#this is why it’s insane to me that there has not been a Protestant reform in the chantry | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hyenahunt · 1 year ago

Text

Saga: Rivals - 26

Writer: Akira

Season: Winter

Characters: Chiaki, Jin, Hokuto, Jun, Hiyori, Tori, Seiya

Proofreading: 310mc (JP) & hyenahunt (ENG)

Translation: kotofucius

Hiyori: Come now, don’t make that face. Give us a smile instead — You look far more lovely with a smile on your face…

[Read on my blog for the best viewing experience with Oi~ssu ♪]

[Location: Reverse Live Stage

Time: Minutes later

Chiaki: Fuhahaha! At last, the final battle is here! I feel so fired up~!! I’m ready to go anytime!

Jin: …Alrighty, it’s our turn. C'mon, kiddos; after the old man.

Hokuto: Couldn’t you have phrased that some other way? It’s made me lose motivation… You’re always so far off from the ideal leader, sensei.

Jin: Ahaha. It would’ve been nice if I could've been someone you could look up to, huh, Hocchan.

Hokuto: No, it's fine. I’m done with looking for someone else to tell me what to do, and just doing as they say.

Seeing you take even the coming final battle in your own stride helps me stay composed, too.

Hokuto: You’re incredible as a leader and an idol in your own right. I’ve always known that.

Jin: Come again~? Don’t butter me up so much, alright? I’m bound to just let you down right away~… ♪

Jun: Sagami Jin! I’ve been waiting for ya! So the moment's finally come at last, hasn't it~!?

Jin: Woah!? Someone’s raring to go… There, there. Easy, tiger.

The murderous aura's fine and all, but don’t actually try to punch me, ‘kay? The audience is watching, plus I hate pain.

Jun: Hah! Why would I need to punch you when I can kick your ass in a fair fight?

Don't you dare look down on me, alright~? I’ll treat you with the bare minimum of respect, at least!

Hiyori: Yes, yes. Don’t you worry, I’ve given him a thorough education on etiquette ♪

Tori: …Hiyori-sama. Umm, I think you’ve noticed, but…

Hiyori: Hmm? Oh, yes, I do see some faces in the audience and staff areas that seem rather unbefitting of an idol concert.

It seems all the local dignitaries are assembled here — What's this, has Reverse Live become a socialite party?

My family is here, and so are your parents, Tori-kun… Come now, why don’t we give them a merry wave? ♪

Tori: Woah… But why are Papa and Mama here? This isn’t something like a parent observation day~

Hiyori: I wonder. Perhaps there is a “massive wave” silently flowing behind the scenes of Project-Saga — No, behind everything we know…

A gigantic scheme, involving even those local dignitaries.

Far beyond merely reconstructing academic facilities; this entire land may be remodeled… With power like that, he might not be simply after the reformation school rules anymore, but instead a protest against the very laws of this country.

Eichi-kun has always been aiming to do such things, as much as feasibly possible. He’s committed to revolutionizing the idol industry, as it is the world that he lives in.

Everyone scoffed at his claims. You must be kidding me! their faces said.

But we felt differently… so we fought together with him, as fine. After all, we shared the same desire: to make a happier, better world.

Whether Eichi-kun’s idea will amount to nothing but an insane fantasy or if it'll actually change the world, I still don’t know yet.

And as someone who has parted from fine, I have no right to see it through by his side.

That’s why you’re needed. Tori-kun of the Himemiya family; the adorable boy who would look up at us with admiration in his eyes…

Should Eichi-kun ever lose control of his ambition, and be reduced to naught more than a great calamity that destroys everything in sight…

I want you to stop him, yes? If that might prove difficult, just say the world — I’ll come to help you anytime.

A long time ago… You asked for my autograph and gave me your love, so consider it my gift of thanks. Of course, I know Eichi-kun was the one you always had your eyes set upon.

Tori: ……

Hiyori: Come now, don’t make that face. Give us a smile instead — You look far more lovely with a smile on your face…

Perhaps your smile may not change the world, but it can bring comfort to those who wish for it.

You can save their souls, and guide them to the right path. And this role, you see, is an important one that “Ohii-san” can't entrust to anyone else.

Tori: …Yes, I understand. Your words are still a little complicated for me, so I can’t understand them completely, Hiyori-sama —

But I won’t ever forget them. Eichi-sama and fine… Please entrust them to me.

Hiyori: …Very well ♪

Seiya: All right, then. Let's bring an end to your chatting, shall we? We have a program to run, so I would ask you to not get me in trouble, and refrain from doing as you please.

Hokuto: Hmph. Get in trouble? I’d love to see it.

Seiya: My, how nasty… Where did we raise you wrong? But I suppose there is a saying that the more troublesome the child, the cuter he is.

Hokuto: Raise me? I hardly remember being raised by you — How many times do I need to repeat myself?

Seiya: Indeed. I was expecting you to say that; in truth, it stirs me with emotion.

You were so obedient when you were little, holding your tongue despite all the dissatisfaction you must have had.

But now, you challenge me outright like this. As your father, how can I not feel joy? I'm certain my wife will protest in envy later.

A naughty boy who charges at an adult will only have his arm twisted…

An experience like that would foster the spirit of rebellion in any child, but we’ve never had such an opportunity.

Without any parental bonding between us, you — being the clever child you are — silently built up that dissatisfaction inside you.

There was never any way to resolve them, so for the longest time, we’ve been in a cold war, haven't we?

But threatening each other through untouchable glares is far too lonely. We’re family, privileged to live in the same house from the start.

I want to close this distance between us. Won’t you let me hug you, Hocchan…?

You don't need to hug back. You can even shove me away in annoyance if you'd like.

It is natural contact like this that we have always needed.

We were oblivious for so long that this overblown ruse became necessary just to do this much, but…

I want to believe that it isn’t too late for us.

Hokuto: ……

Seiya: When you were born, my entire world lit up.

The life of a common man was like another world to me, and I never imagined there could be such bliss to be found there.

In meeting my wife, she showed me the way… And with our love, you were brought to me as our baby.

That was all I needed to feel fulfilled. Of course, I experienced much sadness and pain as well, but…

That moment alone gave everything a meaning. Hokuto, thank you for being born.

I should have repeated those words to you until you were convinced. Just as most people in this world do with their children, I should have given every last effort to never lose you.

Seiya: But instead, I've neglected to do such a natural thing for all this time… I’m so sorry.

[ ☆ ]

✦✦✦✦✦

← prev ✦ all ✦ next →

#ensemble stars #enstars #enstars translation #hyenahunttl #s: saga #tori himemiya #chiaki morisawa #hokuto hidaka #jin sagami #hiyori tomoe #seiya hidaka #jun sazanami

14 notes · View notes

kaileygarrettblog · 26 days ago

Text

Sancta Scala

I chose this place because the reverence and respect felt here was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. The building itself may not be the most grand, but it was certainly the most impactful.

The Holy Stairs became quite controversial during the Reformation. As a monk, Martin Luther visited the stairs in 1510 and ascended them on his knees as a penance. However, he later questioned the practice after learning that it was not a surefire way to be saved. His doubts about indulgences and the teachings of the Catholic Church grew as a result of this experience, which ultimately fueled the Protestant Reformation.

Something surprising I learned about this landmark was that everyone who ascends the staircase does so on their knees out of respect for Christ, who took those same steps.

The Beguinage

I chose this location because of the immense awe that I felt the moment I walked through the gate. It is such a humble and quaint area, but I think that might be why it stands out so greatly from most other things on this list. It represents simple beauty.

The Bruges Beguinage survived by becoming more closely aligned with Catholicism and eventually coming under stricter Church control, whereas many other beguinages were shut down or suppressed during the Reformation. Its persistence illustrates both the flexibility of certain Catholic communities in areas influenced by Protestantism and the larger religious conflicts of the time.

One thing that I found surprising about this place was learning that it now serves as a serene and peaceful place of habitation for nuns and single women.

Aix-la-Chapelle Cathedral

I chose this place because it has been one of my favorite religious buildings during my entire time in Europe and it just so happened to also be the first one we were able to see!

Even as Protestantism spread throughout the empire, it maintained a strong Catholic influence as the site of Charlemagne's burial and the coronation of German kings. During the Reformation, the cathedral itself remained a stronghold of Catholic tradition and imperial power, despite religious changes in the surrounding areas.

One thing that surprised me about this location was learning the entire story behind why it is so insanely ornate and how much influence Charlemagne had on the people of Aachen.

Basilica of St. Servatius/Church of St. John

I chose this location because it is not an incredibly common thing to see two religious buildings of different faiths standing so close to one another while also still being active. It was also quite eye-catching to see the stark contrast between the colors of the structures.

Thes two stood on opposite sides of the religious divide during the Reformation. St. Servatius remained Catholic, while St. John’s became a Protestant church after the Reformation swept the region. Their close proximity stands as a symbol of the religious tensions and coexistence that emerged in many parts of Europe during the Reformation era.

One thing that surprised me about this location was that the Church of St. John was also a Catholic building before being converted during the Reformation. I guess that would explain their close proximity!

Westminster Abbey

I chose this place because the gothic architecture caught my attention immediately and drew me in. It also meant a lot to me to be able to visit a place that has a history as rich as this Abbey and to better understand its importance.

It was originally a Catholic monastery, but briefly became a cathedral under Henry VIII and then became a foundational landmark in the Church of England's institutional years. It remained a central site for royal ceremonies, including Elizabeth I’s coronation, marking the Abbey’s alignment with the newly established Church of England.

One thing that surprised me about the Abbey was finding out that Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking's tombs can be found there!

1 note · View note

altschmerzes · 2 years ago

Note

Hi I would like to know about the 1969 Czechoslovak hockey riots please

CRACKS KNUCKLES HERE WE GO

so this is in re: some tags on an a softer world graphic i made and reblogged from my ted lasso a softer world edit blog (@asofterafcrichmond) that featured sam's kit with the dubai air logo taped over "#the way this thing mirrored my favourite historical event is like, #when i say i lost my fucking MIND, #ASK ME ABOUT THE 1969 CZECHOSLOVAK HOCKEY RIOTS AND WHY THIS GOT ME"

disclaimer i might get a few details wrong and i'm sure this has happened in other situations - sporting competition has historically been a major platform for political protest and this has manifested in many ways! i'm not remotely claiming this is the only time it's happened just that this is the one that sticks with me because it's the one i wrote a paper about in university.

so here we go!!! the 1969 czechoslovak hockey riots and why 'do the right-est thing' made me lose my fucking mind not just bc of what was actually happening but bc of my knowledge of this particular historical event.

content warnings for the general Stuff around like. the ussr invasion and occupation of satellite states in the back half of the 1900s and associated nastiness and the fates that can sometimes befall political prisoners.

so for some background: what is now known as the countries of czechia and slovakia were previously one country called czechoslovkia, and went almost directly from german annexation and occupation through 1945 to occupation by the ussr in 1948.

in the midst of all this you have the czechoslovak national hockey team. international hockey competition is a Big Thing for the ussr, once they started allowing players to compete at all in the olympics and such. they're a juggernaut, they absolutely dominate the world stage for ice hockey, and the national team is one of the only outward facing like...... international relations contact points they have for a long time. i could get farther into this and the insane impacts it had on the soviet hockey players themselves but i digress. this time we speak mainly of the czechoslovak team, who had a run of really bad experiences there.

the 1950 world championships in london were an unmitigated nightmare. the czechoslovak national team that year got all the way to the airport before they were denied the ability to board their flight and were promptly all arrested, charged, and convicted of treason. they were sent to prison labor camps mining uranium where they stayed for five years. several of them, as a result, died.

this happened because there was talk of defection and they - the ussr controlled puppet government - were basically worried that if they let the team leave, they would touch ground in london and never look back. there's also some debate as to whether it happened because the team was Fucking Incredible and they wanted to make way for the soviet team to rise in prominence. without that kind of competition.

fast forward a bit.

the prague spring took place in 1968, it was a civilian revolt against the takeover and occupation. massive reforms took place and it led to the invasion of the country by the ussr and other members of the warsaw pact (alliance of countries around the ussr) because they were Not happy about this.

and then we get to the 1969 international ice hockey federation championships. the first day of competition was supposed to be held in prague. but they obviously couldn't do that, given one of their competing countries was at the time militarily invaded and occupied by one of their other competing countries so that was uhhhh not gonna happen. competition was moved to stockholm, sweden instead and immediately it's very clear that this is going to be a high, high stakes event for the czechoslovak team. obviously there's a lot going on and one of the things prominent in everyone's minds is 1950. these players knew those players. less than 20 years had passed and it's a small circle.

so. 1969 iihf championships. and the entire country essentially pitches everything they have into pulling for this team. the coach spoke later about how they all knew what was riding on them there, that it wasn't remotely about a sport, it was about waaaaay more than that. thousands of telegrams came in from citizens across the country and they basically all had the same message - we don't care if you lose every other match in the competition, you cannot lose to russia. someone, i can't remember who exactly - either the coach or the captain - described the team's mentality as basically "we will beat russia or we will die trying."

"all that is well and good gav but where's the connection to 2x03 of ted lasso?" well.

during the game several of the players used the opportunity to stage political protest.

my favorite is jaroslav holík, who amongst a few other things would turn his stick around, set it on his shoulder, and 'fire' it into the stands like a rifle. he also poked the ussr goaltender in the mask with his stick a lot, just kinda goading the dude.

and he additionally like - when you compete internationally, there's a country crest on your jersey. on the czechoslovak jerseys there was a star at the top of the crest right under the collar representing the warsaw pact and their country's involvement in it - i.e. the force that invaded and occupied them - and holík and several teammates (including his brother) covered the warsaw pact stars on their jerseys with black hockey tape.

and that competition, the 1969 iihf championships, was the year that the czechoslovak national team became the first team in international hockey competition to beat russia twice in the same tournament. and back in prague, the citizens saw this and rioted.

carried signs reading "dubček 4 - brezhnev 3" which was the score of the second game attributed to the leaders of, respectively, czechoslovakia and the ussr. "you send us tanks we send you goals" was another sign. the protests were short-lived and quickly extinguished but like, it turned international hockey competition into like. a quiet symbol of protest and hope in czechoslovakia and i've read some historians talking about it as being a motivating point in later independence acts because it was like... straight up the first time a lot of people saw the ussr lose at something.

the czechoslovak team in the rest of the competition ultimately placed bronze, but they did not REMOTELY give a fuck because that was not at all what counted, they did not lose to russia and that's all that mattered.

#gav gab #gav answers #im insane about it is the thing

35 notes · View notes

thebeltanequeen · 4 years ago

Text

The (Blurred? Nonexistent? Inconsequential?) Line Between Canon and Fanon: An Impromtu Essay by Me

I’m currently have an existential crisis. An absolute, balls to the walls, pull my hair out, stare at the walls wondering what the meaning of existence is, kind of existential crisis. Why, you may ask? Because the older I have gotten, the more Fanfiction I have read. That’s normal. Millions of other people read fanfic like me. Well, in the past few years, I have also realized that the more fanfiction I have read, the less shits I give about the actual canon of the media I love. I care less and less about what “actually” happened, and delve into fanon instead. It’s as if the two have SWITCHED ROLES in my brain. The canon is the lie, and the fanon is the truth. This used to not be the case though, so how did we get here? And why… why is this realization sending me into an absolute spiral of insanity? Why do I feel like I have been sucker punched in the jaw? Let me explain.

I’ve been reading and dabbling in writing my own fanfiction for over twelve years. It used to be an escape, a way to further delve into my latest obsessions and become consumed by them. I have this annoying habit of also picking ships that do NOT become endgame, so I’ve always sought out fanfiction as a balm for my shipper’s soul as well. I still read fanfiction as if my life depends on it… but now it’s at the expense of reading new books. Watching new media. When I do eventually dip my toes into a new fandom, I either reject it quickly or become consumed again and make a grab for fanfiction… but in the past few years, something in not only me, but in fandoms in general has shifted.

The difference between me now, and me back then is this… I used to uphold the canon as sacred. Untouchable. Set in stone. The only credible source for the media I consume. All of the fanfiction I read was just beautiful window dressing. A lovely past time to further increase my dopamine intake.

This is no longer the case.

Now, when I read and write fanfiction, it’s as if it is an act of protest. I am actively seeking to reform the narrative. It’s to “take back” the story, the characters, EVERYTHING, for myself. To make it anew. To make it perfect. I’m not alone either. I see you. I see all of you. Now more than ever, I see more and more of us doing this exact same thing.

THIS is why I am having an existential crisis. I have just realized that I will no longer be content with the canon. Ever. Even the canon of my favorite media. It’s not enough. It’s no longer enough. It won’t ever be enough again. Why? Because there will always be places where the canon is falliable. The authors of the canon, are falliable. As an author myself, this is at once an alarming yet powerful realization.

I went to college for creative writing. At the beginning of my academic career, I thought of fanfiction as a beautiful fairytale world. It was glorious, but it was other. Separate. Not as credible as canon. Had I read fanfiction better than the media it was based on before I entered college? Absolutely, but in my head it still didn’t matter because the canon was the word. The canon was the law. As a writer, I held the power of the author (and by extension the power of myself) as sacred. By the end of college, that began to change.

The more I was taught about writing, the more I came to realize that sometimes, authors are just straight up WRONG. Sometimes, there’s soooooo much potential… AND THEY JUST FUCK IT UP!!!!!!! The bones are incredible, but the canon is weak, the logic is lacking, the story makes no sense, the characters don’t reach their full potential and you know what? I’m tired. I’m tired of it. This is why fanon is canon’s salvation. Fanon makes canon look pathetic. But… if I accept the fanon as the reality, and make the canon the lie, does that still make it fanon? No. I don’t think it does. I think fanon has become something other. Something greater.

I have become disillusion by “published” or “credible” books. 95% of the novels I actually buy at the store today are garbage. Trash. Half written nonsense that only serves the purpose of paying people. I’m TIRED OF IT. I’ve become disillusioned by the “power” of the author. I have become disillusioned by canon. FUCK canon, quite frankly. Rip it apart. Dissect it. Take out it’s beating heart and transplant it into a new body. Give it the soul that the narrative was begging for. REVIVE IT. LET YOUR OWN IMAGINATION MAKE IT ANEW. Characters mean too much to people. Fiction means too much to people. Stories mean too much to people for anything less. Only then will you or I be satisfied.

Now, even an impromptu, unedited, gibberish essay is not complete without examples. I’ll start with one that you probably thought of while reading this. Game of Thrones. I think that two years ago, the ending of the most influential show of the entire decade, is where my subconscious began to shift in this direction. Now, I doubt my opionions about GoT are the same as yours, but you know what? It DOESN’T MATTER because FANON CAN FIX THE CANON. The stories that meant so much to millions can be fixed by accepting the fact that THE CANON ISN’T THE LAW! IT FUCKED UP!!!! CANON DOESN’T DESERVE TO SPEAK ANYMORE!!!! TAKE BACK THE STORY AND TRANSFORM IT INTO A VERSION TRULY WORTHY OF THE GLORIOUS BONES IT HAS!!!!!

We also can’t ignore the role that monetization plays in the media we consume. Why leave our fiction in the hands of just the big names? Why let money dictate what is real and not real? WHY SETTLE FOR MEDIOCRE STORYTELLING JUST BECAUSE IT WAS SOLD TO YOU AND THEREFORE IT’S “LEGIT CANON”??? FANFICTION IS FREE, AND THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PIECES OF WRITING I’VE EVER READ WERE WRITTEN BY FANFIC AUTHORS WHO DID IT FOR THE STORY. WHO DID IT FOR THE ART. WHO ACTUALLY DID IT JUSTICE. FUCK THE CONCEPT OF FANON AND CANON. THE STORY WE WANT IS ALL THAT MATTERS. GET MONEY OUT OF HERE.

Ahem. To avoid going on even more of a tangent, I’ll move on and give the example that triggered my existential crisis in the first place. Sailor Moon. To give some background, Sailor Moon is it for me. I have grown up with it. I’ve watched it my entire life. As a child, I ran around with my toy moon rod and desperately wanted to be Usagi. Ironically, I grew up to be quite a bit like her (but with Rei’s temper admittedly). It is my comfort show, my happiness. It makes me laugh, it makes me cry. I never tire of it. It makes my heart swell. I have never, nor will I ever, love any piece of media the way I love Sailor Moon. Flash forward to today, I watched Sailor Moon Eternal, the two new movie adaptations of the Dream arc in the manga (stick with me non-manga and anime lovers). I liked the films, but I was left with a deep, disatisfied yearning. I want back the feeling of complete bliss I experienced while watching the 90’s anime as a child. The problem with this? I’ll never get it back. I’ve just realized this. I’ll NEVER get it back. Why? Because it’s no longer the perfect version of Sailor Moon that it was to my young eyes. Crystal, while good, is also not the perfected version I seek in my adulthood, and Eternal has not scratched my insatiable itch. I am heartbroken because I’ve realized that Sailor Moon in its perfect form doesn’t exist anymore. If I held any canon sacred, it was this. But the story is flawed. The manga is flawed. The anime is flawed. It’s not infallible, as much as it truly, deeply hurts me to admit to the world and to myself. The only perfect version of Sailor Moon is the one in my heart. It’s the one I choose to piece together for myself with the building blocks that others who came before me have handed over.

