#training myself to not feel embarrassed for posting casted on main

[ariartcor]

Idk what they’ve been going on. But. 🤨

[cheri-translates]

[CN] Gavin’s Basketball Court Date (Eng Translation)

🍒 Warning: This post contains detailed spoilers for a date which has not been released in English servers! 🍒

Note: This is a cancelled date which will unlikely come to EN :’(

More from this Collection: Kiro // Lucien // Victor

The date begins with MC in the gym. She comments that it’s usually fully packed, and today is no exception. While leaving, she coincidentally meets Gavin at the entrance. 

He offers to send her home (even though he just arrived lol). He also invites her to join him for outdoor sports next time.

MC: Sure, but what are we going to do? A night run? Or our usual running?

Gavin: Let’s do something different. I’ll teach you basketball.

Basketball?!

This term leaves me shocked, and I suddenly feel like fleeing…

Even though getting smacked by the ball was something that happened back in high school, just the memory of it leaves me feeling faint.

It is nothing but a shadow of life.

MC: …but I have no idea how to play basketball...

Gavin: It’s okay, exercising is the main point.

MC: …

Gavin: Don’t worry, I’m here.

I look towards Gavin, his eyes carrying with it assurance, as though calling me to trust him.

MC: Mm… I’ll give it a try then! …don’t make fun of me if I play badly!

Gavin: Of course I wouldn’t. Are you free this weekend? I can pick you up.

I nod, agreeing to a date that I am both anticipating yet slightly worried about.

-

On Saturday afternoon, Gavin and I head to the outdoor court in Central Park. Although it is still morning, the courts already have quite a number of people.

I take in my surroundings and discover that most of the people consist of school boys, their movements bursting with energy. The sheer number of basketballs flying around the courts leave me shocked, and I unconsciously shirk backwards.

Gavin: What’s wrong?

MC: …I don’t know how to play basketball…

I lower my head and stare at my sport shoes, unable to say the five words: “I am afraid of basketball”.

Gavin hands me the ball.

Gavin: I picked up basketball late, and only started in Junior High.

MC: ?

Gavin: Back then, I was quite short so the seniors made fun of me. A year later, they couldn’t win against me.

I’m left flabbergasted. Minor mentioned that Gavin is amazing at basketball, but I didn’t expect to hear such a story behind it.

Although Gavin only gave me a brief summary, I know that he must have gone through a lot, and put in much effort during that one year.

Gavin: MC, enjoying the process of exercising is more important than anything else.

There is a smile on Gavin’s face.

He… must really like basketball. I can almost imagine him in the court, playing to his heart’s content.

Realising how much Gavin likes basketball, it no longer seems that frightening.

I muster my courage and pat the basketball, crinkling my eyes into a smile.

MC: A goal of mine today is to throw the ball through the hoop once! I’m going to trouble Coach Gavin to teach me from now onwards!

Gavin freezes for a moment.

Gavin: All right.

Gavin does a simple dribbling demonstration. It’s as though the basketball can understand his every command, remaining entirely in Gavin’s control.

I take a deep breath, deciding not to care about the flying basketballs around me. I focus on learning how to dribble the ball.

My current standard limits me to dribbling the ball in position. With a slight movement of my foot, the ball rolls away…

MC: I didn’t think dribbling the ball would be so difficult…

Gavin: There’s no rush, I’ll help to correct your movements.

I nod, cheering myself on once again.

Although my posture is awkward and odd, it seems like… basketball isn’t that scary after all…

Standing beside me, Gavin rests his hand on the small of my back.

Gavin: Relax a little more, your movements can’t be too stiff.

The warmth from his palm seeps through the thin material of my sports outfit, finding its way onto my skin.

It is only now that I realise how close we are. Just a slight lean of my head is enough to make contact with his face.

His eyebrows are bathed in sunlight, casting him in a gentle glow.

Gavin: When doing a low dribble, let your wrist be the axis. Use your wrist and the strength in your fingers to dribble. Like this.

His other hand gently holds onto my wrist. The resulting warmth and the warmth at my back mix together, painting my face a slight tinge of red.

I find myself in a daze, and am unable to speak for a long time.

Gavin’s eyes trail from the basketball to my face. Looking at my dazed state, the seriousness in his lips turns into a smile.

Gavin: Do you know what to do now?

His low voice and warm breaths enter my ear.

I unconsciously avoid his gaze, but accidentally make contact with his arm when dribbling the ball.

With a light cough, Gavin releases his hold on me. He rubs his neck, his ears turning red.

I apply Gavin’s techniques, and find that dribbling does become much easier.

Gavin: Try taking a few steps.

I try taking a few steps forward.

After an early afternoon of “intimate contact” with basketball, I no longer have a phobia of it. However, it is still difficult to master. With a slight movement, the ball rolls to a corner.

Gavin hands me the ball, comforting me once again.

Gavin: It’d be fine after you try a few more times.

Before I can say anything, I hear a man’s voice coming from the side.

Random man: If you’re playing like that, don’t take up space on the court!

Three young men are standing at the side of the basketball court. The one who just spoke has short hair.

Gavin moves to stand in front of me:

Seeing this, the short-haired man starts laughing.

Random man: Give us the court and go elsewhere to concentrate on your date! Your girlfriend can’t play well anyway haha!

The other two men join in the laughter.

I’m a little embarrassed and at a loss for words.

Gavin sweeps his eyes over them, then pulls me towards the basketball hoop, ignoring the three men.

It seems to be the first time the short-haired man has experienced being slighted, and his expression turns ugly.

Random Man: Let’s have a match. Whoever wins will get the court! How does that sound - do you dare to take me on?

Hearing this, Gavin stops and turns to look at him. The short-haired man laughs even more exaggeratedly.

Random Man: You’d lose out if it’s a 2-on-2 though, considering how your girlfriend doesn’t know how to play haha! I’ll give you a chance, how does a 1-on-1 sound?

I tug at the corner of Gavin’s shirt, a little worried.

Gavin: It’s fine.

Gavin assures me in a low voice, and then faces the three men.

Gavin: I’ll take on all three of you.

I widen my eyes in shock, and the three men are also visibly taken aback.

MC: ?!

The three men: What?!

Gavin: If you don’t dare to, then leave.

Random Man: Hmph, don’t accuse us of bullying you later!

An unplanned match begins. The rules are simple – whoever gets the ball through the hoop first wins.

Gavin takes on a casual posture as he dribbles the ball. Although he is alone, he exudes the aura of an entire team. The three men remain in front of the hoop, defending cautiously.

I am filled with a sudden spurt of spirit, running to the court and shouting:

MC: All the best Gavin!

Gavin doesn’t look towards me, but he suddenly goes on the offensive!

He is undeterred by the attempts of the three men to block him. The wind tousles his hair, and sunlight is reflected off his earring and into my eyes.

Building momentum with his spring-like movements, he takes a large leap. The sweat on his brow slides off his face and enters the air, glistening in the light.

He has a serious look on his face, entirely focused on the ball.

With a lift of his hand, the ball leaves the palm of his hand and fingers, forming a perfect parabola in the air.

With a “thud”, the ball steadily goes through the hoop!

MC: Amazing!

The three men are rooted to the spot, their expressions betraying utter disbelief.

-

After another period of training, I finally learn the basics of dribbling.

Gavin: Very good.

MC: It’s all thanks to your good teaching… even I find myself stupid…

Thinking of Gavin’s beautiful form when he shot the ball through the hoop, my heart does a flip.

MC: Um… could you teach me how to shoot next?

He nods and takes the ball. Within the span of a breath, Gavin dribbles the ball towards the net. The ball once again goes through the hoop!

MC: You’re amazing!

I copy Gavin’s movements, but the ball I toss completely misses the mark. The ball doesn’t even touch the board, much less the hoop.

MC: This is too difficult…

No matter how many times I try, the result is still the same… the basketball is in a completely different state when in my hands and Gavin’s.

I release a sigh.

Gavin moves to stand behind me, pulling both my hands over the top of my head, correcting my posture.

Gavin: Like this.

Perhaps due to our strenuous exercise, both of our breaths are warm. The temperature of the air surrounding us rises as a result.

My hands tremble and the basketball falls to the ground, rolling away.

Gavin: [coughs lightly] …let’s try again, following the same action as before.

MC: Okay…

I take deep breaths and try shooting the ball again, with slight improvements.

The temperature rises as noon sets in. Without realizing it, my forehead is completely drenched with sweat.

At this moment, a cool and refreshing object is pressed against my cheek.

I jump at the sudden coldness, whipping my head around to see Gavin standing behind me.

His lifts his head as he drinks from his bottle, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

The contents of the bottle refract the sunlight, morphing the white rays into a colorful, tiny rainbow.

Gavin: Drink some water.

MC: Mm!

I open the can and prepare to down several gulps, but Gavin stops me.

Gavin: Don’t drink too much. You’ve just finished exercising.

I nod, drinking a few small mouthfuls. The blazing heat of the day has left me in a slight trance.

Suddenly, a basketball comes flying towards me!

Before I can react, I find myself wrapped in a hug.

Gavin shifts us to the side quickly, avoiding the ball.

Gavin: MC, are you all right?!

MC: …

My eyes are wide. Gavin furrows his eyebrows, his expression worried.

The owner of the ball apologises profusely.

MC: I… I’m fine…

Looking at my frightened expression, Gavin holds my hand.

Gavin: That’s all for today. Let’s go.

MC: …why so sudden?

Gavin: You were really scared just now.

Gavin opens his mouth as though about to say something, but simply holds my hand tightly.

Could he have sensed that I’m afraid of basketball…

With this in mind, I summon my courage.

MC: I haven’t fulfilled my goal for today!

Seeing my smile, Gavin relaxes.

MC: Could you give me a demonstration again? I’ll definitely learn it this time!

Gavin nods, bringing me to a safer area on the court. He demonstrates how to dribble and shoot the ball.

Gavin: Try again?

MC: Okay!

Mimicking his posture, I take a leap, both arms raised over my head, exerting strength in my wrist to throw the ball…

The ball circles the hoop twice and falls through the hoop!

MC: !!!

I jump up excitedly, turning around and running to Gavin, excited to the point that I can barely form coherent sentences.

MC: Gavin, you, you saw that right! It went in, it really went in! I’m not dreaming, am I?

Gavin: You’re amazing.

He looks at me, his eyes smiling and filled with commendation.

The look in his eyes alleviates the tightness in my chest, and I finally relax.

MC: Before today, I was quite scared of basketball… I was smacked by a basketball in high school, and I’ve been scared of it ever since. I never thought that I’d be able to shoot it through a hoop today!

Gavin reaches out and rubs my head gently.

Gavin: Does it still hurt?

MC: Ah? …it stopped hurting a long time ago! It was quite strange actually – even though I’m afraid of basketball, every time I’m on duty for P.E. class, it’d always happen to be a lesson on basketball. I think I once met you in the gymnasium…

It was already very late back then. I thought the gymnasium would be empty, but I saw Gavin shooting hoops. He played for a long time, and there were several basketballs by his feet.

By the time I finished my homework and returned to the gymnasium to clean up, the floor had not a single trace of basketballs. They were all neatly returned into the basket.

MC: …at that time, I didn’t have the chance to thank you.

Gavin: Thank me for what?

MC: You might have forgotten… you helped me pack up the basketballs in the gymnasium…

Gavin doesn’t respond. He turns to look at me, the corner of his lips turning up into a smile. He takes my hand.

I look at him, not knowing what to say.

MC: You…

In the next second, Gavin embraces me gently.

His breath envelops me.

I hear the sound of steady heartbeats.

Gavin: MC, I remember everything.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Treat Your S(h)elf: Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire by Jeffrey A. Auerbach (2018)

The British Empire has had a huge impact on the world in which we live. A brief look at an atlas from before World War One will show over hundred colonies that were then part of the Empire but now are part of or wholly sovereign states. Within these states much remains of the commercial, industrial, legal, political and cultural apparatus set up by the British. In many former colonial areas, political issues remain to be solved that had their genesis during the British era.

The legacy of the British has been varied and complex but in recent years much attention has been on making value judgements about whether the Empire was a good or bad thing. Of course the British Empire was built on the use of and the continual threat of state violence and there were appalling examples of the use of force. As well as the slave trade, there was the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, the 1831 Jamaican Christmas Uprising, the Boer War concentration camps (1899-1902) and the bloody response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. However, we must not just focus on these events but examine the Empire in all of its complexities.

In the current moment of our times, it would seem that as a nation we are more concerned about beating ourselves up and making the nation feel guilty than understanding how and why the British came to exist, and setting the growth of the British Empire into historical context to be wise about the good, the bad, and the ugly. History has to be scrupulously honest if it’s not to fall prey to propaganda on either side of the extreme political spectrum.

Truth be told I find these questions about the British Empire being good or bad either boring or unhelpful. It doesn’t really bring us closer to the complexity and the reality of what the British Empire was and how it was really run and experienced by everyone.

For myself personally the British Empire was part of the fabric of our family history. The Far East, the Middle East and Africa figured prominently and at the centre of which - the jewel in the crown so to speak - was India. In my wider family clan I’ve come to learn about - through handed down family tales, personal diaries, private papers, and photos etc - the diverse experiences of what certain eccentric characters got up to and they ranged from missionaries in India and Africa to military men strewn across the Empire, from titans of commerce in the Far East to tea farmers in East Africa, from senior colonial civil servants in Delhi to soldier-spies on the North West Frontier (now northern Pakistan).

My own experience of being raised in India, Pakistan as well as parts of the Far East was an adventure before being carted off to boarding school back in Britain and then fortunate in later life to be able to travel forth to these memorable childhood places because of the nature of my work. Having learned the local languages and respectful of customs I have always loved to travel and explore deeper into these profound non-Western cultures. Despite the shadow of the empire of the past I am always received with such down to earth kindness and we share a good laugh. So I always assumed that the British Empire played a central role in the life of Britain has it had in our family history just because it was there. But historians are more concerned with much more interesting questions that challenge our assumptions.

So when I was at university it was a great surprise to me to first read a fascinating history of the British Empire by Bernard Porter called ‘The Absent Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain’ (2004). Porter was, in his own words, “mainly a response to certain scholars (and some others) who, I felt, had hitherto simplified and exaggerated the impact of ‘imperialism’ on Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after years in which, except by empire specialists like myself, it had been rather ignored and underplayed. […] the main argument of the book was this: that the ordinary Briton’s relationship to the Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was complex and ambivalent, less soaked in or affected by imperialism than these other scholars claimed – to the extent that many English people, at any rate, possibly even a majority, were almost entirely ignorant of it for most of the nineteenth century.” It became a controversial book but a welcome one because it was well researched and no doubt made some imperial historians choke on their tea dipped biscuits (and that’s not even counting the historically illiterate post-colonial studies crowd in their English faculties who often got their knickers in a twist).

Years later I read another fascinating collection of scholarly chapters by different historians called ‘Anxieties, Fears, and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ (2016) edited Harald Fischer-Tiné which challenged a rosy vision of Britain’s imperial past by tracing British imperial emotions: the feelings of fear, anxiety, and panic that gripped many Britons as they moved to foreign lands. To be fair both Robert Peckham’s Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties (2015) got there before him but Tiné’s history set the trend for others to follow such as Marc Condos’s The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India (2018) and Kim Wagner’s Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (2019).

They all set out their stall by highlighting the sense of vulnerability felt by the British in the colonies. Fisher-Tiné’s edited book in particular highlights the pervasiveness of feelings of fear, anxiety, and panic in many colonial sites. He acknowledges that: “the history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment, as well as by the regular occurrence of panics.” 

The book suggests that these excessive emotional states were triggered by three main causes. First, the European population in British India was heavily dependent on Indian servants and subordinates who might retaliate against unfair masters or whose access to European dwellings could be used by malevolent others to poison the white elite. Second, anxieties about the assumed toxic effects of the Indian climate fuelled also poisoning panics. Diseases such as malaria and cholera were considered to be the ultimate outcome of an “atmospheric poison”. Third, Indian therapeutics and the system of medicine were also identified as a potential cause of poisoning European communities. These poisoning panics only helped reinforce the racial categorisations of Indians, the moral supremacy of the white population, and the legitimacy of colonial rule. Overall the book expanded the understanding of how a sense of fragility rather than strength shaped colonial policies.

Now comes another noteworthy book which again sound a little quirky but is no less meticulous in its research and judicious in its observations. Many books about the British Empire focus on what happened; this book concentrates on how people felt. When I was first given it I was predisposed to be negative because here was a book about ‘feelings’ - the current disease of our decaying western culture. But I was pleasantly surprised.

Was the British Empire boring? So asks Jeffrey Auerbach in his irreverent tome, ‘Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire’ (2018).

