded a modicum of privacy. With surprisingly deft and gentle hands, Hank popped the troublesome panel open and slid it back into place.

“There you go,” he patted Connor’s back with a soft smile, “wasn’t so bad, was it?”

He left and Connor got dressed quietly, pondering how Hank knew how to slide the panel back into its correct position. Humans were resourceful, had the ability to improvise and occasionally even had odds defying streaks of luck.

Only, Hank’s luck seemed to run deeper than anticipated. They were on a call, domestic fight gone from wrong to horribly wrong when a knife got involved. The android who called the police was the victim. She was bleeding severely, thirium ran from multiple wounds. Most were controlled and not life threatening but one on her arm was bleeding at an alarming rate. Connor wanted to help but his working knowledge of her model wasn’t up to date, all he could do was apply pressure over the wound and hope she didn’t run out of time before the technicians got to the scene.

“Keep applying pressure but budge up.” Hank sank to his next to them, eyes on the android. “I’m Hank, what’s your name?”

“Andrea,” came the frightened reply.

“Well, Andrea, we’re just going to have a look at your arm, okay? You might want to look away and turn your sensors off.”

Connor watched, fascinated, as Hank cut the sleeve away and took a moment to look at the arm. All the skin had receded, leaving behind a blue stained chassis. Another assessing look later, Hank’s hands were wrapping around the chassis, opening it up with steady hands and sifting through the damaged wires and components with care.

“All we need to do it apply a bit of pressure,” Hank spoke as he worked, “pinch the end of this tube here and this one here. There we go.” He sat back a little, both hands delicately holding the severed thirium lines shut. “And now we just wait for emergency services to come and they’ll take over.”

He continued to make polite conversation with Andrea, getting her to laugh a little despite the events of her evening. Once the technicians arrived, he passed the job on with ease and grinned at Connor.

“Good job,” he murmured and glanced over his shoulder at Andrea. “I don’t think she would have made it if it wasn’t for you applying pressure on the wound.”

Connor looked at him flabbergasted, he’d done nothing but Hank seemed intent on putting the rescue on him. Without being given a chance to respond, Hank was off already and looking at the scene.

It went on like that, little moments of Hank helping one android or another. Connor assumed that he’d read up on them, perhaps even did a course on basic android anatomy. It was the only explanation he could think of when he was sat on the cold table of the interrogation room, shirt off once again and Hank was teasing the fine wires of his sensor relays back into alignment.

He hadn’t meant to get shot, but that was the life of a police detective. Sometimes it was just unavoidable. At least Connor could be fixed up relatively quickly while a human would need months to recover.

“I do not understand,” Connor began and Hank looked at at his face with a hum. The screwdriver in his mouth didn’t allow for much more. “I am a relatively unknown model, how do you know how to patch me up?”

The soldering iron in Hank’s hand was steady and Connor jerked a little when feeling cam back into his thumb. At long last, Hank put the tools down and pulled the screwdriver from his mouth.

“You pick things up along the way, I guess. And it’s not so different between androids.” Hank had the audacity to shrug and put the screwdriver back in his mouth, conversation firmly over from his perspective. As much as Connor wanted to argue, that androids were not all the same on the inside, he knew that Hank wasn’t going to engage him on it.

So he let it simmer, watched from afar as Hank seemed to have a hidden well of knowledge about androids which nobody else had picked up on. He also seemed to be the one behind the small gifts androids kept finding when they needed something. A top-up of thirium on their desk, a little jar of lubricant when a joint was feeling stiff, a palette cleansing solution when a specimen just wouldn’t flush from sensors.

They were out on a call when Gavin was assigned his new partner, a never before seen RK900. By pure chance, they were sent on a call not far from where Hank and Connor were almost immediately. Which was how they heard the radio call go through.

“Officer down, I repeat, officer down,” Gavin’s voice was steady but strained.

It took less than 3 minutes for Hank and Connor to be at their location where Gavin was hunched over the RK900, his hands covered in blue.

“What happened?” Hank was asking even as he settled on the ground next to them, hands already pushing a thirium soaked jacket out of the way.

“Suspect tried to get away in a car, wanted to do away with us. Nines shoved me out of the way but the car still clipped him.”

Hank didn’t say anything about the nickname Gavin already seemed to have bestowed on his new partner. Instead, he was steadily assessing the damage.

“I’ve contacted CyberLife but there are no technicians or engineers familiar enough with the RK900 model to be able to help.” His LED cycled red.

“It’s okay,” Nines tried to smile at them. “Thank you for trying.”

“Don’t go giving up just yet,” Hank snorted. He pulled the panels from Nines’ abdomen and hip, clipping a few wires and thirium lines until he was satisfied. “Okay, Connor please let Jeffery know we’re going to be tied up for the rest of the day at least. Nines is on medical leave, as is Gavin. We’re supporting and debriefing them. He can expect a report tomorrow afternoon earliest.”

Between Connor and Hank, they moved Nines into Hank’s car. Gavin sat in the back with him as was surprised when they pulled up outside Hank’s house.

“Not to be awkward or anything but what the hell are we doing here?” he asked.

“What does it look like? We’re going to patch you and Nines up.” With a pointed glance, Hank eyed up the tear in Gavin’s jeans which didn’t so a lot to hide the scrape on his knee and, with the thirium having evaporated from his hands, it was easy to see the grazes on his palm too.

They carried Nines in, deposited him on the kitchen table and Hank slowly got to work. Meanwhile, Connor helped disinfect and clean Gavin’s superficial wounds.

“I know nobody likes being my partner but come on, was Nines gunning for the shortest record? He could have put in for a transfer, getting hit by a car is a little extreme,” Gavin groused.

“It’s only my leg and hip damaged, not my hearing, Gavin,” Nines called across the room. “And if I really was gunning for a record, I would hope it would be for the title of your longest standing partner.”

“You’ll be standing soon enough, don’t worry,” Hank interrupted with a wry smile. “Con, when you get a chance, grab be the bedside light for me please?”

Puzzled, Connor did as told and watched with fascination as Hank took it apart for a few wires, a capacitor and a circuit board.

“Hank,” he began, “there are no available schematics for an RK900, even I cannot find anything. How do you know what you’re doing?”

“Call it intuition. It just sort of makes sense,” Hank shrugged and twisted two wires together. Under his hands, Nines giggled with a soft “that tickled” bitten out. Hank patted his side in reassurance and continued.

By the evening, Nines was sitting up on the table, helping hold wires out of the way in his thigh as Hank was putting in a few adjustments.

“There,” Hank smiled as the thigh panel slid into place and skin flowed over it again. “Not quite like new but good enough. And hopefully that hip joint won’t give you trouble a year or so down the line when the ball-bearings rust from the thirium drip they’d left in.”

The next morning, Nines and Gavin were already at their desks when Hank ambled in, Connor in tow. They both nodded at them with a warm smile and got on with their day as though nothing had happened the previous night.

[ssfoc]

I saw you rb this on my dash: "Louis has a triangle tattoo permanently tattooed on his body". buuut the same way, "I don’t know why this is even still up for debate tbh. Louis has an E tattoo permanently tattooed on his body. Just because it’s covered up doesn’t mean it’s not still there and you can tell yourself it’s because he loves Ecuador all you want, but deep down I know you know that’s not what that tattoo means so please just stop." the same logic applies?

That is true. Louis does have an E on his hand, a tattoo that appeared after he “reunited” with Eleanor in 2017, to show how much she meant to him. And El has an “L” tatted on her hand.

By this logic, Louis also has the “X” on his forearm that Robbie Williams did for The X Factor, because the show was something dear to him as well. And Louis gave him a complementary one.

A tattoo taken out of context can mean anything one wants it to mean. Tattoos are narrative, as the fandom and TPTB know. They know because there’s been another narrative, involving complementary tattoos, that had been going on for years, covering much of two men’s bodies.

The context of the E tattoo was to further a narrative at a time when Louis denied Larry and the rainbow bears on video, pushed Eleanor and Freddie, and covered almost every tattoo on his body for over a year. Eleanor was credited as the “creative inspiration of his autobiographical album” with papped photos and fan photos. Like twin children, they wore matching outfits. The E tattoo is tiny— one of the smallest that Louis has— but located in a conspicuous place that can be easily seen. Yet it is frequently covered, or angled not to be included in photos, where his “28” tattoo is often flashed prominently.

Louis’ triangle tattoo was done sometime early in 2013, and was first noticed in May 2013. In the link, Emma’s post shows the context of the tattoo. Louis had been undergoing a harsh closet for more than a year, transforming his mannerisms to appear less flamboyant and more stoic, publicly separated from Harry. He had denied Larry on Twitter. He had been “dating” Eleanor since September 2011.

In the context of this narrative, getting a tattoo of LGBT persecution and activism was an act of personal defiance. Covering it in 2017, and keeping it covered for over 400 days, was also symbolic— of an intentional change in narrative. How do we know that it was intentional? Because Louis himself drew attention to it.

On the last papped session displaying his ankle, outside of Sony offices in London, 22 February 2017, Louis (known to abhor the cold) was dressed without a winter coat or socks, and asked the photographer to take close up, HQ images of his ankles.

Five months after these photos, it was announced that Louis signed with Epic Records (part of Sony). And then the BTY/ Eleanour narrative began.

For those claiming that Louis isn’t proud of his sexuality, or support his LGBT community, this is the context of his closeting and proof that Louis himself has been aware all along, is proud, and has been silently but unambiguously fighting his closet.

I think for every anti argument of false equivalence (“the E tattoo is meaningful to Louis”), we can find contextual reasons to refute that argument. Taken out of context, Louis’ compass/home tattoo could mean anything, until one considers that it was done the same day as Harry’s ship tattoo.

In the context of Louis’ Just Like You music video, with its myriad references to LGBT rights, closeting, and industry abuse of artists, and the Miss You video, with prominent display of a pink triangle, the refusal to acknowledge Louis’ LGBT support and to recognize the ankle tattoo’s symbolism is undeniable, intentional homophobia.

[qboo78]

After everything that happened in got, do you ever think about all the awful things Bellamy and Clarke have done and we still see them as good people? Like I think I understand better what they meant with them not being the "good guys", it's still their story and that's why they're the heroes but even if I always understood and loved them in spite of what they did, I feel a little bad for not seeing sooner how fucked up it all was. Like, they committed genocide and we barely acknowledge it.

