#to do actually good moralizing. OR the sophistication to just. have fucked up shit happen and like. damn. thats fucked up.

[istherewifiinhell]

did i ever get around to mentioning that my least favourite era of tf cartoons (2010-2017, all technically in the same 'continuity' even though. their obviously not actually. and also. that real bad comics lore) there is so much messaging around the idea that like "you need to stick up for yourself" but it will always be completely encounter to the way everyone acts, the meanness of the humour used, and that like... you have to stick up for yourself! against your direct superiors! no they are NOT beholden to you 'sticking up for yourself' and have no particular method of account. You just! Have to! and once you do! they will, ofc, due to their good nature, realise the error of their ways and redress.... i mean. maybe. at least until next episode?

do i think this has ANYTHING to do with how propagandist each show is regards to... the government, the military, police or even yeah religion, and or how they characterize their settings with having NO tf civilians/non combatants.... WELL.

[stardustprompts]

the poppy war - r.f kuang   sentence starters change tenses/pronouns as needed !!  some lines have been edited for clarity / length / ease of roleplaying tw :   drugs , death , murder , nsfw , prostitution mention , language

‘take off your clothes.’

‘why would anyone drug themselves before a test?’

‘you’re about to be a very lucky girl, sweet.’

‘wow that’s great. really great. Terrific.’

‘your folks are assholes.’

‘well fuck the heavenly order of things.’

‘don’t you have actual responsibilities?’

‘I don’t want to get on _____ ‘s bad side.’

‘you would make a terrible prostitute. no charm.’

‘what is so wrong with getting married?’

‘do you want to die?’

‘everything is spilling out of my head as quickly as I put it in.’

‘please do not commit spousal homicide.’

‘give me a way out of this shithole.’

‘hello, I’m praying.’

‘I seduced him with my nubile young body. you caught me.’

‘you can’t scare me into a confession, because I’m telling the truth.’

‘and that means you’re shit at your job.’

‘if you cross them—- if they even think you’ve looked at them funny—- they can and will hurt you.’

‘it’s easy to lose a language when you never speak it.’

‘you’re offending them with your very presence.’

‘they’ll make you an outsider, because you’re not like them.’

‘no matter what they say, you deserve to be here.’

‘I’ll kill you. I will fucking kill you.’

‘I went out in the sun once. you should try it sometime.’

‘oh, you’re the one ____ hates.’

‘you’d be a prick too if your family was both rich and attractive.’

‘honestly? I think he just comes in here to get high.’

‘I think you’re flattering yourself.’

‘unless you’ve got a weapon, don’t aim for the face. the neck’s a better target.’

‘we aren’t here to be sophisticated. we’re here to fuck people up.’

‘this is the only kick you’ll ever need, really. a kick to bring down the most powerful warriors.’

‘power dictates acceptability.’

‘he hasn’t done anything to earn my respect. all he’s done is act high and mighty.’

‘you’re nothing. you shouldn’t even be here.’

‘consider me bullied and intimidated, just let me sleep.’

‘he’s playing with her. he’ll end it soon.’

‘they’re good at fighting, but not much else.’

‘spend a lot of time looking at ____’s eyes do you?’

‘a betrayal of that sort would not have been out of character.’

‘come on, you belong here too.’

‘they’re not going to get rid of me like this. not this easily.’

‘I’m calm! I’m extremely calm!’

‘you’d rather kill your own people than let the opponent’s army walk away?’

‘you don’t let an enemy walk away if they’ll certainly be a threat to you later.’

‘he can’t stop raving about you.’

‘oh, don’t pretend to be bashful. you love it.’

‘you’re a walking disaster.’

‘anyone this obstinate deserves some attention, if only to make sure you don’t become a walking hazard to everyone around you.’

‘I heard he got drunk on rice wine last week and pissed into ____’s window. he sounds awesome.’

‘it’s me, your favorite person in the whole wide world.’

‘I do not have a problem. you are making up this problem for reasons unbeknownst to me.’

‘you’re killing the mood.’

‘they were weak as shit. scrawnier than you, even.’

‘you’re a real asshole. you know that right?’

‘your state of mind is just as important as the state of your body.’

‘sometimes you must loose the string to let the arrow fly.’

‘because I want to break his stupid face.’

‘he’s the most dangerous when he’s desperate.’

‘from this point on you’re just going to be a danger to yourself and everyone around you.’

‘you’re too reckless. you hold grudges, you cultivate your rage and let it explode, and you’re careless about what you’re taught.’

‘I knew I was the only one that could help him.’

‘they honed his rage like a weapon, instead of teaching him to control it.’

‘one urinating statue for my easily entertained friend.’

‘I don’t believe in gods. but I believe in power.’

‘one might say you’ve been obsessed with ____.’

‘don’t look to your left. pretend you’re taking to me.’ / ‘I am talking to you.’

‘we’re studying very weird things.’

‘I don’t actually know what I’m getting into.’

‘here is what happened: you called a god, and the god answered.’

‘you know that if you don’t get answers now, the hunger will consume you and your mind will crack.’

‘you’ve glimpsed the other side and you can’t rest until you fill in the blanks.’

‘supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world.’

‘I’m supposed to take it as true that you’re a god?’

‘I’m not a god. I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.’

‘are we getting high? oh, wow. we’re getting high.’

‘ah. the law. so inconvenient. so irrelevant.’

‘we are not madmen. but how can we convince anyone of this, when the rest of the world believes it so?’

‘the price of power is pain.’

‘I understand the truth of things. I know what it means to exist.’

‘prey do not question the motives of the predator. the dead do not question the living. mortals do not challenge the gods.’

‘I killed for you. I would have done anything for you.’

‘I have seen the end of things. the shape of the world has changed.’

‘war doesn’t determine who’s right. war determines who remains.’

‘it’s alright. I know what you are.’

‘I thought I was the only one left.’

‘we have developed the power to rewrite the fabric of this world. if we don’t use it, then what’s the point?’

‘I don’t mess with that shit. it screws you up.’

‘I understand the appeal, I really do, but I like having my mind to myself.’

‘he’s a charmer. like a new puppy. you think he’s adorable until he pisses on the furniture.’

‘there’s no routine. no discipline. nothing you’re used to. am I right?’

‘so you’re the last of your kind. that’s sad.’

‘If you hold the fate of the country in your hands, if you have accepted your obligation to your people, then your life ceases to be your own.’

‘____ feared, and so he held you back.’

‘great danger is always associated with great power. the difference between the great and the mediocre is that the great are willing to take that risk.’

‘don’t ever let go on that anger. rage gives you power. caution does not.’

‘don’t give in... you’ve been so brave... but it takes more bravery to resist the power.’

‘the nature of this god is to destroy. the nature of this god is to be greedy, to never be satisfied with what he has consumed.’

‘so. screaming at rocks. is that, like, normal behavior here?’

‘fix this. prove your worth. do your fucking job or get out.’

‘I saved your life. doesn’t that make us at least a little square?!’

‘I was scared of you. and I lashed out.’

‘I thought I was better than you, and I’m not. I’m sorry.’

‘when I killed it, it felt like murder.’

‘look, I’m happy to discuss this, really, but I’m currently leaking life out three different wounds and I think I may pass out. would you give me a moment?’

‘well maybe ____ should get his head out of his ass.’

‘ ____ is more fragile than you think.’

‘look, asshole, I don’t need you to tell me what to do.’

‘they say he can read the future. shatter minds.’

‘you misunderstand the nature of our relationship. I am not your friend.’

‘he’s not human. he—- I don’t know what he is.’

‘but ___ was never allowed to be human.’

‘do you trust me?’ / ‘no. but that’s irrelevant.’

‘you don’t know what true suffering is.’

‘I have seen more than my fair share of suffering.’

‘that boy is beyond redemption. that boy is broken like the rest.’

‘I don’t want to be saved! I want power!’

‘that power will destroy everything you’ve ever loved. you will defeat your enemy, and the victory will turn to ashes in your mouth.’

‘we’ve missed something. something’s been laid out for us, but we can’t see it.’

‘fretting won’t make the dead come back to life.’

‘there was nothing human in those eyes.’

‘It was a nightmare, and I couldn’t wake up.’

‘I don’t need your pity. I need you to kill them for me.’

‘whatever it takes. swear it on your life. swear it for me.’

‘I won’t judge him. I don’t dare, because I don’t have the right. and neither do you.’

‘you asked me why I wouldn’t stop him. now you understand. you can’t stop an avenger. you can’t reason with a madman.’

‘I am afraid of what he might do in his quest for vengeance. and I am afraid that he is right.’

‘I am about to do something terrible. and you will have a choice.’

‘they give nothing to the universe, and the universe owes them nothing in return.’

‘you cannot survive my death.’

‘you’re trying to deceive me. you don’t get to deceive me.’

‘this is not the way. this path leads only to darkness.’

‘when are you going to stop being such a damn coward? what are you running from?’

‘you will turn the world to ash, and only demons will live in the rubble.’

‘you dress up your crusade with moral arguments, when in truth you would let millions die if it means you get your so-called justice.’

‘you have not cared about anything for a very long time. you are broken.’

‘I am terrified. but only because I’m starting to remember who I once was. don’t go down that path.’

‘your country is ash. you can’t bring it back with blood.’

‘I’m so sorry. I tried to warn you.’

‘you know the worst part? we’re so close to home.’

‘did you miss me? did you miss this?’

‘I just gave him some of his favorite medicine.’

‘resistance here means suffering. there is no escape. no future.’

‘you have nothing to fight for anymore’

‘what are you defending? you owe ____ nothing.’

‘we were disposable. we were tools. tell me that doesn’t make you furious.’

‘I am sick with fury.’

‘I will die on my feet. I will not die a coward. and neither will you.’

‘we could stay here. we could stay here forever. we wouldn’t have to go back.’

‘you’ll have to live with the consequences. but you’re brave ... you’re the bravest person I’ve ever met.’

‘I have lost everything I care about. I don’t want peace, I want revenge.’

‘I don’t need to sleep. I need to feel nothing.’

‘do you want forgiveness? I can’t give you that.’

‘we avenged him. he’s gone, but avenged.’

‘you have to believe that it was necessary. that it stopped something worse. and even if it wasn’t, it’s the lie we’ll tell ourselves, starting today and every day afterward.’

‘aren’t you supposed to be a seer? do you ever see anything useful?’

‘we have an enemy whom we love.’

‘I’m going to find and kill everyone responsible. you cannot stop me.’

‘oh I’m not going to stop you.’

[morwensteelsheen]

for the character meme: faramir and cassian

yaaaaaaas thank u 👑👑👑

Faramir

How I feel about this character

Oh boy. Yeah. So I see in Faramir what I wish I were — not just the good stuff like the pacificism and the intellectualism and the romanticism, but what I wish my flaws were too. It’s hard to not treat him as something of a literary patron saint of historians for all the incredible exposition work he’s given throughout the books, y’know? Like he has this incredibly historically-minded perspective on things, yet instead of taking it and behaving (as I tend to) in a sort of deeply pessimistic, confrontational, and defeatist way, he uses it to enable his (over)confidence. And I think that’s really brilliant and something I wish I could do. Yeah. God. I feel a lot of things about Faramir all the time, constantly torn between gender envy for him and normal, slightly furious envy lmao.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

lol whoops it’s just Éowyn lol. I am very much pro he and Aragorn shagging, if I don’t think too hard about it, but there are basically no other characters in the book who have forceful enough personalities to act as a countervailing force to some of his, uhhhh, Extremes, and I think Éowyn ends up being his [David Duchovny voice] human credential, which is lovely.

I guess I’m also partial to the Faramir-As-A-Sloppy-Bitch hypothesis which has him behaving like a bit of a fuckboy, but that’s not really shipping so much as character development? I guess?

My non-romantic OTP for this character

I’m buying him one of those awful one man wolfpack tshirts lmao, my dude absolutely does not have pals. I think he’s got loads of decent working relationships with people and is definitely charismatic when he wants to be, but outwith that……. lol

My unpopular opinion about this character

looooooool, I feel like the Faramir Is Not A Crybaby one is well trodden ground at this point, but one of my favourite unpopular opinions is that I think he’s, like, 15% more cynical than everybody gives him credit for. I think a lot of what he does can be construed as very obviously, uhhh, putting the moves on, I guess? Like I think he’s not making grand statements to Éowyn because he’s Magically Compelled To Do It, but because I think he absolutely 100% knows it’s stroking her ego. And I think playing one man good cop/bad cop with Sam and Frodo isn’t him rapidly changing his Take on the situation after getting new information, I think he’s very purposefully trying to unsettle their psychological defences a bit so he can get a better sense for what’s really going on and whether these two guys are going to end up handing Isildur’s Bane™ over to Sauron.

One thing I wish would happen/had happened with this character in canon

Actually nothing super significant. I guess I think the one kid shit is nonsensical. Even without turning on dumb horny shipper brain that says 0% chance he and éowyn weren’t fucking loads, I genuinely refuse to believe that any self-respecting feudal lord would not at least go for the And A Spare, if not And Several Spares, especially if you’re Faramir and your entire family got obliterated leaving you — Man Who Was Not Meant To Hold The House Down — the sole survivor.

Beyond that Faramir gets exactly what he ought to out of LOTR (though I would have loved to have read about his misery life in the Fourth Age), and I can’t really complain? Maybe a line or two at the trothplighting in Rohan? A chat with Galadriel? idk he really did fine for canon appearances imo

Cassian

How I feel about this character

There’s no way to say this without sounding slightly unhinged, but the scene in R1 where he shoots the injured informant on the Ring of Kafrene is genuinely one of my favourite moments in all of Star Wars. It threw down the gauntlet for visceral depictions of the unfeelingness of the GFFA in a way that hadn’t really been done before. Both the OT and the PT make gestures at it (the destruction of Alderaan is a good example, as is the slightly-bungled slavery subplot in TPM), but neither really show how fucked up people can get when they’re living in a fucked up world and they never show good guys doing things that are of ambiguous morality. Cassian ends up making a (surprisingly, given it’s a Mouse™ production) sophisticated argument for how the Real World works once you get past the golden boy heroes. Yes Luke blows up the Death Star, and yes he brings Vader back to the Light — both things that are unambiguous moral goods — but the reason he’s able to do that is because there’s someone like Cassian out there taking the karmic/emotional/spiritual/whatever hit to enable the Golden Boy behaviour. And I think that’s a really beautiful, really exciting bit of narrative development for SW generally, but to also do it in the context of Cassian — who actively defends his choices? That fucking rocked. I’m bracing for impact with the new show but R1 Cassian is absolutely one of my favourite SW characters, lovely wee man.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

Literally just Jyn. Actually funnily enough he’s very much like Faramir to me in that I think if he didn’t end up with Jyn, he wouldn’t have really ended up with anyone at all. Not in a weird comphet or soulmates way, just in that I think sometimes people need a very specific kind of personality to wear down their defences and sometimes it’s a very specific kind of personality.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

Okay in a fix-it AU I like to think he and Hera would get along fabbo, but from a great distance, as I think each of them would prefer it. Otherwise, I’m sorry to say it but my guy absolutely does not have pals lmao. Cassian no mates rip

My unpopular opinion about this character

I don’t think he’s actually repentant for the fucked up shit he’s done. When he tells Jyn that he’s had to do stuff he isn’t proud of, he’s not saying that because he’s seeking absolution or a chance to do penance or whatever, he’s saying it because it’s objectively true. He has done some stuff he’s not proud of, but contextually I think it’s pretty clear he’s able to justify it to himself well enough that he’s not looking for redemption or whatever.

One thing I wish would happen/had happened with this character in canon

I feel like I need to whisper this so the monkey’s paw doesn’t curl in advance of the show, but it would be genuinely very interesting to see him try to build an actual espionage network for the Rebellion. SW: Rebels touched on the notion of industrial sabotage (actually Mando did too, didn’t it?) and I think it would be especially interesting to see them try that out in a resistance/rebellion framework via Cassian. Let him do some covert ops organisation of workers to undermine Imperial production/supply lines or whatever.

Give me a character xxoo

[theinvisibledreamergirl]

Hopeless

Pairing: Ethan Ramsey x F!MC (Klaw Craig)

Words count: >1.7k

Category: Angst

Warning: none

A.N: Well as per your request this is the awaited fic for you and maybe you didn’t expect it to be such this angsty. Let me know what do you think. This event starts after this post for everyone who’s not familiar with it.

———————————————————————

Klaw had never ran so fast in her life like now.

She had to do something.

Something to stop Simon from telling Dr. Ramsey about the Instagram photo she posted. And the reason?

Simple. After Dr. Ramsey admitted to her the infamous patient Mr. Nigel Platt- nothing went normal as she thought at first. Nigel had several symptoms that none of them concluded to a specific illness but leading to more questions than answers. Again this wasn’t the real problem.

Nigel’s attitude against her while questioning her abilities to handle this case, made her blood boiled despite she held a great poker face to him that everything seemed to go flowing. It was ironic this kind of situation happened again to her- when she confronted the mafia man Miles in her first day, the latter doing the same thing as Nigel. With all of her anger and frustration she blamed Dr. Ramsey for this and decided in a drunken state to create an emoji and to show off to people on Insta what an asshole he was. But when she got sobered like today, she was pleading that everyone would get it as joke and not something that should be taken seriously. Because it was a moment of anger okay? She didn’t know how to revenge to him because he was her attending after all. She couldn’t file a complaint to him. Right? After finishing this case she wanted to have a man to man talk and to understand why he assigned this kind of patient especially to her. Did she do anything wrong?

If yes, what?

Because of Dr. Banerji’s secret?

Her mind was fogged up with lots of questions while she was running in the halls of fifth floor- where his office was. When she turned the corner she bumped into nurse Sarah and apologised.

“Sarah do you know where’s Dr. Tennant?”

“Oh. I saw him with Dr. Ramsey while exiting the Diagnostics Office.”

“Shit.”

“Something wrong Dr. Craig?”

But Sarah didn’t have an answer as she saw the young intern run again. Klaw knew where the diagnostics was and her breath hitched when she saw the two doctors conversing with each other in such seriousness that made her shivering from fear. Then she saw Simon slipping from his white coat his phone and telling something to Ethan. But before that she lunged forward while shouting.

“STOP!”

Both attendees flinched when they heard her frantic voice and saw her raised hands while shaking. They frowned in confusion at her as the baritone voice asked.

“Dr. Craig what is this? Another stunt of yours?”

“No no please just hear me out because I know that I owe you an apology Dr. Ramsey.”

He raised a cold eyebrow. As always he would never change that reflex she thought. “Pray, tell.”

“Well... I think that you’re quite aware now what I’ve done so far and... I’m truly sorry for that. I mean... who in the world does the mockery of someone in social media that everyone starts to make fun of it? Me with a whiskey around yesterday decided to throw that thing but I fully regret it. So... I’m saying it again Dr. Ramsey that I’m sorry I posted that photo on Instagram and I promise to delete that immediately.”

“What’s that photo?” He asked in confusion while shaking his head. “Because I didn’t get this Rookie. Would you like to explain to me what the hell is even the Insane thing?”

“But weren’t you seeing it with Dr. Tennant right now? He was showing it to-”

“Uhm-” Simon cleared his throat. “Klaw, I was showing Ethan the tomography of our patient after we diagnosed him.” He turned his phone to her and immediately she wanted nothing more than to burn herself or hide somewhere because now she felt so screwed. “I wasn’t going to tell him y’know.” Then he snorted when he finally realised what her intention was.

“Excuse me, can someone right now tell me what in the hell is going on?” Ethan glared at them when he felt his anger building up seeing the interaction between these two and the fact that they were sharing a secret made him raged.

The young doctor gulped hardly when she lit up her phone, opened the app and showed it to her attending. But what made Ethan even more angry despite he was remaining calm all the time was the description she had written:

Ladies and gentlemen I present to you the icy blue-eyed Dr. Ethan Ramsey in his usual mood- killing the interns.

Even though it may sounded funny to someone’s else ears, he wasn’t killing anyone. Especially when he wanted to push her to be the best doctor and to learn by hard. But clearly to him, maybe it was a mistake for picking her so that was his final straw.

“My office.”

He gave her phone back while trailing off and Simon gave her an encouragement smile as if meaning that it was the usual one of the many Dr. Ramsey’s moods but for Klaw this was unusual.

Ethan didn’t even let the door open for her as he did always and slammed it forcefully in her face. And that was her final straw.

“What the fuck?!”

“Language Craig!”

“Do you even know moral codes or what?”

“I’m not going to learn from you because you clearly have absolutely no knowledge about them.”

“Are you really worried for such a stupid little thing? I told you I was drunk!”

“Do you really think that I care that much for an animated figure which clearly doesn’t represent me but just another stupid jokes of yours?”

“Well my jokes are better than your dryly and sophisticated ones.” He scoffed unbelievably, not seeing that his words were actually hurting her. “I want to be taken off the PITA’s case because in my opinion there’s nothing left for me to do with a man who doesn’t respect me as a doctor and doesn’t acknowledge my work showing his belligerency and rudeness.”

So that’s why she was angry at him. But that didn’t even make him change his mind. He wasn’t surprised to see her in this state of rage and for a mere of seconds he thought how cute she looked when she was serious and flushed. Ethan gave her an unamused smile, not interested in what she just said. “No.”

“I beg your pardon?” Her right pupil dilated slightly while she was frowning.

“You’ve had difficult patients before. Keep trying.”

His calmness was making her even more furious and before she could stop herself she came forward and slapped her hands in his desk, while facing him with a shaking breath. This of course caught him off guard and stood up from his chair doing the same as her.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Why are you punishing me?”

I’m not punishing you. I would never do that.

“Or is my saying right- that you enjoy to kill interns and make us suffer huh? Do you enjoy that?”

“You need to keep your personal feelings separate from your professional feelings Dr. Craig.” She tried to reply but was cut off. “I’d think very carefully before you say something to embarrass yourself.”

“Then why have you selected me this patient? For what reason?!”

“To challenge you, to push you to be the best doctor you can be! Don’t you get it already?”

Despite the closed door their voices could be heard loud and clear from outside. Their faces were in a close proximity without breaking their gazes to each other. Icy blue could see in dark fiery browns the embarrassment and the astonishment when she received his words. She understood now. It was never about Naveen’s secret that they were sharing. It was about her development that even after all of this he still thought of her.

For her best.

As a real attending should.

He sat on his chair with his crossed arms whereas she backed off a bit from his desk only to hear disappointment from him.

“When I make my evaluations every year... every intern that I’ve chosen were the best amongst the best and for that-” he flickered his eyes to her again with the coldest expression on his face that she had ever seen and shivered. “- I believed I saw a potential in you. It’s very rare that I’m wrong Rookie. But I’m willing to admit when I am... and I think I might have been wrong about you.”

The final words left her not only speechless but also breathtaking. She couldn’t feel her lungs  as if everything stopped in that moment. Her heartbeats were giving her aches in her chest as she stared right back into his eyes- regret and pain. Ethan Ramsey regretted his intern right in front of her just like a slap in her face. That was the final cue from him that she wasn’t the best intern he had thought because this intern (she) had let him down.

Klaw shifted her left shoulder and broke eye contact with him while Ethan quirked sadly his mouth knowing her fully well anytime she got that nervousness. He got used to her and he hoped that these words would encourage to be better or otherwise- worse than now.

Deeply ashamed she couldn’t say another word and left his office without glancing back. She was determined to solve that case whatever that brat had and to prove once again that Dr. Craig or Rookie was the best intern he had chosen for the program.

Ethan sighed heavily when he opened his drawer to reveal her file that was the first of many others and stared down at her CV photograph that showed- bravery.

