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alarawriting · 4 years

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52 Project #25: Where The Winds Of Limbo Roar

... it is a point of pride to me that I never reuse a title, not even between fanfic and original fic. The title of this almost certainly should be “Veteran of the Psychic Wars”, except I already titled an X-Men AU fanfic that, so I pulled the title from another part of the lyrics.

Story derived from a prompt from @writing-prompt-s. I’m not putting a link on a story as long as Tumblr search is so broken that it excludes posts with links, so check the reblog to my main blog @alarajrogers for the full credits.

***

When their guard patrol passed the building where the psychics sat or laid on their mats, deep in their meditations, Soffrees snorted. “Look at that,” he said, pointing a thumb behind him at the windows of the battery. “We go out on the front lines and risk our lives. They sit in an air-conditioned room, or they nap in it, and they get served their food without even getting up to go get it… and they get paid three times what we do. What the fuck, man?”

“I know, right?” Baslicos chuckled grimly. “Be born with telepathy! Get the whole world handed to you on a platter! Join the army, get pampered like it’s a resort for rich old ladies!”

“What do they even do that’s worth that kind of money?” Soffrees shook his head. “They tell us ‘they defend us from psychic attack.’ Well, you know, I wear this chain—” he took out his charm chain, with his tags and all the charms on it, and waved it a bit – “to protect us from attacks from pink hippoceroses! And see, it works great, because when was the last time you were attacked by a pink hippoceros? Now gimme more money!”

“I knew a guy in basic training, always used to claim he was under psychic attack. Turned out he was just nuts, man.” Baslicos turned the corner – and ran straight into a tall, heavily-muscled man in a top brass uniform. She backed up. “Oh, sorry, sir—” and then her eyes went wide, as if registering who he was. “General Marcus! Sir! I apologize for running into you, sir!”

Marcus waved a hand. “At ease, private, no need to fall all over yourself apologizing. Just watch where you’re going next time.”

“Sir,” Soffrees said, almost reverently. “Can I tell you what an honor it is to meet you, sir? I went into the army because of the stories I heard about you!”

Marcus was a 60-something man with a shock of white hair that apparently rank and age allowed him to get away with not combing into regulation haircut or shaving; it was wild and bushy on his head. There was a small black bird sitting on his shoulder. Stories had it that he had been in combat since he was a young child; that he was immune to psychics; that he’d single-handedly captured the commander of the Ferlan army and forced them to surrender, twenty years ago… and many other stories that made him legendary. “I agree, sir!” Baslicos said. “It’s an honor! You’re a great hero!”

“You kids,” Marcus said, shaking his head. “You focus on the wrong things.” He gestured over at the psychic battery. “I heard what you two were saying about the psychics. You talk about what a great hero I am because I’ve been out on the front lines my whole life, but you don’t even think of who supports you, who lets you go out and serve without poking your own eyeballs out of your head.”

“Sir, I’ve never met anyone who’s been attacked by psychics,” Soffrees said.

“Sure you have. Right now. Me.”

“You? Uh… wasn’t that a long time ago, sir?”

“It sure was,” Marcus agreed. “Because for the past twenty-five years or so I haven’t served in an army that didn’t have a psychic battery, and because I’ve trained my own abilities so even when I’m outside battery range, and inside the range for an enemy battery, they can’t get through. But that’s me. Just two years ago at Fire Heights, we lost five soldiers to a psychic attack when an enemy missile took out our battery. You never heard about that?”

“I was in Basic at the time, sir,” Soffrees admitted.

“I, uh, hadn’t signed up yet. Sir.” Baslicos looked down for a moment as if she was ashamed of not having served for even as long as Soffrees.

“Well.” He motioned the two guards over to the grass on the side of the building. “You’re relieved for a bit. Sit your asses down and get educated.” He turned to the bird. “Find Lieutenant Kallimik and tell her to assign two guards out here for the next hour or so to cover for these two – what are your names?”

“Private Soffrees, sir!”

“Private Baslicos!”

“Right. To cover for Soffrees and Baslicos, because I’ve got them.”

“Two guards. Cover for Soffrees and Baslicos. Asshole,” the bird said.

Marcus sighed. “Not asshole. Can we just forget I ever called Kallimik that?”

“Birds don’t forget. Asshole.”

“Not asshole. If I hear you relayed ‘asshole’ you don’t get any bacon tonight, you hear me?”

“I’m Falli. I love bacon. No asshole.”

“So what are you telling Kallimik?”

“Two guards. Cover for Soffrees and Baslicos. Not asshole.”

“Just go deliver the message,” Marcus said wearily, and Falli flew off. “Messenger corvids. ‘It’s better than sending an encrypted message on a bird’s leg!’ ‘You can train a corvid to carry the message to the right person and not deliver it to anyone else!’ ‘Corvids recognize faces and telepaths can’t read them!’ I miss the days when we sent columbines. Those birds weren’t smartasses.”

“Sir, columbines can’t talk. How did you send messages?” Baslicos asked.

Marcus raised an eyebrow. “What do they teach you kids? We’d tie coded messages on paper to their legs, or give them tiny backpacks to wear. I know, corvids can be given more destinations, they’re smarter, and if they’re shot down, the enemy can’t get the message off of them. But columbines make pretty coos, not wiseass comments about an offhand remark you unwisely made about a subordinate one time.” He sat down on the grass, next to a patch of dirt left from too many people taking shortcuts, and patted the ground. “Come sit, privates.”

Somewhat awkwardly, the two soldiers sat down. “What are we doing, sir?” Soffrees asked.

“Getting yourself an education. You think the psychics aren’t important? Aren’t worth protecting, because they’re not doing anything as serious as what you guys on the front line do? I’m going to tell you about the psychic attack I survived, that no one who was with me did.”

The two soldiers arranged themselves in respectful positions. Their opinions were their opinions, but both of them practically hero-worshiped General Marcus, and if he had something to say to them, they’d listen raptly.

***

“It was during the War for Independence. We’d been moving in from two directions to secure the Gap – I know you soldiers know where the Gap is, right?” In the dirt, with a short pencil he’d had in a pocket, he drew a squiggle for a mountain range, a gap of a few inches, and then a second squiggle. “We were here and here—” He drew X’s in front of the two mountain ranges – “and then they came pouring through the Gap before we could get there.” Extra scribbles to demonstrate the enemy, as a funnel with the narrow bit through the Gap and the wide part between the two X’s.

“Now we had the numbers, between our two groups, that we could have crushed the Monarchists, if we moved fast enough that we could prevent them from getting reinforcements through the Gap. But they had far too many soldiers for either of our groups to defeat them on our own. We had to coordinate the attack. Problem, of course, was the large mass of enemy soldiers between us.

“We sent out several messenger birds. Columbines, in those days. I don’t know how many. A lot. None of them came back. Back then, we had a lot fewer telepaths and they weren’t as well trained. We couldn’t get a message through by psychic, either. If we were to have any hope, a team of people was going to have to cross through enemy territory, deliver the message, and then back, with confirmation.

“Captain Noori picked me and three other soldiers as her crack team to get the message through. Their names were Anders, Caprikin, and Starros. That doesn’t mean anything to you, I know. You look at me as a hero, because I’ve survived. I fought the Willel when they conquered my homeland. I fought for the Demos here in Danza. I fought in every war we’ve had since, and I lived. So I’m a hero. And Noori, Anders, Caprikin and Starros are forgotten. They shouldn’t be. They were bigger heroes than me; they gave their lives to the cause. They were people, like all of you, not numbers.

“Anders and Caprikin fought the Willel with me. I was eleven when Anders and I started doing occasional sabotage, but we didn’t get really effective as guerrillas until Caprikin joined us. He was short – so short, and so baby-faced, he looked eight when he was thirteen, and he looked like a Willel, and he could speak their language without an accent. He’d find a soldier alone, or two soldiers, near an alleyway where we could hide, and he’d pretend to be a Willel boy who’d lost his mother. Sometimes it didn’t work. Willel soldiers could be brutal. One time one of them struck him with the butt of his rifle, in the face. It wasn’t safe or easy work by any means. But when he succeeded at it, when he distracted them and they got involved in trying to help him, we’d come out of the alley with our knives and the guns we’d stolen off the bodies of the last Willel soldiers we’d done this to, and that was that.”

He chuckled, remembering. “The wild thing was that he looked like this innocent lost lamb, but Caprikin was the funniest, most foul-mouthed son of a bitch you would ever have served with. He always had a wiseass comment for any situation. Me, I have no sense of humor, so I don’t even remember any of his jokes… it was years and years ago, but it upsets me. Why didn’t I write this stuff down when I had the chance? Why did I trust to memory?... You soldiers need to write things down. Take pictures. The people you’re fighting beside right now, they’re going to be a part of your life until you die, even if they died forty years ago. Even if you don’t like them. You’re all going through hell together; that forms a bond you’ll never forget, but you’ll forget the details. You’ll forget their faces, you’ll forget the jokes they told…” His voice drifted to a stop as his gaze went far away.

“Sir?” Baslicos prompted.

Marcus’ eyes came back into focus. “…oh, here’s something I remember about Caprikin, but it isn’t a joke. We signed up to fight the Monarchists, all three of us together, and the sergeant doing the recruiting said Caprikin couldn’t join. He was too small, too weak. He’d get killed. So he put on one of our travel knapsacks – even heavier than yours, we had literally everything we still owned in them. Must have been 50, 60 pounds. And he politely asked the sergeant if he could demonstrate his skills, and asked the sergeant to come at him. The sergeant was a big bruiser of a man; he laughed, but he did it… and Caprikin used his momentum to lay him out flat on his back. Sergeant didn’t say a single word against him signing up, after that.

“Anders was a lot more serious than Caprikin. Very quiet fellow, very restrained. He was a low psychic, though, and when we figured out what he could do, when we were eleven, that was when we started risking ourselves to fight the Willel. That, and they’d just killed his father. He could send out a… targeted wave of ‘don’t notice anything.’ You know the fellows with the low psychic ability ‘don’t notice me?’ Where they can walk right past you and unless you’re blocking psi, you don’t even see them? Anders was a little more powerful than that. He could make it so everyone around him, in a donut-shaped range where we at the center wouldn’t be affected, would just… stop noticing anything unusual. We two, and we three when Caprikin joined us, could just run past a few guards, covered in blood and carrying weapons, and they wouldn’t even look up.

“By the time he was an adult, Anders had a lot more control over his field, so he was generally sent out on scouting parties. He used it on leave and on the rare occasions when we weren’t in an army to go exploring. Bird watching. Used to draw them. When he started as a kid he had some talent but by the time he was a man he was amazing. You’d have thought those birds would fly off the page. He drew other things, too, things from nature, always. He refused to draw pictures of any of us. Said he wasn’t good enough. I wish he had.

“Starros… she was such a strange one. Some people called her “the Robot” because she hardly ever showed emotions in her tone of voice. More or less everything was a harsh monotone, unless she was really happy or excited, and then it was a bubbly high-pitched monotone. She had an amazing poker face – her face just never changed, no matter what her hand was – but I learned her tells. She’d drum her fingers on her knees, under the table, and when she was anxious, she’d drum faster. Starros wasn’t interested in romance, or sex – didn’t even much like hugging, and she’d just stand around looking confused and embarrassed if you said something like ‘You’re a damn good friend.’ She didn’t get any of that. But she’d kill or die for her friends. If there were five rations and four people and Starros and they were her friends or comrades, she’d tell them to take the last ration and divide it out. She’d drop whatever she was doing to help you. Didn’t know how to say ‘I love you’ or ‘I like you’ or even ‘You’re my friend’, but she’d drive the getaway car through the flames of hell and crash the gates of the Demon Emperor’s palace to get you out, and cover you while you were running for the car.

“Anders and Caprikin and I spent our childhood fighting; she spent hers studying weaponry. Reading about it. Reading about war. She was obsessed with it. I don’t normally think book learning is ever a match for experience, but in her case… I guess it depends on the book, and how many of them you read, and how close you read them. Every weapon any of us used, she knew how to clean it, how to take it apart if it was a thing you could take apart, how to use it and more importantly when to use it. Any weapon the enemy used against us, too, and she knew all their strengths and weaknesses. Funny thing was, for all she knew about guns, she couldn’t shoot one worth a damn. Couldn’t aim it. I never saw her hit the broad side of a barn. But give her something she could hit the enemy with – a cudgel, a knife, a sword, even a morningstar – and she was amazing. You couldn’t stop her.

“We were – well, I’m not going to say we were the best of the best. I don’t know that. But I can say we were some of the best, and that’s why Captain Noori picked us to accompany her.

“Noori, now. She could shoot. She was an amazing sharpshooter – could take the tuft of feathers off the head of a flying cardinal. She fought in the resistance against the Willel, too; she was in a re-education camp at one point, when she was a child. They tried to strip her of her religion, her language, her culture, and what they got was a lifelong enemy. She got her start shooting messenger birds with her slingshot as they crossed over her city, taking them down with rocks. I think she was doing that when she was nine. Even younger than I got my start.

“In combat she was incredible. She’d stay absolutely in control, all the time. Starros might have seemed like a robot out of combat, but in combat she’d scream, she’d shriek and howl and groan just like most of us do. Whereas I never heard Noori make a sound she hadn’t decided to, not in a fight, not until the end. You couldn’t hear her move, either. In darkness, she turned invisible – you couldn’t see her with her dark skin and her dark uniform, and she didn’t make a sound when she walked. We joked she’d been a cat in a past life.

“Out of combat, though… she could be tough, as a leader, but back then there were a lot of female soldiers who thought they’d impress the rest of us by being tough all the time, never show any emotion but anger, and Noori was never one of those. She was always as kind as she could possibly be to civilians, and if she saw a kid in trouble, she’d help – with us watching her back, of course, because Anders and Caprikin and I all remembered how we’d used that against the Willel. She cried when the battles were over and we counted up the dead; she’d walk among them and say their names and whisper prayers for every one of them, with tears running down her face. One time, one of the privates was upset because he couldn’t write his mother a letter; turned out it was because he’d never learned to read or write. She’d come to the barracks at night and work with him, taking an hour or two every night to teach him.

“We’d have willingly followed Noori to hell. Which is what we ended up doing.”

He lost himself for a bit then, but caught his thread back before either of the soldiers had a chance to try to prompt him. “We were going to cross the Gap along the mountain range line, where the Monarchist presence was as narrow as it got, but of course their presence was thicker there than elsewhere, so we ended up having to spend a day moving around the edge of the territory they held to get to a place that was favorable for us to cross through.” With the pencil, he drew the movements he and his squad had made, against the rough map he’d already drawn in the dirt. “And then the second day, it rained. Well, of course, when you’re trying to sneak across enemy territory, rain’s usually to your advantage, so we made good progress, until the wind whipped up and it was just one step short of a hurricane. We had to dig ourselves a bunker and take shelter in it until the wind died down.

“What we didn’t know was that this was going to smash up one of the Monarchist barracks to the north of us, so they’d called in help from their people south of us. Of course, that meant we ended up running into the Monarchists marching north. We saw some combat, then. The point to sending a tiny group of five soldiers across enemy territory is to make it more likely that they don’t get caught, obviously, because five people can’t fight off an entire army. If it wasn’t for Anders’ ability and the fact that there are a lot of natural caves in that area, we’d never have made it. We had to hide out in a cave. The Monarchists searched for us for five days. We ran out of rations, had to drink from a muddy spring in the cave. By the time they were finally gone, we were… not in good shape.

“So we were less careful, on the rest of our journey. We had to steal food, since we were out of rations, and we weren’t covering our tracks as well as we’d been. Anders was overpsyched, couldn’t hide us anymore without terrible migraines, and he was tough and loyal, he’d have tried, but Noori wouldn’t inflict that on him. She decided that our best strategy was speed. And that meant we couldn’t pussyfoot around trying to sneak around a sentry or two; we just needed to kill them and keep moving.

“By the time we got across the Monarchist territory and back into Demo-held lands, the entire Monarchist army on this side of the Gap knew about us.

“We knew it was going to be hard, getting back across the Gap. We knew we’d made it hard for ourselves by racing across the territory, killing every Monarchist we ran into. But our window was closing; messenger birds from our spies and sympathizers said that there was no more than two weeks before Monarchist reinforcements spilled into the Gap. It was a four-day trip across the Gap if you didn’t have to take a day to detour around enemy territory and you didn’t have to hide in a bunker for a day and a cave in five more. Our comrades over here couldn’t give us more than a week to get the message across. And we’d have no way to get the message back here that we had, or hadn’t, gotten the message to our people.

“The message was that our partners on this side of the Gap were going to move in a week. And they were taking a leap of faith, because if we didn’t get the message through to our side in time, if our side didn’t mobilize and join them in a pincer movement to crush the Monarchists, these Demos would be crushed themselves, and we’d be next. No matter what it took, we had to get the message across in a week.

“Of course we knew better than to send people with secret information in their brains; we knew the enemy had telepaths. I’m sure you all know about me – it’s hardly a well-kept secret nowadays that I’m a blocker. They hypnotized the others, our psychics putting blocks in their head so they wouldn’t be able to remember what the message was until we got back to our side. I was the only one who remembered – but they all knew I knew it, so when I told them how much time we had to get the message through, they knew it was important.