Before I answer your question anon, there are a lot of things to say that need to be said so bear with me. You are right anon, I am indeed a fan of GOT and The 100. But more specifically I’m a fan of House Stark and the Original the 100 crew including Bellamy and Raven of course. Bellamy is family to one of the 100 kru and Raven is family to another the 100 kru so yeah they are included.

While I’m a fan of both shows, the only thing I can see in common with both shows are the House Starks and the North and the Original the 100 crew. Why is that you ask? well, because the 100 and Game of Thrones have completely different scenarios in their stories, The 100 always talk about SURVIVAL while GOT always talked about that stupid ugly chair, the IRON THRONE. Although, it has to be said that some people/characters in the GOT world thinks that sitting in the IRON THRONE means SURVIVAL for them like they have to come up on top so they can make sure that they won’t die but then once they sit in that chair, you then can see that “what they are” really gets amplified to infinity and that is why there’s a lot of people dying if the one who sits there is already a bad evil person to their core.

I say the one common thing of both shows is HOUSE STARK and the original 100 crew because these two groups of HEROES (and make no mistake they are heroes to ME) has always just been fighting to SURVIVE and actually just wants to live in peace and to be SAFE. But, unfortunately, these two groups of heroes lived in a time where to do that is actually quite difficult to do.

House Stark never wanted the IRON THRONE and they just want to be left alone, be independent and never to be under an evil tyrant’s rule ever again because, obviously, if they are under a tyrant’s rule they will end up dying because their honor will always lead them to protect the innocents and do what is RIGHT. Which means, they will end up being the target of that tyrant inevitably. So they fight and they kill to do the right thing. Why must they have to do that? Because it is how this world works, you cannot just “talk” in this world because the people you are up against will never even let you talk and will just end up annihilating you.

In the case of the Mad King, Ned’s father, brother and sister became a target and was murdered so Ned fought for them. With the Lannisters, his best friend and King was killed so Ned tried to do the right thing which ended up him becoming the target and killed. And because Ned tried to do the right thing, his family became targets getting some of them killed. Robb and Catelyn were murdered first while the rest is imprisoned or on the run. You see the pattern here? Then came Ramsey Bolton, Sansa had to escaped and seek refuge with Jon because she was tortured and raped. Then Jon, The Night’s watch, the Wildlings became targets of Ramsey, Rickon was imprisoned and eventually killed by Ramsay. Jon and Sansa had to team up with The Wildlings, The Northern Lords who answered the CALL and The Vale to defeat Ramsey, they then won and Sansa killed Ramsey in the end of that battle. Then came Danaerys, Jon gave up his crown to her. Why??? Jon’s reason was to protect the North and gave the living a fighting chance but she ended up killing some of those living later on, killing the innocents and almost everyone in King’s landing. And after that threatening every man, woman, boy and girl in Westeros if they don’t accept her rule and possibly even when they surrender, she will just end up burning them anyway, because that is what she already did in King’s Landing. And of course, Danaerys will soon come after the Stark sisters specifically Sansa, because Sansa knew what she is (which is a TYRANT in case I’m not clear) and Sansa wants to do the right thing by choosing the rightful heir who is a far better option to rule than the Mother of Dragons, which means Sansa, Arya and the North have now ALL become targets of Danaerys, so Jon killed Danaerys. Jon is the only one who can because he can get close enough to her without Drogon frying him. Drogon can sense the Targ in him so he let Jon go near Danaerys. Jon then tried to TALK to Danaerys but of course since what she is will always be a murdering bitch who will not show mercy because she thinks she is right and everyone is wrong (A TYRANT pretty much) so Jon killed Danaerys to protect the Seven Kingdoms but more so to protect his FAMILY, the STARKS. Jon chose FAMILY. Sansa chose Jon and also Jon chose Sansa. Just as every Stark in this STORY have always chosen. FAMILY trumps everything.

Anon, you must be wondering why I take too long to answer your questions about the “good guys” and how committing genocide is a bad thing but all the things I’ve mentioned above explained some things. If we are talking about “good people” and “good guys”, this does not mean that they cannot do bad things or should not do bad things. In fact, they definitely can when pushed. When their loved ones are threatened, being killed/murdered and when they are all in danger of being annihilated that is when they will definitely do whatever it takes to protect their family, their kru. They protect their own. They will kill when their own is in danger but they will never go out of their way to  randomly wanting to rule other groups, killing other groups or kidnapped other people because they can. But the other people in their world do just that.

The 100 original crew in the beginning came down to Earth because they had no choice, they were sent by the Council, the powers that be in their world, to become guinea pigs to test if the earth is survivable. They were told they were pretty much disposable. At first, the kru are not united, they have some rotten apples within them and they do not trust each other but in the end they ended up uniting because all of them were being threatened and not just threatened let’s face it if they had not defended themselves and fight and kill then they would have all been wiped out and annihilated. So they barbequed the 300 that was sent to kill them in a ring of fire. Are they bad guys? Well as you can see, IT WAS WAR. KILL OR BE KILLED. The 100 won this battle. But then Clarke and most of the 100 kru was captured by the mountain men and then got fed with lots of BS were they were told that some of their kru the ones that are not with them have all died and they are the only ones left and then they were told that they are guests but in truth they were prisoners because they were not allowed to leave. So Clarke not trusting the mountain men, investigated and found out that they are all actually not guests but food. These mountain men wants to get their bone marrow without their permission so the Mountain men can finally go up and lived under the daylight and not get burned. Pretty much the equivalent of Vampires, which means Clarke and her the 100 kru are again in danger so she escaped. She had to because the mountain men realized that she knows their secret and so she cannot even warn the others and had to escape. When Clarke found out from Anya that the Grounders only want to attack them when they unintentionally burn a village because of their SOS to the ADULTS in space, and she realised that the Grounders and the 100 kru have the same enemy, the mountain men, she then proposed a TRUCE to the Grounders. To Team up and fight the mountain men together and save their people that are imprisoned in that mountain. But since, as we all know, in the end the Grounders, specifically Lexa, broke their truce/agreement and betrayed them by accepting the mountain men’s proposal to not be part of their war against the Sky Kru in exchange for their imprisoned grounders and for the Grounders and the mountain men to finally have treaty. Again, in this situation, the mountain men and the Grounders are saying to Clarke that her family, her the 100 Kru, are just disposable. Not worth saving and only good for dying so the mountain men can survive and live above on the ground again. She then went in the den of the mountain men with Octavia and then reunite with Bellamy and Monty and Jasper. These five people that I mentioned have always been the ones who lead their kru in protecting themselves from others who want them harmed. By this time Raven, Abby, Kane, Harper, were already captured. Then, later on Jasper and  Octavia was also captured. So that only left Clarke, Bellamy and Monty to try to save them. Let it be said that they did try to TALK to the mountain men, to ask and beg them not to harvest the bone marrows of their loved ones and end up killing them. Clarke tried to tell them that maybe they can make some arrangement that could get all of the mountain men be able to live above on the ground with the Sky Kru still alive and not dead. That maybe there is a way that the 100 kru and Sky Kru can share their bone marrow to the mountain men that will not make the 100/Sky kru end up getting killed. But, oh no! Cage Wallace of course will not listen, because TYRANT!!! Remember they think they are always right and they think they are the only ones who deserved to survive, so he decided to harvest Abby’s bone marrow first. Abby, Clarke’s mother, is being tortured and getting killed right in front of Clarke. I tell you if a person experiences that and also knows that one can do something to stop that wouldn’t you chose to do that? And what about the other mountain men that are not part of Cage’s kru that tried to do the right thing by protecting our heroes like Bellamy and Jasper and Monty? Did they stop Cage from doing the harvesting of bone marrows and killing the other prisoners/100/Sky Kru or even helping the imprisoned Grounders? Nope, they didn’t, they stood by and watch as grounders for almost a hundred years are being kidnapped, tortured, and killed just so they can continue to survive and also now with the promise of finally being able to go up and live on the Ground, they also just stood by to watch and then partake in getting The 100 kru killed so they can go above. So nope they were also not innocents, IT WAS WAR. So Clarke, Bellamy and Monty chose their own. They protected their family. For me, they did not commit genocide. They just went to WAR and protected, defended and SAVE their loved ones and family. They tried to do the peace way, they tried to not harm all the people in Mount Weather, they tried to ask for a compromise where EVERYONE can LIVE but unfortunately the other group led by Cage just wants to KILL them. So they did what they CAN do and protected and save their own. They chose their family. Did the 100 kru asked to live in Mount Weather? No, but they were captured and imprisoned anyway. All the 100/Sky Kru wants is to be left alone and to be safe and to survive. Sounds familiar??? Indeed it is. Because that is also who the Starks and the North are. It’s like Ned in GOT, he kills but he doesn’t enjoy doing that. The heroes of the 100 also kill but they do not enjoy doing that. They just protect their loved ones and kill the person that threatens the safety and life of their loved ones especially when that person who threatens them will not even listen to them. So make no mistake, they are the heroes of their stories and to me they are still the Good Guys because they protect and defend their own against the tyrants and evil of their world. 

So anon, does this answer your question?

P.S. Thanks for the asked, I enjoyed this because I love my heroes in these two shows. House Stark and Original the 100 Kru for the WIN.

Cause in both these shows, there are only two options so far, either you WIN or you DIE. I said SO FAR because I long for a TIME when my the 100 kru can finally live in peace and not have to just try to survive. I want them to finally be SAFE and flourishing. HOUSE STARK already did that in GOT so now the small people, the common people can now flourish, be safe and protected under the rule of HOUSE STARK, but the 100 Kru is yet to experience that. But I am still hoping they will be fine in the end.

[alteredphoenix]

Some random WoW/Fire Emblem: Three Houses X-Over I came up with on the fly (WIP)

A/N: I’ve never played Fire Emblem; seeing the characters appear in Super Smash Bros. Melee onwards always felt like an inclusion - at least, to a younger me - that felt peculiar at the time. (Also, I am quite awful at RTS games that aren’t online hero brawlers, and it’s the one reason why I haven’t touched Stronghold HD in years, but that is beside the point.) I never caught on with the games as I grew up, my interest was that ambivalent.

But then I started taking note of all the fan art of Three Houses on Twitter over the past month and became curious. To me, this game seemed - and would eventually, given its reception - as if it would be the most notable in its franchise. I don’t have a Switch to access it (and would rather not have to cave in and just hit up YouTube for a quick fix), but I had felt compelled to write something even if there is a good possibility my characterization might be off the mark.