Another, more recent example of falliable canon is The Grisha Verse. More specifically, the Shadow and Bone trilogy. I was brought in to the fandom by Ben Barnes’ depthless eyes and magnificent scruff. And you know what? I liked the story, but I stayed for Ben Barnes. I liked the Darkling so much that I bought the entire grisha verse books. It was a premature decision. I’ve only made it halfway through Storm and Seige, and you know what? I’m tired of the canon already. It’s not that great. The bones are there, but it could be SO. MUCH. MORE. I haven’t read the crow books yet, and by all accounts Leigh Bardugo has improved tremendously as a writer. Which incidentally proves my point. Authors are falliable. Ergo, the canon is falliable. I can’t help but think while I read these books, “Damn. I could write this better.” and you know what? I’ve read fanfics that HAVE written it better.

Am I saying this to trash Bardugo? Or even GRRM? (Yes I admit to trashing D&D but that’s beside the point ahem…). NO. I am NOT trashing the writers. I’M A WRITER. I GET IT. YOUR STORY IS YOUR BABY. I G E T I T . But I’ve realized, and what I think future authors will also have to realize, is that fiction doesn’t belong to anyone. As soon as it’s out the door, the fiction no longer belongs to the author. It belongs to us. The people. That’s what is beautiful about fanfiction. It’s not here for the money. It’s not here for the clout. It’s here for the fiction itself. Plain and simple. It belongs to no one and everyone.

In the past, I would have fought this. I would have wanted my work’s canon to be law. To be the word, the truth, the way etc. Now? I can’t be a hypocrite. I can’t be selfish. It isn’t about the author. It’s about the vision. It’s about the story, the narrative, the characters. It’s about art. And sometimes, the authors give birth to the idea (and they deserve credit for that without a doubt), but it’s also true that sometimes, someone else just writes it better. Someone else quite simply saw the vision, the story, the characters, more clearly than the author did. I make this vow now, as an author, to strive for the vision. If someone takes my vision and does it better than me, that only improves my perspective of my own story. It improves the world of fiction as a whole. It makes me better.

So, canon? Fuck the canon. Take back the story. Take back the characters. Take back the art. Fiction is ours. It belongs to us, and we can do with it what we please. Let’s strive for OUR OWN perfected version of the media we love. Canon doesn’t truly exist. The concept of Fanon doesn’t even exist anymore in the way we used to think of it. The author’s version of events is their own Fanon of the story. Canon is meaningless now. There is only the story that you accept in your own mind. There is only the story that I accept in my own mind, no matter how different it is from yours. There is only the art. There is only the limitless potential of countless people’s imaginations. Let’s continue to collaborate and celebrate beautiful stories together, in any conceivable way, over and over and over again, until the end of time.

Fin

3 notes · View notes

orionsangel86 · 6 years ago

Text

15x04 Episode Review - What a Meta Rollercoaster THAT was!

Jensen Ackles directed this. Let that sink in before you read on. Because this means EVERYTHING.

Davy Perez said on Twitter that he had a lot of help with this episode from Bobo, Dabb, Meredith, Even from Jensen and Rob. Which seems pretty clear from me as I was blown away by what I consider a meta masterpiece.

There is a lot to unpack here so let me just jump straight in with my favourite part:

THE REDEEMED FANGIRL AND THE BRONLY GOD

In an episode directed by Jensen Ackles it both astonishes me and pleases me immensely that the strongest and most interesting plot didn’t involve the brothers. Every single scene with Becky and Chuck was a galaxy brain of meta and my head is still buzzing about it.

**Meta Essay under the cut**

Becky has changed. She has grown up, has gone to therapy, has channelled previously unhealthy behaviour into a stable and successful Etsy business. She is the model fangirl. No longer the source of this shows mockery. Becky shuddered when remembering what she did to Sam. Showing her regret and guilt over her former actions leading the way for this fanbase to forgive and redeem her. Formerly Becky was portrayed as a mockery of those in the fandom who irritated Kripke, now she has grown beyond that dark and hateful corner, has welcomed Castiel into her home as the character whose form appears most often on her shelves. Clearly Becky is a Cas stan now. I bet she ships Destiel in those domestic AU’s she writes on AO3. Only Cas stans and Destiel shippers proclaim “not enough Cas” when referring to the source material after all.

However even though the positive message of the reformed fangirl from obsessive incest fetishist into healthy Cas fan filled me with joy, it wasn’t my top take away moment from these scenes. The entire message of Chuck and Becky’s conversation makes me want to cry tears of joy. After all, it isn’t often your favourite show includes an avatar of yourself arguing with an avatar for the writers - or at least, the villainous arrogant writer who refuses to acknowledge you.

Becky likes the character drama. Chuck likes the monsters. Becky doesn’t care for the monsters. Chuck brings up the Leviathan (because of course Chuck would enjoy the season that first tried to “go back to the shows roots” and reduce the format back to just “Sam and Dean alone on the road”). Chuck tells her that fanfiction doesn’t count, but our strong willed fangirl avatar tells him “writings writing!” and damn right you are Becky. It counts.

Then Becky goes and blows my mind by speaking aloud in my favourite show the kind of things that I think and talk about every time this show brings out another generic MOTW episode:

“If I had to give one note, the jeopardy Chuck, its feeling a little thin. No stakes. It’s fun to hear the boys voices but a story is only as good as its villain and these villains are just not feeling very dangerous. Not to mention there’s no classic rock, no one even mentions Cas, the climax is a little stale. The boys tied up again while we get the villains monologue which frankly isn’t one of your best. A hint of originality wouldn’t… hurt.��

(x)

At this point I might as well be on the floor because holy shit Becky is me. When did the writers become so very aware of their fanbase? It’s taken them 15 years, but they are finally here. Chuck is fuming of course. How dare a fangirl criticise his work, so instead of taking her advice on board, he plays up. He gets mean.

Chuck’s perfect SPN ending is tragic and in some weird insanely meta way this feels like a message from the writers telling us that they hear us because Becky once again says what we have ALL been screaming on Twitter about a tragic ending:

“It’s awful. Horrible! It’s hopeless! You can’t do this to the fans! What you did to Dean? What you did to Sam?”

I keep thinking that the SPN writers have made Chuck into a parody of the GoT writers. Chuck is arrogant, egotistical, and completely incapable of taking criticism. He went to Becky hoping she would fluff up his ego, but she shot him down and unfortunately, he destroyed her for it.

The message here though is one of hope. Everything about Chuck is framed as negative, as villainous - this includes the tragic ending. Therefore if there is one thing I am practically certain of after this episode it’s that the actual finale will subvert Chuck’s vision. We will not be getting a tragic death ending to the show.

The other thing I can’t quite believe that the writers have done here, in an episode directed by Jensen is the shaaaade. I’m honestly feeling a little sorry for the bibro’s right now. Because the writers have been shading them HARD this season. Chuck has proven himself to be one of them. Imagine having the writers see you and the things you like about the show, and make you into the actual villain? I mean... ouch.

Reasons Chuck is a Bibro

He has tunnel vision on Sam and Dean (ignores Castiel completely)

He is all about the MOTW episodes. Doesn’t pay attention to depth of character

He clearly enjoyed season 7 MOTW brother only season

He believes a tragic brother only ending would be loved by the fans

He wants a dark tragic ending

When Becky recommends he write something else, he moans that he only likes Sam and Dean and only wants to write about them.

He is arrogant, egotistical and doesn’t listen to criticism.

(this is technically a crack intermission to an otherwise serious meta post but ADMIT IT there is truth to this crack!)

SAM AND DEAN - CHUCKS PUPPETS?

Whilst Becky faces Chuck and makes all our meta writer hearts pound with excitement, the other main story was a rather generic MOTW episode. But wasn’t that the whole point? What a genius twist on a MOTW this episode was. We all know the formula, so overdone now in the show that it has grown tiresome. Yet to have that tiresome format called out in the very episode that... includes... that...format... well, that’s gotta be one of the most meta things this show has ever done. I’m in awe.

Sam and Dean investigate the mysterious death of a cheerleader at Beaverdale high school (and even though I don’t watch Riverdale even I can see how this school is a blatant nod to that terrible show #sorrynotsorry). It starts off pretty boring and normal. Sam and Dean do their thing, they wear the suits and pretend to be feds. They suspect Veronica (again Riverdale fans are probably enjoying this) but realise that she can’t be their vamp. The boys seem quite lost as to who is responsible... until Chuck starts writing that is. Then suddenly a random car driving past the crime scene on CCTV is enough for them to enter someones house with a machete. It’s a sloppy MOTW storyline, but this seems intentional IMO. From the moment Sam and Dean are back in their lumberjack chic and storming the family home to accuse the father of being the vamp, something feels off - or it did to me anyway.

In fact, as this was all playing out right at the moment that Becky critiqued Chuck’s writing, it felt as if she was critiquing the very MOTW hunt that we were watching, at least from that point onwards.

Suddenly we are back in Chuck’s world and he’s made it dark and tragic.

The son in this nuclear family is Jack. unwillingly monstrous, innocent and guilty at the same time. The father, so desperate and self sacrificial for his child - heartbreakingly Castiel:

“You don’t have children do you, because if you did you would know that to see your child in pain, rips your heart out, and you’d know that you’d do anything. You’d die for them.”

The mother, wide eyed, armed and dangerous - Clearly Dean:

“Or kill for them.”

The son plays his part perfectly. Chuck be proud:

“I killed someone that I loved”

“I’m a monster”

Compare this to Jack in 14x20 saying to Dean as he stares down the barrel of the gun “You were right. I am the monster.”

But we as the audience know that this situation is wrong. There is no real monster here other than Chuck. The boy is a victim just as Jack was. The parents forced into desperate circumstances out of love. They may be the stereotypical white middle class American family made of privilege and self obsession, but what they do is still purely out of love. It is a situation they are forced into by Chuck, just as he forced the TFW family into the same situation at the end of last season, and we are made to look on in horror as what happened in the season 14 finale happens again, and yet Sam and Dean barely blink or question their actions. This is the strangest part of all.

Sam’s reaction is interesting, because he knows this is wrong. He knows they shouldn’t be killing this kid. He can see the mirror, the repeated story here. He can TELL that something isn’t right... but he doesn’t speak up, doesn’t protest, doesn’t stop it.

Dean doesn’t question a damn thing. He plays his part perfectly. It’s haunting. Chuck almost had his clutches in Dean before, but this time his hold is tight.

Look at how this was framed and tell me this whole thing isn’t Chuck’s doing?

In both scenes Sam looks on in horror knowing that it isn’t right. But this time no one protests, and Chuck get’s his horrific ending.

Chuck banishes Becky and her family, and arrogantly proclaims that he “can do anything, I’m a writer” and the next scene cuts to Sam and Dean in the car ready for the classic Bro Melodrama moment as to be expected of all standard MOTW, but this time, it feels like they are reading from a script - at least at first:

Dean: “Well that was an interesting one.”

Sam: “Yeah. What Henry did. We’d have done the same thing. For Jack, if we’d had the chance.”

Dean: “Yeah. Yeah we would. Look man I get it. I get it we have lost way way too much. And its hard enough to feel like just cashing up. I felt like that. After Chuck back at the crypt. But you know what brought me back, you did. You saying that what we do still matters.

That’s why I wanted to drag us out here, to work the case, to save lives. Ya know. Because it is, it’s a crap job. We do the ugly thing so people can live happy.”

Sam: “Lucky them.”

Dean: “Yeah lucky them.”

Sam: “But it doesn’t change a thing. Ya know you still do the job. We don’t do it for us. We do it for Jack, for mom, for Rowena. We owe it to everyone whose ever given a damn about us to keep putting one foot in front of the other. No matter what.

Hey man like you said, now that Chucks gone. We’re finally on our own. We are finally free to… move on. Ya know.”

Sam: “Yeah I dunno I dunno if I can move on. I can’t forget any of them. I still think about Jessica. I can’t just let that go.”

Dean: “No man that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Sam: “I know I know I’m sorry I know. What I’m saying is that I don’t feel free. What we’ve done, what we’ve lost, right now that is what I’m feeling and sometimes its, its like I can’t even breath. Maybe tomorrow, maybe ill feel better in the morning.”

Dean: “And what if you don’t?”

Sam: “I dunno.”

First of all, would they REALLY have done the same thing for Jack? Kidnapped and bled an innocent girl to feed him? Because I don’t think they would have. Then Dean goes into a monologue that we have heard over and over again and it feels like he is reading from a script. It’s like going through the motions. We are back in Chuck’s worlds. There is no freedom here. Even the lack of Cas mention which we can argue is because Dean is burying those feelings and in denial, even so it feels jarring in the episode where the lack of Cas mention was already called out directly by Becky, so it only further adds to how disjointed this whole scene is. Like this scene is pure wank fodder for Bibro Chuck. Quite frankly, it is. But this time it feels like the writers are aware of this and are doing it purposely to MAKE it feel off.

The one time the script seems to trip is when Dean mentions moving on - triggering Cas’s words from last week, which he struggles with, and then Sam protests and actually opens up to how he is really feeling. The brother’s are back in Chuck’s maze, and this time it seems like he has made it impossible to deviate from the path - but I do wonder if Sam is going to be harder to control because of the connection...

The final shot of the episode only seems to further confirm that the Winchesters are once again being manipulated by Chuck. They are his puppets again, and this time it may even be worse:

There is a huge sense of foreboding with this final shot. The shaking funko pops seemingly in fear of what Chuck plans to do. The two feathers behind them indicating their missing guardian angel (as Chuck continues to neglect Cas’s role in classic Bronly form) the tree indicating a garden? Heaven? and the grey paper with the Winchester tattoo potentially the gravestone that Chuck visualised?

Whatever Chuck has planned, it appears to have played out in some form in this episode. Whilst I don’t think that the boys have been completely robbed of their free will, it is safe to say that they are back to playing by Chuck’s script, but this time with the confidence of men who think they are free.

CASTIEL AS THE CATALYST FOR FREE WILL

For years now, I have been one of those annoying people irritating Cas fans by being irrationally happy when Cas isn’t in key episodes because I can see him so clearly in the negative space that his absence basically forms its own overshadowing presence instead.

When I have rambled on about negative space in the past, it is almost always connected to MOTW episodes following some big DeanCas drama, and on the surface level, people have moaned about how the Cas mention wasn’t enough, or Dean hasn’t acknowledged him or something like that.

Well, this episode is no exception. But this episode IS different in that this episode textually calls out the lack of Cas blatantly within it’s script. Which is just some next level self awareness from this show that I am amazed by.

The entire first three episodes of this season spiralled around this DeanCas tension and drama which us Destiel shipping meta writers could barely believe we were watching since it is practically unheard of for this show to set its emotional A plot around Dean and Cas rather than Sam and Dean. But that is what Dabb has done. When that tension came to its climax in 15x03′s final scene, it was well speculated that 15x04 would understate the DeanCas break up due to the episodes being filmed out of order and therefore Jensen not knowing exactly the impact of the break up when he filmed his scenes for this episode.

Well, we were certainly right that it was understated, with Dean basically burying his feelings in denial and work and food and drink. Until Chuck started writing and therefore took control back of the script, Dean was eating or drinking in practically every single scene. As he is well known for using food and alcohol has coping mechanisms when spiralling into a dark mindset. Other than these key clues, Dean doesn’t mention Cas once. So we can speculate that he hasn’t told Sam what happened, and probably made up some excuse about Cas leaving so that Sam wasn’t concerned. Though no doubt we will find out the extent of what Sam knows fairly soon.

On a surface level, DeanCas shippers and Cas fans have a right to be somewhat upset by this lack of acknowledgement of Cas, even though it is perfectly in character for Dean to bury his feelings in denial and distractions. But beneath the surface this meta masterpiece of an episode was so full to bursting with Cas it left me very happy. Lets go through the key Cas positive areas:

1. The AU world vision of Sam’s that opens the episode is dark and depressing and indicates a world in which Sam's demon blood obsession got the better of him, which was a season 4 story arc (which we all remember as Cas’s introductory season), and yet Benny appears as Dean’s right hand man, a season 8 story arc founded in Purgatory (which we all relate heavily to Cas). Castiel is mysteriously absent from this vision though, even though the two key story lines here in the OG world heavily revolved around Cas. The question has to be asked, in fact the entire vision demands we ask it, just as Becky points out later: Where is Cas? This AU world is sure to appear later in the show, and I have a feeling Castiel’s absence will be explained.

2. Becky’s house - The crew clearly had a lot of fun filling this set with fan made merchandise (and what a wonderful way to reward your fanbase by including their creations in the show itself?). As a Cas girl my eagle eyes were mainly looking for any Cas merch and I was not disappointed. In fact there wasn’t a single scene in Becky’s house where a Cas figure of some kind wasn’t in frame. Whether that was Jensen’s decision or not, it makes me very happy. I talk here about the specific arrangement of Cas merch paired up with Dean merch which blatantly proves Becky is a Destiel shipper). In fact, Cas looms in the background in every scene until Cas sits down at the end to write his tragic ending when the camera pans to the Winchester funko pops bobbing like puppets. Cas is jarringly absent from that scene which only further indicates that he has been overlooked and is therefore still free of Chuck’s manipulations.

3. “No one even mentions Cas” - Obviously this was the line that pulls everything else together. For this to be said in an episode in which the very complaint actually occurs is a whole other level of self awareness and by including it the writer is of course reminding the audience to question this very thing. Like with the first scene, like with every moment that Sam and Dean are on screen together stubbornly not mentioning Cas or the extremely dramatic emotional break up scene at the end of the last episode, this line links everything together and forces the audience to keep Cas at the forefront of their mind.

4. The Bro Melodrama scene - As I mentioned above, this whole scene feels like the brothers are reading from a script and going through the motions but particularly Dean, whose stubborn refusal to mention Cas when he says “ We do it for Jack, for mom, for Rowena. We owe it to everyone whose ever given a damn about us to keep putting one foot in front of the other. No matter what.” it feels so intentional that they have left him out here. Thanks to that one line from Becky, the lack of Cas mention is impossible to ignore. He is so present in the negative space that its like a brick to the face. There is no way that there isn’t an agenda here regarding Castiel.

5. Castiel as the self sacrificing father - The second most glaringly obvious mirror in the episode after the son that mirrors Jack, the father of the vampire boy was far too ready to be killed by the Winchesters if it meant saving his sons life. Neither Sam nor Dean ever willingly offered themselves up for Jack, but we as the audience know all too well that Cas did in one of the most heartbreakingly emotional moments of Season 14. In an episode where the Winchesters stubbornly refuse to mention Cas (though Dean’s drinking on the job and overeager consumption of meaty food are a good indicator of his repressed feelings), Cas forces his presence on them anyway. It is a clear indicator of how close and important Cas is to the story that it is impossible for the boys to ever really forget about him, and I suspect that this will start to eat at Dean very soon.

6. Chuck overlooks the most powerful player - What ties in everything I have mentioned above already about Cas in the negative space, is Chuck. Because the whole point of this episode is that whilst he argues with Becky - the avatar for an inclusive healthy fandom that clearly adores Castiel and surrounds themselves in his image - we are left watching a stale and relatively boring MOTW episode where the Winchesters really do act like nothing more than shallow two dimensional bronly versions of themselves - because that’s what Chuck forces them to be. Chuck, who sits down and types with his Sam and Dean puppets metaphorically shaking with fear as they are condemned to live under his pen once again. It isn’t an accident that in a house surrounded with Cas merch no matter where you look, the one time his image isn’t in frame is that all important last shot - an indication that whilst Sam and Dean may now be under Chuck’s control, Castiel is not. Therefore Castiel’s importance in freeing the boys from Chuck’s villainous tragic ending becomes elevated. This episode symbolically makes Castiel the catalyst for true free will - after all, Castiel himself finally took control of his life and his mental health last week when he chose to walk away. In an episode where his presence in the negative space couldn’t be more obvious - he is the metaphorical elephant in the room - I can’t help but wonder just what role he has to play in Chuck’s vision, because right now it seems Chuck has simply forgot about him. A terribly foolish thing to do given everything Castiel has proven to be capable of.