“We had five days. Five days, to make a trip that took us eleven on the way in.

“They sent us with Elias, a combat psychic. Now, I see that look on your face. You’re wondering, if there’s such a thing as a combat psychic, how come our telepaths in the battery don’t go out into the field? Why don’t we have combat psychics?”

Soffrees said, “Uh, I wasn’t going to interrupt you to ask, sir, but… yeah, why don’t we have combat psychics? Sir.”

“The answer is, we do, but you haven’t met any yet, because the telepaths in the battery are so much more powerful than a combat psychic could ever be. Combat psychics have to worry about being hungry, having to pee, watching where they’re walking, not getting killed by enemy fire… put it this way, can you read a book while you’re walking? Through enemy territory? When you might be sniped at any moment, and there’s trees all around you could walk into? Trust me. Psychics are a lot more effective when they’re free to meditate in silence and use all of their mind on their power. We don’t need combat psychics right here because the battery right over there—” he pointed back at the building with the psychics in it—“puts up a wall of psychic defense with such a large radius, none of you have yet been deployed out of it.

“But we needed Elias, because the moment we crossed an invisible line, a short distance into the territory they’d claimed, he reported that the Monarchist psychics were after us.

“Anders did everything he could do. Elias did what he could do; I didn’t know him well, but he was a good man. Noori, Caprikin, Starros and me did our best to protect them both so they could devote more of their brainpower to shielding us.

“The Monarchists had destroyed forests and farms, turning a lot of the countryside into wasteland where you could see straight to the horizon, but they couldn’t do anything about the fact that technically, the Gap is still part of the mountains, just a part that sank low enough that now there are hills and crags and rocks set into the earth, all over the terrain, instead of mountains. We made as much use of terrain cover as we could. Did our best to avoid getting caught by anyone, because we knew the moment we killed a sentry to silence him, their psychics would be on us. Elias and Anders were protecting us by making it so the psychics couldn’t tell exactly where we were, but the enemy had battery telepaths; there was no way Elias and Anders could stand up to an attack by high psychics in a battery.

“We were a day from the border, a day away from home, crossing through some very rocky territory, when they found Elias.

“I don’t know what he saw. He screamed, and wouldn’t stop, to the point where we had to gag him to keep him from summoning the enemy from all around. Anders tried to surround him with his field, but it was no good – the high psychics in the enemy battery had locked onto him already. We had to abandon him, to try to outrun their ability to triangulate on us next. Never saw him again, not even as a name on the rosters from prisoner exchange when we finally beat the Monarchists, so… I’m pretty sure he died there.

“We ran. We tried to find a vehicle – a car, a carriage, maybe a horse – that we could steal and make better time, but we couldn’t find anything before they found us. For a few hours the others saw hallucinations – it was Starros who confessed to it first, saying she kept seeing her mother and older brother calling her, and then everyone but me mentioned they were seeing them too. They didn’t all admit to who or what they saw. We knew this was bad – hallucinations meant they were catching us in the edge of their effect, and that meant they were focusing in – but what could we do? Anders tried, for all the good it did us, but all that happened was for half an hour he didn’t see any visions. He was far, far too overpsyched by then to fight them off in any meaningful way.

“On a grassy plateau surrounded by sheer rock on one side and a relatively small drop on the other, they zeroed in on us, and attacked, full force. The others all started screaming, and dropped to the ground, all of us but me.

“Noori was crying for her parents – she seemed to be remembering how she was taken away from them and thrown in a re-education camp – but then she started shrieking, ‘No! No!’ She got up, backed away, and ran – straight into the stone wall. And then she just kept getting up and running into the stone wall, over and over. I tried to pull her away, to stop her – she was smashing up her face, there was blood and contusions all over her head – but when I grabbed her and bodily dragged her, she fought me like I was one of the monsters she was seeing, and then she broke free of me – after breaking my nose and two fingers – and slammed into the wall again.

“Starros thought the ground had become glass. Very, very fragile glass. She kept screaming at all of us to get to safety before it broke, it was going to break. I think she saw her family members, and maybe friends of hers, fall through the glass. There couldn’t have been anything good underneath it. She was sobbing, begging us to get to safety before the glass broke, crying because she couldn’t save us. She thought her weight would surely break the glass if she went out on it to try to rescue us.

“Caprikin thought he was covered in – something. I don’t know. Spiders? Snakes? He thought they were all over his skin and pouring out of every orifice, and he stripped naked and started ripping at his skin with his nails, trying to get whatever it was off him. Then he started screaming about how they were burrowing into his skin, they were inside him, and he started throwing himself at the ground, over and over… and I couldn’t stop him, either.

“And Anders just calmly put his own eyes out with his thumbs, pulled out his tongue and bit it off, grabbed a long, thin wire brush we used to keep the equipment clean and shoved it into one ear as far as he could push it, and then farther. I don’t know if he actually managed to pierce his brain with it, but he fell over unconscious after that.

“But I’m a blocker. I wasn’t touched. I can’t project. I couldn’t make a field around my friends like Anders could. But they couldn’t touch me.

“Almost.”

He sighed deeply. “I hated that, you know. Sometimes you think the weirdest things in combat. I saw my friends writhing and screaming and going mad all around me, and if I could have saved them, I’d have been grateful for my blocking ability. But I couldn’t. So all I could do was watch them suffer, under an attack that left me be, and… part of me wished I wasn’t a blocker. That if we were going to die, we would all die together. Stupid, I know. And the duty ahead of me wouldn’t allow me to die with them if I could help it, under any circumstances.

“I had to leave them. I was alone, with no support, with four friends that were dying of madness, and I couldn’t save them, I couldn’t even help them. I figured I could maybe knock them unconscious and hopefully they’d be better when they woke up, but if I did that, I couldn’t keep moving with them. If I left them behind, they’d be captured or killed. If I stayed with them, I’d be captured or killed. And I was the only one with the message, the vital message that would drive the Monarchists out of the Gap if I got it through, and would result in both groups of Demos being massacred if I failed.

“I didn’t have the strength to put them out of their misery. Emotional strength, not physical. I had a gun, I could have done it, but I couldn’t make myself end my friends’ lives. I rationalized, telling myself, maybe they’d be captured, maybe we could ransom them back with a prisoner exchange. Telling myself I didn’t need to kill them, because even if they were taken captive, the secret was buried in their brains deep enough that the enemy psychics wouldn’t be able to get it out. Like that was the only consideration. Like I wasn’t dooming them to dying horribly of their madness, or being executed by the Monarchists.

“I knocked Caprikin out, and Noori. Anders was already out, and Starros hadn’t done herself any physical damage, so I didn’t need to knock her out, and I wanted to leave her with maybe the ability to defend herself? Maybe, if the psychics let up, she could… do something?

“I was lying to myself, of course. The psychics wouldn’t let up. They’d peel her brain, looking for the secret, since the other three were unconscious. Wouldn’t find it – our psychics were good, they knew how to bury an encoded secret properly – but that wouldn’t stop them from trying. And if a squadron of Monarchists found them, she wouldn’t be able to fight back – she wouldn’t even be able to leave the tiny bit of land she was squatting on, the only safe place she thought existed.

“I left my friends behind, and I ran, because so many more of my friends would die if I didn’t.

“I mentioned that I was almost immune to psychics. I’m not a blocker in a battery, though, with a whole team of projecting blockers with me. I was just me; they had a battery. So they managed to break enough of my walls loose that they made me hallucinate, like they’d made the others hallucinate before. I saw my friends, dripping with blood, asking me why I left them behind, saying they despised me for abandoning them. My family, during the occupation, and the things the Willel might have done to them after they disappeared and I never saw them again. I could see the real world, faintly, behind the hallucinations, so when enemy soldiers turned up, I was able to fight them. But the psychics made me see them as something else. I’d blow a man’s head off, and he was Caprikin, back when we were boys. I’d stab a woman who was trying to stab me, and she’d be Noori.

“I’ve been fighting in wars all my life. I’ve seen so many dead. Lost so many friends, lost my family – I’m used to grief and horror. I walk with it every day, I see it in my dreams. So they couldn’t break me. They tortured me the entire way back to our camp, and a few times I was almost killed because I was too distracted by illusions to fight back, but they couldn’t stop me, no matter how much psychic force they turned on me. The only reason they didn’t hit me with overwhelming real-world force was that I was blocking them too hard – they didn’t know where I was the way they’d known where my friends were. They could reach the edges of my mind, but they couldn’t get in deep enough to know where to send soldiers after me.

“I got back through the border and I got the message through and you know how the Battle of the Gap went. But I didn’t fight in it. As soon as I got the message through, I broke. They weren’t still attacking me, but they’d poured so much poison into my mind, now it was attacking itself. All the guilt I felt at leaving my friends behind, all the guilt I’d always felt at being the only member of my family to survive, and the thought that maybe they were taken because the Willel knew about my resistance activities, and went to my house to get me, and took my family instead because I wasn’t there… I heard my family denouncing me, telling me I’d gotten them killed. I still saw Noori and Anders and Caprikin and Starros. Sometimes even Elias. Other friends I’d lost over the course of the wars I’d fought. I was 27 years old and I’d been fighting since I was 11. I’d lost a lot of friends in that time.

“It didn’t stop until the battle was over, until they were able to get me in front of a high psychic on our side who was able to bury most of the damage. Not remove, not eliminate, not cure… bury. I still see those things, sometimes, as nightmares mostly, or when everything’s quiet and I’m trying to sleep. I’m in my 60’s now. It’s pretty clear to me that I’ll see those visions until I’m dead. I’m used to them now but they still horrify me.”

The two soldiers’ eyes were wide. “Sir, I… I’m sorry,” Baslicos whispered.

“We didn’t know,” Soffrees said.

“Of course you don’t. If you take a medicine for your headache, and it’s so good you never get a headache, sooner or later you might get to thinking, wow, I don’t have a problem with headaches anymore, why do I have to keep taking this drug? That’s human nature.” He stood up and brushed off his pants. “They should have taught you in Basic, and I’m going to have to see about our training programs for new recruits. They need to make it clear what the psychics do. Because those men and women in there? They find spies, and bombers with ‘you don’t see me’ powers. They root out enemy secrets. They’re an early warning system, they know when enemy forces are approaching. And they protect you, every day, from horrors that could melt your mind. Because that’s what psychics do, in a combat battery. They find the enemy and they drive them insane. Ours, theirs, all the psychics do that And all of them protect their people from the enemy psychics who are trying to do the same thing.”

“I thought that was supposed to be a war crime,” Baslicos said tentatively. “Driving the enemy insane?”

“It’s not. They debated it, but in the end, it’s not. Because you can’t tell the difference between a man that the psychics peeled for information and a man they just deliberately drove mad – both are going to act the same level of fucked-up, and none of the world’s nations want to give up the advantage being able to use psychics to read prisoners for information would give them.” He shook his head. “You ask me… it should be a war crime. Our psychics should be defending us, not doing that and trying to break the enemy at the same time. But, it wasn’t my call, and that’s how war goes.”

He lifted his head backward, gesturing at the battery. “Those poor bastards in there, they burn out. One slip-up and an enemy psychic might get into them, rip their minds apart. And even if that never happens… they do their tour and then they’re haunted for the rest of their lives, because they committed atrocities, and they know it, and they felt it from inside the minds of the people they were doing it to. Or, even if they didn’t… they felt it when it happened to our soldiers, the people they’re protecting. You think they’re being pampered? Just because someone’s taking care of their bodies? They’re shitting in diapers and they can’t even feel it. Someone feeds them mush, like they were infants, and they can’t feel it. They’re on the front lines, with their minds, the whole time they’re in there.”

“We didn’t know,” Soffrees repeated.

“You do now, private. So make sure you tell everyone else you know, if it comes up. You defend those people with your life. Because if it wasn’t for them… there are worse things than death, and I’m telling you, these are the people who will save you from those things.”

He motioned their relief over. “You guys can go back to whatever you were doing; I’m releasing Soffrees and Baslicos back to their watch. Tell Lieutenant Kallimik I want my bird back.”

“Sir, your bird called Lieutenant Kallimik an asshole,” one of the two guards said.

“Goddamnit it.” Marcus facepalmed. “I told that bird. Yeah, okay, tell Kallimik I’ll see her in person to get my bird back before she eats it, and you can tell Falli I said no bacon tonight. Not one little bit.”

“We’ll let the Lieutenant know, sir,” the other guard said, and the two of them marched off, as Soffrees and Baslicos resumed their patrol, and the General went wherever he’d originally been going.

#52 project #soldiers #war #telepaths #psychic battle #tw: induced insanity #tw: self-harm #tw: gore

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tirorah · 4 years

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Road to Berlin’s ‘Road to Berlin’ Sure Was a Road to Berlin Episode

Hiya, everyone! It’s that time of the week, but don’t worry, your assigned reading is pretty light this time. Because, honestly? I don’t have much to say about this episode in terms of character arcs or themes or the like. Instead, you’ll find my brief thoughts under the cut, as well as my favorite stuff from Episode 11.

In the end, this episode was a follow-up to the ending of Episode 10, and also the start of the final offensive, which makes Episode 11 the middle chapter of a three-parter. This is always difficult to make satisfying--look at any pre-planned trilogy and you can see the struggle with ramping up the tension while also not blowing the series’ full load, as it needs to set up the final, climactic piece.

Consequently, Road to Berlin (the episode) didn’t do a lot of exciting things; it simply moved the story along. And that’s 100% fine. It’s just not as richly packed with content as most of the season has been. There was also some blatant reuse of old footage again (they really love that shot of Trude brandishing her guns, don’t they?) but again, I felt it was within acceptable parameters. I did feel like the episode was holding back a bit with the aerial combat, though. Seems the Ratte was the biggest star of the show for this week.

Without further ado and in no particular order, here are my favorite things from this episode!

Patton’s Redemption

Sort of. He was still a gloating idiot, but he actually valued Yoshika’s power enough to argue the 501st’s case to his fellow generals, and he showed admirable tenacity when the Neuroi’s full power gradually revealed itself. He didn’t shout nearly as often either, and was much more reasonable. Overall, he was far less cartoony and made a decent start at showing us why he attained his current rank.

Although I’ll never forgive him for this. That, and calling Yoshika a ‘little missy.’

This Line from Minna

It’s delivered calmly, but I like to think this is Diplomatic Minna Speak for ‘Fuck off and up yours, she saved your damn butts!’

And another thing: the doctor said it’d take Yoshika a week to be able to fly again, but Minna wants a delay of ten days, not seven. It seems she wants half a week extra so that Yoshika can recover more, which is both prudent and kind of her.

The Generals Being Children

Both amusement and disbelief filled me as I watched the generals of different nations bicker like bloody schoolyard kids. It’s true what they say: War. War never changes. (And especially not the ego of man.) The fact a bunch of grown men devolved into chest-thumping and throwing crap at one another is hilarious. Even Lucchini’s been more mature than that this season, and that says something!

Shizuka’s Turbulent Emotions

Again, Shizuka shows off her similarities to Trude; I feel like she’s definitely the type to hold this in until it comes spilling out in one ugly cry like it did here. She just wasn’t able to hold it in as long, likely due to her relative youth.

We also finally got to see the one character arc thing in this episode I was hoping for: Shizuka and her relationship with orders. For the entire season, we’ve constantly seen Shizuka’s rigid obedience to orders reinforced. But when Mio tells her to keep the Shinden’s presence a secret, we see the first time an order brings her true, internal conflict. Although it culminated in a good cry and not her disobeying said order, I have a feeling she’ll buck the trend and either tell Yoshika about the Shinden, or fly it herself.

Finally, it’s nice to see that she doesn’t let her injury scare her, and channels her guilt into some awesome attack runs. Much credit to her; she’s grown quite a bit, and not because she’s emulating the others, but by growing into her new responsibilities as a combatant.

Yoshika Doing What She Can

Respect was earned by Yoshika this episode. Although she was obviously disappointed she wouldn’t be able to fly with the others into the final battle, she didn’t let it get her down and decided to do whatever she could to help. That meant we finally got to see her newly attained medical skills again! All those books she checked out in Episode 1 sure came in handy now.

If you will, think back all the way to Season 1, Episode 2 for a moment. A Neuroi attacked the ship bringing Yoshika and Mio to Europe, and a sailor was injured by shrapnel. Back then, Yoshika was severely shaken by the combat, and when she tried to help the sailor with her healing magic, she was promptly rebuked by someone else, as healing him with the shards still inside would only hurt him further.

But here, people rely on Yoshika’s medical knowledge and even Patton greatly respects her for it. Her suggestion to hole up in the Flak Tower is also a huge success, likely saving all of their lives.

Shirley's Amusement at the Ratte

Why, Shirley, what are you insinuating here? Surely Karlsland isn’t compensating for something! They just like their prototypes huge.

And Perrine’s Dismay

Harrumph! Size doesn’t matter, obviously! Just look at Perrine’s chest.

But honestly, someone else pointed this out too: the fact they’re relying so much on experimental and/or new things shows how desperate they are, and how fragile their gains are.