So the first thing I decide to write - but certainly not the first: that’s reserved for FE3H fic where dogs are endangered species, the houses have to sponsor one breed to get them repopulated, and Edelgard decides to set the fucking world on fire just so she can gain fem!Byleth’s love by acquiring the fantasy equivalent of a Siberian Husky (because Byleth adores huskies and carries a tin full of husky/wolf figurines as tokens of good fortune, but said huskies are allegedly presumed extinct, so Black Eagles are the only house to be universally ridiculed for sponsoring an animal that may no longer exist) - is fem!Byleth winding up in World of Warcraft during the timeskip, becomes a fisherman, and inadvertently becomes the Pack Leader of all the hunter cats in Booty Bay because she feeds them bear tartare, raw fish, and kitty kibble on a daily basis, as seen through the eyes of a pair of human and goblin OCs running a fishing shack.

There was slightly more to this than what you see here, but the power got knocked out due to a strong thunderstorm passing through my area so consider this piece very WIP. (I still think about the “Vereesa embraces her inner troll and murks an innocent blood elf during the Purge of Dalaran” fic that got completely nuked a while back, and feel remorse for not saving the damn document.)

-

“Hey. Brody,” Melanie’s voice called, and when Brody looked up from where he sat at the desk it was to her stepping into the tiny office with a box full of bolts of cloth and other materials she had acquired all over the Bay. “Brody.”

“What?”

“She’s coming ‘round again.”

“Who?”

“You know.”

He blew a sigh upward, sending his long locks flying uselessly and getting in his eyes. “No, I don’t. When you say ‘she’, you could mean anyone.”

“Brody, you know exactly who I’m talking about!” Melanie plopped the box on the floor, put her hands on her hips, and leaned forward for extra emphasis on what she said next, in as diplomatic a tone as she could muster: “No-Face is coming.”

“Oh yeah,” Brody said, lazily twirling the pencil in his hand. “No-Face.”

-

This was how Brody Hookbane and Melanie Hampton’s conversations started off, ever since the woman Brody had come to dub as ‘No-Face’ strolled through Booty Bay three weeks ago. The war between the Alliance and the Horde over the azerite wounds popping up all over the planet had driven Baron Revilgaz to ramp up security and make the official declaration that – once again – no matter what faction colors you wore or what flag you flew, you still had to abide by Booty Bay laws; if you wanted a fight, why, it was better to take it outside and die like the dogs they were. This made flight schedules from Kalimdor Airlines and Southern Skies Platform extremely contentious for the first few months, once word about Teldrassil and Undercity got out, and it was when the fights spilled out from the bars and rival adventurer guilds tried to wrest control of the docks and the entrance from the guards did the Baron sic the Blackwater Raiders on them and declare martial law. If you wanted in on Booty Bay, then you had to say what you wanted to say and keep your hands to yourselves. It was only until just recently, some time before Old Man Heming tasked Brody and Melanie to run The Happy Bobber while he was away at Mechagon Island to ‘cull the population’ of ionized minnows that the imposition was lifted, and people from all walks of life were allowed to come and go as they pleased so long as they went by the rules (which, in all seriousness, the rules were no different than when Azeroth’s superpowers were butting heads, and that in itself was an everyday occurrence).

No-Face was not Alliance. She was not even a hired hand of the Horde, as much as Brody had heard the stories of Thrall employing human sellswords to inform him of events happening in the world as he managed affairs in Orgrimmar. In fact, Brody had learned, from a friend of a friend (who learned from another friend’s cousin, who heard it from that cousin’s third cousin on his third mother’s side of the family), that No-Face did not know there was a war going on. “Don’t know how she got here, she says,” the friend said. “Just shewed up in Stranglethorn and started walkin’ south, lookin’ for answers.” That had been three weeks ago, and seeing that she was still hanging around Booty Bay and the wilderness, Brody and Melanie made the obvious connection that No-Face still hadn’t found the answers she was looking for.

“Maybe she’s an alien,” Melanie said, one day. “You know, like the draenei and the orcs.”

“Nah,” Brody said. “She looks too plain to be an alien. You could put her in a room full of humans and she’d fit right in with all the bluebloods.”

“How do you know she’s a blueblood?”

“I dunno, she’s got the look of a blueblood. Big Nose McGee in Stormwind looks more like a member of a boy band than a king.”

“Maybe she’s an adventurer.”

“She can’t be. Most adventurers I’ve seen wear slutmogs.”

“You call a badass coat a ‘slutmog’?”

“No, the rest of her is all...Look at her. She wears fishnet stockings, Mel. Fishnet.”

“So?”

“So?! That’s something you don’t see your average female adventurer wear! They dare to go bare; that’s the slutmog way! It’s all skin with the low-cut breastplates that are one inch away from having those puppies come out, and-and-and those really thin G-string plates that make their asscheeks look like a pair of balloons you gotta pop at the Darkmoon Faire!”

“All that talk of women, and no men? Have you seen the night elves? They’re wearing thorns, Brody! Thorns!”

“Bah, thorns, shmorns!”

“At least thorns are creative! Someone could try to get up close and personal and, and, I don’t know, maybe they’d get pricked just touching them. Because nothing says distraction like having your eight-pack abs and your noodle jammed in an overstuffed speedo on display for all of Azeroth to see.”

“That’s because you see barely see guys strip down to their birthday suits and use that to seize the day! Women have a more profound effect because it’s expected of them!”

“But now you have all the guys coming off the boats looking like they came out of Uldum, with their fancy feathered helmets and half their chest sticking out from their girdles and skirts. It’s a step in the right direction!”

“And I say good for them! It’s a step in the right direction! Sometimes less is more, Mel. Sometimes you just need a little glitz to make yourself stand out! Not,” and he had waved his hand around, “you know, like that.”

“There’s no shame in looking like that! Everyone has their own way of utilizing sex appeal to their own advantage. Oh, by the way, she has a belly window, too.”

“Ya see what I mean?!”

Melanie did, and they had bickered back and forth on this very topic, as well as the topic of her hypothetical bluebloodedness, for every day No-Face was in town, and preferably once she had her fishing supplies together and was way, way out of earshot.

[qqueenofhades]

The Punisher as Medieval Romance: Tropes, Themes, and Characters

So a few days ago, an anon asked about more mythologies/inspirations for Kastle, apart from Hades/Persephone, and I mentioned that Frank’s character and his overall story arc have substantial (and fascinating) parallels with medieval romances. I was just answering quickly, but I then started to think about it in more depth, and realized that in fact, damn near all of The Punisher can be read as a modern-day medieval romance, sometimes subverting long-established tropes and sometimes playing them almost straight. This extends into Daredevil canon as well, as the characters around Frank also fit into recognizable mythic-medieval roles, and… yes. I resisted writing a long and research-heavy meta, clearly what I needed to do on the last week of term, for oh, forty-eight hours. Then, well, we know how that goes.

A note that I work specifically on medieval history, rather than medieval literature, so if I say anything clangingly bad, I hope my brethren and sistren medievalists can forgive me for it. Also, I don’t know if any of this is intentional on the part of the writers, so it’s not like I am identifying anything they’re specifically doing (or if they are, I don’t know about it), but this is just me, as a nerd, wandering into the candy store and being like “OH HEY GUYS LOOK AT THIS.” Of course, not all the examples fit in every aspect between medieval romance and modern Marvel canon, but there are still enough of them in a number of ways to make this interpretation plausible. And indeed, considering how Marvel stories have become ubiquitously embedded in our popular lexicon almost exactly in the way Arthurian legends and stories did for their medieval equivalent, it’s a noteworthy comparison.

(As you may be able to guess, this will be long.)

Let’s start with the source material. The medieval Arthurian romances are part of what is known as the Matter of Britain: the vast corpus of texts, written and rewritten across several centuries and by countless authors (usually French or English) that deals with some aspect of this mythology. Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, and other characters appear in various guises and playing different roles in each of these texts. They are still “themselves” on each appearance, but the interpretation and the storyline is largely up to each individual author. One may remark that this bears some similarities with the Marvel comic universe. The characters have been written and re-written in a vast array of formats from their first creation to their present modern iteration (and likewise, Hollywood is still making a King Arthur movie every other year). They have been interpreted by many authors and given different plots and re-imaginings, and are part of our collective pop-culture reference in the way that Arthurian romance and chivalric literature was in the medieval era. If Twitter had existed back then, we would have fans begging for Arthur Pendragon to be saved from Camlann the way we now have fans begging NASA to save Tony Stark. It’s a kind of cultural entertainment that you’re probably at least aware of, even if you’ve never participated in, and thus has reached similar levels of saturation. The Arthurian romances inspired endless knock-offs. We likewise have an omnipresent superhero genre. It reinvents and redefines the hero’s journey for its particular day and age on a massive scale. In some sense, we don’t even need to explain these characters or tropes, because everyone already knows who and what they are.

So… onto Frank. At first glance, he is a considerably unlikely medieval romantic hero, right? He’s rough around the edges, has (to say the least) grey morality, and is generally regarded as an outcast and a loner in his community, rather than some idealized, flawless Sir Galahad type who has never done anything wrong in his life and nobly avoids all temptation. But he’s actually a hero in the middle of his trials and tribulations and the corresponding loss (and eventual reaffirmation) of heroic identity. The broad strokes of Frank’s character arc, as seen in Daredevil season 2 and Punisher season 1, are these:

Separation from home and family;

Exile from society and the implied loss of chivalric (military) virtue;

Test of honor/contests against other knights, good and bad (Matt Murdock, Wilson Fisk, Lewis Wilson, etc);

Search for the Grail (life, restoration to honor, vengeance for his family, completion of the chivalric quest);

Partnership with worthy knights on the search (David Lieberman, Curtis Hoyle);

Resisting temptation from a knight’s wife (Sarah Lieberman);

Saving a fair maiden and having to be worthy of her love, while bound by a code of secrecy (Karen Page);

Confrontation of betrayal by an intimate/revelation of the dark side of chivalric honor (Billy Russo);

Menaced by a quasi-mythical and possibly demonic figure who must be defeated, who fights him in a parallel battle at the beginning/end of the story (Agent Orange/Rawlins);

Attempt to re-enter society and re-establish identity (end of s1, though that will be once more disrupted and complicated by s2);

All of this is, basically, the overall character arc for a medieval hero. Pretty much beat by beat. Also, while we’ve gotten used to think of ‘chivalry’ as implying a certain kind of idealized and virtuous behavior around ladies (holding doors, gentlemanly actions, whatever) that was only a small part of the overall code of chivalry – which, at its core, was an ethos about fighting, military prowess, and the display of valor through acts of war. Frank says that he loves being a soldier, and this would be a sentiment familiar to a medieval knight. Chrétien de Troyes has a line about how, essentially, only morally suspect half-men prefer peace. The soldier’s proper right, duty, and true joy in life is the practice of war, and he earns chivalry – martial renown – by doing it. It is not merely a pretty or romantic veneer on courtly behavior (though that is often how it is presented), but about war, the military, the destruction of opponents, and the very nature of being a constant soldier. To say the least, this fits Frank’s character extremely well. He is the consummate soldier who in fact needs a constant war to fight, and who has built an honorable legacy for himself (decorated Marine, Navy Cross, etc) prior to his forcible separation from society. This darker, grittier underside of chivalry, when the violence, bloodshed, and distortion of self was a constant concern, also fits very well with the tone of The Punisher.