It’s an unexpected question, largely because imperial culture was so conspicuously saturated with a sense of adventure. The exploits of explorers, soldiers and proconsuls – dramatised in Boys’ Own-style narratives – captured the imagination of contemporaries and coloured views of Empire for a long time after its end. Even latter-day historians committed to Marxist or postcolonial critiques of Empire tend to assume that the imperialists themselves mostly had a good time. Along with material opportunities for upward mobility, Empire offered what the Pan-Africanist W.E.B. DuBois called ‘the wages of whiteness’ – the psychological satisfactions of membership in a privileged caste – and an escape from the tedium of everyday life in a crowded, urbanised, ever less picturesque Britain.

The British Empire has been firmly tied to myth, adventure, and victory. For many Britons, “the empire was the mythic landscape of romance and adventure. It was that quarter of the globe that was coloured and included darkest Africa and the mysterious East.” Cultural artifacts such as music, films, cigarette cards, and fiction have long constructed and reflected this rosy vision of the empire as a place of adventure and excitement.

Against this widely held view of the empire, As Auerbach argues here, however, the idea of Empire-as-adventure-story is a misleading one. For contemporaries, the promise of exotic thrills in distant lands built up expectations which inevitably collided with reality. 

In a well-researched and enjoyable book, the author argues “that despite the many and famous tales of glory and adventure, a significant and overlooked feature of the nineteenth-century British imperial experience was boredom and disappointment.” In other words, instead of focusing on the exploits of imperial luminaries such as Walter Raleigh, James Cook, Robert Clive, David Livingstone, Cecil Rhodes and others, Auerbach says pay attention to the moments when many travellers, colonial officers, governors, soldiers, and settlers who were gripped by an intense sense of boredom in India, Australia, and southern Africa.

For historians, the challenge is to look past the artifice of texts which conceal and compensate for long stretches of boredom to unravel the truth. Turning away from published memoirs and famous images, therefore, Auerbach trains his eye on the rough drafts of imperial culture: letters, diaries, drawings. He finds that Britons’ quests for novelty, variety and sensory delight in the embrace of 19th-century Empire very often ended in tears. Indeed Auerbach identifies an overwhelming emotion that filled the psyche of many Britons as they moved to new lands: imperial boredom.

Precision in language and terminology is essential and Auerbach begins by setting out what he means by boredom. Adopting Patricia Meyer Spacks’ approach, he points out that the term first came into use in the mid-18th century. Auerbach identifies then the feeling as a “modern construct” closely associated with the mid-18th century where the spread of industrial capitalism and the Enlightenment emphasis on individual rights and happiness that the concept came to the fore. This does not mean that nobody previously suffered from boredom, but that, with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the individual, this was when the feeling first became conceptualised. Like Spacks, he distinguishes boredom from 19th-century ‘ennui’ or existential world-weariness and also from monotony, which has a much longer history. Whilst a monotonous activity or experience may generate a feeling of boredom, it will not necessarily do so. The two terms must, therefore, not be equated.

Significantly, in a footnote, Auerbach cites a passage from 19th Century English satirical novelist, Fanny Burney, in which an individual is described as ‘monotonous and tiresome’ but, as he emphasises, ‘not boring’. To prevent confusion, the term ‘boring’ is best avoided when describing an activity or experience because this is to beg the question as to whether it does in fact generate feelings of boredom in a particular person.

How then should this state of mind be assessed and what should be seen as the symptoms of imperial boredom? As Auerbach acknowledges, boredom ‘is not a simple emotion, but rather a complex constellation of reactions’. Building on that approach, he says ‘imperial boredom’ reflected ‘a sense of dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the immediate and the particular, and at times with the enterprise of empire more broadly’. If this tends to mix cause and effect, the idea of dissatisfaction and disenchantment essentially mirrors Spacks’ definition of the symptoms of boredom, namely, ‘the incapacity to engage fully: with people, with action, with one’s own ideas’. ‘Imperial boredom’, therefore, was more than a fleeting moment of irritation with a particular situation or person and reflected a mind-set that derived from, and in turn, further contributed to, a sense of disillusionment with the overall project.

It stemmed, so Auerbach argues, from the marked contrast between how empire was represented and how it turned out to be, between ‘the fantasy and the reality’. ‘Empire was constructed as a place of adventure, excitement and picturesque beauty’ but too often lacked these features. Nowhere is this better described than in George Orwell’s Burmese Days, in which the promising young John Flory has become ‘yellow, thin, drunken almost middle-aged’. Beginning with this illustration, Auerbach argues that historians have too often overlooked this essential aspect of empire and sets out to discover the extent to which it was characteristic of what Flory called the ‘Pox Britannica’ more generally.

During the 17th century the British Empire sustained itself on the story that the colonial experience was both righteous and unbelievably exciting. Sea voyages were difficult, and when one eventually did reach landfall there was a good chance of violence, but the exotic foreign cultures, the landscapes, and the wildlife made the trip worthwhile. The British colonialist was meant to be swashbuckling. Advertisements for even the most banal household goods offered colourful and robust propaganda for life in the colonies. Travelogues and illustrated accounts of colonial exploration were wildly lucrative for London publishing houses. All of this attracted a crowd of young Brits eager to escape the drudgery of life in the metropole.

By the 19th century, expectations were catching up. As Auerbach makes it clear, from the beginning, the sense of boredom experienced by many Britons in new colonial settings was much more profound during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the latter was marked by a series of bewildering social, cultural, and technological changes that stripped the empire of its sense of novelty. The development of new means of transport such as steamships, the rise of tourism, and the proliferation of guidebooks jeopardised the sense of risk, newness, enthusiasm that had long been associated with the British imperial experience. Consequently, while “the early empire may have been about wonder and marvel, the nineteenth century was far less exciting and satisfying project.

Auerbach spent 20 years gathering evidence spanning the late 18th century to the turn of the 20th, which records feelings of being bored, miserable and deflated. It’s a captivating history of imperial tedium drawn from memoirs, diaries, private letters and official correspondence. In “reading against the grain”, as Auerbach puts it, he has focused on recorded events normally skimmed over by historians, precisely for being boring – multiple entries repeated over and over again about the weather, train times, shipping forecasts, deliveries, lists and marching; or about nothing ever happening.

In five thematic chapters, “Voyages”, Landscapes,” Governors,” Soldiers”, and “Settlers,” Auerbach shines new light on the experience of traversing, viewing, governing, defending and settling the empire from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The monotonous nature of the sea voyage, dreary and uninteresting imperial lands, daily routine, depressingly dull dispatches, mind-numbing meetings are some of the sources of an utter sense of imperial boredom.

Whilst the first chapter, Voyages, may be the logical starting-point, it presents particular problems. They may have been monotonous, but it is unlikely that they would have engendered feelings of disenchantment and disillusion at the outset of an empire life or career. Auerbach begins with the somewhat surprising assertion that ‘not until the first half of the 19th century did long-distance ocean travel become truly monotonous’, arguing that this was because, until then, the weather had been ‘a source of danger and discomfort’ whereas, by the mid-19th century, ‘it was barely worth mentioning’. Leaving aside the obvious difficulties with that approach – many 19th-century travellers, assuming they survived, described enduring terrifying typhoons in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea – voyages certainly could be monotonous, particularly, when steam replaced sail.

However, his assertion that this ‘helped to produce feelings of boredom that had never been felt before’ is more questionable. For example, whilst Sir Edmund Fremantle (1836–1929) wrote in his memoirs that, although the sea passages were ‘monotonous’, ‘it never occurred to [him] to be bored’, Auerbach suggests that, ‘in several places his memories [sic] belie his claims’, in that they refer to the ‘the monotony’ of various experiences, including cruising out of harbour under steam rather than under sail, which ‘always possessed some interest’. But, this not only contradicts what Fremantle wrote but also equates boredom with monotony and, thus, deprives it of any proper meaning.

Similarly, because the Royal Naval Surgeon, Edward Cree (1814–1901) recorded his passing the time ‘reading, drawing, walking on deck, eating drinking and sleeping’, Auerbach concludes that ‘almost every leg of his 1839 journey to the East was boring or disappointing’. However, he omits the opening words of this journal entry which reads, ‘making but slow progress towards China. Weather intolerably hot … The time passes pleasantly enough on board’, which suggests he was certainly not bored. Much of this chapter is not concerned with monotony but with how ‘dreadful’ sea voyages could be, particularly, for travellers to Australia, most of all transported convicts, who, as he shows, had to endure the most brutal conditions. But they had no expectations of empire and this seems to add little to the understanding of imperial boredom.

It may well be that, because voyages were so unpleasant, travellers became all the more expectant and thus disappointed, when, on arriving, they found, as Auerbach argues in the next chapter, that much of the landscape was dreary and uninteresting. Moreover, many could not decide whether they were in search of a landscape that was picturesque and exotic or ‘normalised’ by reproducing English architecture, gardens and surroundings. This dichotomy generated further disenchantment.

If Auerbach dwells too long on obscure painters who often had little success in making these imperial landscapes picturesque, there is no doubt that many of them were monotonous, not least the vast tracts of Australian out- back. Consequently, whilst ‘the early empire may have been about wonder and marvel, the 19th century was a far less exciting and satisfying project’ and this contributed to feelings of boredom.

In the chapter, ‘Governors’, Auerbach essentially covers the administration of the empire. Here, there was also a lot of monotony, although Auerbach wavers between whether this was caused by having too much or too little work to do. Either way, it leads to the assertion that ‘throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, British imperial administrators at all levels were bored by their experience, serving king or queen and country’. However, this is qualified in the next paragraph, in which he cites the Marquess of Hastings, who served in India in the early 1800s, and Lord Curzon, who served as Viceroy at the end of the century, neither of whom, he says, suffered from boredom. It was ‘during the middle decades, that imperial service was far less stimulating’ but he does not explain why it should have been limited to this particular phase.

Indeed, in terms of the staggering quantity of paper generated by the ICS, the problem stretched back to the early 18th century. Records were copied and recopied, and months were spent waiting on instruction from London. The few encounters with colonised subjects came in the form of long, drawn-out formal events. Lord Lytton as Viceroy of India between 1876-1880 was required to bow 1230 times during one particularly ceremonial reception with the Viceroy.

Whilst it is ultimately fruitless to exchange examples of officials who did and did not find government service boring, some of those chosen by Auerbach are not convincing. James Pope Hennessy, for example, the eccentric Irishman who delighted in antagonising the colonials and endearing himself to the indigenous people with his unconventional views on racial equality, certainly found the European life-style monotonous but, as a result, made sure he kept ceaselessly active. In the words of his biographer, ‘the chief impression [he] made on British and Orientals alike was one of superlative vitality. “He would do better”, wrote Sir Harry Parkes “if he had less life”’,  Coming from Parkes, that arch- imperialist, who allegedly died from over-work and could never have been bored, the comment is telling.

While idleness certainly contributed to boredom, it was often the labour of maintaining colonial control that proved to be the most dull. Increasingly professionalised, the management of the colonies became characterised by strict report-making, bookkeeping and low-stakes decision-making related to staff. Whilst these officials may have become disenchanted, it is unclear what sort of mind-set they had when they started out: according to Auerbach, ‘they may well have entered imperial service out of a sense of duty, or perhaps looking forward to a colonial sinecure that offered status and adventure as well as a generous salary, but instead found themselves inundated by a volume of paperwork and official obligations that they had never anticipated, and which they found to be, quite frankly boring’. As a result, they were ‘eager to escape the tedium of the empire they had built’.

Whilst this suggests that, as a result, they threw up their empire careers, the example of Sir Frank Swettenham does not seem to fit the picture. He may have found life from time to time ‘extraordinarily dull’, but he continued as a government official in the Malay States for thirty years, before retiring in 1901. His belief in the imperial cause seems to have overcome the dullness and trumped any possible disenchantment.

In the chapter entitled, Soldiers, Auerbach concedes that ‘the link between military service and boredom can be traced at least to the mid-eighteenth century’. However, he argues, what was different in the 19th century was that boredom was no longer simply ‘incidental or ‘peripheral;’ it was ‘omnipresent’ and this was ‘a function of unmet expectations’, namely, the unsatisfied thirst for action and bloody combat as the ‘small wars’ of the Victorian age became shorter and fewer. However, citing Maeland and Brunstad’s Enduring Military Boredom, he concedes that this omnipresent boredom is a ‘condition that persists to the present day, especially among enlisted men’. This, therefore, divests it of any imperial character and suggests that it was, and remains a feature of modern military service.

Nonetheless, it would have been interesting to know how this boredom affected the performance of the military in the context of empire. Certainly, it gave rise to some of its more unsavoury aspects, with drunken soldiers brawling and beating up the locals and spending much of their time in the local brothels.

According to Richard Holmes, by 1899, there was ‘a real crisis’ in the infection rates of venereal disease of British soldiers in the Indian Army: ‘for every genteel bungalow on the cantonment … there were a dozen young men, denizens of a wholly different world, crossing the cultural divide every night’. Here was imperial boredom in the raw and urgent measures had to be taken to abate its consequences.

Although the final chapter is entitled ‘Settlers’, it encompasses a much broader category of imperial agents, including women, who until this point have been little- mentioned, and, in particular, women in India ‘most of whom went there in their early twenties to work (or to accompany their husbands who were working) and then typically left by the time they reached their fifties to retire in Britain’. It is unclear why these women and, indeed the whole topic of women in empire, should be subsumed under this chapter heading, given their importance in the empire project and the attention given to them in post-colonial scholarship.

In recent scholarship, empire white women have been frequently misrepresented and lampooned in the literature, including the novels of E. M. Forster, George Orwell, and Paul Scott and all too often reincarnated as representing the worst side of the ruling group – its racism, petty snobbishness and pervading aura of superiority and shown as shallow, self-centred and pre-occupied with maintaining the hierarchy of their narrow social worlds. They have invariably been portrayed as both bored and boring.

The wives of these officials were encouraged to run their households in a similar way, managing a large domestic staff and keeping a meticulous watch on financial expenditures. Socially, they were faced with constant garden parties and dinners with whatever small group of colonial families lived nearby. It’s difficult to imagine just how dull the existence of these administrators must have been, yet in reading these colonial accounts, the temporality and the totalising effects of boredom feel undeniably similar to the way that we describe the monotony of work today.

Auerbach effectively reiterates the trope as a clichéd illustration of a female, reclining aimlessly on a chaise longue, conjuring up the familiar image of ‘the same women [who] met day after day to eat the same meals and exchange the same banal pleasantries’ and concluding that ‘it was not only in India that women were bored, which suggests that the phenomenon was not a localised one, but a broader imperial one’.

Of course many western women did find life in empire monotonous and suffered from boredom, if not depression, and no doubt many were insufferable, as were their husbands, but there is an alternative image and the analysis is so generalised that their contribution is, once again, in danger of being dismissed out of hand.

A more nuanced approach would have examined ways in which women overcame their boredom by pursuing activities in which they were anything but bored, including, most obviously, the missions, a category which, despite its importance, does not feature, save for one cursory comment to the effect that, ‘even missionary women, whose sense of purpose presumably kept them inspired, could find themselves bored’. The example given is that of Elizabeth Lees Price, who, at one point during her eventful life, had to help run three schools for 30,000 pupils. But, just because her diary recorded ‘with increasing frequency’ the comment ‘nothing has happened’, it seems a stretch to infer, as Auerbach does, that ‘not even missionary work was enough to stave off the boredom that afflicted women all across the empire’.

For Auerbach, recuperating boredom means reframing the experience of empire as one of failure and disappointment. In the context of colonial scholarship, which tends to focus on the violence of colonialism and the myth-making that went along with it, Auerbach’s book is rather counter-intuitive. He drains the power of these myths, looking instead at the accounts of those responsible for building empire from the ground up: “What if they were not heroes or villains, builders or destroyers,” he writes, “but merely unexceptional men and women, young and old, rich and poor, struggling, often without success, to find happiness and economic security in an increasingly alienating world?” The agents of colonialism struggled to find any semblance of agency in the work that they were doing. Imperial time stretched out, deadened over decades of appointment in far off islands and desert outposts: a sort of watered down version of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” in paradise.

Whilst Auerbach demonstrates that much of empire life was monotonous, to my mind, he is too quick to infer that this monotony necessarily gave rise to feelings of ‘imperial boredom’, properly so-called. He also too easily assumes that, where people were bored, this could only operate in a negative way and, whilst he may be right in concluding that, ultimately, ‘the British were, quite simply bored by their empire’, he fails to draw the evidence together to explore what impact imperial boredom had on the development of empire, for better or worse, during the long 19th century.

If not quite an invention of the 19th century, boredom was a particular preoccupation of the period: the product of new assumptions about the separation of work and leisure and a prominent theme of fin-de-siècle literature. Less clear is whether Auerbach is right to treat boredom separately from other emotional states – anxiety, loneliness, anger, fear – which afflicted the imperialist psyche. After all, a long literary tradition – from Conrad to Maugham, Orwell, Lessing and Greene – describes precisely how those varied shades of neurosis blended into one another.