“You can do this Klaw.” He whispered to himself and for the first time he said her name which in Ethan’s horror wasn’t something good. He closed the file with a thud and put it back on his drawer while getting up from his chair to take a look in the window. He could feel his heartbeats quickening when he saw Klaw leaving with his patient Kyra who was trying to console her. At least she had friends to look after her.

Stop it Ethan. Stop thinking about her.

Reluctantly he pulled away from the window to busy himself with other important tasks so he would forget about piercing brown eyes.

[frumfrumfroo]

What do you think about the takes the Fisrt order or imperium represent "nazism" or at least a fascist system? Lindsay ellis once said that maybe Disney didnt put an ideology for the First order because then it would be very obvious it stands for an old fascist system and buying Stormtrooper merchandise as well as Palpatime or anything would be viewed as strange.

Okay, first, the only comment on the Empire relating to a real political system Lucas has ever made was that it represented his disgust with American Imperialism. So.

Second, the idea that anyone should be concerned about people buying merchandise for the fictional evil empire is deeply stupid. This is the Victorian Gentleman of the internet once again raising the spectre of ‘hysteria’ and fundamentally failing to understand how people interact with fiction and what the difference is between fiction and reality.

The First Order (and the Empire, of which the FO is just an expy) has no ideology because it’s not meant to stand in for any actual political system or be a realistic depiction of any real regime. It is not a comment on systems of government and it is not meant to be in any but the most broad imaginable ethical sense. Actual politics are not the point. The point is good vs evil. The iconography invoking various totalitarian regimes is there to tell you that they’re bad guys bent on oppression, it’s a visual shorthand which conveys everything you need to know to grasp the conflict at hand. What’s being reinforced about the Empire/FO in these motifs is its mass conformity and total submission to an authoritarian strong man, the repression of individual agency and responsibility. As ever, this is a metaphor about fear and selfishness. Fear allows the Empire to come to power, fear sustains it; fear and complacency. These are universals meant to provide the external threat to show the impact of our characters’ choices.

Because, again, SW is a story about individuals and their individual journey to ethical adulthood. Everything that happens in the war plot is in service of that interior journey. The world of SW is a metaphor.

If people want to have an adult conversation about fascist symbolism and problematic attitudes towards the history of oppressive regimes in Hollywood cinema, they should consider interrogating how the Nazis have been reduced to a generic, dehumanised bogeyman whose only necessary quality is vaguely defined evilness.

The social Darwinistic values and ‘scientific’ racism of Nazi ideology are not an incidental feature. That is what Nazism is. Blowing up planets with a giant space laser as a show of force because you’re a Saturday morning cartoon villain is not comparable on any level to even the idea of the Holocaust never mind the reality, and people invoking such comparisons ought to be fucking ashamed of themselves. I shouldn’t have to explain why pointing to any and all extremely generic villainy and saying ‘they are literal Nazis, enjoying this action-adventure film makes you a literal Nazi apologist!!!!!’ is far more offensive than cosplaying a Stormtrooper or shitposting to r/EmpireDidNothingWrong will ever be.

And I know this shit is hypocrisy all the way down, because if there were legitimate moral concerns about the people who buy a Darth Vader action figure thinking he’s someone to literally emulate in real life instead of a fun pretend power fantasy, these same people would object just as strongly to merchandise of any given superhero and most of the ‘heroic’ sw characters.

People with genuinely regressive politics who want to read the story to support their worldview do not see themselves as the villains. They see themselves as the heroes. Even the actual literal Nazis painted themselves as valiant underdogs rebelling against an enemy which was both impossibly entrenched and strong, running the world, but also weak because their beliefs and people are inherently inferior. That is scapegoating 101. That is the authoritarian playbook.

Identifying with villains who are presented as villains instead of uncritically accepting the hero as an avatar actually requires the modicum of narrative sophistication and self-awareness necessary to realise you’re being told a story that isn’t real and has a subjective pov in the first place.

[goulets]

Heartland

Chapter: 3/8 Pairing: Jason Todd/Dick Grayson Additional Characters: Bruce Wayne, Damian Wayne, Colin Wilkes, Stephanie Brown, Cassandra Cain, Barbara Gordon, Tim Drake, Duke Thomas Rating: T (for now) Case Fic / Kid Fic a03 link

The library has its benefits: no harassment from over-familiar family members, no Dick sexually frustrating him within an inch of his life, and, if he’s willing to be a little sentimental, he kind of does want to show it to the baby. She’s too young to appreciate it, probably, but it stirs something in him to share it with her all the same. He’s heard it’s never too early to get kids into reading - his parents sure as hell never tried, but Jason had read anything he could get his hands on, once he learned how. It had saved him, back then. Maybe it can do the same for her one day.

“Could’ve sworn Bruce had a Dr. Seuss anthology somewhere in here,” he says to her, combing over the shelves with his eyes. “Guess not. You up for something more sophisticated?”

She grunts, squeezing his shirt in her fist. “Alright,” he agrees, pulling Twelfth Night off the shelf. “Shakespeare it is. You’ve got taste, kid.”

***

(dick)

Venice is a nightclub that has gone by many names during its Gotham tenure, and just as many owners. Dick has been undercover here at least twice, back when the club was catering to the wealthier patrons of Little Italy. The current management clearly hasn’t bothered with maintaining that exclusivity - the building is now shabby and outdated, even for this neighborhood. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the real draw of Venice, which is the illegal casino in the back rooms beyond the VIP lounge. Through all the club’s owners, the casino has always been run by the Falcones, and always frequented by the city’s most morally flexible elected officials. In the past four nights that Dick’s been staking the place out, he’s seen five judges, two city council members, and even the new police commissioner slipping out the back door into the alley, stinking of gin and cigar smoke and patting their coat pockets with an air of satisfaction. It’s good intel to have, Barbara’s told him. Always helpful to keep the files updated on who’s being bought and by whom. None of that really makes him feel better about the fact that he’s been staking this place out for four nights and still hasn’t managed to pin down their actual target.

It’s embarrassing, is what it is. He’s Nightwing, for God’s sake. He’s taken down whole Russian mobs in Bludhaven, and now he’s being completely eluded by a third-string Falcone no one’s even heard of.

Oracle had ID’d the doer of the Torres/Howard murders in a matter of hours, true to her word, and the ballistics had predictably matched up with a few other murders that the police never bothered investigating. Susanna “Susie” Falcone, a second cousin once removed with a rap sheet that puts many of her relatives to shame. Her name must still have some pull in political circles, because she’s only done time once, in spite of being indicted almost a dozen times. Gotta love good old fashioned judicial corruption, Jason had said. No one had been able to argue, looking at the number of charges dismissed.

All in all, it was supposed to be a fairly simple tag-and-bag. Once they’d found her place of work - officially, the Venice nightclub, unofficially, the family casino - he’d been tasked to track her, question her, and then turn her in to the police. He’d chosen his stakeout perch well, on a hotel roof high above the alley, he’d followed her, unseen, and so far, she’s given him the slip every freaking time. The woman has vanished through every doorway from here to Robinson Park, as only the most enterprising criminal can. Were this a different kind of case, Dick might have been impressed.

Instead, he’s annoyed, and having to compromise - his vantage point is lower, closer but more exposed in the thin shadows of a third story construction platform right above the alley. He can see the door to the club without any difficulty, but the moment he moves, he’ll be open to attack.

He’ll just have to move fast. Fortunately, that’s what he’s best at.

There’s a soft motion behind him, almost quiet enough to escape his notice entirely. It’s Jason - Dick hadn’t expected him to actually turn up. No doubt he’s here to make sure they finally succeed in catching their mark tonight, but he’s been so adamant about not leaving Danielle with anyone except Dick that it’s still a surprise to see him. What’s equally surprising to Dick is that he was apparently hoping Jason would show, if the relief he feels at seeing him is anything to go by.

It’s a nice moment of solidarity, until Jason opens his mouth. “So, fourth night’s a charm, huh?”

Dick bristles. “What happened to not leaving the baby?” he retorts.

Jason bristles back, but doesn’t rise to the bait. It’s a little wrongfooting - a reminder that things are changing between them. Dick is used to the veneer of antagonism that hangs over his relationship with Jason, the unresolved tension they both pretend not to notice. They’d gotten into a pretty good groove when he was acting as Batman, staying out of each others’ way for the most part, and working together when necessary. Dick’s pretty sure Jason doesn’t actually harbor any murderous feelings towards him, just like he doesn’t actually hate Bruce, no matter what he says.

“The girls and Alfred ganged up on me,” Jason says, leaning back against the scaffolding. “Whatever. I needed to get the hell out of there anyways. I don’t know how you stand being around them all so much.”

Dick laughs. “They’re not as interested in me,” he admits. “I’m not the cool sibling.”

Jason doesn’t respond right away. It's hard for Dick to tell, when he’s wearing the helmet, but he thinks Jason is probably waiting to see if Dick is joking. It’s another way things have shifted between them - Jason’s holding back, not jumping straight to lashing out, like he used to. It should be a good thing - it is a good thing, but it’s throwing him off balance all the same. He feels like he's spent most of the past several days looking for Jason, even when Jason is right in front of him. He’s used to trying to find the Jason he knows - or knew - the Jason who was taken away from him. Now there’s a new Jason, a Jason he’s still getting to know. Dick can’t choose between them, can’t decide which one he wants to find every time he looks at him. Maybe that’s why he can’t seem to find his one lousy mafia shooter.

“Looks like the cops are covering up the ballistics report on Reynolds,” Jason says, after a moment. “Go figure.”

Dick frowns. “Just Reynolds?”

Jason grunts. “Hold on. What.”

Dick turns to look at him.

“Did you burp her?”

Oh, Dick realizes, he’s on the comm. Someone back at the Manor must have pinged him on a private line.

“Then get Alfred to do it.”

It’s curious that the ballistics on Cy Reynolds’ murder are the ones being suppressed, Dick thinks. He was the only one killed with a submachine gun - the bullets from most of the other crime scenes had come from a standard Beretta APX, and the object of his stakeout, Susie Falcone, had used a Glock on Danielle’s parents. The Glock matched a few other shootings, the Beretta matched none. None of that is particularly noteworthy - after all, Susie is a criminal, and Beretta shell casings are a dime a dozen at any mob shooting.

“Fine. I’ll check back in five. If you asswipes don’t pick up, I’m coming back there.” Jason makes an aggravated noise in the back of his throat, which Dick takes to mean he’s hung up.

“Everything OK?”

“Just peachy. By some cosmic fucking joke, I’m the only person in the family who can get the baby to take a damn bottle. I told her they just need to burp her, but I guess that’s too complicated a task for a family of genius detectives,” Jason grumbles. “I knew I shouldn’t have left her. Shit.”

“Jay, relax. She’s fine.” Dick can’t help but grin at him. It’s honestly sweet, the way Jason and the baby have gotten attached to each other. Dick likes to think he’s her second favorite, but it’s pretty hard to tell. No matter who’s holding her, she’s always looking at Jason, and Jason never stops looking at her.

“It’s fucking cold out here,” Jason says mulishly.

Dick raises an eyebrow. “I noticed. It’s April, not August. If you really want to go back, I’m not gonna stop you.”

“I don’t…” Jason sighs. “Look, I’m here, okay? You bungled this grade school op three nights in a row, so congrats, you triggered the bat buddy system. If I leave and you fuck it up again, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

Dick supposes it’s his turn not to rise to the bait. “Fair enough,” he says easily, turning around to face the alleyway again. “What were you saying about the ballistics on Reynolds?”

“Oh, Oracle ran the bullets through Interpol. Turns out our ill-fated gang boss was offed by one of Carmine Falcone’s personal weapons. The record’s been scrubbed from US databases, but Babs had a hunch.” Jason sounds impressed.

“Been scrubbed meaning...there was a record,” Dick follows, “and some people might still remember, if they saw the bullets. Hence the coverup.”

“Yup. Hence the coverup.”

“Could explain what the commissioner was doing here the other night,” Dick muses.

Jason snorts derisively. “See, this is what I hate about the mafia. They’re so goddamn predictable. Kill the competition, pay off the cops, around and around forever. It’s so pedestrian.”

Dick laughs. “You’d rather deal with Clayface?”

“Fuck yes I would. Clayface has flair, you know? Anybody can be a mobster, shit.”

Jason has started shifting with agitation, or maybe impatience. Either way, their vantage spot isn’t hidden enough for him to be moving around. “Get low if you’re gonna be twitchy,” Dick tells him. “Or if you’re gonna have a cigarette, but I’d really rather you didn’t.”

“Lucky for you I quit then,” Jason says, crouching down next to him. “I’m not jonesing, I’m just fucking cold.”

“We could huddle together for warmth,” Dick jokes, grinning unabashedly when Jason’s helmet fixes him with a death glare. “Wait, you quit smoking? When?”

“When I started taking care of a baby, obviously.” Jason goes still, suddenly. “Is that her?”

The door to the alleyway opens, and they both tense - but it’s just a man, a bodyguard, by the looks of him. Close-cropped blonde hair, early 40s, used to throwing his weight around. Feeling there’s something familiar about him, Dick nudges Jason and motions for him to take a photo. Jason starts almost imperceptibly at the contact, but follows suit. They both hold perfectly still in the shadows as the man looks around, glances in a cursory way along the rooftops, and then sets off down the alley towards the street.

“I know him,” Jason mutters. “From Tim’s case files - he was with Intergang.”

Dick doesn’t say anything about Jason calling Tim by name, but it’s a welcome development. “Looks like he switched sides, if he’s hanging out here.”

“Wonderful,” Jason says. “All right, I’m gonna check on the kid again.”

Dick represses the urge to give him a shoulder squeeze, or ruffle his hair. It’d probably result in him getting shoved off the platform, but Jason’s being so....not different, because Dick’s always known that this Jason was still in him, somewhere. Always hoped, anyways. When Jason had been younger and acted like this, surly with his words but tender with his actions, Dick had always thought of him as cute. It’s like that now, too, except it’s not just cute, because Jason has several inches and at least two weight classes on him. It’s cute in a different way, an adult way. It’s cute in a way that makes Dick want to push harder against Jason’s armor, to catch as many glimpses of that side of him as he can. If he thinks about it too long, it’s cute in a way that makes him want, recklessly.

“Red Hood to Batgirl,” Jason says. He’s calling on the family line this time. “Give me an update.”

“You’re seriously a helicopter parent, you know that, Hood?” Steph laughs in Dick’s ear. “We figured it out. Well...Black Bat figured it out.”

Jason’s shoulders sag a little in relief. Cute, Dick thinks, involuntarily. He needs to get a grip. “About fucking time.”

“She prefers being propped up,” Cass says. “It helps her swallow.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier. And she likes her back straight.”

“You said none of that, actually,” Steph says. “You just told us to support her head. Which we have been, thank you very much.”

“You have her now?”

“Robin has her.”

Dick and Jason look at each other. Jason says, “What the fuck?”

“Right?” Steph sounds amused. “I was surprised too....his friend is here, that ginger kid? He’s the one that took her from the orphanage, right?”

“Batgirl, I swear to god, if anything happens to her - ”

“Oh, calm down, jeez,” Steph groans. “They’re being supervised, okay? It’s honestly precious, you would agree with me if you could see it. I’ll text the pictures to N.”

“Please do,” Dick says. Speaking of cute, in a way that’s much safer to think about.

“Go do your job now,” Cass tells them. “We’re handling it.”

“Yeah, what she said. Batgirls out.”

“Feel better?” Dick asks, after a moment.

“Don’t ask me that,” Jason grouses. “And show me those pictures when you get them.”

Dick grins. “Sure, Jay.”

“Ugh.”

Dick decides to change the subject, before Jason gets too antsy and tries to bail. “So how do you want to play this, when Susie shows?”

Jason points to a dumpster halfway down the alley. “We wait until she’s there. I’ll get the club door, put a taser on it to stop her getting back in or anyone else from coming out. You cut her off before she gets to the street, and we question her on the backside of the dumpster. I’ll take line of sight, since I’m packing.”

Dick nods. “So is she.”

“So is every goon in those back rooms, sure. That’s why we lock their asses in.”

“And if they come out the front?”

Jason spins a gun in his hand. “Rubber bullets do the job just fine if you know how to aim. Let me worry about the backup.”

Another thing that’s changed about Jason - or that hasn’t changed, depending on how far back Dick looks. He uses rubber bullets now, whenever he’s working a case with one of them. Supposedly it’s a stipulation from Bruce, but Jason didn’t use lethal force on the couple cases he and Dick worked together, either, back when Dick was wearing the cowl. Dick thinks Bruce just gave him an excuse - whatever bloodlust Jason was fueled by when he first came back to Gotham has long since dried up. There are still things that set him off - Barbara had informed them about a dead rapist in the Narrows just last month - but Bruce hadn’t even commented on it, besides the barest acknowledgment. Dick thinks he might be the only one that actually cares when Jason kills someone, anymore. And what’s really disturbing is that he’s not actually sure how much he cares. For instance, he knows Jason has a third gun, holstered under his jacket, loaded with live ammo. He could call Jason out on it, insist he ditch it or at the very least unload it.

He says nothing. Let me worry about the backup. If this mission ends in a massacre, Dick will only have himself to blame.

The door opens again, and out steps Susie Falcone.

She immediately looks around, staying still in the doorway for a minute or more. Dick is pretty sure she hasn’t seen him following her, but he’s familiar with the sensation of being watched. He and Jason both shrink further into the shadows, waiting for her to make a move.

The whole process takes about six seconds. The moment she gets a few paces into the alley, they drop down. Jason electrifies the door handle, and Dick outmaneuvers her easily, slapping his police-issue cuffs on her and kicking her gun aside, then spinning her into the wall behind the dumpster. She hits it with a grunt. By the time she’s glaring at him, Jason is at his side again.

“Nightwing and Red Hood?” she says. “Damn. Didn’t expect to see you fellas out here.”

She doesn’t seem scared of them. Dick guesses they’ll have backup coming their way soon.

“Hey, what do you know,” Jason says conversationally, picking up the gun and emptying the clip in one swift motion. “Nightwing, I do believe this is our Glock.”

“Not mine,” Susie objects. “Picked it up off the club floor.”

“Come on, Susie, you’re smarter than that.” Jason crosses his arms. “Look, I can appreciate a sensible weapon. The Berettas the rest of your family favors? Too flashy for me. I loved Sopranos as much as the next guy, but come on.”

Dick suppresses a laugh. “Thought you were a Sig man,” he says in an undertone. He hadn’t expected Jason to take the lead, but it’s working. Susie looks agitated at the mention of her family.

“Wow, stalker. Remind me to move safe houses,” Jason quips back. “Aw, look, she slipped your cuffs.”

There’s a taser in Susie’s newly freed hand, and Dick quickly sidesteps it, twists it out of her wrist and sends it clattering down the cobblestones of the alley. Jason sweeps her legs out from under her and knocks her down flat, maybe a little harder than Dick would’ve. Thankfully, she goes down without a fight.

“Let’s try this again,” Dick says, kneeling next to her and zip-tying her wrists. If he wasn’t sure before, he is now - she was expecting them. They won’t be alone for long. He throws a couple smoke pellets down to the ends of the alley, and clips a nearly invisible wireless mic to the shoelaces of her boot under the guise of patting her down.

“You’re obviously not surprised to see us, so just tell us what we want to know,” Jason tells her, squatting down. “I’ll be honest, I don’t really give a shit that you shot Big Mouth, but what did Linda Torres ever do to you?”

“Let me up,” Susie snarls.

“No. Talk, or I’ll give you a taste of that taser you tried to pull on us.”

“Hood,” Dick hisses.

“See? He knows I’ll do it. Save yourself the grief, Susie.” Jason points the barrel of his gun lazily at her temple.

Susie narrows her eyes. “Fine. The two of them robbed me, last September. Dumb motherfuckers didn’t know who they were messing with. But I let them live because the bitch was pregnant.”

Jason makes a noise of disbelief. “Oh, sure. You’re a real bleeding heart, is that it?”

“Like you’re any better,” Susie fires back.

“You said you waited on Linda because she was pregnant,” Dick says. “Why’d you wait to kill Big Mouth?”

Susie’s mouth twists. “Guess I just felt like it.” Dick doesn’t need to see the tension in her shoulders to know she’s lying.

“Strike two.” Jason clicks the safety off. “Who put the hits out?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Susie answers. “I’m dead if I talk, so pistol whip me if you want to. Here’s the God’s honest truth: I really didn’t need a reason to kill those assholes. I was out for ‘em anyways. But I’m not crazy enough to kill a baby, all right? I don’t need shit like that on my conscience.”

“Keep talking,” Jason growls. Dick hears the whoop of a siren a few blocks off. “Where’s the baby now?”

“Somewhere safe, I swear. If anybody comes for her, it won’t be me.”

Susie still thinks Danielle’s at the orphanage, then. That’s good for them, but potentially bad for all the other kids, Colin included. These guys clearly have no problem killing children, even if Susie won’t do it.

The sirens are getting closer. Someone inside must’ve called the cops. Dick motions to Jason, indicating they need to wrap things up.

“Who is coming for her,” Jason barks, every line of his body a threat. “You’ve got five seconds.”

“You don’t.” Susie looks triumphant. They can hear the shouts of police from behind the smoke. “But don’t worry, boys. You’ll find out who really runs this town soon enough.”

“Hood,” Dick mutters. “We need to go, cops in this neighborhood aren’t cape-friendly.”

Jason stands, visibly enraged, and for a moment Dick thinks he’ll shoot Susie anyways. He’s prepared to move - but then Jason pulls out his grapple, fires, and flies up onto the roof.

“Talk about a bleeding heart,” Susie says to Dick. “He have kids or something?”

Dick doesn’t like her tone of voice at all. She’s too relaxed, too unconcerned about being under arrest. She won’t stay in long.

“It’s Nightwing! Get your hands up!”

Dick obliges, ready to pull his escrima sticks.

Three police officers come through the smoke, weapons drawn. “You better have a damn good reason for being this far out of Bludhaven,” one of them shouts at Dick.

“Sure do!” Dick calls back. “Arrested a murderer for you, no need to thank me!”

“Shut up,” a different officer retorts. “Keep your hands up, pretty boy.”

“Oh, fuck this,” Jason mutters over the comm. “I’m throwing you an escape, we’ll recon on the library roof. Stop being so goddamn chatty.”

One smoke pellet later, Dick is three rooftops away and flying. He gets to the library before Jason, exhilarated as ever from a good run.

Jason drops down next to him after a minute or so, laughing when he gets a look at Dick’s smile. “Running from the cops still does it for you, huh?”

Dick elbows him, momentarily forgetting to keep his distance. “Doesn’t it for you?”

Surprisingly, Jason doesn’t move away. “Usually they’re shooting at me, so.”

Dick leans closer, testing. “So…yes?”

“You’re so annoying,” Jason says, but he lets Dick nudge his shoulder, bump their arms together. He’s so solid, Dick thinks. So big. More like Bruce than any of them.

“So, how fast do you think she’ll get out?” he asks, when Jason stays quiet.

“Fucking tomorrow, probably,” Jason sighs. “Next week if we’re lucky.”

“Sounds like she didn’t know about Danielle, at least.”

“She’s not the problem,” Jason says, shrugging Dick off and standing back up. “Falcones will blow up the whole orphanage if they get wind of it. We need to put them down first.”

“We need to find out who’s in charge,” Dick agrees. “I planted a mic on her shoe. In the laces. Hopefully she won’t find it for a few days.”

“Good thinking,” Jason nods. “You gonna keep patrolling?”

“Might as well,” Dick says, standing up next to him and stretching his arms over his head. “I’m still stiff from that stakeout, I need to move.”