Speaking of The Ratte

The Ratte is awesome. The way its rounds punched through the Neuroi walls... *chef’s kiss* It’s obvious where the love and attention went this episode: all the carnage! We also got to see a lot of Berlin’s ruins, which is a nice change from fighting over ocean and rural landscapes. In my opinion, this was the way to go with the budget.

Also, Dem Walls!

They were so cool! I was amazed by the way they could reform to cover the gap where they were under attack! They even showed the little drones coming in to stack on top of one another. And later on, how the main body used the walls to shield itself from the Ratte’s full power was also very impressive! I love how powerful the walls were, but that the Neuroi’s resources weren’t infinite. That’s how you write your antagonist.

Not to Mention the Dome of Death!

Let’s be honest: we all knew a snag was coming. But not only was this a clever trap by the Neuroi, it also showcased the Neuroi using the debris to build more of themselves!

Miscellaneous Things

Something I didn’t mention in my Episode 10 post was Lynne’s support. She’s been really good at looking out for Shizuka! And she also scored a huge hit on the drone horde, which was great. And this time, Perrine also took the time to reassure Shizuka; as the one who was originally assigned to train Shizuka, it’s good she’s showing her gentler side now.

The 502nd made a brief cameo! I haven’t watched Brave Witches yet, which I’ll have to get on after this season finishes. It was also really cool to see how the other Joint Fighter Wings were pitching in for the war effort. The 501st are definitely the stars of the operation (as they should be), but there’s a multi-prong attack going on off-screen. Exciting stuff!

I also really like the little touches that RtB’s been so good at this entire season. For this episode, it’s the blue tulip on Yoshika’s bedstand. Seeing as the episode starts on the day after the ending of Episode 10, this means someone (maybe Perrine?) had a Queen of Nederland shipped out to Kiel really quickly, just for Yoshika. It’s sweet!

Finally, while Minna and Trude clashed during the previous episode, here they work together to support one another during combat. Trude comes to Minna’s aid the moment she’s attacked.

The Stuff I Thought I’d Get, But Didn’t

I’d speculated on this episode and came up with things I thought I’d get to see. But nope!

First of all, what’s RtB’s deal with Mio? I can’t believe Minna’s had more subtext with Trude than with Mio this season! Even when the two of them finally spoke with one another for the first time since Episode 2, there was no blushing or anything like that! Are the days of Minna and Perrine fawning over Mio over? Is there someone on the writing team who loves Trude like I do, and has the same problems with Mio that I do? This is really...well, weird. I can’t describe it in any other way.

Anyway, she’s now bringing the B-17 to Berlin, meaning she might get involved somehow (and is also bringing the Shinden, possibly so Shizuka can fly it.) But here I was, thinking, ‘Oh, that plane they showed Mio with in the opening, she’ll fly that, and it’s going to have anti-Neuroi armor!’ and yet I’m not seeing any indication of that happening at all. Mio isn’t even in that plane right now. It’s the Ratte who got the anti-Neuroi treatment, and again, Mio’s presence felt...functional, I guess.

There’s something about her screen presence that bothers me, actually. I didn’t think about it before, because she was absent so much it just didn’t cross my mind, but...what happened to good ol’ jolly Mio? I don’t mind her being a bit more serious--RtB’s been a more serious season, after all--but we haven’t had a patented Mio Laugh since the first episode, and I miss it. Let’s hope the final episode gives her a nice sendoff.

Secondly, for all the fuss they made about Yoshika and Shizuka’s conditions with that downright tragic ending in Episode 10, the two of them bounced back pretty fast. It’s literally been a day and Shizuka’s already running around fine? And Yoshika doesn’t seem to be experiencing any lingering negative effects of her overexertion? (Aside from the obvious.) For a season that’s so focused on consequences and a consistency in tone, I feel like the two of them got off a bit light.

I was also expecting Trude and possibly Minna and Lynne having sad moments because ‘oh no, people we care about are hurt!’ but because Yoshika and Shizuka seem mostly fine, that didn’t happen at all.

Usually, Episode 11 is the one that ends on a somber note, but here it seems they moved that to Episode 10, and instead had Episode 11 strike a more optimistic tone. No one really showed off their flaws, either; maybe Episode 10 was the bookend to that theme after all?

Into the End

The episode ends on a very interesting note. Everyone finds out Yoshika is also trapped inside the Neuroi dome--and why, exactly, was no one informed of her presence on the Ratte?!--and they’re ordered to mount a rescue operation for their besieged comrades.

And then Trude comes with this absolutely surprising revelation:

I imagine at least one staff member had a chuckle at the fact the cast is now embarking on another Road (in)to Berlin.

The what, now? This wasn’t built up or alluded to at all; I have questions, show! Not to mention, how does Trude even know about this? And why is she the one announcing it, and not Minna, the world’s best mom and team captain?

Anyway, the preview seems to indicate some sort of tunnel run--I briefly wondered if they’d have to venture in on foot, but it seems to be big enough for them to fly.

This shot is ominous.

I’m highly intrigued by this decision. Obviously, the final confrontation will play out outside, but to yank the Witches from the air and into a much more claustrophobic space is a confident move. I can only imagine the surprises the final episode has up its sleeve.

Anyway, all in all, this was a decent episode, and while it did have lots of neat little character moments, it’s obviously setup for what I hope to be a spectacular ending.

Even if it doesn’t quite deliver next week, though, RtB’s been so consistently great that it’s already cemented itself as my favorite show ever.

#strike witches #road to berlin

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yume-x-hanabi · 4 years

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Writer Meta Meme

I decided to do all the questions on this meme :)

1. Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

My current project is Concubinage, my gaiwin arranged marriage AU. It started as a random, entirely self-indulgent idea, but it has since grown into an actual project. Progress is good, I’ve managed to do bi-monthly updates and I have 30k in my drafts so far.

What I love the most about it is that, since it’s an AU, I’m pretty free to do whatever I want. I don’t have to be too careful of timelines and so on. Plus, in this AU, Gaius and Wingul are able to get closer than they otherwise would, due to the different circumstances. They have their own trials, but it’s different than in the canon timeline.

Another current project is Tales of Xillia Week, but I didn’t get much inspiration for it so I think I’m gonna do meta/headcanon posts more than fics ^^;

2. Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

I’m looking forward to getting to the part where it’s just domestic fluff haha. It’ll take a while to reach that point though.

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

Not just one scene ig, but I’ve been wanting to write one-shots showing how the Chimeriad survived, and... haven’t gotten around to planning it. So it’s pretty low on my project list tbh.

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

I have... a few, but they’re all spoilers for future chapters XD;;

5. What character that you’re writing do you most identify with?

I don’t... really identify with characters. I mean, they’re pretty different than me in personality, life and circumstances...

6. What character do you have the most fun writing?

I love writing Gaius and Wingul of course, but Agria’s probably the most fun. She’s completely unrestrained, which makes her pretty easy and fun to let loose XD

7. What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?

Exposition and worldbuilding XD

I can’t help it, I always need to develop the setting...

8. Is what you like to write the same as what you like to read?

Yes. I would love it if more people wrote gaiwin XD

9. Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other?

I used to be more of a ficlet writer, but I’m currently doing well with a longfic XD

As for the rest, it varies. I like to plot and outline a bit, but it’s often rather loose and I let inspiration guide me.

10. How would you describe your writing process?

Wait for inspiration time, energy and motivation to align.

11. What do you envy in other writers?

Those who update super long fics every week. How do you do it????

12. Do you want your writing to be famous?

Naah, I’m fine in my corner of fandom. Though I wouldn’t say no to a few more readers, if only to know that the ship still sails xD

13. Do you share your writing online? (Drop a link!) Do you have projects you’ve kept just for yourself?

Yep, I post on AO3. And all projects are meant to be posted one day, but some aren’t simply because they aren’t finished.

14. At what point in writing do you come up with a title?

The beginning, usually, but I might change it

15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?

Tags are easy. Titles and summaries are hard, and I always end up with something boring but heh, as long as they get the meaning across...

16. Tried anything new with your writing lately? (style, POV, genre, fandom?)

It was last year, but I tried first person pov with my Agria fic, because that fits her well. I’d like to try poetry, maybe.

17. Do you think readers perceive your work - or you - differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?

I have no idea tbh. When I write, I like to imagine what my readers will think (especially like when I write funny scenes, I hope they’ll make people laugh), but idk if it’s exactly like I think.

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

In Concubinage, I considered adding a plotline where Arst met an ex and had to deal with complicated feelings about it -- being reminded how it was to be in a loving relationship vs political marriage, craving intimacy like he used to have with said ex, etc. I ended up scrapping the idea though.

I also have... two or three possible ways things can play out in a much later plotpoint, and I think I’m pretty sure of which way I’ll go already, but the other possibilities exist. Maybe I’ll make a post about all abandoned plotlines one day...

19. Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)

“And, but, and, but...” XD;

Also characters often find themselves doing something before they knew it...

My style is probably pretty repetitive. I’m not a native speaker, and I feel limited sometimes...

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

Concubinage is the result of watching too many sageuk and taiga drama. No I’m not sorry.

When writing AU, I always like to include “cameo” of the original storyline (for example, as the plot of a book, or treating the canon games as a fractured dimension in Chimeriad Live AU’s, etc)

In Fractured Lives, I try to alternate Wingul and Gaius’ pov. It’s probably gonna bite me in the ass when some plot points work better in one pov but the chapter requires the other. I’ll probably have to come up with some fillers or something...

I have extensive headcanon about Auj Oule’s geography, history etc, which pops up in a lot of (planned) fics. Even if it’s different fics/AU’s (ex. Concubinage vs my pre-game gaiwin project vs the Wingul fic I was writing for the big bang), I reuse the same settings and OC’s. Most of those aren’t written/posted yet so it’s pretty self-contained for now, but if I ever get to completing those projects I hope it won’t be too confusing to readers who don’t follow all the stories...

21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)

If I had the art skills, I’d love to turn some of them into comics ;A;

22. Do you reread your old works? How do you feel about them?

Sometimes. Usually because I need to refresh my memory before writing a new chapter XD

23. What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?

That project to write the whole pre-game Gaius & Wingul history, that’s something I’ve been wanting since forever. Well, I originally wanted to read it, but since no one’s gonna do it, I started thinking I should write it. It’s gonna be a huge project though...

24. Would you say your writing has changed over time?

I honestly have no idea. I do sense a difference in that it’s much easier for me to just write now; I guess habit helps. But I have no idea if style changed or anything lol.

25. What part of writing is the most fun?

Filling the tag with my OTP XD

#yume fanfiction #ask meme

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bombshellsandbluebells · 4 years

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The 100 Fic: On My Way Amongst the Stars

Summary: Otan used to say they were from everywhere. But Emori knows that's wrong. They don't belong everywhere; they belong nowhere.

Or: Emori struggles to find a place in the world, meets a boy who says he's from the Sky, and eventually visits it herself. Emori character study.

Relationships: Memori, Emori & Otan

Read on ao3

I finished one of those wips

“God will mercifully guide me on my way amongst the stars.” -The Old Astronomer (To His Pupil) by Sarah Williams

Otan used to say they were from everywhere.

He said it when the desert nights were long and cold and they were without shelter, lying curled together to stay warm. He whispered it as they left towns after trading, suspicious eyes pressing heavy on their backs until they were out of sight.

The reason they couldn’t root themselves in any one place, he’d insisted, was because they belonged to too many. They had bits of the boat people in them because they knew the smell of the sea and the bitter taste of salt water. But they also knew the sharp burn of the desert sun and the icy bite of mountain air.

Emori never knew if Otan truly believed his lie or if he said it only for her sake, but she had never been able to believe it. She remembered too well the hot flashes of shame and fear when her hand was exposed, or the bitter envy that grew like an thick, knotted weed in her stomach when she watched young children playing freely without care in the villages they passed through.

They don’t belong everywhere, Emori knows. They belong nowhere.

But Otan was right about one thing – they have been everywhere. In her earliest memories, she is small and young, draped on Otan’s back, her hands wrapped securely around his neck, as they move from forest to forest and village to village – in each place catching only the slightest glimpse into lives they could never have.

Most people, she knows, never leave the clans they’re born in – never even travel beyond their borders. There are people of the southern forests who have never seen snow or desert sand, and people from the desert who have never seen the ocean shore.

But it’s easy to travel when you’re unrooted.

She’s seen the lake people, located to the west on the lake shore, who build their houses on poles to escape the mud. Their boats are larger than her and Otan’s and run on louder, angrier motors. They traded old machinery there once for a fishing net and later had taught themselves to use it. Otan had ended up more tangled than the fish he was trying to catch, and Emori had laughed at him, loud and joyous.

“I will be forced to eat you for dinner,” she’d teased, then screamed with laugher when he pushed her overboard.

Soon they added fish to their usual diet, learned how to clean them and repurpose the scales and bones into jewelry they could sell in landlocked clans. Emori made herself a few pieces as well, sometimes hanging them from her ear or asking Otan to braid them into her hair, other times weaving them into her clothing. She doesn’t hold onto many personal belongings beyond necessities – the more you have to carry, the slower you move, and the slower you move, the faster death catches up with you – but sometimes it’s nice to own something just for the sake of owning it – just because it’s pleasant to look at and it makes her happy.

One winter, they traveled through Azgeda territory and saw snow for the very first time. Struck mute with wonder, Emori had cupped it in her hand and shivered at the sting of it. When Otan wasn’t looking, she’d snuck up behind him and shoved it against his exposed forehead, ducking away as quickly as a hare before he could retaliate.

Emori knows Sangedakru, too – the people that make the desert their home, as few of them as there are. There is a trading post and a small camp on the northern edge of the Dead Zone that deals in food and water instead of tech. Supplies that help them survive their harsh environment have great value there, and occasionally they give her pieces of tech they’d found in the desert in exchange for the meat and edible plants she brings from the forest. The people there have grown familiar with her and Otan; they pass word of interested buyers when they have it. Still, Emori had always kept her hand well covered and Otan, his face.

Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed trust or safety.

There is another Sangedakru settlement towards the south. Emori has only been there once and vows never to return. She steers clear of it when she needs to cross the Dead Zone. It has been months, but sometimes she still wakes up with Baylis’s face in her mind. Otan had always been able to recognize when her nightmares were about him; he would silently wrap her in his arms, and, though on most days she would huff at his mothering and insist she was no longer a child, on those nights she would bury her head in Otan’s chest and let herself feel safe and loved.

She misses Otan like a misplaced part of her, like a limb that has been cut off and can still be felt but no longer used. She misses him with a painful desperation – if only I hadn’t let him go with Jaha, if only I hadn’t left in the boat – if only, if only, if only. She hopes he’s safe. She hopes he’s alive. She hopes John will agree to help her find him.

John is a mystery.

He’s different from any people she’s ever met. Emori can’t tell what clan he’s from, though she studies him closely when he isn’t looking, searching for details she recognizes. He wears no identifying marks on his skin or in his hair. His pale skin is covered in scars, but not the ceremonial scarring of Azgeda. His clothing is strange; he carries no trinkets.

One day, as they sort through their recent score, she decides to ask. “What clan are you from?”

He looks up from his pile. She’d taught him what can get a good price and what isn’t worth carrying, but he seems to instinctively have a good eye for what can still be reused. Sometimes when she sorts something as waste, he pulls it out of the pile and suggests another purpose for it, and she can’t help but wonder if he also grew up as a scavenger.

“I’m not from a clan,” John answers. Emori understands that – the sense that you can’t classify yourself as any one people, that you can no longer claim the clan you were born into. She knows he was banished from his own people, same as her. Still, she’s curious, so she waits, watching him expectantly, and raises her eyebrows in silent question. “I’m from the Ark,” he clarifies. “You guys call us, uh, sky crew, I think.”

Emori has never heard of the Ark. Skaikru sounds familiar, though. Perhaps she’s heard it in passing at a trading post. “I’ve never heard of the Ark. Is it far from the Dead Zone?”

John laughs. “You could say that.” His voice is light with amusement. Emori feels like she’s missed a joke. “The Ark’s on the ground now,” he continues, “but it used to be in space. Uh, in the sky.”

Emori stares at him without comprehension. “What do you mean in the sky?”

“Uh…” John looks unsure of how to phrase his reply. His mouth twists. He scratches the back of his neck awkwardly. “Guess you guys don’t really understand space, huh?”

The insinuation is insulting. She’s sure she would understand it if he would just explain. She continues to stare at him, expectant, slightly more peeved now.

“In the stars,” he says finally.

The metal cup she had been examining falls from her grasp. It clatters to the boat floor, spinning and rolling away. She stares at him. “You’re from the stars?” She doesn’t know if her voice sounds incredulous or just skeptical – she doesn’t know which way she’s feeling, either.

The stars are familiar to her. She has spent many nights staring up at them, from the gently rocking floor of her boat or the cold desert sand or the uneven forest floor. When she was younger, she would trace them with her hand, finding shapes and pictures hidden amongst them, and Otan would add to them, crafting stories to entertain her out of the glittering lights above them.

He taught her how to navigate with them, too – how to find her place and her destination, how to use them to guide her path. The stars are a comfort, because they’re a constant in a world that never lets her settle.

But she’d never thought of the stars as a place you could live.

“I don’t believe you,” she says finally, because ever since that first meeting, she’s never lied to him.