Besides, a more capacious history of discontent and Empire might help to connect the frustrations of the imperialist experience to the suffering of imperial subjects. When, for instance, did boredom turn to aggression and violence? One danger of Auerbach’s approach in Imperial Boredom is to portray an enervated and under-stimulated, yet still extraordinarily powerful, elite as more or less passive.

As imperial rivalry intensified towards the end of the century, so did the quest for new ways of staving off boredom, not only for men in the British Empire but also for those in the other European empires, and war was one of the most obvious solutions.

As other imperial historians have argued, what Europeans were seeking was everything the nineteenth century, in its drawn-out tedium, had denied them. War as Cambridge historian Christopher Clark has argued, “was going to empower them and restore a sense of agency to their limbs and lives.” Auerbach refers to what Clark called ‘the pleasure culture of war’, citing the example of Adrian de Wiart who, serving in the Boer War, knew ‘once and for all, that war was in my blood. I was determined to fight and I didn’t mind who or what’. But he does not explore the consequences of this mood further, other than to say that these adventurers also ‘ended up bored … and disillusioned’. But, the implications were, arguably, much more far-reaching.

Even if it was not directly causative, this mood was ‘permissive’ of the more direct causes and certainly formed part of the background against which Europe went to war in 1914. It may be thought that it did so in a fit of imperial boredom.

I admire the audacity of Auerbach’s writing and as a revisionist piece of history it has the dash and dare of British imperialism and colonialism. But after reading the book I came away thinking that sweeping statements such as that the empire developed “in a fit of boredom” are a tad unconvincing.

Although he spent about 20 years collecting materials, Auerbach seems not to have visited Africa or India during his research. Had he done so, I doubt if he would all too easily accepted that colonial accounts of being bored represented the full experience. Absent are deeper discussions of how expressions of being bored are linked to racism, arrogance and the need to assert power in exotic, challenging and unstable environments. Emotional detachment, disdain and a demand to be entertained were also part of a well-rehearsed repertoire of domination.

But where Auerbach does succeed is in admirably capturing the texture of everyday imperialist life as few historians have. Most of these examples are compellingly relevant and illustrative of some of the colonial circumstances that drove Britons mad with boredom, challenging one of the enduring myths about the British Empire as a site of exciting adventure.

If you are a lover of histories of white imperial rulers and thumbnail portraits, this book is for you. It’s full of excellent quotes. Lord Lytton, for example, fourth choice to be governor-general of India in 1875 (and appalled by the prospect), later summed up the British Raj as “a despotism of office-boxes tempered by the occasional loss of keys”. It was certainly the case that propaganda about empire and the populist books written about it to make money created false expectations, leading to bitter disillusionment. Nostalgists for the age of pith helmets and pukka sahibs will find little comfort here.

In mining the gap between public bombast and private disillusionment, Auerbach demonstrates that – even for its most privileged beneficiaries – Empire was almost never a place where fantasy became reality. I would suggest that rather than the British Empire being mostly boring, more accurate would be David Livingstone’s verdict on exploratory travel while battling dysentery: “it’s not all fun you know.”

The concept of imperial boredom provides a novel and illuminating lens through which to examine the mind-set of men and women working and living in empire, how it was that, despite the crushing monotony, so many persisted in the endeavour and what this tells us about the empire project more generally. There are all states of mind familiar to historians of empire (in the lives of their subjects, of course). It has long been argued that strategies to relieve moments of white boredom in the empire included cheating and adultery, husband hunting, trophy wife hunting, massive consumption of alcohol, gambling, copious diary and letter writing, taxidermy, berating the servants, prostitution, bird-watching, game hunting, high tea on the verandah, fine pearls and ball gowns, all were par for course in the every day lives for those bored British colonisers.

Auerbach’s book reminds me of a not so nice female character bemoans James Fox’s scandalous but true to life colonial novel White Mischief (1982), as she looked out over the Rift Valley in 1940s colonial Kenya, she declares, “Oh God! Not another fucking beautiful day.”

An earnest post-colonialist studies reader might might feel triggered by such a flippant remark as evidence of all that was wrong with the imperial project but at heart it’s a pitiful lament disguised as boredom at the gilded cage the British built for themselves to capture the enchantment and disenchantment of every day life in the British Empire.

[empty-dream]

So IMO the anime really emphasized the friendship between the floor test team, specifically for the main casts. Of course, the webtoon does have a lot of moments, but the anime feels like it colors the whole thing with a neon highlighter. This changes quite some of characters' images.

This post is so long that I have to continue in the reblog *sigh* I keep telling myself I wouldn't make a long post anymore but I just can't stop...

Khun Aguero Agnis

Yeah everyone was screaming over that anime original scene. Khun is hit the hardest. I mean, I'm all for gay, dramatic Khun. I like his additional scenes with Isu and Hatz. I don't mind that Maria gets mentioned so much in the anime to show how much he doesn't want to lose Bam this time. But there is one difference that gives me mixed feeling, which is where Khun pretends to abandon Bam so everyone will be disgusted by himself and agree to help Bam.

In the Webtoon, he pulls it off convincingly. It actually convinced a lot of the graduates. The only one who explicitly knows he's lying is Rak. Idk if anyone else sees actually through this, but the point is, he successfully manipulates people to help Bam. Because that's what he does best. He can and will lie to anyone.

The anime just, makes it into a third rate acting (you can hear Khun’s voice not being that serious) and it is super embarrassing lmao. (I have no idea why Hatz still falls for it) I have to admit, at this point in that version, you must be a goddamn rock to not notice how close he is to Bam and how unlikely it would be for him to betray him. But anw, the scene is modified from Khun lying to everyone so that they would help Bam, to everyone unanimously agrees to help Bam from the beginning.

Endorsi Jahad

Another one is Endorsi. Ngl Webtoon!Endorsi scares me, in a good way. She is pushy, vain, and super aggressive. And yet because she is the way she is, she noticed something is up with Rachel long before the latter's deal was revealed. Her relationship with Anaak, the original Anaak and Bam really humanize her. The first one is not changed, which is great because I really like it. I like that the anime explains the reason why she asks around about OG!Anaak is because the latter was nice to her and her death was a blow.

But this part that I love with her is omitted. When after Bam leaves her to find Rachel she is taken aback and admits fully that she is a bad person, after her bloody sins in the past is revealed to get where she is now. Webtoon readers, remember someone else who does not admit she is a bad person for what she has done? The name starts with R and ends with L.

And there is also this conversation she has with Bam. It is when she bonds with Bam that she makes efforts to become a better person, starting with training Bam for the final test. The anime omits the whole crushing hard over Bam thing and just focuses on her with Anaak. Her towards Bam feels more platonic and/or thick with friendship instead. Tbh I just feel like general people would fall for Anime!Endorsi faster than for Webtoon!Endorsi. I mean, I do. I wonder how the anime will make do with the crush thing, given that there is almost no context of it in the anime.

Hatz +  The Pulley scenes

Webtoon

Anime

Thank God for blushing Hatz. Okay, the anime replaces the much-awaited pulley scene with Hatz's swallowing his pride to get a friend and following Khun's script right to a tee. This is a build-up to the friendship between him-Shibisu and Khun, and the explanation that Khun fails Team A is because his true friends are on that list becomes more reasonable.

In S2, Hatz, Shibisu, Anaak and Endorsi are in Team Shibisu and they work well together. The former 3 is a given since they were always in the same team, same with the girls due to the Jahad princesses matters. Hatz and Endorsi also get along somewhat well apparently? He gets mad at people badmouthing and/or discarding Endorsi and idk if this is true but the wiki says she names his sword (that some cute shit alright)

This though lmao. Thank God for drunk Hatz. This one is obviously to show that it is Bam they are friends with. It is Bam they like to be around with. Not Rachel. And how it hurts and/or pisses her off. Well I guess if you never try to mingle with anyone then you'd never have friends. Surprising, eh?

Hoh’s Funeral

Webtoon

Anime

The Hoh funeral scene. I got robbed of the funeral suits. But as a trade-off, more of the friends are there, Rak giving a LOT of his choco bars, and Lero Ro joins in because he is such a good teacher and man. Even Quant watches from a distance. Workshop Battle arc will be fun.

Party Scenes

Webtoon

Anime

Just wanna put party scenes from Webtoon and Anime. They are just precious (and party hard).

Serena Linen

I like Serena, so more screen time for her means more win. But I didn't expect this exchange with Laure. After losing Hoh, it's nice to see they talk to each other. And I'm surprised by any anime original scenes with Laure. Which is pretty good since I think Webtoon!Him is just a genius powerful Snorlax who unfortunately mostly just sleeps.

Also this scene with Shibisu. Damn, I really like them together. The rivalry and friendship and the similar just-normal-people vibe. The Webtoon often has them hanging out together in Shibisu's room.

[epochofbelief]

Breath Control, Chapter Four

an A Court of Mist and Fury College Swim Team AU

All characters belong to Sarah J Maas!

Primarily Feysand. 

Warnings for drinking, mature content, etc.

Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three

Please Enjoy and let me know if you want to be tagged! 

Four

Monday morning was my first practice with the middle distance group. Luckily, Mor had swooped in and decided we were carpooling to my first day, so she’d picked me up at 5:00 at my house and we’d ridden in to practice together. Indie music issued from her car’s speakers while I struggled to stay awake on the passenger side. 

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

I shrugged. Yes. “No,” I said. 

She yawned. “I bet you are. But don’t worry. Just get in a lane with me, or Rhys, or even Azriel and you’ll be fine. You’re fast as hell, I know that, so you’ll keep up with us without any trouble.”

Her encouragement helped. A little.

But practice ended up going just fine. I wasn’t as weak as I could be. The past month of me spiraling into an enormous confused mess had taken its toll but moving from distance to middle distance masked most of that. I needed to get my ass into gear and fast if I wanted to make the travel team, though.  Coach King’s words had been anything but encouraging on that front.

And now I knew why. The list for this weekend’s travel team had been posted that morning outside the locker rooms. I had not made it. The first time I hadn’t been chosen to travel. I tried to be upset and I was a little disappointed in myself. 

But I didn’t care as much as I should have. As much as I would have a year ago if I hadn’t made the travel team. I really needed to sort myself out. 

Mor gave me a clap on the shoulder and didn’t say anything. She probably thought she’d upset me if she tried to comfort me. Really, I was embarrassed I hadn’t made it, not disappointed because I couldn’t compete. Which was the wrong way to feel about something I was supposed to be passionate about. 

After practice, we headed over to the gym for weights. I partnered with Mor, who kept up a constant stream of chatter, explaining a few new movements I hadn’t previously done while training with the distance group. 

Cassian came over about halfway through the workout. “Hey ladies.”

Mor rolled her eyes as she struggled to deadlift something like 250 pounds. I turned to Cassian. He was attractive--obviously. Dark hair, growing fairly shaggy. Stubble covering his impeccable jawline. Hazel eyes that constantly focused on everything in front of him with clear intent. Unless he was drunk. I’d seen Cassian drunk off his ass at many-a-college-party.

“How was your first day, Feyre?” He winked at me, ignoring the attitude emanating from Mor, who was moving through her five reps with the bar very slowly. I could tell it was playful, though. 

The desire for a friendship like theirs, a group like Rhys’s and Mor’s, suddenly overwhelmed me. 

“Not too bad. A lot less yardage in this group than I’m used to,” I said a little competitively. Wasn’t that what my mom had always said, before she’d died? Talk to people as though they are already your friends and you’ll become friends much faster? Cassian was my new training partner--as all those in Mid-D group were. I may not care so much for the direction my swimming career was headed in right now but I could at least make an effort to make friends with Rhys and Mor’s friends. Especially since Cassian had intentionally come over here to talk to me, it seemed. 

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Archeron. It may have been shorter in terms of length but it was definitely way more intense than you’re used to. You could barely stay under for those eight underwaters, if I remember correctly.”

He was right. Underwaters were killer. This morning we had finished our warmup set with 8x25s (eight lengths of the pool) all underwater on thirty-five second intervals. Not my favorite thing in the world. 

“Give me a week and I’ll be swimming circles around you and your whole group. Above or under the water.”

He smiled and I could tell he was pleased with the very tame trash talk I’d been able to muster. I wondered how much Rhys had told him about the wreck that had been my life for the past few weeks. Months. Year. Cassian had probably come over here out of pity, to help the poor, friendless, out-of-shape Feyre Archeron. No thanks. 

“We’ll see about that. I’m glad to have you in the group. Az is too. Sometimes a change is good. We need more hard workers in Middle D.” 

I blinked. Was that. . . pride I was feeling at his mild praise? “Thanks, Cassian.”

He gave me a salute and crossed back over to the rack he was sharing with Azriel and Rhys. Azriel was deadlifting but Rhys was looking directly at me. I met his eyes. Then Cassian said something and Rhys turned bright red. He snapped his attention to Cassian, obviously retorting defensively at whatever Cassian had said to make him so--self-conscious? I shook my head. None of my business, whatever those boys were joking about. Probably girls, or something. 

I didn’t let the possibility that Cassian had been teasing Rhys about me even cross my mind.  

As I moved to lift the trap bar, Mor having collapsed on the ground next to it and asking me to leave her there to die, I did let myself admit that Rhys’s behavior toward me over the past month had been. . . unnecessarily kind. And the possibility that he. . . felt something for me. . . 

I shut down that thought as quickly as it floated through the back of my mind. And as I pulled the trap bar up, an enormous 

BANG

sounded from Cassian, Azriel, and Rhys’s weight lifting platform.  

“SHIT!” 

I dropped the bar and rushed after Mor, who had taken off without a second thought, and found myself pushing through the small crowd of people already forming around the platform before I knew what I was doing. Rhys, doubled over, his hands braced on the bench in front of him, had his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Cassian was setting a fifty pound weight off to the side. . . and I put together what had happened. That weight had fallen onto Rhys’s . . . foot? Leg? Toes? 

He looked to be in a lot of pain, although he hadn’t uttered a word. The curse had come from Cassian. 

Azriel was already there, easing Rhys’s arm around his shoulders and helping him take a seat on the bench as our athletic trainer ran over. 

“Get back to work, everyone. Only two rounds to go,” our weight trainer said and everyone turned to head back to their stations. Mor made no move that suggested she planned on leaving Rhys’s side. And for some reason I found that I couldn’t either. 

Our trainer, Madja, knelt next to Rhys. “What happened?” She asked gently, assessing the situation with her cunning eyes. Madja was the best of all the athletic trainers at Prythian University. Rhys was in good hands.

Cassian, running his hands through his hair, spoke. “I was being an idiot. I tried to pick up the fifty and the thirty at the same time and I wasn’t paying attention, so the fifty slipped out of my hands while I tried to re-rack them. Fuck, Rhys, I’m so sorry. Shit.”

Madja raised her brows at Cassian’s cursing but said nothing. Rhys, despite looking as though he was in a fair amount of pain, gritted out, “You didn’t do it on purpose, Cass. It’s just sore. I can walk now, I think.” 

Before Madja could protest, he stood up. “See? I’m fine.”

Madja poked his shoulder, forcing him to put weight on his right foot. He hissed, eyes squeezing tightly shut.

“Sit.” Madja eased him back down onto the bench, then seemed to notice that Mor and I were still there.  “Didn’t you hear your coach? Finish lifting. Rhys will be fine.”

Mor nodded, biting her lip. She told Rhys to call her as soon as he knew anything in case he needed help getting home. She brushed past my shoulder as Rhys’s eyes met mine. Something in them seemed to. . . soften, as he looked at me. 

I gave him a hasty smile and turned away. And made sure the suspicion building within my mind was buried.

Deep.

-----------------

After weights, Mor bounced off to a four hour lab of some sort and I walked to class with Cassian and Azriel. All three of us had our Monday morning classes in the same building, luckily.

I’d been extremely nervous about making new friends in this group, and since my Saturday night “bonding session” had been severely interrupted, I’d figured it would take a while to find a group in Mid D. But as I had walked out of the locker room after weights, I’d found Cassian and Azriel loitering around the main path to campus as though waiting for someone. Mor had probably asked them to talk to me or something. 

I was pathetic if I needed someone to arrange my friendships for me.

But I knew Mor had my best interests in mind as I made to walk past the boys.  And I certainly wasn’t going to be able to do it myself. The boys fell into step beside me and Cassian started chattering away. 

“Feyre! Fancy seeing you here. Heard from Rhys about his foot? Did Mor say anything?” I could tell his guilt was eating him pretty badly. His eyes were wide and he radiated tension.  Cassian was in my year, a sophomore, but he’d quickly grown to become close friends with Rhys, Mor, and Azriel, who were all juniors. Amren, whom I hadn’t interacted with this morning, was a senior.

Azriel gave him a look as though pushing him to calm down, but I answered, “Mor hasn’t heard from him.”

