#this is what people looked like when they found out that the soviet union had been dissolved

[reactionimagesdaily]

[walder-138]

MY BELL OC FROM COD BLACK OPS COLD WAR!

I saw another artist make their version of Bell, so I decided to dig up my version (having just finished my 4th play-through of the game last night) and post her here! This is my first post here, and if people like it, then I might make more OC posts.

Side note that my Bell is based off of my reactions/choices in the game, so it might not be 100% realistic or canon. I’m going with the bad ending, but I shot Adler in the end.

INFORMATION:

Name: Diana Jones/Annika Nikolaevna Voronova

Languages: Russian and English

Nicknames: Nika, Di

Callsigns: Bell, as Diana.

Age: As Diane, about 35, her actual age is 23

Sexuality: Lesbian (though during the time, she couldn’t express it)

DOB: January 21st, 1958 (Another plot hole in the Vietnam false memories; she would’ve only been 10 at the time.)

POB: Volgograd, Russian SSR, Soviet Union.

Eyes: Blue-green (got an eye injury while in Perseus, making her right pupil constantly dilated)

Height: 5’7

WEAPONS

M16A1, 1911, M60, Tranquilizer Gun, MP5, Type 63, Gallo SA12, RPD, LW3 - Tundra, Pelington 703, Hauer 77, Recurve Bow, M79, War Machine, XM4, AK-47

EQUIPMENT

Knife, M67 Grenade, Tomahawk, Stun Grenade, Throwing Knife, Smoke Grenade, C4

•

Career information

Occupation: Perseus Operative, MI6 Agent, MACV-SOG, the latter two formerly (implanted memories)

Rank: Lieutenant in Perseus

Affiliations:

Perseus

CIA, MACV-SOG, MI6 (indoctrinated)

Annika joined Perseus relatively young, when she was 17, and quickly rose up in rank as the years gone by. She quickly earned ‘Perseus’s trust, as she was willing to do whatever it took to earn her place. They’d often have Annika undercover, performing assassinations and ‘cleaning house’ whenever necessary.

She was smart, crafty, resourceful, but she carried a lot of unbridled rage within her. Annika genuinely believed everything Perseus did was for the greater good of the USSR, which left her with no hesitation while killing whoever they told her to. Sure, you could argue that she was manipulated, but Annika didn’t really care.

Her methods were brutal yet efficient. Annika didn’t care about whatever mess she made, only getting away with it mattered (unless she was specifically ordered to make it look like an accident).

When she was 22, Kadivar shot her and left her for dead at the Trabzon airfield in Turkey. While Annika was bleeding out, Russel Adler found her half dead in the back of the car. While she was conscience, she bit, scratched, and kicked at him, until the blood loss got to her.

Annika didn’t even say a word while being interrogated and tortured. Before they brainwashed her, she even tried to bite off her own tongue. Was extremely aggressive the entire time.

(I’ll elaborate more on her story later, but this is all I have so far.)

Random thing: I don’t really understand when people ship Bell with Alder. I’ve seen them as having a bastardized father-child like connection. I could be biased, as I’m a lesbian and my Bell is 17-ish years younger than him, assuming Adler’s 40.

Personality traits:

‘Bell’ had a strong sense of loyalty before and after she got indoctrinated. She’d do anything for the people she’s close to without hesitation.

Extremely petty; would go to great lengths to give the people who wronged her hell. (Definitely isn’t a projection to how I played)

Stubborn + Contrary: Whenever someone, who isn’t a superior, tells her what to do, she would do anything in her power not to do it. However, ‘Bell’s stubbornness makes it difficult to break her.

Sarcastic:

Aggressive: Self explanatory

Immature: ‘Bell’s younger than people would expect, so she’s often labeled as immature by her teammates.

That’s pretty much all I could think now, if anyone has any questions or ideas to improve, LMK!

[veliseraptor]

July/August/September Reading Recap

look, it's been a wild time. that's all I'm going to say about it. but now back on the reading recap train and I'm just going to do all of these three months in one go because otherwise I really never will catch up (also read not very much for me in all of these months, individually)

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Worker's Rights by Molly Smith & Juno Mac. I read a lot of books over the last few months that I was kind of "meh" about, but this wasn't one of them. An incredibly nuanced, in-depth and very persuasive analysis of the history and present of sex worker labor rights - neither skewing too far into "sex work is liberatory" nor (obviously) the opposite. The authors consistently approached the subject positing (accurately) that sex work is first and foremost work, and should be approached as such in terms of the goals and needs of rights for sex workers. I already bought into the overall premise of this book, but it still remained compelling and educational for me to read, and I'm going to be recommending it to a lot of people who may be generally liberally-minded but have doubts or hesitations about decriminalization as a strategy that ultimately serves the best interests not just of sex workers but of society at large.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. This was a brutal book to read and I'm glad I read it. I like Timothy Snyder as a historian generally (I've read two of his other books before this one), and I learned a great deal here in particular about Stalin's policies, both in Ukraine and during the war. Some of the ground treaded in this book was familiar to a certain extent from Black Earth, but dug into more and in more depth, particularly prior to World War II itself (i.e. the Holodomor and other associated policies in the Soviet Union). I found the closing parts of the book about the politics of forgetting particularly compelling. Not a casual recommendation but a recommendation nonetheless if you're interested in history and up for the rough ride.

Witch King by Martha Wells. I was...not disappointed by this book, exactly, but a little underwhelmed. I wanted to like it much more than I did. Oddly, while I'm completely in favor of self-contained stories that close in one book, and I definitely liked Kai as a character quite a bit, the whole thing felt sort of rushed, particularly at the end. Everything was tied up a little too neatly, too quickly, for my taste, and in general some of the worldbuilding felt underdeveloped rather than (as I think was probably the intent) intentionally left underexplored in text. All in all, I had high hopes for this one that weren't quite met.

Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region by Masha Gessen. I love Masha Gessen as a historian and writer and this was a short but intriguing book about an episode of history I knew next to nothing about - namely exactly what the title says on the tin. I'd recommend to anyone who has even a little interest in Jewish history in the Soviet Union in particular, though this one didn't blow me away quite as much as The Future Is History did (but that's a high bar).

From Below by Darcy Coates. Darcy Coates is rapidly becoming a favorite horror writer despite the fact that this is only the second book of hers that I've read. She does scary really, really well and this is some top notch ocean horror. Definitely a book that propelled me through all the way to the end and left me with some truly appalling (affectionate) mental images. Good shit, thanks for the rec @bereft-of-frogs (I believe).

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener. The conceit of not naming, just describing the tech companies under consideration in this memoir got a little tired after a while; this was an interesting book but probably would've been more compelling when it came out, before most of what it's exploring was common knowledge. But maybe that's partly because I'm just not really a memoir gal.

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling. Another good horror novel, though I found the ending personally a little bit meh. But I'm really picky about my horror endings, so don't hold that against it. Caving horror is up there with ocean horror as far as subgenres I'm into, and this one did a great job with it. A good blend of visceral horror and psychological horror, though the descriptions of the caving suit were honestly possibly the worst part of it for me.

The Queen's Price by Anne Bishop. As usual the pleasure of reading Anne Bishop is about revisiting my old faves - it's like re-encountering old friends, which was what led me back to rereading the original series. I also did appreciate the rehabilitation of Saetien in this book, who took a beating in the last one that didn't feel altogether fair. I do not, however, know that I can forgive what it did to Wilhelmina Benedict my beloved, whose relationship to Jaenelle was and is very important to me. I don't accept this slander and am choosing to ignore it.

Imagined Life: A Speculative Scientific Journey Among the Exoplanets in Search of Intellgient Aliens, Ice Creatures, and Supergravity Animals by James Trefil & Michael Summers. It was fine and that's honestly about all I have to say about it. Wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.

Hex Wives by Ben Blacker. A fun little detour into a graphic novel about witches-brainwashed-into-suburban-wives that wasn't, ultimately, very good, though I did enjoy the lesbian immortal witches and the revenge fantasy of it all.

Monstress: vols. 1-4 by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. I forgot how fucking good this series is. Reading it all together in trade form, rather than separated out month by month and issue by issue, only makes that even clearer. The way that Marjorie Liu explores monstrosity and outsiderness, the mingled brutality and tenderness of it all...Marjorie Liu is one of my favorite comics writers for a reason and you can feel her passion for this story.

The Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop. I regret to inform everyone that I still love this series and I probably will not be over it any time soon. I don't know. Sometimes a series that may objectively be not very good just digs into you as an impressionable teenager and then lives inside you in a very particular way forever, and I guess that's what happened here. The second book remains my favorite for the way it's focused on the coven and Lucivar (and their relationships with Jaenelle), which remains my favorite part of this series. I can't in good conscience necessarily recommend it. But I do love the damn thing.

Heaven Official's Blessing: vol. 7 by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Book 5 isn't my favorite section of TGCF, and this part of Book 5 is probably one of the sections I'm least interested in, with the exception of "deal with it yourself" which never fails to knock me out of the fucking park. It is just very important to me. But still, this book remains beloved of me and it's a treat to read regardless (for the fourth time, or whatever it is).

Qiang Jin Jiu by Tang Jiuqing. I keep describing this one as a classical military/political epic with a sprinkling of danmei and I think that's accurate. And that's what I love about it. Dizzyingly complex sometimes, with a large cast of characters and more conspiracies among them than you can shake a stick at, this is a delightful work of historical fiction with bonus gay protagonists, and I actually kind of love that the romance spends a lot of time taking back seat to the political drama. Also side f/f ship and Qi Zhuyin is amazing. Shen Zechuan is so unhinged but in a way it takes you a minute to notice and I love it.

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David Kertzer. This book was deeply infuriating, but in the way it was meant to be, in that it's all about the painful inaction of Pope Pius XII during World War II, and not just that but actively collaborating with both fascist governments in an effort to protect the church. I didn't find it very compellingly written - kind of a drag, if I'm honest - but boy did it make me very mad. The dedication to saving Christian/converted Jews while completely ignoring and doing nothing about the wider persecution was particularly choice.

Tangled Webs by Anne Bishop. Reread; not as good as the main trilogy, in my opinion, though has some fun stuff with Lucivar in particular. Probably suffers for me in that Surreal has never been my favorite, though she doesn't annoy me as much as she used to.

Thousand Autumns: vol. 2 by Meng Xi Shi. My main concern when it comes to this book so far is that it keeps promising me bad-wrong sex and I don't think it's going to give me bad-wrong sex. Or at least bad-wrong kissing, or something. The relationship between Shen Qiao and Yan Wushi is, at this point, a delightful trainwreck, though the larger plot of this book as a whole hasn't really grabbed me. I'm enjoying the read but it's not thus far a book I'd come back and reread later.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane. More personal story than the science that I was hoping for; it was still interesting, but in my opinion felt a little overwritten in places and definitely suffered in my estimation just for being not quite the right genre for what I was looking for. It was interesting, though, and still delved into some neat stuff along the way; I just didn't need it filtered so much through "one-guy's-journey" as it felt like it was. In general it's a delicate balance for me with books like this (about a writer digging into a subject); if the writer is too present then I start to get impatient, which is probably missing the point.