That separation is often the keystone for a medieval hero’s journey, and functions to drive him out from the context in which he has until now been respected and earned his living. Sometimes we have an outright reason for that action, sometimes the hero just leaves Camelot and sets out on a quest, but Frank’s separation from society bears some similarity to Bisclavret, a twelfth-century werewolf romance written by a woman (Marie de France), and interesting for various reasons. (Some literature is available via Google Books.) In this case, the hero (the eponymous Bisclavret) is driven from society by the treachery of his wife, who hides his clothes so he can’t turn back from a wolf into a human and is forced to spend seven years in the forest as a beast. Of course Frank loses his wife, rather than being betrayed by her, but there’s still the connection between loss of wife – loss of home – loss of self, resulting in exile to the margins of society and transformation into a “monster.” Bisclavret never gives up his principles and identity even while forced to remain a wolf, and Frank gains a reputation as the “Punisher,” but likewise adheres to his own code of honor. He remains a knight, even if a knight-errant.

Bisclavret is rescued and brought back from the woods by an unnamed king, who sees his humanity and treats him well even as a monster (and yes, there are some definite homoerotic undertones in the fact that it’s the king’s love that restores him to himself, after his wife rejects him for his monsterhood or arguably, queerness). However, you could credibly parallel this to Frank and David Lieberman, who believes that he can help Frank and they can restore him to his former self/his good name. David of course physically helps Curtis care for Frank after his injuries in TP 1x05, and in general performs the humanizing role for the “monster.” He serves as Frank’s companion in the wilderness and believes that he is not the way the rest of society sees him (just as everyone else in Bisclavret sees him as a werewolf and has to be convinced by his good behavior that he’s really a man). Likewise, Karen recognizes early in Daredevil season 2, and never gives up in believing, that Frank still has honor. He’s (literally) not a monster to her. He has been expelled from the chivalric society in which he operated before, but he has not completely abandoned his morality.

Next, as noted, the motif of contests against other knights is essentially a central theme in all quest narratives. Frank must match his wits and skills against challengers, and be paralleled and anti-paralleled to them. One of his most obvious foils is against Matt, as they are explicitly set up as reflections and reverse images of each other. In some sense, Matt is the perfect chivalric knight, at least in DD s1/s2. His morality tends to the black and white, he always has some sense of how his faith informs or restricts his actions, and he constantly incorporates the church’s teaching into his sense of self. As Richard Kaeuper discusses in Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry, this is basically exactly what the medieval church would want for a knight. Some degree of coexistence (sometimes a great deal) exists between chivalry and Christianity, but the underlying question of violence and sin always underlies it – can a man who makes his living by killing people really claim to be acting in a holy cause? Matt avoids this paradox (or tries to) by not killing anyone, but Frank almost exactly embodies the tension between these two ideologies that was ever-present in the medieval era. Clerical moralists always worried that knights were too comfortable with killing, violence, and general unethical behavior (even as they needed and co-opted that violence for their own purposes, such as the preaching and popularization of the crusades). For their part, the knights often selectively used the parts of Christianity that they liked, and fashioned it into their own ethos, just like Frank does to justify his campaign of vengeance.

In other words, Matt and Frank are perfect symbols of the struggle between church and chivalry, with Matt embodying one side (reconciliation) and Frank embodying the other (estrangement), but neither of them are completely excluded from knighthood despite their differences. They’re in fact the central tension of its existence – how violent can a knight be, and how much consideration, superficial or otherwise, does he have to pay to the church’s restriction of his ethics and behavior? There is some argument that chivalric literature was written as an attempted correction or moral instruction for real-life knights, who were supposed to take it as guidance on their own behavior and be more merciful. This isn’t always the case, since as noted, the literature exalts the very kind of violent behavior that built a chivalric reputation, but there was always that inherent wariness about how much was too much. Matt and Frank push and pull each other on this very question, end up working together at points because they are both within the system, but can’t fully reconcile.

(Also I’d like to point out: Stick, Matt, and Elektra as Merlin, Arthur, and Morgana. Stick is the mysterious, possibly immortal mentor, who teaches and mentors both of them, but also misleads and manipulates them for his own purposes. Matt becomes the ‘hero,’ son of the dead/fallen king (Uther Pendragon/Battlin’ Jack Murdock), while Elektra becomes the villainess/feared sorceress, marginalized by a society frightened of her agency and unwillingness to play nice. Also, one of Arthur’s two half-sisters, usually Morgause but sometimes Morgana, is the mother of his illegitimate son, Mordred, who is prophesied to be his destruction. So there is a dark/forbidden/taboo sexual aspect to their relationship, and just as Mordred causes the ultimate fall of Camelot, Matt and Elektra are literally caught in a falling building at the end of Defenders, which destroys their current identities. Matt enters Once and Future King stage after that and at the beginning of DDS3, where he is ‘gone’ or sleeping or suffering a crisis of faith and must summon up the wherewithal to return, and the character of Benjamin Poindexter becomes one of the many Arthur imposters. There are also some parallels for Elektra with Nimue, the ambitious young student of Merlin’s who overthrows him, ends his reign, and imprisons him in a tree.)

Anyway, back to Frank. So what are knights actually doing with all this questing? Well, various things, but they’re most often searching for the Holy Grail: symbolic of eternal life, forgiveness and atonement of sins, return to self. For this reason, few of them actually find it or are able to encounter it without being changed. It too has a deeply underlying Christian context, and Frank, the ex-Catholic, has been estranged from his belief but not separated entirely. (Likewise, if you were not worthy to look on it, you could be blinded, so… the fact that Matt himself is blind is arguably a commentary on who he actually is vs. how he imagines himself.) The Grail is also, interestingly, in the custody of a figure known as the Fisher King. He is the keeper of the castle where the Grail is hidden, and in the context of the Punisher, he’s basically Curtis.

The Fisher King, for a start, is always wounded in the legs or the thigh, and unable to stand. Some scholars have interpreted this as a metaphor for castration (since “thigh” is often a euphemism for the genitals), and that the Fisher King is passive and impotent because he is physically unable to perform warfare and thus to acquire chivalry. Either way, the Fisher King is the keeper of eternal life, but is physically disabled and needs the help of a knight to activate that power. Curtis is to some degree a subversion of this trope, because he is explicitly not helpless and functions to enable other questing knights (veterans with PTSD) to search for the Grail (health and reconciliation to society)… but in TP 1x09, he still needs Frank to save him. Frank has to encounter the Fisher King and make the correct choice/ask the right question (which wire to cut) to save him and continue his own path toward the Grail. Curtis, by running the veterans’ group, is symbolically the keeper of eternal life, where questers have to literally ask questions/talk to each other to restore themselves, and Frank, by going at the end of s1, is still trying to reach it. But true to form, with the beginning of s2, he’s not going to be able to entirely get there. There is still another obstacle/quest to overcome.

So what about Karen? Visually and to some degree topically, she is set up as the lady whose love Frank needs to obtain and maintain, even in the wilderness of his exile. Karen is blonde-haired and blue-eyed, which was often viewed in the medieval era as the ideal/most beautiful kind of woman (because white supremacy in Europe has always existed to some degree, even if in differently constructed ways. However, the thirteenth-century Dutch romance Morien, and some other ones, feature black and mixed-race protagonists, who are just as able to achieve the predicates of the heroic quest as others). She is also, as discussed above, one of the only people to believe in Frank’s honor and to reach out to help him. However, this relationship has to be kept secret, and has the potential to destroy them both if revealed. This is a fairly close parallel to another of Marie de France’s romances: Lanval (adopted in fourteenth-century English form, by Thomas Chestre, as Sir Launfal).

In brief, Sir Lanval, after being cast out from Camelot, meets a fairy woman and they become lovers, and she promises him that he will have everything he needs, as long as he keeps her secret and never mentions her to anyone. (Marie’s original version of this is much less misogynist than Chestre’s, which adds Guinevere making sexual advances to Launfal and her jealousy being the cause of him being thrown out, so yes, Dudes Ruining Stuff has a long history.) This is not an exact analogue to Frank and Karen, but keeping the code of secrecy (Karen obviously can’t tell anyone about Frank, Frank receives what he needs from her in terms of information, emotional support, etc, but likewise can’t tell anyone about it) is paramount in both relationships. Speaking about the relationship or revealing it to the outside world will result in its destruction, and the fairy lady has to vouch for Lanval’s goodness to the court in Camelot, just as Karen stoutly defends Frank to the court of public opinion/literally everyone. In some sense, while the knight has to rescue the fair maiden, the fair maiden is also the arbitrator of his fate and his overall reputation. (Also, all of TP 1x10 is  basically Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, in which Lancelot must rescue the abducted Guinevere from Meleagant, and having to struggle with the revelation of this relationship and the fact they can’t be together and the dictates of public/proper behavior. Anyway.)