Cassian cast his eyes down and I found myself suddenly eager to assuage his guilt. His attitude now was so at odds with the playful guy I’d spoken with in the weight room. “But I’m sure he doesn’t blame you, Cassian. It was an accident.”

Azriel pitched in. “You’ve got to relax, man. He’s not going to hate you.”

“What if I just ruined his career,” Cassian stated flatly.

Azriel launched into a long explanation for why a foot injury wasn’t going to ruin someone’s career and I realized this was probably the first time I had ever heard Azriel speak. He was definitely the quietest of their group, usually overshadowed by all of his friends. All of them had such large, loud personalities. Mor was both chipper and an absolute badass, Cassian had the confidence of a world leader, Amren took no shit, and Rhys was self-assured and--the thought flew through my mind, unbidden--sexy.

I shook my head. Rhys and his sexiness did not belong there. 

But Azriel. . . he was fast. Always traveled to compete with the team. Had decent grades, from what I’d heard. He was one of the few who didn’t hook up with girls from the team. He was just. . . quiet. 

Cassian’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Well as soon as I hear from him I’m going to the med clinic or wherever he is. What if he can’t travel with us this weekend?”

Azriel sighed. “He’ll hang out with Feyre, I’m sure. Pretty ideal--” He cut himself off at the look Cassian was now giving him over my head. 

“What?” I asked, glancing between them. 

“Guess I’m not the only stupid, clumsy one around here,” Cassian finally grinned, sticking his hands in his pockets. “Rhys will hate us both when he gets out of the doctor’s.”

“Bye Feyre!” Azriel said hastily and he and Cassian sped through the doors of our building, up the stairs and out of my sight before I could badger them for details about what they’d meant.

My suspicion grew.

----------------------------------

After my three classes, I headed back to the parking lot to wait for Mor’s lab to finish.  I hadn’t realized that I’d be stranded on campus for an extra few hours since she’d been my ride. And almost as if she’d sensed me thinking about her, my phone rang. 

“Feyre! Thank God you picked up. I need an enormous favor, that will also happen to benefit you.”

I tried to respond but she trilled on in her usual way. I couldn’t help smiling a little to myself. Mor was so confident with her every word and yet kind at the same time. Nothing like Ianthe, who’d talked over me constantly for the past year and a half, always feeling the need to be in the spotlight of whatever conversation we had, with whoever we were with. I’d take Mor over Ianthe any day, I realized.

“I’m in the middle of my lab but Rhys just called me. His foot is 100% broken. He can’t travel this week, nor can he swim for at least the next month. Don’t get me started on how devastated he is. I feel awful for him, and for how I know Cassian is going to feel, too. The doctors want him to go home but it’s his right foot, so he can’t drive himself. I know you can’t get back to Astrid Oaks until I’m done but. . . What if you got the keys from Rhys and drove him back there? The doctor wants him to rest the rest of the day. No class.” 

I didn’t even have to think about it. I owed Rhys enough already and he was probably in a lot of pain, not to mention anxious over his swim season. “Of course. Where is he now?”

Mor told me to head over to the Med Clinic at the edge of campus. “Oh, and Feyre? He has no idea I’m sending you. He’s kind of embarrassed that it’s broken and that his season was just doomed so he might be kind of surprised when you show up! Okay bye!”

She ended the call. Great. 

I pressed on toward the clinic though, and found Rhys sitting in the lobby, staring down at his phone, his foot in one of those black boots and a pair of crutches leaning against the chair next to him. 

He looked up only when I stood right in front of him. A frown covered most of his face. “Feyre.”

This might have been the first time I’d ever received a less-than-enthusiastic greeting from Rhys. I could tell from his facial expression and tone that he was not in a good place right now. 

“Hi,” I said and sat down next to him.

“Mor sent you didn’t she.”

I nodded, daring to glance at him from the corner of my eyes. 

He groaned and leaned back in his chair, resting his head against the wall. “I do love my cousin.”

“You’re cousins? I never knew…” I had used to assume that Rhys and Mor had a thing, or something, considering the fact that they’d been roommates since they’d moved out of the dorms. They’re interactions over the past few weeks had mostly disproved that, but. . .

“Most people kind of assume we’re involved in some way. Nope. Just cousins. And because of that, Mor usually takes it upon herself to do things that she thinks will be ‘good’ for me. Often without consulting me on them.”

“How would me coming to pick you up and take you home be considered ‘good’ for you?”

I dared another glance. His ears were bright pink. I instantly regretted my question. I used to think that the great Rhysand Night could never be flustered but. . . Now I wasn’t so sure. 

“So you are taking me home?” It didn’t escape my notice that he had avoided my question. 

“If you’ll let me. Doesn’t seem like you can drive yourself, and walking would probably take you all day. . .” 

He let out a sharp exhale of breath from his nose. “Alright. Let’s go then.” He made to stand but before I could stop myself I had my hands on his shoulders and I was forcing him back down. He stilled at my touch, and I didn’t think it was just because he knew he should stay off his foot.

“No, no, no. You give me your keys right now and I’ll go find your car in the athletics lot and bring it here. You are not crutching your way back across campus.”

“Feyre.” I was pleased to hear he sounded more exasperated than sullen for the moment.

“Rhys.” I put my hands on my hips. 

“Fine, Mom,” he said sarcastically and passed me his keys. 

“Thank you. Don’t move or you’re grounded.”

Twenty minutes later I pulled up outside the med clinic and found Rhys seated on a bench outside. He used his crutches to get to the passenger side and clumsily got in, pulling the crutches in beside him and tossing them into the back. We were five minutes down the road when he spoke.

“Thank you, by the way.”

“It’s the least I could do.”

“Nothing I’ve done for you over the past two weeks has been because I wanted you in my debt.” He was back to his sullen self. I didn’t like it. I wanted his mind off of his current situation. An injury like a broken bone for an athlete. . . Wasn’t good, to say the least.

“I know. Neither is this. Although. . .”

I waited, but he didn’t bite. His uncharacteristic silence really unnerved me.

“I could think of ways you could repay me.”

“What does that mean.” 

I clicked my tongue. “I’m sure you’re well versed in all the ways you can repay a woman.”

He stiffened, then turned in his seat, eyes wide. A smirk erupted across his face. “Why are you suddenly so eager to help me, Feyre darling?” 

I smiled at my victory. “Perhaps I’m interested in what the payout for me is, after all.”

He rolled his eyes and settled back in his seat, nothing more than a satisfied male. “When I’m back on my feet again, Feyre, you might just find out.” 

And damn me for feeling it barely two weeks after my breakup with Tamlin but I couldn’t prevent the thrill that raced through my body at his words. 

Time to get this conversation back on track.

“So what’s the official prognosis?”

“Broken,” he sighed, although his somber attitude was all but gone. “At least four weeks until recovery. They put me in this boot for now and I’ve got to go back tomorrow for x-rays and shit. Crutches until the pain goes away and they clear me to put weight on it. I’m clearly not traveling for our dual meet this weekend.”

I worried he’d slip back into his early drudgeon. “Looks like we’ll have to find something to do with ourselves while everybody’s gone, then.”

Despite himself, he smiled. “Looks like it. Isn’t that going to be a lot of social time for you, though? The Feyre I knew a month ago would probably hole herself up in her room if she wasn’t able to travel. Talk to no one.”

“You barely knew me a month ago,” I reminded him. “You still barely know me now.” I didn’t mention Tamlin’s tendency to insist I hang out with him and only him--or Ianthe. I remembered the day he’d walked in on Lucien and I as we innocently watched a horror movie last year. The fight between the two had been earth-shattering. And all we had done was turn on a movie to watch as friends while we waited for Tamlin to finish a final, or something.

No one but Tamlin and I knew why Lucien had transferred from Prythian University to swim somewhere halfway across the country. And even though Lucien had never had the strength to stand up to Tamlin, he’d been a decent friend to me. Friend and nothing more, and yet Tamlin’s jealousy destroyed his friendship with Lucien and drove Lucien away from the school. It didn’t do much for Lucien’s and my relationship, either. I hadn’t spoken to him in a long time.  The reality of my stupidity at remaining with Tamlin hit me again. 

Rhys seemed to read my mind though. “I know you more than you think. And I guess now that you’re single it’s easier to have friends. I hope at least that’s a positive for you. I know it must be hard.”

I knew it pained him to say those words and I was grateful for them all the same. “Yeah. There’s a lot less arguing, too. And at least if I want to hole myself up in my room alone now, it’s my choice.”

He didn’t respond for a while. “I guess you’re going to be my personal chauffeur this week while everyone else prepares to travel. No holing yourself up til after then, I’m afraid. I’ll need someone to cater to my every whim.”

“I think the price of my services just increased.”

He reclined in the chair. “I promise it’ll be worth your while.” 

“Pig.” 

[timeagainreviews]

Reappraising Companions

Years after having watched every available episode of Doctor Who, I've had plenty of opportunities to rewatch episodes time and time again. As with most movies and television, I've found revisiting certain stories and eras has caused me to see them in a different light. A story I may have once reviled is suddenly more interesting. I even came to appreciate Peter Davison's performance as the Fifth Doctor for its subtle nature. But what about companions? Are there any companions I didn't care for at first, which I've softened toward over time? That is the question I wish to explore.

Below I've chosen a selection of companions of whom I had initially disliked for various reasons. They span across multiple eras and both the classic and modern versions of the show. With each companion, I have endeavoured to be fair in my reappraisal, but this doesn't mean I've changed my mind. I would also like to state that none of these appraisals are about the actors. My goal is to evaluate companions by the way they were written. The performance will come secondary.

1. Danny Pink

I chose Danny Pink to kick this list off because he is the reason I am writing this article in the first place. Recently, I took to rewatching a selection of Danny Pink episodes, in hopes that I may find something I didn't initially see. When Samuel Anderson was cast as Danny, I was excited. I've always been a big fan of male companions. They offer a different dynamic to the TARDIS that we don't often get to experience. However, in the wrong hands, they can be exhausting. Enter Steven Moffat.

When Steven Moffat took the reins of Doctor Who, he introduced us to Rory Williams. A smart, loyal, and combative male companion, not at all enamoured with the Doctor's mystique. At his worst, Rory was made to compete with the Doctor for Amy's affection. At his best, Rory held the Doctor accountable for the lives he brought aboard the TARDIS. With Danny, I felt like this is what Moffat was trying to do again, but this time, it wasn't as successful.

When we're introduced to Danny, we watch him and Clara fumble over their words like teenagers. It's meant to be cute, but their chemistry is non-existent. It feels like watching an episode of Coupling, in that it's painful and causes me to scan the room for exits. Their adorkable awkwardness is supposed to endear us to their relationship, but it seems forced. This is compounded when the Doctor enters the equation. Forcing Danny to fight for something very few of us in the audience believe in the first place.

Once again we find the male companion being forced to compete with the Doctor for the affection of a woman. But in this instance, instead of holding the Doctor accountable, Danny seems to hold the Doctor in contempt. Coming from his own history of military training and PTSD, Danny projects all of his inner struggles onto the Doctor. Which is unfortunate, as Danny's inner turmoil is his most humanistic trait. This wouldn't be the first time in Moffat's era where the Doctor's nature as a hero was called into play. The problem with Danny's appraisal of the Doctor as a general, barking orders, is that he's wrong. And we as an audience know it.

Not only do we know it, but so does the Doctor. The Doctor even gets a character arc over the identity crisis Danny gives him, wherein he realises Danny is wrong about him. Danny, however, never comes around to the Doctor's side. Even in his final moments on screen, he remains combative with the Doctor, in an exhausting refusal to grow as a character. We're supposed to believe he's come to some sort of character growth of self-acceptance by sacrificing his chance at a new life, for the life of a boy he mistakenly killed. Instead, he carries the same chip on his shoulder to his grave.

Danny is a companion wholly failed by writing. Even at his most heroic, it seems in service of making the Doctor look like a buffoon. His mimicking a soldier while yelling in the Doctor's face is embarrassing for everyone involved. Imagine this is your boyfriend meeting your friends. You would be mortified by his behaviour. Now imagine you have to lie about hanging out with your friends because it might make your boyfriend upset. Now imagine this friend is a very dashing person who constantly puts the lives of others before him. Danny and Clara's courtship is a romance by gaslight.

2. Clara Oswald

Clara is a whole other can of worms. I could probably dedicate an entire article to her character. I should clarify that my initial dislike for her character is somewhat mired in personal disappointment. By the time Clara was introduced, we had seen a string of modern human companions. We got the occasional tertiary companions from the future, such as Captain Jack or River Song. But we hadn't had a main companion from the past, future, or another planet. So when Jenna Coleman was introduced as Oswin Oswald, Junior Entertainment Manager of the starliner Alaska, I was very excited. Finally, a companion from the future! I was so ready for the Doctor to go on a quest to save Oswin from the cruel fate of becoming a Dalek. What an exciting storyline that was going to be.

And then we see her as governess Clara Oswin Oswald. Ok... Well at least she's still from a different era, right? Oh, she's dead now too? Oh. Much like Moffat's Dracula, all of this great promise was suddenly dashed against the rocks of a contemporary setting. Sigh. I was so excited. What we're given in “The Bells of St. John,” is a new character with less direction than either Oswin or the governess before her. So much that Moffat had taken to literally modulating her brain with an app. Maybe she's really good with computers now? Sorry friends, much like Rose Tyler's gymnastics and Peri Brown's botany, it's never going to come up again.

And this is the biggest issue I have had with Clara Oswald. She spends most of her screen time fluctuating between what character they're writing her as this week. The writers simply didn't know what to do with her while the Doctor tried to figure out why she's so "impossible." One week she's wacky, one week she's stern, another week she's bisexual queer bait. Her characterisation is all over the charts, which sadly, tracks with her entire storyline. She's a woman, fragmented across time, and so is her personality. And don't even get me started on that impossible girl nonsense.

Steven Moffat once said in an interview that one or two people usually guess his big reveal ahead of time, but that no one had guessed Clara's. Perhaps that's because nobody's fan theory was "It's going to be absolute shite." Instead of just being a woman who gets to be her own person, she has to become the most importantest companion. She has to save the Doctor by being planted throughout his timeline, saving him from the Great Intelligence. You know, by sometimes being born as herself, and other times being born as a Time Lord. Sometimes knowing who the Doctor is, other times having no idea whatsoever. Sometimes having a name that is a play on of Oswald, or Oswin, or Clara. And at no times did it make any kind of sense.

The funny thing is, that for me at least, Clara's character doesn't really become interesting until all of that nonsense is behind her. The Clara I find most compelling is the Clara in mourning. Clara post-Danny Pink is a Clara with focus. Her mood swings seem more from a place of destructive behaviour in the wake of great loss. Watching her hold the TARDIS keys hostage above a volcano was some seriously gripping stuff. Aside from the gross digs at her appearance, I found the Twelfth Doctor's relationship with Clara far more endearing than that of the Eleventh Doctor. It may have taken them until her final moments as a companion, but they did get her right, in the end.

3. Melanie Bush

Back in 2015, I had the opportunity to meet Louise Jameson, who played Leela, my all-time favourite Doctor Who companion. I also got to meet Colin Baker, who was all charm. Also in attendance was Bonnie Langford, aka, Doctor Who's Mel. After having gotten autographs from Louise and Colin, and having circled the convention hall a few times, I decided "Sure, why not. Let's meet Bonnie Langford. It's only 10 quid for an autograph." Upon meeting her, she was a very kind woman, and even still, I was racking my brain for something nice to say about Mel. To save face, I lied a very simple lie. I said, "I really liked you in Doctor Who." She smiled, said thank you, and signed my picture. And I walked away, taking my shitty liar mouth with me.

Because the fact is, I didn't like her in Doctor Who. I found every moment she was onscreen excruciating. From her poodle haircuts, to her 80's disaster attire, to her fat-shaming the Sixth Doctor, to her constant screaming at every little thing, she depressed me. I spoke in my review of "Terror of the Vervoids," just how weird it was that we're never actually introduced to her as a character. Instead, Peri is written off, and suddenly, Mel is there, already chummy with the Doctor. You guys know Mel, she's the Doctor's friend, because we told you she was! Instead of getting to know Mel slowly, we're thrown into the deep end, forced to sink or swim within the curls of red hair piled high. Mel doesn't just come out of nowhere, she comes on strong. Fitness expert Mel here to get your fat Doctor Who loving asses into shape. Drink this carrot juice you geek pig!

Not even in Big Finish audios was I finding myself warming up to Mel. When Ace was introduced, they couldn't have pushed Mel out quicker. I found everything about Ace immediately refreshing. Here was a calm and collected badass rebel that I could get behind. It's ironic then; that it was in the Seventh Doctor era that I have begun to find something likeable in Mel. Much like Clara Oswald,  a changing of Doctors enriched my appreciation for her character. This appreciation didn't come immediately, mind you, it came about around my third or fourth watch-through of "Paradise Towers."