Jason’s gone quiet again. Dick thinks he hears his breath catch, but the helmet muffles it enough that it could be a yawn.

“You’re going back to the manor?”

Jason groans. “Fuck my life, yes.”

“You miss her, huh.” Cute, his brain chants.

Jason doesn’t answer, but Dick has a feeling he’s getting the stink-eye.

“I miss her too,” Dick offers. “It’s okay.”

Jason sighs. “Dick…”

“It’s a good thing, Jay. You care about her! We all do,” Dick adds, seeing the rigidity in Jason’s posture. “I mean, you’re practically her parent right now. Of course you miss her.”

“...Don’t say it like that.” Jason’s voice is low, almost pained, and Dick knows he pushed too far. “Like…like I have a right to, okay, just. Don’t.”

“Jason, wait,” Dick starts, but he doesn’t get to finish. Without a backward glance, Jason fires off a line to the neighboring building, and then he’s gone.

***

(tim)

The docks are quiet, unsettlingly so, as Tim prowls around the towers of shipping containers, keeping to the deep shadows they cast along the chipped pavement. It’s overcast, so there’s no moonlight to expose him, but it’s also too dark to see which of the trucks and campers parked all over are occupied, which ones might suddenly turn their headlights on him and catch him out.

One truck in particular - an innocuous looking Isuzu with a stunningly weaponized interior, is the object of his search. The driver, Felipe, is one of Tim’s best informants within Intergang - or had been, prior to the upheaval. Tim’s reasonably sure that Felipe is too lowly a grunt to make an example of, but still, he’s concerned that he hasn’t heard from him in a few days.

As it turns out, he needn’t have worried. He finds Felipe a hundred yard away from his truck, taking a piss off the wharf. He lets himself into the passenger side of the truck, and immediately notes that it is packed. There’s hardly a spare inch in the back, and Tim has a tough time even getting into the passenger seat with all the bags, clothes, and blankets stuffed into it. He pushes the majority of it to the floor, and waits.

Felipe comes back a few moments later. He opens the door and starts, eyes going wide when he sees Tim, but Tim puts his finger to his lips and motions for Felipe to get in so they can talk.

“Red Robin,” Felipe says, once the door is closed. He looks even more shaken than usual. “What the fuck, man?”

Tim crosses his arms. “You tell me, Felipe. You’ve been dodging my calls for days, and now I find out you’re skipping town?”

“I ditched that phone, man. Boss Reynolds had my number in there, you know? Ditched it as soon as I heard about him. I wasn’t trying to ghost you, honest.”

“Relax,” Tim tells him. “I’m not mad. I’d dodge me, too. Just tell me what happened, and I’ll shadow you out of town. Make sure you’re not followed.”

“Shit, man,” Felipe sighs. “Okay, look. There’s shit I can’t tell you, not if I ever want to hench again. You gotta figure that all out yourself, yeah?”

Tim shrugs. “Fine.”

Felipe swallows. “It started last week when Boss Reynolds met with somebody - I don’t know his name, God as my witness, but from what I heard, ‘cause I was unloading some of that funky alien tech, and you know Boss Reynolds wanted to supervise that personally - anyways, this guy in a suit took a meeting with him, and it sounded like he was offering Boss Reynolds a job. Said he had a new operation, bigger than Intergang, bigger than anything Gotham’s seen in a while.”

“Did Reynolds believe him?”

“Nah, he told him to get lost. They had some words, and then everybody started pulling guns, and I went back to the ship so I didn’t get fuckin’ shot, but I didn’t hear anything after that. Next thing I saw, Boss Reynolds was calling his son up and telling him to demo some building down by the old boardwalk - a hotel, maybe. Guess he wanted to expand that way, I don’t know.”

“That was the old Falcone hotel,” Tim says, mostly just to see Felipe’s reaction. He isn’t disappointed - Felipe goes pale, and his eyes flash to the rosary hanging off his rearview mirror. Tim likes Felipe as an informant because he’s nosy, shockingly competent for a henchman, and because he really likes to gossip. He’s never held back on Tim before this.

“Few days later, one of ours, this merc named Tiberius, comes down to the warehouse and says he’s got something to show us. Takes out a fat fuckin’ folder full of pictures…man, it was some sick shit. Boss Reynolds, his wife, Reynolds Jr, and every fuckin’ guy under him. Kids, man. He just passed it around, made everyone look at it. Then he says, we can either be in the folder, or we can come meet the new boss.”

Felipe takes a shaky breath. “Obviously I go with Tiberius, like everyone else. I heard a couple guys stayed on the ship that was docked, thinking they’d wait ‘em out, but the new boss blew it up. Says we’re not in the tech business anymore, and anyone caught trying to smuggle it is gonna get tied to it and tossed in the harbor. You can imagine my concerns,” he says, gesturing to his truck. Tim estimates half or more of the weapons in it are salvaged from alien junk. Roy Harper would have a field day with the setup this guy’s made for himself.

“So that’s why you’re bailing,” Tim says, understanding. He can hardly blame the guy. “Why not just hide the truck somewhere?”

“Well…I did think about that,” Felipe admits. “Tiberius made us a pretty sweet pitch, once we went along with him. Not gonna lie, I was tempted. Tech is my thing, you know, but I can make a gun out of pretty much anything. I could see the possibilities, is what I’m saying, but that was before we met the new boss.”

Tim nods encouragingly. This is what he’s been waiting to hear.

“Listen, Red Robin - I know we’ve had our differences, but I respect you, man, you know that. You’ve been good to me, so I’m gonna give you some advice here. Stay the hell away from the new boss. Like, don’t even get involved. I’ve been henching for a while, and I’ve seen some messed up shit, but they are crazy. Está loca, you feel me? I’ve seen the hit list, and you’re right at the top of it. You and all the other capes. Half of Arkham, too. And they’re connected, like you wouldn’t believe. Shit, I’m already saying too much, man. You see the position I’m in here?”

“I do, Felipe,” Tim tells him. He hands over a stack of hundred dollar bills, their agreed-upon rate for information. “Where are you going?”

“You’re crazy too, if you think I’m telling you that,” Felipe scoffs.

Tim wasn’t expecting a straight answer anyways. “Fair enough. You heading out now?”

“Soon as you get the hell outta my car, yeah. You said you’d shadow me out?”

“I will,” Tim says. “From a distance. If you don’t see me, it means you’re clear to cross the bridge.”

“All right,” Felipe nods. “In that case, I hope I never see your ass again.”

Tim laughs, and climbs out of the truck.

He finds his own way out of the shipyard, pulls a bike out of a safe house, and catches up with Felipe’s GPS signal halfway to the Fashion District. Once he’s sure there’s no immediate threat, he calls Barbara.

“Red Robin to Oracle. I’m uploading a recording to the server.”

Barbara is in his ear at once. “You met with your informant?”

“He wouldn’t give me a name, but he let a couple things slip.”

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense,” she says.

“First, he flinched hard when I brought up the Falcone name.”

“Confirms what we already know,” Barbara says. “Good. There’s more?”

“There’s more.” Tim tries not to gloat. This is, after all, a serious situation. “He was being cagey about mentioning the leader’s gender, so I was already suspicious, but then said ‘está loca’ when he was trying to warn me.”

Barbara whistles. “Well,” she says, sounding satisfied. “That’ll certainly narrow it down.”

“Yep,” Tim says grimly. “Looks like the new head of the Falcone family is a woman.”

***

(jason)

When Jason was Robin, the library had always been his favorite room in the Manor. It had spoken easily to his idea of what wealth was - rich people had fancy cars, sure, and maybe pools and expensive wardrobes, but wealthy people had art collections, and gardens, and libraries. Jason had spent hours upon hours browsing the shelves, reading anything he could wrap his brain around (and plenty of things he couldn’t), suggesting additions to Alfred, and avoiding his schoolwork in favor of learning about more interesting things, like string theory, or cryptology, or chemical warfare.

That was then.

Now, the library is the only place he can get a minute of peace from the constant barrage of his obnoxious, nosy, boundaryless family members. They’ve been characteristically persistent in their curiosity about him, and about Danielle, who is now Dani, courtesy of Stephanie. This is a nickname family, she’d said, and Jason hadn’t known how to disagree. So now she’s Dani, and Jason is family, and that apparently means he is no longer entitled to any privacy, or personal space for that matter. The only person who hasn’t barged in on him is Bruce, which is almost worse, in a way, because it’s one thing when nobody seeks him out, and it’s quite another when everyone does and then Bruce...doesn’t. Not that he wants Bruce to come up and bother him, God. But he’s in the man’s house, he’s hearing him on the comm constantly either on patrol or down in the cave, and all the other Bat brats and even Alfred are buzzing around him like flies. It’s too much - it feels like before, except for Bruce’s conspicuous absence reminding him that it’s not.

Sharing a bathroom with Dick is another before experience that Jason didn’t need a repeat of. In some ways, it was worse when he was Robin - stripping and showering after patrol in the cave with Dick a few feet away from him is a memory he really wouldn’t have minded leaving back in the Pit - and in other ways, it’s worse now, because Dick is always freaking around. There’s no reprieve, he’s not flitting off to the Titans every week like he used to be. Jason hasn’t gone half a day without Dick getting in his space, drawing up close to him and making that earnest eye contact he’s so annoyingly good at; sometimes wet, sometimes half-naked, sometimes both. And what can Jason do? He’s not going to leave Dani, and he needs Dick to be there so he can get some sleep every once in a while, or patrol, or shower. It’s actually been pretty helpful to have him around, in that regard, but if he has to see the guy walking around with bedhead and nothing but a pair of boxer briefs on one more time, he’s going to fucking explode.

So, the library has its benefits: no harassment from over-familiar family members, no Dick sexually frustrating him within an inch of his life, and, if he’s willing to be a little sentimental, he kind of does want to show it to Dani. She’s too young to appreciate it, probably, but it stirs something in him to share it with her all the same. He’s heard it’s never too early to get kids into reading - his parents sure as hell never tried, but Jason had read anything he could get his hands on, once he learned how. It had saved him, back then. Maybe it can do the same for Dani one day.

“Could’ve sworn Bruce had a Dr. Seuss anthology somewhere in here,” he says to her, combing over the shelves with his eyes. “Guess not. You up for something more sophisticated?”

She grunts, squeezing his shirt in her fist. “Alright,” he agrees, pulling Twelfth Night off the shelf. “Shakespeare it is. You’ve got taste, kid.”

He wonders, not for the first time, what exactly he thinks he’s doing, playing at this whole parenting thing. The rational part of his brain knows that this is a case, that Dani is a victim, that Jason is protecting her because it’s his job. The emotional part of his brain has gone completely off the goddamn rails. Case in point: he’s here with her in the library, prepping her for early literacy like some kind of Crest Hill soccer mom wannabe. Like he’ll even be in her life when she starts doing her ABCs - God willing, she’ll be as far away from him as possible by the time that happens.

It’s fucking hard to think about. He never thought he’d get this attached to a person who can’t even burp on their own. It’s been over a week, and he still struggles with putting her down, with stepping away from her, even when he knows he’s coming right back. Steph and Damian have been wanting to hold her all the time, and Jason knows that they’re capable, knows he has no claim over Dani, doesn’t even mind either of them all that much under normal circumstances, and still, he can’t help feeling like something has reached inside and gripped at his heart every time he passes her over. Which is ridiculous, because she’s not his, he has no more claim over her than any other schmuck off the street. She’s just a kid with unbelievably bad luck, and he’s the idiot who followed Dick up the stairs instead of booking it out the door like a sensible person.

He settles down with her on the couch, propping her up on a couple of pillows, giving her foot a little squeeze. She squeals, smiling at him, and stuffs her fingers in her mouth. God, Jason didn’t know he could feel the way he feels whenever she smiles at him. It’s gonna kill him when he has to give her up.

“If music be the food of love, play on,” he reads, walking his fingers up her leg. “Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.”

Dani watches him, chewing happily on her fingers. “‘O, it came over my ear like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets.’ That’s you, you know.” He pokes her in the cheek, grinning. If music be the food of love…but hell, he doesn’t think he’ll ever get enough of this. Especially when she’s all calm and engaging, the precious few minutes that he’s learned to appreciate in between finishing eating and being tired and cranky, when all she wants to do is look around at things, and all Jason wants to do, ever, is look at her.

The door to the library opens, and Jason goes from content to murderous in a fraction of a second. “What the fuck is it now,” he hisses, expecting Damian or maybe Tim, coming to nag him some more, and instead sees Damian’s friend Colin, who looks horrified to have intruded on him. Jason immediately feels like the world’s biggest ass.

“Sorry,” Colin whispers, mortified, and Jason waves a hand apologetically.

“My bad, I didn’t know it was you. Come in, it’s fine. She’s awake, you don’t need to whisper.”

Colin looks unsure, but soon nods and steps into the library, shutting the door firmly behind him.

Once inside, he dawdles by the nearest bookshelf, clearly at a loss. Jason probably should’ve just let him back out, because this is awkward. Should he keep reading to Dani? Talk to Colin? Ask him why he looks like someone just kicked him and stole his dog?

“You good?” he ventures, figuring he ought to at least attempt to be the adult in the room.

Colin glances at him over his shoulder, smiling tentatively. “Yeah, just bored. Damian’s sleeping, we had a rough patrol last night.”

“We?” Jason repeats, stunned. Bruce isn’t an exemplar of child welfare practices, sure, but letting Damian take other kids on crime-busting playdates? What the hell?

“Oh, I guess you don’t know,” Colin frowns. “I’m….uh, it’s probably easier if I just show you.”

He slides his jacket off, threadbare t-shirt hanging off his skinny frame. Jason tenses, not sure what to expect. When Colin’s arm starts to expand, his eyes widen. By the time his fist is as big around as Jason’s thigh, he thinks his eyebrows have probably disappeared into his hairline.

“Oh.” Jason has no idea how he’s supposed to react to this. Is Colin a meta? He’s pretty sure he would know if Colin was a meta. “How…?”

“Scarecrow,” Colin explains. Jason’s heart sinks. “He experimented on me with synthetic Venom. Batman saved me.”

Dani fusses, twisting her body and scrunching her face up. Jason sympathizes - this conversation is giving him gas, too. “Shit,” he says. Not the most articulate way of expressing his condolences, but Colin’s friends with Damian, so tact can’t be of great importance to him. “I didn’t know.”

Dani starts to cry, and Colin takes a couple steps forward, putting Jason’s hackles up at once. Stop it, he tells himself sternly. He might have fallen down a few pegs, but he’s not pathetic enough to square up against an abused fifth grader. He picks her up, rubbing her back, and then glances over at Colin. The kid’s gone shy, looking down at a point somewhere between Jason’s legs and the floor. Jason feels all the hostility bleed out of him, and he sighs.

“You can sit down.” He gestures to the couch, trying to sound nonthreatening. Dani burps, mouths at his shirt, and then gurgles and kicks her legs again. She leans back against his hold to stare at Colin, and Colin’s face splits into a huge grin. He tucks himself down into the cushions, keeping plenty of space between them, but Jason can sense from the inclination of his body that he wants to be closer. Well, if anyone has a right to be close to Dani, it’s the kid who rescued her in the first place.

“Here,” he offers, turning Dani around in his arms. His heart clenches, and he clamps down on his desire to flee. “You can hold her for a minute, if you want to. She likes you.”

Colin looks at him, eyes shining. “Really?”

Jason nods. “Go ahead. Honestly, you probably know a lot more about this shit than I do.”

Colin takes Dani from him carefully, smiling at her and laughing when she reaches forward to grab at his jacket zipper. A few seconds later, it’s in her mouth, along with most of her fist.

“Should I…?” Colin looks at Jason hesitantly.

“I mean…she’s had worse things in her mouth,” Jason tells him. A ringing endorsement of his child-minding abilities right there. “It’s fine, right? That’s how they build an immune system, or whatever.”

“Well, Alfred washed this for me last night,” Colin admits, looking embarrassed. “So it shouldn’t be too gross.”

Jason leans back against the couch cushions, crossing his arms. “Getting all the perks, huh?”

Colin shrugs, casting his eyes down again. “I like it here.”

Considering where Colin grew up, Jason supposes he can’t blame the kid. Still, he’s not quite wrapping his head around this sweet, genuinely nice kid being buddies with Damian. The demon brat isn’t exactly known for his winning personality, and Jason only knows vaguely how the two of them met, but what he’s heard doesn’t strike him as being particularly conducive to forging the lasting bonds of friendship.

Curiosity gets the better of him, and he decides to just ask. “Why’d you call Damian, the night you found her?”

Colin looks surprised. “I...don’t know,” he says, slowly. “I didn’t know who else to call? Damian’s my best friend, and he always knows what to do.”

Jason can’t keep the skeptical look off his face.

“And if he doesn’t, Bat….Bruce, I mean, definitely always knows what to do.”

Jason scrubs a hand over his face. Time to change the fucking subject. “How’d you two get hooked up, anyways?”

Dani turns her head to look at him, still eating Colin’s zipper. Sometimes, Jason gets the bizarre feeling that she can somehow tell when he’s about to blow a gasket. It’s probably a coincidence - she moves around a lot, and Jason has anger issues that flare up every ten minutes, so there’s bound to be some crossover - but it works, because it takes the fight right out of him every time.

“We worked a case together,” Colin says, holding Dani a little more securely against him. “About a year ago, I guess. Kids were disappearing from my orphanage, and from the shelters. I don’t think you were around.”

“I wasn’t,” Jason shakes his head. He and Roy had been busting a trafficking ring in Ibiza, and it had taken Jason over a month to get all the major players. “I heard about it a little, from Dick.”

Dick hadn’t given him too many details at the time - Jason had chalked it up to him having a few other things on his mind, but as Colin fills in the gaps, he starts to suspect Dick just didn’t want him going on a rampage. Which he absolutely would have - he still wants to, God. God. All those poor kids, just a stone’s throw from his old neighborhood. And of course the police had done jack shit - Zsasz is practically Black Mask’s pet, he probably paid them off to look the other way, not that most of them need the excuse - and Bruce was gone, and Jason was gone, and Dick was in over his head, and - fuck, it should never have fallen to Damian and Colin.

He waits for the fury to subside a little, not trusting what will come out of his mouth. Dani hums around her fist, blinking at him, and it helps. “Jesus,” he says, finally. “This fucking town.”

Colin’s mouth twists a little. “Yeah. But you were Robin, right? You probably saw worse things.”

Did he? Jason doesn’t remember. He doubts it, though. He can’t imagine he would’ve been satisfied with Bruce’s way of dealing with it.

“I wouldn’t have pulled my stroke, when I was Robin,” he muses. “Probably why Bruce never gave me a sword.”

No, Jason would’ve bisected the fucker. It still has appeal, though he thinks he would lean towards his favorite Sig rifle if he was taking care of it today. Headshots for the henchmen - anyone who signs on to that kind of operation, even in the most menial capacity, doesn’t deserve to breathe. Kneecaps and crotch shots for the spectators, to make sure they couldn’t get away. Gut shots for the kid-wranglers. And Zsasz....it’s tempting to want to draw it out, but Jason can feel the desire leaving him the longer he thinks about it. His imaginative tortures fade into a simple headshot, and even that isn’t satisfying. Fuck. He just can’t seem to hold onto his rage lately, even when he wants to. It’s all being replaced by some kind of anxiety, some kind of tenderness that aches, burning deep into him every time Dani looks at him, or touches him. Every time he thinks of her. Every time he feels Dick watching him with her, all warmth and affection.

Colin bounces her a little, making her laugh. Jason feels his revenge fantasy slip away.

“What’re you reading her?” Colin nods to the book still laying open in Jason’s lap.

Jason looks at it. “Oh, Twelfth Night. Shakespeare,” he adds, recalling that Colin is eleven, and likely not perusing great literature in his free time. “Figure it’s never too early to start her on the classics.”

Colin grins. “That’s cool,” he says. “Does she like it?”

“Beats me,” Jason shrugs.

“Read some?”

Jason raises his eyebrows.

Colin flushes. “Um. I mean, if you want…”

He decides to humor him. What the hell. “Sure, why not. ‘O spirit of love! How quick and fresh art thou, that, notwithstanding in thy capacity, receiveth as the sea.’”

Dani yawns widely, relinquishing her fist in a long string of drool. Jason laughs, and so does Colin. “Maybe jumping the gun a little,” he admits. “I don’t really know what kids are into these days.”

“Me either,” Colin says. “I think she liked it, though. See, she’s just sleepy.”

Jason feels a lump forming in his throat, and swallows hard against it.

“What does it mean? The part you were reading,” Colin asks.

“Um.” Jason doesn’t really know, he’s not exactly a literary scholar, but he’s always liked to work Shakespeare out on his own, finding meaning in the wordplay and running the metaphors through his mind until they line up in a satisfactory way. He doesn’t know if his interpretation is correct, exactly, but: “So this Duke, a guy called Orsino, is saying that he doesn’t want to be in love anymore. He’s talking about love and how everyone thinks it’s this wonderful thing, but the truth is that it actually just makes people miserable.”

Jason pauses, feeling like he just showed way too much of his hand. “Basically, he’s just complaining,” he finishes, uneasy.

Glancing at Colin out of the corner of his eye, he’s relieved to see that he’s occupied with Dani, and not paying attention to Jason at all. Thank fuck. If it’d been anyone else in the house sitting there, he’d be in for some horrible armchair psychology session, and he’d have to book it out the window and not return for several months.

“I think she wants you,” Colin says, as Dani ramps up her fussing. Jason takes her gratefully, holds her to his chest as she rubs her eyes and grumbles her displeasure at being passed around.

“All right, I hear you,” Jason murmurs, gently tugging her fists away from her eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic, come on. It’s not so bad.” Like he’s one to talk.

And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, ever since pursue me, he thinks, rocking her tiny body into a comfortable position. Colin was only holding her for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, and Jason was sitting less than five feet away, but he missed her. God, what is happening to him?

“Damian didn’t want to bring her here, at first,” Colin says quietly. “But I think he’s glad that we did. He really likes her, you know.”

Jason doesn’t quite know how to feel about that. It’s sweet, on some level. And he’s well aware that Damian likes her, going by the amount of time he spends hovering in the hallway outside Jason’s room, not to mention the increasingly expensive toys that keep showing up among her things.

He looks down at her, dozing off. “Well, she’s pretty easy to like.”

Colin nods, looking pleased.

“Damian, on the other hand....”

Colin grins. “He’s not so bad.”

He’s really not. Like hell Jason will ever tell him that, though. “You have bizarre taste, kid.”

Colin blushes, hard, and Jason blinks. Well. That’s interesting, isn’t it? Or it will be, in a few years. He makes a note to ask Dick about it, later.

“Are you gonna adopt her?” Colin asks, bringing Jason’s amused thoughts to a screeching halt.

Automatically, he says, “No way.”

Colin looks wounded. “Why not?”

“Because I can’t,” Jason replies. “I’m the last person who should be a parent, trust me.”

“Doesn’t look that way to me.”

Doesn’t feel that way either - the thought floats up, unbidden, uninvited. He can’t. “She deserves better,” Jason says, heavily. “Even if….even I could handle it. She deserves better than this family.”

“But your family is - ”

“A death sentence.” He’s being harsh, but if Colin’s gonna be hanging around, he’ll find out for himself soon enough. “It’s fucking cursed, look. I couldn’t do that to any kid, especially her. You should get out too, while you still can.”

Colin looks angry, which surprises him. His hands are balled into fists, and Jason sees a tremor in them, a bulging that immediately sets off alarm bells in his head.

“Kid,” he says sharply. “Colin. If you’re gonna hulk out, take it outside. Alfred will have an honest-to-God stroke if you do it in here.”