John bristles. “I’m telling the truth.” Emori knows she’s hit a nerve; his voice is sharp and tight, his shoulders hunched. He throws the shredded fabric he’s holding in the trash pile. “I’m not the one who goes around lying.”

It’s Emori’s turn to tense. She’d thought they’d gotten over that, honestly. He’s never brought it up again. “I apologized,” she snaps. “And I haven’t lied to you since.”

John doesn’t reply. Nor does he look at her. She watches him places a decent looking wire in the trash pile without hardly looking at it. When she leans closer to him to move it to the keep pile, he tenses.

Sometimes he reminds her of cornered prey. She can’t fault him for it; the world is hard and cruel and she’s often been made to feel like cornered prey herself, though she’s gotten skilled at hiding it behind a smile. The only time she lets herself appear vulnerable anymore is when she’s pulling a con.

“I didn’t say I thought you were lying,” she explains softly. With Otan gone, the thought of John growing angry with her and leaving is terrifying. “But I don’t understand how it can be real.”

“It’s not my fault grounders don’t understand science.” He still sounds defensive.

Emori scrunches her nose up at the unfamiliar word. “Grounders?”

“That’s what we call your people. Because you live on the ground.”

“I don’t have a people,” Emori corrects sharply. John looks up abruptly at her tone and locks eyes with her.

“Right,” he says, and something softens in his eyes. “Yeah, I know. Skaikru aren’t my people, either. We’re just from the same place.”

“The sky,” she says, still trying to wrap her mind around the idea. She looks up into the sky and images a city built in the clouds. It sounds impossible.

“You believe me now?”

Emori stares at the sky for a moment longer. She doesn’t understand it still, but, if nothing else, John believes it. He isn’t lying to her on purpose. She shrugs. “Well, you’re a terrible liar, so it must be true.”

“What? That’s not true.”

Emori grins at him. “It is. You’ll have to play a corpse in our next con because it was so bad. I thought I would have to come out of the trees early to save you.”

“You’ve just had more practice,” John snaps, but his tone is not truly angry. This is a friendly argument, like she would have with Otan, and it fills her with happiness. She’s glad that John is here with her; she’s glad he still seems to like her.

They continue to bicker playfully as they sort the rest of the stolen goods, and Emori can’t keep the smile from her face. She likes him, she realizes. She’s never had anyone to like before. It’s a wonderfully addictive feeling.

“So how do you live in the sky?” she asks one day as she’s repairing the boat engine.

“I don’t know,” John replies. He’s no help at all with machinery, so he’s lying in the shade of the boat cover, fanning himself with a spare piece of fabric. It’s hot with the sun beating down on them, but he’s still too scared of the water to jump in and cool himself off. “Same as down here, I guess.”

She stares at him, shrewd and unbelieving; seeing it, he falters.

“Well, not exactly the same. You can’t live outside in space because there’s no oxygen, so you have to live in a ship.”

“Oxygen?” she asks curiously, catching on the unfamiliar word.

“It’s an element in the air that you need to breathe.”

She takes that in, processes it. “And there’s lots of oxygen here?”

“Yeah, there’s tons on Earth. Lot more than the Ark had.”

When she asks him to explain further what oxygen is, he fumbles over his words, unsure how better to describe it. Eventually, she tires of both bombarding him with questions and messing with the stubborn engine and decides to teach him to swim instead.

“Everything floats in space,” John tells her one night when they’re cleaning fish for dinner.

“Why?” she asks.

“There’s no gravity.”

And then she has a new word and a new concept that John finds difficult to explain. She mentally adds it to the list.

“How do you travel to your home in the sky?”

“With a rocket ship.”

“Like a boat?”

“No, not really. It has a massive engine, and it just sort of shoots you up there.”

Emori tries to picture it, but the only image she can produce is their little boat fitted with a bigger engine, floating up towards the clouds, and she knows that isn’t what John means. It’s frustrating to be unable to fully understand him. She’s not stupid, but the concepts he talks about are so unfamiliar it’s nearly impossible to wrap her head around them. And John, much as he tries, seems unsure how to explain them so she can.

Still, when she asks questions, he answers them honestly and as best he can, and she appreciates it.

She understands better when the chip is in her head and ALIE is feeding information into her brain. Everything comes easier to her then, even the explanations that John had struggled to give her.

Still, she won’t fully understand space for nearly another year, not until she sits beside John in a rocket ship – not at all like her boat with a bigger engine attached – and leaves the only places she’s ever known behind for the stars. Suddenly, she can understand all of it. The lack of gravity is what lets Raven float into the air like she’s weightless. The lack of oxygen is what nearly kills them all. The concepts that John had tried his best to explain become real in a way they never had before.

Space is deadly, she learns. Perhaps more deadly than the deserts or the oceans or the fierce cold of Azgeda territory. It is cold and dark and empty and vast.

And yet, it feels safer than any place she has ever been before. None of the people there threaten to cast her out because of her hand; most of them don’t even treat her differently because of it. The Ring is small and confined, but she learns to be free in a way she has never been before. She stretches herself out and grows, one day, she realizes she's stopped covering her hand at all.

Otan used to say they were from everywhere, but the first real home that Emori ever knows is in the sky.

#emori #emori kom spacekru #the 100 #the 100 fic #memori #my stories

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fictionadventurer · 5 years

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WIP asks: 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 24

5. Where did you draw inspiration from?

I’ve already talked about my direct literary influences (my philosophy for this story is ‘shamelessly steal from everything’ and it’s great), so I’ll talk about some more general sources of inspiration. I’ve gotten a lot of aesthetic inspiration from Pinterest, worldbuilding inspiration from European history, and some physics help from my brother. When brainstorming, I tend to get inspiration about plot structure from writing podcasts, and get character insight from listening to music (I’ve only just noticed the distinction).

I’m also doing research into the flight aspects via the James Holzhauer method--reading children’s books. It’s already been so helpful that I don’t know why I haven’t done this before. Rather than getting 300-pages-minimum of highly technical and specific information that largely doesn’t pertain to my work, I get 30-40 pages of very general, easy-to-understand information that provides a great knowledge base and tons of pictures! (Did you know that there was a pedal-powered plane that successfully crossed the English Channel? Do you know how perfectly something like that would fit into this book’s aesthetic?)

6. Is your WIP part of a series or standalone?

It’s a standalone story within a wider universe. The original “lost library” idea that sparked this world still has potential if I can ever figure out a coherent plot/character arc, and I have nascent ideas for Beauty and the Beast, The Princess and the Pea, and Goose Girl retellings in this universe. I’m also considering the possibility of reworking A Beautiful Tomorrow and setting it here.

7. What genre is your WIP in?

Though I’m somewhat ashamed to admit it, it’s fantasy romance. You wouldn’t think I’d be surprised by this, given that it’s directly Austen-inspired, but I was so focused on the fact that I’m weaving together Austen and Cinderella plot points with the details of this world that it wasn’t until later that I stepped back and realized, “This is a romance.” But I’m aiming for a classic-novel romance where romance is just one part of life, rather than romance-genre romance where the feelings and emotions and attractions are the point of life.

9. Who is your favourite character to write?

Based on my usual character preferences and the fact that he undergoes the most significant character arc, I would guess it would be my prince character (I keep avoiding his name, so I think I need to change it). However, he’s a bit too unpleasant early on, and I think his character arc’s going to be difficult to write. So if he’s not my favorite character to write, I’m hoping it’s Lisette, because we’re going to be in her head the whole time and I want her to be a character worthy of that focus. It’ll probably be a side character though. Maybe the fairy godmother, if I can decide exactly who’s filling that role.

10. Do you have an outline? Do you stick to it?

I’m going to have such a detailed outline. I’m getting tired of having intriguing beginnings that never get finished because I hit roadblocks. However, I’m using an outlining process that plays to my discovery writer strengths. Rather than filling out forms and making charts and making sure that every scene has all the Required Points of Conflict, I’m just...writing. Writing quick sketches of scenes in the plot and adjusting them as brainstorming reveals better directions. Sketching out a character’s life story rather than filling in slots in a checklist. I’m building my story piece by piece and fleshing it out, so that by the time I get to the drafting stage, I’m going to stick to it because I’ve already figured out that this structure works.

11. How do you structure your plot?

I’ve got the fairy tale to guide the first half of the story, and I’m just figuring out the big scenes that need to happen and filling in the gaps between them. For the second half, I reintroduce the characters, set up their new situations, and figure out the points that believably lead to a happy ending. I’m probably going to throw seven-point structure over this at some point. And I’m trying to figure out ways to have parallels between the two parts of the story.

12. What part is the hardest to write in your WIP?

Again, not drafting yet, but I think the hardest part is going to be making the two halves feel like they’re both part of the same story. Both my mains undergo a lot of character growth during the time they’re apart, so they feel like two sets of characters in two separate books. It’s going to be a big challenge to make their older selves feel like believable developments of their younger incarnations.

15. Post a line from a WIP that you’re working on.

No lines yet from this project, but there’s a line from the planning document that’s necessary to all Cinderella retellings: “As long as you’re back by midnight, you’ll be fine.”

16. Give a spoiler for your WIP.

I’ve already given away most of the spoilers I know. Oops. Well, here’s a minor one: It rains on the night of the ball.

24. Do you have any abandoned WIP��s? What made you abandon them?

There are very few that are entirely abandoned, because aside from extremely minor ideas that never got past a page or two of brainstorming, there’s always at least a chance I could return to an old project someday.

One of the few major projects that I’ve permanently abandoned is actually another Cinderella retelling. It was a space fantasy on a planet where storms had strange effects on people. I abandoned it because I decided the premise of the world was really dumb. And because there was no real narrative drive--my Cinderella character just wandered through her world having things happen to her. I may reuse some of the character dynamics in other projects, though.

#thanks for asking!#adventures in writing #lost library #ask games #answered ask #isfjmel-phleg #i need to figure out a title for this project

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travllingbunny · 5 years

Text

The 100 Final Season Speculations

I was tagged by @nightbleeder and @kizo2703

Thank you both!

From the OP by @nightbleeder : It’s been a long road, but the last season of The 100 is currently in production! Since Jason & The CW announced that Season 7 would be the show’s last, I thought it would be cool to make a post where each of us gets to share our speculations for the show’s final plot. Then, a year from now, we can look back and see how accurate we were!

Pick one or more characters you think will survive: Jordan, because, by this very existence, he represents hope and Marper's legacy, and it would be a huge failure on Clarke and Bellamy's part to not take care of him, as Marper told them too, so killing him off would just feel like nihilistic grimdark crap. Madi for a similar reason, and probably Hope, because they’re really not subtle with the symbolism of her name. They will have all the “new generation” characters survive. Also Niylah, Miller and Jackson will all survive, because there is really nothing to be gained by killing them off, and the show wants to avoid being called out on the Bury Your Gays trope again.

The rest I’m not sure about. I could only see Raven dying if she gets a really good, big storyline for a change, but I’m inclined to think she won’t, and that her story is about finding happiness, foreshadowed by Shaw’s words “Tell Raven she deserves happiness. She thinks she doesn’t, but she does.”

Pick one or more characters you think will die: Russell is 100% dying (there's no way a Prime, the Prime leader in fact, is going to survive to the end. You can't close off the story of the Primes and bodysnatching without his death. And that means definitely destroying all the mind drives and killing him off.)

Gabriel, probably - he's lived for 260 years and he will do something good to fix everything and sacrifice himself, after he has learned the mystery of the Anomaly.

Charmaine Diyoza, unfortunately, has a high chance of dying, because the show loves to kill off the parents.

I’m not sure about the rest. At least one of the main characters will probably die, and my money would be on Murphy, who was high on my death list in season 6, because so much of his story has been about his fear of death and desperate wish for immortality, and because he was considered a cockroach who just cares about his own survival for so long - so it would be a fitting and ironic ending if he sacrifices himself. He wouldn't do it for the 'greater good', but he probably would for his friends and definitely for Emori.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned Clarke, Bellamy or Octavia, because they’re my biggest question marks. But the one thing I’m sure is that Clarke and Bellamy will either die together in some great epic "Together" moment, or they survive and get a happy ending together, even if it's an off-screen/epilogue happy ending. They aren’t going to kill off just one of them. (Especially since either would be really repetitive: killing just Bellamy would feel like we're doing the old "kill the people Clarke loves so she can suffer" thing that's been done to death on this show and would feel lazy. And we've already seen Clarke sacrifice herself and "die" and Bellamy mourn her, twice, except she didn't really die either time.)

Pick one deceased character you think might make a cameo: If I had to pick just one, Abby, in a fantasy sequence/hallucination by Clarke and/or Raven. But, since it’s the last season, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a lot of dead character cameos, depending on the actors’ availability and willingness to return, and some more reused footage flashback appearances of those whose actors won’t return.

Do you expect any romantic changes to happen this season? Definitely: Bellamy and Echo to finally amicably break up, which I expect to happen in a low-key manner (much like their relationship has been.. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it happens off-screen between episodes and they just reference it);

and Bellamy and Clarke to finally have a love confession and/or kiss and/or get together - I just hope it won’t happen at the last moment, in the last episode, before they die, but I wouldn’t put that past the show.

I don’t expect any changes to Memori or Mackson (except maybe one or both of Memori dying, which is possible). The rest is up in the air - whether Octavia, Raven or any other character will get another romance. They surely could, the show often develops romances over the course of one season or less.

Where will the final scene take place?: It would be nice if it takes place on the Earth, which is livable again.

What will the final line be?: “We have survived... Now... we live”.

Who will say it?: It would be most fitting if it’s Clarke. (If she survives, obviously.) Or maybe Bellamy in reply to Clarke (same caveat).

If they both die (and of course their last words in that case would be “Together”), then... I'm not sure, but probably one of the “new generation” characters.

What’s one thing you hope happens?: Clarke and Bellamy getting to be happy together at least for some time, any amount of time.

Do you expect a happy ending?: I expect a sort of a happy ending ("our version of happy ending” as JRoth put it), in any case. This, at the very least, means a happy/hopeful ending for the humanity. It would be fitting if it included going back to Earth and making it livable again, but I must say I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary, they could still make a community on Alpha as well. Now. which characters will get a happy ending, that’s trickier, but at least some of them will. It won’t be a nihilistic “everything sucks” or “rocks fall, everyone dies” ending.

List your favorite character, season and episode up to this point:

Character: Clarke and Bellamy (I can’t choose)

Season: Season 6 (followed by: season 2, season 4)

Episode: Blood Must Have Blood Part 2 reigned supreme for most of the show, but now maybe Nevermind, and What You Take With You, and Matroyoshka. Honorable mentions: the last three episodes of season 4 (The Other Side, The Chosen, Praimfaya) and the season 5 finale Damocles, both parts.

Tagging: @jeanie205 @theatre-steph @immortalpramheda @wankadi @wolfheartgirl @platonic-oxymoron @lee-em-dee @lesbellamy @justbecauseyoubelievesomething @still-watching @katersann @clarke-the-ferrari @persepholily @carrieeve and anyone else who wants to do this.

#the 100 #the 100 season 7 speculation #the 100 speculation #the 100 season 7 #clarke griffin #bellamy blake #octavia blake #raven reyes #john murphy #jordan green #madi griffin

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s4lticid · 6 years

Text

The Shady as all Hell Whistleblower: Or why we shouldn’t take Romelle at face value.

Some firsts:

First and foremost, my deep thanks to the wonderful family at the Lotura Discord Server. In the midst of dumping this stream of consciousness mess on you all, I may pull some ideas that were discussed there and are not original to me. Where possible I will try and credit individuals, but if I miss anyone my deepest apologies and know that everyone there has had a great deal of influence over my thought process. My love and thanks for all the great discussion and support – even the stuff I haven’t been present for!

Second, this and the stuff to come right after, was the work of lots of thought and research that started right after S6 dropped. That is a long time, and I wanted to get something out sooner but I have just been too swamped with RL, which has decided to become a giant, bloody, throbbing, pus-filled buboe blocking me from doing much of anything fun at all ever again. Thus you will be treated to a stream of as much shit as I can spit out at once in the time I have to get this down, and it may not be in the best format or particularly well written, but here goes… oh, and this is also another reason I may forget who said what in conversations exactly, because some of it happened nearly 2 months ago.

I am aware there have been a few metas written about Romelle. I haven’t actually read any of them at this point, except for Leaking Hate’s awesome meta here, because I didn’t want to get overly influenced by the ideas of others. As such I have been on reading and participating in fandom even less that RL gave me a chance to. So if you see something here that was said by someone outside of the Lotura Server and they are not credited, it is not me copying someone, I have just been holding on to it until I could post this.

That said, this builds off of some things LH posted in the above link, and I will do my best to credit those conversations I can remember reading and/or participating in within the Discord.

~oOo~

OKAY.

I’m going to come right out and say it:

Romelle is not who she says she is.

There are too many inconsistencies in her story. So, let’s start at the very beginning and begin poking the holes to prove my point:

1. Keith and Krolia find Romelle:

Keith and Krolia are in the Quantum Abyss riding a Space Whale and it brings them to a planet. Krolia takes a reading, and finds the same signal as the strange quintessence the Blade has been tracking on that planet.