I'm trying to make October a month of spooky ready (or at least related-to-spooky reading) though we'll see if that continues or if I get distracted.

Reading The Earth Is Weeping might count as horror, anyway, in that it is almost certain to be very upsetting. Also on my shelf from the library are The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin and Ariadne by Jennifer Saint (whose Electra I read and didn't hate, even liked a little bit). I'm sitting on The Hollow Kind by Andy Davidson and The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling as two horror novels that have been on my shelves for a bit. We'll see what happens.

[infamousbrad]

"Socialist agriculture" in Julia: A Novel (1984) -- SPOILERS

In George Orwell's 1984, the character of Julia Worthing exists mostly to be a naive mirror to Winston Smith's realism, to make him look smart for having correctly predicted that they weren't going to get away with what they were doing. So when Sandra Newman got the approval from the Orwell estate to tell the story from Julia's point of view, it was up to her to make up a backstory that explains why Julia fully expected to get away with it altogether.

The full explanation doesn't come until late in the book and it's rather obviously a re-skin of a real "socialist agriculture" disaster that happened in our timeline in the Soviet Union, and then again in the People's Republic of China. What startled and pleased me is that Newman's explanation for what went wrong is NOT the version that's taught in schools in the west, not what was in western newspapers. But it's one that I have heard before, and many times since then I've felt like I was the only one who heard it. It left me wondering if Newman heard it too, or if it was just a guess on her part?

There was a Reddit thread that seems to be lost to the misty depths of time, but about 15 years ago I saw, for my first time, that evergreen AskReddit question pop up where someone who's too young to have lived through it asks older people why the Soviet Union fell apart. The top-voted answer was the one we've heard since the earliest dawn of neo-liberalism: they ran out of food because not letting farmers make any personal profit off of their work made them all lazy.

But this one time, someone popped into the thread who said he knew that was what we were all told, but he was there, and that wasn't what happened. Now, I'm not naive. I know that it's easy to pretend a fake identity on the Internet. But so many of the facts he alleged have turned out to be true that most of me thinks he might have been who he said he was and might have been telling the truth as he knew it:

He said he had been one of the first low-level commissars in the Soviet Union's Department of Socialist Agriculture (or whatever it was called). That he was sent to Ukraine before the engineered famine. That he and other similar low-level commissars were sent there to confiscate gigantic slave-labor plantations, liberate the slaves, and invest the money the plantation owners never would have in tractors, combine harvesters, fertilizers, and weedkillers. That the liberated slaves were given an equal vote in the running of the collective farm ("sovietized" meaning "state owned but worker managed"). That they were given a quota of how much food they had to turn over to the national government in exchange for the manufactured goods they (were supposed to have) received, and then told they could vote on how to distribute however much was left.

And he did not deny that it failed catastrophically. But he didn't blame "lack of incentives." He blamed a failure innate to revolutionary soviet communism, but not the one everybody else blames. He blamed a bug in the USSR's constitution.

According to Common Article 6, in order to prevent counter-revolutionaries from weaponizing the newspapers and the courts, no Communist Party member could be accused of misconduct, in the press or in the courts, until his or her case had been heard by the Party Disciplinary Committee; that only if they found probable cause, and revoked his or her party membership, could the accusation be printed or litigated or indicted. But the Party Disciplinary Committee was never adequately funded, and soon practically stopped hearing cases. He said that everybody "knew" they were taking bribes to not investigate cases, that he couldn't prove it himself (despite having in fact tried to denounce his superiors for corruption and theft), so he had no opinion one way or another.

But, he said, it was definitely true that almost as soon as the last shot was fired, with the ink not yet dry on the new constitution, upper-level commissars figured out that they could steal everything not nailed down, and pry lose anything that wasn't nailed down thoroughly enough, smuggle it to European mafia via Albania to be sold for a fraction of its worth, and park their share of the cash in numbered Swiss bank accounts. High- and mid-level Russian commissars, like Chinese Communist Party officials now and kleptocrats throughout third world history, had one foot out the door and were each setting aside millions' of dollars of embezzled wealth in places they could flee to if they were denounced or if the whole system failed.

So, yeah, he said, the collective farms failed, including his, and eventually so did all of the collectively-managed mines and factories. Not because "the workers were lazy," that accusation enraged him. He said bluntly that neither you nor he nor anybody you have ever met has worked so hard for even one day as his farmers did for months on end. Desperate people don't need profit motives. No, they knew there would be no food for them if they didn't hit their quotas despite almost every tractor they were promised, almost every gallon of fuel they were promised, almost every bag of seeds or fertilizer they were promised having disappeared before it got to them. He said they busted their asses, and most of them died, but it wasn't "socialist agriculture" that killed them, it was plain old non-ideological kleptocracy.

Oh, and the money the thieves stashed away in Switzerland? Was money-laundered back into the Russian Federation the first time there was a hiccup in its economy, to buy out the shares of all the newly created shareholder-owned (formerly state-owned) factories and mines. Those kleptocrats founded the Russian mafia, that was how they became the original "oligarchs."

He said that it wasn't "socialism" that destroyed the USSR. It was a two-tier justice system. It was kleptocracy, money laundering, organized crime. It was impunity.

Nobody else but me seems to have heard his side of the story, or remembered it. But it's so close to what Sandra Newman wrote, when she wanted to explain Julia Worthing's attitudes by making her a survivor of a manufactured famine in rural northern England, just a couple of years after the revolution, that I wonder if Newman came up with it herself, or if there's at least one other person out there who heard the same story I did. Either way, it was fascinating.

[imagoddamnonionmason]

Holidays at the Mason Home: Chapter 3 - Humble Abode

Fandom: Call of Duty

Word Count: 1894

Relationships: Frank Woods x Bell OC, Alex Mason x OC

Characters: Frank Woods, Alex Mason, Bell OC,

Summary: Bell meets Alex's wife.

A/N: ok so I did some research just to make sure my assumption about Christmas basically not being a thing in Soviet Russia, due to the Soviet Union. I was right. The Soviet Union basically said 'no Christmas is bad. no religion'. I'd recommend going and looking it up if this interests you, 'cause I don't wanna hound y'all with a history lesson-

It was half past midnight when the three of them managed to park the pickup and escape into the heat of the home, which had steps leading up to the front door. On it was a wreath of holly, pinecones and red berries brought together with a red ribbon and golden thread. Sometimes, Bell forgot that it was the time of year where people celebrated Christmas, as she had never really done such a thing. Maybe as a child, but from her teen years and onward, the whole thing was deemed nothing more than a distraction the west built up and up on; the usual schtick that her then comrades would discuss in order to villainise just about every aspect of a society that didn’t hold their ambitious ideologies.  

Mason unlocked the door, allowed his friends to step inside first, then turned his eyes to the outside. He scanned, checked everywhere he might expect to find something amiss and when he was satisfied he turned in. He barely had time to take a breath before the stairs light was on and he was being interrogated. 

“What time do you call this? I thought something had happened. Has something happened?” 

Sarah, for all the good that she was, was a worrier. Her fraught lashings always came from a place of deep caring and it was this knowledge that Mason used to cool down the heat of annoyance whenever she got irate. He found her standing a few steps up on the stairs, wrapped warmly in a dressing gown and slippers on her feet. He doubted that their arrival had woken her from sleep, but rather that she had remained awake. 

“Everything’s fine, go to bed.” He offered, “I’ll show these two where they’re staying.” 

“Did you tell them about the room?” She asked, finding another reason to remain. 

Woods and Bell stood silently, having removed their wet boots and removed their winter wear, hanging them on the hooks nestled at the front door. It was clear now that they were edging into tiredness, but neither of them would say it. 

“I didn’t,” Mason admitted.

“Right…” Sarah huffed, rubbing her puffy eyes, “well, why don’t I show them, and you sort out Maximus because the dog won’t come inside and I swear we’ll never find him under all that snow in the mornin’. He never listens to me.” 

Putting his hands up, Mason slowly backed into the hallway that headed to the kitchen, offering his wife a soft smile, “alright, just go to bed after, I’ll sort it.” 

She nodded, wiping her eyes again. Bell could see that she was utterly drained, her skin a little pale and eyes darkened with circles. She wasn’t quite ill looking, but she did look like she was carrying the weight of the world on her frail shoulders. Then, she gestured to the two of them, a sweeping motion with her hand, and invited them to follow her upstairs. 

“Come on, we’ll get y’all settled in,” she offered a warm smile and though it fought to reach her eyes, it couldn’t quite succeed in its endeavour. Woods let Bell go first, taking the rear as he nodded goodnight to Mason. They had shared a look, which Mason had waved him off as nothing to worry about regarding Sarah.

Woods had always found it a little bit annoying how worried she could be, but not because it was her but because of the trait in general; he couldn’t stand to be worried over and, at times, Sarah worried herself out of solutions for the things she worried about - it all seemed pointless and Woods hated inaction. But, she and Mason had their way of dealing with her anxieties, ways that Woods felt he could never quite grasp. He remembered once making her worse when he tried to calm her down. 

He’d never do that again. 

“So, we didn’t have time to finish the other room before you came,” Sarah began, her voice just above a whisper, “David wasn’t very well and other things, so it just got left until the last minute, and then the last minute wasn’t long enough. That means you two are going to have to share the other spare bedroom. There’s a cot in there, but also a double, so… decide between yourselves who gets the comfy bed and who doesn’t. Unless you’re… sharin’?” 

Sarah had looked over her shoulder, a slight glint of hope in her eyes when she asked the question and it caught Woods off guard. He knew exactly what she was implying, but refused to think on it further, unless he wanted to give himself a headache. 

Bell threw her brows up in surprise, lips pursed in question, “why would we share?” 

“Oh, no reason, it’s only an option,” Sarah urged, quickly regaining an air of innocence about her. She would admit that it was a shame to find that the two were not together and she’d tell her husband as such when he’d finally decide to roll into bed beside her later. 

Once at the designated room, Sarah opened the door and let them venture in, flicking the dull light on in the room, a singular bulb with a cream cover hanging from the ceiling. Her voice was erring on the side of teasing, as she bid them goodnight, “behave, you two.” 

Then, the door closed, and it was just them. 

“Behave? What does she think we are, teenagers?” Woods puffed, nose scrunched slightly in his irk. Bell merely shook her head, patting his shoulder before dumping her bag on the end of the double bed. The sheets were pristine white, with the occasional flower patterned along a seam, as well as ruffles that cascaded to the floor all around the perimeter. Four pillows nestled at the head of the bed, the headboard was a cream colour, the fabric velveteen and adorned with buttons in a diamond pattern across its body. 