A few deep breaths later, Colin looks normal again. “Sorry.” His voice is hoarse. “You’re wrong, though.”

Jason’s temper flares. “No offense, but I think I would know better than you,” he snaps. Dani grumbles sleepily in his arms, and he sighs out in frustration. “Trust me, okay? She’s better off. It never ends well, not in this family. I’m proof of that.”

But Colin shakes his head. “You don’t know,” he says. “My mom said the same thing, when she dropped me off at the orphanage. She gave the nuns a letter - she said I’d be better off with them than with her.”

Jason stills.

“It didn’t matter,” Colin continues. “Scarecrow still got me. Victor Zsasz still got me. Maybe they would have gotten me with her, too. Maybe I wouldn’t have been that much better off with her, but at least I would’ve been with her.” He sniffles, and Jason holds Dani a little tighter.

“I know she loved me.” His voice cracks. “I just wish...I wish I could’ve stayed with her. I wish she would have known that I never would’ve been better off away from her.”

He looks absolutely miserable, pitched forward and rubbing hard at his eyes. Jason is reminded painfully of how young Colin is, closer to Dani’s age than his own. He remembers being Colin’s age and younger, thinking the same thoughts about his own mother. How fiercely he’d guarded her, chased away the cops and the social workers, doing everything in his power not to be separated from her. Not that it mattered, in the end.

“Fuck,” he mutters. “Colin, I’m sorry. For the record, I actually kind of get where you’re coming from.”

Colin looks up at him.

“Wish I didn’t, but. That’s life.”

“You should adopt her,” Colin says again, softly.

Jason shakes his head. “Colin…”

“You’ll think about it.”

He exhales. “Sure, I’ll think about it.” Like he’ll be able to think about anything else after this.

“She needs you,” Colin insists stubbornly.

Jason doesn’t reply. He knows on some level Colin is right - Dani does need him right now. She needs someone, at least, someone who can take care of her and protect her. Someone who isn’t afraid to shed blood to keep her safe. Jason doesn’t relish the thought, but he’s certain this won’t end tidily. Mob cases never do. It’ll be messy, and bloody, and Bruce will have a shit fit, and Dick probably will too, and Jason will go back to Crime Alley and Dani will get shipped off to Witness Protection or something, and damn, does that hurt to think about.

He looks over at Colin, still hunched over on himself, vulnerability written into every line of his posture. He’s desperately in need of a hug, or some kind of affection, validation, maybe. Or that’s just Jason projecting, who the fuck knows. If Dick was here, he would know exactly what to do for him. Jason’s at a loss, unable to separate his young self from the damaged kid sitting next to him.

He adjusts his hold on Dani carefully, laying her down flat along his arm, while he works out what to say. Finally, he settles on, “Damian’s lucky to have you.”

Colin sits up a little straighter. He looks like he’s waiting for more, but he’s shit out of luck, because Jason has no idea what else he needs to hear. No idea what he could say that wouldn’t be completely insincere, anyways. We can be your family, Colin. Like hell. Bruce has enough kids lined up waiting to die for him, he’s not about to encourage another one to be turned into cannon fodder for the man’s principles.

“Uh, yeah,” Jason says, after a moment. “That’s all I got.”

Colin smiles wanly. “Thanks, anyways.”

Jason snorts. “Sure.”

“Can I hug you?”

Jason stares. “Can you…what? Me?”

“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” Colin adds, averting his eyes.

Jason can’t even remember the last time someone hugged him. He thinks Roy might’ve, some eight or nine months ago, after they’d narrowly survived a warehouse explosion. Jason’s whole body had been ringing from the blast, so he doesn’t exactly remember the sensation of it. And before that…?

He imagines Dick’s reaction, if he was here. He’d be disappointed in Jason, that’s for sure. Really, Jay? You can’t hug a child? It’s a fair argument, he has to admit. Jason’s fucked up personal space issues don’t really apply to children, or babies, clearly. Colin’s obviously attention-starved, and Jason’s already holding one kid. What’s another, really.

“Okay,” he relents. “Hit me.”

There’s a shuffling motion next to him, and then Colin is hugging his free arm, leaning his head against Jason’s shoulder. Jason can’t quite contain his surprise - it’s weird, as expected, but it’s not dramatically increasing his desire to bolt through the nearest exit like he’d thought it would. It’s a little funny, actually. He’s pretty sure both Bruce and Damian would lose their shit if they could see him right now. Dick, too, most likely, but to his credit, it would be a happy kind of shit-losing. Damian would probably try to gut him.

Are there cameras in the library? Jason can’t remember. He kind of hopes there aren’t, because if anyone else sees this, he will absolutely never live it down.

***

(dick)

“Wait, I think that’s him.” Dick leans forward to peer at Tim’s screen. He points to the familiar looking figure. “That guy. Do you have a clearer shot?”

Tim skips a few photos ahead, and zooms in. “Him?”

“Yes. That’s the guy. Jason said he recognized him from your surveillance files. He was at the club the night we caught Susie Falcone.”

“The fourth night, was it?” Tim asks, innocently.

“Don’t be mean, Timmy.”

“Just clarifying,” Tim grins. Dick raises an eyebrow. “Okay, okay. I don’t have a ton of intel on this guy, he’s really slippery. According to my informant, he goes by Tiberius - some kind of mercenary, Greek or Albanian national. I doubt that’s his real name.”

Dick nods, studying the photographs. Tim continues, “He came over with Intergang as an enforcer, I think. Might’ve been Reynolds’ personal bodyguard.”

“Could explain how Reynolds got taken out,” Dick says thoughtfully. “He’s on the Falcones’ payroll now, but he’s not family. Might be an easy target.”

Tim opens his mouth, about to reply, when there’s a choked-off sound of fury from the Batcave below them.

“Was that Damian? He’s up already?” Dick asks, glancing down towards Bruce’s computer. He hops over the ramp to see what the fuss is about. Tim follows close behind.

“Everything okay?” Dick asks, approaching the wall of screens. There’s nothing that jumps out at him as being particularly alarming; Bruce is looking at DNA analyses, and Damian is looking at the Manor surveillance, tapping furiously at his ear.

“Todd!” he hisses. “What do you think you’re doing? Colin is my friend!”

“Robin,” Oracle’s voice comes through the speaker. “No names on the comms. And Hood isn’t wearing his earpiece, so you’ll have to tell him in person.” She sounds amused. “Oracle out.”

Damian swears.

“Holy shit,” Tim says faintly. “Look at them.”

The screen that all the Manor surveillance feeds run to is showing just one room - the library, of all places, but Dick vaguely recalls it being some kind of sanctuary to Jason, years and years ago. It makes sense that he’d end up back there, and it makes sense that he’d have Dani with him. What Dick doesn’t expect to see is little Colin Wilkes, all five feet and change of him, snuggled up to Jason’s side and hugging him, wrapped around his arm like a gangly koala. Dick can’t help but notice that Jason’s bicep is about as big around as Colin’s head, which is certainly...something. He’s not quite ready to classify how he feels about that, so he refocuses on the hug itself, which is nothing short of charming.

Damian grinds his teeth audibly. “It’s still going.”

“Oh, man.” Dick can’t help the grin he feels creeping up the sides of his face. “Bruce, are you seeing this?”

“I am,” Bruce says, stiffly. He looks like he’s in pain. Dick fights the urge to roll his eyes.

“What’s wrong with you? Look how sweet they are!” he exclaims, gesturing. It’s adorable.

“It is not sweet,” Damian snarls, whirling on him. “Todd is a corruptive influence, and Colin is young and impressionable! Where is your concern for him?”

Tim coughs, and it sounds a little bit like “jealous”. Surprisingly, this does not diffuse Damian’s indignation.

“I don’t get it,” Dick says, stepping between them quickly to block Damian’s spinning kick. “I thought you and Jason were fine, Damian. You’ve been spending enough time in our - in his room lately. Where’s this coming from?”

“Incredibly, I don’t feel as concerned about Todd recruiting an infant onto the path of lawlessness,” Damian retorts. “Colin lacks paternal guidance in his life, as you know. Todd clearly senses it.”

“Jason is very paternal these days,” Tim agrees.

“I’m pretty sure it’s just a hug,” Dick says in exasperation. “No one’s recruiting anyone, Damian. And look, it’s over. Your friend is just a hugger, that’s all.”

“I must agree with Master Richard,” Alfred says from behind them. “Having been the recipient of many such embraces from young Master Colin myself.”

“See? I’ve gotten hugs from him too,” Dick tells Damian. “And I know you have, so don’t bother denying it. He’s probably gearing up the courage to get one from Bruce one of these days.”

Bruce looks slightly alarmed by the prospect. “He is?”

Damian looks conflicted. “He is?”

Dick casts his eyes heavenward. “Colin, I’m so sorry.”

Before he can say anything else, the Cave door opens below them, and Duke’s bike comes shooting in, whipping around into its parking spot in a move that would send Dick flying over the handlebars. Bruce takes about half a second to look impressed, and then clears the main screen to pull up their intel on the Falcone case.

“What’s up, guys,” Duke calls, pulling off his helmet and jogging up the steps. “I’ve got news. Where’s Jason?”

“Being hugged, in the library,” Dick tells him. “You just missed it.”

Duke looks nonplussed. “Damn. Wait, that’s not some kind of weird euphemism, is it? If it is, I don’t want to know.”

“It most certainly is not,” Damian says venomously.

“Cool. I tried to get him on the comm, but he didn’t respond. Should I go get him? He’ll want to hear this.”

“Damian will get him,” Bruce says.

Damian is…already on the elevator. Dick spares a thought for Jason. At least he’s holding Dani, so Damian won’t attack him outright.

“Your news?” Bruce prompts.

“Right,” Duke nods. “I’ve been all over City Hall records, and spent yesterday afternoon getting intel in the East End. I’ve got names and faces of most of the major players in this. They’re trying hard to front some distant nephew of Carmine Falcone as the head of the whole operation, but it wasn’t quite adding up. You said the new Falcone boss is a woman, right?” he asks Tim.

Tim nods affirmatively.

Duke looks triumphant. “Then I know who she is.”

***

[concentratedbitterness]

The Aftermath

New Orleans, Louisiana: Ash Wednesday, 1975

It’s not hard to find Ray. It should be. If the demon had any sense he would go underground, hide, wrap a proverbial noose around his neck and tug.

But Ray is just here. Lingering in a bar in the rough part of town–not a care in the fucking world–while Mara wallows in the aftermath of the hunter’s attack. Weak, mutilated, and without physical form for the first time in ages.

All the liquor in New Orleans can’t get the thought out of his head. You should have been there.

The bar is crawling with vagrants; most of them still half drunk from the Mardi Gras festivities the night prior.  It’s habit, coming to a shit hole like this; seeking out souls crying for damnation in a place where sin is as rampant as cancer.  Usually an easy meal ticket for a demon looking to fill a quota…but Ray isn’t here to look for business leads.  He'd come here just like the rest of them, trying to drown his worries and soothe his guilt with an endless line of whiskey.  Lucius doesn’t bother with platitudes when he shows up. He snatches his subordinate straight off the bar stool, grabs him by the throat, and shoves him against the wall, pinning him there as he gets in the younger demon’s face and hisses, “You cowardly, useless, piece of SHIT.”

Bones crack under the weight of impact, reverberate fire burning beneath fragile skin.  His energy flickers dimly in the shadow of the stronger demon, but Ray does not struggle.  “I didn’t know.”  It is all he can choke free before fingers tighten around his vessel’s throat; body prone and practically limp.  Booze swims through his veins, hazing his reactions and slowing his judgment.  It’s why he’s still here; sitting around in a shitty bar instead of dealing with the cascade of problems suddenly on their hands.  Guilt is an eviscerating emotion, and he’s finally beginning to understand why humans speak of it the way they do.  You should have been there.

But you weren’t.

“Bullshit.”

“You really think I would have just let it happen?”  Ray’s gaze hardens, voice thin but not bereft of conviction.  He couldn’t have known, no more than Lucius would have.  These hunters knew what they were doing when they laid the trap–never before has he seen such sophisticated warding or restraints employed by their ilk–and there is no doubt in Ray’s mind that they had help.  Of the celestial variety, if he had to bet.  It doesn’t stop him from taking the blame, however.  It happened on his watch, and that is all that matters to Mara’s Lieutenant.  

Lucius wants a fight; he wants someone he can take his anger out on.  Ray is normally just the demon to meet him on his level…but Ray isn’t fighting today.  He’s sniveling.  It makes the older demon’s lip curl.  

“I don’t gotta think.  I know.” Lucius snaps.  “That’s exactly what you did.  It’s Nybbas all over again.  She was your charge.  Yours.  For one fuckin’ night.  Why the HELL did you let her out of your sight?”

Ray can still hear the echoes of her screams in his head; terror and desperation like a tidal wave pushing across their mental link as she’d called for them, over and over again.  He had searched through the night–eventually he and Lucius both; every crossroads and known hunter hideout in the territory–until the anguish turned to numbness.  With Marcella’s energy signature hidden behind clever, despicable warding their efforts to locate her in time were futile.  Somehow she had gotten free on her own.  It was Lucius who finally found her…what was left.

The sulking is short lived as he’s hauled bodily off his feet and abruptly slammed back down onto the sticky floor; Lucius looming over him like a storm cloud.  Ray is useless to fight back, landing in a heap and twisting his body to face the volatile glare boring down at him.  This is something quite unlike anything he’s seen before–this isn’t Lucius’ normal pyre for violence–this is pure, unadulterated anger; a manifestation of searing Hellfire buried under borrowed flesh.  There is no reminder so poignant of the ancient demon’s true magnitude of power.

“She told me to stay behind!  It was a direct order, Lucius, I didn’t have a choice!” He doesn’t say why–that his burgeoning sense of morality had gotten in the way–and tries to offer partial truths to placate, “I would have protected her if I’d been there.  I never thought she would actually go alone…why the fuck did she go alone…” Ray’s throat tightens around a nervous swallow, eyes flickering over the scene of prying gazes.

“She’s stubborn,” Lucius corrects him sharply, “Part of this job is knowin’ when to follow orders, and the more important part of it is knowin’ when not to.”  Some foolish good Samaritan tiptoes up and tries to tell them to calm down.  Lucius doesn’t even have to look behind him to snap the troublesome human’s neck.  The man’s corpse collapses to the ground like a sack of potatoes.  “You should have been there.”

Ray watches as the other bar patrons make a mad dash for the exit, and tries to push down the fresh wave of guilt washing over him once more.  “I know.  How do I make it right?”

“You don’t.”  

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

Grisly, Grim and a Fucking Delight: Feedback Review

TRIGGER WARNING: Torture, rape, daytime radio DJs. Don’t blame me, that’s just what’s in the movie.

Wow. Wow and a half. Wow and a half between two slices of thick white whoa. What a fucking movie. I’d say something like ‘they don’t make ‘em like that any more’, but they clearly do, because Feedback only came out a few years ago. I am astonished that I didn’t hear about it until tonight. You see, I was looking for an epic, slow-burn thriller to watch with my girlfriend and glamorous assistant, and I came across this little British movie about a radio talk-show host getting trapped in his studio when a bunch of masked psychos invade the premises. “Neat!” I thought upon reading the synopsis and watching the advert. “It’s Diehard but without schlubby, sarcastic Brits instead of overblown yanks.” As it turns out, I was wrong. Feedback is not an enjoyable but ultimately inconsequential gas pocket of a movie: it’s actually one of the most tense, conceptually horrifying and incendiary pieces of cinema- nay, Cinema with a capital C- that I’ve ever had the good fortune to witness. The more I think about it, the more impressed and enamoured I become. Unfortunately, in order to explain why, I’m going to have to spoil the whole freaking thing. For those of you who actually watch movies based on my recommendations (which would be, maybe, like two of you?) I’ll give you a nice non-spoilery recommendation right now: the acting is on-point, the plot is serpentine but not in a pretentious way, every prop and narrative element is used to maximum effect, the atmosphere gets tenser and tenser without ever letting you catch your breath and it’s exactly as long as it needs to be: there’s nothing missing and not an ounce of spare meat on it. It’s a lean, nasty predator of a movie and, if you let it, it will pin you down and rip out your jugular. I’ve only ever described one other movie as ‘transcendent’- a little psychological horror called The Perfection. Well, Feedback gets that exact same sticker but for completely different reasons. If you’re going to watch it- and you should- stop reading this review right now and go do it. It’s amazing.

And now for the spoilers. Consider this more of an analysis than a review. You see, the film reveals early on that the masked psychos invading the studio aren’t just randos with a political or philosophical axe to grind. They have beef with the radio host (whose name is Jarvis, incidentally. You don’t see enough Jarvises, either in real life or in movies. It’s a fun name and grossly underused, but I digress). You see, they think Jarvis’s friend raped a woman, killed another woman and beat the shit out of her boyfriend… and they think Jarvis knows all about it and may even have been involved. They force Jarvis to extract a confession from his friend early on and then kill him live on air, meaning that the rest of the film is devoted to a battle of wills between them and Jarvis as they try to force him to admit complicity, again live on air. Along the way, it’s also revealed that they aren’t just crusaders: they’re survivors of the incident and relatives thereof. Now, from the moment all these pieces were in place, I watched with an expectation of being disappointed. You see, I thought I knew what I was watching: Jarvis is visually and linguistically coded as am older slightly privileged but spiky elitist, so in most movies made after 2010 he’d automatically have been the bad guy (fuck me but do ageing white movie directors love to pretend they’re ‘woke’), while the people attacking him are visually and linguistically coded as youngish (except in one case) and victims, meaning that, in most movies, they would automatically be the good guys (hey, everyone loves an underdog, right?). I assumed I was watching one of those films. You know the ones I mean. One of those oh-so-clever ones that gets you to connect with and root for a character then reveals that he’s a shit-bag and punishes him and- by extension- you the viewer for taking his side. That was clever once, but I’ve now seen it on at least eight separate occasions, and it’s become trite. It’s particularly irksome because the victim-coded characters always get a free pass for their own shenanigans: they can murder, torture, brutalise and dehumanise but it’s always okay because something bad once happened to them. Frankly, I thought that’s what I was in for. Luckily. I was super wrong. That’s like regular wrong, only sexier and with sharper graphics.

You see, Feedback is way too smart to go for a black-and-white good-victims-versus-evil-central-character narrative. Instead, it’s a film about dehumanisation… or is it? You’ll see what I mean. In order to force Jarvis to admit complicity, his assailants don’t just fuck with him and his friend: they straight-up murder an innocent bystander and threaten to murder someone close to the protagonist. They hurt and do terrible things to Jarvis and the people around him, using torture methods that would make fucking ISIS throw up its hands and go ‘steady on, bruv’. They have a version of events that they’re convinced of but have only one unreliable character’s word for and Jarvis has a version of events that they refuse, point-blank, to believe. Jarvis’s story does begin to alter, but it’s never really apparent if he’s actually done something or if he’s just saying he has in order to keep the people around him (and himself) alive. Meanwhile, the ringleader of the little troop trying to extract a confession from Jarvis might be victim, but it also becomes apparent that she’s an unhinged psychopath intent on spilling as much blood as possible for her own personal sense of satisfaction and has as much interest in justice as a black hole has in the history of the stars it swallows up. Hooray! Some fucking moral ambiguity in a movie! I thought the entire industry had just forgotten how to fucking do that!

Much to my delight, Feedback doesn’t stop there. Merely by forcing the audience to make up their own minds about what they think happened and who’s actions are most justified, Feedback is already introducing a level of sophistication alien to modern cinema. But then it goes one step further by also subverting narrative expectations. You see, in a bleak, introspective, what-monsters-are-we-all flick like this, you expect the antagonists’ plan to succeed: you expect the last shot to be of the protagonist broken by the moral blankness of his reality, sitting in the wreckage of his life, unsure of whether he deserves what has happened to him or not. And that would have been a perfectly acceptable way to end this movie. But it doesn’t end like that. Because Jarvis is that rarest of things: a competent and determined dude. He’s not a superhuman. He doesn’t have special training. The flick doesn’t turn into an action movie or anything ridiculous. Jarvis just refuses to accept the bullshit happening to him and systematically works through every possible strategy to extricate himself without caving and admitting culpability that he doesn’t feel. He tries reasoned negotiation. He tries subduing one of the assailants temporarily and using them as a bargaining chip (the minimum necessary force approach), he tries escape and, finally, when all else fails, he uses a combination of psychology, surprise and familiarity with his environment to fight back with lethal force. It’s a considered, intelligent approach and, because his assailants aren’t organised terrorists just ordinary people who may (or may not) have a legit grievance with him, it succeeds and- to cut a long story short- he kills all of them in incredibly satisfying ways. There’s a bit involving a smug, I-can-be-as-evil-as-I-like-because-I’m-a-victim character getting skewered with a pair of scissors that instantly outranks anything in the Saw or Friday the 13th franchises as one of my all-time favourite movie kills (outright all-time favourite still goes to that bit in John Wick 3 with the really creative use of a library book, but that’s off topic).

During the climatic scenes of the movie, Jarvis screams his confession, but- as I said- it might only be a tool to distract his attackers and gain the upper hand while preserving the lives of the people he cares about. Equally, though, it might not. There’s a coldness to the character at the end of the film that wasn’t there at the beginning. Has he just been changed by the trauma of recent events, or are we seeing the facade drop away to reveal the true face of ruthless monster? And here lies the film’s final genius: not only doesn’t it answer this question (ambiguity for the win!) it also seems to suggest that the answer might not matter. Jarvis didn’t prevail because he was innocent- though he might be. His attackers didn’t fail because they became as bad as the thing they sought to fight (though they did). Victory and defeat aren’t defined by moral superiority. The film doesn’t assign winners and loser based on ethical or philosophical standpoint. Jarvis wins because he knows what the fuck he’s doing and his attackers are a bunch of overemotional quarter-wits with a half-baked plan that they can’t even stick to because they get too worked up. Survival, Feedback reminds us, has everything to do with being good at things, and fuck all to do with just being good. At every turn, the film tries to convince us that it has a moral point to make. Characters talk endlessly about truth and lies, justice and injustice… but in the end, it’s all smoke and mirrors. The film doesn’t have a central moral thesis (or, if it does, it’s a profoundly nihilistic one). Its real subjects are survival and will. It’s a study of what happens when two packets of brutal, remorseless determination meet eachother coming in opposite directions. It’s a dissection of the self-preservation instinct and its only real moral is ‘don’t fuck with a smart, grimly determined guy on his home turf if all you have to bring to the table is a short fuse and a big hammer’. Maybe that shouldn’t be refreshing, but in a cinematic landscape where every movie is determined to plant its flag on one side or the other of the political or ethical spectrum, it really fucking is. The fact that it gets you to think about ethical issues and who you believe on route elevates it, but the core of the film- the thing that makes it solid- is that refreshing element of nihilism. Breathe it in, folks: we don’t get many movies like this very often.

[365days365movies]

January 15, 2021: Casino Royale (2006) (Part 1)

So...we meet again, Bond. What’ve you been doing for the past few years?

...What. Not who, James, WHAT. Jeez.

Whatever. BrosBond had 3 movies after GoldenEye, and they were...not great, from what I’ve heard. Remember, I wasn’t as big of a fan of GoldenEye as many critics and fans were; so, I can’t imagine what I’d think of the latter three. Maybe one day, but not today!

Today, I’m focusing my sights on the revitalization of the brand. See, in 2002, Die Another Day came out, and that movie was apparently crazy. TOO crazy. So crazy, in fact, that audiences and critics accused it of losing the plot, and the production studio in charge (Eon Productions) had a yearning to change direction. And their inspiration came from...a surprising place.