Note: Krolia first sees the readings from space and tracks them to the planet. She doesn’t find any Quintessence signal anywhere else, she specifically states that it is strong and coming from exactly one place.

It is coming from here:

So, if there was a moon base absolutely full of Alteans being drained for their quintessence, as they were shown later, why ever did such a larger source not register first and foremost rather than that cute little dome Romelle is in?

Speaking of that Dome, it’s pretty small, isn’t it? It’s a bio-dome. Meant for a few inhabitants. Does this look like it could house a colony, or even a village realistically? No. It can handle a handful, maybe a dozen people. Probably, it was meant to house just one. But we’ll get to that later.

Keith and Krolia break in and find Romelle, alone and by a riverside. Washing clothes? Why do that in her only clean water source when she has technology all around her? And make no mistake here, she is alone and demands help.

~oOo~

Now I am going to digress here for a moment before I go on to point 2, so I can point out a parallel to the original show, Defender of the Universe (to be referred to from here on as DotU for brevity’s sake, and for my fingers).

There are a LOT of nods to the original shows, (GoLion too), throughout VLD. Some are flat out mirrors for the original, same plot ideas remade, lines taken and reused, Characters, Mechas, motives and situations, they’re all here, though sometimes reworked in very unexpected ways. It’s beautiful seeing them all.

Finding the pretty Damsel alone by a stream, helpless, perhaps even passed out, is one plot device DotU used a LOT.

For instance, when Allura’s Aunt Orla comes to visit, Haggar intercepts and captures her, and then takes her form and lies down to appear knocked out after an attack on her carriage. She is found lying by a stream. That was a plot to get to Allura:

Or how about the time Haggar herself was caught being pretty for a day – in apparently her original form – and cursed the person who saw her?

Again, found by a river.

Fine, you say. But this isn’t Haggar pretending to be Romelle. That didn’t happen, right?

Oh but it did. “It’ll Be a Cold Day”:

Ok, so she wasn’t found by a river this time. But two out of three combined with the VLD writers’ way of reworking things make this a nice little reference point for this original trope.

Something else to note here is there is always some part of Haggar that is a tell. Some part which she cannot disguise. I would posit that we have one with VLD Romelle too: Her clothes. As you go through this post, where you see images of other Alteans, please get a look at their garb. There are several styles that are re-used among each of the people shown. However not one of them wears the same cut we see Romelle wear. And yet someone does. Who? Haggar/Honerva.

No, I am not saying Romelle is actually Honerva/Haggar in disguise. But she could easily be in league with her, and at the very least she definitely is not the innocent she appears and claims to be. Not just because of these fun little references to the original, but they are nice signposts along the way.

~oOo~

2. Romelle’s Story: The Colony

Romelle starts her story to the Paladins by telling them she comes from a planet where there are thousands of Alteans.

This bears repeating: Thousands. Of living Alteans.

Not “were” thousands, but are.

Lotor apparently hunted down every Altean who had been off planet at the time Altea was destroyed, and their offspring, to bring them to the first Colony.

Here is an image of the beginnings of that colony:

Here’s another:

Green as far as the eye can see and a giant ship that, as Leaking Hate pointed out in her meta and on Discord, is easily the size of the dome we were shown above where Keith and Krolia first found Romelle.

That ship would never fit in the bio-dome. And as the upper picture of these two states in the subtitles, Lotor chose a remote planet beyond the Quantum Abyss, not in the Abyss. A planet with a sun such that plants could grow, not a pulsar.

This means it cannot same planet as Romelle was found on, because she states the colony planet is beyond the Abyss, so the Abyss and the Pulsar within it already existed back then. Neither could that ship ever hope to fit inside that dome, as is shown in her memory.

And that colony that was built, shown in the lower picture? Is easily twice as big, or more, as the one Romelle is found in.

3. Romelle’s Story: The Second Colony

Generations ago, once the Colony was very successful, Lotor began testing Alteans for special characteristics such that they could survive the journey to and live on a “Second Colony”. “To better our chances for survival”.

Let’s start with who was chosen.

Around Nine Thousand Five Hundred to Nine Thousand years ago – assuming time for Lotor to mature enough to do all this, knowing that he ages slowly thanks to the writers – Lotor would have started the first Colony. The last people brought might have been found within a couple of hundred years of that range, but probably less.

Think about how long a time that is.

Now, get a look at the faces that came in with some of the survivors found way back then:

Now look at who is being tested:

(Note: I circled a few faces, but if you really look you will see many of the same ones from the above pic)

And note two of the faces I circled.

We know Alteans have a long life span. Far longer than Humans. But we also know from Allura’s reaction that they shouldn’t be anything like at least Nine Thousand Years or more.

So how are First-comer Refugee Alteans alive and young at the same time – ‘Generations Later’ – as both Romelle and Bandor?

Let’s argue that they could be. Bandor and Romelle were just younger then and not chosen. So then Why have neither of them aged at all by the time Romelle related that eventually Bandor was old enough to be tested and passed?

And look, here are some of the first people chosen. Recognize at least one face and clothing? (Not including Petrulius who is a contemporary of Romelle’s as she identifies him on the Moon Facility)

Sure they could be chosen much later, but then why have they not aged at all?

So were Romelle and Bandor refugees? If so then why did Romelle say she was born onto that planet?

Were they born on the planet as she claims?

Did Lotor start testing for special Alteans earlier than she says? Or was it really later? If the latter then how are these original refugees still so young?

However you look at it, her timeline does not add up,

4. Romelle’s Story: The Monument

Thanks in advance to Trisha, Giobana, Crystal Rebellion, Leaking Hate and anyone else who contributed to the conversation that led to this one.

Romelle shows us in her memory that there was a memorial wall to those who went to the Second Colony. Whether she mentions it to the Paladins, I don’t know, but what is shown in the episode looks very much like a memorial to the Fallen.

The base of the Lotor’s statue is covered in names, and we see it cracked with age. People go there to pay respects and leave flowers – and not just any flowers, but pink flowers.

This kind of memorial is what you do for Fallen Soldiers and Fighters in a struggle, not people who are alive off somewhere on another colony and whom you hope to see again once the struggle is over. We even see this is a cross-cultural, cross-species, and intergalactic practice when we see the monument planet Pidge first traced Matt to.

And what do we know about Pink to Alteans? From Allura:

Fallen Warriors. Not people who have gone to a second colony in the hopes of keeping their people alive.

Actually, let’s look at that little tale there. Any colony, in order to be successful, requires a genetically diverse population, a breeding population. A handful of people at a time, because they test as special is not going to provide that. Particularly not in what has been portrayed as a potentially dangerous and harsh journey and place – that alone would be safer in numbers.

Add to that we clearly see that Lotor has separated breeding pairs – Couples – in the few images we see of those chosen. If he is trying to establish a new colony why would he logically do that? The Alteans are intelligent and have some technological expertise, at least some of them, how did no one question that?

I call Shenanigans.

Whatever was going on, it was not another colony and the Alteans all knew it.

This wall? Is a War Memorial honoring warriors who the Alteans think are probably dead.

5. Romelle’s Story: The Communicator

When Bandor is chosen, he is portrayed as giving Romelle a communicator to try and stay in touch with her.

This, despite his being portrayed by her as someone who deeply believed in the importance of not compromising the location of each colony through stray communications that could be picked up and tracked. He is portrayed as explaining to Romelle, in such a ways that impies he has explained it to her time and again, why it was so very important that there be no communication. He seems to understand and believe that it could be life and death. But he creates one anyway?

And then, he doesn’t think to give it to her until he is about to board the ship, in front of the guards:

Look at this picture above. If you zoom in, everyone is looking at them and watching.

This whole part of the story is flat out ridiculous, and makes zero sense. There is no logic to this chain of events or his giving her the thing only at that very moment and not before testing just in case or something.

It is a lie on the level a six year old might tell. It shouldn’t even be considered as more than that. And it is here, I think, that we fly into the realm of pure fantasy. Everything up till now was probably half-truths and misdirection. From here on out though, her story really starts to fall apart and it is very likely we are seeing total and full fabrication.

6. Romelle’s Story: The Dome

We know Romelle never gets chosen for the second Colony, or at least she never states that she does. Her never being chosen for the second colony wouldn’t be something to hide, it could totally benefit her story. It would also help to explain why they didn’t try to warn anyone or stop the testing once they found the moon base – a fact that no one questioned, which itself is suspicious. But she implies by her story that she remains at home, among her people, all alone and depressed because now she has no family.

So she is supposedly still at the original colony when Bandor finally does contact her. He has crashed by the woods. She goes to him and what does she see?

The roof of the Dome. Which we have already established does not exist on the First Colony. So, where is she? Why is she now in this Dome?

What happened in the intervening time that she is not telling us, and is this story about Bandor crashing and the communicator even true? Or are we now in fully manipulative fantasy?

There appear to be no other people in the Dome at all. At least neither Keith nor Krolia relate having seen even one single person to corroborate her story. No other Alteans on this original Colony she is supposed to still be on, which is where Keith and Krolia supposedly find her, and where she states very clearly in the beginning of her story that there are thousands of living, healthy Alteans.Why did Keith and Krolia not see one other person?

Why does Romelle know about a flight bay on the outside of the Dome such that she can take Keith and Krolia to it, but they are supposed to be on an open planet?

When Romelle shows them to said pod, she actually says that “No one else here would know how to fly them if they wanted to”. She represents in this line, once again, that this is the First Colony and there are other people here. So where are they?

7. The Moon Base

Let’s begin with a question I asked at the beginning.

Why, when they were coming in to the planet, did Krolia see

no quintessence signal at all

from that moon base?

These supposed people are supposedly being harvested – and Keith uses the active verb.

These people

Are. Not. Dead

The signal of Quintessence from a place so full of so many people, and the energy being harvested from them, not to mention the pods of Quintessence being harvested off in a storage room somewhere, being collected and stored for pickup, would have logically dwarfed the signal coming from Romelle and her little Dome. They would have ended up here first, not at the Dome.

Even when they finally get there, at first Krolia only says she sees something down on the moon, not that she is getting any kind of Quintessence signal there.

Why? Because there isn’t any.

The pods and the people are a mirage, created by them and for them; woven out of their own pre-existing prejudice and hate, and so very easy for them to believe.

Lotor never was portrayed as taking so very many people at once. For that many people to still be alive and being drained on that station, almost every single Altean would have to still be alive and being used.

A key thing Lotor has been portrayed as is not wasteful. Realistically, and if this were true, Alteans would have died of age. Some even may have died from the process itself.

Why would you keep a dead body in a pod like that for generations, and just build another?

You wouldn’t. You would dispose of the corpse and reuse the pod.

There wouldn’t be so very many of them if what Keith and Krolia saw was real, and was what they thought.

Let’s get a look at the pods, btw. They are very reminiscent of Earth Batteries or Quintessence Capsules themselves, aren’t they? Why do you think that is? Perhaps because they are being manufactured from the thoughts and imaginings of Keith and Krolia?

Here is what real Galra Pod Tech looks like – this is the most recent example, but we HAVE seen it before in earlier seasons. I am just too lazy to go and find it.

Lotor is a Prince, with access to resources and a scientist who designs and creates his own tech advances, ships and fleets. To top that he has access to all of the best and latest technology in the empire.

Does this really look anything like real, known and hi-tech Galra technology, except in a passing, functional way?

And why, after they have seen this and come to the conclusions they have, if the colony is right there and they have not only the proof but are themselves outsiders, giving them credibility…. WHY do Keith and Krolia – both Altruistic heroic do-gooders – not go and try to warn the rest of the Colony? Get them to stop participating or submitting to the tests?

Again, that makes no sense at all according to their personalities. Instead, they run headlong back to Allura to blow the whistle on evil, evil Lotor. No stops, no questions, no thought about the others still at risk.

Also, no proof aside from this one little girl and her story, which without other evidence amounts to nothing more than Heresay. No pictures, no video and no attempt to grab a jar of Quintessence to prove their case.

We find out in S7, that Keith at least sent a message to Kolivan and asked him to send a squad out there. But what did Kolivan’s team find?

Nothing. The place was empty. “Cleaned out”. And judging by the lighting when they got there, it was already probably empty and shut down. They just imagined the pods. How else would it be empty? It’s not like Lotor had any time to clear it. Neither did Honerva, if Kolivan acted right away – and honestly, Kolivan would have acted as fast as he could.

Speaking of Honerva:

8. On the Castle of Lions

Honerva is watching through Mommy Cam Kuron. Nowhere in this episode is she at all surprised or disturbed to see another living Altean.

We find out later when she speaks to Lotor that she is aware that he has continued her work and succeeded where she could not. That work was partly involving Alteans, but I will get to what that means later and probably in a different post.

So she is aware that Alteans exist, but she is still not at all surprised to see Romelle there in the castle. At all. As if it is part of her plan. Could Romelle be in league with Honerva? A part of a plan?

OR, thanks to the Blade being compromised by the alliance with Lotor – which Keith points out in S7 – Honerva found out about the investigation into the Quintessence early on into the new Alliance and traced the path herself. She has access to all databases and resources in the Empire, after all, and we do not know what she was doing for a looong time while a lot of other things were going down in S5 and S6.

Kolivan and the blade, despite their own resources, were having trouble tracing the source and route of the quintessence. Perhaps what they did find was carefully fed to them when Honerva was ready for them. When both she and Romelle were prepared.

And let’s talk a moment about how not one of the members of the team, including both Hunk and Kuron – both great voices of calm and reason for the team – questioned any of the discrepancies of the story I mentioned above, or Keith and Krolia’s actions, lack of corroboration and lack of trying to help the surviving colonists.

They have started to build a relationship with the Galra, learn their culture and working hard for peace for months and months. They were all starting to get to know and like Lotor even. They know the careful balance going on right now in the empire. And then one girl shows up with an MIA team member and has an uncorroborated story, and starts ordering people to shoot Lotor down, not caring that Allura is there too. Even after she is told that Allura is there she doesn’t care.

Her story starts preying on emotion and projecting her own obvious desire to see him dead. And the team members all get very emotional and ready for violence as well, as if the last several months never happened. Their reasoning starts to slip, they don’t question or think out what they’re being told, not even the ones that normally do that no matter what.

And then we have this foreshadowing from waaaay near the beginning of the show:

Keith is still a hothead in many ways. And he was too impatient to get Lotor to be focused against mind control.

He shows up on the Castle ready to rush into the rift and attack. Even after hearing that Allura would be caught in the crossfire he presses to try and do just that and has to be bitchslapped by Lance.

The sheer venom and anger in all of the Paladins’ responses once Romelle is done with her story is off the scale. Especially Hunk and Shiro. Shiro’s tone when he says once Lotor and Allura land they will separate them and “Take Lotor down!” is a tone I have never once heard from him in the entire series. It’s sheer rage fueled bloodlust. This is not any of them. This is them being manipulated.

A brief thought about S7… Never mind that Romelle’s Altean frankly sucks, and she seems able to read Hunk’s mind – convenient that. How about Romelle identifying Lotor’s fleet by sight? When did she ever see enough of that, while living isolated on the colony, to know his ships by sight?

SO. Who or what is Romelle?

Well, we have seen how characters are reworked from the original. And there is one major character from the original we still haven’t seen.

Merla.

It makes no sense to bring in a new character now. But merging her with another character already brought in, one who disliked and enjoyed thwarting Lotor as much as the original Romelle did? That is not only possible, it is plausible, considering many of the character merges and re-works the VLD Team has already done throughout the series.

Merla is telepathic, but more, she can control people. Partly via telepathy, but most often she uses the trope known as Emotion Bomb:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EmotionBomb

It is so much easier to control people through emotions and insecurities they already have. And by the behavior of the Paladins that day? That is exactly what was happening. Not one of them acted rationally or completely within the current development of their character to Romelle and her appearance/story. Not even Keith and Krolia did when they found her, as pointed out earlier.

They are all being manipulated and at least mostly, lied to. They are pawns and Romelle a tool to get Lotor out of their Alliance and out of his safe space with Voltron. This is why Honerva was not surprised about Romelle being there on the ship. This is how Honerva knew about the Alteans and the research when she finally got Lotor back onto her ship to try and talk to him.

Honerva is back to herself and she wants to get back to her people, probably to lead them. She wants her son back now that she has herself again too. To get even a chance at that she needs to get him away from his safe and stabilizing place with the Voltron Coalition. She wants his Sincline ship, so she wouldn’t need Voltron anymore. She certainly wouldn’t want him cozying up to Alfor’s Daughter.

Honerva has put a nice chess game onto the table, getting Romelle on her side, manipulating the Paladins, and forcing the breach in the budding New Empire and Alliance.

Romelle is pissed, perhaps understandably, and has a bone to pick. She may have been exiled to that planetoid by her people and Lotor, for starting shit on the Colony, and found there by Honerva, or she may have been set up there by Honerva. In the end the result is the same. Perfect tool.

Because Lotor had not been harvesting Alteans all this time. Romelle, as he said in the episode, was not telling the truth and did not know what she spoke of. What would be the point of that, there is no research in that, only death. No, he has been developing fighters like the one we saw in the end of S7. Fighters that fuse Altean Alchemic Magic and fighting skill from the pilot, allowing the pilot to see and experience straight through the ship’s sensors, and powering the ship through their own Quintessence – very like the Lions only more. (My thanks to Crystal Rebellion who helped me develop this base idea with this meta. There will be more to come on this.)