Lastly, Frank’s initial and final conflicts, and the overall shape of his quest, are dictated by his encounters with two archvillains: Billy Russo and William Rawlins, or “Agent Orange.” These are made especially painful for him by the fact that they are or were both close to him. Billy was his best friend, essentially part of his family, and as noted, there is a major theme in chivalric literature revolving around a betrayal (and subsequent murder) by those closest to you. We already discussed King Arthur being overthrown and killed by his incestuous illegitimate son, Mordred; the best-known version of that tale is of course Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, though only the seventh book, as linked above, actually tells the story of Arthur’s death. There is also Arthur’s half-sister and Mordred’s usual mother Queen Morgause; in the Morte, she is killed by her son Gaheris for committing adultery with Sir Lamorak and dishonoring her husband, King Lot. So in one sense, the knight is always doomed to face a betrayal from within his family, or from a close friend.

However, Billy Russo is also straight-up one of the demon knights of Perlesvaus, or, The High History of the Holy Grail. In Perlesvaus, Lancelot is haunted by the specter of these demon knights, who engage in a dark mockery of chivalric behavior, excesses of violence, and satanic imagery, and are otherwise the “dark side of the force” of honorable knighthood, as Richard Kaeuper puts it in Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe. Honor and chivalry are not permanent or unchangeable qualities, and in fact are very fragile. The perfect knight can and should have both of these, but he can also lose them very quickly by impious, dishonorable, murderous, or otherwise wrong actions. The demon knights are a metaphor and a commentary on the same tension we discussed in regard to Frank and Matt: when does a knight-errant become a bad knight? When does his behavior permanently transgress him and cast him beyond the reach of repentance? Billy outwardly embodies the same qualities as Frank, has been through the same wars, is part of the same order, but he isn’t a hero on a quest whose chivalric identity can eventually be reconciled to him. He has crossed too far to the wrong side of the line; now he is the embodiment of evil, a shadow parallel and a cautionary tale. He is not a knight-errant, he is merely a monster.

Then, of course, there’s Rawlins/Agent Orange. Noting the fact that his nickname is also color-coded, we can see some parallels to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In short, in this tale, a mysterious “Green Knight” challenges any man to strike him, with the condition that he will get to return the blow in a year and a day. Sir Gawain accepts and beheads him, after which the Green Knight stands up, picks up his head, and remains Gawain of his promise. Gawain has to struggle to both honorably keep his bargain and avoid dying, and is eventually struck at in return by the Green Knight, wounded, but not killed. In some interpretations, this has just been a test all along for Gawain to prove his honor, or an attempt by Morgana to deceive him and cause him to betray his chivalric ideals, and the Green Knight is just a pawn to achieve this. In others, the Green Knight is a potential embodiment of the Devil. (He also has a dual identity, as the Green Knight/Sir Bertilak, as Rawlins does.) Frank strikes at/beheads/blinds Rawlins, as seen in the flashbacks of TP 1x03, so Rawlins literally wants to do the same to him (an eye for an eye) in TP 1x12. In the story, Gawain and the Green Knight part on cordial terms, but in this case, Frank has to actually complete the death/destruction of his opponent. Like Gawain, however, he is wounded but not killed, and must find some way to survive his encounter with a possibly demonic entity determined to pay back in exact measure the physical wound/symbolic beheading inflicted earlier.

So. . . yes. Overall, both in the broad parameters of his character arc, in the obstacles he confronts, and the other people he meets and the encounters he plays out with them, Frank is actually an excellent hero for a modern-medieval romance. The essential core of the medieval romance was not about love, though that was often present, but about identity, adventure, and the challenge to self, and while in some places these tropes have been updated or nuanced or subverted, in others they’re played as recognizably or directly descended from their medieval counterparts, and the way in which we have thought about stories and enjoyed them for a very long time.

[jennaschererwrites]

‘Doctor Who’: Long Live the First Female Doctor! – Rolling Stone

In its five decades careening through the cosmos and the popular imagination, Doctor Who has given us plenty of philosophies to choose from: “Go forward in all your beliefs.” “There is no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes.” “We’re all stories in the end.” “Bananas are good.” But on yesterday’s Season 11 premiere, the latest incarnation of the time-traveling, galaxy-hopping, species-saving, face-changing Time Lord gave voice to what is perhaps the show’s most enduring philosophy: “We’re all capable of the most incredible change.”

As surely as the Doctor has two hearts, change is built into this show’s DNA. It has a lot to do with Doctor Who‘s enduring message of hope and progress, and even more to do with practicality: A show can go on indefinitely if its lead can change bodies whenever an actor decides to call it quits. In its 54-year history, 12 blokes have stepped into the role — four of them in the past 13 years alone, since the series’ 2005 resurrection. But no change has been more monumental, more timestream-shattering, than the decision to have the Doctor regenerate as a woman.

As with any major news about a beloved franchise, last year’s announcement that our hero would be transforming from Peter Capaldi into Jodie Whittaker (along with a new showrunner, Broadchurch scribe Chris Chibnall) was met with equal parts euphoria and derision. But the proof is in the pudding, and Whittaker’s long-anticipated debut, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” is an episode rooted solidly in the Who tradition while also offering something deliriously new.

After six seasons under showrunner Steven Moffat — who delighted in the kind of “timey-wimey” plotting that would leave your head spinning — the character’s mythos had become so convoluted as to be indecipherable to new or casual viewers. The latest series mercifully hacks through that jungle of backstory to bring us a fresh start. New to this universe? No worries — so is the Doctor.

Freshly regenerated and separated from her TARDIS (that’s the blue police box that can travel through time and space and is bigger on the inside, for those just joining us), Whittaker’s Who crash-lands on Earth clad in the tattered, oversized clothes of her predecessor. She’s a bit confused and still cooking, brand-new-body–wise. “Why are you calling me madam?” she asks one of the first humans she meets. When she find out it’s because she’s a woman, she widens her eyes in surprise and delight. “Am I? Does it suit me?”

But never mind that, because the lady has got extraterrestrial bad guys to fight ASAP — in this case, an electrified tentacle-y creature and a goth Power Ranger-looking dude menacing greater Sheffield. It wouldn’t be Doctor Who without some jerks threatening Great Britain, or without a scrappy, endearing human or four to join the Time Lord in her heroics.

The new crop of companions breaks the usual mold of “plucky young woman looking to have an adventure.” This time, it’s a quartet: local teen Ryan Sinclair (Tosin Cole); policewoman-in-training Yasmin Khan (Mandip Gill); Ryan’s nan, Grace (Sharon D. Clarke); and her husband, Graham (Bradley Walsh). Together, they help the addled but very game Doctor find her bearings, craft a shiny new sonic screwdriver, and take down the threat of the week. (It’s a testament to the new series’ spirit of inclusivity that this group includes three actors of color.)

Fittingly, said villain is toxic masculinity personified: a gravelly-voiced alien (Samuel Oatley) who hails from a planet where they hunt and kill random innocents for sport in order to rise up the ranks; as a fun, gross bonus, the guy wears the teeth of his victims as face jewelry. When the Doctor wins the day and turns his own DNA-melting weapons against him, she tells him: “You had a choice. You did this to yourself. Go home.”

It’s one of several lines in the episode that function both within the plot and as a message to skeptics and haters. “Don’t be scared. All of this is new to you, and new can be scary,” she tells Graham, and later, in a crane-top showdown: “We can evolve while still staying true to who we are. We can honor who we’ve been and choose who we want to be next.” It’s all a bit on the nose, sure, but you could argue that this is a moment — in a show whose occasional heavy-handedness is part of its charm — when everyone’s noses need a good poking.

Because, well, let’s get personal here: As a Who fan ever since Christopher Eccleston first grabbed Billie Piper’s hand and shouted, “Run!” back in 2005, I’ve been enamored of the Doctor’s particular brand of heroics. You know the drill: brains over brawn, godlike powers married to self-deprecating wit, searing curiosity, hidden darkness, endless wonder and a determined compassion for even the most monstrous of creatures.

Through its many incarnations, the show has imagined a universe of infinite possibility, so it seemed nuts that the Doctor would be limited to resurrecting as a series of white guys. Not that the 12 men who’ve captained the TARDIS haven’t been frequently brilliant, but like many other women who love Doctor Who, I’ve been waiting for the day when that Time Lord regeneration glow would fade to reveal a different sort of face than the ones we were used to.

It’s a truth multiversally acknowledged that the Doctor is always the smartest, most capable person in any given room. And the value of seeing a woman in that position, after five decades of alien mansplaining, cannot be understated. The real world is miles behind, but as far as speculative fiction is considered, we have the sci-fi equivalent of a female president.

Whittaker (who’s best known for her previous work with Chibnall on Broadchurch) absolutely owns the part from moment she leaps into the frame. Like every Doctor, she’s a ball of frantic energy and one-liners, commanding the room by thoroughly flustering and out-talking everyone else in it. But she also brings something else to the table that sets her apart from her male antecedents: emotional availability. Take the way she describes the experience of regeneration: “There’s this moment when you’re sure you’re about to die. And then … you’re born! It’s terrifying.” Previous incarnations drew power from shoving their true feelings down deep; Whittaker’s version airs them in the open, and is no less formidable for it.

There comes a moment in every Doctor’s first episode when they take a stand against the bad guy, square their shoulders and declare: “I’m the Doctor.” It’s formulaic, but it’s thrilling; the mantra is both the establishment of a moniker and a mission statement, a superheroic call to fight injustice across time and space. And when Whittaker says it — wind-whipped and majestic in the charred remnants of a black coat tailored to an old body that no longer suited her — it sent a shiver up my spine. For the first time in half a century, women aren’t just in the passenger’s seat of the TARDIS. We’re the goddamn lords of time and space.

[cataschism]

➤ closed starter for @katikis.

Magic, when nothing else is left, is what people turn to when they’re afraid.

It’s the experience of the unusual that guides them through their fear, the mystical, the unnatural. The oddity of the ‘ other, ’ the supernatural, monsters             /             & the tyranny of men are what guides people through their own dark corridors, the things that make them afraid of the mirror. Bad luck & unfortunate coincidences curdle the soul in terrifying ways, beginning with their sleep             /             & then the quietness of their loved ones as they distance, distance             /             & distance themselves farther away. Terror is only one head of the hydra of true fear. Guilt & remorse, loneliness             /             burying one’s self in their own pity.

Magic is what they turn to. Endeavor knows this well & clear from his own experiences with his children, & the public he serves on the daily              /             he believes Jujutsu Sorcerers are charlatans wearing the disguise of ordinary men, but even he won’t underestimate power, & guts & the masses’ belief in the people who rise & exist above them. Even the most famous magicians rely on the beliefs of their watchers, their fans. Endeavor must rely on himself             /             without strength, there is nowhere else to turn.