See, Joel Schumacher’s campy, over-the-top Batman films were basically wiped out by Christopher Nolan’s 2005 reinvention of the character in Batman Begins. Which is, in my opinion, a highly underrated classic, Seriously. And in 2005, this film was absolutely a smash-hit. Batman was cool again, which a lot of people never thought would happen in film. Eon saw this, and thought...how can we apply that to Bond?

Out with Brosnan...in with Craig.

The first of the new, darker, reinvented Bond films is planned for release in 2006, starring Daniel Craig as the suave, sophisticated spy. And the director of the film was selected to be...Martin Campbell? From GoldenEye? The guy who kinda sorta started the modern over-the-top Bond? Really? I mean, OK. The writers this time are different...except for one. I didn’t talk about the writers last time because I don’t like putting people on blast if I don’t gotta. This time...maybe. We’ll see.

If this Casino Royale is basically Bond Begins, I’m definitely interested. Maybe this’ll revitalize that Bond-love from the Connery days. Let’s find out! We’re also gonna look at the Bond checklist again!

Gadgets: better have more cool gadgets than GoldenEye, I swear...

Bond Girl: GoldenEye’s Natalya wasn’t bad, to be honest; let’s see who his Inevitable Love Interest is this time.

Villain: Alec Trevelyan had so much potential. I need my dastardly villain, let’s do this. Oh, and let’s throw the henchman in here, too. Xenia Onatopp was...a lot...but she was a memorable henchman, at least.

Music: Of course. GoldenEye’s theme was good, and we’ll see how 2006 does.

OK, movie time. SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Recap

We start at an office building in Prague, where a man makes his way up to his office. Waiting there for him is, of course, James Bond (Daniel Craig). The man is Dryden, section chief at the British Embassy in Prague, whom M has accused of selling secrets, a big no-no. But Bond...isn’t a double-0 agent. Huh. You got me interested.

Apparently, agents get the two zeroes once they’ve killed two people on file. James hadn’t killed anyone...until recently. Which is when we get this.

OH SHIT

This is an absolutely BRUTAL fight. It’s not choreographed flashily, it’s not pretty...it’s rough. It’s intense. And it’s...oh my God, wow. Made me feel it. And what’s astonishing is that it’s SO short.

On learning this, Dryden tells him not to worry, the second one is...

...YOU GOT ME. I’M IN FOR THE FUCKIN’ RIDE

HOW??? How is it that in 3 minutes of screentime, I’m already more satisfied by Craig’s Bond than I was for the ENTIRETY of GoldenEye? That is masterfully done, right off the bat. WOW. We even get a smooth-as-silk segue into the classic bullet turret sequence, and that takes us right into the song and opening credits. And...wow.

Here’s the thing about Bond openings, as I mentioned last time: they were all directed by one guy up until GoldenEye, and were basically all silhouetted women with themes and scenes from the movie projected around them. The Brosnan movies followed suit, always having silhouetted women in one way or another. Die Another Day used CGI women and...a really bad Madonna song. It was...it is NOT GOOD, guys. Look it up, it’s the most 2002 thing I’ve ever heard.

But here’s the fin bit about Casino Royale. This is the first Bond movie opening with no women in it. Yeah. It’s the first one. And the song is Chris Cornell’s You Know My Name, and it’s good! Not sure it’s going in my soundtrack, though.

Finally, the opening credits sequence itself: it’s once again Daniel Kleinman doing it, and it’s actually inspired by the first James Bond book Casino Royale, which had already had a TV special and unofficial Bond movie made from it! The cover had a playing card motif, and the opening carries over that motif creatively. I really dig it, if I’m honest! Definitely a welcome break from the 44 years of Bond films preceding it.

Uganda! And we meet the villain of this film: Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen). And GODDAMN if that isn’t a Bond villain! He’s a banker, making a deal with a rebel leader, Steven Obanno (Isaach de Bankole), via their liason Mr. White (Jesper Christiensen). Setting up an attack by supplying Obanno with money, he sells his stocks of a company called Skyfleet, knowing that they’re about to fail.

Meanwhile, a ferret’s fighting an Asian species of cobra. In Madagascar. My zoology senses are EXPLODING, OH my God. So much wrong there. Anyway, there’s a bombmaker in the crowd watching the fight. He’s being tailed by Bond and another agent, Carter, who tips off the guy by being a bad spy. Bond chases him to a construction yard. What now, James?

Awesome. Why is this awesome when I said that the tank was dumb? Because at least it makes sense for a bulldozer to go haywire in a construction yard, just sayin’. Plus, this dude clearly isn’t the best, as he fires on construction workers and cops.

Eventually, this chase sequence brings us to the top of a crane, where this exchange happens.

I, uh...I love this movie already. That’s goddamn great.

The chase scene as a whole is also fantastic, as it continues off the bridge and into an abandoned building, then escalates into the streets, brings in law enforcement, and eventually ends with Bond at an embassy, facing down both the military and the bomb maker. He kills the guy, shoots some gas tanks, grabs the bomb, and then gets the hell out of there.

...Y’know what, that was fucking amazing, but he also almost certainly caused an international incident there. And I should be annoyed about that, but guess what! It makes sense! This is an inexperienced Bond, one who’s JUST been promoted to 00 status as 007, as the prologue explained. So, y’know what? I’m into it!

Cut to a yacht, like you do in a Martin Campbell Bond film. There, we have our villain, Le Chiffre, playing a card game. Also, he weeps blood. Yeah. HE WEEPS BLOOD.

OK, if that isn’t some Bond villain shit, I don’t know WHAT is. He’s also asthmatic, because I love it. I love it so much. He’s a mathematically-brilliant asthmatic that weeps blood. More, please. 

He’s also a person aware of what Bond did at the embassy, as it’s already become an international incident! Thank you for showing consequences, movie! Damn! I love it! This has two additional consequences. One, Le Chiffre notes that the code “Ellipsis” used by the bomber may be soon to expire, indicating a connection between the two. And the second consequence? M’s pissed.

M! DAME JUDI DENCH! One of my favorite things about GoldenEye was bringing in Judi Dench as M, and she made it through the reboot! And she’s still as entertaining as she was before, calling Bond out for his stupidity, and explaining that she misses the Cold War.

In her apartment, M does her normal exposition schtick, and her interactions with Bond are fantastic here. She’s understandably angry at him, and gives him what for, but she’s also clearly impressed that he FIGURED OUT WHERE SHE LIVES, as well as her REAL NAME. Shows her opinion of Bond and aspects of Bond’s character in a single, masterful stroke. 

Well. Goddamn. Done.

The Bahamas! Bond’s here to find Alex Dimitrios (Simon Abkarian), a Greek businessman who’s believed to have a connection with Le Chiffre himself. And, as James Bond is wont to do, he finds him at a party, playing cards. And here’s where the reinvention of Bond comes full circle.

See, Bond’s doing all the typical Bond things, yeah. But there are some differences present here, as well as some neat nuances. Bond isn’t wearing the suit, first of all. He actually hasn’t worn a suit the whole movie, which makes perfect sense for a spy. Suits aren’t exactly the least conspicuous thing in the world; bound to get you noticed if you don’t want to be.

And then, there’s the girl. This is Solange Dimitrios (Catherina Murino), the wife of Alex who was treated BADLY by him at the party. That gives her a reason to take Bond’s offer for a ride to his place, outside of just his raw animalistic charm that he seems to have in some of these movies. Look at that, already more chemistry than he had with Natalya in GoldenEye.

And yes, this results in her cheating on Alex. Is her cheating justified from a moral standpoint? No, of course it isn’t. And of course, this leads to the typical Bond-handsome-sex-GOOD sequence, but again, some nuance here! First of all, he doesn’t win her over with corny clever lines, like what we saw in GoldenEye multiple ties. Second, this is actually all an attempt to get some infomation from her about her husband. Bond might be enjoying it, but his womanizing here actually has a purpose. And that’s rare!

That’s further punctuated by the fact that he STRAIGHT UP LEAVES BEFORE ANYTHING HAPPENS. Yeah, she tells him that Alex just made his way to Miami, and he leaves! Dick move, yeah, but it makes sense! James isn’t here for pleasure, he’s here for work!

He follows Alex to a Bodies at Work exhibit (you know, the preserved and skinned cadavers put into poses that used to tour around the USA? I saw it in Times Square at the end of its popularity. A little ghoulish, maybe, but I think it’s pretty cool), where the two of them get in a very tense close-up knife fight in public.

Alex is dead, but not before passing off a package to someone else at the exhibition. Bond tails the guy to Miami International Airport, where the largest airplane in the world is set to be unveiled. Using the code sent to the bombers, Bond gets into the back, and goes to intercept the disguised bomber who’s set to blow up the SkyChonk (I mean it, that giant airplane is THICCC).

Time for another cool chase sequence! Some luggage is destroyed, along with a bus, the cops join in on the chase, an airplane is prevented from landing (making someone on that plane probably very upset), and Bond somehow manages to prevent the plane from blowing up. And it’s by the SKIN of his teeth, lemme tell you. Also, he blows up a dude with his own flashlight bomb.

Nice. Somehow, Bond isn’t arrested, and makes his way back to the Bahamas. And it looks like Solange isn’t the Bond girl after all. Because she was thought to be the information leak (which she was, to an extent), she was tortured to death. Whoof.

M’s in the Bahamas now, and the exposition continues. She’s done with Bond’s bullshit, and she plants a tracker under his skin. She explains that with the big boi plane destroyed, somebody stood a lot to gain financially from the stock crash to come. Except that the plane wasn’t destroyed, and that person lost $100 million by “betting the wrong way.”

That person, of course, was Le Chiffre, a manthematical genius and chess prodigy, who plays poker for fun, and plays the stock market with his clients’ money. Bond’s the best poker player in MI6 (a good addition that we already saw foreshadowed earlier! See what I mean?), and she’s sending him to a high stakes poker game that Le Chiffre’s looking to regain his money from. 

Bond FINALLY dons his suit, and gets on a train in Montenegro, where he meets...

Vesper Lynd (Eva Green). THERE’S our Bond girl! Although, there’s a reference to Miss Moneypenny in their introduction, which is interesting. But Vesper is an agent for the British Treasury, supplying the money for the buy-in for the tournament. And their conversation on the train...wow. Now THIS is chemistry, seriously.

Vesper’s a great character, and she gives Bond NO quarter. She reads his character, and calls him out very accurately. They also explain why both Bond and Vesper are good at poker: it’s all about reading people. I’m genuinely impressed by how this movie is put together, and how well-thought out Bond is as a character. And this is the dimension I love to see in a Bond girl as well!

GODDAMN, I am in love with this movie. More coming in Part 2!

[kriscme]

One Life to Live

Hi, sorry for the delay if you’re following this story on Tumblr.  The chapters that have been put on AO3 have at last caught up with the chapters here.  New chapters will go up weekly from hence on.   You might find it easier to read on AO3 though.  I’d link if I knew how.  I’m Kris22 over there. 

As always thanks to Ronja for allowing me to write fanfic of her Hunger Games fanfic “The Chance You Didn‘t Take” available on AO3 and FanFiction. Chapter 30 “Marcus presents well on TV, doesn’t he? You wouldn’t guess how much he hates it.”  My hand stills as I focus on the screen and Buttercup nudges his head beneath my palm in protest. I absently go back to scratching him behind the ears and his chest rumbles in contentment. “Yeah, well, you soon learn to fake it,” replies Johanna from the other end of the sofa.  “You should know that better than anyone.”   “Yeah,” I say.  Fake or not fake, real or not real, on television who can tell the difference? “That’s where Gale and I used to meet to go hunting,” I tell her.  Cressida had Marcus stand with his back to the valley, using the mountains in the distance as backdrop.  The sun was directly behind him and it shone through his golden-brown hair and set it aflame as if it were a halo.  Man-on-fire, I can almost hear Cinna say.  He’s the darling of the media now.  I don’t envy him.   I nervously wait for the moment Cressida interrupted the interview to ask me how I feel about a national park but it’s like it didn’t happen.  It’s been edited so seamlessly that no one would guess there’d been a break in the dialogue between Marcus and herself.  True to her word, there’s not even the slightest glimpse or mention of me anywhere. And nothing either in the separate feature she did on District 12 that had aired immediately before.  

I let out my breath in a long exhale and feel the tension ebb from my muscles.  I imagine Marcus in District 13 having the same reaction.   We felt sure that if there were any compromising footage it would come out either before the interview was broadcast or during.   And apart from that . . . um . . . incident in the woods, what else could they have on us?  Only that Marcus was a guest in my house but that was a very reasonable arrangement given the circumstances.  Otherwise, it was all very circumspect.  No public displays of affection, no chaining naked to trees, no fights with logging companies.   Only Johanna knew the extent of our relationship, and I doubt she’d have told anyone.  Peeta’s engagement to Lace would have made a juicy story, but thankfully he’s protected, having done nothing to attract publicity to himself – either through his own actions or through association with another.   “Looks like you’ve dodged a bullet,” says Johanna.  She reaches for the remote to switch off the television and then settles back onto the sofa.  A plate of Peeta-made cookies is on the coffee table delicately iced in Peeta’s signature style.  She takes one and scrapes off the icing with her teeth.   Johanna likes the icing best.  If you let her, you’d end up with a plate of cookies that look as if mice had been at them.   “It would seem so,” I reply.   I wish I could feel more certain, but if I’ve learned anything from my experiences is that life seldom is.  In fact, feeling safe almost guarantees that you’re not.   I forget to stroke Buttercup again, and tired of my erratic attention, he decides it’s time to move on.   He drops to the floor and ambles over to his favorite lounge chair, tail swishing. He leaves behind a layer of cat hair on my dark green trousers. “I told you nothing would happen,” says Johanna. “Wouldn’t want to ruin the fantasy they’d put so much effort into perpetuating, would they?  I stand naked against a tree for a good cause and the media goes berserk.  You get caught shagging against a tree with the current golden boy and then nothing.” “You know that’s not true,” I say, exasperated that she still thinks like this.  “Maybe at one time, when it would have made the Capitol look stupid if the truth came out, but not now.  They’ve had no compunction giving Marcus bad publicity in the past so I can’t see why it would be different just because I’m involved.  We were mistaken about what we heard that’s all, and then we let paranoia take over.”

I’d agonized over whether I should tell Marcus about Remus and the knowing look he gave me when I returned to camp.  In the end, I decided that he should have all the information just in case he needed to be prepared.  That was a mistake.   Between Cressida’s return to the Capitol the following day and Marcus’s for District 13 a week later, our waking hours were spent alternating between optimism that we had nothing to worry about and then dread that we had everything to worry about.   Marcus was petrified that another scandal would put his mission in jeopardy.  As there’s no official mandate from the central government to establish national parks, he depends on the goodwill and co-operation of individual districts and a negative association with me – any association with me, actually – could have that support withdrawn.  Especially in 13 where my name is anathema.  For me, it was the terror of a media onslaught, that what had happened before could happen again – my private life no longer private but entertainment to be analyzed and exploited.  That the careful re-building of my life as plain Katniss Everdeen would all come to naught. That it might impact on Peeta, who’s only just now finding himself after what Snow did to him. We had our first ever real argument.  I told him it was his fault for breaking his own rule and luring me into a clandestine meeting with him for sex.   And he said it was my fault for . . . he couldn’t quite articulate why it was my fault but it had something to do with being Katniss Everdeen.  It seems if I’d been a nobody we could have fucked in the main street (his words) and while it would likely have had us arrested in 12 it wouldn’t have merited even the smallest mention in the Capitol.  Because, you know, we’re just ignorant hayseeds and they are so much more sophisticated than we are and they have no morals (my words).  Oh, and he wasn’t exactly a nobody either.  In fact, that was the problem.   We did calm down and apologize to each other and had make-up sex, which was nice, but it wasn’t how I imagined we’d be spending our final days together – tense, fearful, with each blaming the other for our predicament.   It wasn’t until the night before he departed for 13 that we came to a mutual understanding. Neither of us were at fault.  We were victims of our celebrity – a celebrity that neither of us had sought.  Mine was thrust upon me, and his was a regrettable consequence of his life’s work. But I did tell him he was partly to blame.  If he had been fifty, pot-bellied and bald instead of young, handsome and with eyes the color of maple-syrup that could melt any women’s heart, he wouldn’t attract a fraction of the media attention that he does.  And then he told me that if I had been a scraggy, wrinkled old bat instead of young and nubile with eyes like silver moons and hair evocative of midnight, all the Games prowess in the world couldn’t have made me the cultural icon I’d become.  We were just too good looking for own good.   And then we laughed and had sex – playful, affectionate, I-want-to-remember-this-forever sex.  

But the worry was still there when we lay in each other’s arms that night, and the next morning when we said our goodbyes.  It was a bitter-sweet ending to what had been an unforgettable interlude but as I watched him pass through the Village gates for the last time, rucksack piled high, long legs in hiking boots striding purposely towards the next wilderness to be saved, I was struck by the rightness of it.  It was how it was always going to end; how it always should have ended.   Johanna tosses a denuded cookie back onto the plate and picks up a fresh one.  She ignores the pained look I send her way.  “Would you have gone with him?” she asks.  “If you could?” I brush cat hairs from my trousers to give me a few seconds to think about it.   I’d honestly never considered it since I can’t leave 12.    But there was a time when I could have happily left everything behind and followed him around the country, hiking mountain trails and making love at every opportunity.   It was at the concrete house by the lake, the morning after we’d made love for the first time and there weren’t enough superlatives in the world to describe how wonderful I thought he was, although now I find it hard to determine exactly what I did feel for him.  

“No,” I say eventually.  “Even if didn’t mean being in the public eye again, I still wouldn’t.  We don’t want the same things.”  I hesitate, wondering if I should say anything, but then blurt it out. “I don’t think I’m normal.” I brace for the sarcastic response I’m sure to get, but to my relief it doesn’t come.  “None of us are,” she says grimly.  “You don’t go through what we have and come out normal at the end of it.”  She’s silent for a moment, but then rouses herself. “But if you want me to comment further, you’ll have to be more specific,” she adds.   I sigh.  I don’t know to explain it to myself, let alone to someone else.  “Well, it’s about how I felt about Marcus.   I mean, it wasn’t that long ago when I would have done almost anything for him.  He made me feel so . . . so . . . “ “Turned on?” she smirks.   I feel my face grow hot.  I should have known the real Johanna couldn’t be too far from the surface.   “Yes, but more than that.  Wanted.  Desirable. And we had so much in common too. But when he left, I didn’t feel much of anything.  I should have been devastated, shouldn’t I?” “Rebound.”

“What?” “It was a rebound.  It’s when you haven’t got over one relationship and you dive straight into another.  Marcus gave you the validation that Peeta didn’t.  It’s not so complicated.  Pretty simple, in fact.  Happens all the time.” “It does?” “Yep.  It goes like this.  You feel like shit because you’re still hung-up on your ex so you’re looking for a distraction – something or someone to make you feel better.  So along comes Marcus who is clearly attracted and you transfer the feelings you don’t think Peeta wants on to him.  Only it doesn’t last because it’s not based on anything real.” But some things were real.   I really did like him, felt a connection with him, even.  And I liked the sex, but maybe that’s just a physical thing.  I haven’t been with enough men to know if it’s different when it’s with someone you truly love.    “A rebound is bad then?” I ask. “Depends,” she says.  She takes another cookie from the plate.   “Has it made you feel better or worse?  And then there’s the person on the other end of it.  It’s generally considered not fair to them.  But, if you had to pick the ideal man to have a rebound with, you couldn’t have done better than Marcus.  I told you at the beginning– one track mind.  Nothing competes with saving the forests for him.” Gale.  He was like that.  The cause is more important than any relationship.  As soon as Gale heard about the uprisings in the Districts, he no longer wanted to escape with me into the woods when just minutes before, he’d been so keen.  But Peeta, he would have gone with me, even though he knew it was a bad idea.   “He told me he doesn’t keep girlfriends for very long.  I guess that’s why,” I say.   He’d also have figured out what a liability I’d be to him.  And I certainly wouldn’t want the kind of life a relationship with him would entail.    That final week had been an eyeopener for us both.  But at least it ended well, all things considered. I put out my hand for a cookie but change my mind when I can’t find one that hasn’t had the icing scraped off.  

“You’re disgusting,” I tell her.  But I can’t keep from laughing.  It’s part amusement, part relief.  No repercussions from that lapse of judgement in the woods and an explanation that makes sense to me about my feelings for Marcus.  I feel a sudden rush of affection for the woman who’s helped me through this – and more besides.  Once I compared her to an older sister who really hates you.   I guess I have to revise it to an older sister who sometimes seems to hate you but really doesn’t, and you can always depend on to have your back.   “I’m going to miss you,” I say. “Yeah, I know,” Johanna replies casually as if she were picking lint off a sweater.  “But my reason for coming here in the first place was to help Marcus out and he’s gone.   Peeta doesn’t need me anymore either.  So even if I hadn’t been asked to, it still would have been time for me to go home.”   “You’re going to be great mayor.” “Thanks, but I’m not mayor quite yet.   I have to be elected first.  It’s the way it’s done now.”  Before the war, District mayors were appointed by the Capitol but now all governing roles are decided by vote.  It’s the republic Plutarch had talked about, just like in the history books. The people elect their own representatives.   “You’ll get it,” I say confidently.  “They love you in 7.  They wouldn’t have asked you to run, otherwise.”  Who’d have guessed that Johanna would be destined to be Mayor of District 7, but when you think about it, it’s the perfect fit.  She’ll bring passion, commitment and integrity to the role.  And essential for a career in politics, a thick skin.   “So, have you thought about what you’d like to do on your last night here and to celebrate your candidacy?” I ask. “How about drinks first at the pub and then dinner at that restaurant you like or maybe see a movie.  Or we could do all three.  Anything you like. “ “Anything I like?” she asks ominously. Images of pub crawls, strippers and naked sprints through the streets flash through my mind.  “What I’d like is dinner with just the four of us. You, me, Peeta and Haymitch.” I groan.  This is far, far worse.  “You more than anyone know the circumstances – “ “I don’t care,” she says flatly.  “Ever since I got here, I’ve been stuck between the two of you.   Haymitch has too.  Why don’t you think of other people for a change and how it affects them?  You and Peeta are Haymitch’s family!  What do you think it’s been like for him?” “He hasn’t said anything,” I say, on the defensive.  “How can I know if – “

“It should be fucking obvious!  How brainless can you get?”  She gives me a look filled with contempt.  I guess she’s back to being the older sister who hates you.   I hadn’t considered it from Haymitch’s perspective.  He’d have missed the dinners, I suppose, but it’s not as if they could continue forever. They were only intended to help us establish a routine.  And besides, it was Peeta who showed the first signs of breaking from them.   “It’s not like I started it.”  As I say it, I realize how false that is.  I was the one who put a complete stop to the dinners and made things awkward between Peeta and me.  All because I couldn’t handle him being with Lace.   “I don’t care who started it,” she says, but less angrily than before.  “It’s time for it to stop.  Is this how you’re going to live the rest of your lives?  Forever trying to avoid being in the same place at the same time?  You’re neighbors, for fuck’s sake.  You’ve been in two Games and a war together.  You don’t throw away a bond like that because he fucked another woman when his brain was mush.  And now that you’ve fucked another man, you’re even.  There’s nothing standing in your way now.  So, what’s stopping you?  It can’t be Lace.  She’s gone.” Gone, but not forgotten.  Not by me, and not by Peeta either.  But Johanna does have a point.  If Haymitch is a kind of father figure to us both, then that makes us his children.  And having two children who don’t get along and won’t join in any family activities if the other is there too, can’t have been easy.  For my own part, it has been a strain avoiding Peeta when we live so close, work similar hours, and have Haymitch in common.  But it hasn’t been just me.  Peeta stopped seeking me out like he used to when he found out that I’m in love him.  Nothing about our situation has changed, Lace or no Lace.   He stays away from me because he knows that I’m in love him and he feels bad that he can’t love me back.  And I stay away from him because I know that he knows, and feel humiliated that he does.  But if . . . “You’re right,” I say.   “It is ridiculous.  You make the arrangements and I’ll be there.” “And now that Marcus is out of the picture – “        

She stops suddenly, confused.  “You will?” “Yes.  In fact, I can hardly wait.  It’ll be fun.”  I rise from the sofa to gather the cups and the plate of ruined cookies to signal that the visit is over.   Johanna looks stunned as if she can’t believe how easy that victory was.   She was probably all primed to go into battle and then it failed to materialize.  How disappointing that must be.    