OVERALL

As a quick summary, I’ll say I loved this episode and everything about it. Even the puppet bronly Winchesters because they were so clearly framed as being wrong. It’s such a hopeful episode, that indicates a hopeful non tragic inclusive TFW ending at least. Chuck is the villain and he will be beaten in the end. Dean and Cas will reunite and it will be the kind of scene that will rip all our hearts out in its emotional investment. Jensen Ackles directed an episode that threw major shade at the Bronly fandom corners, that celebrated TFW inclusivity through the reformed healthy successful fangirl Becky. That villainised the dark tragic brother only ending. This was a thoroughly validating and satisfying episode for me as a meta writer to watch. It has elevated my hope for the rest of the season, and following the incredibly emotional Destiel break up scene that held the focus of the last episode, I can’t stop myself from feeling joy just knowing that right now, everything that I watch this show for, all the things I adore about it, are the same things the writers of this show enjoy and are making the focal points for the series.

This isn’t a show for people that only care about seasons 1-3. This isn’t a show for people who hate Cas. This isn’t a show for people who fetishise the dark, depressing tragic game of thrones style brother ending. This is a show for people like me. Who actually enjoy it and celebrate it and can’t wait to see what happens next.

580 notes · View notes

akechicrimes · 5 years ago

Note

Hey crimes, feel free to disregard this tangent but, do u ever feel like P5 inadvertently or otherwise implied Goro was right with his fake “vigilante justice operates outside and the law and thus must be brought to heel” opinion? What with the fact that the Yaldabaoth confrontation implies the thieves work perpetuated humanity’s sloth AND THEN after an entire game showing us the hundreds of people who were at the v least COMPLICIT in shido’s machinations, a system which is (1)

ohhhhh this one is fun!! this is a super neat question, ty for asking!!!

hmmmmmmmmm

im going to try and break this down into parts, partly because persona 5 is such a convoluted mess with its own lines of thinking, so tell me if i dont do it right. the issues are: (1) goro definitely did say that operating outside the law was bad just on principle that you shouldn’t operate outside the law, and (2) persona 5 did definitely go on to say that all of the phantom thieves’ operations outside the law didn’t come to anything in the first place anyway, because they were only targeting individuals instead of mass systemic corruption/their presence was enabling people to become more apathetic.

i think what persona 5 is trying to get at is that it’s not necessarily that acting outside the law is bad, but that, like you said, targeting only individuals doesn’t work as a tactic. so vigilante justice (e.g. batman style of taking down supervillains) cannot compare to societal reform through collective action.

when i say collective action, i mean that i think persona 5 is trying to point out that “systematic” corruption is really just a corruption of many, many, many individuals working in concert--and that “reform” could just be said to be the opposite, which is activism from many, many, many individuals working in concert.

obviously the ending cutscene where akira;s social link network gets together to protest his arrest is the best example of collective reform, but i think one of the things that i rly like about shido’s wide-spread conspiracy is that it does a rly good job of paralleling akira’s social link network, and pointing out that in the same way that shido’s conspiracy is a collective effort of many many many people that make up a “system,” akira’s widespread social link network creates the opposite effect of a collective effort of many many people that make up a force for change.

which is why having the phantom thieves as a group itself just promotes more apathy--you get one group of people doing all the work for the rest of society, when if anything’s going to change, we need everyone on their feet.

which surprisingly correct, insofar as i’m aware. if society’s going to change in a substantial way, beyond just changing the hearts of a handful of abusers and letting the rest of the system remain untouched, everyone’s got to be involved. collective effort. do your part. wash your hands. stay indoors. don’t forget to vote. seriously, wash your fucking hands.

but when it comes to whether or not persona 5 says that you shouldn’t be acting outside the law...

i think persona 5 really really really really really doesnt want to be caught promoting lawbreaking while also being You Should Break The Law: The JRPG.

part of this trouble, i think, is just because they need players to actually like the characters in the game, and therefore all the character have sympathetic reasons for breaking the law. because persona 5 has to sell marketable characters, too, persona 5 itself makes it pretty clear that people who operate “outside the law” are usually not evil dipshit criminals who love sin. the people in persona 5 who act outside the law are usually people who dont have enough power to operate inside the law in the first place. akira, the pt, and goro all seem to have resorted to what they did because they had no societal power at the start, wound up with a persona (aka fast and easy power source), and wouldnt have been able to do anything about their situation otherwise. characters who operate outside the law (like takemi with her vaguely illegal practice, or kawakami and her also vaguely illegal sex work, or iwai and his vaguely illegal gun business) are still supposed to be waifus you are sympathetic towards.

(...i think i accidentally called iwai a waifu? hmm. on second thought, i’ll just leave that sentence as it is.)

and i really do have to point out that persona 5′s attitude of FUCK COPS is insanely strong. like. persona 5 HATES cops. and that doesn’t let up basically ever, at all, at any moment. for anything. persona 5 wants me to believe that makoto will become a good cop in the future, but if i wanted to find an existing good cop, i’d have to go all the way back to persona 4. like!! shit!! goro akechi is the closest thing we have to a good cop, and he has a pet guillotine for CEOs and his middle name is komaeda.

and that part of the big attitude with FUCK COPS is that it’s another way of morally exonerating the phantom thieves. i think... although the game ultimately concludes with “you should probably not break the law any more because the metaverse is gone,” it’s difficult to argue with the fact that persona 5 is a game in which it presents you with 10000000000000 reasons to break the law and feel Great about it.

(another tangent: i feel like one of the big undercurrents of persona 5, and especially the TV station, is that the phantom thieves are justified in their lawbreaking because the police aren’t doing their fucking job. like, someone’s got to keep people safe, and if the cops don’t like the phantom thieves, maybe they should get off their asses and actually get the criminals before the thieves do. akira literally was on live television and he was like ALL COPS ARE BAD and goro was like wow. anyone else think that was really sexy? @ the guy in the glasses in the back, call me later when you’ve leveled up your charm and knowledge.)

so atlus is in this place where they’ve pointed out that people break the law because they dont really have any other choice, and also persona 5 the game HATES cops, and also persona 5 the game cannot tell you that breaking the law is bad because it is literally A Game About Breaking The Law, but at the same time, they cant really go around promoting crime. from a doylist perspective i was 100% unsurprised that they came up with a fancy narrative reason to get rid of the metaverse and their change-of-heart abilities and just the phantom thieves in general, because all of those are a threat to the status quo. although the game might be right that relying on the phantom thieves to change society for the rest of the population makes the rest of the population lazy and apathetic, it’s pretty convenient that this means that the kids are now no longer able to break the law. so persona 5 really wants people to do things the kosher way, e.g. protesting and such.

hhfmgmhfmghfmgfmghmfhgg. taking this all with a grain of salt, because again, i do think atlus is trying very hard to avoid saying that people should break the law:

i think atlus wants to say that it’s not necessarily acting outside the law that’s not right, but the fact that just loading the phantom thieves with a ton of power makes people apathetic, and changing the hearts of a few individuals is Not enough to get rid of something like shido’s conspiracy. so instead they say, you shouldn’t break the law because it’s not effective without collective reform.

i think another thing that persona 5 wants us to believe is that for the most effective reform to be achieved, people both inside and outside the law/system have to be involved in the collective effort to improve society.

e.g., toranosuke wants to be a man of the people--someone who speaks for the people who are outside of the diet, but toranosuke himself is someone inside the diet. sae’s the other good example; the phantom thieves protest akira’s arrest at the end of the game, but sae, as the insider in the justice system, has to be there to hear and work with them. and this might just be because i watched haru’s s link last night, but i feel like takakura is a really good example: haru pushes back against the company’s shitty policies with her “outsider’s” perspective (quoted because she’s technically the largest shareholder, she just hasnt ever been really involved in how the company is run), but takakura, as the company president and most powerful person at okumura foods, has to be there to hear her request and agree with her, and make company changes based on her requests.

and it’s for this reason that persona 5 wants us to consider maybe lawbreaking isnt morally bad, just not effective.

i wish i could say that that’s more bad atlus writing, but it’s not. i’ve only really examined changing schools on an institutional level, but the best examples of institutional change in school administration have always been cases where the administration, parents, and community members all work together. in some cases, parents bring up requests for the school to accommodate their needs, and the administration listens and works with them. something something--everyone needs an advocate. the point of a lawyer is to advocate for you. the point of a politician/representative is to represent you and your interests. so on and so forth.

(and i also wish that it could be as simple as saying, “wow atlus said something right for once!” because that’s not true, either--acting outside the law can be outrageously effective. persona 5 trying to tell us that acting outside the law to get shit done isn’t effect smells like corporate trying to tell its workers that unionizing doesnt actually do anything.)

(and i also wish that persona 5 would have acknowledged that sometimes, it takes more than just an extremely moral person to change the world. take toranosuke, for example--i’m sure that if he gets elected, he’ll go out there and be a wonderful representative of the people, but at the same time, can’t we also simultaneously acknowledge that any politician who can make “politics” a career for profit will always be incentivized towards self-interest? in the same way that a military for profit will always be incentivized towards war?)

but insofar as whether or not persona 5 thinks that vigilante justice/acting outside the law is in and of itself morally bad--i’d say probably not. i think they want us to think that it’s not effective.

this is a slight tangent that kind of goes off the issue of whether or not persona 5 is concerned with whether or not breaking the law is moral or effective. i was going back through goro’s dialogue in the engine room--who knows if that’s going to be changed in royal--but i was trying to figure out exactly what the phantom thieves condemn him for. (fucking difficult as fuck considering how bizarre that dialogue was at places.)

the first one is murder, which goro is unimpressed with (LMAO. KING). the second is that he operated outside the law, to which he replies that they did the same thing (valid). the third is that his form of justice was “selfish,” in that it only served his personal need for revenge. at that point, goro changes the subject--which is not really surprising, since goro admitted long before the engine room that his quest against shido was for his own personal satisfaction.

that is to say, the phantom thieves can’t say that they don’t operate outside the law, because they do--however, if the phantom thieves can’t be legally exonerated, the phantom thieves are morally exonerated despite operating outside the law because they do it for the benefit of others. that’s actually not an incorrect statement from the phantom thieves, although i dont think they’re doing it for Society Writ Large. the phantom thieves in every single palace have taken on targets to help someone else: firstly ann and ryuji and shiho, then yusuke, then various shujin students being blackmailed by kaneshiro, etc, etc. i remember pretty distinctly that ann insists that she doesnt want to get involved with madarame just for drama or fame (whereas ryuji wants to pick a big target just for the sake of getting famous), but she agrees to get involved with madarame’s palace because she doesn’t want to leave yusuke to possibly kill himself like a previous student.

because the phantom thieves are not able to say that they haven’t operated outside the law in the same way that goro has, the dividing line between them is instead that the phantom thieves are doing so selflessly. but this is just an elaboration on the question of whether or not “is lawbreaking moral?” rather than necessarily “is lawbreaking effective?”

there’s an argument that nothing goro or the phantom thieves did was effective in the long run, and there’s an argument that sae is proof positive that working inside the system won’t be effective, either.

anyway, unions are effective. so maybe we should agree to wash our hands and join a union.

#mine #meta #clouis-loumentine

108 notes · View notes

thepropertylovers · 5 years ago

Text

What Foreigners Really Think of The U.S. Right Now

The other night, after the kiddos went to bed, we decided to watch the second Borat movie that just came out (have you seen it?). It was insane and hilarious all at the same time, but it got me wondering: what do folks who don’t live in the U.S. think of The United States of America right now? What is their perception of us?

So I decided to pose this question on Instagram and wow. Y’all did not hold back. I want to thank everyone who submitted for your candidness and honesty, even if some of these were hard to swallow. It’s important to note that just because these are their opinions of America, it doesn’t mean it is all necessarily true. Regardless, it was interesting to read everyone’s thoughts and get an outsider’s perspective.

We received hundreds of submissions and couldn’t post them all, but below, people from all over the world share what they really think of the United States at the moment.

Leadership is out of touch with reality and messing things up real bad, not just for the U.S. but also for the world. What’s worse is that half the country is being misled successfully. It just shows poorly on the country all over. -Annonymous

Your president is a disaster when it comes to foreign politics and corona. No class, no knowledge. A joke. Very scary to watch. But half of the voters are happy with it. And that is even more scary. Very difficult to understand the hate and ignorance in your society right now. -Mikkel

It’s just weird. Everything basically. I totally understand now why the U.S. is described as '“flawed democracy” in the democracy index. It’s just a crazy system which is not providing equality among people- regarding the vote especially. This system leads to the fact of the two big parties (similar in the UK basically). But democracy is about diversity in opinions and options. Not just two. -Max

The US is more divided than ever. The two parties cannot work together nor do they appear to want to. The government is no longer run by reason, facts, and policy aiming for the betterment of the entire country and or world in the long or medium run; rather it’s instant gratification for the few who benefit from nepotism. Lies and misinformation are used to build a dictatorship hiding in the form of “patriotism”. And those who could act as a check or balance focus on their own personal gain, putting their needs above those of the persons they should be representing. -Joel

I personally don’t think there is a very good atmosphere in the USA, especially right now, Trump’s administration does not protect the American people or the economy. He only cares about himself and his male-white supremacy. The worst of all is that lots of Americans think Trump is actually a good leader (idk why, honestly). But thank God that people are starting to wake up and fight about what they believe. We can see it through BLM protests, feminist movements, and so on, and the whole world is proud about those people fighting for their rights. America was once the land of dreams, but nowadays (with all that is happening) it is even scary to go there. Lots of things have to change and those changes have to start, voting and defending your rights and your beliefs are the first step. Greetings from Spain. -Antonio

The main reasons I can think of are vote suppression/gerrymandering, expensive health care wealth inequality, racism, lack of fun control… -Brian

Definitely find the hypocrisy of the Republicans so annoying, Trump still being in office, the fact that there has been no police reform or justice for Breonna Taylor, the gun laws, and the COVID numbers just to name a few. -Brian

Here in the UK it seems like CARNAGE over there..don’t get me wrong, it’s wild here too but Trump is insane and it’s really odd seeing so many Americans supporting him. -Dan

Really worried about the fact that you might go for 4 more years with Trump and the fact that he’ll for sure contest the results if he loses. Add to this, all the racial violence and in particular the way some policemen act without being condemned by any judge. And finally the pandemic which seems to be even more out of control than in other countries. This is coming from someone who lives in France where we’re going to be under lockdown for the second time since the beginning of the pandemic (2nd lockdown starting tomorrow evening and will last at least until December 1st 😢). -Estelle

To put a long story short, let’s just hope Cheeto doesn’t get reelected otherwise our UK trade deal will be a disaster and we don’t need any more negative influences in the UK around gender and sexual equality.-Christian

I think with this administration, the US has demonstrated how to shipwreck a whole nation economically, ideologically, socially, and politically within a really short period of time. After just 4 years, we’ve come to associate the US with widespread narrow-mindedness, a lack of respect and courtesy to other nations (and minorities in its own country for that matter), short sightedness when it comes to global phenomena like environmentalism or migration patterns, and a celebration (by some at least) of almost barbaric notions of violence, oppression, and backward thinking, all under the camouflage of its constitution and socio-historic heritage. We’ve really admired the Obama administration over here in Europe, which-despite its flaws and shortcomings- has opened up the US to international partnerships and has established an ongoing discourse shaped by mutual respect and politeness…the contrast couldn’t be more pronounced these day…-Sebastian

I look at our Prime Minister and government and then see Trump and think we really could have it so much worse! Vote!! -Ant

As an American living in London, I can tell you that the news coverage here makes the US look like an absolute joke. Mainly due to 45, his lies, his bigotry, and his insane desire to make covid seem as though it’s a falsehood “created by the left” while hundreds of thousands of Americans have ben victimized by this pandemic. What was once seen as a country of opportunity and freedom, is sadly no longer held to that level of greatness in comparison to its neighboring countries. It saddens me because I had plans to move back home within the next year or so, but if the US continues on its path, I can see myself in London for the unforeseeable future. I can’t live in a country where I am seen or believed to be lesser than another because of my sexual preference. I can only hope and pray that this election brings the change we need to be that country of greatness once again. -Rob

Very poor to be honest. And I’m not necessarily [talking about Trump]- I think the immediate reaction is to blame him. Though, he is pretty awful. There was obviously a huge level of social and other problems in the US, and the current administration has exploited them to the breaking point. Whereas more “skilled” past administrations had the ability to leverage those issues for their benefit, but not let it boil over. I actually thought Trump would be a positive for the US and world- in that his incompetence would force other world leaders to step up. Meaning more equity in how disputes etc. are assessed and the US wouldn’t bully smaller nations. I think the US has hit the point in its journey with capitalism that the USSR hit with socialism in the late 80’s that led to its collapse. Does that mean collapse for the US, I don’t know but the system isn’t providing equity and equality for all as it stands. -Paul

Worried but also hopeful for you guys because I don’t think all citizens in America reflect the current administration. It’s been really great to see people voting early and making their voice heard. No matter what happens just know you did what you could in this moment in time. Even though the current administration provides a scary outlook for the future. As long as the current and future generations lead with love, there will hopefully be a brighter future. Love from Canada. -Ajetha

I've been subscribing to all of the US News since the Black Lives Matter Movement commenced and honestly, it made me scared as a Filipino Asian to step foot in the States ever since. I have big dreams of flying over there and probably working there as an immigrant after I finished college. However, when I found out about the racial injustice that is currently ongoing in the country, I became hesistant of still wanting to live there. Although, I'm positive that there are still people like you two that will be open about working immigrants, I really hope that racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia will end for good among every human beings in the US and also around the world. I do wish and pray that the 2020 US election will make certain amends to the current situation y'all are experiencing because it's getting pretty scary out there. -Harvey I’m an American living overseas working for the US government. I’m trying my hardest to stay overseas so my family and I don’t have to come back to the mess that is the US right now. From politics to COVID, it’s not a good time. While the virus may be surging again in Europe, at least the people comply with the government rules. Sometimes I believe Americans take freedom and liberty a bit too far, especially when it comes to the greater good. -Anonymous

Allthough on social policy the US is no real example for us (I think there is more social ‘security’, more justice, high standards in education for all in most of the EU countries), they always have been a ‘safe haven’ in big international politics. It now feels like ‘they have our back’ doesn’t imply anymore. -Jasper

Well personally I think the country seems in total disarray, instead of focusing on the real issues in the streets both house of the capitol are focused on bashing each other during the election campaign which is a circus due to the sitting POTUS. The obsession with the right to bare arms and the gun culture bewilders most other countries, you have teenagers walking into schools with Assault weapons and yet people still want guns to be available, worst still you ban one type of assault rifle but another just as powerful is kept on sale, it’s plain weird. -Philip

Neither candidate represents their party well. As an outsider looking in, it just baffles me that either of these men could potentially be the leader of the free world...It genuinely feels like worrying times are ahead for the US. -Marc I'm from India and living in Germany at the moment. The race problem in the US is as bad as the class/caste problem in India. Even if I don't have money I can go to a government health center in India. I just had an operation and stayed at the hospital for 18 days here in Germany, I had to pay only 180 Euros, everything else ( the operation and the many tests and scans that followed) was covered by the insurance. When my friends at the US heard about it they were shocked about low the hospital bill. There are really great labs (I'm a researcher) that I would like to work but I have no intentions of working/living in the US for a longer period of time. -Maithy

I think the US has become a joke to the rest of the developed world. Neither candidates running for president are fit to run such a powerful country. I can't help but feel after the election if Trump wins the left will riot and if Biden wins the right will riot. The country might just rip itself apart. American politics has zero empathy and zero morals. Honestly its terrifying. -Andrew

The US has always been a bit confusing to me - the two party system, the focus on religion, the divide in income and possibilities- as well as being the beacon of light in the fight for human rights, the strong personal pride in creating caring societets, the blending of and openeses for ethnicities and cultures... But for a while politics have become not at all about politics, religious beliefs are taking charge in policy work, the wealthier part shows little companion towards the less wealthy, the public spending is way above budget year after year while health care seems to be crazy expensive and not for all. The intrusion of US interest in politics in other countries are blunt to say the least, creating conflict where human lives have no value if they’re not US lives... School shootings that seems to be acted upon as that is part of normal lives, and schools to expensive for even middle class kids to study at... This is a shift in trust and soft power that affects all of us. -Olof

To be honest, I couldn’t come to the US right now, it scares me. The leadership, the gun laws, the violence and the divide of the nation. It sucks, because I love America and have been there 7 times in the last two years from Australia for work... but not anymore. I’m not coming back now until peace wins. -Anonymous