Then, there was the cot, which looked like it had crawled from the depths of the jungle, gasping for freedom. They had definitely tried to make it more comfortable than what it was, with a sleeping bag, blankets, and a plush pillow.

David even left his bear on the pillow, Woods thought. 

“So, which do you want?” Bell asked, watching Woods with tired eyes. Her tone was enervated, heavy, as though sleep was encroaching on her mind quickly. 

“Take the bed,” he ordered, “you wouldn’t survive on the cot.” 

Her features soured with a look of derision, but she didn’t respond to him. Instead, she hovered in place, eyes watching the same spot of scuffed fabric on her duffel bag, lost in thought. Thoughts of events earlier in the night, of things said and things done, and how easy some of them had come to her. Of course, their camaraderie had meant that she would throw herself on a grenade if the time called for it, if it had ever called for it, as that’s what you would do for those you fought alongside with. 

So, turning on the man that would dare threaten the integrity of either Woods or Mason had been the right thing to do. In anyone else’s eyes, they were veterans of a war they were forced to fight and deserved respect. But, to ease into a character such as a wife, a lover, that had been the surprise; she had never thought about anyone in such a way, really only using the prospect of romance to earn something in return, to manipulate. None of her connections in the past had been of a genuine sort, well, all except one. However, she had buried those memories so deeply that she feared they had fossilised. 

Anyway, she was left to wonder why she was uprooted by this display of affection between her and Woods. It was that which she couldn’t make sense of and it left a bad taste in her mouth. 

“Hey, you still with me?” A hand waved in front of her face and when she broke free of her stupor, Woods stood by her, expertly hiding the concern on his face. 

“Why did you go with it? You could have told that guy the truth,” she asked. 

“You’re still on with that?” Woods raised an eyebrow, before moving to pull his shirt over his head. His arms then rested against his stomach, the appendages momentarily trapped by the item of clothing, as he thought about his answer. 

Bell looked away, quickly. 

“Why not?” That was what he settled on. After all, there was no point in mincing words; Woods had felt no need to explain to a fucking idiot the measure of his relationship with Bell. If the Cliff guy wanted to believe that they were married, well that’s on him. Woods didn’t go around correcting people’s assumptions about him, good or bad, because Woods didn’t give a shit.

“It’s like you didn’t even think about it,” she admitted, sitting on the edge of the bed. Woods soon discarded the shirt onto the cot, hands on his hips, chest open as he took a deep breath. 

Had his decision upset her that badly? Shit. 

“Does it bother you?” He eventually asked, feeling like he was dancing on knives. 

He hated that. 

“No.” 

“Then what’s the issue?” 

She should have anticipated it would turn onto her. 

“There isn’t one,” she chided, folding her arms over her chest. 

Well, maybe just the fact that it leaves me feeling vulnerable, emotionally, and she was not used to that. 

“Good,” Woods almost seemed to smile at this, but he turned his back to her, rummaging through his belongings before she could venture to gauge his features and their tells. 

A beat. 

“Thanks, for putting that guy in his place,” his voice was muffled as he pulled a vest over his head, hair becoming messy as his head popped back into view, “people like him really fucking piss me off.” 

“Forget about him. He doesn’t know what it’s like for people like us.” She offered, as she too began to undress, “they want to make it out to be about choice. They think it’s about being good, or being bad. I’ll be damned if I ever knew I had one.” 

After all, in war the only choices available are to kill or be killed. To take the bloodied knife that had just killed your friend and plunge into the backs of your enemies, less they use it against you. In her time, all choices were out of reach. It was yessir, no sir, three bags full sir, fucking we have a job to do, Bell. 

Her nails were digging into her palms and it was the pain that brought her back to her senses. 

Woods quietly regarded that point and came to the conclusion that he couldn’t have worded it better - Vietnam had taken its toll on a lot of people, but try as it might, that place had failed to create a corpse of him and drag him to the depths. 

He’d crawled out of that hellhole just to spite those who had put him there. 

“Fucking A,” he muttered, after a moment. 

That was seemingly it for the night’s conversation and the two got into their beds. Sleep eventually took them, though they slept lightly throughout the night.

[darkened-storm]

Mayblade: Day One

For Mayblade this year, I’m setting out to post a 500-600 word scene from my current WIP: No Sacrifice, No Victory (link below), and for day one, who better to start with than our fave redhead, Tala. This scene needed a bit of a refresh to fit my story edits, so it was a good idea for this project. This one is for you @hellovivirose​

(shh, I’m posting a tad early, it’s technically May 1st here in Aus!)

The Past

“I was four,” he said finally, and he turned to look at her, his blue eyes cold and calculating. “I was four years old when my father died and I became a ward of the state. Do you know what it’s like to be an orphan in Russia?” Steph shook her head. In all the years she had known him, Tala had rarely spoken of his life in Russia. He’d told her the important bits of course - that his parents had divorced when he was a kid and how his father had been an alcoholic for many years before he’d died, leaving Tala to fend for himself. She knew about the experiments and the enhancements too - not because he’d told her about them, but because the equipment and research had been seized by Interpol when Balkov was investigated. But his life in the Abbey? How he’d wound up there? Steph had figured that was something that Tala might go his entire life without sharing anything more than a tidbit or too. Tala, it seemed, hadn’t planned on offering up the information willingly. He seemed both eager and hesitant to continue and Steph didn’t press him. Instead, she found a comfortable spot on the grass and waited for him to continue.

“This was after the Soviet Union fell, and Russia was in a political and economic crisis - which for the kids in orphanages across the county meant not enough food and too many hungry mouths to feed,” he began, and there was a hint of sarcasm in his voice. He flopped onto the grass beside her rather ungracefully, his blue eyes never leaving the stadium as he went on;

“The orphanage I lived at was run by the local church in a pretty poor area, so there wasn’t much in the way of donations. Bryan and I - we were two of the lucky ones though - we found a way to get enough extra food and provisions to survive those early days. “I had seen kids beyblading after school, but I’d never spun a beyblade myself. When you’re scrounging around for your next meal you don’t really have time for hobbies. “The first time I picked up a beyblade was in the orphanage. Some kid bet me his bread roll that I couldn’t beat him in a match -  and as you could probably guess, he ate his words that night instead.” Steph rolled her eyes. She had never known Tala to apologise stomping people into the dirt after they made the mistake of challenging him. “We made a name for ourselves, Bryan and I - we’d beat up on the younger kids, and when they inevitably grew wise to our game, there was always a new orphan or two to pick on instead. Our operation made what the Bladesharks were doing here look like kid’s play,” he snorted derisively at the thought. “It wasn’t long after that Balkov facilitated my transfer to the Abbey. At the time the facility was operating under the guise of a school for kids with remarkable athletic talent - and anyone who discovered its true purpose was paid a great deal of money to look the other way.” “That sounds like Kai’s grandfather, all right,” Steph muttered, picking absent-mindedly at the long blades of grass in front of her. “I don’t think that man’s ever met a problem he couldn’t solve with money.” Tala nodded. “That money funded one of the most advanced beyblade development facilities in the world,” he reminded her. “And the facilities were one thing - but the training program, that was another nightmare all together. “For five years I trained from sun up to sun down to become not only the best beyblader, but the perfect soldier…

TBC in No Sacrifice, No Victory

[veronicaleighauthor]

Fun Facts About “God’s Truth”

Good morning, all ya’all! I meant to post more this month, but got bogged down by various WIPs. Anyway, on May 17, the “Detectives, Sleuths & Nosy Neighbors” anthology by Inkd Publishing released. It featured my historical crime story, “God’s Truth.” It is the seventh story in the Lady Sheriff Series. If you’re interested in buy the anthology, you can do so here. Whenever a story of mine is published, I like to do a Fun Facts post on what inspired the story and some behind the scenes tidbits about it.

As mentioned above, “God’s Truth” is the seventh story in the Lady Sheriff Series. While you can pick up any of them and read a good story, I did write them in a certain order. But many of them have been published out of order, and a few who haven’t sold at all. You never know what an editor/the readers might be interested in. Two that haven’t sold have been used for my current novel, and two I still hope to place somewhere.

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned how various historical women were the inspiration for Sheriff Claire Williams (Lillian Holley, Florence Shoemaker Thompson, Jennie Walker). Today I want to shine a light on Maud Collins, who was the first female sheriff of Ohio. A mother of five, she had worked alongside her husband as a jail matron, while he served as sheriff. She was appointed through Widow’s Succession, after the murder of her husband, and fulfilled the remainder of his term. Sheriff Collins took a more active approach to her job, like delivering prisoners to the state penitentiary to conducting several murder investigations. In 1926, she ran for sheriff for herself and won, beating out two male candidates. She served until 1930.

“God’s Truth” features two characters, who are hobos. During the Great Depression, many people were out of work and lost their livelihoods. Some became hobos, they lived in shanty towns or small encampments, they road the rails, and did odd jobs to barter for food. My grandmother, who was a teenager in the early 1930s, remembered hobos calling. Her parents fed whoever visited. If my great-grandfather was home, their visitor was welcomed inside for a meal and he’d talk with them, make them feel at home. If my great-grandfather wasn’t home, my great-grandmother would serve their visitor on the back porch. My grandmother recalled that a cat was drawn on their fence, which was a sign to other hobos that a kind lady lived their and people were welcome. This family tale found its way into this story.

When the Great Depression began, Herbert Hoover was president and he received the public’s scorn for the hard times everyone was facing. In 1928, there had been a campaign promise made that there would be “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” Obviously, this didn’t happen. Well, his opponents used this against him in the 1932 election and the damage was done, and he’d live in the shadow of his successor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Shanty towns were called Hoovervilles, an automobile with a horse hitched to it was called Hoover Wagon, newspapers used as blankets were called Hoover Blankets. What was forgotten about Herbert Hoover is that after both world wars, Hoover came to Poland’s aid and organizes relief efforts that saved hundreds of thousands of Polish children’s lives. Following WWII, when Poland was more or less handed over to the Soviet Union in 1945/1946, Herbert Hoover advocated for their freedom. He may have been disliked in America, but in Poland, Herbert Hoover was a hero.

One of the characters in my story is named Howard Chase. I think when I was writing “God’s Truth” I was currently binging “Only Murders in the Building.” In the show, there is a character named Howard Morris, portrayed by the brilliant Michael Cyril Creighton. So, I kind of picture the Howard in my story looking like the Howard in the show.

The town gossip, Iva Kent, has been mentioned in many of the Lady Sheriff stories. She finally makes a cameo debut in “God’s Truth.” I had Ellen Corby, of “The Waltons” in mind when I wrote her.

Until next time!

[mariacallous]

We used to live in a world where large-scale conventional wars that left thousands of dead and wounded existed only in video games and books. A world where mutually beneficial commercial activity was guaranteed by a global security order, to which the world’s leading nations adhered in exchange for membership in a shared civilization. A world trending irreversibly toward liberal democracy.