The special Alteans who went with him from the colony were test pilots, heroes to their people, to help ensure their survival. A new protective military force. .

Test pilots have a dangerous job, one that is known to lead to death. And who knows, maybe some Galra had snooped around at times. Regardless, that memorial to fallen warriors was just exactly that, and all the Altean people knew exactly what they were volunteering for.

Even Lotor said a few were martyred for an important cause to save the future for thousands. One cannot become a martyr unless everyone knows what they did and why.

Lotor is their greatest Hero and Savior. And now his Mother is likely there – having forsaken the Druids – and has given the Colony a story of betrayal, and the Komar to perfect their fighters. Perhaps a wounded and/or Comatose Lotor is with her if she managed to pull him out of the rift first. But regardless, the Alteans are not friends to Allura, Voltron or the Coalition. They are going to see Allura and the Paladins as enemies, who betrayed and hurt their leader and protector.

That fighter was not a part of Sendak’s fleet, she was a forward thrust. A shot across the Paladin’s bow. The Alteans will be hunting Voltron.

I’ll leave you with a parting thought.

The writers also said in the end, we would look back and see that Lotor was never lying. And that he came from a genuine place, though he never had the tools and choices the rest of the Paladins were given in their upbringings and lives. And lastly, that his feelings for Allura were indeed genuine.

I am working on a meta for Lotor. I’ll get there soon.

My thanks again to everyone on the Lotura Discord. You are all amazing, wonderful people and I am lucky to have met you and to be able to discuss ideas with you.

Thanks to Crystal Rebellion for helping me last minute find links at 2 AM so I can get a bit of sleep before work

And thanks to the love of my life for putting up with me being tied up so late tonight.

Without your support I can do so little.

#lotura #@VLD #meta #Romelle is Shady #don't trust the bitch #Romerla

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creideamhgradochas · 6 years

Text

Thanks to the lovely @youngmoneymilla for taking the time to answer these! Get to know more about lovely Eliza, go give her a follow and then show her some love!

These questions are from this list. You should check it out, there’s 50 questions all together and they’d be great to ask your favorite fic writer!

1) How old were you when you first starting writing fan-fiction?

2) Do you prefer writing OC’s or reader inserts? Explain your answer.

I did love writing OC’s because I have a lot of fun with physical description. However, that was when I wasn’t aware of Reader Inserts since I just recently came back into the fanfic world. Reader Inserts are great because I have to work that much harder on giving them a backstory/personality and not focus at all on physical description. Plus, everyone gets to read the work and hopefully find themselves in it. The only thing I hate is being unable to use a name. I can’t write “Y/N” bc it bugs me haha.

3) What is your favorite genre to write for?

Ummm Angst probably? I’m a huge horror fan so, I’m trying to incorporate that into more work.

4) If you had to delete one of your stories and never speak of it again, which would it be and why?

“It Would Have Made it True” just because I didn’t really connect with it that much and the ending was rushed.

5) When is your preferred time to write?

11 am to 10 pm haha. I’m an asshole and write a lot during my job.

6) Where do you take your inspiration from?

I have about a million fics bookmarked from over the years, literally fics from when I was in high school to now. They’re so gorgeously written and they inspire me to write. I pretty much only read non-fiction outside of fanfic so, that doesn’t really work.

7) What’s your favorite scene that you’ve written?

Bathtub/Bedroom scene in the second part of “Bungalows and Baths”

8) Have you ever amended a story due to criticisms you’ve received after posting it?

Yep. In one fic, I included a descriptive characteristic for the reader that implied she was white. It hadn’t even occurred to me but, I immediately fixed it when someone pointed it out.

9) Who is your favorite character to write for? Why?

Tossup between Bucky and Steve. Bucky has the very obvious trauma and grief that’s interesting to write about but, Steve has a lot of buried darkness that’s subtle and extremely intriguing.

10) Who is your least favorite character to write for? Why?

Maybe Bruce? I don’t care that much for his character (despite the fact I love Hulk)

11) How do you come up with the titles for your stories?

A lot of the time, it’s a line that’s said throughout the narrative. However, I have a word doc filled with random quotes I like and I usually throw something together. I always think up the title at the end and it’s always an afterthought. Titles blow.

12) What do you think is the best idea you’ve had for a story so far?

I am currently writing a Bucky x Reader fic (TRYING TO AT LEAST) that is going to take the team to New Orleans. It’s going to involve vampires since I wrote a novella about vampires back in high school and want to re-explore that mythology. However, there is going to be a lot of twists and it won’t be an AU, it’s just introducing the possibility of vampires in the MC universe. The reader and Bucky will both be struggling with the idea of themselves as monsters and trying to help themselves through that. It’s going to be a lot of voodoo and magic and angsty “will they, won’t they”. I’m going off on a tangent now but, that’s the gist. I have not written an actual series in a long time so, this would be my first one.

13) Do you have any abandoned WIP’s? What made you abandon them?

There are many half-filled one- page word docs on my desktop that are rotting away as we speak. I just get bored or think of something else.

14) Are there any stories that you’ve written that you’d really love to do a sequel to?

I’d love to do more fics with the same reader from Bungalows and Baths.

15) Are there any stories that you wished you’d ended differently?

Lol I’m actually annoyed with how I ended 6 Times right now. Not sure why.

16) Tell me about another writer(s) who you admire? What is it about them that you admire?

Omg I admire so many but, here are a few.

@bitsandbobsandstuff – obviously for her “Safe with Me” piece which is fantastic, emotional and well-paced. Pacing/keeping the reader on their toes is the hardest thing for me in a series and so, I really admire her ability to do that. I also LOVED her “A Million Invisible Threads” piece because it’s such a gorgeous character study on the Winter Soldier

@a-splash-of-stucky – She’s the Queen of Angst duh and a GORGEOUS writer. I love her stuff. A Messed Up Place left me weak.

@imhereforbvcky – Her “Mirror for the Sun” fic inspired me to start writing from Bucky’s POV actually. She’s just a beautiful writer.

@tilltheendwilliwrite – I love everything she writes. I love all the mythology she brings to her fics while still staying within the Avengers universe. Her smut is on another level, too. I find myself rereading her stuff again and again.

17) Do you have a story that you look back on and cringe when you reread it?

Here and there. There are definitely moments in a fic where I think why did I keep that. It’s usually because I ended it too quickly or just wanted it over.

18) Do you prefer listening to music when you’re writing or do you need silence?

I love music when I write fics. It’s all movie scores. I have a spotify playlist for it.

19) Have you ever cried whilst writing a story?

I’ve cried (ish) when writing anything that has to do with alcohol/substance abuse. I’ve been in and out of AA for the past two years and have finally started recovery again. I also have depression so, writing about that can leave me raw. Writing truly always helps though.

20) Which part of your fics have been the hardest to write?

SMUT. Jesus Christ. I struggle so hard with making smut sound hot, as well as lyrical so, it can fit with the narrative. I don’t want to reuse anything I’ve used in other fics before or repeat words but, it’s SO hard (pardon the pun). I always forget what position they’re in and where the body parts need to go. It’s legitimately why I have yet to write a Stucky x Reader fic. I can’t introduce another person into my difficult SMUT journey.

21) Do you make a general outline for your stories or do you just go with the flow?

I usually have a general idea and I’ll have a very vague outline going. I just write everything out like word vomit and go back and edit.

22) What is something you wished you’d known before you started posting fan-fiction?

That some of the best stories I’ve read aren’t necessarily the ones with the most likes or comments. I stumble upon stuff and wonder “HOW DOES THIS NOT HAVE 2K LIKES”.

23) Do you have a story that you feel doesn’t get as much love as you’d like?

That’s tough. Maybe the stuff I wrote in the beginning where I didn’t have many followers. I loved the concept of “You Don’t Mean for it to Happen” but, sometimes I want to rewrite the whole thing. I put a lot of myself into “I Think of You All the Time” but, I feel like that got some good traction. IDK. Bungalows and Baths got a crazy amount of love. Did not expect that but, v grateful.

24) In contrast to 23 is there a story which gets lots of love which you kinda eye roll at?

Nope. I appreciate any love haha.

25) Are any of your characters based on real people?

Well, I think it goes without saying that every reader character has a little bit of the author in there. I think I pull from some of my friends but, not really.

26) What’s the biggest compliment you’ve gotten?

Someone once said that their soul was marked by “Bungalows and Baths” which was amazing haha.

27) What’s the harshest criticism you’ve gotten?

I haven’t really gotten criticism other than that time I screwed up on including a feature for a white reader. I felt terrible about that.

28) Do you share your story ideas with anyone else or do you keep them close to your chest?

Not really. I don’t have people to share them with haha.

29) Do people know you write fan-fiction?

My best friend knows but, she doesn’t read fanfic. Shockingly, my mom and sister know but, I told them that they could never read them. I just share reviews with them. My mom likes to know that I’m staying creative.

30) What’s you favorite minor character you’ve written?

Oh jeez idk if I have one. Natasha isn’t considered a minor character but, she usually plays a side character in my stories and she’s fun to write for.

31) What spurs you on during the writing process?

Once I get started, I’m usually good at keeping it going. Music helps.

32) What’s your favorite trope to write?

Probably slow burn romance or one of the lovers is injured/captured. I also am a huge sucker for love triangles because I’m greedy AF.

33) Can you remember the first fic you read? What was it about?

Lawl this might not have been the first one but, I read a Lizzie Mcguire SMUT piece when I was maybe in 6th grade and was severely chilled to the bone. I was trash even at 12.

34) If you could write only angst, fluff or smut for the rest of your writing life, which would it be and why?

Angst. I always write better when I’m emotionally distraught and tortured. Although as I get older, I realize this isn’t fabulous for my own mental health.

#milestone celebration #ask the author #youngmoneymilla

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sarcasticace · 4 years

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I don’t disagree with most of the stuff you post and I kind of agree that it’s annoying when PB reuses people who are important to the story in a different book, but imo Addison was a bad example bc she really wasn’t central to RCD. I know she was in Hollywood U but that game is now 7 years old I think? So a good number of ppl who play Choices might not have even played it. To me there’s a difference between reusing Addison as a background character in another book versus, say, Madeleine from TRR being in BaBu etc etc. Also whatever the fuck they did to that one sprite of Ava just being a slightly altered Eliana from Sunkissed. idk if this was coherent sorry lol

Oh, don’t apologize. This was very coherent. I know exactly what you were saying.

I mean, I do agree to an extent. You could’ve definitely removed her and it wouldn’t have changed the story... though the story could’ve done with a lot of changes. Regardless... and maybe this is just my own bias... I feel like characters from HSS or HWU should just be off limits. It just really rubs me the wrong way when Autumn is reused for a random mother in Open Heart or Payton is a minor cheerleader character in MTFL, but then Hunt comes back as a full Love Interest.

I’m definitely speaking more emotionally, if that makes sense, but like.... idk I feel like of all the characters to reuse, I feel like they should respect the ones from their previous games even if they’re like 7 years old??? Even if most Choices players haven’t played those games.

But yeah, you’re right. HWU or HSS aside, reusing characters like Madeleine is definitely more offensive like... she was a major character. Also, which Ava are we talking about lol. I haven’t played Sunkissed and the only Ava that comes to mind is from It Lives?

#ask #anon

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stephenmccull · 4 years

Text

Health Workers Unions See Surge in Interest Amid Covid

This story also ran on NPR. It can be republished for free.

The nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, declared on March 6 — by filing the official paperwork — that they were ready to vote on the prospect of joining a national union. At the time, they were motivated by the desire for more nurses and support staff, and to have a voice in hospital decisions.

A week later, as the covid-19 pandemic bore down on the state, the effort was put on hold, and everyone scrambled to respond to the coronavirus. But the nurses’ long-standing concerns only became heightened during the crisis, and new issues they’d never considered suddenly became urgent problems.

Staffers struggled to find masks and other protective equipment, said nurses interviewed for this story. The hospital discouraged them from wearing masks one day and required masks 10 days later. The staff wasn’t consistently tested for covid and often not even notified when exposed to covid-positive patients. According to the nurses and a review of safety complaints made to federal regulators, the concerns persisted for months. And some nurses said the situation fueled doubts about whether hospital executives were prioritizing staff and patients, or the bottom line.

By the time the nurses held their election in September — six months after they had filed paperwork to do so — 70% voted to unionize. In a historically anti-union state with right-to-work laws and the second-least unionized workforce in the country, that margin of victory is a significant feat, said academic experts who study labor movements.

That it occurred during the pandemic is no coincidence.

For months now, front-line health workers across the country have faced a perpetual lack of personal protective equipment, or PPE, and inconsistent safety measures. Studies show they’re more likely to be infected by the coronavirus than the general population, and hundreds have died, according to reporting by KHN and The Guardian.

Many workers say employers and government systems that are meant to protect them have failed.

Research shows that health facilities with unions have better patient outcomes and are more likely to have inspections that can find and correct workplace hazards. One study found New York nursing homes with unionized workers had lower covid mortality rates, as well as better access to PPE and stronger infection control measures, than nonunion facilities.

Recognizing that, some workers — like the nurses at Mission Hospital — are forming new unions or thinking about organizing for the first time. Others, who already belong to a union, are taking more active leadership roles, voting to strike, launching public information campaigns and filing lawsuits against employers.

“The urgency and desperation we’ve heard from workers is at a pitch I haven’t experienced before in 20 years of this work,” said Cass Gualvez, organizing director for Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West in California. “We’ve talked to workers who said, ‘I was dead set against a union five years ago, but covid has changed that.’”

In response to union actions, many hospitals across the country have said worker safety is already their top priority, and unions are taking advantage of a difficult situation to divide staff and management, rather than working together.

Labor experts say it’s too soon to know if the outrage over working conditions will translate into an increase in union membership, but early indications suggest a small uptick. Of the approximately 1,500 petitions for union representation posted on the National Labor Relations Board website in 2020, 16% appear related to the health care field, up from 14% the previous year.

In Colorado, SEIU Local 105 health care organizing director Stephanie Felix-Sowy said her team is fielding dozens of calls a month from nonunion workers interested in joining. Not only are nurses and respiratory therapists reaching out, but dietary workers and cleaning staff are as well, including several from rural parts of the state where union representation has traditionally been low.

“The pandemic didn’t create most of the root problems they’re concerned about,” she said. “But it amplified them and the need to address them.”

A nurse for 30 years, Amy Waters had always been aware of a mostly unspoken but widespread sentiment that talking about unions could endanger her job. But after HCA Healthcare took over Mission Health in 2019, she saw nurses and support staff members being cut and she worried about the effect on patient care. Joining National Nurses United could help, she thought. During the pandemic, her fears only worsened. At times, nurses cared for seven patients at once, despite research indicating four is a reasonable number.

In a statement, Mission Health said it has adequate staffing and is aggressively recruiting nurses. “We have the beds, staffing, PPE supplies and equipment we need at this time and we are well-equipped to handle any potential surge,” spokesperson Nancy Lindell wrote. The hospital has required universal masking since March and requires staff members who test positive to stay home, she added.

Although the nurses didn’t vote to unionize until September, Waters said, they began acting collectively from the early days of the pandemic. They drafted a petition and sent a letter to administrators together. When the hospital agreed to provide advanced training on how to use PPE to protect against covid transmission, it was a small but significant victory, Waters said.

“Seeing that change brought a fair number of nurses who had still been undecided about the union to feel like, ‘Yeah, if we work together, we can make change,’” she said.

Old Concerns Heightened, New Issues Arise

Even as union membership in most industries has declined in recent years, health workers unions have remained relatively stable. Experts say it’s partly because of the focus on patient care issues, like safe staffing ratios, which resonate widely and have only grown during the pandemic.

At St. Mary Medical Center outside Philadelphia, short staffing led nurses to strike in November. Donna Halpern, a nurse on the cardiovascular and critical care unit, said staffing had been a point of negotiation with the hospital since the nurses joined the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals in 2019. But with another surge of covid cases approaching, the nurses decided not to wait any longer to take action, she said.

A month later, officials with Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic, which owns the hospital, announced a tentative labor agreement with the union. The contract “gives nurses a voice in discussions on staffing while preserving the hospital’s right and authority to make all staffing decisions,” the hospital said in a statement.

In Colorado, where state inspection reports show understaffing led to a patient death at a suburban Denver hospital, SEIU Local 105 has launched a media campaign about unsafe practices by the hospital’s parent company, HealthOne. The union doesn’t represent HealthOne employees, but union leaders said they felt compelled to act after repeatedly hearing concerns.

In a statement, HealthOne said staffing levels are appropriate across its hospitals and it is continuing to recruit and hire staff members.

Covid is also raising entirely new issues for workers to organize around. At the forefront is the lack of PPE, which was noted in one-third of the health worker deaths catalogued by KHN and The Guardian.

Nurses at Albany Medical Center in New York picketed on Dec. 1 with signs demanding PPE and spoke about having to reuse N95 masks up to 20 times.