The fact that such a hate filled government is presiding over what is one the greatest countries in the world is scary. And it is seriously mind blowing that out of such a powerful country filled with some of the greatest minds in the world it’s these two men are the best you can do to be your next president. Unbelievable. Seriously unbelievable. -Rachel

I think the orange dude in office is making you guys look bad. But also, good (?). Seeing the black lives matter movement and so many of you stand up to the problems your country faces has been inspiring. One thing our countries have in common is how we are divided into very distinctive opposites sides. I mean, where do all these racists, bigots, utterly, madly conservites people came from? I few like a few years ago things did not seem so much as a boiling pan about to explode. Or maybe they were all hiding and when a lunatic like them rose to power (how that happened still boggles my mind) they all showed their true colors. It’s scary. I hope Trump doesn’t get reelected. Brazilians loooove to imitate americans🙄, so if he gets reelected it makes that much probable that our lunatic will also be in office for four more years. P.S. have you guys watched the show Years and Years from HBO? A really good watch is this election times! ☺️ -Taty

Re. The US atm. Unfortunately your president has made your country a laughing stock around the world and he's destroyed relationships with allies. It's gonna take time to rebuild all of that. He's also moved an entire branch of your government to the far right, even though the majority of the country if left/centr of left. So you've a supreme court that doesn't represent you and it's looking like they're going to try and take away rights from people. You have a healthcare system that doesn't look out for its people and there's this bizarre fear of universal healthcare that seems insane to every other 1st world country. If if Biden wins (and I really hope he does for everyone's sake), there's going to be a lot of work in undoing the damage Trump has done before he can even get into what he wants to do. All the while you've an ultra conservative highest court. There's also the massive political division and the systemic racism. It's a lot. It's not impossible, but it's going to take so much time and people who want it to change. -Ciara

I’ve been sitting here for an hour thinking about your question and there are many different outlooks I could raise so I’ll keep it generic. I’ll start with the elephant in the room known as Covid. Each day, our morning news informs us of what your leaders are doing and daily case numbers in the US. We sit here completely shocked at how your government has let it reach this point. You may have heard that Melbourne has just come out of one of the strictest and longest lock downs in the world. I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone to have to do, but I will say, I feel much more comfortable to be able to go to the shops knowing the numbers are at about 2-3 a day instead of in the thousands. I do think that your government does need to address this now, could even be making it compulsory mask wearing. It’s hard for me to comment about your economy as we don’t here much about it, but I will say Trump ‘says’ make America great again, let’s get more jobs, they are pro life, yet how is someone who is prolife not doing anything to stop a virus that is killing people? Isn’t your unemployment rate worse (pre-covid) than what it was when Obama was president? I think as a generic outlook, if change isn’t made in the election, the outlook from a Australian does not look like it would be something you’d want to be apart of. I love America. Have visited a couple of times, even thought about moving there, but at the moment, I’ve never been more thankful to not be there. -Ben

7 notes · View notes

ma-freeradical · 5 years ago

Text

The Constitutional Rights of the Peculiar

I remember watching all 51 days of the Waco siege in the Memorial Hall lobby at Geneva College with many of my classmates. Geneva College is affiliated with the Reformed Presbyterian Church, and the RP's practice of Christianity is mildly controversial. As Christian College students, the events vibed with us because it involved Christian. Peculiar Christians, but Christians nonetheless.

In case you weren’t aware, the basis for all the flavors of Christianity comes down to the fact that we all believe at least part of what the other guy believes is peculiar. Peculiar enough to have different churches.

Not the least of their controversial beliefs, the RP Church does not use instrumentation in their worship. As a guitar player, I was offended. But I've attended their services. It was compulsory as a student for certain events. And I lifted my voice in worship along with the rest of the congregation.It wasn’t fatal. Just felt like it. Especially during the singing.

The School scored higher on the controversial scale when they parted way with a professor because he had converted to Catholicism. I recall it as the least scandalous scandal one could imagine. Geneva College is a Protestant institution of higher learning and holds that the authority of God is found in the Bible. ("Sola Scriptura") The Catholic Church holds that the authority of God comes equally from both the Bible and Church tradition.

Geneva College held that the distinction was so fundamental, there was a rule that a professor that converted to Catholicism could not be a professor. The professor knew it. My recollection is that both the professor and the College handled the situation with grace and integrity.

I remember 51 days of astonishment and disbelief. My instantaneous belief was rooted in the knowledge that the Branch Davidians were an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. In short, they were probably nuts. If you're not a Branch Davidian, the logic isn't hard to follow. In short, the idea that they were hoarding guns and were extremists was fairly believable, because at our Christian college, the extremist box was already checked.

But some of us were more curious than that. We weren't sure that David Koresh and his followers weren't having their First Amendment rights trampled. Despite the fact Koresh was a polygamist and was married to teenagers.

The curiosity turned to suspicion when the image of the tank with the American flag flying appeared on the screen. It just didn’t sit right with me, and it’s been an iconic image for me ever since. Frankly, I thought the flag was a foolish decision for anyone trying to resolve the situation. The FBI was camped on the door of the Branch Davidians. The FBI was flying helicopters around, and let’s not forget the incident began with the ATF at the front door locked and loaded and with a warrant. There was no confusion about who the tanks belonged to. So why the flag?

I can’t think of a single compelling reason for a group of people hoping to resolve the situation peacefully to decide to fly that flag. But I am assuming the FBI knew they were the FBI.

During my summers at home while I was in college, I also watched Waco: The Rules of Engagement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco:_The_Rules_of_Engagement) and Paradise Lost (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost:_The_Child_Murders_at_Robin_Hood_Hills). They are each a good watch in their own right. They each also scared the shit out of me for different reasons.

First, I wasn’t that different from Damien Echols. Weird white kid. Still am. I don’t know if Echols did it, but I do know the evidence produced against him was gathered with such recklessness and negligence that it led to the West Memphis Three entering Alford Pleas. After Eighteen years in prison.

The government can do that. And if they can do that to those three kids, they can do that to me. And you. But this is about me. Eighteen years. That shit is scary.

But, one could say that they got off better than Koresh.

“The Rules of Engagement” is very compelling. One thing that is clear is that Senator Schumer has always been a dick. It’s also compelling from witness testimony that Koresh and his followers held some peculiar beliefs, but lived peaceably and lawfully as a general rule.

Koresh attended gun shows and was a dealer. What the ATF called “stockpiling” is what a gun dealer calls “inventory.” If things had unfolded differently, any case for “stockpiling weapons” might have been summarily dismissed. Because the enforcement of such a law absent the intent to commit a crime is an abridgement of the Constitution. The enforcement of such a warrant would trample all over Koresh’s First Amendment rights. In a tank flying the American flag.

Of course, the ATF warrant wasn’t predicated on “stockpiling” alone. Two thirds of the warrant was predicated on statutory rape. But, the ATF has no jurisdiction over statutory rape. Other issues with the warrant have been noted to be the fact that it was prepared in a “prejudicial and inflammatory manner,” and “put together in a sloppy fashion.”

And there is the fact that prior to the ATF raid, Koresh had invited the ATF to visit and inspect the compound. The ATF opted to have it all unfold differently. Perhaps they didn’t have time for a visit because they were busy practicing for the raid at Fort Hood with funds they had inappropriately secured by misrepresenting to the military that it was for an anti-drug raid.

Unfortunately, we’ll never be able to study the evidence. Somebody burned the house down. Somebody, perhaps somebody else, crushed all the vehicles. Somebody else lost the tape. Somebody lost the front door. And then no agent on the scene filed a written report of the incident. At best, this is not acceptable for a government agency. At worst…that’s some scary shit.

Senator Tom Lantos said of the Waco siege : “The most plausible single explanation for this nightmare is the apocalyptic vision of a criminally insane, charismatic cult leader who was hell bent on bringing about this infernal nightmare in flames and the extermination of the children, the women and the other innocents,” Lantos said.

Well, I saw it reported that way on television as well. But, "most plausible?" "Single?" Five years later, I still thought Koresh was peculiar, but, I was also still bothered by that tank with the flag

When Patrick Henry said “Give me liberty or give me death,” I don’t think he was merely defining a binary solution. Rather, I think he spoke conceptually. I don’t think he viewed his options as “take the liberty or you die.” I think it is better understood as “Give me liberty, or somebody’s gonna fucking die.” Might be you. Might be me. Or, you could just give me the liberty.

Patrick Henry was calling on the patriots to arm themselves in order to fight the British if the demands of the convention were ignored. As a result, we now have a convention called the Constitution.

This may have had little to nothing to do with Koresh's peculiar beliefs, and everything to do with Koresh's Constitutional rights. And Koresh may just have chosen the "Give me death."

Unlike Senator Lantos, I can conceive of an explanation of Waco that holds Koresh as a polygamist with some peculiar beliefs that chose “give me death” when the ATF tried to trample his Constitutional rights.

And the ATF was more than happy to oblige. For those of you that struggle with reading comprehension, I am not saying Koresh was a hero. What I am stylistically referring to as peculiar is allegedly immoral and illegal. Texas had run investigation of child abuse at the compound however, and there were no charges however.

We were supposed to learn something from the Waco Congressional hearings. I learned something from the hearings, and I have learned it repeatedly over the last 30 years.

At least in criminal matters, I’ll make a judgment when there is a judgment made.

In the case of Waco, my judgment is that there isn’t enough evidence. And that is a crime.

Teaser? I wonder if you know what made Geneva College rate high on the controversy scale in the Supreme Court in recent years?

Teaser? I wonder if Bob Dylan has ever been so drunk that he started playing the same song in concert and had to be corrected by the band? At a Vermont airport while opening for the Grateful Dead?

Paradise Lost is also an integral part of Geneva history, Inspiring stained glass in Mcartney library and a painting by one of our Humanities professors. I got a C, and that is the summation of what I remember from that class.

1 note · View note

phroyd · 7 years ago

Link

American presidents lie. They always have. Just Google “Lyndon Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin,” “Bill Clinton and NAFTA” or “George Bush and weapons of mass destruction.” Even Honest Abe likely told a fib or two.

But no U.S. president has ever lied as prolifically, constantly, insidiously and dangerously as Donald Trump. He never stops. He’s the Energizer Bunny of endless falsehood.

It’s enough to make even Orwell’s head explode.

Trump, who received votes from just one in four U.S. adults in 2016, claimed that he would have won the popular vote over Hillary Clinton were it not for the voter fraud of undocumented immigrants. The alleged criminal votes were never cast.

Trump called his 2016 Electoral College victory “The biggest electoral victory since Ronald Reagan.” It was no such thing.

Trump lied about the size of his inauguration crowd even as aerial photographs of the event contradicted his boasts.

He has repeatedly and preposterously claimed that the Latinx immigrant population is full of murderers, rapists and gang members. It is not.

Trump claimed that President Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” just before his 2016 election victory. They were not.

He claimed to have as president-elect negotiated a deal to “save 1,100 jobs” at a Carrier plant in Anderson, Ind. He did no such thing.

He absurdly concocted a terrorist attack that never occurred, in Sweden, during his first month in office.

He claimed that the head of the Boy Scouts called him to say his speech was the best ever delivered to the Boy Scouts Jamboree. No such call ever took place. Trump’s terrible oration was widely reviled.

Trump claimed to have fired James Comey because the FBI director mishandled Hillary Clinton’s email scandal prior to the 2016 election, not because he was continuing to investigate Trump and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. That was another baldfaced lie.

He claimed that white-nationalist and neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Va., were “protesting very quietly,” and that liberal and left counter-protesters “didn’t have a [protest] permit.” False and false.

Trump laughably told oil workers in North Dakota that environmentalists “didn’t know why” they opposed the ecocidal, petro-capitalist Dakota Access and Keystone-XL pipelines. Ridiculous.

Trump lied repeatedly and viciously about the number of people who diedduring and after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

He ludicrously claimed to have led a strong federal response to the devastating storm in Puerto Rico. (He gave himself a “ten.”)

Trump absurdly claimed that his former national security adviser Michael Flynn didn’t do “anything wrong.” Flynn was later convicted for lying about his communications with the Kremlin during Trump’s presidential transition.

Trump farcically claimed that Paul Manafort never played a major role in his 2016 campaign. (Manafort chaired the Trump campaign up through the Republican National Convention that year.)

Trump falsely claimed that a Justice Department inspector general report exonerated him of collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. The report did neither of those things.

Trump ridiculously claimed that Michael Cohen was never a big player in his career or campaign. Cohen was Trump’s longstanding personal attorney and “fixer,” and he too has been convicted on federal charges.

Trump has claimed to know nothing about the illegal campaign finance payoff of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Cohen exposed that lie this summer.

After Cohen turned himself in to federal authorities, Trump said that Cohen pleaded guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that “were not crimes.” False. The violations are indeed federal crimes.

Trump unbelievably claimed not to have known that his son and son-in-law met with Russians claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton in Trump Tower in June 2016.

Trump helped concoct the White House lie that the real subject matter of that June 2016 meeting was U.S. adoption policy.

He says that China “has been attempting to interfere in the upcoming 2018 elections.” There is no evidence to support that charge.

He falsely claims to be a self-made billionaire, something that The New York Times shows to have been a lie. (His father staked his entire business.)

Trump says that he and the Republican Party passed a “middle-class” tax “reform.” He certainly knows that they enacted a plutocratic tax cut, a great windfall for big corporations and the richest 1 percent.

Trump absurdly claimed before the tax cut that “we [U.S.-Americans] pay more taxes than anybody in the world” (we don’t) and that the tax “reform” would “cost me a fortune.”

He absurdly said that “public lands will once again be available for public use” while handing over 2 million acres to private corporations for coal mining, oil drilling, uranium extraction and other environmentally disastrous industrial activities.

He falsely claimed that he was legally compelled to order a “zero tolerance” border policy last spring that separated Mexican and Central American children from their parents.

In defense of his good friends atop the absolutist, head-chopping Saudi Arabian regime (which sends kill teams to torture, kill, and vivisect dissenting journalists in foreign embassies), Trump claims that Saudis have purchased $110 billion worth of military equipment from the U.S. and that this purchase creates “five-hundred thousand jobs,” later inflated to ““1 million jobs.” ”in the U.S. His numbers here are absurdly exaggerated.

He claims without evidence that there are “people of Middle Eastern descent” in the latest Central American migrant “caravan” moving through Mexico towards the U.S.’ southern border.

He baselessly insisted that “Democrats are paying members of the caravan to try and get into the U.S. to harm Republicans in the midterms.”

He has sent U.S. troops to guard the border on the absurd lie that the beleaguered caravan constitutes a “national emergency.”

He preposterously claims that it is the mainstream media, which he calls “the enemy of the people,” and not him that has created our current climate of hatred and violence—even as he applauds a Montana congressman for body-slamming a young reporter.

Trump’s evasion of responsibility follows a hate-filled campaign and 21 months of ax-grinding in the Oval Office that has seen him call immigrants criminal gang members, murderers and rapists, while maliciously describing his political enemies and media critics and journalists as “evil,” “low lifes,” “low IQ” and “the most dishonest people on Earth.” Along the way, the openly sexist Trump has referred to women as “animals,” “dogs,” “horse-face,” “fat” and worse. The white supremacist who killed 11 people in a Jewish synagogue last Saturday was egged into violent action by Trump’s ridiculous and hateful caravan rhetoric.

The Trump Lie Machine is going into head-spinning and soul-numbing overdrive as the midterm elections draw closer.

Trump claimed earlier this year that leftist violence will break out across the country if Democrats reclaim Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. The absurdity speaks for itself.

Trump said in Arizona recently that immigrants had illegally taken over a city council in California. The claim was complete nonsense.

Trump has recently and insanely suggested that people are “rioting” in California “to get out of Sanctuary Cities. …They’re demanding to be released from sanctuary cities.” (This may be the single craziest thing I’ve ever seen Trump claim. It is truly bizarre.)

Trump is ridiculously claiming the Democrats will kick seniors off health insurance, abolish insurance protections for people with health problems, destroy Social Security, abolish U.S. borders and (I am not making this up) give “illegal” immigrants “free cars.” That’s right: “free cars” for “illegals.”

Trump repeatedly—36 times across seven political speeches this fall—called the Democrats “radicals.” Of course, the Democrats are a deeply conservative, Big Business-friendly, imperial/pro-military, and depressingly centrist apparatus. There isn’t a single genuine radical in their entire party.

Trump says that the “new platform of the supposedly ‘radical’ Democrats is to abolish ICE” (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement). That is flatly false.

Trump lies and distorts so relentlessly and profusely that tracking and fact-checking his false statements has become a full-time job for journalists at home and abroad.

One of these journalists is Daniel Dale, the Washington bureau chief of the Toronto Star. He calculates that Lyin’ Don has made four false claims per day since being sworn into the presidency 21 months ago with his hand on the Bible.

When Dale was first assigned the Trump beat in September 2016, he found the Republican candidate “so incessantly dishonest” that his habit of twisting and inverting reality required a specific focus “separate from the day-to-day news coverage I was doing.” Dale looked forward to being “freed from this [ugly] task” of covering Trump’s persistent untruths once Hillary Clinton prevailed, as was widely expected. Trump won “and so, [he] had to continue.”

What accounts for this endless mendacity and rhetorical manipulation? Speaking to “Public” Broadcasting System “NewsHour” anchor and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Judy Woodruff last week, Dale theorized that Trump and the Republican allies and outlets who repeat his outlandish and bogus assertions want to drive media coverage and political discourse away from topics they wish to avoid—health care, the Mueller investigation and “anything else the president doesn’t want us to talk about,” such as Trump’s still unreleased tax returns, climate change and the party’s regressive tax cuts.

Dale is on to something there, no doubt, but the real meaning of the president’s Twitter-amplified Fibby Pulpit is deeper and darker than mere diversion and partisan spin. As Chris Hedges suggests in his latest book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” Trump and his party’s continuing defiance of reality suggests that the United States is sliding into “corporate totalitarianism”:

Trump and the Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are intensified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. … But Clinton did not pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.

The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of ‘fake news.’ They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted them with the revoking of net neutrality. … “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed,” Hanna Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. …

The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. … Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit – only there never was a report. … The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. … When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, and depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s faith in threats and force.

Consistency is discarded. The Trump administration has cited “states’ rights” in trying to roll back federal requirements that out-of-date coal and nuclear plants be shut down, even as it endeavors to federally negate the state of California’s right to enforce comparatively stringent emission regulations.

Republican Congressional candidates run campaign commercials proclaiming their commitment to retaining the Affordable Care Act’s provision prohibiting health insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions at the same time that the GOP is viciously challengingthat provision in court.

Trump blames the nation’s bourgeois media and a timid, centrist Democratic Party for the hatred, incivility and demonization that pollute U.S. politics while he calls his opponents “evil” and celebrates violence against liberals and journalists.

It is important to understand, as Hedges does, that the Trump-led assault on veracity, evidence and our very ability to separate truth from falsehood has been able to gain traction only because a decades-long corporate coup has devastated and discredited public education, academia, organized labor and the legal and criminal justice systems. It has done all this and more while turning the Democratic Party into what the late Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin called the nation’s Inauthentic Opposition.

Think of this distinctively American “corporate-managed democracy” and “inverted totalitarianism” as the nation’s pre-existing authoritarian condition for the rise of an Amerikaner-style fascism.

In the face of what an authoritarian like Trump and his white-nationalist Republican Party have done over the last two years of one-party rule—an annulment of what’s left of the U.S. Constitution’s much-ballyhooed “checks and balances”—there’s no credible moral argument against the notion that progressives living in contested districts should choose the lesser of two evils in next week’s midterm elections. Adolph Reed Jr., Noam Chomsky and Arun Gupta’s warnings about the dangers of a Trump presidency have been richly born out. I, for one, should have paid them more heed.

Still, we on the left, what’s left of it, should nonetheless retain our capacity to be properly nauseated by a yard sign I recently saw in arch-liberal, super-blue Iowa City, Iowa. Surrounded by other, smaller signs with the names of a handful of dismal local and statewide Democratic candidates, it read “MAKE AMERICA GOOD AGAIN: Vote.”

Please. The notion that the richly bipartisan corporate totalitarianism of which Trump is the apotheosis can be reversed, and the nation made “good” simply by voting Herr Donald and the Republicans out of office is a childish fantasy.

That, too, is a Great Lie. As marchers celebrating a rare legal victory over a white supremacist U.S. police state in Democratically controlled Chicago chanted last month, “The whole damn system is guilty as Hell.” It’s the whole damn system that must be democratized from the bottom up. From the dismal dollar Democrats, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, “P”BS, Tom Steyer, the Gates Foundation, the Brookings Institution, the CFR, the Atlantic Council, the Obama and Clintons on the so-called left, to the radically reactionary Republicans, the Koch brothers, the Mercers, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Fox News, the Weekly Standard, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, Breitbart, right-wing talk radio, the Sinclair Broadcasting Co., the Federalist Society and more on the actual right, imperialism, racial inequality and class rule have brought us to this menacing pre-fascist moment.