Russia’s war of choice shattered these assumptions. In the heart of Europe, at least 18,000 civilians are dead, 14.5 million displaced, and thousands more tortured, mutilated, forcefully resettled. The trauma and misfortune Russia has wrought, unprovoked, on Ukraine is akin to those depicted in the tragedies of antiquity—advanced weapons such as drones and missiles notwithstanding. The barbarity of Russian warfare defies everything modernity stands for.

When this war is over, though, there is still hope that Ukraine will take its place in a brighter and honorable future, earned through the heroism of its people. The same cannot be said for Russia, which now finds itself staring down the inevitable black hole of its future.

I came of age as the borders of the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia embraced the West. I was one of those euphoric young Russians standing amid the ruins of communism, looking forward to a life free of ideology, oppression, and untruths. Back then, it seemed that after a decades-long totalitarian detour, Russia had finally found its true path—that of a free, democratic country. Now I’m forced to revise, yet again, my assumptions about what Russia is and what it will become.

This time, I, like many others, struggle to see any light in Russia’s future. I asked a group of military experts, sociologists, journalists, and economists who think about Russia professionally to help me envision the future. If there’s any agreement among them, it is that Russia as we knew it—a semi-mythical Eurasian nation that, according to its own lore, had saved the world from the Mongols and Nazis, endured a communist experiment, and then reunited itself with the West—is no longer there. Should Russia endure as a state within its current borders, we might as well come up with a new name for it.

So deep is the country’s malaise that even Russian President Vladimir Putin’s exit from the Russian political stage, whenever it occurs, is unlikely to change the country’s current trajectory. Too many red lines have been crossed, too many points of no return passed. Increasingly lawless, economically doomed, and morally bankrupt, Russia is running out of good endings, as though caught in a reenactment of its own sad folk tale in which the only choices available to the protagonist are to lose his horse, lose his life, or lose his soul.

War is a great catalyzer: It sharpens trends already in place and hastens their inevitable denouement. Russia’s descent into authoritarianism started a long time ago, but until Feb. 24, 2022, Putin felt compelled to at least maintain the semblance of a managed democracy.

Not anymore. “War has accelerated Russia’s descent from autocracy and into a totalitarian state,” said Mark Feygin, a former Russian opposition politician and lawyer who now runs a popular YouTube channel tracking the war. Russians’ two remaining freedoms—the ability to leave the country and to access alternative sources of information—can be shut down at any moment. Lev Gudkov, a prominent Moscow-based sociologist and director of Russia’s last independent pollster, the Levada-Center, described Putin’s regime as “totalitarianism 2.0,” under which key repressive instruments of the Soviet Union, including a politicized police force, subservient courts, and media censorship, have been reinstituted in a reversal of 1990s liberalism.

One clear break from its Soviet past is the Kremlin’s willingness to operate outside of any legal boundaries, or even its own societal norms. The distance between prison and success has always been short in Russia, but Russia today is a country where private individuals such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the infamous Wagner Group, can recruit convicts, arm them with weapons supplied by the Russian Ministry of Defense, and throw them to the frontlines. Those who manage to survive are granted amnesty and hailed as heroes, despite their criminal pasts.

Exiled businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man before Putin imprisoned him, said Putin had “reset the rules of the game towards pure violence.” Russians never expected much from their historically weak legal system, but now they can be punished outside of the court of law in a positively medieval fashion.

This brutal “justice” isn’t limited by Russia’s borders, or battlefield lines. In case it wasn’t already clear by the poisoning of Alexey Navalny or Sergei Skripal, Russian agents’ suspected involvement in the recent Spanish letter bomb campaign—whose targets included the Spanish prime and defense ministers, and foreign diplomats—is yet another indication that Russia will resort to terrorism to achieve its goals, a hallmark of a failed state.

Whatever Russia emerges after the war, it won’t be the Russia of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, the country that once tantalized Western intellectuals with its perennial quest for meaning and capacity for the sublime. It will be a country of warlords and criminals, where force is the only argument and crimes are not crimes so long as they are committed for the Motherland.

If this metamorphosis worries Russians, they show few signs of it. Having once considered themselves part of a peace-loving nation that picks up arms only to defend itself, the population has now closed ranks around its war-waging president. “If at the start of the invasion we saw fear and disorientation, towards the end of 2022 our polls showed increased public support for the authorities,” Gudkov told me.

In a repressive state, polls may not accurately reflect the true sentiment behind perfunctory answers, and samples may be biased towards pro-government participants, because those who don’t agree are afraid to participate. But they do indicate an overall trend. Of the 72 percent indicating their support for the government, 20 to 25 percent are actively pro-war—either because they have bought into Putin’s ressentiment narrative or been convinced that Russia really is surrounded by enemies. Propaganda pours daily from every TV screen in the country, and it is effective in manufacturing a form of organized mass consensus.

Many Russians likely share some psychological propensity to justify the war because if what they believe—that their country is engaged in a righteous war against forces of evil—is untrue, then the alternative is being complicit in, and thus culpable for, its crimes. Still, the majority may simply be afraid to protest given the scale of repression they experience and the regime’s track record of brutality against dissenters. “People feel impotent to influence the regime, so they adapt,” said Mikhail Fishman, a Russian independent journalist and host of a popular analytical show that is blocked in Russia.

As economic conditions worsen, Russians will simply be told to tighten their belts further and make sacrifices for Russia’s “great victory.” Those sacrifices won’t be small. Sergei Guriev, a professor of economics at Sciences Po in Paris, warned of the “catastrophic” economic impact of Western sanctions on the Russian oil and gas sector, the main source of funding for the federal budget.

Equally bad for Russia’s economic prospects is its unprecedented brain drain. Since the start of the invasion, more than a million people, or 1.5 percent of the country’s labor force, have fled. Whether afraid of being drafted or repulsed by Putin’s war against a nation with which Russia shares centuries of common past, those who leave tend to be more educated and productive. Their absence will prevent Russia from developing knowledge-based industries or diversifying from an oil- and gas-based economy in the future. Likely a long-term pariah state, Russia will continue to be cut off from cross-border trade and investment while it hemorrhages cash and resources into a bottomless war effort—instead of, say, schools or hospitals. Taken together, these trends indicate a bleak economic future, the brunt of which will be carried by the Russian people. The only trajectory available to their country is that of irreversible economic decline.

What of the Russian elites, whose hedonistic pre-war lifestyles, replete with yachts and villas on the French Riviera, are a far cry from the stringent demands imposed by their boss? They can’t be happy, yet there have been no high-profile government resignations or criticisms of the war from this group. The oligarchs, too, are silent, even though many have ended up under Western sanctions. “Putin has done a lot to make sure they all know he can persecute any lack of loyalty,” Guriev said. According to Gudkov’s data, 12 percent of Russia’s high-ranking officials have been arrested over the past five to six years.

This reality creates the same mood of fear among elites as it does among regular people. Arkady Babchenko, a journalist who staged his own death to thwart an alleged assassination plot by Russian security services, put it more bluntly: “Anyone showing dissent will simply fall out of the window”—a nod to a string of unexplained deaths of Russian businessmen over the past few months. “Putin rules Russia as if with a joystick,” Babchenko said. “It’ll go wherever he turns it.”

Lawless, declining in population and talent, and stuck in a resource-draining war against the collective West, it’s difficult to avoid the question much longer: Can Russia survive as a state? Many experts—and a growing portion of world leaders—think not.

Retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army Europe, told me that the West should be preparing for the federation’s imminent breakup. What—or who—would emerge after the current regime is anyone’s guess, he said. “The Kremlin has always been opaque, but in the old days we knew who the next three or four guys were,” Hodges said. “Now I don’t think anybody has confidence in what would regime change look like.”

If the breakup is imminent, how soon will it come? In an assessment created for the U.S. military a few years ago, Alexander Vindman, former director for European affairs for the U.S. National Security Council, forecasted Russia’s decline over the course of decades; now, the calculus has shifted to years. It’s possible, he said, that the beginning of Russia’s breakup may be seen in the next five to 10 years, particularly on the state’s margins. Vindman has studied Russia for years, but even for him it is hard “to break out of the confines of the notion that Russia will always be there, that it’s an enduring state,” he said.

Unlikely as Russia’s disintegration might sound, breaking the country into national “successor states” may be the only way to put an end to its pattern of predatory, consumptive despotism against its neighbors. For centuries, Russia has cast itself as a metropole, and its playbook for success has been based on the contributions of its provinces and republics, which act as an economic engine and talent farm for Moscow. That arrangement collapsed in 1991, and since then, Russia has failed to replace it with a more sustainable or productive model. It can’t quite shake its raiding mentality.

Alexander Etkind, a historian at the European University Institute, thinks in terms of “de-federalization,” a process in which Russia’s ethnic regions sue for sovereignty to reclaim their wealth. Most of Russia’s oil and gas, Etkind said, is extracted in two autonomous ethnic regions in Siberia: Yamalo-Nenets and Khanty-Mansi. From there, oil and gas are piped to Europe, but the hundreds of billions of dollars of profit go to Moscow, which then doles out payments to its regions. Disruption of that model by Western sanctions may prompt resource-rich regions to challenge Moscow’s control. Why can’t the Republic of Sakha sell its diamonds itself? Why does the Chechen Republic need a battled, isolated Moscow to sell its oil?

In the post-colonial world, Russia’s modus operandi of plundering territories in its domain is not only amoral but outdated. “The problem with the Russian empire,” Feygin said, “is that it doesn’t produce anything. Let it finish falling apart.”

Can anything be built on the territory once called Russia that isn’t a prison? Despite the country’s failure to do so in 1917 and 1991, Khodorkovsky—the exiled businessman and head of the Open Russia opposition coalition—believes that Russia could be rebuilt as a parliamentary republic. In his manifesto How Do You Slay a Dragon?, a riff on the anti-totalitarianism fable by Soviet writer Evgeny Schwartz, Khodorkovsky sees the transition to a decentralized, de-personified parliamentary model with self-governed regions as a way for Russia to break free of its autocratic curse. The idea seems to be shared among other opposition politicians, including Navalny and Ilya Yashin, both of whom are now in prison. A change of this magnitude, however, will require a radical overhaul of Russia’s entrenched bureaucracy and a way out of the inertia inherent to a country of Russia’s size.

This and any other remotely optimistic scenario for Russia have one important condition: Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat. Though in the short term, likely the next two to three years, the defeat would only lead to more repression, it would weaken Putin politically and open the possibility for change. That doesn’t mean there will be a revolution. Russian people have long abandoned attempts to influence their government (elections in Russia are “managed” from above, just like everything else), but a more moderate faction within Russia’s current ruling elite may be able to steer the regime toward a lite version of Khrushchev’s Thaw, the period of relative liberalization that followed denunciation of Stalin’s terror. It could even be that, after a temporary revanchist swing toward “national patriots,” a democratic coalition would get another chance at rebuilding Russia, as is the hope of Khodorkovsky.