Perhaps it's the influence of Andrew Cartmel, but with the Seventh Doctor, I have begun to appreciate Mel in the snarkiest manner. Mel is best utilised as a commentary on the Doctor/Companion relationship. She's precocious to a fault, she chews scenery, she screams at the drop of a hat, and she is oftentimes a naive idiot. Yet in "Paradise Towers," it becomes hilarious. Like much of the 80's era of Doctor Who, there is a very "2000 AD," atmosphere to the stories, and I could easily see this as a setting for Judge Dredd to drudge through, busting skulls and filling bodies with bullets. Setting the sunshiny persona of Mel against this backdrop is so brilliant that I can't imagine another companion in this story. Where she would usually grate against me, her sharp contrast from the things happening around her is exactly why I began to soften toward her.

Not even the ire from the Kangs could shake Mel's confidence, which is oddly what makes her cool. Or "ice-hot," as they would say. For the first time, Mel's headstrong sense of self makes her a rebel. She doesn't need to follow a crowd to feel accepted. Sadly, very few writers were able to find this core to Mel, but it was enough for me to be able to look at her in a different light. I could finally look at Mel and say I did like her in Doctor Who. Even if it was just for a moment, and even if it was somewhat at her expense. From a very cynical perspective, Mel can actually be pretty fun.

4. River Song

I know a lot of you are probably aghast to see River Song on this list, but I assure you, I have my reasons, and they are not without consideration. I should begin by saying some good things about River. She's smart, she's competent, she's got a healthy grasp on her sexuality, and she's cool. Why then did I not like her very much the first few times I watched her? Well, if you hadn't noticed, the bulk of this list are characters written by Steven Moffat, and once again, it all comes down to writing.

We're first introduced to River in the Tenth Doctor two-parter "Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead." At first, she's just one of a team of forgettable space scientists on an expedition. However, as she finds out the Doctor is who he is, her entire demeanour changes. Like Mel on steroids, we're given a heaping dose of "Who does this bitch think she is, being all familiar with the Doctor?" Only, instead of it lasting one episode, it's every interaction we have with her character beyond this point. Instead of getting to watch River and the Doctor grow as a couple, we're forced to watch them meet in opposite directions. It is the antithesis of "show, don't tell." Everything about the Doctor and River's relationship is implied. "You're going to love me someday," she promises. Couldn't we just see it play out naturally? Spoilers.

This idea is one that can only really be done on a show like Doctor Who, where things are wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey. The problem is, this doesn't mean that the idea is worth exploring, or even successful. It's made even worse when the relationship implied is one deeper than friendship. The Doctor is famously chaste, married only to his TARDIS and what lies ahead. Because of this, the idea of a person the Doctor will someday trust enough to share his real name and eventually marry carries with it a sizeable amount of convincing. Such a huge shift in the show's dynamic requires a lot of character development. Sadly none of that is to be seen onscreen. Who is Jim the Fish? Who cares? Steven Moffat's joke of "I'll explain later," became painfully prophetic of his time as showrunner.

I've got no complaints about River being a Time Lord, or even her being the child of Amy and Rory. Those elements are fine, really. It's the way in which she is presented which I find most detrimental to her character. I never did buy into the idea that the Doctor loved her as a wife. Their wedding seemed necessary to save the universe, as opposed to a union made out of love. Any kind of enjoyment I've ever gotten out of River stems mostly out of my love for Alex Kingston's performance. Where the show fails to establish her, she more than makes up for in style and substance. I grew to like River Song, despite the show's failure to ground her properly. River grew on me as she always said she would, but by no effort on the part of the writers. River is cool because River is cool, not because it was inferred that she was.

5. Susan

If you’ve followed this blog long enough, you’ll know I’ve already mellowed on Susan. In my reviews of the First Doctor era, I’ve had mostly good things to say about her character. This doesn’t change the fact that I found her utterly irritating at first, and it feels appropriate to talk about it here.

My initial dislike for Susan is a lot like my intial dislike for Clara. A lot of it was wrapped up in my own expectations of the character. Susan is the Doctor’s granddaughter. She is a Time Lord, therefore she should also be brilliant. And we get a lot of that in her first episode. She is mysterious, she’s enigmatic, and she is brilliant. Even her teachers at school found her perplexing. But the show doesn’t continue down that line. In fact, there are times when they make Susan borderline stupid. But how much of this is clouded by my own preconceptions?

For starters, Susan wasn’t a Time Lord. At least, not then. She was just a young girl. She may have been smarter than her fellow students, but this played more into how she was raised. So when the show depicts Susan screaming at every little thing, grabbing her hair dramatically, it smashed apart my mental image of a Time Lord. I couldn’t appreciate that they had her act this way to help sell a bad effect. Oftentimes Susan, like many Doctor Who companions, had her character sacrificed to make the baddies scarier. It was a product of her time, and even still I feel her character suffers for it.

However, one of the things I have discovered through repeat viewings of the First Doctor era is the surprising amount of character development among the TARDIS crew. The Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Susan all go through deep character development that was sadly often secondary in classic Doctor Who. Before the nature of the Doctor and companions was transient, there was a feeling of a family bond forming. Through this, I have come to find Susan to be a rather deep and sensitive person.

When it comes time to say goodbye to Susan, I can’t say I exactly agreed with the method. The Doctor locking her out and deciding she was mature enough to set out on her own felt hasty. But I would be lying if I didn’t agree that Susan had gone from a little girl to a young woman at that point. When you stop expecting Susan to be the Doctor, and allow her to be a kid, she grows on you instantly.

6. Adric

Let's be honest; it's not really original to hate on Adric. It's nothing new to point out what a bad companion he is, but here we are. Something I constantly endeavour to do on this blog is to be fair. One of my biggest complaints about the Doctor Who fandom is the proprietary attitude people take toward the fandom. The "I don't like it; therefore you shouldn't like it," attitude spat with such vitriol is one of the worst parts about being in the Doctor Who fandom. So when you say "Adric is my favourite companion," I'm not devising an argument for how wrong you are, it's fine. Like who you like. This doesn't mean I'm not also thinking in my head "What? Why?" Because I honestly, without malice, do not understand.

The most I ever enjoyed Adric, was in his introductory story "Full Circle." Setting him against a group of fellow Alzarians dilutes his lesser qualities. In fact, when paired with Varsh, he almost seems likeable. Sadly, we have to say goodbye to Varsh, and it's downhill from there. We're forced to watch a contrarian boy genius butt heads with the Doctor while he waddles around in a toddler's outfit while showing off his pound shop sheriffs badge for "mathematical excellence," to anyone who will listen. Adric is so obnoxious that he makes Wesley Crusher seem likeable in contrast.

However, it's not just his contrarian nature that makes me despise Adric, he's also disloyal to the Doctor and his friends. He's so susceptible to bad ideas as long as they a presented logically, that I've dubbed him the Ben Shapiro of the TARDIS. He's a smarmy little shit who believes himself superior to women, and he's really got no justification for his ill-placed self-confidence. Constantly demanding respect while giving very little reason to deserve it, he's like a poster child for incels. To make matters worse, he's oftentimes wrong and easily duped into taking the side of evil, turning him into more of a liability than an asset.

Recently, the idea that the Thirteenth Doctor could save someone from sacrificing themselves by using the TARDIS at the last moment to save them came under fire. "Why didn't the Doctor do this for Adric?" they said, forgetting conveniently when the Twelfth Doctor did the exact same thing in "Into the Dalek." But yes, why indeed? Why would the Doctor ever let a duplicitous, argumentative braggart die by their own stupid need to solve a math problem? My headcanon is that the Doctor got better at flying the TARDIS. The real reason is that people hated his character. The silence over the credits after Adric dies isn't out of respect for the character. The real reason is that the BBC couldn't secure the rights to Kool and the Gang's "Celebrate Good Times," before it aired.

Listen, I am not unsympathetic toward Matthew Waterhouse. He never should have been given such a big role, considering his utter lack of ability at the time. I imagine it was his own insecurity that fuelled his on-set antics. Giving unsolicited advice to veteran actors is cringey, but also the actions of a young and naive boy, in over his head. I know I said I was going to try and treat the performance as secondary, but in this case, it goes hand in hand. He has the stage presence of a fake. Every moment he's onscreen is disingenuous. The fact that he is present at the death of my favourite Doctor, stinking up the scene is genuine pain to me. If he has been made better in Big Finish, I've not yet heard it. As of now, there is nothing I've seen of Adric that has changed my opinion. But I'm glad if he makes you happy.

[allaroundcringey]

Dependency ~ Sherlock Holmes

Chapter 2 ~ Eavesdropping

Pairing : Sherlock x Female Reader

Summary : After a few years John Watson was left no choice but to call his old school mate Amelia Harold. The matter of the call you ask? Sherlock's drug problem. What started out as a simple phone call to help out his friend turned out to be so much more: it gave Amelia Harold a chance to find out who deemed her father guilty of murder. Full of friendship, truth, heartbreak, suspense, and love this story showcases what matters most in life: your friends and family.

Warnings : mention of drug abuse, addiction, and emotional abuse in later chapters

A/N : Just want to pop in and say that I plan on making a master list for this series once I get a few more chapters posted! Also- I think my schedule for posting will be every Sunday since a weeks worth of time ensures I can put out good chapters. If I feel the compulsion to post earlier than that then I will. Enjoy chapter 2!

***I do not own any of these characters, plot ideas, and lines taken directly from the show (though there are only a few of those) anything pertaining to Amelia is my original work.***

Both scattered across the ground due to the velocity of the explosion, Amelia and Sherlock quickly got themselves back together enough to stand up again. Sherlock looking nonchalant, Amelia was forced to question his odd behavior after such an event.

"Does this stuff just... normally happen around here?"

"Yes. Now if you would show yourself out that would be lovely." Sherlock said, flipping his night gown with his hand and heading towards his room. Before he could make it far Amelia stuck out her hand to stop him from going any farther.

"I'll leave when I please. And you'll be polite to me since I am company of John's. And I don't take bullshit from anyone especially from Sherlock Holmes. Understand?"

With a silent nod and look of defeat Sherlock sat back in his chair. Amelia could have left when he told her to since she had no reason to stay but she could not stand Sherlock being rude to her again. The main thought she held was how John was able to put up with such a creature.

In an attempt to clear the silence, Amelia spoke up. Sherlock clearly had the same idea since he started to speak at the same time. With an awkward stare, Sherlock spoke up again.

"Why are you so sensitive about your father?" He said bluntly. In truth he didn't mean for it to sound condescending but like many other things he'd said, especially that night, it did.

"How about you learn to shut your mouth and understand that not everyone is an open book. You definitely aren't." Amelia replied with a scoff.

"I only meant to make conversation." Sherlock snapped. Amelia had had a big enough dose of Sherlock for the night (if not a lifetime) and decided to see herself off. Wondering whether she should say goodbye or simply leave she decided on the latter to avoid more tension.

On her way down the stairs making her way around the corner, she caught a glimpse of Sherlock from where he stood near the window. He looked almost lonely. No, he definitely looked lonely. Contemplating on if she should go back up there he caught her staring and immediately put on a facade and slammed the door shut.

~

Today being a day off work, Amelia made her way straight to 221B that morning. She peculiarly found that this morning had been the easiest for her to awake since the traumatic events in her early adulthood. Not wanting to acknowledge the sudden, and frankly scary, change she blocked out the thoughts by what today could hold.

Hopefully John could finally have a moment to sit down with her and explain what he had phoned her for in the first place. What on Earth could Sherlock possibly need from her?

Hailing a cab outside her flat she knew that soon enough she would find out.

~

Pushing her way past the emergency crew outside 221B, Amelia found herself walking up the steps almost as if she had been there many times before. 221B had that affect on people.

When she arrived to the sitting room she found a new face sitting in John's chair. Sherlock of course was sitting in his own chair and John was standing near the desk.

"Hi, did I walk in on something? I'll come back later if you'd like." Amelia spoke directly to John, avoiding the curious gaze the new man cast upon her.

"No it is totally fine. I was just wrapping up anyway. Mycroft Holmes, pleased to meet you." Amelia could tell the smile he put on was fake, and he simply just wanted to get on with the matters that brought him there.

"Amelia Harlod."

"Are you John's girlfriend?" Mycroft asked which received a howl of laughter from John and Amelia.

"Oh my goodness you think I would want to be with this lad?" Amelia laughed, pointing her thumb at John, gasping for breath.

"Mycroft we've been friends since primary school only having recently reconnected again. Nothing of the relationship sorts." John explained so Mycroft could understand.

"Oh. Sorry to imply anything." Somewhat embarrassed, although trying to hide it the best he could, Mycroft turned back to Sherlock. "Maybe you can get through to him John. Or even possibly you Ms. Harold. Sherlock I don't think you understand how urgent this case is."

Tuning out since she felt it wasn't her place to listen, Amelia looked on at the damage that was caused to the flat due to last nights events. All of the previously skewed decorations were truly thrown all over the place now. She questioned whether it was safe to be in the flat at the moment but decided either way it didn't matter. She would have gone in no matter the answer.

Drawn away from her investigation of sorts, she found that Mycroft was getting into the details of the case he wanted Sherlock to take.

"Andrew West was found dead on the train tracks this morning." He stated.

"Tried to kill himself?" John questioned, even though that seemed self explanatory.

"Seems like the ovbious solution but no. West was believed to have held the plans for a missile defense system that are on a memory stick. These are now missing."

"That's not very clever."

"Assuming they have any brain's, it's not the only copy." Amelia added into the conversation, with a look of approval from Mycroft.

"Yes. Indeed that is the case." Turning his attention from John and Amelia he faced Sherlock. "You need to find these plans brother. Don't make me order you."

"I'd like to see you attempt that." Sherlock answered with an eye roll.

"Think on it." Mycroft insisted, that seeming to be his goodbye to his brother. Walking towards John he shook his hand and said his departures to him.

"Goodbye Ms. Harold it was nice to meet you. I hope I'll be seeing more of you." Mycroft added then promptly left the flat.

Annoyingly Sherlock played an ear splitting tune on his violin to match Mycroft leaving.

As soon as Mycroft was out of ear shot John started in on Sherlock. "Why did you tell him you've been busy? Your schedule is completely free to the point it's making you go mad."

"Why not?"

"So it's a rivalry between you two, a sibling rivalry? I wouldn't put it past you." Amelia thought out loud.

"You've known me for a day don't make assumptions." Sherpock answered, dragging the 'day.'

The ringing of Sherlock's phone started cutting off the argument that was bound to happen if the conversation lingered. He immediately picked it up and extanged a few words with whoever was on the other side.

"Ah. How could I say no." He hung up the phone and got up from where he was sitting to leave the flat. "Lestrade called to summon me. Are you coming John?"

"Yeah I guess so." John stuttered throwing a questioning look towards Amelia not sure what to do.

"Oh don't stand there looking like a lost puppy. Come along if you must." Sherlock said frustrated. Amelia wanting to say no just to retaliate but realizing she had no other plans for the day was forced to listen to him, and she followed the consulting detective and blogger out the door.

~

Not returning to the flat until late that night, the three of them were simply exhausted. Sherlock didn't bother to make conversation before heading straight into his room and closing the door behind him. Not that he would have in the first place. Finally having a moment of silence to speak, Amelia and John sat in the sitting room. Sherlock not being there to reprimand her, Amelia sat in his chair.

"I'm sorry it's taken so long to sit down together." John sighed as he sank into his chair.

"Nothing to worry about. I actually had a bit of fun today." Shifting in the chair so her elbows rested on her knees she looked directly at John. "I know you wouldn't have phoned me without a purpose. Not to just catch up."

"I'm sorry for that too. I know I should have called earlier not just when I needed you. I hope you can forgive me because truly I am so glad we are talking again."

"John of course I forgive you. It's my nature to not stay mad at anyone, you know that. Now tell me what you need because I'm getting impatient." Amelia replied with a light laugh.

"It's not widely known to the public but Sherlock tends to not have the healthiest of coping mechanism. Particularly when he's bored."

"Like he was yesterday."

"Yes, exactly. I know that when things with your father went down," Amelia took a sharp inhale at the mention of him as John continued on, "you experienced some of the same things. To put it bluntly I was wondering if you could help Sherlock get over his drug addiction. He says he can easily do it on his own and all other sorts of excuses but something that complicated can't be done by yourself. I'm sure you would understand."

"You would understand also. You were always there for me." Amelia commented with a sad smile, reminiscing on the past.

"I know it's a lot to ask and if you think it will be triggering in any way-" before John could finish Amelia cut him off.

"Even if it is I know how to handle myself. And I can see that you clearly care for Sherlock a lot. And although I don't want to admit it, I see why you care. Of course I'll help in anyway possible."

"Amelia you never cease to amaze me. Thank you again." John said as he got up to hug Amelia. Only staying in the hug for a moment, they released each other when John spoke up once again.

"I know you don't love talking about it but you do know if you need someone to talk to about anything pertaining to your father you know you can come to me. Right?"