Satoru is the Sorcerer in charge ( the most powerful, the only ‘ in charge ’ title that ends up mattering in the reality they both live in. ) of the Jujutsu Sorcerer corner of the world, and Endeavor, the heroic. Justice turns yellowed & old at the price of magic, where unfairness takes its toll. Even the magical bear the brunt of unfairness / the term ‘ heroic ’ must bear it as well, & it does so with pride, unable to hide its own gruesome history             /             when children take the brunt of the heroic world, Endeavor must wonder to himself what the fighting’s all for. If it’s not to protect the future at large, children & those yet unseen still accounted for             /             then what is it for? & who exactly is he protecting?

Not Satoru, who’s supposed to be able to handle themselves with relative ease.

Endeavor mentally flicks through the case details that he’d been given. Bodies disappearing out of thin air             /             strange, almost whale song noises as a believed luring mechanism ( not quite angelic, as he’s been told. but something akin to a sound - equivalent of an anglerfish’s light. )               /             strange people, maybe copies or decoys             /             could be human, could be a curse             /             unknown, unknown, details always unknown. Endeavor’s eye twitches.

Alley in the dingiest part of downtown a few miles east of Musutafu, and several miles west from Tokyo. In a happy coincidence, the last victim had been taken somewhere in the middle of both Endeavor and Satoru’s locations. 

He braces himself before parting the sea of cops, detectives, and black - uniformed Sorcerers             /             ❛ Where’s Satoru? I was told they’d be here. ❜

[bluethepaladin]

What do you have against Bex? (Can u also provide evidence thanks 💜)

When I first got this ask, I was tempted to play it off as a joke and say “the fact she exists,” and leave it at that. But I feel like it’s important to stay informed. And if you genuinely don’t know, I’ll give you the complete rundown. It’s long, it’s messy, and it’s nasty, so bear with me.

First, and introduction. When I talk about Bex, I’m referring to the actress Bex Taylor-Klaus, who is the voice actor (or VA) of the character Pidge in the show Voltron Legendary Defender on Netflix.

It all began a while ago when Bex liked a comment of a picture. The picture involved a ship called Shei//th. I censored the name so it doesn’t show up in the tags of that on tumblr. But essentially it’s a ship between two characters, Takashi Shirogane, a 25 year old pilot who is the leader of the team, and Keith Kogane, one of the other “paladins” or fighters on the team. People like me find this ship to be distasteful, since Shiro is an adult, and the others are teens (it’s actually a bit messier than that, since an official Voltron source listed Keith as 18, but the producers of the show, Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim Dos Santos, said they were not consulted on the book so there’s some question as to whether it’s canon or not). Either way, the consensus by most reasonable people is that it’s probably not a healthy thing to depict in children’s media, when you consider the considerable age difference, the power imbalance (leader, senior officer with someone they are in charge of), and finally, the iconic line by the character of Keith himself when he defines their relationship as a familial one.

Nonetheless, the ship persists, as nasty things on tumblr are wont to do. There’s a lot of shipping discourse on tumblr between two distinct groups which can be labelled as “antis”–people who are not in favor of any Shiro/paladin ships, or what has become to be known as “shaladins”–people who ship any variation of Shiro with the paladins.

Here is where Bex got involved. On Instagram there was a picture of a black shoe and a red shoe together and the joke was about the shoes being a prophecy that Shei//th would be canon. A joke, mostly, considering all the evidence above. But here’s where Bex got herself in trouble. She liked a comment on the picture where someone said “Keith is a power bottom confirmed.”

Obviously, this caused a bit of an uproar within the fanbase, especially between the discourse between antis and shaladins. Shaladins were celebrating that an Official Voltron Source liked their ship, and antis were angry about that acknowledgement of the ship at all by official sources, and the sexualization of a kid’s show (more on this later.)

So of course this sparked the discourse on tumblr. One user, @lancehunks, who was receiving asks about Bex, tagged her in the replies.They were definitely unfavorable. 

and 

and a few more. 

Bex, being the big strong, adult, woman she is, decided that she could not take this obviously grievous insult to her name [sarcasm], and decided to reblog them all and respond to them. Keep in mind, that @lancehunks was just 13 years old. And Bex (22) decided that these were appropriate responses:

Yep, you read that right. Not only an adult but employed on a kid’s show! To a 13 year old! The target audience of the very show she’s a part of! (Oh, the hypocrisy). But wait, there’s more:

Just in case you’re confused, let me tell you the many, many reasons why this is unacceptable. 

 Bex is an adult. You’d think she’d be a little more mature by now just in general. It’s the internet and there are trolls.

The person she was addressing was 13!!!! Do I think it was mature to tag Bex in all those posts? No. But it’s… behavior that you can expect from 13 year old’s on the internet. If we swore at and tore down every single one of them every time they did something dumb, we would need a lot more therapists for teens in the world. Plus it’s really disingenuous to pretend that we wouldn’t have done something similar when we were younger if we were in that position.

Bex is famous. While she’s certainly not on the caliber of massive A-List stars like Tom Holland or Zendaya, she has a fanbase that exceeds the normal person’s friend group. Just because she’s been on TV before, she has groupies that will support her no matter what, who will troll for her, who uncritically and unconditionally worship her. I’m not a Bex fan, nor do I really care to know her well enough to know just exactly how many fans she has, to be certain she does have them. When she publicly reblogged those words, that “motherfucker,” those fighting words, she weaponized her fanbase. What I mean when I say that is her behavior gave her groupies permission to behave the same way. By targeting someone who didn’t like her (a thirteen year old!!!!!), she opened the gates to her fans and groupies doing the same thing, to a kid.

This lead to some terrible things happening. The 13 year old was getting death threats, sexual violence threats, and nsfw content, all because Bex just couldn’t let it go. 

What does this mean? Finish it? Finish the kid? If you’re so sick of the fighting, then why did you even respond in the first place? Bex is the one who escalated the situation. Bex is the one who caused the fighting in the first place (by that I mean the fighting between the two that night, the fighting between antis and shaladins has been going on for as long as the show).

There we go. Now he have something resembling dignity. But unfortunately the damage was done, and user @lancehunks deleted their blog. As a direct response to Bex’s actions. Bex caused a 13 year old to leave tumblr. 

When hearing this news, Bex offered a half-assed apology:

This is the most insincere apology I have ever seen. “The internet has Bad things on it and it’s YOUR fault for seeing them” is not an apology. The best part is that she’s a big fat hypocrite. “Sometimes, when it’s harmless, the best thing I can do is shake my head and keep scrolling.” So why didn’t you Bex? Why didn’t you keep scrolling instead of targeting a 13 year old?

In light of recent political events, though there’s one thing that stands out to me: 

Sound like anybody you know? The esteemed President, perhaps?

*disclaimer* I am in no way claiming that Bex is a Trump supporter. I don’t know enough about her–and I don’t want to know enough about her–to know where she leans politically. I’m just drawing the attention to the similarities in moral equivalency going on, here.*

Sure you targeted a 13 year old and weaponized your fanbase, but someone tagging you in a snarky post is just as bad, right? (Wrong.)

You’d think that would be the end. You’d think that Bex would be capable of living and learning, or maybe even just taking her own advice, and keep scrolling. But here we go again.

The next bit of drama started when the possibly canon guide book was released, stating Keith’s age as 18. There was a big celebration on the shaladin side because technically, that would make it “legal” for Keith and Shiro to have sex. Besides the fact that legal ≠ moral, again, Voltron is a kid’s show. But on tumblr this time, Bex posted this.

This time, the discourse surrounding Bex was a little different., This time, the discourse mostly focused on the fact that even if Shiro and Keith disregarded canon and morals and the fact that it’s a kid’s show ever did get in a relationship, the only thing that matters is how they like to have sex.

This is a problem for a lot of reasons. There’s a culture, pretty prominent on tumblr of women, mostly white, who are obsessed with gay sex. They write fanfiction and p*rn solely for their own personal gratification. This, of course, is a gross misinterpretation to wanting LGBT+ representation. If you aren’t a mlm (an acronym for men-loving-man, that includes many sexualities) then writing p*rn about is sexualizing them, using them as a tool to get yourself off, and not like complex human people. Mlm are more than how they like to have sex. In fact, that shouldn’t be a part of a discussion for anybody except between willing partners. This also feeds into the popular and damaging stereotype that gay men are predatory by nature.

So, as a whole, not good. 

And again, we have a whole situation escalated by Bex. The worst part is, to people who tried to explain this to her, the only response they were given was a gif:

So once again, a minor dared to express their distaste for Bex on tumblr. But this time, they didn’t tag her. This time, they censored her name. But Bex found it anyway. And she decided to do the exact same thing that led to a minor leaving the website, and to stop watching the show. 

Have no fear, this time though. This time, Bex is going after a 14 year old, at least she’s not going after kids anymore, right? [sarcasm]

Some final notes. 

Bex claims to be an LGBT+ rights activist. I’m also pretty sure she’s a lesbian herself (again, I already know too much about her, I’m not looking to get to know her better.) So, you’d think, as someone who wants equality for LGBT+ people and communities, she’d have the wherewithal to listen to specific subsets of that group when they say something about themselves, like, for example, young mlm who don’t appreciate being sexualized by a white woman. So I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when I saw this on her blog:

Now, I happen to agree with the above statement, but it’s so ironic, so hypocritical that Bex is talking about the sexualization of anything. Because kid’s shows aren’t safe from her sexualization and mlm certainly aren’t. How can one person be so incredibly oblivious? A mystery that I don’t have any interest in solving. 

I also want to address something a little more devious and a little more dark. I personally know of at least 12 different people who sent Bex asks, politely explaining some of the things I’ve talked about here, or relaying how her words hurt them personally. Bex never answered any of them. But she did answer this:

Just to be perfectly clear, I do not condone or encourage hatemail. Do not send people anything wishing them death or harm in any way. I have never sent nor do plan on sending hatemail, and you should be ashamed of yourself if you do.