Paul Street

ContributorPaul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books,…

Phroyd

#trump #lies

99 notes · View notes

shianhygge-imagines · 7 years ago

Text

In The Name Of Love [Wrench/Reader] Finale

Series: In the Name of Love Part 4/4 Chapter Title: At The End Of My Love Words: 4,462 words

Brief AN: So, I’m back from the dead. Since I haven’t written, nor posted anything in a while, I’m going to slowly start writing and posting again. The first order of business, was to finish “In the Name of Love” because it’s been two years(I think?) since I started “Project Wrench Your Heart,” and it’s among the easiest to write out of all my series. This ending, might have you all... really livid, but I’m rather pleased with it.

edit 28/8/18 16:52: edited for POV discrepancy, and reformating

|Masterlist|

In the Name of Love: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I want to tell you a story, my dear audience. It’s a story that anyone might be able to relate to - one about heartache. Specifically, this story is one about a young woman who fell in love with a man whose smile halted her breath, and whose tenacity would inspire her to walk with him to the ends of the Earth. It’s a story of how her love would quickly become her greatest weakness - a slow poison to eat at her mind, body, and soul.

I want to tell you that his love for her was pure, and that the two lived a life full of happiness. But that is never the case with most relationships. Despite all that she would say and do, his love for her faltered and wavered, doubts, fears, and lust consuming him while she desperately sought to save him. It wasn’t enough for him, so the young woman let him go.

Yet still, it hurt.

She loved him with all of her being. If he was in danger, she ran to his aid. Even when her life would tear at the seams, she ran to him. Even if he would hate her, she would run to him.

You would run to him.

You would help him.

You would save him.

And you would take his hate.

Because in the end, it was all for him.

“At the beginning of my love, there was only blind devotion, innocent and uncorrupted. I could only see the best in you despite your actions. I would make whatever excuse I could to keep myself blind.”

You knew that this story could only end in two ways. In one outcome, you and Wrench would both perish, losing your lives to the woman who had created such a large divide in your relationship. In another, you would rise victorious, having saved Wrench from Lydia and her deceit. The ramifications of both outcomes were dire enough that you stood, frozen, at your position in the darkening alleyway.

You had sacrificed so much for Wrench - losing your arm, your heart - and while you still held onto it yet, you were sure that you might even lose your humanity if everything went south.

Still, you waited patiently and silently as the sun set, casting the streets of east San Francisco into the dark. This was your job. Only you and Isa’s cohorts would be able to get this done.

Given that you only had one arm left to use, you’d armed yourself with a silenced pistol, extra ammo, a few grenades (of the explosive, smoke, and flash variety, and a hunting knife. In all honesty, you felt out of your comfort zone without your rifle, but having only one limb severely limited your lethality with a two handed weapon.

And then, just as the sun disappeared from the horizon completely, the screams started.

Despite knowing what would go down tonight, you flinched just the slightest. Those weren’t screams of rage, after all. They were screams of pure unadulterated terror.

You gave a count of ten before you sprinted out from the cover of the pitch black alleyway. In front of the safe house gates were three armed guards, each wore kevlar vests and held a Blume modified military grade rifle - their attention seemed to have been redirected when the screaming started, and had their backs facing you. All three seemed to have been frozen in place, no doubt horrified that someone had gotten past them. But none of them moved from their places, likely in terror.

And with your position, crouched not even ten feet away from them, it wasn’t difficult to hear why. Gunshots were heard followed by horrified screams, but unlike before, when it had only been screams, you heard begging and the sick sound of screams dying in throats. The squelches of something.

One of the guards shoved at another’s arm, “Hey, man. You go check that out.”

“W-what? Are you fucking insane? There’s a slaughter going on in there, and you want me to waltz in there and do what?” The shoved guard’s voice rose pitch after pitch in fright.

“Yeah, Wellington, if you’re in any condition to be telling Thomas what to do, maybe you should go in.” The last guard seemed about as willing to go in as the others.

“Oh fuck off, McCullum! I’ve got kids and a wife waiting for me.” Wellington snarled with a shack of his head.

“Hey! I’ve got a baby girl on the way! No way am I leaving my wife and child!” Thomas protested, before turning to look at McCullum, “And what about you?”

“…Boyfriend.” McCullum grunted quietly, crossing his arms and turning away. “…He proposed last week, but given how dangerous my job is, I didn’t answer him yet.”

“Oh yeah… that handsome doc working at the Children’s Hospital, right?” There was a sudden realization in Thomas’s tone, and by the protective glare on McCullum’s face, the guard held his hands up in surrender. “Hey! I’m not judging! You love him, and who am I to judge.”

“So we all got people waiting for us back home.” Wellington muttered, staring down at his gun and indecisively shifting back and forth on his feet. “But we also have a job. If we don’t go in, we might be out of a job. But if we go in, we might die.”

From you crouched position, you grit your teeth and clenched your hands. You wanted revenge. DedSec wanted revenge. Blume wanted revenge. But how many people, innocent people, were going to get stuck in the crossfire. The three men standing guard? They didn’t ask to be employed by such a corrupt system, but it was their living. Isa, Chikage, and their men? All they wanted was peace. You, DedSec, and Blume were the ones that dragged the others in.

You were already going to take the life of one or two individuals tonight. Did you really want to take three more?

Heaving a sigh at your sudden development of a moral conscious, you stood and holstered your gun, putting your hand up and walking around the car slowly. “Hey.”

All three men whipped around with their rifles trained on you, laser sights marking three points on your body, head, heart, and lungs, but none of them fired. Ignoring your instincts to duck for cover, you kept your hand in the air, “Beautiful night, isn’t it?”

“What the hell do you want?” It was McCullum that interrogated you with a snarl, flicking the safety off the rifle.

You made a small motion with your head towards the safe house gates. “I need to get into that place.”

Wellington gave a mocking laugh, “Are you kidding me? We’re not going to let you in, kid.”

“Well someone has to go in.” You were playing this a little too close to the chest for you liking.

“Trust me, kid, you don’t want to go in there.” Thomas warned, and as if on cue, another terrified scream rang from behind the gates.

“Hmmm.” You mused in thought, “It sounds like your coworkers are dying, sir.”

“And you’re not moving from this spot.” McCullum warned when you took a step forward.

You were getting impatient now, so you dropped the whole act. “Listen, boys, I need to get into that place one way or another, and you’re kind of in my way. It’s obvious that all of you are unwilling to go in there and help, so why don’t I make you guys an offer?”

“And why would we listen to anything you had to say?” Wellington snarled, and from the glint of a street light, you could make out his trigger finger flexing just the slightest.

“I mean… you don’t have to. Just thought I’d throw it out into the open.” When no answer came, you took it as a sign to continue. “You see those cameras up there?” you pointed with your remaining limb at the two discrete lenses poking from atop the gate and covered by some foliage. “When everything is said and done, and all your coworkers are dead, your employers are going to investigate whatever happened tonight. All they’re going to find are dead bodies in the building, and you three, standing out here, not doing anything to help. Now tell me, without a potential culprit for these murders, who do you think is going to become the figurative scape goat?” Understanding seemed to cross their expressions, and you grinned, “They’re going to blame you three. And suddenly, your names will be blacklisted and wanted everywhere. Everything you hold dead will be forfeit. And everyone. But if you let me into that safe house, I’ll give you my name, and I’ll erase all trace of your involvement with Blume, whether it be your employment with them, or your presence here today. And then I’ll get you all jobs of your choice. I’m a woman of my word.”

There was silence before Thomas spoke up, ��Your name first.”

A sly smirk appeared on your lips, “Are you all in agreement? Because I’m not just going to give my name if all of you aren’t going to go along with it.”

Reluctantly, McCullum lowered his gun, and after a while, Wellington did as well. “Fine. But you better keep your word.”

“Hmm. Y/N L/N.” You mumbled, walking past them and through the gates. “And I’ll contact you all once it’s done. You should probably go home now. The authorities might arrive soon, so you’ll want to be far away.”

Without a goodbye, you strolled through the rest of the way and disappeared in the darkness.

“In the name of love, I would kill, I would steal, I would cheat, and I would lie. All for you. All for something I thought would bind us. But slowly, our love became corrupted. Was it because of me? Was I too obsessed with you? Was it because of you? Was it because you took advantage of my love and obsession? What happened to make you abandon me so? And yet still, I crave to be by your side?”

It didn’t take much to block out all the bodies littering the halls. It didn’t take much thought to block out the sounds coming from the shadows. The squelching and crazed giggles. Because deep in this mass grave, was your target. Your end goal.

“The Prince bids you good hunting.”

“Follow. Follow. Your damsel awaits.”

“Hehehe guarded by an ugly troll.”

“And a small snarling bitch.”

“Oh…”

“Troll’s dead, Troll’s dead!”

“Disgusting red. Don’t touch.”

“Don’t touch.”

“Don’t touch the bitch.”

“Don’t touch the damsel.”

“They belong to the hunter now.”

“The arrows will guide you.”

Those were among the voices that you could understand. Some were snarling, and some sounded borderline crazed. But you followed the giant red arrows leading you through the safe house anyways. You didn’t trust these goons, but you trust Isa and Chikage to keep their subordinates in line.

When you arrived at the heavy set of double doors, it’s steel complexion marred with a giant red X, you heard the giggling, louder than ever. To the side of the doors, propped up on the wall, was the corpse of a giant man with a shredded throat and multiple puncture wounds along his body. He was the man who held you down just as Lydia hacked your arm off. And you felt no remorse at his death, simply took in his face stuck in terror and turned away.

“X marks the spot.”

“The hunter found the treasure.”

“Time to kill the yipping bitch.”

“And take back the damsel.”

You took a deep breath in and waited ten seconds before exhaling, and shoving open a door, your pistol drawn to take aim.

The interior of the room was unfurnished save for a few left over tables and chairs, the paint along the walls cracked, and the ceiling missing panels. The room was dimly lit, casting shadows all over the room. And at the center of the space, stood Lydia, dressed in the same dark outfit that she’d assaulted you in.

“So, you really did survive.” An arrogant smirk was on her lips as she crossed her arms and straightened her posture to maintain a superior stance. “Too bad you were too late to save the others.”

“Where’s Wrench?” You demanded, grip firm on the pistol as you kept the firearm pointed and aimed at her.

“Wrench, Wrench, Wrench. That’s all you seem to talk about, you know? So fucking boring and predictable.” A mocking sneer twisted what would have been a pretty face before she stepped aside, allowing you to see that Wrench had been strapped to a chair and gagged. “He’s a bit roughed up, I’ll admit. And I might have broken him a little.”

A bit roughed up, yes. You could see the bright bruises on his unmasked face from where you stood. And the normally bright blue eyes of his were dull and lifeless. His clothes were disheveled and ripped, as if he’d been thrown around. But he was alive.

“Give up, Lydia. You’ve lost.” You gave it your best shot, but you were in no way as intimidating as Batman, what with only one arm, and dressed in streetwear.

“Hmmm… how about no?” Lydia drew her own gun - a hand cannon - and pointed it at Wrench’s head, turning the safety off. “You have nothing to threaten me with, Y/N. But I have lover boy. Oh… but he’s not your lover boy, is he? He’s still mine.” At your hesitance, Lydia continued to speak. “Oh you should have seen his face during this entire fiasco. He was so fucking happy that I gave him the time of day, and was all too happy to leave you. It was pathetic really. Wasn’t it Wrench?” a muffled whine of humiliation was her answer. “He wasn’t even a good fuck. Couldn’t get me off for the life of him.” Lydia released a long suffering sigh, “Not like Dusan. Now there’s a guy who was hot, wealthy, smart, and oh boy could he make me cum. But no matter. Don’t have to pretend anymore. I have what I want now. Dusan is still mine, after he left his girlfriend. And I single-handedly brought down DedSec. Now all I have to do is… tie up all the loose ends. Starting with lover boy here.”

“Oh? Are you scared of me, Lydia?” You had to get her attention away from Wrench. “C’mon, you’re scared of a one armed cripple? That’s just pathetic. Face me. One on one, just knives.” You holstered your gun and drew your hunting blade. “I know you like to use your machete, Lydia. And besides, what do you have to lose? I’m a cripple. And if you manage to kill me, you’ll only have made Wrench suffer more before you kill him.”

Lydia smirked, and brought out the machete strapped to her back, putting the hand cannon away as she waved the blade around. “Oh… I know you’re baiting me, Y/N. But you’re right. You’re an easy kill, and guns just aren’t personal enough. Fine. You have yourself a duel.”

It didn’t take a moment before Lydia was charging at you, swinging her machete with calculated aim. She wanted this duel to last - wanted to hit you in non lethal areas. It would hurt, and you would slowly bleed out, but you would last longer. Your eyes sharpened in concentration as you dodged the downward slice by dodging to the side, careful to stay on your feet because Lydia had the advantage in maneuverability.

Yes, you were baiting her, you were glad, in a sense that she caught onto your game so easily. It would make her too confident, too arrogant. It would be easy to get Lydia to slip up. So you bid your time, dodging the oddly angled attacks, getting a feel for the room and throwing some cheat shots at her.

Dodge her swing, get in close, quick slice to the abdomen, and dance back away.

Rinse and repeat.

Thanks to what Isa did, you felt like you could keep it up all night, but Lydia didn’t have that advantage, and you quickly began to notice that her motions were getting a bit lazy, there was less energy in her swings.

And then there.

Lydia faltered in her swing due to a misstep, whether it be from carelessness or fatigue, you took advantage of it. You went in and swing your hunting blade down, severing the tendon in her dominant hand, forcing her to drop the machete. She let out a harsh choked scream as she leaned forward to grab at any part of your body. Dancing to the side, you watched as Lydia overstepped, and with a well aimed kick to the back of her supporting leg, she went crashing down to the floor.

Quickly, you got to your knees, straddling the struggling woman, and taking out her hand cannon from her hip holster. With a look of distaste, you threw the hand cannon across the room before arming yourself, once more, with your hunting knife.

“GET OFF OF ME!” Lydia screamed, writhing on the floor and trying to hit you. Her attempts were weak and ineffective given that she was laying on her front instead of her back. The cut on her wrist was still bleeding severely, so she must have been feeling the effects of blood loss by now.

You didn’t lighten up on the pressure against her back, sitting firmly as you played around with the hunting knife in you hands. “An eye for an eye.” You muttered thoughtfully, before plunging the knife through her lower back, in the same place that you had been stabbed by her.

“W-what? Are you going to torture me now?” Lydia hissed in pain, “Well! D-do your w-worst! Dusan will avenge me!”

“You know,” you drawled in low bored tones, “I highly doubt he’ll care about you being gone.”

“No! He’ll get you! He’ll send people after-ARGH”

You interrupted her protests by twisting the knife just a little and pulling out. “You see… Dusan’s got bigger worries than getting vengeance for the death of his latest squeeze. He’s got to worry about DedSec.” You let Lydia go and went to stand, casually putting the hunting knife away in favor of your silenced pistol.

There was a slight shiver of satisfaction from the look of horror on Lydia’s face when she fully registered what you had said. “…no. NO! I killed them. I KILLED THEM ALL!”

Shaking your head, you took out your new cellphone and dialed a familiar number, setting it to speakerphone. The line rung once, twice, before the other person picked up, “Y/N! How is everything on your side?”

“Things are going great, Marcus!” You answered, savoring the look of horror on Lydia’s face. “How is everyone?”

“Well, they’re great! Thanks for having our backs, Y/N.” Marcus thanked, his voice sounding a bit remorseful. “Even though we don’t deserve it… Just… thanks. How’s Wrench?”

“I’m about to get him now. I’ll see you at the gates.”

“Sure thing. Be safe now.”

“Of course.” With a click the phone went dead, and you were left with the despairing wails leaving Lydia’s mouth. Flicking the safety off the pistol, you took aim at Lydia, “You know… I really wanted to make this last. Make you feel everything that the members of DedSec felt. But I realized that I would have done everything that you did to us. And I guess it’s a bit late to take the moral high ground, but for what it’s worth…” You gave a tiny smile at the woman. “At least I’ll never become like you.”

Lydia made to lunge at you just as you pulled the trigger.

She made no sound as she died. Just fell to the floor with a single bullet through her head.

A sigh left your mouth and your shoulders slumped in exhaustion. It was done. Now, all you had to do was get Wrench to safety.

Turning on your heels, you found Wrench, his shoulders shaking and tears falling from the eyes that stared at Lydia’s lifeless body. He didn’t speak as you untied him, as you ungagged him, or even as you supported him on the way out of the safe house. There was only silence and your thoughts.

Thinking back to the way that Wrench had stared at Lydia’s body, with tears streaming down his cheeks; with tears still streaming down his cheeks, you lamented that maybe he’d really loved Lydia after all. That he’d been in a one-sided love as you had. And almost bitterly, you wanted to take satisfaction that he’d experienced what he’d put you through. But it was so vindictive, that you couldn’t.

At the safe house gates, you saw that the three guards had taken your advice and left. In their place were the remaining members of DedSec, ready to receive Wrench, just like you planned.

“Wrench!” Sitara called out in worry, she and Marcus sprinting over. “Y/N… I’ve got him.” The woman assured you, pulling Wrench away from your side so that you could balance your entire body again. “Thank you. We can never repay you.”

As Sitara led Wrench towards Josh and Ray, who stood by as guards, you couldn’t help but see Wrench look back at you. Solemnly, you waved your arm in farewell, “Get better soon.”

“You’re not coming back with us?” Marcus questioned, peering at you through his lensless purple glasses. “Wrench might need you.”

Your face set in a heavy frown as you shook your head. “I’m not coming back to DedSec. And I’m not going back to Wrench.”

“But… he needs you, Y/N.”

“No…” you protested, crossing your arms to create a makeshift shield. “Wrench needs his friends. He needs you, Sitara, Josh, Ray, and even Wrench Jr. But he doesn’t need me.” Seeing the argument that Marcus was going to start, you firmly stood your ground and said what you needed to. “I love Wrench. From the bottom of my heart, I do. But the relationship that we had, that we have… it’s poison. For both of us. And in order for either of us to be able to function, I have to leave. So long as I’m around him, I’ll continue to tempt myself, and to make him feel bad.”

“So you’re just going to leave?” Marcus snarled, “Without saying goodbye to him?”

“I think he and everyone else heard me, Marcus.” You huffed, eyeing the group in the truck, who stared looking extra guilty. “But you know that I’m right. And you know that I’m right. So unless fate makes it so, this is the last that you’ll see of me, Marcus.” With one last nod towards the members of DedSec, you bid them farewell, walking down the street and out of sight. “I wish you all the best.”

One week later…

ZzzzzZttt

“So you are a woman of your word.”

You took a long swig of your drink and gazed, unimpressed at the man before you. “Yes, Mr. McCullum, that’s what I said last week.” You gestured towards the open seat at the cafe table. “Sit.”

ZzzzzZttt

It was the first time you saw McCullum since your first meeting, and in the day, dressed casually, you could finally make out what he looked like. Tall, probably in his mid-thirties, short beard and styled short black hair. He was a handsome fellow, that’s for sure, though his ice blue eyes were intimidating.

“I heard from Wellington and Thomas.” McCullum informed you, analyzing you critically. “They said you wiped their employment with Blume and got them jobs at Cybertech and Abstergo. You’re a difficult person to track down, Y/N.”

ZzzzzZttt

Another long sip of your drink as you watched the people go by from behind your sunglasses. “I did contact you, McCullum. You just overreacted.”

ZzzzzZttt

“Of course I overreacted!” McCullum snarled defensively, “You contacted my fiancé!”

ZzzzzZttt

“Ah. I should also congratulate you on the engagement!” you sent the taller man a bright and beaming grin, genuinely happy that someone you knew had a happy romance going on.

“Ah.. Yes…” McCullum coughed, a blush making its appearance on his cheeks, “Thank you, by the way, for the engagement gift.”

Your smile widened, “I’m glad you two liked it!”

“But… ah… isn’t an entire apartment a bit too much?”

ZzzzzZttt

“Nonsense!” You protested with a kind smile, “The two of you were living in the slums, and that just wouldn’t do. Though I suppose, you’re here to ask me about that job, now, right?”

“I… Yes…. I wanted-”

ZzzzzZttt

… The table fell silent as you glared at the cell phone in your bag.

“You know that I don’t mind if you get that, right, Y/N?” McCullum cleared his throat, staring as you took the offending object out. “It must be important.”