"Yes John. I appreciate it." Amelia sighed, which then turned into a yawn.

"You can stay here tonight if you'd like since it's late. Cabs don't usually circle around here at this hour."

"That would be lovely John."

"You can have my bed if you'd like." John offered gesturing towards the upstairs bedroom.

"Well now, that would just be confirming Mycroft's suspicions John! The couch is just fine in all seriousness. Now get to bed." Amelia lightly slapped John across the shoulder in an attempt to shoo him off. After an extange of goodnights, John was off to his bed.

Alone again, Amelia sat on the couch and rubbed her face with her hands. After all these years it was still hard to openly talk about her father. Not wanting to think about him longer she gingerly laid down on the couch, calling it a night.

~

After he heard the final noises of the couch moving, Sherlock sat up from where he was on the floor next to his door with a hard look on his face. Eavesdropping was a bad habit of his. After learning the new information on Amelia and that her intentions were truly good he felt remorse for treating her rudely. He wasn't sure how to make up for his actions. In typical Sherlock fashion he didn't feel comfortable or right saying sorry. Deciding to sleep on it, Sherlock laid down in his bed. Alone again.

[yeet-me-into-oblivion-please]

Well, Supernatural is actually ending and I don't know what I'll do

[ Brevity is not a strong suit of mine since I've included personal details but there's stuff I feel everyone in the SPN family needs to read]

You might be expecting another post about how Supernatural saved someone's life and how devastated they will be when it ends because they've watched it for so long as well as how the actors have impacted their lives. This is probably one of those but please hear me out.

Supernatural premiered in 2005 and I was in preparatory class (aged 5 years and was before I began 1st grade). I heard of it because my aunt would watch it time to time so I'd also tried to get some peeks myself but I wasn't allowed to because it was "too scary".

Then our local cable began to show seasons 1-5 and that was when everyone in class started watching and quoting it. This was in 6th grade and I was frustrated because I knew about it before most of them yet they acted like it was a new show. I had a fair idea about the story but once I began watching it, I fell in love with it and loved it like a part of my soul.

Yes, Jensen Ackles was my first crush but I still thought (and do think) that both he and Jared are super hot. So I was sucked into this vortex, this Neverland which I never thought I would end.

I joined Tumblr for this show in 2013 because I saw the jokes about there being a Supernatural gif everywhere and wanted to be a part of the fandom/community. This was also the year I actually became interested what other fans felt though I never used this site properly until 2016 I would read the IMDb discussion boards because I hated scurrying through Destiel-infested posts.

(Fun fact:I wasn't using any social media of my own but on my mother's Facebook I liked a Supernatural fan page asking people's opinions on Destiel. This is was around the time season 8 was just finishing or had already finished so I read the comments--- people talked about Dean and Castiel being gay and didn't approve of it as there was this one girl who was conservative and didn't believe in homosexuality while others went on how Dean was always a ladies man which I agreed with. Not that I commented but I thought there was something I missed and I thought Castiel used Dean as a vessel, thus Destiel.)

But I digress. I was in deep by the time season 9 premiered and majority of the people I knew stopped watching the show except for this girl who bullied me throughout preschool who put up this update that Dean had become a demon. I doubt she watches the show now but it was hard seeing her put pictures of "I heart Dean Winchester" and pictures of Jensen when my mom asked me why I don't do the same.

Supernatural, I feel, has become that embarrassing thing you are into in middle school but suddenly drop when you're older, looking back and thinking, "Yeesh, I can't believe I used to watch this show."

I'll be a grown woman at 30 or 40 and probably eventually in my 70s and 80s but I will still look back fondly, the good, the bad and the ugly because I have like many teenagers have undergone many changes (friends, family, emotions, hobbies etc) but Supernatural has always been this constant in my life.

Because let me tell you, I'm seeing these posts saying stuff like how people are glad that it's finally over with its "bullshit" and that's it's dying. That is extremely disrespectful and insensitive to those people who literally live for it, who have invested time and money into it: gif makers, artists, meta writers (I may not agree with you guys but even you count). They don't know what to do once the show ends because it has helped them in ways others will never ever be able to fathom.

I saw the video put up by the guys. I saw and I could tell that Jared, Jensen and Misha had probably cried their guts out before the announcement because their eyes were red and puffy. Jared was controlling himself by talking less as Jensen was clearly on the verge as well but yes they said that they should save the angst for next year.

I love the guys; I love Jared being a goofball and Jensen being equally goofy as well and I'll say this too, I used to enjoy some of Misha's crass jokes (not the highlight ) as well which was why I looked forward to the gag reel every summer (because of J2) because it was cathartic after a traumatic season finale. I love the witty banter and the pranks the cast would do and I will miss it tremendously.

I have some issues with my aunt but everything would be okay when we would fawn over the guys and bingewatch the entire season the summer after it finished airing. We'd quote quotes back and forth and even spiritually killed ourselves watching short clips of "Sammy, close your eyes", "I'm proud of us" etc. Hell, she even promised me that when we go visit my uncle in the States we'd attend a con together.

If, and whenever we do go, it'll be different because the show won't be on air anymore and I know for a fact that I won't feel the anticipation of an episode.

So don't say disrespectful and callous things like "fucking finally". You can dislike the cast/plotline/show but don't ridicule and mock those who invested in the show,some of you are most probably speculating and have barely seen it.

I'm not some dumb, blind fan. I can see some stupid mistakes and don't always eat up what the writers show. For example, everyone must have figured that I dislike Destiel because it's based on groundless assumptions. I thought the Bloodlines was a crap idea that had nothing to do with the main plot and knew it was destined to fail.

As for Wayward Daughters/Sisters or whatever the fuck it was supposed to be called, I was not looking forward to it at all because it was one of those "forced diversity" shows, y'know gender bent stuff.

I felt that they were bastardising everything that Supernatural has and will (always) stand for because some people had a hair up their backsides. Yeah, I loathed Claire and that Kaia mourning thing was bullshit. Thank goodness I was sick that day and couldn't keep my eyes open for that episode.

If we were told that there would be a Men of Letters(with Henry Winchester) or even a Bobby-Rufus spinoff I would be okay with that but for now since the show will finish next year let's the wounds heal first, shall we?

I hope that Jared and Jensen get some offers once the show is done and I will pay good money to see movies, TV shows of them etc but for now I will keep quiet since I hope we get an ending we (and the boys) deserve.

Yes, the writer situation scares me and I think they should call Eric Kripke for a last hurrah. I mean, it is his baby and he should get to have a say in the series finale as well as J2.

Will one of the brothers die and the other will live (I'm worried we'll get a reverse Swan Song)? Will they both die leaving Cas behind and Jack as some sort legacy who trains future hunters? That would be a possibility since the sheriff in 14.16 asked the Winchesters why they don't tell people about monsters. What happens to Baby?

I seriously doubt the ending will be happy(maybe not 100%) but the best thing would be if they go driving with Baby into the sunset...

Dean at the steering wheel with Sam riding shotgun, where they should be ---- where they will always be, home. Dean plays his "mullet rock" as Sam would playfully mock his brother's musical choices. No chick flick moments. Just the Winchesters.

The boys need to lay their weary heads to rest, so they can cry no more. Because they are the legendary Winchesters, the hunters who saved the world countless times unbeknownst to many. I don't think their work will ever be done but there will be peace when they are done and how they will reach that point we'll never know till 2020.

Everyone will hear "Carry on wayward son" for the last time ever in Supernatural over a painful montage of "Dad's gone on a hunting trip and he hasn't been home in a few days" and "Saving people, hunting things, the family business". Now who in this fandom wouldn't be wracked with pain?

This is the show we all joked about that made a deal with the devil to never go off air but I did expect this a long time ago. Only thing was that I didn't know how I'd treat the news. I was that person who would go, "pfft, of course Supernatural would get renewed". Then again, this was the show that an ending was imminent and the whole season 4 debacle about Misha and the angel storyline saving the show blah blah blah.

So next year, everyone will flock to see the finale and epic conclusion to the Winchester saga whether they stopped at season 5,6,7 or 10,12. Diss it all you want for the shit show it may have become but wherever you left off, you may still want to know what happens to Sam and Dean Winchester in the end.

Once Supernatural ends, I'll turn 20 next summer and I would like to think of it being poetic that I end my adolescence with a show I have loved when I brave the cold, ruthless world of adulthood. I'm a picky person and can't say what's my favorite xyz is but you know what I'll say about my favorite TV show.

We will have completed 327 episodes which is the highest for a scifi TV show so I do hope the boys get some sort of recognition. It was us crazy bitches and jerks that gave the show the mileage and it was us that gave Jared and Jensen faith that they could carry on so for the remainder of season 14 and for 15,support these guys. Support these annoyingly sexy and ridiculously hilarious dudes for this show. I'm sure Jared and Jensen love the show like it's their kid practically but I wish everyone would just shut up, tinhatters, bronlies, stans, destihellers because we are all fans of the one show so let's ease the time we have left.

But seriously imagine Sam and Dean on a desert highway, the orange and yellow rays of the setting sun make Baby shine in all her splendor which makes Dean swell with pride. He starts the engine with a low rumble and they're off. They might to California to feel the sand beneath their feet or to Disneyland. They're living the "apple pie life" and this is their personal heaven : with each other.

I wouldn't mind this playing in the background if the ending is the inevitable and unspeakable you know what :

It's wishful thinking, since I wish they'd actually play some Zeppelin instead of song titles being used as episode titles but I wish they could use some Queen or Guns n Roses and stuff before 1979 because everything sucked ass afterwards according to Dean.

I want the classic rock resurgence in the show as well but I know they'll end up using the cash elsewhere. I wouldn't mind a body swap episode but if wishes were horses, right?

[bhaalble]

Alistair: A Defense, a Critique

I PROMISED AN ESSAY

I DELIVER AN ESSAY.

So here we go. What’s up Ferelden, its him, ya boi

So, let’s start off by clearly delineating some things that Alistair is, and more importantly, what he is not.

I think there’s a tendency with Alistair critical posts to treat the worst possible version of Alistair as the “real him”, which is more than a little unfair. Unhardened, kinda bitchy Alistair is a part of him, yes, but its a part of him that only arises when your Warden is continually a dick to him, and I think it’s fair to say that none of us are the best versions of ourselves when we’re constantly being treated like shit or ignored. Furthermore, this isn’t really something we do when we talk about the other characters. Zevran straight up tries to murder you if you don’t have his approval ratings high enough and somehow most people don’t see Zevran as inherently a backstabbing little shit.

So, let’s run down the list of common accusations and overturn them

Alistair is not stupid. He’s just…not. Morrigan jokes, yes, but Morrigan tends to see everyone as an idiot for not sharing her worldview, including your Warden. The one who jokes about Alistair being stupid more often than anyone is Alistair, but as we see time and time again, he’s rarely the most trustworthy source for his real complications.

Alistair may not be a scholar and can make some pretty boneheaded statements, yes, but he’s hardly alone in that department for the DA:O crew. His retorts show some real wit behind them at points. He can demonstrate great social awareness (e.g. catching on to the fact that the Grand Cleric sending him, an ex-templar, to interact with the Circle Mages was definitely an intentional slight). Furthermore, I’d like to point out that he managed to catch on to the Chantry’s bullshit all on his own, before he racked up dozens of counts of mage abuse (*cough* CULLEN *cough*). He still shows some effects of the templar’s training, (especially in his treatment of Jowan and Morrigan) but I’d argue that this is hardly a surprise. He’s been subjected to it 24/7 since he was a child. But he’s aware, and based on the other templars we meet throughout the game that on its own shows some serious introspection and critical thinking.

Alistair is not selfish. While he has his moments, I don’t think that’s really who he is, deep down. Take, for instance, his forgiveness of Arl Eamon. He hasn’t seen Eamon for years. The expected arc would be that he waits for Eamon to wake up, gets an apology, and then forgives him. But based on how he talks about him when you enter Redcliffe, its clear that he’s already forgiven Eamon, and is honestly more than a little ashamed of his behavior. Frankly, this is more selfless than even I would be: imagine being twelve, having lived your life as a street urchin because your adoptive father simply won’t treat you any different than he treats his paid employees, only to be sent away from the only home you’ve ever known because your presence embarrasses his wife. Frankly, I think Alistair would be justified in resenting Eamon for it, but it’s clear that he doesn’t. He calls him a good man from beginning to end.

Furthermore, I think what the Guardian says to Alistair is telling. He doesn’t just feel sad that Duncan is gone. He feels guilty. He, deep down, genuinely believes it should have been him. He wishes he could throw himself on the sword to save his mentor. Then there’s the ritual to consider. It takes some convincing (because of course it does) but with little fuss, Alistair will sleep with a woman he genuinely dislikes (which hoo boy does this make a consent conversation more than a little shaky) to conceive a child that he will never get to see. He, a bastard child cast away from his father, is essentially doing the same thing. All to ensure that he won’t risk his friends dying. Even an unhardened King Alistair casting off a non-human non-noble Warden, while it of course hurts, to me shows a sense of latent responsibility. He genuinely loves and cares about your HoF, but he has the sense that this matters more. That even though he never wanted this burden, he has to carry it as best he can.

What Alistair is is immature.

I want to draw a fine distinction here because I think we tend to use immature interchangeably with “selfish” and “stupid”, so it can sound like I’m contradicting myself. So, to explain myself: I use “immature” in the sense of a symptom, rather than a personality.

For an example of “immature as a personality”, look no further than Tony Stark in like, the first half hour of Iron Man (arguably Tony in the rest of the movies too but ashfagdkh follow me here)

Early Tony Stark is very much someone who is irrepressibly immature. He is capable of being an adult, but he chooses not to be, valuing his own desires above pretty much everyone else’s. He acts out simply because he knows no one will stop him, chases the shiniest, biggest toys he can get, and throws a fit when he doesn’t get his way. He treats other people’s time and needs with a flippant attitude, generally behaving like they are literally side characters who only matter so long as they help him get what he wants.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a reason Tony is the way he is (his relationship with his father being a big contributor), but what is important is that Tony is fully capable of being otherwise, knows it, and chooses not to. He revels in his shamelessness, believing that his immaturity is a sign of his intelligence. Everyone else acts like an adult because they have to, but Tony acts like a child because he is smart enough and rich enough to get away with it. Call it a sort of Capitalist Peter Pan syndrome.

By contrast, Alistair strikes me as immature as a symptom. First off, his age is important to factor in here. Alistair is 20 (my age, which is trippy as fuck). He is barely done being a teenager by the time you meet him.

There are further factors that have stunted Alistair’s emotional maturity, even for the average 20-year-old. He jokes about having been raised by Mabari, but its very clear there weren’t a lot of adult influences in his life at a young age. He mentions Isolde ensured that the castle wasn’t home to him long before he was sent to the Chantry. Imagine being under ten and feeling like you were unwanted by a person who has the power to make your life miserable in every imaginable way.

Then, once he was moved to the Chantry….well, if the Circle is any indication, the Chantry doesn’t exactly know how to accommodate children. Alistair made life a merry hell for the priests but it’s clear he wasn’t treated very well by them. Then straight into templar training. All of this while barely interacting with the outside world and shunned by his peers for his status as a bastard. Kids need to engage with other people in order to grow up effectively. With that in mind, it’s frankly stunning that Alistair has as much care for other people as he does.

The observation of Alistair’s immaturity is exactly groundbreaking either. Think about his dream in the Fade. We see Alistair at his most honest and vulnerable, fully convinced of the illusion. And it seems his greatest dream is to have the family he never got as a child, via his sister. Alistair behaves childlike to the point of parody in this dream. He pleads like a child and tries to entice the Warden to stay by begging his mom sister to make a special meal, his favorite. Hell, the whole “hardening” subplot is basically about the Warden forcing Alistair to let go of the childhood he never got to have and moving forward into adulthood.

His immaturity doesn’t just express itself in the obvious childlike behavior, however. Even though we tend to forget that Alistair is a junior member of the Wardens and is barely more experienced than the HoF in terms of actually fighting darkspawn, I think we can all agree that tossing the decisions on someone who’s barely past their Joining probably isn’t great behavior. Pretty much every comment he makes, about mages, blood magic, elves, even women, also read as the words of a man who simply does not have the world experience yet to really know how to engage with people who aren’t like him. It doesn’t mean these comments don’t….yanno, suck, but there is rarely any real malice behind them. Despite the hardships in Alistair’s life (of which there have been many, I grant), he has still been on the receiving end of certain privileges by virtue of being a man and being human non-mage, and it is clear he is still unlearning the prejudice inherent in that. His youth doesn’t excuse how hurtful or ignorant his comments can be, but its the unfortunate truth that, especially for those of us who grow up relatively privileged, being mindful of the Other is a learning process.