However, this is incredibly nefarious. Bex doesn’t answer any of the many asks she got that were polite, but proved her wrong. She didn’t answer any of the young mlm who gave her their personal stories and who weren’t anonymous. Instead, she publishes this. And she did this on purpose, to make her look innocent, to make her look like she’s the one being attacked. I get hatemail every single day too. Things along similar lines to this. I block the user. Delete them, One, because I don’t want to expose my followers to that kind of negativity on a daily basis, two, a mature person knows that deleting them is the best kind of revenge because the user will be constantly looking for a response and they will know they had no effect on me and three, because if you do that, eventually they stop. This is intentional on Bex’s part to make the people who don’t like her look bad. I don’t like Bex at all, and I certainly do not support that message. Any reasonable person wouldn’t. Also the fact that it’s an anonymous message adds a certain air of doubt as to who sent it. 

The point is, Bex is purposely ignoring polite and well-meaning people and posted this to “prove” she’s the one on the “good” side because no good person would send that message.

This is also worth noting: 

This was posted after the lancehunks debate but before the power bottom comment she made. In this post, Bex admits that a relationship between Shiro and any of the paladins is predatory in nature. She said that. Her words. And then after that she said that Keith was a power bottom. 

The last thing I want to say, is that Voltron is a kid’s show. It’s rated US-TV-Y7. Which means for years 7 and older. Regardless of the ship, there should be no sexual content, be it fanart, of fanfiction of Voltron characters at all. We are all collectively responsible for keeping content age-appropriate for the target audience. So, stop it. All and any ships. 

For minors, this is my advice to you:Bex is a predator, a hypocrite, and a liar. Do not engage with her. Block her. Do not tag her in any of your posts. She has a history of targeting minors. Protect yourself. Do not engage.

[fedonciadale]

Women in Westeros and misogyny- part 1 - Cersei

With many fans hyping over the next season and accusations about almost everywhere in the fandom, that disliking a woman on the show makes you a misogynist or anti-feminism, I think it is well worth discussing if women in Westeros are feminists and what exactly would it mean to dislike someone because of misogyny. I’ll start by talking about the terms I use.

Being a feminist means that a person aims at equal rights for all human beings regardless of their gender (and in modern times their sexual orientation or gender identification). In my book that involves that a person does not only aim for her own rights, but aims at improving the situation of all women or at least other women than just herself. Fighting for your own right can lead to an improved situation for rights in general, but that is not necessarily the case. A woman could for example fight to be admitted at the citadel, but as long as she is the only woman accepted, women’s right are not furthered by her admittance. Still one woman’s acceptance might breach the dam and lead to more women being admitted in the long run. So we should differentiate between feminism, aiming at equal rights of women, aiming at improving the situation of a significant part of women, aiming at improving one’s own situation. This is the level of motivation.

When we look at the results, a person might get results she/he never wanted. Thus a woman who has a honoured position as lady of a keep, a woman who is an heiress, like in Dorne or on Bear Island, would have more rights than other women and would be better respected than others - Arianne Martell or Dacey Mormont in the books - and their equivalents on the show, Sand Snakes and Lyanna Mormont. These women had better rights than their fellow women, but that does not necessarily make them feminists. Still, the result of such women existing might lead to a more open mind towards the competence of women to rule.

I think, it is very important that we have that little detail in mind: Motivation and plans are not the same as results! Thus, a woman who fights for her own rights might improve the situation of all women. A woman who tries to improve the situation of women in general might fail and make it worse. That’s why it is very important to think thoroughly about plans and possible consequences!

There is another layer and that is what the show and the books want us to see and understand about the women in Westeros and how patriarchy influences them.

And then there is the layer of what kind of arguments are used by the fandom to talk about a given character.

Now to Cersei:

First of all, my own opinion on Cersei naturally colours my judgement, so I’m coming out into the open here: I think Cersei is a very interesting character. I plain hated her in the books, although I think she is interesting, but I love to hate her on the show and that’s Lena Headey’s fault. She nails Cersei to an extent that gives me shivers.

Cersei very keenly feels the disadvantage of being a women in a patriarchal world. She complains that as Jaime and she grew older people treated them differently and she longs for masculine attributes, not because she wants to be a man, but because she wants to have the privileges of men. (I should wear the mail , I’m the only son, Tywin ever had - and many, many similar quotes). So, Cersei longs for her own situation to be better, and yet she internalised the misogyny of the patriarchy around her. She can only think of herself as positive, if she thinks about herself with male attributes. Even when she fights with Robert or Jaime, she uses the idea that men are better then women (”I should wear the mail and you the skirt”, she says to Robert. “Better close your pants, your dick is hanging down rather pitifully”, she says to Jaime).

She joins in belittling other women in a misogynist way - She abuses other women as ugly, stupid, fat, old hag etc., tragically never realising that she herself is getting old, ugly and fat. And she (sexually) abuses other women. The bedscene with Taena Merryweather in the books is creepy, but shows very well, how her mind works. All she ever wanted was to be accepted as an equal mind by her father, even after his death she emulates her father and wants his approval. I think, that the changes for Cersei’s costumes in the show underline this brilliantly. Her last look in season 6 has a very armoury look about it, very black, very virile.

Book readers usually agree, that Cersei overrates her own intelligence, and while she has her moments, she does not really fit into Tywin’s shoes. The tragic thing is and this is something the books show very well: Cersei is a victim of her father’s inherent prejudices. It is fun to speculate what could have become of Cersei if her father had taken her seriously and actually had tried to teach her something. But Tywin just wants her to be pretty and a pawn in his plans.

Now, as for Cersei being a feminist. Just because she is a victim of patriarchy (if a very privileged one) does not mean that she is a feminist. She works to improve her own situation. She seeves at the prejudices, but not once does she try to change situations for women in general. She works just for herself. She would be totally happy to become queen/to be queen and not change a iota for other women.

As far as motivations go, Cersei is no feminist, not even remotely so.

Nevertheless, as for the results of her actions, her case might have a heavy influence on how people will look at women in power. She probably will be a failure as a queen and that might mean that women after her will have it even harder, even if “evil and mad Queen Cersei” certainly will make it into the songs.

As for the show/author’s view on Cersei I think it is pretty clear, that on a certain level you can feel with Cersei who struggles with the fact, that she cannot fully live up to her talents, that she was not even allowed to hone that talents. Cersei’s answer to that problem is a “I’ll give shit to everybody”, not very nice and over the top, but you can see how she got there. That she is not an overall genius, but only moderately talented in politics is tragic. If she were a man nobody would think lesser of her for it.

Now for the arguments against Cersei: Since most people agree that Cersei as queen of Westeros is bad news, this is difficult. As far as I know, (and I don’t claim to know “the fandom”), Cersei haters are rarely accused of being misogynistic. There are just too many of them.

But, some of their arguments are misogynistic: For example: “She fucks her brother, she is not fit to rule”. Nope, her sex life does not come into politics. “She is a whore.” Nope, doesn’t say anything about her fitness to rule.

“She’s not intelligent enough to rule”. If you say that and think she is not intelligent enough, because she is a women, it is misogynistic. If you say that, because she is not intelligent enough, it is not!

“She’s ruthless.” Well, that one tends to be misogynistic at least implicitly, because people usually don’t care about men being ruthless. So, ask yourself, if you use the same standard on men as on Cersei.

“She antagonizes people by being bitchy and ruthless. She exploits people.” True enough, yet again, ask yourself, if you would say that about a man.

Cersei’s problem is, that she can’t act like a man. She can’t fight, but she fumbles with what she does. She has no role models of a female ruler she can adhere to. But instead of looking for her own way to do things, she tries to outdo any man in ruthlessness, brutality and even misogyny.

In a way, it is tragic, she never learned to rule, the only role model she has is her father and by using masculine symbols of power she sort of absurdly delegitimises her own rule. There is no way, she can juggle that situation. Only a very exceptional person could do that, and although it still remains to be seen if Cersei will make it so season 8, it is highly likely that she will fail. That makes her such an interesting character. In an ideal world, Cersei might have had the chance to learn politics and to either become better at it or to learn that politics is just not the thing for her.

So much for Cersei, to be continued.....

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

The Vindication of Venom Part 4: Spider Stalker

Part 3

Part 5

I appreciate that I might have come off as rather audacious or condescending (or both) the last part when I basically said most readers were judging Venom in ASM #300 by an unfair set of criteria.

 Allow me to defend my view by elaborating further on what the actual intentions behind Venom were.

 As I discussed in Part 1, Michelinie’s conception of Venom stemmed primarily from wishing to find an opponent for Spider-Man who was invisible to his Spider Sense. This was emphasized in Venom’s first two off panel appearances where Peter makes note of the lack of warning from his spider sense.

Obviously not having any warning from his spider sense would make Michelinie’s new villain dangerous in a fight, but in these two appearances he’s chosen to build Venom up as an unseen assailant to Peter Parker, not Spider-Man. In the latter instance the assailant even targeted Peter when he was using his powers but was out of costume.

As far as establishing this mysterious individual as a threat this was an ingenious move as it killed three birds with one stone.

By having Peter attacked in his civilian identity it undermined two essential functions of spider sense. Namely that it protects Peter physically but also that he can rely upon it to help him keep his identity a secret. And with these attacks (especially the second one) it is all but confirmed that whoever this assailant is, they are aware of Peter’s double life.

Immediately any reader pondering Peter’s attacker would realize the severity of the danger Spidey was in. He’s under threat from an unknown enemy who knows who he is, possibly knows how to track him down and his usually reliable spider sense can give him no warning as to the assailant’s presence or hostile actions.

These early hints of Venom convey him as insidious and creepy as opposed to a brute force powerhouse. And of course when you think about it, portraying Venom this way early on is the most obvious idea in the world when you villain’s central gimmick (and original source of inspiration) is that they are invisible to Spidey’s in-built danger alarm. In fact such a thing had already been done in the classic ASM #39 where the Green Goblin followed Peter Parker after disabling his spider sense through a chemical.

And this all brings me to my essential point. Despite media and later renditions to the contrary, originally Venom was never intended as a ‘dark reflection of Spider-Man’, at least that wasn’t the main idea. He was also not intended as a villain with a significant link to Peter’s life.

No the key to understanding Venom’s concept is that he was in fact…a stalker. More specifically he’s the equivalent of a celebrity stalker, Spidey being the celebrity in question.

Actually there is even more to it than that which dives into Brock’s psychology, but I’ll address that (along with the ‘celebrity’ aspect of things) in later instalments. For now allow me to focus upon the former rather than the latter.