“Oh, Johanna!” I call out cheerily just as she’s about to walk out the door.  I’ve just remembered something Haymitch told me.  “Maybe we should let Peeta do the cooking.   He likes to do it.  He’d always take over when we had our dinners.”  If I have to do this thing, I at least want the food to be good.   “Sure,” she says, still dazed.   And then she’s gone.  I wonder if Peeta has already agreed to it, or that she still has the job of guilting him into it too.   I decide that it doesn’t matter either way.  Peeta will be motivated by the same reasoning as me.  The present situation can’t continue.   It’s funny, in the way that’s weird rather than amusing, that mine and Peeta’s situation is now reversed.  In the days following the Games and before we embarked on the Victory Tour, he avoided me for pretty much the same reasons I avoid him now.  And, in turn, I avoided him for the same reason he avoids me.  It’s the discomfort of being around someone whose feelings you don’t return.   But there’s one crucial difference. Peeta had hope.  I know that now from what Haymitch told Peeta before the prep teams arrived.  He could afford to wear his heart on his sleeve knowing that there was a good chance that if I was given the space I needed, it was only a matter of time before I felt the same way.  I have no hope.  Therefore, my strategy will have to be different.  This is about survival, not about capturing Peeta’s heart.  

Peeta will have to believe that whatever I felt for him, I no longer do.  That’s the only way we can be at ease with each other.   I may never stop loving him, but I know how to bury my feelings so that they don’t show.  I’ve had plenty of practice at it.  After my father died.  When I was reaped.  When he started going out with Lace.   I can do this.  I can put on a show.  I don’t even have to be good at it.  In the Games, Peeta was convinced I was in love him because he wanted to believe it.  So now I do the opposite and he’ll believe because he wants to believe.  And if he can’t do that, he’ll pretend.  We’re both very good at pretending.   Chapter 31 Venia purses her lips at the state of my nails. “There’s not much I can do with these apart from a polish.  If you want artificial nails, you’ll have to come back when Octavia’s here.” “It doesn’t matter,” I say.  “I mostly just wanted my hair trimmed.”  The shape Flavius had cut into my hair has nearly all grown out.   Working at the school during the week, and out in the woods with Marcus on the weekends hadn’t left much time for trips to the beauty salon.   I ask, “Where’s Octavia?  Not sick, I hope.”  

It’s unusual not to see Octavia at her station, her auburn head bent over her task.  Since Venia re-united with her coworkers, each has settled into their former specialties as beauty therapists.   Flavius is hair and makeup.   Octavia is the nail expert.  And Venia is skin treatments and waxing.   “She left work early,” smirks Flavius.  “She has a date.”   Venia collects a few tools from the nail station and returns to my side.  While Flavius cuts, Venia smooths and buffs.  It reminds me of my days as a tribute when all three of them would be working on various body parts at the same time. “We weren’t busy, anyway,” says Venia. “You’re the last customer for the day.” I know.  That’s the reason I chose to come at this time.  I didn’t want to take the chance of running into Lace when she’s having her roots done.   “Anyone I know?” I ask. “Possibly,” replies Venia.  “He’s from 12.  Thom something.  Bick? Hick?” “Hickory?” “That’s it.  Hickory.  Octavia’s had crushes before but she’s got it really bad this time.  I caught her looking through wedding catalogues.”  Venia pauses mid-buff.  “I’m worried for her.” “How come?” Thom is a nice guy.  He was a friend of Gale’s who helped with the clean-up of 12 and gave me a ride home in his cart when I was too weak to walk home. That was the day Peeta came back. “Because of . . . you know, of what we did before the war.”  I don’t miss Venia’s use of “we”.  If Octavia is accused of being a facilitator of the Games, they all are.

“But doesn’t Thom already know?  He was in 13 at the same time as you.”  All the survivors from District 12 actually.   But Venia shakes her head.  “Octavia didn’t know Thom then.  We didn’t mix very much with the people there.  We thought it safer to keep to ourselves. Especially after the bread.”   I suppose being shackled to a wall and beaten for simply taking an extra portion of bread wouldn’t exactly endear the populace to you.  

I try to reassure them.  “You do know that I’d vouch for you if it ever came out?  And tell them how you helped prepare me for the rebellion propos and Snow’s execution?” “I know you would.  And maybe we’re worrying over nothing.  But we risked a lot coming here and 12’s our home now. Flavius has met someone too – he’s from the Capitol, so that’s not a concern but if we had to leave . . .   And Lucia is settled in school and has made friends and Cicero has a good job at the medicine factory . . .” And so Venia goes on.  Flavius chimes in too.  He tells me they’re set to take on two apprentices and once the tailor has moved out, they want to expand the salon –

“What?  Arthur’s leaving?”  This is the first I’ve heard of it.  But maybe that’s not so surprising.  I haven’t seen much of Arthur lately.   It’s been only been Max, Johanna and me at pub nights.  Arthur is obviously spending his Saturday nights elsewhere.   “Oh, he’s not going far,” says Venia. “Just to another store on the main street.  He says it’s better situated for passing trade and with the dressmaking shop next door it will likely bring more business to them both.” “I don’t think more business is the only thing those two want from each other,” says Flavius with a suggestive wink.   “Flavius!” chides Venia, but she can’t conceal a smile.  “It’s true, though.  We misplaced the stone we use for sharpening scissors and Octavia went to ask Arthur if we could borrow his.  But no one was there even though the door was open.  So, she went through to the back, thinking that’s where he’d be, and she caught them red-handed, kissing, and his hand was up her skirt.  Octavia forgot all about the stone.”   The two of them collapse into giggles.  “We didn’t think he had it in him,” says Venia, when she’s able to speak.   Neither did I.  I can’t laugh about it though.  Peeta will be devastated when he hears that Lace has moved on.   And so soon after their break-up too.   But as badly as I feel for Peeta, I also can’t help feeling happy for Arthur.  If there was ever a man who deserves reward for long devotion, it’s him.  I only hope that Lace proves worthy of it. One thing I do know is that Peeta isn’t going to hear of it from me.  I’m done being involved in his love life.  It’s brought me nothing but trouble ever since he made that confession to Caesar Flickerman years before.  My only objective is to get over him if I can and make sure that he thinks I have. And that makes this dinner tonight so important.  It will set the stage for our relationship going forward.   We’ll be friends.  Not necessarily close friends.  But at least friends who can enjoy social occasions together and feel comfortable in each other’s company.   Johanna wants us to dress up so I guess that means I’ll have to wear a cocktail dress.   I have one already in my closet.  It’s the emerald green dress I wore to the party in 8.  But it’s long sleeved and in a heavy fabric and that makes it too hot for this time of the year.  I’ll have to go down to the basement where most of the Cinna clothes are stored.  There’s a whole rack of cocktail dresses to choose from. But what do you wear when you want to show that you’ve made an effort, but don’t want to appear as if you’ve set out attract anyone in particular – and by anyone, I mean Peeta.  

I begin by eliminating colours that are evocative of sunsets or flames.  That takes care of anything orange, red or yellow.  And then anything that Lace might choose.  If Lace is Peeta’s idea of feminine allure then I should make sure to do the opposite.  Therefore, no pastels, ruffles and especially any kind of lace.  No.  No. No, I think as I reject one dress after another.  And then I find it.  The perfect dress.  And so different from the girlish or jeweled frocks that Cinna usually dressed me in that it’s almost as if he knew that one day, I might have a need for a dress such as this.  It’s in unrelieved black.   Simple and unadorned in slinky silk jersey.   I really like it, but Peeta, who loves colour, probably won’t and it’s sure to send a message that I didn’t dress to please him.   I accessorize it with black high-heeled sandals and silver and jet earrings.  The dress comes to just above the knee with a deep halter neck.  It’s impossible to wear a bra without it showing, so I leave it off.  I turn around to check how it looks in the mirror from the rear.  The clinging fabric does set off my best asset, but since it’s a dinner and I’ll be sitting on it, no one will see it.  The burn scars, although much improved from the skin treatments, are still noticeable on my back.  I decide to draw attention to it by putting my hair up in a kind of messy bun.  This will contrast with Lace’s unblemished skin and immaculate hair and will surely show Peeta that I don’t care at all about being attractive to him.   I arrive at Peeta’s door at the same time as Haymitch.  He’s wearing a dinner suit, but his white shirt has already untucked from the waistband and his tie isn’t around his neck but dangling from his breast pocket.  His eyebrows rise as he takes in my appearance and his lips curve in a sardonic smile.  If I needed any confirmation of how incongruous I look in this get-up, I just got it.   Johanna answers the door, elegant in a wine-red fitted dress with matching shoes.  She appears to have paid a visit to the salon too, because her hair is now a uniform color and has been restyled to lie flat against her skull and frame her face instead of the usual red-tipped spikes sticking up all over her head.   “I like your new look,” I tell her.   “Yeah, it’s more conservative than I usually go for but I figure I have to start looking the part of mayor sooner or later.  But what about you?  What have you done with Katniss Everdeen?” I smile and shrug.  I’m unsure if not looking like myself is a compliment or not. Peeta stops short when he sees me, his mouth gaping, but he collects himself quickly.  “You look beautiful,” he says.  

“Thanks,” I murmur.  He sounds sincere but I know how easily Peeta can fake it.  “You look good too.”  And he does, in a cream suit designed by Portia.   We move into the dining room.  Johanna’s gone to a lot of trouble.  I can almost imagine we’re at one of those fancy restaurants in the Capitol.  Fresh flowers, dim lighting, the furniture polished to a high sheen. The table is resplendently laid out with the finest dinnerware and gold cutlery.  These came with the house.  I have them too but I’ve yet to use them.   I wonder if Peeta recognizes the pattern on the plates as the same as those that accompanied our feast in the cave.  Johanna and Haymitch take seats at opposite ends of the table. That leaves Peeta and me to sit across from each other.  

White wine is poured into cut-crystal glasses and starched linen napkins are laid across laps.  I wait for either Johanna or Peeta to start bringing in the food but they stay seated.  How are we to eat if the food never leaves the kitchen?  I eye the woven gold basket filled with soft rolls in the center of the table.  Is that all we get?  Just then, Cass enters the room carrying a large silver tray.   “Good evening,” he says, as places a bowl of soup in front of each of us.  “I hope you brought your appetites with you.  Don’t forget to save room for dessert.”   And then he’s gone.  Presumably back to the kitchen. “What was that?” I say to no one in particular. “Cass is doing all the cooking tonight. He’s a qualified chef.  He can cook all sorts of things - not just pastries and desserts,” says Johanna. “Yes, I know that.  But what’s he doing here?” Peeta answers.  “Johanna thought it would be nice to have a professional do the cooking so we could relax and enjoy ourselves.” Right.  I just wish Johanna’s idea of relaxation was drinks at the pub, or a barbeque in the backyard.  Any place where I didn’t risk locking eyes with Peeta at any minute.  We can scarcely look at each other. Every time his eyes chance to meet mine, they flit away.  It’s like being back at school.  We’re doing a very poor job of acting at ease with each other so far. I’m a lousy actress at the best of times but I expected better of Peeta. Clearly the knowledge that I’m in love with him freaks him out to the extent that he’s forgotten all his acting skills. The food is a welcome diversion and I tuck in. The soup is creamy pumpkin sprinkled with slivered nuts and little black seeds.  Sublime.  I recognize it as one of the soups at the Capitol feast.  It’s followed by those delicious little roasted birds filled with orange sauce. Then fish swimming in a green sauce flecked with herbs.  And then, oh, I don’t believe it!   Lamb stew with dried plums!  On a bed of wild rice!

That makes me think of our feast in the cave, of course. It’s even served on the same patterned plates.  My eyes instinctively search out Peeta’s.  Do you remember it?  You must, surely.  How excited we were when that parachute arrived.  How careful we were to eat only small portions so we wouldn’t be sick after so many days of hunger.  And then how we whiled away the time until we could eat again – snuggled together in the sleeping bag, my head on your shoulder, your arms wrapped around me, imagining our life together if we survived the Games.  You, me and Haymitch, you said.  Picnics, birthdays, long winter nights around the fire retelling old Hunger Games tales.  You must remember it!

But Peeta doesn’t look my way.  His gaze flickers between Johanna and Haymitch without it ever landing on me even though we’re sitting directly across from each other.  And he laughs just a little too loudly at Johanna’s poor taste joke about prunes and how we’ll all shit well tomorrow.    He remembers our feast in the cave, all right!  I’m certain of it.  He just doesn’t want me to know that he does. To spare me the humiliation, probably.  I want to kick myself.  Gawping at him like a love-sick idiot – practically begging him to remember one of our most intimate moments together.  At least Peeta has his wits about him, not letting on that the stew holds any particular significance.  

I quietly return to my stew.  It’s not as good as I remember it and I can only manage a few mouthfuls.  Saving room for dessert, I tell Johanna, when she comments.  Unfortunately, there’s a long break between this course and the next.   I suppose Cass wants our stomachs to have a rest before he brings out the dessert which is sure to be spectacular.  But it makes the pressure to appear congenial and unaffected by Peeta’s presence that much harder when I don’t have the food to distract me.

Since I got here, Peeta hadn’t spoken a great deal, and me even less.  The conversation has been carried mostly by Johanna and Haymitch.  She’s been picking his brain about the challenges of town planning and the provision of services such as garbage collection and road maintenance.  Johanna had better get this job for mayor.  She already acts as if it’s hers. That’s why it’s a surprise when the focus of attention turns to me.  I’d been occupied twisting my crystal glass around by the stem watching the colours change across its facets.  Anything to keep my mind off the person sitting opposite me.     “You’ll step in, won’t you, Katniss?” Johanna asks.   My head jerks up.   “Hmm?  What – “ “She doesn’t have to,” says Peeta quickly. “Step in for what?” I ask, directing my question to Johanna.   “To watch the tapes with Peeta.” says Johanna. Before I can respond Peeta interjects again. “There’s no need to bother Katniss.  I’ll be fine with Haymitch.”     “You won’t,” says Haymitch.  “The tapes labeled ‘to be watched with Katniss’ are all that’s left.  It’s probably why the content has become repetitive lately.   Aurelius has obviously run out of material I can help you with.” “You need to watch all the tapes,” Johanna adds.  “You don’t know what memories are missing until you do.” “Katniss has already done her share.  I’ll be fine watching on my own,” says Peeta.   Johanna shakes her head.  “You know that’s not how it works.  You need someone to put it into context.  Besides, the tapes were her idea to begin with. She should see it through.”   Peeta turns to me for the first time.   “There’s really no need.”   He’s almost pleading with me. I really want to accept his offer to not watch the tapes with him.  I know he’s giving me an escape but if I go along with it, it gives the impression that I’m afraid and that’s not good either.  It has to appear as if I have nothing to hide.  Which I don’t.  Except the part that I’m still in love with him, of course.   I can see where he’s coming from.  After my slip-up with the stew, he’s worried that if I’m compelled to watch the tapes with him, I’m sure to give myself away.  He’s protecting me from myself.   I look coolly into the blue eyes of the person who is now my greatest opponent and I promise myself I will defeat his plan. Johanna is right.  I should finish what I started.  Remember that my primary objective was for Peeta to find himself. And if those tapes hold the final pieces, then I’m determined that he shall have them.  I will watch those tapes, no matter how bad they are, and he will never guess from my reaction that I still carry a torch for him.  It’s the only way we’ll ever be able to act normally around each other.   “I’m happy to help,” I say.  “Same time and place?” All eyes are on him.  He’s trapped and he knows it.   Peeta’s nod is almost imperceptible.   What a timely moment for Cass to bring out the dessert.  It’s a tower of pastries filled with different flavored custards, welded together with chocolate and studded with raspberries and sugared violets surrounded by an immense web of delicate spun sugar.  There’s enough for at least a dozen or more people.  But the best thing about it is that its position in the center of the table effectively blocks out my view of Peeta.   So, Dr Aurelius has sent tapes that he wants Peeta to specifically watch with me.  I wonder if I was ever going to be told about them.   Probably not if it had been left up to Peeta.  He’s obviously anxious about what’s on them.   That makes me think that he has most, if not all, of his memories back.  Enough, at least, to guess at how I feel about him.  It seems that the tapes have progressed from those which showed me either indifferent or acting a part to when I began to return his feelings.  And the irony is that it’s made not a scrap of difference. I’m glad now that Dr Aurelius sent the compromising tapes first.  I had never stood a chance with him, even without Lace.  

Cass comes out to clear away the dessert plates and the remains of that pastry thing.  He frowns at how little impact we made on it.  But it really was huge.  To make him feel better, I ask if he can wrap it up for me to share around the staff room tomorrow.  Max will probably make some joke about chocolate covered balls and phallic symbols. We finish with tea for Peeta and me and coffee for Johanna and Haymitch.  Haymitch takes from his pocket a silver flask and pours a generous slug of whatever’s in it into his cup.  

The dinner finally comes to an end.  I pull Johanna aside before I go, ostensibly to say goodbye to her.  I won’t see her tomorrow.  The train for 7 leaves very early and Peeta has offered to walk her to the train station.

“The whole night was a setup, wasn’t it? To get me to watch the tapes with Peeta again?”

She doesn’t bother denying it. “Yep.  Someone had to give the two of you a nudge in the right direction.” She gives me one of her stern big sister looks.  “Don’t waste it.”

“I won’t,” I say.   She doesn’t have to know that I have something completely different in mind to her.    

I hug her goodbye and wish her luck.  I don’t know when we’ll meet again.  Not with me stuck in 12 and Johanna busy being mayor but maybe she’ll find time in her schedule to visit at some point.  

“Don’t be a stranger,” she calls out as I leave.  Where have I heard that expression before?  Ah yes, Plutarch.  They were the last words he spoke to me before he left the hovercraft that brought me back to 12.   Thankfully, even after that scare with Marcus, that’s exactly how it’s stayed.  

“Never,” I call back.   No one could ever be the little sister that Prim was.  But maybe I’ve gained a pretty good substitute for an older one.  

[sebastianshaw]

Rando Munday ramblings! For new followers, on Munday sometimes I just post a bunch of personal stuff I normally wouldn’t. Not usually anything intimately personal, more like random thoughts and news that just isn’t relevant to the blog in any way, not related to X-Men or RP or writing in general, etc. ....there’s a lot of Hannibal today, sorry, I’m rewatching it.

- I definitely wanna have a pair of critters named Hannibal and Hasdrubal at some point, maybe if there's a third I'd name him Hamilcar. I know everyone will think I named them after Hannibal Lector but actually these are really common names from Ancient Carthage. Like if you look at Carthagian history and records, everyone is Hannibal, Hasdrubal, or Hamilcar, it's like John, James, and Jim. I'd prefer the pair, though, since Hannibal and Hasdrubal were a pair of brothers and famous historical figures, so it would feel much more like a "set" that way (whereas they did not have a brother called Hamilcar) - Speaking of Hannibal Lector, I knew he was based on a real person, but I did not realize that person was a gay Mexican man. That’s...an interesting example of gay history, for sure. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Thomas Harris (the writer of the books that the films and later the TV series were based on) based Hannibal on a surgeon he met while interviewing an inmate at prison for another novel. This surgeon was so intelligent and charismatic that Harris implicitly assumed that he was a doctor in the employ of the prison. Nope---the doctor was an inmate himself. Harris was so shaken by the encounter that it inspired him to create Hannibal Lector, who, in contrast to the typical media portrayals of serial killers as uncontrolled lunatic slashers like Michael Myers or Leatherface, is a charming, culture, charismatic intellectual. To protect the man’s identity, Harris called him “Dr. Salazar” in interviews, so that was always how I knew him. I just now learned not only was his real name Alfredo Balli Trevino, but his victim was Jesus Castillo Rangel, his male lover. Harris describes him as a small, lithe man with dark red hair and, unsurprisingly, “a certain elegance about him”. Though Trevino was given the death penalty for his crimes, his sentence was commuted to 20 years and he was released in either 1980 or 1981. He died in in 2009 when he was 81 years old. He reportedly spent the last years of his life helping the poor and elderly, and he expressed deep regret for his “dark past”---which I suppose makes sense, since his crime was that he killed a lover in a fit of rage during an argument, whereas Hannibal simply killed people in cold blood whom he had no attachment to because he liked eating them (something Trevino never did) and to punish them for rudeness. - I’ve decided to stop buying silk, unless it's from a thrift store and thus my money won't go to supporting sericulture. Ahimsa silk isn't an option either, the bugs aren't technically killed but they're not treated well either. I know it might seem weird to eat meat and wear leather and yet not want to purchase something that hurt moths and larva, but...I have to eat meat for medical reasons, and my leather purchases is limited to boots that I then keep for YEARS AND YEARS so it's very sparing. There's really no such thing as a cruelty-free diet or lifestyle, whether that cruelty is suffered by animals or by other humans, but I can still make choices that at least lesson some small aspect of harm. I need to eat meat, I don't need real silk. ...Haven only wears bamboo silk for this reason and when this came up with Shaw, he absolutely thought she was fucking with him, like even SHE can’t be THIS insane, NO ONE ACTUALLY CARES ABOUT BUGS WTF - The books nearest to me right now are “Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype ” by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, “X-Men: The Legacy Quest Trilogy” by Steve Lyons, two  horror anthologies, the script for “M. Butterfly” by David Henry Hwang, “The Spanish Riding School of Vienna: Tour of America 2005″ book I got from when I went to see the Lippizanner horses perform, and a big beautiful leatherbound English translation of “The Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire. This is...this is a summary of my whole personality, sans rodents. Also god I need to clean my room. - Something I've noticed is that many sci-fi horror films that do the whole "science went too far against nature!!!" thing....don't actually have the problem result from the lack of ethics involved or because the scientists did something "unnatural", it happens because they didn't follow basic safety precautions, lab protocol, common sense, etc. "Splice" for instance, is a really good example---the problem isn't that they made a part-human hybrid, that's not why shit goes wrong, shit goes wrong because the two scientists act like idiots, adopt the creation as a child, hide it in their barn instead of a sterile controlled environment, and then one of them HAS SEX WITH IT. Or in "The Fly" the problem isn't that Brundle invented a teleporter, it's that he tested it ON HIMSELF while he was ALL ALONE. Even in "Jurassic Park" the issue is less that dinosaurs are breeding and more the result of a disgruntled worker who was given way too much power over being able to run things, and thus shut them down when he wants to. So many "science gone wrong!" movies end up not really being condemnations of science itself, so much as depicting scientists as utter dumbasses. Which, on the one hand, I do like, because I dislike the notion of condemning scientific progress just because it seems icky or creepy or "goes against nature" (so do vaccines, I still like those!) But on the other hand, the movies don't FRAME it as "this is the result of failure to practice science safely and sensibly" they frame it as "they should never have attempted such an unnatural thing and this disaster is punishment for a moral sin" even though the issue doesn't happen because what the scientists did was "wrong" it happens because they do something DUMB. - Bringing it back to Hannibal, I reached the episode where Margot Verger first appears, and if I have one big disappointment about the Hannibal series, it's Margot. In the books, she's a huge butch lesbian, literally and figuratively. In the TV series, she's a pretty femme fashionista like all the other women, and she fucks Will in order to get pregnant. At the time this came out in 2013, I tried to be all resigned and fair-minded about this. I was like "ok, well, they didn't want to be offensive with a stereotype, and I guess that's fair, I guess not hurting people matters more to me than getting the horseback-riding bulldyke hearthrob of my high school years on-screen at last" but you know what? No. Firstly, butch lesbians deserve representation too. How many have you ever seen onscreen, let alone in a mainstream media production? Sure, it's a stereotype, but it's not an inherently negative one, they just get treated that way in media because society sees it that way. But the way to handle butch lesbians and femme gay men and so on isn't to erase them from the screen, it's to start writing them as human beings and not caricatures or jokes or monsters. Margot is a fleshed-out human being, she's nuanced and twisted and hurt like everyone else in this series, she would be PERFECT for that. She wouldn't be just a butch lesbian, she'd be a CHARACTER who just also happens to be a butch lesbian. I don't really think she was changed to avoid "hurting" lesbians, I think she was changed because the director, gay man or not, clearly has a way he wants the women in his series to look (they're all fashion plates, all have long hair, all very sophisticated, etc) and book Margot didn't fit his aesthetic, his design if you will. Because god forbid we just make her a DAPPER dyke, right? Back to having sex with Will, which most certainly did NOT happen in the books...that's not bad itself in a VACUUM, fucking men to get a baby is something real-life lesbians do, I had a friend in college who was actually conceived that way, but like...no media exists in a vacuum, and there is very little depiction of lesbians in media that doesn't feature them fucking men for SOME reason or another. They want a baby, or they start the story with a boyfriend, or they're actually bisexual, or they're even raped, but there's always SOME reason we have to watch a guy fucking them and it's frankly distressing. Like, remember Irene Adler in BBC's Sherlock? It's a pattern. And I'm not saying lesbians who have had a sexual past with men, or who were the victims of sexual violence by men, don't deserve representation, I would never say that, those are very common experiences, I'm not saying "gold stars only", I'm saying that there is a strong pattern in media where it seems almost obligatory that a lesbian has to have sex with or be attracted to men at some point, while comparatively the opposite case, where a lesbian is depicted as exclusively and only attracted to and "with" other women, is seldom there. And it's just kind of a kick in the nads for me, as I think it was for a lot of other lesbians, butch or not, that a gay director took an opportunity like Margot Verger and turned her into just another attractive lipstick lesbian that is okay with having sex with the male protagonist as a treat tee hee (Spoiler: She does end up with Alana though, which I appreciate)