With a grimace, you unlocked your phone to find several unread messages:

Wrench 2:30pm

>> Y/N. I know that you’ve been reading these. Answer me.

Wrench 2:32pm

>> Please? Answer something?

Wrench 2:35pm

>> I’m sorry, alright? I never should have doubted you. I shouldn’t have betrayed you.

Wrench 2:37pm

>> It’s not the same at DedSec without you.

Wrench 2:38pm

>> And you just disappeared from our radar like that.

Wrench 2:40pm

>> I never got to say goodbye to you.

Wrench 2:42pm

>> I wish we could try again.

Typing a quick reply and sending it, you quickly placed the phone down and went back to addressing McCullum. “Sorry for that. Anyways, while I did get rid of all the evidence concerning your involvement with Blume, you gave a bit of a shock when you requested your ideal job.”

McCullum leaned forward in his seat, his ice blue eyes holding all the seriousness that his being could muster. “I was serious, Y/N. I want to work for you.”

A grin crossed your face, and you nodded, clearly elated at the prospect of employing McCullum. “Tell me, McCullum. What do you know about CyberMasque?”

“At the end of my love, I finally see what I must do. I tried so desperately for you to see me as I saw you. I didn’t want to give up on you. But your words, your actions… that in the end, when all was said and done, nothing had changed in your stubborn heart. I know what I must do now.”

Y/N L/N (Me) 2:44pm

>> Let me go, Wrench. Forget about me. Move on.

Wrench 2:45pm

>> I don’t think I’ll ever.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed my work, please consider buying me a Ko-fi!

#shianhygge #shian imagines #watch dogs 2 wrench #wrench imagine #reader x wrench #wrench x reader #wrench #watch dogs 2

179 notes · View notes

tunglo · 2 years ago

Text

John o' Groat Journal, 06 October 1864 - lots of papers carried the full London Telegraph article or shorter paraphrased versions like this. On the one hand this appealed greatly to worthy Church of England types - if Ignatius had worked harder at school he’d: a) be able to spell, and b) know full well what perversions monastic life invariably lead to.

On the other, coverage like this can be blamed for the rash of copycat brotherhoods which sprouted up during 1864/65. As any medieval Bishop would have warned them - don’t threaten people with a good time. Once you’ve described the sin you’ll be overrun with parishioners eager to give it a go...

We have troubles in the religious world. Father Ignatius is in grief. He belongs to the Church of England, at least he says so, and no Lord, Bishop, or Diocesan has said the contrary, probably because the State Church is now so wide as to embrace within its limits every shade of belief from infidelity to papistry. But for that reason I hesitate to speak of the Father lest any of your correspondents should accuse me of doing so in the illiterate and uncultivated style which always marks the Presbyterian or dissenting scribe. Shades of Buchanan, Campbell, and Blair, guide my feeble hand! Now Mr Ignatius, as you are probably aware, has founded a monastery in Norwich, and is endeavouring to propagate monasticism as a 'feature' of the Protestant Church of England, He has succeeded, it appears, in getting some disciples, whose piety may be guessed from what follows.

A young lad, aged fifteen, the stepson of a widow in Norwich, and apprenticed to a printer, was in the habit of attending the choir of the monastery, but against his mother's wish, upon whose remonstrance Father Ignatius promised not to admit him again. But after this promise the boy went or was decoyed there, and a letter was put into his hand by a "brother 'Augustine,' which the lad handed to his mother. This letter was made public both in the provincial and metropolitan journals. I cannot criticise it in the nakedness of the English language, let me say it might have been written by Elagabalus to his dancer, charioteer, or prefect; it revived in the minds of scholars the most polluted and dark page of Greek and Roman history - 'peccatum illud horribile inter Christianos non nominandum.'

Father Ignatius now writes to one of the morning papers, asserting his ignorance of the letter having been written, intimating that the offending brother was expelled, &o, and defending monasticism on the authority of Saints Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine. He characterises the letter as a 'tissue of trash,' 'a passing infatuation almost amounting to insanity,' and seems to have such strong faith in 'celibacy' that he would probably submit his monks and nuns to the ordeal, by which Cyprian tells as the virgins of Africa tested the unearthliness of their nature. Be this as it may, the world knows what it knows about monasticism--why lift the screen to gaze upon the putrid and stinking mass behind?

I would speak of Ignatius himself, his mission is to reform the age and enlighten the heathen at home! Poor fellow, he sadly wants some kindly Samaritan to take him in hand, and fit him for the work. Here is a man speaking of the Fathers who cannot spell his own language--whatever the Fathers were they were at least men of powerful and cultivated intellects. It is enough to make the Ciceronian Lactantius, the philosophie and learned Eusebius rise in the flesh and denounce their successor. Here is a weak minded young man burning for notoriety, an enthusiast in the sense of being a dreaming innocent, an illiterate, an uneducated man, whose diction and orthography would disgrace a national schoolboy (and that's giving margin enough) aspiring to become the teacher of the age. Take this as a specimen of his spelling - it is impossible to describe his grammar and construction - 'emenated,' 'celebacy,' 'primitave;' 'hir;' 'hirself,' 'proofit,' 'eventualy,' &c. and with a lofty scorn he dispenses with the use of capitals, punctuation, or the division of his letter into sentences. God help the age with such a guide! What with spirit-rappers and Protestant monks one sighs for the 'education of the masses,' even with Social Science Congress aid.

#press coverage #for the copy paste

1 note · View note

princessesofauradon · 7 years ago

Text

Lana: Isle vs Auradon

a/n yes it is I, Bianca, aka @darlingsteveharrington , back from the dead and ready to write for Descendants again. So I posted these a while back and I have since revamped them and I am so much happier with these. My babies have been reborn!!!! I’m so happy to be writing for them again I missed them so much anywho (also requests anyone?)

also shoutout to @askhaylieooc I saw your ask and I have no clue what happened but it’s not there anymore :( I did see it though and thank you 1000 times over for showing interest in my OC's and inadvertently helping me start writing for them again <3

Lana on the Isle

All through her childhood Lana never once stepped foot on the Isle. She was raised in the Underworld by her father. The closest she ever got to it was her father’s restaurant and even that place was nothing compared to what was outside its walls. Her mother died on the Isle of the Lost and, despite what most people thought about him, Hades was almost overprotective of Lana.

She has on occasion visited Mount Olympus though. It was always when there was a meeting of the Gods. Her father, being the God of the Underworld, was invited to them (albeit a little reluctantly). The Gods were different than the people down on Auradon. Staging a failed coup wasn’t the worst thing one of them had done and so they always greeted Lana with open arms. It was during one of those visits when she met Kellan wandering around the gardens.

That was the first time Lana had had a living friend. A few days later Yen Sid delivered a letter to the restaurant. Kellan had sent it to her from Auradon. They exchanged letters back and forth and Yen Sid soon became her designated messenger, not that he minded much.

Hades was quite possibly the only parent on the Isle who genuinely cared about his kid. He had a temper, for sure. More times than one he banished people’s souls but still, that was tame compared to some of the more…spirited villains. It was part of the reason why Hades had avoided sending her to both Dragon Hall and Serpent Prep. Instead, he sent her to Elysium three times a week to be taught by some of the better ancient philosophers. “C’mon Lana, who doesn’t want to be taught by some dead guy who everyone thinks is so great”

Hades actually tried to talk Lana out of finally heading up to the Isle. “Lana, those people are crazy. Trust me, you don’t want to be around them” “Can’t be any crazier than the ones down here” After a lot of arguing Lana finally convinced him to let her see the Isle. They compromised and he armed her with a dagger that was said to be able to rip the soul straight out of your body.

Lana was a bit of an urban legend around the Isle so there was a lot of talk when she finally left the Underworld. Mal and Jay were the first ones to approach her. “It’d be in your best interest to fall in line with us. I’ll even teach you everything you have to know about his place personally” “Sorry, I don’t fall in line very well”

That day she went to Yen Sid to pick up her letter and that was when she was approached again. “Your Hades’ kid?” “Who’s asking?” “He came to the Chip Shop a few days ago and told us you’d be heading up soon. Recommended we take you under our wing” “Did he? And who might you be?” “Uma”

Uma and her pirate crew adopted Lana almost immediately. They called her ‘the purest thing on the Isle’. Lana hadn’t been exposed to enough of the chaos to become as corrupted as the rest of them and it had made her more than a little naive. She was trained to defend herself by Uma’s best, Harry and Gil.

It wasn’t long before she ran into Evie in the markets. Lana caught her trying to take some fabric from one of the little shops. “You really should get better at that, you know” They talked for hours and eventually somehow ended up in Evie’s castle looking at all her designs. They exchange some scraps they had gotten ahold of and at the end of the night they’ve successfully made each other a new outfit. Lana becomes almost as close with Evie as she was with Uma and the crew.

Lana told Evie about her single encounter with Mal and she laughed. Ultimately she did convince Lana to talk to her one more time to try and fix things. Reluctantly, Lana followed Evie to Mal’s loft and although she didn’t think she was the best, at least they were on speaking terms. Jay she thinks is pretty okay. Besides Evie, Carlos is her favorite.

She watches him tinker with whatever objects he can find. Eventually, she develops a habit of stealing items from the pile of things that had been confiscated from the new souls. She takes whatever she thinks Carlos will like and gives them to him. They have a lot of surprisingly meaningful talks late at night as he’s messing with whatever object she’s brought him.

The more time Lana spent up on the Isle, the more she realized why everybody, didn’t matter where they were from, looked towards Auradon with longing. It was just out of arms reach, taunting them every single day and she too grew tired of it quickly.

Two guards, each with the symbol of the palace, found Lana one day and handed her two letters. She recognized the one from Kellan and opened it immediately. You’re going to love it here, Lana. I convinced Ben to let you come along and I’m already making a list of everything you have to see first. Lana protested going to Auradon all the way back to the Chip Shop.

“There’s no way I’m going off to Auradon while all of you stay here” “You’re going Lana” “No I’m not. Good luck making me” “You can’t just turn down the prince of Auradon” “I can and I will” “No you won’t” “I’m not leaving you all behind. You’re all more deserving of that place than I am” “Then go and you can help get us there next”

It took hours of convincing before Lana agreed to consider going. She went back to the Underworld to talk to her dad about it. She was more than a little surprised by his answer. “Take the chance to leave while they’re giving it to you” “But what about you?” “I’m gonna be fine, Lana. Besides I got Cerberus to keep me company”

Lana watched the Isle disappear from the back window, almost melancholy.

Lana in Auradon

Lana’s foul mood disappeared quickly once she saw Auradon up close for the first time. She stepped out of the limo that was sent to pick them up and immediately more whispers started. Everybody had a good feeling about who she was for two reasons. One, she was obviously not completely human: the children of the Gods were always exceptionally radiant in a way no one could quite put their finger on. Two, Kellan hadn’t stopped talking about her.

Kellan wasted no time in rushing through everybody, running past Ben and Audrey (almost knocking over Fairy Godmother in the process) and practically tackling Lana as he shouted her name repeatedly. The two of them talk animatedly back and forth for a few minutes, not paying any attention at all to what Ben is saying. It’s not until he clears his throat, telling them he’s about to start the tour that they pay him any attention. Kellan literally begs Ben to let him take Lana. “Come on, babe! I promise I’ll bring her to you in one piece later. (Ben agrees, mostly because he is almost incapable of saying no to him)

Lana takes to Auradon immediately. By the end of the day, she’s caught on to plenty of things and talking to dozens of people. She even talked to Chad for a while, whether it was completely civil is up for debate. As promised, Kellan takes Lana to Ben and needless to say she had a lot of things to say to him. Ben had never been so intrigued by somebody the way he was with Lana at that moment.

It doesn’t take very long for Fairy Godmother to realize that Lana is way ahead of the others academically. “Please, the schools on the Isle are a joke. Maybe if you spent more time trying to educate people other than the royal kids we would have genuinely reformed villains kids” Her constant remarks are what land her in Remedial Goodness 101 with Evie, Carlos, Jay, and Mal.

Lana spends a lot of time learning the politics of everything and what the best way to get her friends off the Isle would be. She asks Ben a lot of questions, after all, who better to ask than the future king? More than a few times she’s been found sitting where ever faces the Isle, a guilt-ridden look on her face.

Lana quickly becomes a huge fan of tourney. Kellan drags her to practice one day and she gets probably way too into it. After one practice Kellan offers to show her the ropes and she quickly finds out she’s terrible at it. Nonetheless, she still enjoys watching and a couple Friday nights later she starts getting way too into the games.

After Jay, Carlos, Evie, and Mal get a call with their parents Lana gets one with her dad. They spend a good hour or two talking and only stop when Kellan joins them. “Oh hey Uncle Hades” “Kid, I’m not your uncle” “You kind of are though”

The longer she spends in Auradon, the better Lana gets at hiding how mischievous she really is. She’s able to talk her way out of whatever trouble she gets into. Usually anyway. Ben is the only one she just can’t seem to convince and it drives her insane.

Speaking of, she hates the fact that Mal opted to use a love potion on him. True love is a big concept on Auradon and although Lana didn’t quite believe in it herself it wasn’t fair to be manipulating it. It causes a huge rift in her already rocky friendship with Mal. “Oh come on, your dad is a villain just like our parents. Don’t act like you don’t want what we do” “Of course I do but manipulating somebody into thinking they love you just to use them to do your bidding is terrible on a whole other level!”

She may not agree with Mal’s method but she still takes her side after the whole incident on family day. Lana was easily the one who had fit in on Auradon the fastest and easiest. Her father had been declared a villain and so that made her a villain’s kid, despite people’s opinions that she ‘didn’t count’.

Later that day is the first time Lana’s hair turns to flames. Some snide comments from more than a few people set her off. She starts screaming profanities, her eyes go dark, and her hair turns to blue flames. She ends up being dragged away from the scene by Jay. It takes close to four hours for the flames to die down.

She has to be carefully guarded until everything dies down. It means Kellan gets into a lot of fights that week. At one point it’s the about the twelfth time he’s late to class and Lana has had enough. “What do you think you’re doing?” “I’m defending you” “I can handle myself, thank you very much” “Yeah well it’s been proven that you’re scary when you’re angry so trust me, getting punched by me is the better option”

Evie requests Lana’s help in getting their coronation outfits ready and the two of them have the time of their lives. One conversation leads to another and somehow they decide to create their own label if all goes well.

Lana’s thrown off by the entire coronation. She quickly comes to the realization that she doesn’t like the spotlight. A lot of her time is spent beside her family who all came down just for Ben’s coronation. She spends it mainly with Persephone, who reminds her of a lot of home and her father.

She’s a little bit surprised after the whole fiasco that happened at the coronation. But she can’t deny that the second Maleficent shows up she begins plotting how to get her friends off of the Isle. Her attention is taken, however, by Mal insisting that she wants to change. If she’s honest, she had no idea that was going to happen. But still, she helps defeat Maleficent and watches as everybody comes to again. “What was that?” “That was me taking into account what you said. Turns out you were right, Lana”

Lana and Evie offer to make Adelaide and Eva outfits for some event they both have to go to and they love them. Soon the two of them are getting commissions from most of the girls in school. They send Kellan and Jay on runs to get more materials for them and they quickly establish a system that works near perfectly.

Two months after the coronation Lana starts spending a suspicious amount of time with Ben. Suspicious in the sense that he always seems to be around, whether it’s while she’s hiding in Kellan’s room or running into him in the most random of places.

It works to her advantage eventually. Even as time passes she doesn’t forget about trying to get her friends off of the Isle of the Lost. She has her fair share of arguments with Ben about laws and proclamations and such. “It’s not as simple as you make it seem” “Isn’t it though? I’ve been through countless pages of documents and there’s not much standing in your way. You’re the King of Auradon, Ben!” “You are insufferable you know that?” “Likewise”

There is so much tension between the two of them and everybody starts noticing it. It isn’t until a conversation Lana has with Mal one day that she realizes it herself though. “You know even while under that love spell, which is one of the most powerful, mind you, Ben always found a way to bring you up” “No he didn’t” “Oh I can assure you, he did”

Lana is the most stubborn person and so the next day she very begrudgingly asks Ben if he wants to go to some postseason party Kellan is throwing with her because “everyone says we have tension and I kind of think they’re right so here I am embarrassing myself and I get-” “It took you long enough” They’re officially dating the next morning.

Lana finally draws up a proposal that both Ben and his committee agree on and not even a week later Uma, Harry, Gil, and the rest of the crew are on Auradon. She is so excited and literally will not leave them alone. It’s then that she understands Kellan’s enthusiasm when she first arrived. “Lana that’s the fourth bathroom you’ve shown us, I think we’re okay for now”

Exactly a day later she’s causing trouble with them again and it’s like she never left them. Lana also may or may not have gotten a little emotional. “You said you’d get us here and you did” “How could I possibly leave you guys behind?”

#lana has so much potential #i'm excited to get to write more!#also i need to revamp my tags lmao #lana #lana elsie #daughter of hades #my ocs #my oc #lana headcanons

8 notes · View notes

demyrie · 7 years ago

Text

Hanakotoba (Camelias are for Longing)

Summary: Three (two) mischievous teachers have some questions about a certain Symbol of Peace and his old arch-nemesis, the reformed "Nature’s Revenge” villain Mandrake. So how did this turn into a discussion about the secret language of flowers?

Tags: oneshot, OTeach3 goodness, flustered Toshinori, mention of sex, implications that there are MHA in-world hero fanzines with dirty content because there fucking are, vague one-sided All Might/OC reference, light Erasermight because I have no self-control, random flowershop AU nod

Notes: I love the superhero genre really I do, including steamy archenemy chemistry. This came out of ... so many things, but mostly a need to embarrass Toshinori and have the OTeach3 fangirl/fanboy out. Enjoy.

Yagi Toshinori was finally, finally getting into the swing of teaching. He no longer became lost in UA's labyrinthine hallways and had committed to a briefcase for his materials, which 13 had courteously alphabetized with charming space-themed dividers. He even took his lunch break every day and the relentlessness of education – most of all the sense there was always something to be catching up on or looking over to better his students' experiences – left him so little time to truly worry or think about his old life that it almost seemed as if he had left the hyper-vigilance and cutthroat instincts of All Might in the past.

That is, until he entered the staffroom one afternoon and a very particular threesome of heroes instantly fell silent and turned to face him and the fine hair on his arms rose in definite warning.

Supremely startled, Toshinori gave Kayama, Yamada and Aizawa a halting smile before ducking his head and heading in, their joint gaze drilling into his back all the while. The terrible three let him get as far as the counter and the electric kettle: As soon as he had filled the kettle for tea and turned it on, there was a stifled rustle and somebody ostentatiously cleared their throat.

“Heyyyy, so, Yagi-san! My man!”

Yamada-san, of course. The frontman for their less savory ideas.

“How can I help you, Yamada-san?” he asked unsurely, still not quite willing to turn around, and so busied himself with righting the tea box. The kettle creaked to life far too slowly. Escape was not an option.

“Psh, I told you to call me Mic!” came the rejoinder, brash and indulgent. With a creak of leather that implied he was leaning back or settling in, 'Mic' continued, tone almost wheedling. “I mean, you've been with us long enough, you're part of the UA family! In fact, All Might, big guy, I feel like we're really close now. Aren't we? I feel like we are.”

“Stop,” Aizawa's deep voice cut in, almost making Toshinori jump. Something was strange about the command, but was Aizawa really that opposed to him fitting in?

“I'm, ah … maybe?” Toshinori mumbled as he turned around, unable to delay it any longer in the name of politeness. Even as he knew it was coming, the sight of the three of them arranged around the staffroom table and watching him unblinkingly made him tense down to his toes and feel like he was stepping into a network of boobytraps. Human boobytraps. Confirming his fears, Mic tilted his head, grinning.

“Soooo can I ask you something?”

“Don't do it,” Aizawa said loudly, unmoving behind his battered UA laptop. Mic ignored him, instead knocking his green glasses down his nose with roguish panache.

“Be honest with me, big guy. Did you and Mandrake ever get it on?”

“Did Mandrake and I – pardon me?” Toshinori gasped, mouth falling open. If he had been holding a mug, he would have dropped it.

They erupted into peals of laughter – or Kayama and Mic did, shoving and slapping at each other, while Aizawa shook his head and glared determinedly at his laptop screen, resuming his typing with clear annoyance.

“That means no,” Mic snorted when he found the breath, a hand to his face.

“Or only once, in a fit of long-buried passion only freed by battle!” Midnight screamed, holding a finger underneath her nose as if to abort a nosebleed and stamping her heels underneath the table in glee.