When I say Venom was a stalker I do not merely mean that he literally stalked Spider-Man. After all the Green Goblin, Harry Osborn, the Puma, Kraven the Hunter and even Mac Gargan (before he became the Scorpion) all did that.

What I mean is unlike those other characters Venom was built  around the idea of him being a stalker. And not in an ‘urban hunter’ way like Puma or Kraven where the characters are understood to be an animalistic men, or else see some form of honour in their hunt.

I mean Venom in his early hints and appearances is through the artwork and his actions coded as the types of creepy stalkers you hear about in the news. The people who in our cultural stereotypes of them are heavy breathing, binocular owning, photo taking, peeping around corners and keeping to the shadows weirdos.

Whilst Venom doesn’t directly conform to that described stereotype his actions and portrayals clearly code him as such to the readers of the time.

Just take another look at Web #18 and #24. It can all too easily be read as touching upon ideas you’d find in a stalker storyline, especially since (ala Web  #24) this assailant is apparently following Peter and striking from the shadows only to disappear again.

Cut to ASM #298 and we get a wall of Spider-Man pictures and news clippings in what looks like a grim little apartment that Venom. Clad in shadows is musing over.

Again this is obviously shorthand for classic stalker behaviour. This is emphasised further in ASM #299 where Venom is fully unveiled and the scene is played to sell creepiness and terror. The latter aspect is further emphasised through the use of Mary Jane, an innocent and unarmed woman who’s being accosted in the ‘safe space’ of her and our hero’s home.

The scene (specifically in having a defenceless woman confronted by a horrible ‘monster’) is at least somewhat reminiscent of many slasher movies which had a certain degree of  popularity at the time, or many horror or even noir films. Whatever you think about the appropriateness of using Mary Jane in this way the point is that the scene is being played to be unsettlingly creepy and scary. 

Whilst lacking his frightening costume and creepy grin, ASM #300 itself even features a scene showcasing Brock stalking Peter.

The idea of Venom following an unsuspecting Spider-Man and invading his private life is furthermore played up in consequent Venom stories, and even in the character’s debut episode in the first season of Spider-Man the animated series.

In fact the idea has even evoked in stories published long after Michelinie’s departure.

Michelinie additionally used stalkers repeatedly in his run on Spider-Man albeit, ones targeting Mary Jane rather than Spider-Man, indicating the idea of a stalker villain held an appeal to him. Forgive me for repeating this image again, but compare this image from ASM #298 with this other one from ASM #307.

Personally I find the latter creepier (especially considering he has some of Mary Jane’s clothing...)

In addition to being coded as a stalker Brock is also (rightly or wrongly) coded as a ‘religious lunatic’

I will be addressing this more  later in the Appendix but it is important to bear in mind that in the time period this sort of coding was shorthand for a disturbed individual, thus complimenting the stalker coding of the character. 

The time period in question by the way was the mid-late 1980s. It was an era when comic books had been getting edgier for quite awhile and Spidey was no exception (e.g. the Death of Jean DeWolff arc). So having a villain be something more sinister and insidious like a stalker (rather than a common thug or costumed criminal) would’ve fit with the times. And as far as original concepts were concerned, it was an idea that had not been done to death within Spider-Man’s series at that point in time.

This then addresses one of the most frequent criticisms surrounding Venom’s origins.

·         Other versions of the character (such as Spider-Man the Animated Series, Spider-Man 3 and the Spectacular Spider-Man Animated Series) all make Brock to be a much better dark reflection of Spider-Man than the original comic book version

Yes, those versions in many ways present Venom as a much better darker reflection of Spider-Man. Yes the original comic book version perhaps doesn’t sell the idea of Venom as a dark reflection all that effectively. 

But like I said earlier, it simply was never the original (or at least primary) point of the character.

The symbiote was used as part of Venom’s character because Michelinie wanted a villain who was invisible to the spider sense, which was an already established power of the symbiote. He then opted to use the established concept rather than invent something new whole cloth.

The fact that it had also been established as capable of granting the host additional powers like Spider-Man and came with an established visual was incidental. Nevertheless (as I discussed above) those facts fed into inadvertently building fan expectations up for something that Michelinie et al didn’t intend for.

 When we understand Venom to be a stalker character a lot of his early presentation makes a bit more sense, and feeds into further understanding the other oft criticized aspects of his character. 

With that in mind let’s begin to address those.

P.S. I recognize that older comics perhaps did not imply the wearer of the alien costume would get all of Spider-Man’s powers. 

That might have been a deliberate embellishment by Michelinie.

However I maintain it wasn’t something done as part os a central idea of Venom as a ‘dark reflection’. Rather it was simply done to allow Venom to pose a tangible threat to Spider-Man. 

After all being able to find Spider-Man wherever he was and not trigger the spider sense wouldn’t be particularly threatening if Spidey could simply use his speed to evade his assailant or his strength to easily overpower them. By giving Venom strength as well as speed similar to Spider-Man’s Michelinie allowed his villain to physically challenge our hero on a more equal footing and make him (and us) sweat over every attack.

Part 3

Part 5

[weloseeveryweek]

my football day

I was thinking of my football day, especially now that the season is over, and whether I have any rituals and somewhere along the way realized that each version started and ended with my jersey. So bear with me as I talk about this seemingly cliche topic, literally the most obvious answer in many ways when one thinks about this topic.

You see I’m not a person of many rituals. I have patterns of how and where I watch my games, what I do beforehand sure, but they are in part a function of circumstance. How early the game is, where I am physically (and mentally) on that day and whether Fubo has the game – none of it set in stone. Nothing that will feel too out of place if I skip as long as I’m watching the game one way or the other.

Except when it comes to my jerseys and there I’ve realized I have a ton of rituals and arbitrary rules that are nonetheless quite strict. While thinking about what I was going to write for this prompt I realized two things. For one I was adhering to these rules without exactly thinking about it for quite a while and also that in some way the jersey is the closest that comes to a sacred object for me, but more about that later. For this very reason I love hearing about how other fans connect to their jerseys too? The similarities and the differences.

I need to see the game in a jersey for sure. Hence a couple of days before the game I need to make sure that the jersey is clean. It’s the one thing that makes me do laundry midweek without uttering a long string of expletives, this, and I also quite enjoy carefully turning my jersey inside out, putting it in the wash, always in cold water, and then carefully hanging it to dry, the damp fabric soft under my hands, a ritual of care that I hope minimizes the wear and tear.

For similar reasons the jersey is not to be worn on non-match days. I absolutely love having the United crest over my heart, it gives me courage and strength and like even on a shitty day I can run my hand over the embroidery and it makes me feel just that bit better, instantaneously. But that is why I have regular team articles of clothing collected over time from various stores, just so that I can go around with that crest over my heart without inflicting additional tear to my dear old jersey. (There are of course those days where I break this rule, where the additional wear is worth the additional bit of strength having that red fabric gives me to carry me through whatever unhappiness the day may hold in store, but it’s a last resort of sorts.)

This makes no sense, by the way, and it’s not something I told many people about because the crest kind of acts like a cross worn around my neck and why should a piece of football garb fulfill the role of a religious artifact? When the club is a profit making institution and it neither knows nor cares about me? It makes no sense and yet it is.

You can just get a new jersey, yeah? I can also hear you asking and the answer is well yes I suppose so but also no. Because it’s not any old jersey I’m talking about and I’m very particular about what I get to call /my jersey./ Like if you wanted to be exceptionally cruel you would gift me twenty original jerseys tomorrow one for each season or one for each player in the squad with the condition that I keep them all and I’d break down in tears because there would be no way I’d be able to *own* them all but as jerseys of my team they’d all deserve care and respect. God, I’m shuddering just thinking about it.

For me to *own* a jersey there is a bond that needs to develop. I really don’t like blank jerseys so to begin with it needs to carry the name and the number of a player I revere, someone who fights for the team and loves it like I do. For Manchester United that is Michael Carrick. I don’t know what it is, a promise (again to a man who could care less about my existence?), solidarity? And again I can’t wear the jersey of someone I’ve never toiled alongside with (if shouting at the TV from a pub counts as ‘toiling.’) I am dying to get a retro Gary Neville jersey but I’m not sure if I could ever put it on because I simply wasn’t there. I haven’t earned the right to it. Similarly getting the jersey of someone who just came to the team is out of question, because in a way the person whose jersey I’m getting needs to earn my respect too.

Then I need to wear it in, wear it week in week out because the way I see it everything that happens on the pitch when I have that jersey on gets stitched into the fabric. My first ever (I mean I only have two, but…) United jersey, Carrick’s from last season, was on me in every home game I went to last year. When my ass was freezing at Leigh watching the U21s because I did not estimate how cold it would get at night. When I sat in Edinburgh waiting for my train and screamed when Martial scored a last minute equalizer in the FA cup on the tiny screen of my phone. Or in the many games we let go at the last minute this year. When I had a cold and should have stayed at home but was screaming at the top of my lungs as the lads lifted the Big Vase. The list goes on and on.

That Carrick jersey has been through so much with me that it feels as though it sucked up the memories it witnessed to the point that now it’s made less of red polyester and more of joy and anxiety, the heartbreak, the love and even the horror my team made me feel. To me I realized (while it perhaps makes little sense to my fellow more sensible fans) the jersey is a physical manifestation of the covenant between me and my team. It’s a pledge I make to be by its side and in return it’s belonging to an idea bigger than myself and bigger than the eleven men currently running along in Old Trafford. I support Fenerbahce too for example but this year when I fell further and further apart from the team I could barely touch let alone put on my beloved Kuyt jersey, the Fener equivalent of Carrick. In many ways I felt, the team, or rather it’s fans, had failed me, and I had failed the team by not being there for them in glory and defeat. I cannot describe the rush of excitement when I finally reconnected enough to watch a random game that didn’t matter towards the end of the season and I could finally, finally put on my Kuyt jersey again.

Maybe I hope one day I can watch enough old games to convince myself I too get to rock a retro jersey, or more likely spend enough time with the team that 15/16 Carrick becomes *the* retro jersey I always rock with pride. In the meanwhile I need to get another jersey and wear my Rashy one more often because like no way I’m getting the Carrick jersey wear away before it’s time. It will be there with me when I’m 80.

Wow this got long and I don’t know…what to make of it myself? I’m strange as is that much I know, following these oddly specific rules about what is essentially a piece of fabric but perhaps football, our teams, make us do strange things as well.