The hospital told KHN it follows federal guidelines for reprocessing masks, but intensive care nurse Jennifer Bejo said it feels unsafe.

At MultiCare Indigo Urgent Care clinics in Washington state, staff members were provided only surgical masks and face shields for months, even when performing covid tests and seeing covid patients, said Dr. Brian Fox, who works at the clinics and is a member of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists. The company agreed to provide N95 masks after staffers went on a two-day strike in November.

MultiCare said it found another vendor for N95s in early December and is in the process of distributing them.

PPE has also become a rallying point for nonunion workers. At a November event handing out PPE in El Paso, Texas, more than 60 workers showed up in the first hour, said SEIU Texas President Elsa Caballero. Many were not union members, she said, but by the end of the day, dozens had signed membership cards to join.

Small Successes, Gradual Movement

Organized labor is not a panacea, union officials admit. Their members have faced PPE shortages and high infection rates throughout the pandemic, too. But collective action can help workers push for and achieve change, they said.

National Nurses United and the National Union of Healthcare Workers said they’ve each seen an influx in calls from nonmembers, but whether that results in more union elections is yet to be seen.

David Zonderman, an expert in labor history at North Carolina State University, said safety concerns like factory fires and mine collapses have often galvanized collective action in the past, as workers felt their lives were endangered. But labor laws can make it difficult to organize, he said, and many efforts to unionize are unsuccessful.

Health care employers, in particular, are known to launch aggressive and well-funded anti-union campaigns, said Rebecca Givan, a labor studies expert at Rutgers university. Still, workers might be more motivated by what they witnessed during the pandemic, she said.

“An experience like treating patients in this pandemic will change a health care worker forever,” Givan said, “and will have an impact on their willingness to speak out, to go on strike and to unionize if needed.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Health Workers Unions See Surge in Interest Amid Covid published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

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gordonwilliamsweb · 4 years

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Health Workers Unions See Surge in Interest Amid Covid

This story also ran on NPR. It can be republished for free.

That it occurred during the pandemic is no coincidence.

Many workers say employers and government systems that are meant to protect them have failed.

“The pandemic didn’t create most of the root problems they’re concerned about,” she said. “But it amplified them and the need to address them.”

“Seeing that change brought a fair number of nurses who had still been undecided about the union to feel like, ‘Yeah, if we work together, we can make change,’” she said.

Old Concerns Heightened, New Issues Arise

In a statement, HealthOne said staffing levels are appropriate across its hospitals and it is continuing to recruit and hire staff members.

Nurses at Albany Medical Center in New York picketed on Dec. 1 with signs demanding PPE and spoke about having to reuse N95 masks up to 20 times.

The hospital told KHN it follows federal guidelines for reprocessing masks, but intensive care nurse Jennifer Bejo said it feels unsafe.

MultiCare said it found another vendor for N95s in early December and is in the process of distributing them.

Small Successes, Gradual Movement

National Nurses United and the National Union of Healthcare Workers said they’ve each seen an influx in calls from nonmembers, but whether that results in more union elections is yet to be seen.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Health Workers Unions See Surge in Interest Amid Covid published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

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thisselflovecamebacktome · 7 years

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Reputation (almost) 3 months later thoughts.

For those of you who have missed the other posts of these, I’m basically mapping out my every thought on the album and songs as time passes to compare with 1989 which I overhyped only to admit a few months after that it wasn’t that great. I’ve done one the day Reputation was released, along with one and two months thought posts and plan to do this one, a seven month one (the tour starts just before then if you’re wondering why I’m doing it at seven months over six months), a one year one and dependant on if TS7 comes out in 2019 or not, a two year or one week before TS7 one. Idealistically I would be doing this post right on three months, but with university starting up again on the 12th, I found it best to do it now while I have the time to fully go into everything. So with that in mind, lets get into it.

Album as a whole + Grammys drama: I’m going to be honest, I don’t listen to this album from start to end anymore. Like with the exception of End Game and Look What You Made Me Do, I listen to all the songs individually all the time, but I just don’t find myself inclined to sit down and listen to it in “order” (I’ve mentioned in pasts posts how I feel the order of the songs is wrong for the story she’s trying to tell) anymore. I also feel like so many people objectively do not get this album, including a lot of fans. Like so many people have looked at the surface of certain songs (So It Goes, Delicate and Gorgeous are the main ones to come to mind) and made judgements and feelings off that, most of which completely contradict what the song is actually saying. Some of it even feels deliberate to copy the harmful mindset of “Taylor’s only ever happy now!!!!” that the 1989 era had which is extremely frustrating. As a somewhat related side note, all your alcoholism jokes you make about this album are not funny. They are disrespectful and even if they weren’t, are just cringey, so if that could stop, I for one would be happy. In saying all of this, so far Reputation along with What If Nothing by Walk The Moon would still be my top picks for album of the year at next year’s grammys. I say so far because there was a good month or so where I thought Divide was album of the year last period and look how quickly that changed when Melodrama came out. But here’s where part of my issue lays with the grammys scapegoating Taylor like they did (along with the obviously bigger issue of sexism/racism shown with the “step up” comment and lack of diverse winners this year). Reputation deserves to win awards on its own and I truly believe it would have regardless, but now I’m just going to be guessing how much of it is legitimate and how much was the grammys “fixing” a problem they created, and that’s just a shitty feeling to be honest.

Ready For It: I know we’ve seen live performances of this song already, but I’m still so excited to see this live. Like I still legitimately adore this song and listen to it at least daily. And I mean it’s going to be hype as hell on tour as the opener.

End Game: My one regret on not holding off on the two month post? The music video for this dropped like a day later. I mean I don’t have much to say, but I would have rather it just all go in one post seeing as I haven’t listened to the song outside that all month. Long story short, the video was lacklustre. Basically just the 22 video with more special effects and less relatability.... Not that I’m surprised. That’s all Joseph Khan seems to know how to do. I mean every video this era has basically just copied one of Taylor’s old ones idea wise and added more special effects. I stand by the fact that this means that even without the crappy stuff he’s done, musically he should have been left behind with the 1989 era. Hopefully the fans pick up on his reused tricks soon and stop watching the music videos so Taylor gets the hint, but I doubt it. All up, the only worthwhile moments for me in the video was Sweeran, the animals and the rainbow dress. Hell, as much as I don’t like her, I’m kinda sad Katy wasn’t in the video now, because along with killing their stupid feud, at least it would have been a moment of surprise and interest in the video, even if only temporary.

I Did Something Bad: So the most interaction I have had with this song this month is Swifties using the first line with that attention seeking picture Kim put up and really all I gotta say is why? Why give her the time of day? I mean do you really think that she’d be doing shit like that if it didn’t get a reaction? Just ignore her to be honest. Taylor’s learned to do that, it’s about time we did too.

Don’t Blame Me: The more I listen to this song, the more I realise that it’s probably not going to be the aerial act on tour and Look What You Made Me Do is and the more I get sad. That’s really all I have to say about it.

Delicate: As I mentioned earlier, people misinterpret this song so badly. Like they see some of the anxiety but brush it off as a cute song about being in that grey area between friends and a relationship. This song is not meant to be cute. It’s extremely sad and filled with a lot of low self esteem and anxiety. When she asks “Do the girls back home touch you like I do?” it’s basically saying “I don’t have the self esteem to feel like I have anything but sex. Please tell me that no one else can give you that, because if they can, why would you stay?”. The song is also filled with the fear that she thinks she’s way deeper in this than he is and wanting to take things to the next level but having anxiety about actually talking to him about it. And as someone who has been there, done that, that’s part of the reason I love this song so much. It’s complex and relatable and I love it.

Look What You Made Me Do: To be honest, I haven’t heard this once since the last post.

So It Goes: Yet another song people only look skin deep at. Like this song is filled with anxiety, insecurities, fear, issues with object permanence and more, and yet all people see is a sex song. I also fear daily that this is not going to make it on the tour set list because you all sleep on it.

Gorgeous: Out of all the songs that are misinterpreted on this album, this song has it the worst. And it has it the worst because people misinterpreting it takes away all the meaning from it. What makes this song sad isn’t that she cheats, because she doesn’t (”Unless you want to come along” is a thought), it’s the fact she realises she deserves better but DOESN’T go for it. Her doing better/having a ‘bad’ moral sense is the thing that she “can’t have” because she chose to stay faithful rather than do what’s right for herself.

Getaway Car: I feel like everything I need to say about this song has been really. Like all up it’s just a really great song that is close to my heart.

King Of My Heart: I’m not going to lie, I’ve said so much about the second half of the album in my past posts that really, there’s not much more to say. They’re all good to amazing songs. This is especially the case for this song.

Dancing With Our Hands Tied: So somehow I’ve never said it despite thinking it all the time (along with most the rest of the fandom tbh) but this song is such a lgbt+ song and I love it. I will say though, I hate how the fandom acts as if it’s the most underrated song on this album when you only need to go into the tags to see that all the posts are either love for it or “Why isn’t it more appreciated?” posts.

Dress: I still think this song is overrated by the fandom, but I must admit I have started listening to it more again recently. It’s arguable that this song is also super misrepresented seeing as people see it as the sex song when it’s so much more intimate than that.

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: I don’t really have anything more to say about this song either right now.

Call It What You Want: I love this song so much. I say that every time but it’s true. The amount of growth and self + recognising others’ love it has in it is just beautiful and I love it. As I have said in the past, it will probably always be one of Taylor’s best songs in my opinion.

New Years Day: This song is at it’s best late at night to be honest. The calmness of it all is just beautiful and while I don’t listen to it nearly as much as I should, the times I do are just beautiful and warm and it’s still the best way to end this album.

#reputation album #taylor swift

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flockofdoves · 4 years

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was trying to think of a way to divide up ocs on toyhouse so i don’t get too embarrassed about them yesterday but then it turned into just trying to list like every character i’ve ever made the vast majority of them i’d never put on toyhouse lol. but this was fun for myself even though i definitely forgot chracters and even whole stories from when i was younger

kinda old (definitely need updating they’re from when i was 17/18 and haven’t done much in recent years but nonetheless are my most recent ocs and i would probably like to do something with them someday still):

all the alienated characters - raul and michael primarily, also side characters like their relatives (lennie, joaquin, marcell, maybe also shinsuke, natalia, nina, naomi, hana, leela, etc) and friends (still need to name them lol) etc

justicia (less set on doing her story any time soon compared to alienated, but still theres something to it i might want to work with someday)

pretty old (like i was 16-17)

gf debate characters (this is actually older than a lot of the ones i list as even older in this list but i kept working on them til i was like 17 so they hold up better even if i don’t want to finish making their story anymore) - isaac, micah (micah is literally kinda from when i was 12 lol but i brought her to like 3 different stories and she was a boy in the first one too so shes basically not that character anymore), and then side characters like mirabel (originated in same story at 12 as micah), ayçin, anna, micahs mom and her wife, micahs cousin (another one from that old story) etc

those ocs that literally none of them have names or barely personalities i only ever did character sketches and basic concepts but its like a ghost story thing i was gonna do - 12 y/o baby butch protag, the ghost girl, baby butch’s trans girl cousin, cousins trans guy friend

really old (characters from when i was like 14-15 that did not really develop much from there. most of these are characters i have had fun with and maybe drawn since but are goofy and don’t hold up in a lot of aspects and most of them i’ll probably never pick up for stories again)

football lesbians - monica, wanda, and rania

pigeon magical girls (technically maybe i actually finished a very abbreviated version of their origin story for a school art project when i was 15 lol but i planned to do more back then and now i dont want to) - zehra, ronni, the pigeon, probably not amy and zoë that was just a cameo for myself of ocs from when i was like 11 lol

naomi’s story (this one i might actually want to do something with someday, i wrote a short story about it plus a bit more, but i have to make some serious changes i don’t really think i thought of some of the implications of some stuff in it before) - just naomi and the ghost basically. not to be confused with naomi in alienated who is michael’s sister they are not at all the same person

assorted characters that never really had a story - mels and cvijeta, charlotte (thought about putting her in football lesbians. she does basketball but. jock wlw you know)

really really old (characters from late middle school, like 13-14)

uhhh that wizards story. it never had a name idk. i still kinda like them though tbh even if i’ll never do anything with them anymore - tess, ali, nataline, brandy, mo, remora, cnidarian

really really really old (characters from the middle of middle school, like 12-13. at this point my recollection of what came before what might be kinda off tho)

that fae folk in pennsylvania and ohio story - emilia, ilana, micah (first version! lol), mirabel, that boy that i just hate and don’t remember the name of and resent making a character that had a crush on micah, micahs cousin, darling/angel (a faerie that just went by terms of endearment as if they were names), uhhh the second group of characters in a different more rural town i tried to write that i dont remember the names of

haunted victorian house story - benji, aisha, elizabeth

updated onex arget (fantasy world i wrote about a lot when i was in elementary school) story - nai, rieae

idk this story never had a name and barely a plot beyond ivy and victor becoming friends and venting to each other - victor, ivy, miles, maitê

forks and spoons (story i improvised with my little cousin who was like 8 at the time lol) - florimundi(?), i’m forgetting literally all 3 of the other characters names lol (maybe reese and victor for two of them??? but maybe not bc those are also other very old characters that idk if i reused the names of)

theo and ted - theoni and theodore (aka theo and ted!), oh also that guy they meet who wears like. a trench coat iirc

super old (characters from the later half of the 6th grade and early 7th, like 12ish)

really dumb story about a closeted trans person with did getting transformation powers - i actually dont remember the main character and their main other alters names anymore, i remember the other character they had a crush on stephan though

all those characters in bands that i never actually could settle on a story for beyond a variety of interpersonal drama. very inspired by the webcomic jenny hanniver tbh - avery, mark, etti, adrian, xavier, pepper, uhhh theres literally So Many more of them and also so many i dont remember the names of anymore but just for some that come to mind. that periwinkle colored hair in a bowl cut character that always wore a beanie who was in avery’s band whos names on the tip of my tongue (maybe that was etti and the character i’m calling etti was called something else?? maybe victoria? maybe andy? maybe andy was an entirely different 3rd character?? idk. actually yeah i’m positive bowlcut character was etti rereading this), xaviers ex-boyfriend who was obsessed with homestuck (lmao), that guy with red hair i accidentally directly ripped off the design of some jenny hanniver character, that goth guy with braces and glasses (maybe he wasnt in this?), that screamo band with 2 lead singers, that guy with brown hair that said he was straight with an exception (msfdkjghhsfd god), that person with the emo haircut in flame colors, this literally is not even all the characters lol

extremely old (largely from 6th grade, like age 11ish. weird period of time where i suddenly wanted to write about romance but thought it had to be straight but then very quickly was like ‘wait actually nvm i have a laptop now and think i’m bicurious i’m only gonna write about gay people)

gsa story (this might have been the summer before 7th actually but it feels distinctly before the other stuff in the last category so idk maybe just my whole impression of when i made things for middle school is off) - emmy(?), allie(?), noah(???), some other kid, i think noah(?) or the other kid got reused to be the guy i regretted making a part of that faerie story who liked old micah lol, maybe more kids, their teacher

idk that kid with blue hair and black eyes with white irises and his sister

middle school lesbians - leah and cass

lesbian who works in food service and there were weird references to comic books but filtered through me referencing an obscure emo humor youtube channel that made jokes about comics i’d never read - amy, zoë, amy’s straight best friend i dont remember the name of??

tosca (this wasnt straight romance but it was like the last thing pre me always having lgbt main characters) - idk. there were two characters i drew like once. theres nothing to note about this except wanting to make it is what made me learn about webcomics

that story i posted the first chapter of on quibblo about a hippie girl (somehow in 2010?? dont ask me) and an emo boy liking each other before abandoning to never write about cishet romance again. didnt even get to the romance part lol - i forget her name. maybe it was april? maybe it was florimundi and i reused it later for another character, nix, reese (her goth lesbian best friend. thank god for reese)

first attempt at straight romance. also about like. idk. fantastical powers in clouds in providence rhode island - selia, shay, cassandra, selias other friend i forget the name of??

ancient (literally elementary school ocs. obviously theres a lot of grades covered here but its just my memory and ability to reference this is so loose idk if i could even try to accurately divide it further)

shadow magic - mezzaluna, her aunt tabby(?), alexa

a, j, & j (barely counts i didnt do anything with them. those are the only characters also)

arine (some of these characters might not be arine characters and just from other onex arget (fantasy world i wrote a bunch of stories in and made a shitty conlang for and stuff) stories but i just dont really remember) - lia, lias sister, dibujurm, that other fantastical creature who was friends with dibujurm i forget the name of that kinda looked like calcifer from howls moving castle but fuzzy not an actual fire (maybe isigo??), emiaelaesa, that obnoxious prince (i think the story was called arine bc that was his name?), the prince’s servant, there absolutely were more

the musical adventures of shiri and don - shiri, don, some evil villain and his henchmen

rosington (there were like no characters besides her. weird junie b jones rip off with nonsensical humor to everyone but me)

that tree prophecy story (maybe set in onex arget?) - nico, emi (?? maybe not her name), their uncle (i forget his name, maybe lester?), their uncles shipmates, that fortune teller

idk some kid that goes on a scavenger hunt to solve a mystery on vacation in like bermuda or something where he meets some quirky girl character who helps him. thats all

i had some characters that started out as me trying to draw characters from the book hoot by carl hiaasen but for some reason then turned into my own ocs and looked nothing like those characters were described and also basically had nothing to do with them in personality and action beyond name after a while. - beatrice and napoleon. this was in a phase where i got a ‘how to draw anime’ book and napoleon straight up looked like a yugioh character his hair was ridiculous

those fake siblings i made up and lied to a substitute teacher in kindergarten about me having 6 siblings because of for absolutely no reason even though i only have one sibling irl

imaginary friends i shared with my brother and then made stories about - theres so many of these, the most important though was chick-chick-chick. who was a very small chick who wore a top hat. and then he had a family(?) of infinitely smaller chicks (chick-chick-chick-chick, for example) the more “chicks” you added to the name

#my ocs #cpost

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moved-to-moothebloo · 7 years

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Explain your opinions pls

Okay. I have a lot, and I mean A LOT of opinions about this new movie so let me give a non-spoiler review of all the things I liked about the movie, and all the things I don’t like.