“You guys,” Aizawa sighed so deeply he threatened to deflate on the spot, leaving the older hero looking between them all open-mouthed with a pounding heart. He was missing something – he had to be – and couldn't put the pieces together. Was this new slang, or a joke? What connection could be made between one of his first arch-nemeses and sex?

“What? I'm afraid I don't understand. This was in order … to … defeat him?” Toshinori eked out, a hand to his (apparently weak) heart.

At that, Mic started laughing so hard Aizawa had to Erase him briefly or risk losing the entirety of the faculty lounge mug collection, the lift of his tangled hair as lackluster as the glare Eraserhead was fixing him with.

“Oooh! Is that how you did it, during that showdown in the thunderstorm?” Midnight cooed, giving a saucy wink. She wiggled in her chair. “We always wondered. The broadcast went dark, after all.”

“No!” Toshinori yelped as the heat rose in his neck, threatening to choke him even more than these preposterous theories. He shook his head, bangs wagging frantically. “No, please, why are we talking about Mandrake like this? He's reformed, you know, and a very valuable member of the League!”

“Yeah, which means you saw his potential even then, right?” Mic wheezed, patting his throat with a glance at his best friend, like a promise not to go supersonic again. Then he sighed, pillowing his cheek on his fist. “Dude, even I gotta admit, when you guys were enemies? Before you were frenemies? You had this vibe. All the staring. All the sweaty battles and the weird, possessive pride he took in being your rival and the way you kept swearing to bring him to justice with your own two hands.”

Toshinori waited for something further to clarify the string of technically objective statements, heinously lost. Mic shrugged.

“Like, you were clearly banging.”

“But we weren't,” Toshinori protested, little more than a rasp.

“What Mic is saying is that there was tension there. And it was kinda horny,” Kayama said evenly with a pass of her tongue over her lips, blue eyes gleaming. Aghast and frozen, Toshinori looked to Aizawa, who he could count on to be objective if nothing else. To his despair, the Erasing hero shrugged.

“Above average levels of horny,” he mumbled, continuing to type.

“I mean, that was pretty much the whole Golden Age arch nemesis vibe if I'm gonna be honest,” Midnight said with a throaty sigh, leaning back. “Like, soooooo much could have been solved if you'd just dropped trow.”

“She has some X-rated fanzines from academy if you want a step by step,” Mic snickered, earning himself a fond and entirely proud whack on the shoulder from the pervert in question.

“I ...” Toshinori said into his hand, singularly mortified. “O-oh my.”

“Please ignore my sex-obsessed idiots,” Aizawa said just loudly enough to be heard over his friends demented snickering. “They haven't been outside today and it's clearly warping their minds.”

“I haven't been outside in weeks,” Mic boasted, turning a gleaming insane grin toward Toshinori. “It's finals!”

“You can breathe, Yagi-san, you know we're just teasing you,” Midnight assured him after a moment, clearly trying to put him at ease. “We all know things were still a little rough back then and everyone had their little tensions and melodramas. We just thought, since we had the source right here, we could put a silly rumor to rest and –”

But Toshinori had a hand over his eyes and was frozen against the counter, towering body as stiff as a board. Midnight tilted her head.

“Um, Yagi-san?”

“I'm just … thinking ...” he began hoarsely. He dropped the concealing hand and took a deep breath and realized, self-consciously clutching his arm, that the entire table was looking up at him with wide eyes. Even Aizawa, and that was saying something.

“After Mandrake reformed and we had our first meeting as the League, at Tokyo hall, he … well, he sent me a gift. Personally.”

“And?” Midnight gasped, a hand to her chest. Mic grabbed her elbow, leaning in and nodding vigorously.

“And he asked me to see him as more than an ally,” he finished very quietly. There was a beat where the staffroom was profoundly silent, the only sound the labored hissing of the electric kettle.

“Did heeeeee ask you to see him as a brother? Maybe?” Mic offered somewhat hopelessly, wincing.

“No,” Toshinori mumbled, feeling his neck warm horribly again. “Just more than.”

“And you thought that was him being honorable and polite,” Aizawa said flatly, clearly extremely disappointed in him.

“It was both honorable and polite, what else was I supposed to think?” Toshinori protested, long fingers tangling desperately with his tie. “Our history as rivals was all the news outlets were talking about at the time and I-I didn't have any context!”

“Well, what was the gift?” Mic asked. “That should have given you some context, huh?”

“It was …” Toshinori paused, and excruciatingly so. Seeing the three of them lean forward, eyes widening even further, Toshinori ducked into his hand again. “A very tasteful flower arrangement.”

It was a curious thing, to hear three people gasp in unison and with such a sense of outrage.

“I had just moved in to a new agency, so I thought ...” he began reedily, knowing how idiotic it sounded even as it left his mouth.

“What kind of flowers?”

Now it was everyone's turn to stare and blink at Midnight, who frowned at him and flipped her silky hair over her shoulder.

“A former villain with a Quirk that controls and creates plant life, who once made Tokyo tower into an absolutely gorgeous trellis during one of his attempts to take over the city, and you didn't think to look for hanakotoba?”

“I thought they were very nice,” was all Toshinori could offer, to the raucous groaning of the assembled heroes and, apparently, the sole retainers of common sense. It was clear that none of them were going to let him walk out of the staff room without entirely embarrassing himself – even Aizawa was committed at this point, possibly through spite alone – so Toshinori grimaced and thought back.

“It was … mostly white and red and yellow. Very densely petaled white flowers, so, camelia I think? Also bigger ones, with thick white splayed petals, possibly gardenias. There were red carnations, forget-me-nots ... daffodils. Oh, and one giant sunflower.”

He listed them off with a frown, plundering the very shallow depths of his horticultural know-how and the distant memory that had previously been a blip on his radar in terms of potential love confessions. Luckily, they were all relatively common flowers even if the arrangement itself was bursting with professional skill. It had been beautiful, he realized with a surge of regret, and thoughtful and Mandrake had been very odd about delivering it. Personally. With minimal eye-contact or explanation. He cleared his throat.

“That's it. The wrapping was blue, too, so I thought it very kind that he'd, er, matched my color scheme.”

For a moment, Midnight just looked up at him. And looked. And looked. And then slowly, delicately put a hand to her head and sighed.

“So. Starting with the least suspicious of the bunch, daffodils mean deep respect. So that's nice.”

The predatory look on her face indicated that 'nice' was a horrendous understatement for what was to follow. She ticked them off on her perfectly manicured fingers with a widening cheshire grin.

“Carnations could be fascination or love depending on the color, but if they were red, that's no question. Gardenias mean secret love. Forget-me-nots are for true love. Sunflowers are for passionate love and radiance. And camelias mean –”

“Longing,” Aizawa finished sourly, glaring up at the older hero as if personally affronted.

“Dude?” Mic whispered, staring at his best friend like he was dreaming. Aizawa, caught, snorted and forcibly returned to his work.

“You know my parents are florists,” he muttered, looking a little angry that the buried knowledge had escaped him in front of his friends. Mic cackled obnoxiously then seemed to catch up on all of the righteous indignation that he should have been feeling, abruptly cutting himself off and whirling to look at Toshinori with an open mouth.

“It was a love confession! Mandrake went out on a limb for you, Yagi-san! A rickety, be-flowered tree limb of secret love!” he exclaimed, deeply offended and deeply loud. He covered his mouth just for effect. “I bet you didn't even text him back, you cad.”

“Actually, we didn't have texting at the time, so ...” Toshinori shook his head and refocused on the unfortunate conversation and the even less fortunate truth. He sighed heavily, brow furrowed. “Oh my. I genuinely thought it was a peace offering of sorts. Considering.”

“The only peace he was offering was a piece of ass,” Aizawa snorted, apparently unable to keep himself out of the conversation. Midnight barked out a laugh and Toshinori coughed so sharply that bright red blood streaked his lips, hastily bending and yanking a worn handkerchief out of his pocket.

“Aizawa-kun, please!” he croaked through the cloth, mortified. Aizawa shrugged and Mic sat his chin on his hands again, pouting.

“Dude, you missed out. I bet he really loved you.”

“Oh shut up Mic, don't say such irresponsible things,” Midnight scolded him, smacking the back of his head.

Mic whined back and they devolved into familiar bickering over the best way to confess love or what obligations came with what kinds of confessions, including what kinds of confessions they had made in their youth and what they had really expected from it. Despite his friends wheedling, Aizawa's contributions were limited to refusing to indulge them on any further knowledge on the language of flowers and ordering them to get back to work and do something useful for once. The usual.

Somehow finding himself passed over as the center of attention, Toshinori quietly filled his mug with hot water, picked a teabag and made a hasty exit while they were distracted, frowning all the while.

“They feel bad for bringing it up.”

Toshinori looked up from where he sat on his customary lunch bench, blinking at the combination of direct sunlight and the unexpected shadow of Aizawa Shouta hanging over him.

He had just come outside for a little bit of fresh air and Aizawa's approaches were unrivaled in stealth, leaving him little room to react. Stunned, Toshinori didn't respond, or he didn't respond quickly enough, so his fellow instructor continued, regarding him with little patience over the crest of his coiled capture weapon.

“Mic and Nemuri. They feel bad for bringing up you and Mandrake.” When Toshinori still couldn't find anything to say, Aizawa sighed heavily, crossing his arms and glaring into the distance where the children milled around on the green, in the sun. “Because it's obvious that you're taking it hard and you're distracted. Upset.”

As little as he spoke, Aizawa was nothing if not observant: Toshinori was certainly distracted and he was certainly upset and he had no idea how to deal with either.

Tangling with such a delayed and important realization had consumed him over the past few days and showed no sign of slowing, especially when he thought about what the next step should be. He was lost in thoughts and regrets, trying without success to triangulate his and Mandrake's rocky relationship over the years and the battles: what it was, and what his now-comrade hoped it could have been. He felt paralyzed, mentally stuck in his doorway on that day and endlessly replaying how jaunty and utterly dismissive he must have seemed in taking the bouquet. The confession.

How could he have done such a thing? How could he not have known? It was all too much, but was it too late?

So, in keeping with his preceding uselessness, Toshinori just cleared his throat and tapped his long fingers together, looking askance. He hoped that Aizawa would give in to their general lack of accord and bad track record and consider his professional duty done with this short inquiry. Be on his way, and leave him to his guilt.

Then, of all things, Aizawa sighed again and took a seat next to him on the bench with peak reluctance, making the hair go up on the older heroes neck.

What, exactly, was happening? Did Kayama and Yamada send him to scold him back into shape again? It was too strange and too unprecedented and suddenly he hardly remembered how to breathe normally.

“How long ago was it?” the homeroom teacher asked, lacing his hands between his knees and staring out at the sun-soaked grass. Once again, as if the man had bound him in his carbon fiber reins, there was clearly no escape. Toshinori swallowed audibly, nudging his own knees closer together to make room.

“Eight … maybe nine years ago.” Toshinori sighed heavily and shook his head. “He did put himself out on a limb, and after we'd been through so much ... It must have taken a lot of courage. Regardless of how long it's been, I have an apology to make.”

“And what would you be apologizing for?” Aizawa asked. “For not knowing what he meant, or for not feeling the same way?”

Toshinori looked over at him, startled, and Aizawa boldly met his gaze, silent and expectant. It was probably the most words they had exchanged in their entire relationship and Toshinori was caught between the urge not to mess up and the urge to just run away, out from under this exacting man's eyes. And the question itself?

There was so much history between the two of them, it was hard to parse. There was the basic shame of not knowing what he meant, not understanding the gesture or the weight of it, true … but also the pervasive regret that he had personally let Mandrake down. Someone who had very strong feelings for him, and yet those feelings were unreturned. Mandrake was a good hero and a better man and Toshinori felt blindly guilty that he had disappointed him in such a personal and heartless way, so what was there to do but apologize?

“Both, I suppose,” he admitted, frowning down at his shoes.

At that, Aizawa shook his head impatiently.

“That's the problem with you. You'll take any excuse to feel guilty,” he snorted, the sheer derision in his tone making the older hero want to shrink into his oversized jacket. “It's no shame you weren't interested in him, but a decade later you're acting like it was a poor personal choice you made out of spite.”

It was all Toshinori could do to stare at him, skin chilling nonsensically. Aizawa continued, relentless.

“It's a useless apology, one that doesn't deserve the breath it would take to say it. The world isn't in your hands anymore, All Might, and sometimes misunderstandings happen. Especially when there are flowers involved, which is a poor substitute for actual communication,” he finished grimly, like he had a lifetime of flower drama stories locked away in his childhood. Then he shrugged, absently scratching at his unshaven chin.

“That's life and you have to let it go and move forward. Otherwise you'll drown in what you didn't do and be of no use to anyone, yourself included.”

Toshinori didn't know what to say to that, at first, as shock and offense and denial warred in him. Then it came to him, because it was really rather simple.

“Ah. Thank you, Aizawa-kun,” he said hesitantly. Smiled. “He's a good man and a good friend, but maybe it's a little too far along for these kinds of regrets. You ... I think you might be right.”

It wasn't exactly a revelation, after all. He could very well be a sentimental old fool prone to self-castigation for things he had no control over. Maybe.

Next to him, Aizawa snorted and quickly stood, their strange truce apparently over in an instant. Had his friends really sent him, or was this something he had chosen to do on his own? Toshinori really knew nothing about him. He watched in dual discomfort and curiosity as the younger hero paused to instill a few eyedrops and shake out his tangled mane, grimacing.

“Just stop brooding,” Aizawa said when he'd finished, replacing his eyedrops in his utility belt and shoving his hands in his pockets as he turned to go. He glanced over his shoulder. “You're winding my idiots up and it doesn't fit your type.”

“Ah, am I encroaching on your edgy Underground style?” Toshinori called after him, chuckling, but Aizawa was already gone around the corner, leaving the Symbol of Peace sitting on a warm bench with nothing but the distant chatter of students and the breeze for company. Despite the scraped feeling of being scolded in such a way, he felt lighter already. Simpler.

Perhaps, instead of an apology, he would send Mandrake a flower arrangement. A very … platonic flower arrangement, full of respect and appreciation. Focus on what he could offer, instead of what he couldn't. He felt a faint heat in his face and hid a smile from no one in particular.

Maybe he would ask Aizawa for help in putting it together.

#erasermight #bnha #all might #toshinori yagi #boku no hero academia

76 notes · View notes

sosation · 4 years ago

Text

Volume is Power

The following is a transcript of my "Audio Liner Notes" for Volume is Power, the album I released earlier this year under the project titled Temporal Distortions.

The album can be purchased for free on my bandcamp here: https://temporaldistortions.bandcamp.com/

and it is available on all streaming services:

-https://open.spotify.com/album/3983Bepp9uxIv1pb9qaEwY?si=qWpTAozTS2ujMQ79R_FZZg&utm_source=copy-link

-https://music.apple.com/us/album/volume-is-power/1557283830?uo=4

and music videos are up on the Local Famous Records Youtube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRIjOlGfx0M

Volume is Power

Transcript of Audio Liner Notes and Recommended Readings

Hi. My name is Anthony Sosa and you have just listened to Volume is Power. I hope you enjoyed it. I began actively writing for this record in December of 2019. Some of the musical ideas were written in previous bands going back as far as 2009 and others were written after I had started working on the record. As you know, 2020 was an insane year. So, as you can imagine, it affected the writing and conception of what we were working on. When I began writing lyrics it was the middle of the democratic primaries for President. I was a Bernie Sanders volunteer. I wanted to talk about issues in the US and around the world. But then COVID happened and George Floyd happened, and I had to talk about those things as well--If anything, to document this moment in time. Honestly, those events backed up what I already wanted to say with this record: Our system is broken.

Sonically, Volume is Power has a lot of specific influences that influenced specific songs. For each track I tried to lean into whatever influences were present at the time and treat each piece almost as a genre study, though the genres span a narrow spectrum along the “rock” continuum. Time -- was, and will continue to be, an important aspect of the project. Temporal Distortions are happening all around us all the time. This record is essentially a series of distortions, or songs, that span, temporally, from the mid 1990’s to the late 2000’s. There are also audio clips from the 1950’s and 60’s as well as from this historic summer of 2020. Songs from my past still inspire me in the present to create an album for the future which is now here. Now, this album will exist in the past for me but for you this is your present. Maybe, if I did my job right, and you are so inclined, it will inspire you to create something in your future.

I had intended to make this album available for free everywhere, but youtube and bandcamp are the only platforms where I can achieve that. You can always email [email protected] and we will send you a free digital copy.

In this Audio Liner Notes track I intend to give credit to all of the amazing artists who helped me create this record. I am honored and privileged to know and have the pleasure of working with so many amazing people and to all of you thank you for giving me your time and energy. Chief among these is Dale Brunson, my colleague and compatriot. I met Dale in 2009 when he was playing in Werewolf Therewolf and I was playing in Housefire and The Raven Charter. We’ve been friends ever since and in 2012 we started a Top 40 cover band called Sweetmeat who is still together as of this recording. Dale mixed and co-produced this record with me and without his patience, insight and guidance this record would have been impossible. I definitely threw him some curveballs throughout this process and he has handled all of it graciously.

I, now, am going to give a track by track breakdown of the record but I am not trying to spend too much time explaining or discussing lyrics. Those are for you to interpret how you will. I’m not great at insinuation, anyway, so I’m sure you get the point. I’d rather discuss the people on the tracks and the musical influences behind them. So:

Track 1 is titled Our Streets and begins with the voice of Rod “Teddy” Smith whom I met on the streets of Fort Worth during the protests this May-July. Rod and I, as well as Defense Attorney Michael Campbell, Christopher Rose and my wife, Amber, started a non-profit organization in the wake of these protests called The Justice Reform League with the goal of advocating for evidence based socio-economic and criminal justice policies at the municipal, state and federal levels and to empower impacted communities through civic education. I, personally, believe that there needs to be more effort put toward educating our community on how local politics actually works, how it impacts us, and how we can get involved and change things. So that is what we are trying to do. I also feel that music, or art in general, can be an educator and is one of the reasons I was inspired to write this record.

In regards to the opening clip with Rod, I actually have hours of footage from weeks of protests in May and June but this clip stuck out to me particularly because it evokes Fort Worth and the particular sentiment I was wanting to express with this record. The piano was played by me, recorded here at my house. At the end of the track are protest chants from one of the larger protest-days this past summer here in Fort Worth. My wife, Amber, and I marched for about 3 weeks before actually beginning to organize. On those later days of the protests I started carrying a battery powered PA speaker on my back in a doggie backpack with a mic and using that for chants and to further project those giving speeches. The album cover is a photo by local photographer Zach Burns capturing me doing just that. Zach being another awesome person I met this past summer. Before I move on, the real first voice (and last) you hear on the album, and multiple times throughout, is of Jordan Buckly of Every Time I Die- my favorite band. Early in the pandemic I paid Jordan $30 on Cameo to say “Temporal Distortions” and to “purchase” a shitty riff idea. I didn’t use the riff, it was god awful like he said, but I made some clips of him because it made me smile.

Track 2 is Daring Bravely.

This song was intended to be a The Raven Charter song and was introduced to the band near the very end of our time together. For those who don’t know, The Raven Charter is the most serious project I have ever been a part of. It was the most important thing in my life for many years. I am not going to use this time to give a history lesson on TRC, though that would be fun. Go check out our stuff if you’re into Prog Rock. So this thing kicked around on my hard drive since 2015, I recorded multiple demos with guitar, bass and drums, over the years and finally settled on a bridge. I didn’t actually write the lyrics until I began working on this album proper in Dec of 2019.

I had the awesome pleasure of doing this song with my boys Daniel Baskind and Erik Stolpe of TRC. Daniel wrote a beautiful solo for this track. It was exactly the energy the song needed and also sounds quintessential Daniel. As I stated at the beginning, I was leaning into the genre for each track and the genre on this track was “Ravencharter” and Daniel nailed it. And Erik, I truly feel, did an amazing job in making this song more than it was. The orchestration and production aspects of his writing for this track are spot on. He really got the vibe I was going for and took it even further. It was great to get to work with both of them again to recreate some of that magic we used to make. The audio clips are from Dr. Brené Brown and her TED Talk “The Power of Vulnerability” from Jan 3, 2011. Funny story about that. When my wife Amber and I first saw Brené’s TED Talks we really enjoyed the concepts she covered. We both came away from watching those remembering the phrase “Daring Bravely,” which is why I named the song that. I like those two words together and the concept they elicit. However, when researching for these Liner Notes I discovered that all along she was saying “Daring Greatly.” She even has a book with that title. So, we’ve been saying it wrong the whole time. Regardless, I prefer “Daring Bravely” because it requires bravery and courage to dare greatly and have confidence and believe in yourself. So be brave. Dare Bravely.

Track 3 is titled Division of Labor.