However, the main reason I view this immaturity as a symptom more than a personality is that I think Alistair has a genuine desire to grow past this. He acknowledges that he complains a lot, with an additional note that “and you haven’t been having an easy time of it either”. If you push back on his comments (or at least when the game gives you the chance to), he’ll usually apologize for it. And as I said, the hardening storyline to me indicates that Alistair is more than ready to grow up. He’s just still learning how to do it.

None of this, by the way, means that you have to love Alistair. Its more than easy to be annoyed by him, especially for a non-human and/or non-noble character. In the interest of full disclosure, it took me romancing Alistair to move past simply tolerating him. But I think its time for all of us to stop pretending Alistair is something he isn’t. He isn’t really a side character as much as he is a deuteragonist. More than any other companion (except, arguably, Morrigan), Alistair has a character arc that acts in response to your own characters. He grows and changes over the course of the narrative in a way that parallels how the story treats him, and if you create an Alistair that behaves like an asshole, well, you might want to take a look at how you’ve been treating him

to

[kootenaygoon]

So,

When Paisley and I first broke up in February 2016, I spent a few weeks in rapturous relief before realizing what a dire state I’d left myself in. I was nearly homeless, with a few car-loads of possessions that I was lugging from one temporary refuge to the next. She got the dogs, I got the RAV-4. It was dark days, and suddenly the reality TV star that everybody thought would’ve dropped out of the presidential race by now was getting taken more and more seriously. I didn’t believe the rhetoric, didn’t believe the people saying Donald Trump could win. He reminded me of Cam Carpenter, a right wing bully, and I hated him from the moment he started making headlines. 

What did interest me, though, was how he was using social media to his advantage. Here was a senior citizen weaponizing Twitter in ways that astonished me. The pundits were dissecting each tweet, word for word, while press releases from other candidates sat unopened in their inboxes. He’d found a way to circumvent the media, then make them scramble to keep up to the conversation he was creating. They were treating him as a joke while playing right into his hands. It was like watching a magic trick in slow motion.

I’d been a reporter in the Yukon when Obama first began campaigning, and I remember the sensation of giddy hope that came with the idea the U.S. was finally going to elect its first black president. It felt like finally, now, things were going to be better. Fast forward eight years and this sexist bigot was proving that there was plenty of opposition to progress, plenty of people keen to give this orange-faced huckster the reins. And coming to terms with that felt like accepting that the world was a darker, shittier place that I’d once thought. I was glad to have found my Kootenay refuge, but I feared for the future.

After crashing for a week with Niles, enjoying his John Cooper artwork and sharing joints over morning coffee, I ended up moving in with a newly elected city councillor named Anna Purcell. She lived with her husband Gary and a German exchange student I didn’t like. Anna had earned more votes in the election than any other councillor, and it was easy to see why. She had the perfect amount of Nelson quirk, while being ultra-articulate and incredibly passionate about her new gig. She was the type of person who walked her talk. When I interviewed her for the Star she’d been outspoken about the affordable housing crisis, so I knew she would understand if I asked her for a place to stay. She lived just a few blocks up from Paisley’s place, meaning I would have to pass by it every morning on the way to work. 

“When my ex left me, it was like the words were bonked out of me,” Anna said, sitting in her living room one afternoon. “I just couldn’t talk for a while after that. I literally couldn’t speak.”

I told her I felt embarrassed after writing that love-drenched introductory column for the paper, and making Paisley such a big part of my public persona. Now everyone was going to know I fucked up my family, and would be watching the fall-out like a soap opera.

“I feel like this is such a huge hit to my social capital, you know? Like I used to be a guy with a partner and a place and some dogs, now I’m just a guy. With nothing.”

Anna shook her head. “That’s enough. I don’t think it will be as big a hit as you think. It’s not like single people have less value, right?”

Once a week I would swing by Paisley’s place to pick up Muppet and Buster. We would take the train tracks to Red Sands, or trek along Baker Street and down to the Prestige, but I didn’t have a dog-friendly place to take them home to. Sometimes I just walked them around the block, hanging out at the Central School playground en route, then brought them back an hour later. At first I was having no problem processing my separation from Paisley, but with the dogs it was different. They were blameless, had no idea what was going on. One afternoon I sat on a random lawn and held them to my chest, weeping. I called my parents and sobbed into the phone.

“I don’t mean to be insensitive, but you need to stop crying in front of the dogs,” Paisley said, standing in the doorway of her house. “It really upsets Muppet.”

“How did you know I was crying?”

“Last time you took them she came home and she wouldn’t sit still, she was stressed out and wagging her little body around. She knows something is wrong.”

“Well, this feels wrong.”

Paisley was having no trouble transitioning into the next stage of her life. Her dessert business was thriving, she was dating new guys and making new friends. She posted so many pictures with her new roommate that people started to wonder if they were a couple. She had shaved her head, Britney Spears-style, in the midst of our breakup, but now her hair had grown into a cute pixie cut. She looked like Winona Ryder in Alien Resurrection, and when she stood with her hands on her hips you could read her tattoo: It Could Be Worse...

“What’re you eating these days? How are you feeding yourself?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Nachos, peanut butter and jam, stuff like that.”

She shook her head. “Peanut butter and jam?”

“You know I’m just keeping it simple. I don’t have many groceries.”

“But you’re still going to CrossFit?”

“Yeah, I told Ali I couldn’t afford it and she was like ‘just keep coming, and get the money to me when you can’. I think she knows what I’m going through, you know?”

“That’s nice of her. How’s Rock of Ages?”

Having something extracurricular to focus on had been crucial for me, otherwise I would’ve spent all my time either crying, smoking pot or sleeping. For the audition I’d ripped off my shirt and belted my way through an 80s power ballad, earning a spot in the chorus. I’d been given one half-sentence solo at the beginning of a song early in the show, and for the rest of the production I swapped my time between being the bartender of the Bourbon Room and a slimy producer who creeps on the female lead. It was keeping me just busy enough to feel stable, and made me feel like I was in high school school again.  

For the Star coverage, I did a photo shoot with the cast at an abandoned building near the Selkirk College campus. It was covered in the expected graffiti and looked like it would be a perfect setting for a horror movie. At the time there was a particular cartoon that had been popping up all over town, Thug Bear, and he showed up in a few of the shots. There was a main couple, then a rockstar named Stacey Jaxx who had been played by Tom Cruise in the movie version, and a quartet of sexy nymphs. The costumes were neon and pastel, with big wigs and plenty of bare skin. Though they were squinting into a harsh afternoon sun, I got an awesome shot that ended up on the cover. 

The rehearsals were more challenging than I was expecting. The choreography for the dance sequences was intricate, the pace that we were putting things together was faster than I was accustomed to, and I felt way out of my depth when it came to the singing. I’d been a soloist in the church choir as a kid, and I’d done a few musicals in high school, but I hadn’t sung in front of people for years. As the weeks passed I became increasingly more nervous, though I knew I was basically just background furniture for the other actors.

One day a woman named Siobhan approached me. She was part of the production, a swaggering farm girl with a sarcastic streak. Rehearsal was just about to start, and I’d just put down my bag.

“I’ve been meaning to thank you,” she said.

I smiled, expecting a joke. “Oh yeah, for what?”

“That picture that you took of Andrew Stevenson, the one where he’s handcuffed and being led into court? I wanted to thank you for taking that photo.”

I blinked for a moment, caught off guard. “Thanks, yeah. I was really happy to get that shot. It took me over a year.”

She took a deep breath. “Well, I was there in court for the proceedings, but I never got a chance to really see his face, not like you can see it in that photo. When I saw it, it honestly blew me away.”

I was confused. “So who’s this guy to you?”

“I was one of the bank tellers that day, at the credit union he robbed. He waved his fucking gun right in my face. Traumatized me. I’d been having nightmares about this guy for months, every night, and it was like he wasn’t human. With a black mask, jumping around and screaming like some sort of ghoul. That’s what I saw every night when I closed my eyes.”

“Holy shit.”

“Then I saw that photo, Will, and it changed everything. I saw he was just a human, just a normal human, just like everyone else. He wasn’t some supernatural monster who was out to get me. He couldn’t hurt me anymore. That’s what that photo did for me. So that’s what I’m saying thank you for.”

“I don’t even know what to say.”

She smiled warmly, and hugged me. “You don’t have to say anything.”

The Kootenay Goon

[minijenn]

Keys to the Kingdom Chapter 7

AN: SURPRISE new chapter of Keys so soon after the last one (that I forgot to fucking post alksdjalskdjklad) but yeah, this one’s kind of a lot shorter than I thought it would be, but I do like it quite a lot, so I hope you will too. Enjoy!

Previous: https://minijenn.tumblr.com/post/184403048029/keys-to-the-kingdom-chapter-6

Chapter 7: Promising Beginnings

You’re only everything I’ve ever dreamed Ever dreamed of, ever dreamed of

For as long as she had been able to remember, whatever life Kairi might have led prior to her arrival at the Destiny Islands had been a complete and utter mystery to her. It was as though her memories of her birthplace, the first few years of her life in general, had been washed away by the very same tide that had landed her on the island’s shore in the first place. At the time, the only piece of fleeting knowledge the girl had carried with her was her own name. And for the longest time, the absence of those essential memories, of a home, a family, friends, anything else she might have once known, had created a deep, almost aching emptiness within her heart. An emptiness that, in time, had been filled by new memories from the new life she had come to lead. By the sound of the surf washing up onto the sand, by the way the pale glow of the moon would illuminate the small, peaceful village at night, by the seagulls and sand crabs and paopu fruit hanging from the lofty palm trees. By the mayor and his family, who had kindly, warmly taken her in and raised her as their own. By Selphie, Tidus, and Wakka. By Riku and perhaps most of all, by Sora.

And yet… the moment Kairi stepped foot into the rising city known as Radiant Garden, she knew. This was exactly where she had come from.

The spark of familiarity that had burst inside her heart upon even so much as a glance at the city’s famous central plaza was undeniable. Though the memories of her childhood here were still distant shadows locked away in the back of her mind, Kairi was confident that she had walked these cobblestone streets before. She had a connection to this place, to her home, her real home, and the suddenness in realizing that connection was more than enough to rattle her to her core. She let out a shallow breath, her eyes wide as she pressed up against one of the courtyard’s shorter walls, a hand pressed again her head as she tried to remember something, anything else about her now former home.

And yet… the only memory that stirred was that of a woman’s voice, kind and gentle, followed by a burst of warmth centered around the very same pearl necklace Kairi still wore to this day. “I just cast a magic spell on you,” the woman’s voice said, her image all but indiscernible in Kairi’s practically faded memory. “One day, when you’re in trouble, the light within you will lead you to the light of another. Someone to keep you safe.”

Kairi’s gaze drifted down to the charmed necklace, her fingertips grazing it ever so slightly. She still had no idea who the woman in her memory had been, but she couldn’t help but feel as though her spell had rung true. Because for some reason or another, it had led her away from this place and to the Destiny Islands instead. To Sora and Riku. To someone who had kept her safe.

“Excuse me, are you all ri—oh! Wait… Kairi?! Is that you?”

“Huh?” Kairi blinked out of her thoughts, realizing that she had slid down to sit against the wall. Focusing on the present once again, she noticed a young woman, clad in pink, with long, braided brown hair, her face filled with concern as she knelt down in front of her. A face that, after a moment or two, Kairi quickly recognized from her rather brief stint in Traverse Town well over a year ago now.

“Aerith!” she exclaimed with a surprised smile, not hesitating to embrace the older girl. “It’s great to see you again!”

“Same to you,” Aerith chuckled warmly, returning the hug before extending a hand to help Kairi up. “Look at how much you’ve grown! What brings you here to Radiant Garden?”

“I’m actually here to train to use my Keyblade under Merlin the wizard,” Kairi informed.

“Oh, so you’re the other pupil he mentioned earlier!” Aerith said. “Well, in that case, it’ll be great having you around here for a while.”

“Thanks,” Kairi grinned, glad to know that there would be familiar faces around to help, even in some small way, ground her amidst the uncertainty she was facing in the new regiment she was about to undertake. “Actually, Aerith, could you maybe point me in the right direction to Merlin’s house? I… don’t really know my way around here anymore…”

“Say no more. I’m actually heading there myself,” the older girl turned to head off, beckoning Kairi to follow her. “The other members of the committee will be done their own rounds soon, but we’ll probably still be the first to make it back.”

“Committee?” Kairi asked as she walked alongside Aerith through the calm city streets.

“The Radiant Garden Restoration Committee,” Aerith explained. “For over a year now, we’ve all been working hard to rebuild our home to the way it used to be. There’s still plenty of work to be done, but for now, Leon says we’ve made pretty good progress.”

“What exactly did Radiant Garden need to be restored from?” Kairi wondered, eager to learn more about her former home.

Aerith’s expression saddened at this as she turned her glance over to the castle towering high over the city’s smaller homes and shops. “Several years ago, this world was overrun by Maleficent and her endless army of Heartless.”

“Maleficent?” Kairi interjected, familiar with the dark fairy’s name. “Isn’t she that witch who captured me and the other princesses?”

Aerith nodded gravely. “She came here completely without warning. We fought to protect the town the best we could but… it wasn’t enough. She took over, and Leon, Yuffie, Cid, and I were some of the only survivors that made it out alive. It wasn’t until Sora and his friends defeated Maleficent that we were able to take our home back and start rebuilding it.”

“Oh,” was all Kairi said, even though her thoughts were practically exploding upon hearing all this. She wasn’t positive, but she had a strong suspicion that Maleficent’s conquest of Radiant Garden had been the event that had somehow caused her to be cast out of her former home in the first place. She didn’t know how exactly, or why her memories would have been stripped away from her when Aerith’s seemed to be completely intact, but it made sense, given that it had been enough to drive most of the city’s other residents out. Still, that didn’t explain how she had ended up in the Destiny Islands in the first place, but she supposed that was a question for another time.

For now, their brief travel through the city had come to an end as they reached a seemingly small home tucked away between several others. However, upon venturing inside, Kairi was surprised to see that it was much more spacious than it appeared to be. A large computer mounted the wall on one end of the main room, a round meeting table filling out the center and still leaving ample space for several bookshelves and other collections of various items. She marveled in silent wonder at the almost impossible space as she followed Aerith into it, realizing that aside from the two of them, no one else seemed to be there. Until….

“Ah, Aerith, there you are! First to arrive back, as usual. I trust your patrol went well?”

“Yes, it did, Merlin,” Aerith responded dutifully to the wizard’s seemingly disembodied voice. Confused, Kairi looked all around for any signs of him, though sure enough, Merlin himself soon materialized before them in a burst of colorful magic.

“There, that should do it!” the wizard exclaimed, mostly to himself as he brushed a bit of dust off of his shoulder. “Forgive me for the abrupt appearance, my dear, I was just putting the finishing touches on the training grounds for our soon-to-be Keyblade trainees.”

“Speaking of trainees,” Aerith grinned as she stepped out of the way. “I happened to find one of them while I was out on patrol.”

“Well, what a spot of good luck that was!” Merlin exclaimed excitably as he stepped up to shake his newest pupil’s hand. “You must be Kairi. I’ve been expecting you for quite some time now, though I don’t blame your relative tardiness on you. Yen Sid does have a terrible habit for rambling for far longer than necessary, which I’m sure was exactly what he did before sending you off here.”

Kairi almost laughed at the wizard’s bout of witty humor, though she held it back in favor of maintain the proper respect for her new teacher. “I-I’m very glad to meet you, Master,” she said with a humble bow. “It’s an honor to be training under someone as wise and powerful as yourself.”

“Oh, huff to all that puffery!” Merlin scoffed with a wave of his hand. “You don’t have to be so formal around me, my dear. Just calling me Merlin will suffice.”

“R-right,” Kairi nodded, somewhat embarrassed. “Sorry.”

“Now, now,” the wizard said with a good-natured grin. “I can tell you’re feeling a bit anxious about this undertaking, but fret not. It’s been quite a while since I’ve taken any pupils in under my tutelage, but I can assure that you I am nothing if not a fair and competent teacher. And from what I’ve heard of you thus far, Kairi, I’m sure you’ll be quite a receptive, model student. Why, by the time we’re through, I guarantee you’ll be well on your way to becoming a true, bona-fide Keyblade Master!”

This assurance did the trick in finally setting Kairi at ease. Ever since Yen Sid had tasked her with this training, she couldn’t deny that she had been worried about it for more reasons than one. She had only the barest knowledge of how to use her Keyblade, and even then her skills were minute at best. She was nowhere near the level that either Sora or Riku were on, of that she was certain, and though she wanted to strive to accomplish the strength they both knew, she couldn’t help but fear that she never would. After all, she was already so far behind both of them, weak and under-skilled, a novice through and through. She would certainly have her work cut out for her to even just become competent with her Keyblade alone. But to hear Merlin voice his vote of confidence in her so early on gave her just enough hope to think that maybe starting from the bottom and working her way up to the top might not be so difficult after all.