(Also keep in mind that I am not going to be judging this like an episode of Ninjago. I’m going to be judging it as a full length movie that was shown in theaters. So obviously I’m going to be more critical than I would the show.)

Things I Enjoyed about The Lego Ninjago Movie:

Going all Out (not the song)

I don’t think I’m lying when I say that this movie.. definitely didn’t have to exist. Ninjago isn’t exactly a super well known show among most audiences and it’s already a pretty ballsy decision to make a movie about it. But you can tell they really did try to make something good.(For the most part.)In behind the scenes clips you can clearly see the people had fun making the movie, and despite what the movie is, you really have to appreciate that.

They threw A LOT of ideas and clear effort into this movie and its hard to be upset at anything that tries like that. Especially since there are movies out there that don’t try and focus on manipulating the audience. (I’m looking at you Lorax!!)

Lord Garmadon

Simply put, their enemy Lord Garmadon is the best thing in the movie. He has the best voice acting, the best jokes, the best writing, and he’s just very entertaining to watch and see him interact with the other characters. It’s very safe to assume that he steals the show. (Which actually kind of leads to another problem but we’ll get to that later.)

The Animation

I don’t know if this counts, since it’s still kind of the same animation as in the other movies, but I’m still going to mention it because the lego animation is still pretty damn impressive. A lot of the movement between things like how the characters move, how the mechs and machines move, the fight scenes, and all other sort of things like that work very well.

Unique and Surprisingly kind of Deep

This movie definitely puts some twists on some old kids movie cliches. I won’t go into detail on what things exact but lets just say there’s some very interesting conflict between Lloyd and his father near the sort of climax of the movie. Yeah there are some cliches that don’t change like the reveal of the Ninja’s powers. But it’s alright.

Some of the Jokes Work

Like said. Some of the jokes work very well. From inside jokes of the show, and other jokes that managed to make me actually laugh. Some of them visual, some of them dialogue based. But there are some good jokes Most of them involving Wu and Garmadon.

One of my favorite jokes is actually the one that contributes to the story, with Garmadon’s generals in the middle of the movie. For those who’ve seen the movie I think you know what I’m talking about.

The Movie Does get Better as it Progresses

I’m happy I did get something out of this movie. Most notably near the end where I did start getting happy and started feeling more involved in the movie.

Things I didn’t like about the The Lego Ninjago Movie:

The First 1/3rd of this Movie is Some of the Worst Piece of Film I’ve ever seen (and I wish I was exaggerating)

Everything before the scene where they go to the forest is just plain awful. Literally everything is wrong with the beginning of this movie. I can’t say specifics because this is a spoiler free answer, but I will say that every scene in the beginning is painfully flawed, when the film is available everywhere I’ll probably make a post analyzing the scenes and explaining why they suck.

But for now your just gonna have to listen to the other points I make after this point because the rest of these can completely describe the first couple of scenes.

Everything Moves too Damn Fast

Almost everything in this movie (especially the beginning) moves waaaaay to quickly. The pacing is so fast you can barely tell whats going on. Sometimes it takes no more than a blink for you to be completely lost in what’s going on in the movie. Most notably any scene that had the other ninja in it, would run by so fast you would think the director was ashamed of the characters and wanted to get them over with as soon as possible.

Too Much Focus on the Wrong Details

All the writing and scenes are focused on all the wrong things. Remember how I said Garmadon was the best thing in the movie? That’s because 70% percent of this movie is focused on him. Other things are focused on Lloyd which is fine, but also stupid scenes with background characters and much more other things I don’t even really remember. (And I just saw the movie a couple of hours ago.)

Horrible Writing and Story

If you haven’t seen the show, you will have absolutely no idea what is going on in this movie. The whole movie treats you like you already know who the characters are, what they’re like, and so forth. Even though we really don’t.

The beginning of the movie already starts out with the Ninja in action, as if it’s the beginning of Guardians of The Galaxy 2. But while that was fun and entertaining in that movie since well, we already know who the characters are in that movie and what we think about them. In this movie we don’t even know what they’re like before their fighting scenes is shoved in your face.

Some of the Jokes Physically Hurt

Just…. the joke about the ultimate weapons. No. No. No.

Important Main Characters are Horribly thrown to the Side.

The other Ninja: Kai, Jay, Cole, Zane, and Nya, are all completely unnecessary to the story. They have a few cute moments but they only get about 2% of the focus of the movie. You could take them out of the movie and it wouldn’t make much of a difference which honestly really really sucks considering how much the marketing was centered around them, and just the fact I enjoy those characters a lot.

Strangely Bad Voice Acting

Most notably the voice acting of the other ninja are strangely underwhelming. Lloyd, Zane, and Garmadon are alright but everyone else felt like they were phoning in their lines. (There were actually multiple points in the movie where I couldn’t tell if Kai, Jay, or Cole were talking since they sound so monotone.)

REPEATING THE SAME ANIMATION, SOUNDEFFECTS, AND CLIPS OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND PRETENDING LIKE WE WOULDN’T NOTICE

This pissed me off the most in the entire movie. Literally all the time, scenes would be reused and reused over and over again. Most notably when the ninja are talking to each other with their masks on. Its painfully obvious and genuinely insulting to think they could just repeat the same scenes over and over again and think we wouldn’t notice. It is beyond stupid.

#tlnm #the lego ninjago movie #lloyd garmadon #lord garmadon #critical #someone complained that i shouldve tagged this as spoilers even though a review isn't a spoiler #but fine #spoilers #/ spoilers

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riotatthemovies · 4 years

Photo

So welcome back to another QUESTIONS WITH RIOT!

So here is a nice big post for you to read, see it on my tumblr page and the facebook group and maybe in a new book someday.

I will be reaching out to B movie directors and actors in the next week or so with a handful of (often similar questions) .

They are not real time interveiws , I just sent them the questions and they msgd me back. Because they are awesome people.

Todays guest that I suckered in to using their precious time to answer my questions for b movie film makers is Richard Mogg a fim maker from Vancouver. Richard chilled us with the Massage Parlour of Death! As well as hit us right in the Easter time nightmare of EASTER BUNNY BLOODBATH which just recently released a sequel. Riot at the Movies folks will remember BIGFOOT ATE MY BOYFRIEND that played on the first ever Terrible Two Day best a few years ago. On top of all that he is a writer of a few of the most detailed go to books on the genre of shot on video and low budget underground film makers.

Lets get to the questions

ADAM RIOT : SO RICHARD, IF YOU WERE GIVEN A MULTIMILLION DOLLAR BUDGET WHAT WOULD YOU DO? GO CRAZY?

Mogg: To be honest, I'd split it - but only half of what you're thinking. I'd take half and make THE ULTIMATE sci-fi Extravaganza! Then I'd make a whole bunch of small independent features. So yes, I'd make my GALAXINA but with a bunch of cheese to go with it.

Adam Riot: HOW OFTEN HAVE YOU WRITTEN SOMETHING AND SAID "OH THAT'S SO BAD, BUT I'M KEEPING IT IN"?

Mogg: Actually never... unless it overwhelmingly sucks. I've been writing scripts long enough to know you can write unlimited, but it's smarter to write what you can actually do. So write ambitiously but never against your vision. One time I thought to not include something, but after we shot the film, I was able to edit back in my original idea... so first impulses are usually the right impulses.

Adam Riot: WE DO TEND TO DOUBT OUTSELVES TOO MUCH. OF ALL THE MOVIES YOU HAVE MADE WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE? FROM EXPERIENCE OR FINISHED PROJECT, WHAT MADE IT YOUR FAVORITE?

Mogg: My favorite film that I've done is BIGFOOT ATE MY BOYFRIEND, which isn't gory at all but heavy in the awkward comedy I enjoy. But the real reason it's my favorite is that everything seemed to come together. It was the first time my vision matched execution, and the final product was as good/better than I had hoped. BIGFOOT was my 5th feature film, so it took that many tries to get things right - plus I had my all-star cast.

Adam Riot: WE ALL LOVED IT HERE.

HAVE YOU MADE FILMS THAT YOU HAVE NOT SHOWN TO THE WORLD THAT YOU JUST DIDN'T LIKE SO YOU HID IT AWAY?

Mogg: There are films I've done that haven't been released yet, but that doesn't have anything to do with hiding them. Sometimes it seems that opportunities come up and you have to be ready to jump in... my 3rd feature film was shot just as 2013 rang in, but that was the year I found out we were having our first baby. So after quickly moving and getting our lives set straight, I had an empty bedroom while we anticipated the baby's arrival. But did I waste the opportunity of an empty bedroom? Heck no, so I quickly shot MASSAGE PARLOR OF DEATH using the bedroom as a massage parlor. So MASSAGE took the place of that 3rd film I shot (which hasn't been released), but that's the way life happens sometimes. One day I'll release everything but timing and momentum occasionally get in the way. I still have 3 films in the can yet to be released: HOT CHICKS BLAST URANUS, DEATH RIDES OF DEATH (formerly ROLLERCOASTER KICKBACK) and my "exotic" picture JOHNNY GLOBBER.

Adam Riot: I AM ALMOST SCARED BY THOSE TITLES BUT CURIOUS AS WELL. AND LAUGHING THE MASSAGE PARLOR BECAME A BABY ROOM.

WHAT MOVIES IN A MICRO BUDGET GENRE HAVE IMPRESSED YOU RECENTLY?

Mogg: You know, I'm so obsessed with watching older films to see their overall genre evolutions that I don't get to see many "newer" films. Drew Marvick's POOL PARTY MASSACRE was a favorite, as was 2019's MORBID STORIES. I recently caught Dave Castiglione's rerelease of DEEP UNDEAD and it's a knockout with some amazing underwater photography - stuff you just don't see in a lot of micro budget flicks. And that's the great thing about lower budgeted stuff... it's made from the heart using igneous techniques rather than boatloads of money.

Adam Riot: WHAT MAKES YOU LOSE YOUR LOVE FOR INDEPENDENT FILMS, THE PEOPLE? THE MONEY? THE RESPONSE FROM FRIENDS OR BUYERS? HOW DO YOU OVERCOME IT?

Mogg: Wow, LOSE my love? That's a tricky question. I think there are personal turn-offs that might not let me get into a film, but the filmmaking spirit never leaves. Yeah sometimes the people involved are only out to "get rich quick" can be trying, or rip off artists who turn out flicks every week with no investment in their content... that's a turn off. I don't personally enjoy mean-spiritedness in movies, which is why all RickMoe titles are lighthearted and silly. But as a pure business, I think basic indifference and self-righteousness in people infront and behind the camera can really effect the product. But that's true of any business really...

Adam Riot: WE ALL KNOW THERE NEEDS TO BE SOMETHING MORE THAN MONEY. YOU HAVE BEEN MAKING WITH A LOT OF DIFFERENT PEOPLE, HOW DO YOU FEEL FRIENDSHIP IN THE INDEPENDENT FILM WORLD IS IMPORTANT AND HOW HARD WOULD IT BE WITHOUT CLOSE FRIENDS?

Mogg: Great question. Close relationships and treating people with respect is everything. Acknowledging that everyone counts and their efforts are never taken for granted is key to longevity and happiness in this business. It's true, in independent filmmaking many (perhaps all!) people involved in making films don't get paid financially... maybe they do it for a credit or recognition or even just to have fun, and we as the audience need to know that people really do put their blood, sweat and tears into these movies. Sure there are straight up jerks running around with a camera, but when you start seeing the same people out there having fun and KEEP TRYING, you really get to feel that they're being honest with the audience. Making movies IS fun - even when you're against problems - but a positive, uplifting leader can make the world of difference. And I think that positivity can draw others together. So making close friendships is really the sign that you're doing things right.

Adam Riot: WHAT'S YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE STREAMING SERVICES, DIRECT DOWNLOAD, TUBITV THAT KIND OF THING?

Mogg: ANY OPINION? Well I'm trying it now for the first time with EASTER BUNNY BLOODBATH 2: NO MORE TEARS. I went thing route (direct streaming through Vimeo) because I needed to have quick access for viewers before Easter. But also because of this damn coronavirus pandemic. So being able to have audiences access something instantly without waiting for physical mail was very important. But in general, I'm a physical media type of person. I WANT a VHS/DVD/BLU copy on the shelf to look at, admire, hold. I don't think I'll ever get away from that need to hold a film... because when everything is digital, it almost feels like it doesn't exist. Delete and it's gone forever!

Adam Riot: FOR THOSE READING RICHARD MOGGS EARLY WORK IS ON SRS IS AVAILABLE ON TUBITV NOW.

IS THERE A CHARACTER YOU SHOWED THE WORLD THAT IS ON THE TOP OF YOUR WANT LIST TO BRING BACK?

Mogg: 100% our Federal Bigfoot Investigator John Saurius (played by the incredible Kirk Munaweera) is a character I'd bring back for EVERY film. He's so applicable to any story, and he carries a comical vengeance (his dick was torn off by Bigfoot). But I'd like to see him lead a film completely too... he sorta does with EASTER BUNNY BLOODBATH 2: NO MORE TEARS, but I'd like to bring him in in a bigger way for our upcoming Noir picture.

Adam Riot :I do hope to see the son of the kung fu kid or something (smirk)

YOU HAVE WRITTEN SEVERAL BOOKS ON THE SHOT ON VIDEO GENRE, ONE THAT'S NOW BASICALLY THE GO TO ENCYCLOPEDIA FOR THE GENRE AND ON THE TWISTED HORROR LOVE FOR CHRISTMAS. IS THERE SOMETHING ELSE ON THE DRAWING BOARD/TYPING BOARD?

Mogg: YES! And thank you for asking! I learned a lot writing "ANALOG NIGHTMARES" and even more with "GIFTWRAPPED & GUTTED" and the door is always open for another... maybe even a revisit. But the next writing project excitedly being discussed is turning some of my own films into novels. And not just the movies written as stories... but actual novels based on the ORIGINAL SCRIPTS of the films we've made, including much more graphic ideas. For example, sex scenes were originally written in our early films that (of course) our actors weren't too interested in performing for no money... but NOW! Now we can really write in detail the spicy hot sex always intended! And same goes for the gore!

Adam Riot: EASTER BUNNY BLOODBATH 2: NO MORE TEARS IS ONLINE NOW AND ITS A VERSUS TITLE. TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT THE MOVIE AND TELL ME WHAT VERSUS TYPE MOVIES IMPRESSED YOU IN THE PAST.

Mogg: YES! EBB2 is a "BIGFOOT VS BUNNY" sequel! So there's an amazing climax where the two beasts meet for a showdown to the death! After shooting BIGFOOT ATE MY BOYFRIEND, I knew that the only way to bring Bigfoot back would be to pair him against and equal of physical strength... and the Bunny hit me like a ton of bricks. Plus it was great fun revisiting 2010's EASTER BUNNY BLOODBATH which isn't the best film around but was my first feature length film (which I lovingly say "taught me all the mistakes I wanted to teach myself"). So in making this sequel (after making tons of other films), I was able to re-examine my early approaches and redo things from a new standpoint. It was also fun to reuse some of the old musical cues and try to match the style of the first film. But I think the biggest difference was in the editing, because I have become a much more experienced video editor since then... learning how to better time things for a greater payoff. But as a versus film, I felt it was important to focus clearly on the Bunny storyline first, then bring in Bigfoot almost unexpectedly at the end - surprising the audience. And that's sort of the way I cut films, leaving the end to play out in a zany over the top fashion (anyone who made it through TEENAGE SLUMBER PARTY NIGHTMARE can see this). But I do love THE TOXIC AVENGER III's pair off with TOXIE and the DEVIL...

Adam Riot: Thanks so much Richard, now every get his books and get your Easter and rent or buy Easter Bunny Bloodbath 2. Stay Safe and Stay Awesome

Rent or download Easter Bunny Bloodbath 2 here https://vimeo.com/ondemand/bunny2/

Ps I will post a review of Easter Bunny Bloodbath 2 tomorrow on my social medias as well as the Riot at the movies instagram. Regardless you know I think you should see it too.

#rickmoe #richard mogg #easter bunny bloodbath #bmovies #thank you #riot at the movies

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