What radicalized me? Working in the service industry and learning history. This song is essentially an amalgamation of that. The line in the bridge is an Oscar Wilde quote. This was just a rando idea on the guitar that I recorded into my phone on new year's day 2019. Musically, the main guitar riff seemed to me Every Time I Die influenced but when I put drums and bass to it it ended up sounding more like At the Drive In or something, to me. My demo leaned into that a lot more than the finished product. This song definitely ended up in a different place than when I started working on it which is always fun and surprising. Workers rights are very important to me and I tried to put that into this song.

Track 4 is Pay for your own Exploitation.

This is another relatively recent idea recorded into my phone on the acoustic in October 2019. I remember when I did it because my friend and fellow musician/producer Randall C. Bradley from Delta Sound Studios came over and before we could even really greet each other I had to stop and say “hold on I have to record this idea before I forget.” It kinda had an Aerosmith vibe to me when I put it all together in the demo process for the record. Like 90’s Aerosmith. I dunno. I guess really the 90’s are smeared all over this album. Another temporal distortion. And then from the bridge on it goes all ETID. The “sex organs of the machine world” line at the beginning of the song is a Marshall McLuhan quote. The bridge vocals “Politics is war without bloodshed. War is politics with bloodshed,” I heard from Adolf Reed Jr. but I don’t know if he was quoting someone else.

I had the pleasure of working with Double Bear on this song - my Local Famous Records brethren. The gang vocals in the song are myself, Michael Garcia, Brandon Tyner, Garrett Bond, Matt Bardwell, Glenn Wallace, and Dale Brunson and we’re having a lot of fun, if you can’t tell. It makes me happy that we got to work together on this project and I imagine there will be more collabs down the road.

Track 5 is We Make the Past.

This song is essentially a Bush song, or was when I wrote it. Very Pixies influenced. Dale’s production took this a lot further than I imagined in the best way possible. I also showed up to the studio thinking my lyrics were finished but realized I was missing a second verse. The demo version was just like a minute and a half and I extrapolated the rest and got it wrong. Once that started I essentially re-wrote all the lyrics on the spot. The lyrics are meant to be scattered and random, like Gavin Rossdales’, though they come from a book by the late Hatian anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolp Trouillot. Bush was one of my favorite bands growing up in the mid-late 90’s and early oughts. I’ve always liked their raw energy and lyrical strangeness. (The same could be said for my love of The Mars Volta.) So this was my homage to Gavin, Nigel, Dave and Robin and shitty guitar playing. Also, I pronounced “His-tor-icity” wrong. I said histori-ocity and I don’t know why I didn't notice it until really late in the process. Same with “commodozation” instead of “commoditization” Oh well. Making up words is fun too.

Track 6 is Serve-Us Industry. This song was fun. It originally was going to be a new Huffer song. I had the pleasure of being a part of Huffer from 2015-2018 with Chea Cueavas and Jeremy Nelson, and we were working on a new album in 2017. Between Chea and myself we had about 10-13 ideas kicking around. This was one of the ones I had thrown out there. To me it had a Foo Fighters vibe, which makes sense because Chea and I were also playing in The Foo, our Foo Fighters cover band, a lot around that time. I just thought it would be fun to sing about all the mistakes that happen while working in the service industry and having to deal with customers. These lyrics made me laugh and sometimes that’s all you can do.

Track 7 is an interlude titled Employer vs Employee. This is a clip of David Griscom from the Michael Brooks Show episode 145 - Police & the ANC & We Need a Liberation Theology ft. William Shoki & Ronan Burtenshaw recorded on June 23, 2020. I really enjoy David and even though at the time of recording he has been living in Brooklyn for several years he has never forgotten Texas. His insight on economic issues and worker’s rights is immensely important. The underlying music on this track is just myself playing bass and guitar. A bass riff I had laying around for almost a decade.

The Michael Brooks Show has greatly impacted and influenced my life since I became a Patron in Dec of 2019. I wanted to take what was I learning from Michael, David and Matt and their guests and put it into music. Since Michael’s passing in July 2020, David and Matt Lech have gone on to create their own show Left Reckoning. Check them out for leftist theory and international news and analysis regarding the global left. As Americans, we all need a lot more international and historical perspectives.

Track 8 is titled Class Struggle.

This song was influenced by Silverchair's 1997 and 1999 albums Freakshow and Neon Ballroom. At least that’s kinda what I was going for tonally. The quote being shouted by Karl Marx from his Communist Manifesto, with a slight edit. In hindsight I probably should have use “their” instead of “his or her,” but it was an effort to use more inclusive language. I feel like most people hearing this will know that that was Marx, but if you don’t now you do. This track was originally written and proposed to Huffer as an idea in July 2017 but didn’t make it further than that. Dale plays the double stops in the middle of the song.

I suppose I should take this moment to say that this album is my first lyrical endeavor. I have written personal things in the past but never anything for any of the various bands and projects that I have been a part of, save one short lived hip-hop project back in 2010 I did with Aaron Anderson which was never released. So any idea that I “proposed” to any previous band was just music not lyrics. When trying to decide what to write lyrics about it became clear to me that politics and history was what I felt I needed to talk about. As a History teacher, and someone who studied history at the graduate level, I understand that not everyone learns history by reading historical monographs--but rather through pop-culture. So this is my contribution to pop-culture and I hope some people do learn some things by listening to this. And perhaps, then inspired to do some of their own research.

Track 9 is the Stoop Romans interlude.

These are 2 clips from two different performances of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The first is from the 1970 film and the second, I believe, is from the 1953 production. I got them from youtube and you ideally, got this for free, so hopefully no harm no foul. The piano is a repetition of the piano at the beginning of the album. And these clips, to me, summed up the sentiment of many in America in 2020.

That is another thing I want to take a moment to say. The creation of this record and the method of its release is a statement. I do not want to profit from this. That is not why I made it. I made it for the message and I want this message spread as much as possible and the best way to do that is to make it free. So it was a labor of love and I tried to reject the capitalistic game of “the hustle” that most musicians, and artists, are forced to play with their creations as much as possible. It is my gift to you and example that things can be done differently.

Track 10 is Imperialism get Fucking Bent.

Soooo I was reading a lot of Noam Chomsky at the time, what can I say. If you don’t know who that is look him up. He is an important intellectual whose perspectives on recent American history and economics are invaluable. This song was heavily influenced by ETID, though a lot more simple, and was written on the guitar in 2018.

Initially, when I began writing lyrics I wrote stuff about Magic the Gathering, of which I am an avid Commander player, at least before the pandemic. But the tone of the song didn’t match the lyrics so I scrapped them and started over. The clip in the middle of the song I got from the Congressional Dish Podcast hosted by Jen Briney, of who I am a Patron. She got it from the Senate Hearing: United States Strategy in Afghanistan, United States Senate Armed Services Committee, February 11, 2020. The two men speaking are Sen. Angus King (Maine) and Jack Keane: Chairman of the Institute for The Study of War who was appointed by John McCain when he was Chairman to the Congressional Committee on the National Defense Strategy.

If you want to know what congress is up to, which you should, then you should listen to that podcast, it is invaluable. The point of the clip is to demonstrate that these men acknowledge that we will be at war “indefinitely.” They said the quiet part out loud in an untelevised hearing of which at the end of they say essentially “let's not discuss this again publicly.” I’m not a journalist but this is me trying to do my part of getting this information out there. We, the American People, shouldn’t want “preventative war,” eternal war. IMO we should want no war unless all other options have been exhausted. Take those trillions of dollars of our money and give it back to us in the form of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal and free college. Then there will be plenty of money left over to rebuild our infrastructure and provide Universal Basic Income. I believe a healthy and educated populus is crucial to a democracy. We need that in America, desperately. And it would be a lot easier to pay for all of that if we weren’t in Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. And that is just for drone strikes. The U.S. military currently operates in 40% of the world’s nations including most of Africa and Central Asia. Check out the Smithsonian Magazine website for info on this. And read Chomsky. Book Recommendations are at the end.

Track 11 is Ka’s Dance. This is a straight up Stephen King love song. He wrote all the words and it’s the 2nd, 5th, and 8th stanzas from Song of Susannah, the 6th book in the Dark Tower series. The clip is from the audiobook narrated by George Guidall (gwidell). This song was another one that was influenced by ETID. Energetically, it reminds me of Jefferson Colby--the band I was in with Matt and Danny Mabe from 2010-2013. Those two have absolutely influenced the way I play and view music, as well as their father Mark Mabe-who taught me how to play bass. Anyway, that is a story for another day, I hope to collaborate with them again in the future. The clip at the end is Captain Janeway and Chekote from Star Trek Voyager.

Track 12 is You Opened My Eyes. I had the honor and the privilege of working with 3 amazing artists on this song: Tornup, Chill, and Canyon Kafer. Christopher Hill, AKA Chill, and I have known each other for years via Dale Brunson and we briefly worked together on a collaborative musician lottery competition thing titled DIG back in 2017 that never happened. I have always wanted to record with him and had a lot of fun doing so. He is one of the best drummers I know and his pocket gave this song the life it needed. Torry Finley AKA Tornup and I met on the streets this past summer of 2020 during the protests and I heard him speak at the public speaking event we held at Trinity Park-- and he moved me. Eventually, we started talking music and I found out he is a fellow musician and bass player as well, I thought “I definitely want to collaborate with this dude.” Fortunately, this opportunity presented itself and, as I am sure you can tell, this song wouldn’t be what it is without him. He performed the first verse. Canyon performed the sick bass solo before the final chorus and I am truly humbled and grateful to have all of these guys on this album.

Track 13 is Fight the Hegemony. This is by far the heaviest track on the album and I essentially shout out some of my influences in the lyrics. Thrice, Glassjaw, and The Used, Dream Theater, Cohoeed and Cambria and other early-mid 2000’s bands still have a big influence on me. My friend and colleague Chris Musso performed the drums on this track. Chris and I played together in Silverlode in 2004 and in The Raven Charter from 2005-2008. We still play together in the aforementioned Sweetmeat, with Dale, and I am super happy to get another opportunity to collaborate together again. As I mentioned earlier, I volunteered and canvassed for Bernie Sanders during the Democratic Primaries in 2020 and the lyrics in this song were inspired by his movement. Now that I am writing these Liner Notes in early 2021 I want to take a moment to reiterate and clarify-- in the wake of the attempted insurrection on January 6th--this song is NOT aiming to inspire violence nor an overthrow of the system by using violence. It is crystal clear to me now how people can read into things and take what they will. These lyrics are about the Bernie Sanders movement. Period.

Track 14 is Simp for the System (Free Market Capitalism Love Song). This is another one of those songs that, musically, was originally written for Huffer, well the bass part anyway. Chea and Jeremy, both had written completely different stuff but I didn’t want to rip them off so I rewrote it and made it as emo as possible. Brand New, was the band I had in mind, circa Deja Entendu. The lyrics are a joke. I was laughing out loud when I wrote them. I had considered just making it instrumental because for the longest time I couldn’t think of any lyrics to go with it. I didn’t want to do “real” emo but I couldn't think of anything else. Then I was like “ well, often these emo songs were about a girl. What if the girl wasn’t a girl but a system that people simp for all the time?” Ta-da. It was actually Dale who suggested the “Hey girl…” rant in the bridge and I think he was onto something. I hope you thought it was as funny as I did.

Track 15 is Cold War Nostalgia. This song is the oldest one on the record and has gone through the most changes- creating nostalgia for me on multiple levels. I wrote the original version in 2009 for my band Housefire. That version was more upbeat and the main verse riff was a dotted 8th note delay melody...very 2009… and Housefire broke up before it was properly recorded. I really liked the song and re-worked it several times on my own over 7 or 8 years until Huffer began working on our new record. I rewrote the track again to be more “Huffer'' sounding by making the bass carry the melody in the verses rather than the guitar. I also slowed it down quite a bit and went for a more rough sound (thinking Refused-esque) rather than polished, uber-compressed late 2000’s scene music. Chea and Jeremy weren’t that into it, and honestly even with the changes it didn’t sound like Huffer so we dropped it. Then, I picked it up again when I started working on this record and tried to put some words to it, and it has now become this sprawling lengthy piece. The original version was a tad over the 3 minute mark and it is now close to 7.

Lyrics were difficult at first. But because the song, for me, was oozing with nostalgia it seemed like a good topic to start with. I had written a paper in my final semester of Grad school in 2018 for a transnational history class about the Cold War- my area of study for my history degree. That paper is my proudest academic achievement to date, titled “National Narratives in Post Cold War America and the Former U.S.S.R.'' and was about the stories we tell ourselves. The ones we tell ourselves at the interpersonal level and the ones our culture, society and leaders tell us at the macro level--and how the totalitarian can affect those stories. This looked at Nostalgia of the Cold War and how that nostalgia is different for the US and the former Soviet states. All the lyrics from this song are taken from that paper- particularly from certain quotes that I quoted throughout. The first verse, starting with “Nostalgia then…” is either Olga Shevchnko or Maya Nadkarni (both are cited) in 2013 from Kevin Platt’s article “Russian Empire of Post-Socialist Nostalgia and Soviet Retro at the New Wave Competition” published in the Russian Review issue 72 no 3. The second verses’ “Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence?” is from a book titled “Life and Fate” by Vassilli Grossman-- an epic novel about Stalin written in 1960 from someone who lived under him. The only reason it was published was because a friend of Grossman smuggled a copy out of the USSR into the west. One of the few published examples from that period of people questioning the totalitarian state from the inside.

I encourage anyone interested in the full paper to read it, it can be found on my Tumblr blog- Sosations Transmissions.

Now, you may notice that there is phenomenal guitar playing on this track. That is the work of my very good friend Glenn Wallace. Glenn is one of the best guitarists I know. He and I met back in 2004 via Daniel Baskind, Erik Stolpe and Chris Musso from Silverlode and The Raven Charter. The only time we have had the pleasure of playing, or sharing the stage together was in Housefire, so I was thrilled when he agreed to do this song. Glenn was our 3rd and final lead guitarist in the band before we broke up, (following Eddie Delgado and Dusty Brooks). There actually is a video on youtube of one show we played at The Boiler Room in Denton from mid-late 2009. Getting him on this track was something that I had been thinking about for a while but the opportunity finally arose when Glenn, Dale and myself, along with the Double Bear guys: Michael Garcia, Brandon Tyner, Garrett Bond and Matt Bardwell, as well as Erik Stolpe and the resourceful Tanner Hux, decided to start our own record label: Local Famous Records. Now that this relationship has solidified you can expect much more collaboration from all of us as well as more records like this one. Starting a record label with friends has been one of the most enriching experiences of my life and I highly recommend that you try it.

Track 16 is “Be ruthless with institutions, be kind to each other” - is the final track on the album and is a brief quote from the late Michael Brooks from his talk at Harvard University titled: “Michael Brooks MLK Jr. and Love and Power | Class Warfare | Harvard” from the Harvard College YDSA youtube page, recorded on Feb 1st. 2020. I had written a blog about Michael’s passing and how important he was to me personally and to the progressive movement in America today and in the world , and it can be read at the aforementioned Tumblr. I had set this clip aside to put on this record back in May or June of 2020 but after Michael’s passing in July it became clear to me that I would close the record with this sentiment. “Be ruthless with institutions, be kind to each other” is an affirmation I will carry with me for the rest of my life and I will proselytize this message wherever I go. Humans over entities. Always. “The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over all laws and institutions.” As far as the music for this track, it was just me pulling something out of my ass to go under the quote and I did it in one take, on an untuned shitty acoustic (for those familiar, the one from high school and college with the Albino squirrel sticker on it.) I recorded the guitar without any accompaniment into a handheld recording device and just got really lucky that it was an appropriate length. I was going for a Dashboard Confessional vibe and I think I got it.

So that is Volume is Power. Thank you to everyone who helped me create this thing and to those who supported me along the way. I am forever grateful.

Thank you to my wife, Amber, for without her this would not be possible. You are my superhero-bird-watcher, my anchor, my guiding light, my soulmate. Thank you for inspiring me to dare bravely.

Thank you to my parents for allowing me to follow my dreams and drop out of college to pursue a career in music. I know it didn’t make you happy at the time but you believed in me anyway. And thanks for not saying “I told you so” when I decided to go back to school 3 years later.

Thank you to my brother David for all the love and support over the years. For your artistic contribution on Daring Bravely. And for always having the courage to be you.

Thank you to Samantha, Lauren and Matt, for being so supportive all these years. I couldn’t ask for a better step-family.

Thank you to Dale for making this record happen, putting all the work into it that you did, and for putting up with my bullshit.

Thank you to every musician I have had the pleasure of playing with, on or off the stage.

Thank you to Aaron Anderson, Jason Dixon, Andrew Del Real and Anthony Davis for being the first band of dudes I got to do real shit with.

Thank you to the Silverlode/Solace Prime/ The Raven Charter guys: Daniel Baskind, Erik Stolpe, Brandon and Garrett Bond, Brian Christie, Chris Musso, Stephen Thacker, and Brandon Bailey. You guys are my brothers.

Thank you to the guys in Dreams Like Fire, who I only had a brief stint with in 2007 but learned so much from: Alan Mabe, Dathan Martin, Ryan Moody, and Kyle Istook.

Thank you to the Mabe Family for treating me like family and for--literally--teaching me how to rock: Mark Mabe, Matt Mabe, Danny Mabe, Chris Mabe and the beloved Terri Mabe.

Thank you to Chea and Jeremy from Huffer for bringing me into your lives and music. I am so glad we got to do what we did.

Thank you to Neal Todnem and Justin Jordan for being awesome roommates and apart of memories that I will always cherish and for our Tsegull Tsunami.

Thank you to Ben Napier for being a good friend, and at times mentor, and for asking me to be your Bogus “Green Day” cover band. I appreciate our time together.

Thank you to Ansley Dougherty, Nick Wittwer and Scott White for making our rage Against the Machine cover band a real thing, even if only for 2 practices. And to Scott for being my headbang partner at our The Foo and the Kombucha Mushroom people shows. And for trusting me to record some of your demos.

Thank you to Randall Bradley for being such a good friend. I value our talks and our jams and always look forward to hearing that you are in town from Argentina. Your perspective is unique and important.

Thank you to Cody Lee and the 27’s for involving me in your record and to Jaryth Webber for being a badass academic colleague, a badass musician, and for introducing me to Congressional Dish.

Thank you to Ben C Jones for the opportunity to work together on your music.

Thank you to Daniel Kunda for the opportunity to be apart of what you’re creating and for, at times, letting me be your sensei. Your future is bright.

Thank you to Chill, Torry Finley and Canyon Kafer for taking You Opened My Eyes above and beyond where I possibly ever could have. I hope we can do it more in the future.

Thank you to all my Local Famous brothers: Dale, Garrett, Michael, Brandon, Glenn, Matt, Erik and Tanner, for believing in this thing with me and making it a reality.

Thank you to Collin Porter for being a good friend and letting me bounce creative and political ideas off you. I truly value our conversations.

Thank you to Ryan Smith for always being a good friend and for our jammy jams.

Thank you to the bands that invited any of my bands on the road with them over the years--you guys helped make my dreams a reality: Matt and Mike LoCoco, and Danny Borja from Transit Method in Austin; Nick Barton, Trey Landis, and Justin Huggins from Sleepwalking Home in Tulsa, and Johnny Hawkins, Mark Vollelunga, and Daniel Oliver from San Antonio’s Nothingmore. The memories I have from those shows and trips are truly priceless and I am thankful to have those experiences to look back on.

Thank you to Dr. Johnny Stein, Dr. Joyce Goldberg, Dr. Christopher Morris, Dr. Patryk Babiracki, and Dr. Andrew Milson at the University of Texas at Arlington for greatly influencing my historical knowledge and thought that has influenced the making of this record.

Thank you to all co-founders of The Justice Reform League: Amber, Christopher Rose, Rod Smith, and Michael Campbell. And to Thomas Moore from no Sleep till Justice. I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to start a nonprofit with and I look forward to our future.

Thank you to Michael Brooks, Hank and John Green, Dr. Cornel West, Slavoj Žižek, Dr. Kevin Dunn, Dr. Richard Wolff, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Fred Hampton, Rita Starpattern and Edward Snowden for being my exemplars, always daring bravely and inspiring me to do the same.

And thank YOU for taking the time to listen to the songs, and this Audio Liner Notes track. If you are unfamiliar with any of the influences I have mentioned over the course of this I encourage you to go listen. And if those bands resonate with you, find out who influenced them- you’ll find more awesome music, more temporal distortions, if you will. I hope you find some inspiration to create your own work, whatever that may be, and to put it out into the world.

Dare Bravely. Salut.

Anthony Sosa

12-6-2020

(Updated 2-6-2021)