It isn’t clear, though, how eager Putin’s elite will be to give up their wealth or even freedom, as they’re likely to someday face criminal charges for their involvement in his war. Just as Putin was once the guarantor of their wealth, his rule may be their only chance to avoid persecution.

Putin may even convince his underlings that being shunned by the West is not the end of the world and that money, the raison d’être of his regime, can be made elsewhere. Russia still has plenty of sympathizers who see it as a counterweight to U.S. hegemony. The unfolding geopolitical realignment may even weaken the effect of Western sanctions, as Russia could switch its supply sources and develop alternative markets for its oil, gas, and other natural resources.

One year into the invasion, with Russian casualties mounting, it is clear Putin has decided to win this war no matter the cost. He’s urgently switched Russia’s economy onto military tracks and directed factories to work day and night to produce artillery shells and guns. The Russian army is expected to mobilize more troops in the spring. They may be untrained and unequipped, but they will still be thousands of men thrown into a fight.

Drawing out this war is Putin’s only hope, Hodges says. Today, Western support for Ukraine is strong. Yet it is not inconceivable that if the war goes on for too long, at some point the West may be forced to address other pressing domestic or international issues instead. In this less hopeful scenario, a battered and outnumbered Ukraine will be forced to negotiate. And Putin’s regime will be allowed to survive, regroup, and pursue its next target.

There seem to be three paths available for a post-war Russia under Putin or whomever may succeed him: break up into smaller pieces, turn further toward tyranny to keep what’s left of the realm together, or endure a long period of slow decline.

The common thread in all three is violence. A breakup means re-distribution of power and assets, which won’t happen peacefully. A weakened, anachronistic empire, whether in its tyrannical or slow decline incarnation, means a Russia severed from its foundational myths and struggling to stay economically relevant—a dark, unpromising place.

This is a far cry from the Russia that people shaped by perestroika had hoped for. Instead, Russia has become a democracy supernova that never fulfilled its promise, collapsing in on itself, spreading death and destruction to those within its orbit.

But nothing lasts forever, not even a black hole. The decline is slow, but one day a black hole runs out of matter to consume and starts losing its mass, exhaling tiny particles back into the universe. They escape faster and faster, until the black hole’s center is small and unstable. In the final tenth of a second of its long life, all that is left evacuates at once in a huge flash of light and energy. What was once thought to be eternal becomes a memory.

No one—not the best experts, the Kremlin’s innermost circle, or even Putin himself—can predict conclusively whether Russia’s own demise will come in the form of a huge explosion, a slow decay, or some combination of the two. But after years of consuming and destroying all the light in its path, perhaps the bigger question is whether Putin’s Russia can transform what it has consumed into something viable.

For Russia itself, Ukraine’s victory may be the only chance. In the words of Gudkov, “It’ll bring some future back.”

[josiebelladonna]

some things people who’ve lost a crap-ton of weight, and i don’t mean 20-30 pounds, we’re talking upwards of 50 pounds (in my case, it’s now fucking 80 pounds) don’t seem to talk about:

my god, do you learn about your body. i always thought i could naturally carry a lot of weight, like i felt good at 250, but i can apparently drop weight like it’s no one’s business and i don’t look “too big” for my frame.

and my god, do you learn about your mind. you think a lot more clearly, for starters. i used to get mood swings when i was approaching 270: i stopped having them almost immediately after i started losing. you also find a new particularly morbid love of body horror.

hooooooly shit, do you learn about your family. never mind the fact that my parents both have health issues now (my dad’s diabetes and past drug addiction, and my mom’s blood clots, weight issues, leg issues, and actually had a tumor in one of her breasts when i was like 2?), i have generational trauma that apparently has roots in the soviet union, ww2, the civil war era, the religious wars in ireland, and the liberal wars in portugal, and i feel it all in my bones. it’s going to sound weird but when you shed a lot of weight, you see that trauma come out to play in ways that you don’t want it to, like… family treating you differently. family not knowing how to treat you now. because of its vastness, you can’t help but look at yourself and feel as though you just broke a curse of some kind. you’ll never have kids because a.) you don’t want to pass that on more than it already has; and b.) you’re too selfish, in your 30s, practically broke, can’t land a date, eating disorder did *something* to you, and you’re watching the world fall apart around you so it’s out of the question anyway, but you broke through nearly three centuries worth of bullshit, champ.

fatphobia is real. and when you get fat to laugh in the face of anorexia, you start seeing fatphobia for what it is. and you get thin with that in mind. you know what it’s like to have this big belly on you and to have a double chin. you know all the caveats of being fat, too—in my case, you know the eroticism of being fat.

the “phantom limb” feeling. i started noticing this when i hit the 40 pound threshold: subconsciously, you still think you’re that heavy. i let my belly relax and notice that it’s not hanging out nearly as much. i just did 20 minutes on the rowing machine—when three months before, i could barely do 5 minutes. i’m not getting edema in my feet anymore, and in fact, my feet are slender now. i can feel my hipbones. i can feel my ribs. i can feel my collar bones… holy shit, my jeans are falling off.

you’re cold. i’ve found myself wearing a hat more on cold days. a hat with gloves and my sweater because i’m freezing most of the time. it’s a jarring difference from being fat where i was often too warm.

you don’t use the bathroom as much. i remember taking a shit multiple times during the day at my heaviest. i would have these weird pains in my stomach like i had to fart (and i did, often) but they would just happen. i do piss a lot, though—most of that is from the fact that i drink a ton of water but apparently a big way you break down body fat finds its way into your kidneys and your bladder. i don’t bleed as heavily anymore on my periods (could be because i’m getting older, too).

there’s this overhanging feeling that you can very easily go into “lost too much” territory. in fact, this is my biggest concern (carrie fisher suffered a heart attack after she had lost a bunch of weight, after all). and in fact, there’s evidence to back me up on this, in that it’s better to be a little chubby/on the side of “overweight” than the “normal” section, notwithstanding the fact that bmi is a bunch of eugenicist bullshit. now you know why i actually don’t want to lose my belly all the way because it could probably be the only thing separating me from something awful.

loose skin. i actually don’t have much (if you can believe it, 80 pounds down) but i got it on my belly for the most part. my stretch marks are still there, these pale ghosts around the bottom of my waist. this weird indentation on my hip where i had a pretty stout love handle going. my skin there is unreal levels of soft now.

and lastly, everything tastes better?? obesity will, among other things, nuke your tastebuds so when you start dropping a lot of weight, you start craving healthier food and also more flavorful food. for example: never in my wildest dreams did i think i would love things like onions especially shallots and green onions, bell peppers, mushrooms, and a dash of chili flakes, but here we freaking are. god almighty, i love anything and everything aromatic. i season everything. i got two words for all of you and that’s “flavor bomb”. and i enjoy all the baked goods, as i think everyone on a weight loss journey should.

[sneakymystique]

Mystique Origins

I’m doing a clear-out of some old master links on my page which were from rp days and are long redundant.

One of them is a Mystique bio I wrote for X-Men Evolution. It’s probably the closest I’d come to writing a comics origin story, as nowadays I’ve swung round to the view that Mystique’s origins are better left shrouded. Also, canon has moved on and confirmed that Mystique pre-dates the 19th century, so it’s also obsolete for that reason.

Over 200 years ago a little girl was born to a young couple in the Austrian Empire. For the first ten years of her life the girl was much like any other, although times were hard hers was a loving family and as she grew older it was obvious she was going to be a great beauty, leading her father to hope he’d be able to make an advantageous match for her and his family. But soon after her fourteenth birthday everything changed when the young girl’s skin started to turn blue. The changes didn’t stop there, soon the girl’s raven black hair had turned an unnatural blood red and her eyes began to turn yellow and glow with an ‘unholy’ light. The girl’s parents and the villagers believed the girl had been possessed by the devil and knew what they had to do. A pyre was built in the village, and the girl who needed several men to drag her kicking and screaming, was tied to a stake and set fire to. In those few desperate moments, with the fire licking at her skin, the girl wished she could fly away and her body responded.

A bird, its feathers singed from the flames, escaped the pyre unnoticed and landed in one of the mountain forests. Badly burned, traumatised and starving the girl thought she would soon die, which she indeed did, for the girl did not survive that forest, Mystique did. The first winter was the hardest, although she didn’t feel the cold, there was little to eat on the frozen slopes of the mountains and plenty of predatory animals who could smell a fearful girl from miles away. But she was slowly mastering her powers, working out that she could change into virtually any animal in the forest, become bigger and meaner than anything that stalked her and soon she was the queen of the forest.

Her revenge against her birthplace was brutal. One day a group of hunters from her home village stumbled upon her by accident, they were no match for her, but as she stared down at them she had a sudden realisation. Could she become another human, could she look like them? The villagers were dismayed when the badly wounded hunter returned, talking of an enormous bear. Nobody noticed the yellow glint in his eyes, and soon the villagers began to die one by one. People from a nearby village who eventually came to investigate found the entire village deserted with no traces left save for the remains of a giant pyre in the main square. The rescuers soon left, convinced that the place was cursed, taking with them the village’s only survivor, a stray dog.

Mystique never looked back. The road took her to Vienna, where she used her shapeshifting powers to assume the identity of a wealthy aristocrat. She travelled all over Europe, living in luxury, assuming and discarding hundreds of identities, ingratiating herself with the rich and powerful, her only goal being her own survival. Mystique drifted for most of her first century, sampling the lives of actors, soldiers, spies and politicians. When the First World War came along she sold information to the highest bidder and helped to stir up revolutionary crowds in Russia. During the twenties and thirties she worked for the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and the United States, hiring her skills as a spy to whoever would pay the most. Shortly after the war Mystique met Eric Lehnsherr and for the first time began to understand that she wasn’t alone. She soon became hooked by his ideology of mutant supremacy and put her talents to use furthering the cause.

Taking the role of Principal of Bayville High, Mystique used the position to recruit young mutants to the cause and keep an eye on the X-Men. Following Magneto’s betrayal, Mystique broke away to pursue her goals independently, creating the identity of Risty Wilde to spy on the x-men and later captured and replaced Professor Xavier and blew up the X-Mansion.

Following the revelation of mutants and the Apocalypse incident, Mystique has killed and replaced National Security Advisor Valerie Cooper whose position she’s using to further her own agenda, which includes the destruction of the X-men.

[rockislandadultreads]

Book Recommendations: More Nonfiction Book Club Picks

Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham

April 25, 1986, in Chernobyl, was a turning point in world history. The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer.

Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles - at the time equivalent to $18 billion - Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state built upon a pillar of lies.