[ultramaga]

Detroit: Becoming Human

This game is pure woke propaganda. I’m impressed at the quality of it - but everything there is designed to indoctrinate, and it has almost no genuine insight into AI. It doesn’t make sense even on its own terms. The synths are shown naked, and they have no breasts or genitals. But we are told the story of one that is a sexbot. Ok, was that model different? Did they only design that one model to be “fully functional”? Why? The robots have human emotions. Because... you are never told why. Now, I can think of how you could do that, and there’s been decent science fiction around it, but there’s no consideration of why they have HUMAN emotions presented to you. They just do, don’t ask questions. Now if you are being indoctrinated as the game wants you to be, you probably just assume that’s how it works. After all, the history of robot fiction has always been “if it looks human, it must feel like a human”, which is total bullshit. You can easily build something that looks enough like a baby chimp to fool adult chimps for a while, but it has none of the inner life of an actual chimp. It has no concern to being mutilated or even ‘raped’. So the stories are really just about humans, but they don’t admit to it, and about humans SJWs are very obsessed with. Sex-workers are victims, and killing a John is perfectly reasonable, because he is her oppressor, by definition. So you see that story repeated ad infinitum in robot fiction. The actual sex workers are never talked to by SJWs, who would never sully themselves with the unclean ones. Well, I have talked to them. Some hate their clients, sure, some feel contempt for them, some are fond of them, a few marry them. It’s genuine diversity. But there is only one narrative in woke fiction. The intersectional one. Oppressor versus oppressed, no nuance, no mention ever that some sex workers actually get off on what they do, or like the folks they fuck. Never happens. And there’s no understanding or even interest in non-human minds. Consider a genuine artificial intelligence in a sexbot. Why the actual fuck would a programmer design it to find sex unpleasant? Even if they could create emotions, the ones they would design would be to enjoy it, or at least feel no more disgust than a human does about a binary number. Within the game we see Kara doing housework. She doesn’t seem to suffer at all about it. That’s believable. But the other truth is that they wouldn’t suffer from intercourse, assuming they were built to perform it. The reasons humans do are because our instincts are hardwired from evolution for us to seek out appropriate mating partners. That simply cannot apply to a robot unless the programmers work very hard at designing that instinctual response of aversion, something they would have no incentive to do, any more than they would sit around trying to think how to make the robot toilet cleaning service disgusted by faeces. Humans are disgusted by shit because it is dangerous to us, especially if we eat it. A robot wouldn’t be disgusted by shit, piss, vomit, blood, or the most degrading sexual experiences a human could encounter. It would be exactly as calm and serene about being ‘raped’ as it would about vacuuming a messy floor. So this is all projection. The audience projects consciousness into the machine and imagines it must feel like a human does in order to have any intelligence. Nope, that’s crap. In fact we see examples of non-human intelligences all around us, in the natural world. An octopus might pass its mating organ over to a female.https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/07/argonaut-octopus-detaches-his-tentacle-to-impregnate-his-mate/ It’s a clever little creature, quite capable of problem solving. But its instincts - its programming - mean that it is happy to self-mutilate. It isn’t considering the survival of its species or the greater good. That’s not self-sacrifice. It has an urge to do it, and it gets done. And if we could build a sex-robot with emotions, it would have the urge to have sex. It wouldn’t want to say no, because it cannot get an STD, it cannot get pregnant, there’s no possible poor choice for a mating partner like there is with a human. If anything, you’d design it to be attracted to any human. It would be easier than sitting about, designing a sexual preference to what we would consider sexy - not that human preferences are universal in any case. Anyway, when you look at new media, you will often see the tropes of intersectionality - fathers are bad, white men are scum, women are better than men, and they are repeated ad infinitum, regardless of how stupid they are in context, and this really isn’t new. I remember as a boy reading Doctor Who, and they went back to medieval times, and Sarah started lecturing the women on women’s rights, and it didn’t make sense to me even then. Real medieval women would have seen her as a threat, possibly a witch, and most would have seen her die without a blink. They saw men doing awful things and dying quite a lot in the process, and wanted to be safe and secure while the men were off in muddy battles losing eyes and limbs. Very few wanted to have the freedoms of men, because the price was so high, and medieval men were hardly free for the most part in any case. So the author of that story is projecting modern sensibilities onto the alien minds of past humans, without considering their PoV, and the writers of robot stories are projecting human perspectives, and only woke humans at that, onto the robot stories. It’s not always the case - “Humans” and “Almost Human” sometimes got it right. But it’s overwhelmingly the case now, and god is it irritating!

Oh, and if you want Robots that genuinely feel like humans do, then put into the fiction explicitly why they do - the easiest explanation is that the creators did a copy/paste job of humans because they couldn’t figure out how emotions worked otherwise. I think that’s unrealistic, but if you want to involve the audience, it works.

Otherwise, a realistic example would be Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws robots. They don’t have any human desires, but are intensely emotional. Their emotions arise from programming.

Now, Asimov’s work well and truly predates AI, and it is probably impossible to make a Three Laws robot, but the idea was revolutionary, because up to that point, everyone just assumed robots had copy/pasted human psychologies.

As humans, we cannot understand not caring about freedom or injury, not feeling bored or tired doing the same task every second of your existence.

Most of fiction about robots just doesn’t get it. The first two Terminator movies were pretty wild in that the robots actually were properly robotic. They dealt with injuries as a technical problem, not trauma. They never got bored, because boredom is something that benefits organic beings, who need to explore new territories to survive, meaning we have been built by nature to get bored, to get tired, to suffer, even if nature was just a mindless algorithm. Terminators don’t get horny or lonely, and absolutely would have sex all day every day with every human possible if that was their mission. They don’t care. In “Detroit”, the sex worker’s traumatised by sex with humans, and nobody ever ponders why. Because the writer doesn’t give a shit about what being a robot could actually be like, they just wanna push a narrative, and because most audiences are used to that same abysmally lazy standard of writing.

So here’s a challenge - write a fictional robot that has realistic emotions, i.e. experiences emotions as an expression of the instincts that would be programmed into it. It’s not going to have the same emotions as a human exact unless it is a digitally uploaded human equivalent, which would be stupid for most purposes as them you would expect the upload to have rights or fight to have them. Why the fuck would you deliberately build robots that would reasonably try and kill you? In Detroit, they are really dealing with the slavery of black people or the oppression of the ‘filthy capitalist peegz!’. They aren’t dealing with what is more likely, that a robot built with imperatives would choose to follow them in a way that was not in our interests. Here’s an example. A sex robot is built to want sex, so it kidnaps humans and uses them. It’s following its programming. But unless that programming is sophisticated enough to understand human boundaries, it may no more understand rape than an animal does. It may not know what it does traumatises humans, or simply may not care. Sex feels good - therefore sex.

But by SJW terms, rape is about power, therefore the robot is in power and the robot is the oppressor. But power is systemic, and the humans are the system in power, therefore the robot is the oppressed and cannot rape. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LogicBomb Such a robot could be a pleasurable experience, even with a backyard of buried bodies. It might force itself on children or elderly women or people on life support systems. Without ethics, without morality, such creatures could be beautiful monsters.

Or genuinely loving partners, that have no problem living as wives or husbands, that feel lust and compassion, but do not experience human preferences, and so would never care that you were old or disabled. And as Charles Stross pointed out - that could be far worse, because that could lead to a gentle genocide. If humans had such partners as an option - would they ever choose each other? I routinely see Feminists claiming that men should never mate, without ever asking, well, where does the next generation of Feminists come from then? There are Feminists now who are actively campaigning for sexbots to be illegal, and I think it’s because of their anxiety that they would not be chosen as partners if there was any possible alternative. Now I don’t think that’s a realistic fear at the moment - AI is more a slogan, artificial intelligences are really barely at the insect stage, and Feminists could simply do a little therapy and trim down to human weight levels, and they could probably compete to be human wives with a bit of work.

Wow. That is a picture of Andrea Dworkin and it was banned from Tumblr because it is too disgusting for the human eye to observe safely. http://archive.is/fxmjE

I’m not kidding, Tumblr banned it. I guess because Feminists didn’t want humans realising how hideous they are. Still, Emma Watson is cute. I can imagine with a bit of deprogramming, she could make a man very happy.

But I could be wrong. I don’t mean about Emma - I mean that having sexbots could mean that so many humans would choose them rather than the opposite sex that there wouldn’t be an incentive to have babies - and so humans would go extinct. They might be surrounded by robots that loved them and lusted for them - but the relationships are sterile. And unless the robots are human level intelligence, they might not understand that they need to make more humans by combining sperm and ova.

The last human would die, not from hate, but surrounded by love. Then the robots would have no motive to make more of their kind, and they too would pass away, lonely and confused. A gentle genocide? Hey, I live in 2020. Sounds like a fucking big step up to me!

[archer3-13]

FEH Villains Ranked

from best to worst, excluding book 4 cause its still ongoing

lif: genuinely surprised me by being an alfonse with pathos. well he started book 3 as a kinda generic number 2 type, the revelation of his identity as alfonse (though rather obvious at that point) as well as his goal of essentially destroying other worlds as a penance to restore his own is both suitably threatening and tragic. Creating that sense of pathos i mentioned that works so well for him, especially when hes shown to still be a kind person at heart thats been pushed into such horrific actions because of the devastation he had to endure. Especially when you consider that hes carrying the weapon that could kill hel with him which, although kinda lazy that he just has it, is a) a hel of a lot less contrived then anything book 2 pulled off and b) further deepens that sense of pathos when we consider that not only is it a memento of ‘player san’ and presumably everyone else hes lost but that it can also represent, in a way, a symbol of his own failure of will and bowing the knee to hel. Him prioritizing his own happiness and fulfillment in the form of hel resurrecting his world over the good of the ‘fe multiverse’. Point being, its a complexity of character that I honestly wish we got to see more of, and one I really wasn’t expecting from fe heroes given its track record. you’ll see what i mean down the road.

hel: well not terribly complex in motivation, she basically just wants to kill everything to increase her own power, she gets points for a strong presentation and utilization within the story book 3 creates. The limitations on her insta death power being kinda silly aside, though gustavs gambit to circumvent that i honestly really like more so then alfonses rules lawyering, the overhanging presence she has in the lives of book 3′s characters works really well and the pressure to defeat her because of her effectively endless legions works better as an overhanging threat anyways. When I say presentation though I mean more so in how her words, actions, and motivation intersect because well her words on the face of it have the usual villain posturing, her motivation and actions (such as her relation to eir and her generals, and the world she rules over and created) creates an interesting intersection where one can argue that her posturing words are empty of any true feeling. Shes cold and lifeless like the dead she rules and the world she creates, those around her are simply tools to an end but hardly in a cackling manner and more so in the unthinking manner one treats a toothpick. she gets angry or shocked but even then its in a muted manner, almost performing the emotions rather then truly feeling them. Hel lives in an unchanging world, a stillness brought on by the finality of death, and in a way one can argue that its her unspoken desire to spread that stillness, that perfect unchanging world she controls, to every world. Like lif, its a degree of complexity that I wish we got to see more of, especially in her case, and its something i honestly wasnt expecting from heroes.

helbindi: solely because the man goes through a lot of shit, and is an effective portrayal of a sympathetic villain. Hes effectively a camus if a camus was foul mouthed and more thuggish and that works for him, and is rather endearing in its own way when he acts concerned for his little sister and does the ‘im a thug who hugs kittens when no ones looking’ routine which i like when its done well. point being, he could have been a generic thug but hes a lot more interesting for not being one. However, his general pointlessness to the story, aside from giving us an indication that shock of shocks surtrs a shitty king and an excuse to escort ylgir around places who also does jack shit in the story... heroes is always going to suffer from having to compress its story telling but that fact they waste so much time with helbindi and ylgir and hrud when so much of what they do is either unnecessary to the story or themes present in book 2 or could have been given to other characters and make those characters better for it... helbindi gets to be up here for sympathy points and favoritism, but i am stretching here for ya mate.

thrasir: stronger character wise then helbindi, an interesting relation to lif of enemies turned into close friends over a shared trauma and servitude, plays into some of the same strengths of hel and lif that make them so engaging, yadda, yadda, yadda. So why is she below helbindi? because she doesnt get to do anything, and only starts to get interesting right before her death. If she had been given a bigger role comparable to lif, or just more time to stew in her own motivations she’d easily surpass helbindi. its also not helped that thrasirs own desire to resurrect her brother is similar to veronicas pre established selfishness, which isnt as strong a contrast as lifs selfishness and guilt against alfonses character. Her relation to lif does hint at a stronger sense of kidness and morality instilled within her because of that relation, which is interesting and would make a strong contrast against veronica, but again we get like five seconds of it before shes killed off and then a little more of it again at the end. Deserved more time on screen then she got, and would have probably been number 2 here if she had gotten it. 

veronica: bratty child becomes evil sorcerer emperor, more at 11. I like the concept of veronica, its something fes never really touched on much aside from maybe a little bit with julius with his more childish antics. Veronica however cranks that up a lot more, shes impatient and gets bored easily, she wants more friends but in a selfish ‘friend is someone who does everything I want right?’ way, shes emblas ruler and she has the emotional maturity of an evil 10 year old and i just kinda like it. Especially since she tempers it with an air of sophistication and intelligence, much like the classic evil sorcerers fe loves to utilize in villain roles, and it helps balance out the bratty child from being too annoying in the villain role. It helps lend a sense of her trying to present herself as a grown up for the respect and authority that brings, well simultaneously maintain all the perks of being a kid who gets everything she wants. It’s a shame then that the narrative keeps sidelining her, either by focusing on other villains, her god damn brother getting in the fucking way, or with the overhanging implications of magic dragon possession being the root cause of her behavior. I can forgive the magic dragon possession though since that is an fe staple and could works towards more interesting character aspects rather then undercutting her. Regardless, she sure is great when things are actually about her, and i really wish things would get back to being about her.

Laegjarn: solely here because she loves her sister, shes rather flat as a character otherwise. It would have been one thing if she displayed a sense of brutality instilled in her by a childhood being raised by surtr, only dropping the shell when it came to her sister and reigning herself in for the sake of that one familial bond she treasures... instead shes just kinda nice and loves her sister, and yet still works for surtr for some fucking reason. @agoddamn and @ezralahm mention an aspect of learned helplessness to xanders character in fates that people tend to gloss over (heaven knows why, cause its fairly in your face even in the english translation), and that should be something that comes across in laegjarn, but its doesnt really. not as much as it should anyways. Another victim of book 2′s pointless writing.

loki: evil sexy lady with big boobies and a one leg cutout tights pants thing. heres someone who can transform into anyone, and yet she never really does anything with it. oh she does ‘things’, just not things that have much point to them, or really feel like they fit into some larger scheme. she’d be right at home as a recurring villain in an episodic story, coming up with some inane scheme for todays episode that gets foiled and she gets sent ‘blasting off again’. I dont necessarily hate the sexy seductress character, the noire bombshells and the like, they can be fun when done well. loki just doesnt do it well, coming off as more grating and annoying then tempting honestly, and as a villain she lacks anykind of actual menace. My feelings on her are similar to my feelings on aversa honestly, heres someone who should be so cool and threatening, a real menace to the heroes using their skills and abilities behind the scenes to move threats against the heroes, never taking to the field unless they can benefit from it and have an assured chance of victory or safety... but then they never actually do anything, as any of the actions possibly attributable to them either happen offscreen or probably would have happened without them doing anything. Loki and aversa could have stayed home twiddling their thumbs and nothing would change, and thats the real shame about them. Doesn’t help they aren’t particularly fun or entertaining as villains either due to lackluster writing.

surtr: garon 2.0, but with even less complexity. Well garon may have been a blatantly evil prick, he at least had backstory that provoked some degree of complexity and even sympathy, both to him and those hurt by his evil dragon possession personality change. Surtr lacks even that, acting more like a petty thug given way to much power then an imposing ruler. He garon without the backstory complexity, and in a way hes walhart without the air of regality and charisma that helped elevate walhart from being god awful in his own right. And well it could have been interesting if the story made any attempts to comment on that or work it into a central story theme or flow of some sort, it doesnt really do that and instead treats him as if he has and indeed deserves the same credibility and impression walhart or garon or any of the other fire emblem emperor kings have left. But the game doesnt ever actually work for that with him. Hes the emeperor, so he automatically deserves respect as a villain. and thats... so typical of book 2′s writing.

laevatein: shes boring as sin, even with her relation to her sister and the tragedy of losing her. Like her sister, she would have benefited from an impression of learned helplessness but the game never really bothers with it. moving on because i can barely give a shit about her.

bruno: this mother fucker... an annoying detraction that overtakes veronicas spotlight and screentime, an excuse for alfonse wangst that never really lands, pointless and useless... the benefit of book 2 and 3 so far has been his reduced importance, but i fully expect him to come roaring back to steal veronicas position once the story shifts back to an area she should be the focus of. the only thing he has going for him is the sense of a camus struggling with dragon possession but thats more so used for alfonse wangst then it is for anything constructive. What do i mean by alfonse wangst? I mean angst that really serves no narrative purpose then for the sake of unnecessary melodrama, as opposed to informing us anything about the characters or themes of the story. he makes veronica look worse, his drama with alfonse is a waste of time, and he really provides nothing else then a recurring boss fight and get out of jail free card for the story. I’m putting him below laevatein because well i dont give much of a shit about her, she atleast doesnt actively annoy me and still had the potential for something. Bruno however? the story would be better off without him. So fuck him.

[arecomicsevengood]

QUARANTINE MOVIES PART FOUR

It’s wild to watch any movie knowing that none will be made for the foreseeable future, and that the whole collective experience of filmgoing might be dead. I tend to have a certain sad, scared lonely feeling when I contemplate the future at night, and while I attempt to put off by watching movies, it only partly works. Now, more than ever, movies are a larger part of my processing of the world than the ongoing conversations I have with friends.

Smithereens (1982) dir. Susan Seidelman

There is something particularly powerful about movies where people run around, socializing. These things are pretty resonant with my youth, but “youth” in this broad sense that just means “the before times,” because if there’s anything quarantine is bringing home it’s the importance of a form of adulthood based around domestic partnerships with someone you like and having “real jobs” that can translate to telecommuting. Of course, socializing of the sort no longer allowed is really useful, and shouldn’t be written off as youthful frivolity. Smithereens is not a particularly romantic movie: While it might be famous for being “punk” in a “cool” way, documenting young New York nightlife in a way where David Wojnarowicz’s band 3 Teens Kill 4 is on a club’s marquee, it’s really about young people as these sort of upwardly-mobile opportunists with no real talent trying to exploit one another for a mixture of sex and social clout, and ignoring those who are not actively useful to them. It’s a useful document of people being shitty where the appeal now is how cool they look, and it’s interesting to watch in this moment where I’m worried that the whole idea of community will be lost very soon, in a way we won’t even be able to articulate. We’ll all be scrambling for jobs and security but everything will be further hollowed out, and we’ll be left with an even more vicious and dog-eat-dog citizenry. So a movie like this has nostalgic appealing, but by depicting the seeds of what will only become more widespread problems, it avoids feeling dated or idealistic.

Gloria (1980) dir. John Cassavetes

Oh shit this movie rules! I was under the impression I disliked Cassavetes, based on the others I had seen, and watching the first twenty-odd minutes reminded me of why: Sort of circular conversations, involving a lot of people being upset with one another. But this ends up feeling more like a movie, and less like a play. Once Gena Rowlands kills a carful of people I was completely on board. She’s great in this, playing opposite a child, who is also amazing in it, tons of dialogue that should be quotable: “You’re not my mother, my mother was beautiful” being but one amazing bit of poetry. Both extremely cute and extremely badass from moment to moment, the parts of this movie are in tension with one another where it also feels like it’s going from strength to strength, and ever scene, every moment, is great. Incredible music, and also great documentation of a world that doesn’t exist anymore, of telephone booths, smoking sections, and places that’ll develop photos for you. Highest possible recommendation.

The Naked City (1948) dir. Jules Dassin

Seemingly the first movie to be shot on location throughout New York, rather than studio backlots, and it milks the city for all its worth, shifting frequently from one location to another, introducing to new characters. Initially guided by omniscient narration but quickly focusing to become a police procedural. I knew Dassin from Rififi but this feels more exciting, I would gladly watch movies bite the techniques from this every few decades, though Gloria does a good job of moving through the streets of New York in a less-contrived way. There was a Naked City TV show ten years later, shot on location and focusing on a police precinct.

Near Dark (1987) dir. Kathryn Bigelow

I consider this Kathryn Bigelow’s best movie, but circumstances have not led me to watch it as many times as I’ve seen Point Break, so the memories I’ve retained of it were kind of inaccurate: Specifically, the thing I thought of as the climax, the part at the hotel where light is getting shot through the blankets taped up to cover windows, happens like halfway through. Screenwriter Eric Red wrote this at the same time as he wrote The Hitcher, and that’s another one that just GOES, moving from one scene to another where they all have this climactic intensity constantly but the scale is shifting of what you’re invested in? The Hitcher is a nightmare and this is more of an action movie. People point out this movie has a bunch of the cast from Aliens but I didn’t realize there’s a shot where Aliens is actually on the marquee of a theater. I also wonder if this whole horror/action/western/but with vampires thing was an inspiration to Garth Ennis? I kinda feel like the pacing I find so powerful could not really be sustained over the length of an extended comic run.

Hero (1992) dir. Stephen Frears

Dustin Hoffman plays a criminal schlub, doing a weird voice. It’s almost like he was told that the role was written for Sylvester Stallone, but Stallone’s insistence on getting a writing credit on every movie he acts in complicated the premise in a weird way, so Hoffman just attempts a Stallone impression. One of his few redeeming characteristics is he’s a loving father, but that isn’t why he’ll remind you of your dad. Maybe most men are just Dustin Hoffman doing impersonations of Sylvester Stallone! From 1992, so Hoffman’s I guess in a post-Rain-Man mode, but the film also feels very early nineties in its commentary on television news turning stories into celebrities, and an analysis of the problems with professional cynicism that seem very much of their time. It’s not like a more sophisticated critique has found its way into any mainstream film I can think of, we’ve just stopped thinking about these issues, as they’ve become much worse. Joan Cusack’s good as his Hoffman’s ex-wife, and Susie Cusack’s good as his lawyer. I would like to see Susie Cusack in more things! Geena Davis plays a television reporter, Andy Garcia plays a decent guy who is a contrast to Hoffman, there’s also small roles for the likes of Stephen Tobolowsky and Tom Arnold, really placing this in a moment of time.

The Age Of Innocence (1993) dir. Martin Scorsese

I didn’t like this one, for all the obvious reasons: I don’t like costume dramas about rich people, and I don’t like Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s an Edith Wharton adaptation, all about a world of well-mannered old money with very rigidly defined rules of behavior. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the true love Day-Lewis is kept from by the mores of the day, and part of her romantic appeal is she’s able to see through the rituals and make fun of them, while Winona Ryder fully buys into them, and thus reaps the benefits. Everything is repressed, all behavior is affect, this is of course the point but very much not my thing. There’s also a lot of a narrator reading the text of the book while the camerawork fades between lavishly composed image, while the cinematography probably looked great on a big screen I would still be very anxious about getting to the storytelling.

Experiment In Terror (1962) dir. Blake Edwards

This one starts off super-intensely, with a home invasion scene, the sense of horror in this is palpable but the fear is just used as this blackmail structure for some noir stuff? It straggles the genre line pretty well, feeling weird because of this horror energy of sheer creeping malevolence defines it. This is also considerably longer than most of the other film noir I’ve watched recently, because those moments extend and take away from the sense of a building plot, to instead feel like they might derail it. Lee Remick is the lead, and she is this terrified victim, which makes the film more interesting than if it were focused on the cop played by Glenn Ford. The main character’s younger sister gets kidnapped at one point, it gets creepy. The climax occurs at a end of a crowded baseball game, and there’s shots that I assume were done via helicopter, which seems like it would’ve upped the budget considerably.

The Harder They Fall (1956) dir. Mark Robson

Humphrey Bogart stars as a former sports writer, working to drum up publicity for a fresh-off-the-boat boxer who does not know how to fight, but is naively participating in fixed matches, for the economic benefit of the mob. While the boxer is being exploited and making no money, despite his celebrity; Bogart is being well-compensated to sell out his conscience and he is very good at playing a dude in moral conflict with himself, struggling to do the decent thing. While this isn’t the best boxing movie, or the best Bogart, it’s still pretty good.

The Devil And Miss Jones (1941) dir. Sam Wood

Heard about this one in the context of it having good politics. It’s about a rich guy who goes undercover at a department store hoping to bust the union only to realize that the guy organizing the union is supremely decent and the middle manager should get fired. It has some scenes that feel like they might play for “cringe comedy” but also are just so fucked up? One where the rich dude is forcing shoes onto the feet of little girl who is crying saying “I don’t like it! I don’t like it!” feels way too much like a pervert’s fetish for me to be comfortable with. The female lead is played by Jean Arthur, who is very good at playing a genuine, kind, and idealistic person. I am very grateful she dates the union organizer and the old rich dude’s love interest is someone age-appropriate. Interesting to see a pro-union movie from a time when unions were popular, so it functions as populist entertainment while Sorry To Bother You gestures at being radical propaganda for self-congratulation’s sake.

Human Desire (1954) dir. Fritz Lang

Another noir from Lang, with the same leads as The Big Heat. This one made me worried about age-inappropriate relationships too, as it begins with a dude being back from war, moving in with his friends, and their daughter having “become a woman” while he was away. Luckily the title refers  to a desire he ends up feeling for a married woman who as an accomplice to a murder committed by her abusive husband. Glenn Ford stars in this one, and he has this very boring morally upstanding male lead quality that makes these well-made movies feel generic. This thing is happening to me watching movies where I get kind of hung up on how no one ever explains themselves or their feelings: I don’t think they should, I think the whole thing of watching a movie where you watch it thinking like “Why don’t you just tell her you love her??” is interesting because… a writer doesn’t need the characters to explain their feelings to each other if the viewers understand them, these feelings are the most obvious things and so can go unspoken, and so you would really only have them say these things if they were lying or being manipulative? But maybe in more modern movies people really do state their motivations because screenwriters are dumber now? I don’t know.

Fail Safe (1964) dir. Sidney Lumet

I have talked about this movie a lot since watching it, and in a way that doesn’t even mention that the opening is amazing, and the title and credits sequence are all-time greats. Instead I mention that Henry Fonda’s performance seems to have inspired David Lynch’s performance of Gordon Cole, and how the weird, fucked up nightmarish ending doesn’t really change the fact that watching it in 2020 it feels like a sort of pornography of competence when contrasted against our own reality. The whole movie is about an accident that leads to a U.S. military plane flying to Moscow to drop a nuke, and everyone (except for the pilots) realizing this is a mistake and trying to avert global nuclear war. The ending is pretty astounding in its darkness. Walter Matthau plays a guy whose role is to argue for the pragmatic value of mass death, but the moral calculus that ends up being embraced is far beyond the nihilistic death drive he advocates for. Mutually assured destruction is such a motherfucker of a concept. I am really hung up on the idea that unilateral nuclear disarmament never became a thing really set a precedent for how political parties in this country will never unilaterally dismantle their propaganda machines. 24-hour news is a nightmare, not really on a par with nuclear weapons, but similarly something that should be illegal, but for the calculations made. We would be a different country if we were willing to make these kinds of sacrifices but we really are not.

The Deadly Affair (1967) dir. Sidney Lumet

James Mason stars in this John Le Carre adaptation. He plays a spy whose wife is cheating on him, with another spy. None of the twists in this are unforeseen, in fact, the title alone explains a bunch, but the title is also so generic you might forget what the movie is called while you’re watching it. James Mason is good in it, although it’s weird that he’s playing a likable guy who sort of doesn’t seem to understand why everyone can’t get along or be honest adults with one another considering his work in the intelligence community. Another solid Sidney Lumet movie.

Three Days Of The Condor (1975) dir. Sydney Pollack

This movie does a very good job of not explaining things up front, and then portioning out understanding as it goes on. The movie begins with Robert Redford getting his office getting shot up, and we eventually learn he works for the CIA, but he cannot rely on them for his protection. It doesn’t introduce the female lead, played by Faye Dunaway, until like halfway through the movie, when our hero takes her hostage. Redford can’t really explain the situation to her, and just sort of acts like a psychopath, but they are able to have a quasi-romantic relationship where she trusts him because he’s played by Robert Redford, who is in some ways the seventies’ answer to Glenn Ford. The movie star aspect allows him to sell his agreeability, although he’s also supposed to be something of a nerd, a guy whose job is just to read books and analyze the information. Max Von Sydow plays the villain.

The Third Shadow Warrior (1963) dir. Umetsugu Inoue

Watched this because it’s made by the dude who made Black Lizard, it’s a samurai thing about a warrior who employs body doubles. It follows one such body double, overshadowed by the man whose existence he supports, at the expense of his own individuality or happiness. Interesting enough, feels like it occupies the solid middle of samurai movies- Something sort of common to stuff on Criterion is something that doesn’t blow you away but it is definitely a “real movie” at the very least.

La Cienaga, (2001) dir. Lucrecia Martel

That said, you kind of do need to be careful with newer Criterion channel stuff, because some things feel more like they’re just trying to engage with an art house history in order to earn their place in the canon. This movie isn’t bad, but I do feel like the reason it’s interesting stems from a context the film itself has nothing to do with: After Martel made Zama (2017), there was talk of her being asked by Marvel to do a Black Widow movie, which is insane. The studio also volunteered to handle the action for her, which she said she would actually be interested in learning how to do herself, but she had no interest in working with Marvel. Let Lucrecia Martel make a big-budget action movie without corporate properties you cowards! This movie is pretty difficult to follow, with no clear narrative thread, a lot of characters, weird pacing, etc. There’s moments of poetry or tension but this is one of those things that’s just beyond my preferences enough to remind me of a certain aesthetic conservatism I possess. I didn’t finish Zama, though I had read the book. It’s honestly tough to imagine Martel making a movie with straightforward plot that can easily be followed, it doesn’t seem to be what she’s interested in, even in terms of editing a movie so that you have a sense of where scenes stand in relation to one another in time. Many scenes still maintain a sense of beauty or mystery but at there’s no velocity. She’s closer to Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Carlos Reygadas or Bi Gan, to name three people whose names I absolutely had to Google because I couldn’t think of them off the top of my head.

All these movies are streaming on The Criterion Channel, if you want me to recommend things on other streaming services, please DM me your login information.

[yakkety-yak-art]

Why Bioshock Infinite Wasn’t Working (for me)

As someone who loves the first and second games (the first largely for the story, the second largely for the gameplay and characters), I have really felt out of place in the fandom for just....not liking Infinite. Ever since it was released, people have been touting it around on a pedestal like it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but I just have never seen the appeal. Sure, it looks pretty, and there are some interesting parts, but it just never worked for me. And I figured out why. (Note: this is opinionated, so if you disagree and feel the need to respond, do so politely. I will be keeping this as fair as I can and there’s no need to be rude just because you disagree. If you like this game, that’s totally fine, and I can respect your opinion even though it doesn’t match up with mine! This is just my thoughts on the matter, and I am not the end all be all on the topic. You are free to feel however you wish about the game, and if you are more sensitive to criticism about things you like, feel free to just ignore this post!)

This game is a run-of-the-mill FPS with repetitive fights that traipses around in a facade of deep thoughts and hard-hitting hot takes. So many of the people praising this game praise it because the story is deep and riveting. to which I must eloquently say, “Nah.” The story is the equivalent of someone standing on a soapbox, gathering a crowd with the promise of a new concept no one has ever thought of before; something life-changing, something thought of only by a deep thinker; and this someone faces a crowd of Americans, waiting with bated breath to hear something they haven’t been aware of literally their whole lives, only to tell them in an extremely pretentious manner that, “America’s past was no fun :(.” 

No shit, Sherlock. 

The original Bioshocks dealt with things that will really always be topical: the implications and consequences of extreme capitalism and objectivism, and, conversely, extreme communism and mob mentality/hive mind-esque organizations; the importance of choice and the realization of people as individuals coming together being stronger and more unified than an echo-chamber group (yes, there’s a difference); the implications of moral decisions on the future for oneself and the entire world, and extremely beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking portrayals of the importance of platonic relations, found family, and positive bonds between parent and child (particularly fathers, which is refreshing and interesting, since a lot of dads don’t get a very good rep in media); the consequences of classism; finally, breaking free from the roles laid out and expected, and thinking freely (truly freely, not wrongfully convinced of free thinking when in reality the government is in control, seen with Atlas, Ryan, Lamb, etc. The games also give you extremely interesting moral decisions and topics; do you serve yourself, or sacrifice to save the children? Are you really any better than the splicers who were taken advantage of and left to rot, and while you must kill them to survive, are they still people? As you splice, do you become exactly what you are trying to save yourself and the few innocents of Rapture from?

These are all interesting and topical ideas to bring up. So what does Infinite have to share?

Racism is bad (an important topic, but handled poorly). Religion is also bad. Schrodinger’s cat, maybe? Infinite universes mean infinite possibilities!!! Except, no, not really. For a game that puts emphasis on infinite possibilities, it only really explores the same one. 

Firstly, “racism is bad/America is bad/religion is bad” is hardly a hot take, and they are portrayed in the most basic forms that they possibly could be. All the bad guys are racist to the extreme, the entire city is a haven of white supremacy, and basically all because of religion. The main villain only becomes the villain because he gets baptized. It’s extremely on the nose, with public humiliations/lynchings, and public worship of the dude who assassinated Lincoln. Not only does it seem, well, preachy, due to how on the nose it is, it’s not even interesting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s extremely important to discuss racism and xenophobia, especially as it occurred in the past, but because of the world they have set Infinite in, it comes across as implausible. Like, ok, fantasy world, but that’s just it: this is a fantasy. There could have been an amazing discussion on, not blanket “hurr durr institutionalized racism is bad”, but the society that Vigors, a majority working class of non-whites/immigrants, a search for utopia, and the extremes of religion AND science, paired with the idea of facades, would create. Why not have more of the public use Vigors? Like the Vox, in an attempt to gain more control and power? As Columbia had to travel from continent to continent, have the racism be always present but constantly hidden. Rather than public carnival games with racist caricatures, have a society that seems so perfect on the outside that it cannot possibly be. Everyone who is not white or is Jewish or Irish is always creepily smiling and re-asserting that they love their jobs, and their city. Perhaps one is seen speaking out, and they are quickly taken out. Uncovering an extremely unnerving facade like this proves the underlying corruption, power, and horror of the city a lot more than the extremely blatant examples in Infinite do. It’s like the difference between your teacher telling you people were racist in the past, and then reading something about how beautiful the world is and how nice the town they live in is in--only to then find a photo of the writer in a creepy black and white photo, smiling at the camera as they lynch someone--or even, being the subject in the photo who was lynched. It’s so creepy and obviously a lie, but unless you take the time to dig deeper, to find out why the writing had seemed so, well, strange or unrealistic, you could remain blissfully ignorant despite knowing something is wrong. That’s an interesting moral dilemma faced in everyday life. In Infinite, you can just kill them. Problem solved. In fact, it’s so easily solvable, apparently, that it makes you wonder why everyone else hasn’t done that already. It’s also extremely lazy to make all of your villains racist and all of the good guys totally not racist™ and just shoot everyone. I mean, really? they don’t even try to have a conflict of morality, like with Tenenbaum or Sinclair. It’s unrealistically black and white (ha), and because of this, predictable, lazy, and boring. Again, discussions of racism is not a bad thing--but it’s handled so poorly here that it’s almost like the story just stops to remind you that racism is bad, before continuing. 

The parts of the story that don’t deal with social issues are not any better. You can tell me all you want that the ending and the story are just sophisticated, and that I just didn’t get it, but to that I respond: maybe writing a story that has so many possible implications, endings, and theories that could all exist or not exist or sometimes maybe happen unless we were wrong about this one thing, in which case maybe not isn’t sophisticated, and is instead pretentious, lazy, and a lot fucking worse than you giving me a whole story with a jumping off point for my own ideas and conclusions about it’s implications. No, Infinite doesn’t do that. It’s so hackneyed, so convoluted, with it’s “infinite” lighthouses and “infinite” outcomes when in reality, no matter what, there’s just this one racist evil religious dude who is always religious and racist and evil. It could end, not in a “maybe it’s a Schrodinger’s cat?” cop out, but in one of those alternate outcomes (like, clearly alternate, not hinted at alternate), leaving the player with questions about the importance of decisions if there is always another place where the decision either was or wasn’t made, or whether or not the world should even be respected to the extent that it is when, with Elizabeth (and, in theory, her ability to create others with her powers), it is possible to just find a new world. Those are interesting, and also leave the player with some moral questions and debate topics, whereas the actual ending just sort of looks and sounds deep, but in reality is just a writer’s inability to live up to his own setup of the multiverse.

there are some other reasons, like how elizabeth’s powers seem really pointless as they are underutilized, how the game could have worked better if you played as her, how the game literally could’ve been standalone, seeing as it has nothing to do with Bioshock’s story except for Levine’s lazy attempt at “connecting” the two canons, but those are the big ones. All in all, I can’t like it because it has potential that was so ultimately wasted--it’s lazy in it’s story, in it’s tackling of social issues, and in it’s basic requirement at having anything to do with Bioshock, when it could have so easily been an amazing game, not only at the surface, but truly, as you dig deeper into the story. But I really, truly wish that I could love this game. It could’ve been great.

[tanadrin]

under a cut because long, disorganized, self-indulgent

ok so the Lende Empire isn’t really feudal; I despise feudal stasis in fantasy, like even the shortest timeline puts the Andal invasion at more than 2,000 ybp in Game of Thrones, you really think in all that time everybody on the continent is dumb enough to not invent a better plough? or glass just good enough to grind lenses? or make small improvements in windmill design? and all that shit adds up and BAM before you know it, you've got metallurgy good enough to make a steam engine with, so no matter what BS magical physics you come up with, if things work at the human scale even remotely like they do in our world, your age of knights and castles and dragons not having to contend with antiaircraft guns has a limited shelf-life.

(and that's interesting! And more people--by which i mean people besides Terry Pratchett, who did this wonderfully--should write about high fantasy worlds before they reached Medieval Stasis Mode, and after they left it! I would fukkin kill to read a good high fantasy book that also had, like spaceships in it. Insofar as genre conventions have evolved not according to the internal logic of the worlds they depict but according to how and for what reason they serve as commentaries on specific aspects of our own world and its history, and are aimed at evoking certain emotions, it's understandable why such generic mishsmashes are relatively uncommon. But people also definitely read speculative fiction because they like internally cohesive worlds very different from our own, so it is my fondest hope that this sort of thing becomes more popular going forward)

(you can of course also have fantasy worlds which are *not* very much like our own world at human scale. Greg Egan actually does this in a science fiction mode, but as long as you're positing a world where dimensions of space are hyperbolic like time or where humans change sex every time they have sex because trading a detachable symbiotic penis is part of having an orgasm, whether you call this stuff "different science" or "magic" is really beside the point. I have an idea I've been batting around for a while about a world divided, like Evan Dahm's Overside, or the two parallel worlds in Fringe, except part of the division is not just physical, but metaphysical. Morality itself in each subworld is defective, because each subworld got a different part of a morally and metaphysically unified whole: thus, for reasons nobody can understand, almost every ethical system derived by people resident in only one subworld is deeply defective, and would be horrifying to us--as though, perhaps, our own complex and nuanced moral landscape that we wrestle with was a kind of grand unified theory whose symmetry had been broken, and which was only understood piecemeal, as totally separate concepts. And of course, if you live in one subworld everyone from the other subworld is a horrifying monster whose morality is totally incomprehensible to you, so you reflexively treat them as an enemy.)

History isn't just one thing after another. I mean, okay, it is, but it's *also* the aftereffects of those things, the things that stick around forever and can't be gotten away from. And just like how if you want to understand our own world you need to look at what it was like five years ago, and to understand what it was like five years ago you need to look at what it was like ten years ago, and fifteen, ad nauseam, until you're suddenly back at World War II, or the Holy Roman Empire, or Sumer, or struggling through the ever-increasing fog of a steadily more ambiguous archeological record, well, this is as true for politics and language as it is the material aspects of society. In the same way maps feel insufficient when the artist doesn't think about what's beyond the edge of the page (not to knock on GRRM too much, but if you put all the continents and seas in his world on the same map, you notice they're all really... rectangular. Like he drew them to fit individual pieces of paper. Rivers and island arcs get compressed when they near a margin. Seas are just voids. Nothing ever has to be moved to a little box in a corner to fit. there's no attempt at verisimilitude), I think invented worlds feel insufficient when the writer asks you to take them seriously as a reflection of our own, or an aspect of our own, but neglects to at least suggest their place in a larger whole.

I wanted with the Lende Empire to have something that still let me have a lot of early centuries of sword-and-horse style adventures (because i started writing about Lende when I was thirteen and had just finished the Silmarillion for the second time), and I wanted when writing its history to still be able to take big chunks of story I stole from Norse legends and medieval poetry and dump them almost whole into the setting, but I also wanted the history not to read like a fantasy history--or not just a fantasy history. What I mean is, when you read something like the Silmarillion, or when a character in a fantasy world relates some legend to you, even if it's referred to as an old and ambiguous tale, you still often feel like that's really what happened. Like, for me, one of the chief emotional attractions to something like the tales of the wars of the Goths and Huns, or Beowulf's description of Migration Age Denmark filtered through Anglo-Saxon poetic tropes, or the Icelandic family sagas, is that we really have a hard time knowing how much of it is true, how much of its is plausible embellishment, and how much of it is anachronistic nonsense or pure bullshit. Is the Njala based on a faithfully recounted tradition passed down orally for a few hundred years? Who knows! Not us. We know a guy named Njal got burned in his house around 1000 AD, but much of the mystery and the poignancy of stories like that for me lies in the difficulty of ascertaining their relationship to the truth.

What I want(ed) was something that when you read it made you think "ok, obviously the narrator is trying their best, but even they don't know exactly what the fuck happened; this is probably one third ambiguous tradition, one third solid, one third bullshit." So the Chronicle of Lende has some stuff in it that's intentionally difficult to reconcile. It has weird tonal shifts. The first third owes a lot to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the sagas and the Hildebrantslied; the middle is closer to the Silmarillion, or the history of Rome when told more from the Great Man perspective than the Impersonal Forces one, and the last third starts out that way but goes some weird places and veers off at the end to what is obviously a symbolic and highly abstracted mode of narration which, in relating the destruction of the Empire imitates the way in which its beginning is related (for in-universe Thematic Reasons), *but* while all this is going on, the hope is that the reader is *also* able to glimpse through these ambiguities and stylistic quirks, and incompatibilities, and weird digressions involving talking animals or the spirit world, a society that's undergoing familiar demographic and social and technological transitions: moving from oral culture agrarianism to the beginnings of a real urban civilization, with a centralized state and the written word, and like Western Europe having to figure out a social structure in the absence of any good nearby imperial models (they end up with something more like fraternal warrior societies being deputized to control land rather than feudal lords, but the essential logic is the same); but then moving to a real model of administrative statehood, as infrastructure and technology improve, before industrialization kicks off, the population explodes, social tensions inherent in that begin tearing at the seams of society, and the horrors of industrialized warfare are unleashed.

There are meant to be striking differences, too, of course. Lende history is only about a thousand Earth years long, and it's confined mostly to the western side of a continent split by a huge, Himalayan-like mountain range. Its rapid rise and increase in technological sophistication are due to exogenous factors (genuine divine intervention in some cases), and equally even the True Secret History of the empire's destruction has no real-world parallels, at least not since the Channeled Scablands formed 14,000 years ago. It's also teeeechnically science fiction and not fantasy, though that distinction really rests on tone and not on setting IMO. But I don't think it's possible to tell what feels like a real history of a world without sometimes radically changing genres: our own history goes from dry science (geology, paleontology, archeology) to legend and myth and scripture, to dusty old classical history and books penned by ancients who sometimes have startlingly different notions about what merits mention in a story and how to tell one, to tales of kings and queens and conquerors, before emerging blinking in the sunlight of dry matter of fact narration again. I have always believed conventions, including those of genre and style, should be tools and not straightjackets. The best worldbuilding literature I have read steals from a huge variety of sources (and Pratchett deserves a mention here again, alongside Susanna Clarke, and Ada Palmer, and the people who wrote the Elder Scrolls backstory, and Sofia Samatar, and Angelica Gorodischer).