The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of Reactor No.4 of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told - until now. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the Motherland. Midnight in Chernobyl, award-worthy nonfiction that reads like sci-fi, shows not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new kind of enemy.

Last Call by Elon Green

The Townhouse Bar, midtown, July 1992: The piano player seems to know every song ever written, the crowd belts out the lyrics to their favorites, and a man standing nearby is drinking a Scotch and water. The man strikes the piano player as forgettable.

He looks bland and inconspicuous. Not at all what you think a serial killer looks like. But that’s what he is, and tonight, he has his sights set on a gray haired man. He will not be his first victim. Nor will he be his last.

The Last Call Killer preyed upon gay men in New York in the ‘80s and ‘90s and had all the hallmarks of the most notorious serial killers. Yet because of the sexuality of his victims, the skyhigh murder rates, and the AIDS epidemic, his murders have been almost entirely forgotten.

This gripping true-crime narrative tells the story of the Last Call Killer and the decades-long chase to find him. And at the same time, it paints a portrait of his victims and a vibrant community navigating threat and resilience.

Yellow Bird by Sierra Crane Murdoch 

When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher "KC" Clarke, had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became particularly concerned. No one knew where Clarke had gone, and few people were actively looking for him.

Yellow Bird traces Lissa's steps as she obsessively hunts for clues to Clarke's disappearance. She navigates two worlds - that of her own tribe, changed by its newfound wealth, and that of the non-Native oilmen, down on their luck, who have come to find work on the heels of the economic recession. Her pursuit of Clarke is also a pursuit of redemption, as Lissa atones for her own crimes and reckons with generations of trauma.

Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz

Eighteen months before Kathryn Schulz's father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, she weaves the story of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of the role that loss and discovery play in all of our lives. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering - a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief. A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition, and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Lost & Found is an enduring account of love in all its many forms from one of the great writers of our time.

[silverwolf1249]

Raising Awareness: China's White Paper Protests

If possible, please consider reading and sharing this post.

So my tumblr has absolutely nothing to do about politics, but this is something hitting a little close to home and stuff like this is so important to get seen because it sure won't get the attention it needs, so I want to help increase its visibility any way I can.

I can't even begin to tell you my shock when I learned that the top 2 universities in China (Tsinghua University and Beijing University respectively) were both protesting against the CCP. That the protesting started from people all over China, and once some universities began protesting, the networking between the academic institutes made the protests quickly spread to roughly 175 universities all over China and abroad like Harvard and Caltech which have decent amounts of Chinese international students. I've even seen a few signs about the Ürümqi Fire (one of the major tipping points that started the protests) on my own university campus, which was the reason I started researching the situation.

For some background for those who might not know, the origin of using a piece of white paper to protest comes from a joke when Russia was still the Soviet Union. The general gist of the joke is that a man passes out blank fliers out to people, and gets arrested. He shows that he's only handing out white pieces of paper, but gets locked up anyway because "The fliers may be blank, but it shows your true intentions!". This, by the way, was explained to me by my dad, so it may deviate a little from the original joke. In any case, it's used to represent everything they cannot say aloud due to China's censorship.

But back to the coverage on the situation. I've been searching through most of the major english speaking news sources and read what I expected to see. Police intimidation in broad daylight, entering trains and people's own homes, and accosting people to delete any possible pictures they had from the protests and deleting all social media apps and VPNs which could help spread the word. They also recorded people's personal data, facial recognition, retinal scans, fingerprints, etc.

Several people were grabbed and arrested. There were also apparently a few journalists (including one from the BBC) who got caught trying to cover the issue and got beat up and arrested by the police before being let go after a few days. There's some other stuff as well, but overall it was mostly what I expected, but I still felt like there had to be more. I turned to my dad for some help, who's fluent in Mandarin.

With just one small search in YouTube with the phrase "白紙抗議", I got so much more new information. The phrase translates to white paper protests in traditional Chinese. This helped me find a treasure mine of recordings from a Taiwanese news channel that went further in detail and showed more first hand footage and images that was different than what I'd already seen, and so much more terrible to watch. But there were also videos and images that made me want to applaud the protestors.

Remember when I mentioned that an event called the Ürümqi Fire was a major tipping point to all the protesting? For some background information, Ürümqi is the capital city of Xinjiang, a huge region of China's north west area, and is also know as the Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The Ürümqi Fire was an event where an apartment building in the city burned down, killing at least 10 people. This wasn't even the first incident since China's zero-Covid policy, it just happened to be the event that got the ball rolling. In the english speaking media I looked into, I only saw pictures of the fire, or a silent video of it.

In the video I found? The recording also had sound, people screaming desperately for someone to help, unable to escape their locked rooms, and with no firemen coming to save them until much, much too late; all issues stemming from China's zero-Covid policy. It only gets worse from there.

Currently in english speaking media, most people only suspect more violent police suppression than just restraining people. Well, no need for any more speculations when you can watch two first hand accounts of young women being beaten by the police for not complying. The actual violence is, thankfully fully censored. Just seeing the beginning of the videos alone made my heart drop to my stomach.

But it's not all doom and gloom. These videos also held plenty of pictures of slogans graffitied by protestors all over different college campuses, and lemme tell you, people get creative under rigid censorship. I'm still not clear what some of them actually mean because I'm barely able to speak any Mandarin, there's no hope in me deciphering the word play. There was also a clip in one of them on how one student at Tsinghua University started a protest on her own, until she was surrounded by a veritable crowd of people.

I will be adding both of the videos I watched below, they both have english subtitles and can help explain more than I can. They also go into more detail other major reasons people, especially college aged people, began protesting. Most of them are unsurprisingly, covid related.

Other than that, it's just...so incredibly frustrating and heartbreaking to see what these people are up against. The White House released a statement essentially saying they won't touch the topic because of the potential fallout with China. Apple is apparently helping the CCP by limiting AirDrop time to prevent protestors spreading awareness to other people. And, let's not forget what the CCP did with the last large, public, student ran protest; the CCP sure tried their best to make sure it was erased from their history.

The protestors, the majority being people my age, have everything against them. A much like the Hong Kong protests, they don't stand a very high chance at succeeding. But they're still fighting out there for what they believe in, and have definitely left their mark in history. I have so much respect for all of them, I'm worried for all of them, and all I can do is sit here and write this post and hope more people see this and spread the word. At the very least, I want raise awareness over the situation.

*Just a reminder to watch the videos at your own risk as they contain potentially triggering content*

(the first video is the most recent update

the second one only has english subtitles for part of the video, but they have Mandarin subtitles if you're willing to google translate, and also the first hand clips throughout the whole video are still worth to watch even if you can't fully understand what they're saying)

Some Other Sources:

*If these sources or any of my words above end up being from unreliable sources or later found to contain false information/updated information appears, don't hesitate to send asks or comments so I may edit my post/delete the links/add new or better sources.*

White House Weighs How Forcefully to Support Protesters in China

New Symbol of Protest in China Roils Censors: Blank White Papers

China Covid protests explained: why are people demonstrating and what will happen next?

Apple Limits iPhone File-Sharing Tool Used for Protests in China

How blank sheets of paper became a protest symbol in China

Protests erupt across China in unprecedented challenge to Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy

[pashterlengkap]

Lesbian couple who fled Ukraine marries in Ireland

For over 10 years, Ukrainian lesbian couple Alina and Uliana kept their relationship a secret. While they lived together in Kyiv, they told everyone in their lives they were simply best friends. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, everything changed. The couple shared their story with GCN. After what they described as Putin’s “terrorist state of the Russian Federation” invaded their home country, they fled, arriving in Ireland last St. Patrick’s Day. It has now been a year since they left home, and they have since been able to tie the knot. --- Related Stories Ukraine’s only transgender correspondent has become a local legend LGBTQ Nation correspondent Sarah Ashton-Cirillo may have moved into a new role, but she has significantly impacted the warzone. --- “After some time, we learned that in Ireland, we have the same rights as heterosexual people,” they explained. Ireland is known for being very LGBTQ+-friendly and indeed has strong protections for LGBTQ+ people. Same-sex marriage is legal, there are anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination laws in place, and it is legal to change one’s gender without undergoing surgery. A survey from Eurobarometer found that 80% of Irish people accept same-sex relationships and that 65% support trans people changing their legal gender. Upon arrival, the couple reached out to the advocacy organization LGBT Ireland, which helped them find a host family in Dublin. They lived with a lesbian couple from Estonia and slowly began to realize they didn’t have to keep their relationship so hidden. “In Dublin, we met many friends, and the LGBT Ireland community was very important to us.” On November 16, 2022, Alina and Uliana got married with their host couple as witnesses. “Together with the guests we drank champagne by the river, after the registration of our marriage,” they said. “We had nine guests and our hosts prepared a surprise dinner with Ukrainian colors and food… We felt very happy that day.” They emphasized that they never believed this is something they’d be able to do. “Once upon a time, we dreamed of going to an island and perhaps having a fake ceremony, and now we got married in Ireland. We never dreamed it would be real for us!” The couple worries for their parents, who are still in Ukraine and who still don’t know they are romantically involved. At least, they don’t acknowledge it, the couple said. Nevertheless, they miss them and are praying to reunite with them again soon. “We strongly believe that the war will soon end with Ukraine’s victory. We hope that peaceful people will be safe and that we will see our parents.” They praised “the strong spirit of the Ukrainian people and their desire to fight for their independence and development, as well as the support of other nations.” “Maybe after the war, it will be better for gay people in Ukraine,” they posited. “Like Ireland, we hope. It is very important for us.” Ukraine decriminalized consensual same-sex sexual encounters after declaring independence from the failed Soviet Union in 1991, but the World Values Survey found that only 5.6% of Ukrainians find homosexuality justifiable. 62.4%, on the other hand, found it unjustifiable. The country has not legalized marriage equality, though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently voiced a desire to look into legalizing the status of same-sex couples. http://dlvr.it/SlTYS4

[rabbitcruiser]

Extraterrestrial Culture Day  

Extraterrestrial Culture Day exists "to celebrate and honor all past,  present and future extraterrestrial visitors in ways to enhance  relationships among all citizens of the cosmos, known and unknown." It  was established with the passing of House Memorial 44 by New Mexico's  legislature on March 21, 2003. (Memorials do not have the force of law,  and do not need to be passed by both houses or be signed by the  governor.) Although the day is specific to New Mexico, it has been  celebrated by those beyond its borders.

State Representative Daniel Foley of Roswell introduced the day with  House Bill 766. The bill designated the day to be celebrated on every  second Thursday of February, but when the memorial was passed, the  holiday was changed to every second Tuesday of the month instead.  According to the memorial, the day was created because  "extraterrestrials have contributed to the worldwide recognition of New  Mexico through their many and ongoing visitations, sightings,  unexplained mysteries, attributed technological advances,  experimentations, expeditions, explorations, intrigues, provision of  story lines for Hollywood epics and other accomplishments of alien  beings throughout the universe."

How have extraterrestrials contributed to the worldwide recognition  of New Mexico? It all goes back to 1947, to a spot about 75 miles from  Roswell, where rancher Mac Brazel found debris in his sheep pasture.  After finding metallic sticks held together with tape, a glossy and  heavy paper-like material, and pieces of plastic and foil reflectors, he  called the local sheriff. The sheriff called Roswell Army Air Force  Base, and they came and took the debris away in armored trucks.

On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Daily Record ran a front-page story  titled "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region." The  following day, the Roswell Army Air Force put out a statement saying  that it was not a flying saucer that had been found, but rather, it was  remnants of a weather balloon. But by looking at the debris, it was  pretty clear that it wasn't a weather balloon, and many people didn't  buy the story, with some even believing that it indeed was a flying  saucer.

In the decade that followed, many "dummy drops" to research ways  people could survive high drops were done in New Mexico. Dummies with  skin made of latex and bones of aluminum were dropped from the sky and  military vehicles retrieved them. People found this quite odd, as it  looked like aliens were falling from the sky, and some thought that was  the case and that the vehicles that picked them up were taking them to  get experimented on by the government. This did nothing but increase  speculation that there had been a conspiracy and cover-up in Roswell in  1947.

In 1994, the Pentagon declassified most information about the dummy  drops. They also declassified information about what they claimed had  really been found in Roswell, which they said had to do with something  called Project Mogul—a top-secret atomic espionage project. The General  Accounting Office also released a report titled "Report of Air Force Research Regarding the 'Roswell Incident.'"

According to the government, Project Mogul was started during World  War II and stationed at the Alamogordo Air Field, being made up of  geophysicists and oceanographers from New York University, Columbia  University, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The project placed  balloons with low-frequency sound sensors in the tropopause, the area  between the troposphere and stratosphere, where sound can travel  thousands of miles. The hope was that they would be able to pick up  information about nuclear tests taking place in the Soviet Union.

The report said that the debris was made up of 700 feet of neoprene  balloons, radar reflectors, and sonic equipment. Some new materials  were invented for use in Project Mogul, so it made sense that some of  the materials weren't recognizable and looked otherworldly. According to  the report, the Roswell Army Air Field didn't have any knowledge of the  project. They weren't exactly sure what had been found, with some  thinking the debris may have been from a Russian spy plane or satellite,  but they just said it was a weather balloon because that made the most  sense. Those at Project Mogul couldn't step up and say what it actually  was, as that would compromise the project. In the present day, many  don't believe the government's story, and some make trips to Roswell to  be near the spot where they believe extraterrestrials crashed to earth.  On Extraterrestrial Culture Day, we honor these and other  extraterrestrial visitors.

How to Observe Extraterrestrial Culture Day

Perhaps the best way to celebrate the day is to go to New Mexico and attempt to find the Roswell crash site. Tours are sometimes also given. Official tours weren't given until 2018, and you could check if any will be held soon. There are also other tours  you could take, which are given by local researchers that take people  to various sites related to the incident. Roswell also has the International UFO Museum and Research Center and other attractions.

The day could be celebrated by reading a books about aliens or the Roswell incident. You could watch television shows such as Roswell or Roswell, New Mexico, or a documentary series like Ancient Aliens. There also is not a short supply of alien movies. Some classics include Alien, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Source

[deerydear]

I was listening to alawyer describe 'Subjective versus Objective perspectives' and their usage in the courtroom, earlier today...

Subjective:

"What were the people involved thinking? What was their thought-process at the time of an incident?"

Objective:

"What kind of precedent do we want to set for society as a whole? What is our ideal? What is our goal in becoming a just society?"

I find this interesting because of my ruminating, obsessive mental argumentation which used 'social justice discourse' as its base and script.

The claim:

"Objectivity is racist, classist, sexist, ableist... (what other words can I think of... I haven't usually seen it described as homophobic.) There is not one, objective way of looking at the world. If you had endured as much suffering as my family has, for generations... perhaps you would understand. It has a background. The flower has roots in the earth.

I actually find myself understanding a similar feeling.

What is 'the right way' for a society to be?

Is it this way?

What's your idea?

How would it come to pass?

I find myself studying the societies of the Soviet union. They pretended to be objective, too... They thought they were right. They felt vindicated, even as they suffered. Perhaps the mockery of other people was an anesthetic to one's own condition of suffering.

Perhaps this suffering does not exist. I said it doesn't, so what? Will you pull it out of me? Will you vivisect me, just to prove I suffer?

Where on this anatomical chart is my suffering? Is it the spleen?

hmmm....hm-hm.

"Killing things is not so hard. It's hurting that's the hardest part, and when the Wizard gets to me... I'm asking for a smaller heart."

--- Amanda Palmer.

There isn't an end to a person. They aren't sentences.

...or even if one was imagined that way: I have sentences answer me back, in my thoughts. I have sentences that reprise themselves all the time, revealing new information in the sets of words that accompany them.

Mathematical...

I was suffering from a sort of subjective argumentation between two people in my head. I didn't really understand the arguments, but I pretended to take a side. This caused my suffering, because I was defending something I did not understand.

"I want to be a good person."

"Good can mean a lot of things. Can you do arithmetic?"

A line that people have either loved, or hated:

"I have no idea who I'm going to wake up as... Every day is brand new. The truth is alive, and it refreshes itself continually."

"Yes, but you're still you, right? How could you be someone else?"

A good question!

Actually... it depends on the definition of 'you'. I think I romanced with Egoic ideas too much. An Ego like dead skin...

Ah, something subjective... something not-literal.

Mathematics are much more clear. It either is or it isn't.

It isn't willy-nilly. There is a right answer and a wrong answer.

........*dipshit caricature of OCD*: "prioritizing math is racist and sexist".

Real argument I've heard.

sometimes I wonder, though... if some subjects of discourse are psy-optic. "Get them to tear eachother apart over the stupidest things. Imply that all of [demographic] are inherently unskilled in particular ways. Um... um... um..."

Yet, I also know that the human being can be insane enough to invent these sorts of distractions all on their own. Sometimes, there's just "luck" involved. "Things just work out a certain way." I've seen it happen enough to know it..... but there is always that possibility.

Even a 0.01% chance is still a positive possibility.

Maybe I just drove myself insane through boredom. Gotta find 'something to do'. That's the driving impulse, inside the vehicle...

Hey, I have a better car that you can drive, right here...

I found some really nice sketching pencils, with a gradient of softness/hardness... I started trying them out, and I feel so.... free!

Dude! I've wanted to delve deep into the detailing illustration for a looooong time, but I honestly hadn't thought to buy a set of sketching pencils. Some part of my psyche thought: "huff... Those are hoity-toity. I don't need other special pencils, when I have my trusty #2 ticonderoga!

I finally wanted to try them, because my mom had a set... I think that my parents might have bought a set for me when I was much younger, but I had no impulse to really use them, until they were "someone else's", first. Funny animal behaviour. Monkey see, monkey do...

I feel capable of life again, because my artistic sensibility is reactivated. I was in such a slog. My skill level was rapidly advancing, but my technology hadn't produced the results that I knew that I could... with a new tool!

:D

[fanartbyherd]

So… I did at one point draw these two in magical girl outfits.

Honestly I’m a sucker for magical girls (yet somehow I have never finished a single magical girl show??)

This drawing is actually one of the ones that inspired the current mundane horror au to also feature minor aspects of magical girls.

Note that this drawing is a joke, Michel and Gerry do not become magical girls in this au, though there is another character who is.

So another long post incoming, magical girls in that setting.

————whoo————

Magical girls as an institution was founded properly after ww2 but have their beginnings during the war. They started out as civilians with power contributing to the war effort, you know nationalism and all that, they did this informally and sometimes illegally as a lot of the powers ( including the spiral ( correction the majority of the dread pantheon and the “shunned” aspect of the admiration pantheon) where illegal or at least banned. These early magical girls (as a lot of them where women banned from joining the army or not able to help in other ways) became rather messed up as in trying to help out with their powers they would become stronger and risk being consumed by the powers. This was around the time that key charms came into existence. I haven’t decided who invited them or what country they originated from, they where rudemettary items in this case designed to sever off part of a person and a more specifically their power. It might have originated as an instrument to try to entirely remove powers from people. Though I don’t know yet.

Regardless it was only after World War Two that magical girls really became a thing. In part because the imperfect key charms of ww2 where redesigned and updated with research done in that era, including information that was learned from occult experiments conducted by the natzies.

(See this here is why I don’t like world building for urban fantasy, I’d rather not have to research natzi occultism but whatever, ww2 was when a lot of horrid experiments that happened all over and in a world where occult stuff is very real and well known about, I don’t see any reason why absolutely awful things where done with it. I’ll just leave those horror to imagination. Real world baggage in my fiction I loath you.)

Magical girls in their modern iteration where precent to small degrees and had the beginnings of thier larger organizations in the 1950s but took off in popularity in the 1960s seeing the first widespread use as an occupation in 1962. Then officially adopted as the main defense against monsters in 1966. The Cold War helping to propel the use and availability of key charms in both regions allied with the USA and Soviet union.

————occupation————-

Being a magical girl is seen as something like being in the scouts or an extracurricular mixed in with being a summer job. It’s a well paying job for young people still in school or just out of it.

Identities of magical girls are kept secret as a lot of them are minors when they start their careers (and usually end)

Some magical girls also have personas as idles and stuff; child stars, young athletes pushed to perfection, etc.

Most magical girls start their career around the age of 14-16 and most of them retire from magical girl work around the age of 25. Though there are people who began working with magical girl work as a teen and is still work with it in thier adult life. In some way or another, either as mentors or in the less glamorous but still important research, containment, disposal and legal departments.

It is notoriously rare for people under the age of 15 or so to have any sort of alignment if they where not born with it. But not unheard of.

The youngest anyone can be to apply for being a magical girl is 11-15 depending on the country though the average legal low bar is 13.

… let me look something up…

Ok according to the Geneva convention (article 4(3) (c)) says that anyone under the age of 15 can not be recruited to armed or groups allowed to partake in hostilities… good to keep in mind.

Noting that in this au their Geneva convention has some differences to our own as they do have people just walking around with powers. Some rules about how power can and cannot be used in warfare; like no zombies, what to do if a war zone becomes a domain, a lot of specifics that would require me reading the actual Geneva convention to list (mabey I should read that regardless), key charm users (aka magical girls) can not be used against humans.

Back to magical girls. most countries have their minimum age be whatever the minimum working age is or in the case of the USA where technically the minimum age is 16 for full time but where the minimum age is 14 for part time, there’s also exemptions to this when it comes to agriculture. So likely hood is that in this setting the minimum age is something around 14.

Though that being said becoming a magical girl requires a good deal of things, parents permission under the age of 18, at least two years of training. And that it doesn’t interfere with school for students under certain ages. Then of course a person has to have an alignment to a power, or in some cases at least a leaning to one power or another.

A lot of 15-16 year olds take the job because it pays really well even in the train period.

The reason for this ridiculously low age is for two reasons, a in-world reason and an out of world reason.

In world it is because key charms tend to bond easily with younger individuals. Having difficulty with making a permanent connection to anyone over the age of 27. As they operate in some ways simular to imaginary friends. So having teens make the connection is easier.

The irl reason is because a lot of magical girl media the characters are young to teen girls. Card captor Sakura is 10, sailor moon is 14, same for madoka magica, and the winx club member are between 16-18, Tokyo mew mew they are 13 to 16 years old, in magical girl do re me the characters are between 7-14. And even in miraculous lady bug The character of ladybug is 14. So I just kind of stuck with it.

Onto something else.

— — key charms-

Aka the means of transformation.

In order to be a magical girl instead of just a person with power.

Key charms; amplify existing power, prevent physical reformation, protect user from physical harm, heal injuries, strengthen physical abilities and sharpen a persons available senses.

Key charms are loosely explained at the end of these:

(In this one key charms are discussed under the category of artifacts)

So what are key charms and how do they work?

… good hypothetical question… unfortunately I don’t have a clue myself.

Ok that’s not entirely correct, I have ideas on how they work and function in practice, but not theoretically. Like what makes them tick, though I don’t think I will need to know that for this silly fic.

But here’s what I can explain.

A key charms is a small object, usually in the form of a pice of jewelry though not always. Each key charm is unique, and change when they are introduced to a power. Unable to bond with anyone that is not aligned with that power as that is what they have become.

Key charms are difficult to make whitch makes them rather rare. Then to add to the rarity of them is the fact that once a key-charm has bonded to a person it will remain bonded to that individual until the end of thier life unless something severs that connection. Though having a connection severed is usually a choice by both the key charm and weilder but it’s been reported that the power of the end and the desolation can sever that bond too.

Many key charm familiars and their magical girl will perform a passing on ceremony, with a ceremonial  “death” and a passing of the charm to its next wielder  .

So somewhat eluded too, key charms have thoughts and personality! Usually the personality that forms as a key charm becomes full fledged is one that mirrors its weilder. in the case for key charms that have had previous users the key charm will have the personality of the first user, though it may take up quirks of other users too.

Some key charms are able to sever their connections with ease so have had several users. Others are focused on the mission of defending humanity against monsters at all cost and will sever and take on new users as the need to fulfill that mission. This is the odd ones out when it comes to key charms as most form deep bonds to thier users.

Now outside of the need to form a bond a key charm dose a few other things.

A key charm forms “armor” around the user. This armor is what is visually seen as the magical girls outfits. The armor also obscures the identity of a magical girl. The same way someone with the power of the Stranger's face would.

This armor is made of exess power that the key charm has collected over the years with its user and others, this is inpart why the training period is two years, a magical girl can not go out on regular missions when they do not have armor. (It’s a safety risk!)

In part for identity protection but also for a meriad of legal reasons, like how with the armor the chance of injury is lowered. Not entirely remove but lowered. That and with a proper bond the injury can be healed by the key charms (a bit with how the power of flesh and strategy can heal).

The armor is not entirely real, made of light, (alchemy and crafting) some parts of the appearance are dictated by the key charm while other parts are influenced and dictated by the user.

When a key charm is not acting as armor it often takes on the form of a small creature, a familiar or a mascot if you will. This creature can be something like a little bird, a mouse, a cat, or frog. Other times it might be chimeric like a hedgehog with moth wings, or a griffon or a unicorn or a puppy dog with a lizard tail. Other times they take on the form of an amorphous thing, The creators of the key charms have no idea why these “mascots” became a thing but assumed it has something to do with the nature of powers as it’s still not well understood. (On my end it’s because, come on what’s a magical girl without some sort of mascot… still a magical girl, but missing out) (I have another post about what different creatures are capable of powers wise: xxx).

Now a key charm can only make the mascot and the armor, one thing they rarely can make is a magical girl’s weapon. Those are usually provided by a magical girls agency. Though once a key charm gets ahold of a weapon they can use the users natural power to do some interesting things with them. There’s a few reasons why a lot of a magical girls weapons are toy like. But sometimes an agency will just give a 16 year old a gun… I’m looking at you America.

Now a this whole ordeal about the armor and mascots and weapons is just extra to what key charms are mainly designed to do.

That is to allow someone with power to use and access that power without risking themselves or becoming consumed by that power. This key charms achieve quite well. As magical girls can become powerful but never suffer the body altering affects of powers.

————— magic, monsters and maintenance——

Magical girls hunt monsters, that’s what they do. But not everything with power is a threat so rules and procedures are set in place to work with this.

Magical girls generally rely on the numerical ranking system mentioned here:

To organize what kind of creature they are dealing with.

This is useful for a handful of reasons, such as determining how much of a threat a monster is and if it can be delt with by an individual or if a team is needed to contain it. If a monster is of too high of a threat the magical girls will either have another agency contain it or the seasoned older magical girls will be tasked with that creature’s removal.

Especially if they are dealing with anything that used to be human (or perhaps still is) as when dealing with those the rules are different from when a monster crawled out of the world of dreams. Or even former animals.

(Animal rights activism in this world is probably a right mess. Bigger of a mess than irl.)

Magical girls are not police. But often work with the police, governments and military. But only when it comes to monsters and research. Several magical girl institutions are multinational.

---- Police, Policy, Politics ----

Magical Girls are not Police Officers. they are not law enforcement.

they exist in a sort of limbo, meant to protect people from creatures of power, but hold no greater authority than pest control. Though sometimes that pest just happened to have been human…

the Magical Bureo of Investigation:

Or about five hundred other names that change depending on what country you are in.

when dealing with a monster that used to be human, even if slightly suspected of being human it is out of the magical girls jurisdiction. the most they can do is apprehend the creature and secure it until the Magical Bureo of investigation steps in.

these are the guys who are often derogatorily + commonly referred to as the Magical Police.

they are responsible for containment and care of people with power and their interaction with the public at large. They do a lot of messed up stuff that is relatively just swept under the rug. They also (try to) keep track of who has powers, how they are being used, and that they are interfering with normal life for normal people as little as possible.

For most people of power they play a very little part of their life.

They are also responsible for informing the public about paranormal phenomena, and keeping paranormal places (domains) from harming people. Also run prisons, and educational programs.

They don’t really do research, but they work with researchers, they don’t do public relations well.

A lot of magical girls continue onto careers in the burro or with associated agencies and companies.

The magic police are state run.

Hunters: the oldest of all these institutions, and mostly seen as an outdated practice, in cities that is. as magical girls have replaced hunters for the most part in cities, but hunting is still a common profession in rural areas or areas that simply can not afford to have other institutions in place. hunters usually work alone or in small groups. They work on commission. often having licenses to do thier work. allowing them some of the investigative powers like a private investigator.

Some hunters are organizing into loose guilds or unions.

All sorts of people can be hunters, and some hunters are not as picky about laws and such as the other institutions. There also exist rouge hunters. Two kinds, one is a hunter who continues to hunt even though they have lost their license or don’t have one in the first place, sometimes nicknamed the poachers. The other is hunters who believe that anything with any power is a monster and this needs to be exterminated. Not unusual for these types of hunters to overlap.

Some hunters specialize in hunting certain things, like vampire hunters.

Sectioned Officers: these are incidental. Popular and mainstream culture likes to keep themselves separated from the ongoings of power. But sometimes power comes nocking. Sectioned officers (and their equivalents in fire brigades and hospitals) are people either trained in dealing with crimes involving smaller degrees of power or more commonly they are officers who started out as normal officers and had one to many cases involving power and becalmed the designated go-to.

Magical girls are just as much a tool of propaganda as they are there to genuinely help people.

A lot of magical girls perform in charity events, do club like activities and often do this with these other organizations.

Magical girls as an institution have had a lot of controversies and internal issue, just like many IRL organizations. But is overall seen as a positive force on a young kids life, instead of being a “problem kid” or institutionalized. The world lives with the power, but dose not fully know what to do with them either.

————social————

So being a magical girl is a gender nuteral occupation. But because of it’s history it is more associated with girls. So when places are hiring for magical girls they usually advertise to girls.

But boys and Agendered and gender-fluid and so on so forth individuals can become magical girls. Key-charms don’t care what gender their user is or if it changes.

Another thing in regards to magical girls and why girls where originally targeted in recruitment was because of the false notion that girls are more likely to be aligned with the pantheon of admiration and boys the pantheon knowledge. (Magical girls sold themselves to the public as defenders of love, justice, and humanity against the treat of monsters.) beat the shit out of monsters with the power of friendship and love… and incredible violence. The last section is usually left out of PR stunts.

Because magical girls are generally associated with the pantheon of affection girls from other pantheons are encouraged to hide their actual alignment and simply claim that they defeat monsters with the power of love…. What kind of love? Uuugh, the love kind! Yea ignore the way I make shadows eat things, this is definitely the power of love. Stop asking silly questions…

Now another thing I have had to consider is the relationship between superheroes and magical girls.

See becoming a magical girl was not really pushed onto boys until the late 1950s during the silver age of comics. Where the notion of becoming a magical girl was rebranded a while as being a super hero. To some extent.

Supper hero comics where created during the Great Depression and ww2 for most of the same reasons they where in our world. As a way for a generation at was to learn how to cope with adversity and trauma… as well as instill a sense of patriotism and a tool for propaganda.

But superhero’s where generally marketed to boys.

With the idea that men where soldiers and girls where magical girls.

(Some superhero are relatively the same, but things like the X-men and such are very different than their irl counterparts, but Batman, wonder woman, and a lot of other superheroes are relatively the same )

One thing to note is that magical girls mainly operate in big cities. Rural areas and smaller towns are generally left to fend for themselves when it comes to monsters. Still using older methods of keeping monsters away, methods that are not always that affective in large cities.

Sometimes being a magical girl in your teen years is treated similarly to having been in Girl Scouts or something like that. It looks good on resumes as a lot of other skills are taught by the institutions.

It is also not unusual to find certain lower income families try to get their daughters to become magical girls. It pays well and offers a way up, in similar ways to how college in theory opens up more job opportunities and higher paying jobs. This is especially true for people who have power. Power can be a bit of an extra hurdle in getting jobs. Or keeping them. Especially depending what kind of power it is.

————conclusion——————

This whole magical girl aspect of this fic is actually sort of messed up and dystopian. Sort of the point.

I’d not want to live in their world.

I’m still considering naming them something other than magical girls with the name being so gendered, and sort of tied to anime. Even with the existence of non anime magical girls. Also what else could I call them?

All of this information is interesting and all, but relatively irrelevant to the fanfic proper. It’s just background information…

This is why I don’t normally write fanfics look at this mess.