However, before she could properly thank the wizard for his kind words, Kairi was all too quickly reminded of the other major misgiving she had when it came to her training the moment the door burst open behind her. “Alright, gramps,” Lea trudged into the house, apparently disgruntled as he glared over at Merlin first. “I’ve been looking all over town for that portal you opened up, but I haven’t been able to find it anywhere! What gives? Is this some sort of a secret test or something?”

“No, actually, it wasn’t,” Merlin pointed out patiently. “The errand I sent you on was for the sole purpose of finding and bringing your fellow pupil here.”

“But…” Aerith interjected with something of a wry grin. “It looks like I beat you to it, Lea.”

Lea prepared to fire back a sarcastic retort, though he immediately stopped short the moment he spotted Kairi standing stiffly beside Aerith. “Oh… h-hey, Kairi,” he greeted, his tone quite awkward compared to the cool confidence it usually carried. “L-long time no see, huh?”

Kairi took in a deep breath at this, her lips pressed into a thin line as she kept a cold, scrutinizing gaze on the former assassin. She knew, based on what she had been told, that he wasn’t a Nobody anymore, nor did he carry any further ill will towards her or her friends. But as far as Kairi was concerned, that was all just hearsay. Because when she looked at Lea, she still saw Axel, the man who had kidnapped her, who had dragged her away from her home again, all for the sake of hurting one of her closest friends. And even if all that was said and done and in the past now, Kairi still couldn’t help but harbor some mistrust towards him all the same. “Yeah,” she answered flatly before pulling her sights away from him quite intentionally.

Lea seemed to start at this, almost as if he wanted to say something else to her, though he didn’t get much of a chance to before Merlin intervened. “Well, its good to know the two of you are already acquainted with one another!” he exclaimed brightly, though it was clear he didn’t know exactly how they were acquainted in the first place. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to check over the area I’ve prepared for the two of you to train in one final time. Be back in a jiff!” And with a simple wave of his wand, Merlin disappeared in a puff of magical smoke to do just that.

“And I should probably go out and find Leon and the others,” Aerith remarked as she began to head out herself. “They’re usually back by now, unless they got held up by something. Either way, I’ll see the two of you around!”

Kairi almost spoke out to ask Aerith to stay out of nerves alone, though by the time she decided she didn’t particularly want to be left alone with her former kidnapper, the older girl had already stepped out the door. An uncomfortable silence filled the room almost immediately, with Kairi quickly diverting her attention towards a nearby bookshelf in an attempt at distracting herself away from Lea. She hoped that the next several minutes until Merlin’s return could pass in that silence, but of course, the former assassin couldn’t just leave her well enough alone as she would have preferred.

“So…” Lea began, leaning against the nearby wall as he tried to put on a casual front. ‘H-how ya been?”

“Fine,” Kairi answered tersely, forcing both her expression and her tone to be apathetic and unyielding.

“You feel like you’re up for this whole training thing?”

“Mm hm.”

“You really think that wacky old coot can actually teach us anything when it comes to Keyblades?”

“Yes.”

Lea’s coy smile fell as even his attempt at reaching Kairi through humor fell. In fact, his attempts at striking up an actual conversation in general seemed to be getting him nowhere as she would barely even spare a simple glance over at him. So instead, he decided to go with a route he wasn’t entirely used to taking: being genuine. “Ugh, Kairi, look,” he sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose as he pressed against the wall. “I’ve been thinking about this ever since the old man told me we were gonna be training together, so I might as well just come out and say it: I… I’m sorry.”

Kairi’s frigid manner quickly broke at this, mostly from just how much it surprised her. “W-what?” she asked, finally looking over at him fully.

“I said I’m sorry,” Lea huffed once more, clearly swallowing his pride as he spoke. All the same, his expression was earnest, perhaps even a bit remorseful as he elaborated on his initial apology. “Ya know, for the whole… kidnapping you thing. To be honest, I’ve sorta been sorry about it ever since I did it.”

If you really had been sorry, then you wouldn’t have done it in the first place, Kairi thought rather crossly upon hearing this, though even so, she said nothing as he continued.

“But since I can’t really undo any of it now,” Lea frowned, scratching the back of his neck as he looked down. “I want you to know that… well, I regret a lot of things that I’ve done in the past. And what I did to you is pretty close to the top of that long list of regrets.” He paused for a beat as he crossed his arms, still clearly not satisfied, even despite his sincerity. “Just figured I’d lay all that out on the table before we really get the ball rolling here. So… are we good?”

Of course, Kairi didn’t answer this right away as she continued staring at the former assassin, trying to wrap her head around everything he had just said. In her few brief past encounters with Lea—or rather, Axel, at the time—she had only ever seen him act callous and arrogant and cunning, a personality befitting one of Organization XIII’s cold-hearted cronies. And yet here he was now, standing before her showing guilt, remorse, honesty—things that, even despite her still-lingering uneasiness, Kairi didn’t doubt was genuine. Yet even so, she still didn’t know if she had it in her heart to forgive him, especially when she remembered exactly why he had kidnapped her in the first place. The fear and danger he had brought to her was one thing; but the fact that all of it had happened simply out of Axel’s malicious attempt to use her to get to Sora, to hurt Sora, was what Kairi just couldn’t look past after just a few mere words of supposedly earnest regret.

And she was more than prepared to tell him exactly that too, with all of the honest, pent-up frustration and anger she had to give. Or at least she would have had not both of them suddenly disappeared into thin air entirely without warning.

Fortunately, they reappeared just as quickly, though when they did, they found themselves in what felt like a different world from the wizard’s house entirely. The pair now stood within a vast, dense forest, with large, lush trees stretching out for as far as the eye could see, their wide branches reaching up towards a cloud-speckled blue sky. The entire wood was drenched in silence, no birds singing or crickets chirping as only the gentlest of breezes rustled the leaves of the trees. It was quite a beautiful place, though all the same, something about it felt strange, ethereal almost, and their abrupt arrival was more than enough to leave both Lea and Kairi in utter confusion as to how they got there in the first place.

“What in the worlds…?” the former assassin muttered incredulously as he looked around.

“Where are we?” Kairi wondered aloud, though her question didn’t hang on the empty air for too long before receiving an answer.

“A marvelous question, my dear!” Merlin’s voice suddenly broke through the otherwise quiet wood. The wizard himself was nowhere to be found, something that only bewildered his two new pupils even more as he began to explain. “Behold! Your very own training grounds, created by yours truly, of course. In this magical realm, time stands completely still, which means that you’ll both be able to hone your skills and abilities with almost no time at all passing in reality itself. Its quite brilliant, don’t you agree?”

“So what, we’re just supposed to hang out here, knocking our Keyblades against a bunch of trees until you decide we’re pros at it, gramps?” Lea asked, flashing a sardonic smirk as he called back to the unseen wizard.

“I’d watch that sharp tongue of yours if I were you, my boy,” Merlin said, clearly disgruntled by the former assassin’s playful teasing. “You’d be much better off saving that cutting wit for the battlefield instead. Let that be your first lesson.”

“Excuse me, Merlin,” Kairi cut in, much more politely. “But I’m afraid I don’t really understand either. Exactly what do you want us to do here?”

“Why, I figured that would be quite obvious,” Merlin remarked. “A training grounds is for the purpose of training, is it not? So here, you’ll both have ample time and space to do just that. In fact… I see no reason to not give the two of you a… running start, so to speak…”

The pair exchanged a somewhat worried glance as the wizard’s tone turned rather ominous. They immediately realized what he had meant, however, when out of nowhere, a sizable horde of shadows sprung up from the ground, surrounding them both instantly.

“Heartless!” Kairi gasped, startled as she took a frightened step back away from the twitching creatures.

“Mirages of a weaker subset of them, yes,” the wizard mused from wherever he was. “But still, they should prove to be a suitable test for me to gage the level of your current abilities. So, let’s see what tricks both of you have up your sleeves! And remember: I’ll be watching!”

“Greaaat…” Lea deadpanned as the Heartless began to move in. “As if this whole thing couldn’t get any more creepy. But no problem; this is just a little case of pest control.” The former assassin smirked as he called forth his pair of chakrams, sparks already bursting around them in anticipation for the battle ahead.

“Ah, ah, ah!” Before Lea could lash out, however, his usual weapons suddenly disappeared in two puffs of bright smoke almost as soon as Merlin spoke out. “I’m afraid there is a strict policy against using any weapons ASIDE from Keyblades in this realm. After all, that’s what you both are here to learn how to wield in the first place, correct?”

“Ugh… you’ve gotta be kidding me, old man…” Lea groaned, exasperated as he took up a weaponless defensive stance instead.

“Keyblades…” Kairi repeated thoughtfully to herself as she looked between the pair of Heartless inching towards her and her own hand. Slowly, she reached forward, recalling the same movement she’d seen Sora and Riku pull off to summon their own Keyblades many times before. And yet, despite her own attempt at getting her own weapon to materialize, for some odd reason, it just wouldn’t appear.

Lea found he was facing a similar issue, for much like Kairi, he had only ever summoned his own Keyblade once before. The effort and subsequent lack of a response frustrated the former assassin even further, to the point that he ended up simply kicking one of the Heartless that leapt at him first away with his boot. Still, it hardly kept the creatures as bay as they persisted towards the pair, neither of whom really had any sort of means of defending themselves against them with their Keyblades as absent as they were.

“This is stupid!” Lea finally shouted angrily, glaring up at the sky. “How are we supposed to fight these things if both of our Keyblades are no-shows, huh, gramps!?”

Surprisingly, Merlin didn’t offer a response to this, not giving either of them any sort of hints on how to proceed through this perilous exam. So instead, Kairi decided that there was only one immediate option left for them now: running.

“Forget it!” she exclaimed, pushing her way through the horde of shadows to break through their wriggling line. “Just come on!”

Lea didn’t argue as he followed after her, effectively fleeing from the Heartless as they ran deeper into the forest. Of course, the creatures made sure to give chase, diving into the shadows and speeding after them, forcing them to run even faster just to outdo them. Neither of them had the faintest idea as to where they were going, and even if they did, the woods itself seemed to constantly be shifting and changing all around them, disorienting them even more. Eventually, the forest maneuvered itself in such a way that it ended up cutting their escape off, trapping them between a tight thicket of trees on one side, and the encroaching group of Heartless on the other.

“Tch, cornered,” Lea said, scowling the Heartless down as they both cautiously backed away from them as much as they could. “Got anymore brilliant ideas over there?”

“Hey, at least I had an idea!” Kairi countered harshly. “I guess we’re just… gonna have to fight them with our Keyblades!”

“Oh, yeah,” the former assassin scoffed, rolling his eyes as he held his hand out inseriously. “Because summoning a Keyblade out of thin air is just soooo easy and-” Lea cut himself off with a gasp when, completely out of the blue, his fiery Keyblade suddenly flashed into his grip just in the nick of time. “Well, I stand corrected,” he remarked, a brazen grin crossing his features as he poised his weapon to attack. “Now we’re talkin’…”

Without any further hesitation, the former assassin rushed forward, blindly and rather haphazardly swinging his Keyblade at the opposing Heartless. There was little skill or finesse to his movements, but his brute-force attacks still managed to get the job done in downing several of them, though still more came to take their place in the wake of their defeat. All the while, Kairi simply stood by, watching Lea fight with an increasing sense of rising fury. In truth, she found she was angry at several things all at once: at Lea for being able to summon his Keyblade with such ease, at herself for not being able to so much as even call upon hers, at this test as a whole for proving just how of a disadvantage she was at, even compared to the former assassin. And as one of the Heartless managed to skitter past Lea and make its way towards her instead, Kairi found herself unable to contain her anger over just how unfair ever single part of this whole ridiculous situation was any longer.

“Kairi!” Lea exclaimed in alarm as he noticed the shadow rush for her. “Look out!”

The former assassin moved to take out the attacking creature himself, though ultimately, he found he didn’t have to. For in a flash almost too quick to catch, a bright, colorful Keyblade appeared in Kairi’s hands and with one single, swift swing of its radiant edge, the Heartless before he was no more.

“W-whoa…” Lea remarked, genuinely impressed, though Kairi herself didn’t take a moment to revel in her accomplishment. Instead, she continued acting on her frustration, rushing into the fray with Destiny’s Embrace tight in her grip. Despite how mild-mannered she usually seemed, the former assassin couldn’t deny that his fellow pupil had an odd sense of urgency and ferocity in the heat of battle. Things that not only completely caught him by surprise, but instantly forewarned him that, regardless of whatever he may have thought of her before, she was not one to be underestimated.

All the same, both of them were quick to fall into the steady flow of the fight, their stances keeping them back to back as they rounded out what was left of the surrounding Heartless. Overall, they did well to cover each other, though their swings were largely still uncalculated and unskilled, and their maneuvers sloppy to the point that their stamina was quickly drained. But fortunately, just as exhaustion was starting to wear down upon them both, the Heartless finally petered out, marking the end of their first, rather arduous test.

“Well now, I’d call that a wrap!” Merlin announced across the wood as the pair finally paused to catch their breath. “For beginners, I must say that you both preformed admirably, though you certainly have much to learn in the art of the Keyblade. Fortunately for you, that’s what I’m here for! All the same, I’ll give you both a generous pass on your first exam. And might I add that you two make a surprisingly handy team! Training together will do both of you a great deal of good, I can already tell. And with that, I’ll give you both a chance to rest up until our next exercise. For now, feel free to explore this realm, as well as your own abilities, to your heart’s content. I’ll be back to check in on you before you know it!”

“Hey, no rush, gramps!” Lea called back to the wizard, even though he was no longer actively listening in on them. “Especially if you have any plans of sicking more Heartless on us.”

Kairi almost laughed at this, though she was quick to stop herself, instead opting to let her Keyblade disappear as she turned her attention back on the forest instead. It seemed as though stiff silence was about to fall upon the pair again, but this time, Lea was quick to fill it instead.

“H-hey, so… back what I was trying to say before we were so rudely interupted,” he began with a huff, though his manner soon turned serious once more. “I really am sorry about what I did to you. I… I know its probably not gonna be easy for you, but… I hope you can manage to forgive me for it eventually, even if that’s not anytime soon.”

“…You’re right,” Kairi sighed, crossing her arms. “It really won’t be easy for me to forgive you.” Surprise, and what almost looked like genuine dejection washed across Lea’s face, and though Kairi wanted to revel in that, she found she ultimately couldn’t as she continued slowly, sadly. “I’m just… trying to understand how you could do something like that, how you could drag me away from my home and try to use me against my best friend, and then just… turn around and act like none of that means anything anymore just because you say you want to help us! Everybody keeps saying that you’ve changed and that you’re a good person now, but how do I know that?!”

“Because,” Lea interjected, his tone and expression both surprisingly hard. “Maybe you’d understand if you knew why I was willing to go as far as kidnapping you in the first place.”

“…W-what?” Kairi asked, both confused and appalled all at once.

Lea sighed, running a hand through his crimson locks. “I… I wanted to get Roxas back,” he admitted, looking to the ground morosely. “It was all I could think about. I’m pretty sure losing that kid drove me half crazy. Crazy enough to come up with a hairbrained scheme that, if I’m being perfectly honest with myself, probably wouldn’t have even worked. See, Roxas is Sora’s Nobody, so, I thought… I thought that if Sora lost his heart…”

“…I-it would bring Roxas back?” Kairi finished, shuddering at the thought of Sora losing his heart again. Even so, her tone couldn’t help but soften all the same when she heard the sheer longing in Lea’s voice when he spoke about his lost friend. This was a side of the former assassin she had never seen before, one that she found she couldn’t truly be angry with, no matter how much she wanted to be.

Lea nodded, though he shook his head soon after. “It was a dumb plan. The only reason I got you involved was because I knew you’d be more than enough to lure Sora in. But then Isa—I mean, Saïx had to go and stick his nose where it didn’t belong and—everything just got screwed up from there. Though I guess, looking back, the whole thing was pretty screwed up in general, huh?”

“I can’t argue with that…” Kairi frowned, rubbing her arm.

“Wanna know the worst part of it all?” Lea asked, leaning up against a nearby tree as he looked deeper into the forest. “For the longest time, I tried telling myself that what I did was what Roxas would have wanted. Guess it was the only real way I could justify it all to myself. But… knowing what I do now, I don’t think that could be any further from the truth.”

Needless to say that Kairi had no idea how to respond to any of this. She had never really considered any sort of personal motivation behind Axel’s actions before, and until now, she had never cared to. She had always just assumed he had been acting on the orders of the twisted Organization he had been a part of. But now that she knew that it hadn’t been for them, but for Roxas instead, it was as though her entire perspective on the former assassin had shifted. Kairi still wasn’t sure if she was willing to go as far as to excuse his slights against either herself or Sora, but she was willing to admit something that she hadn’t before. That perhaps, in all her close-minded anger, she had only believed that she was being treated unfairly by having to train alongside Lea in the first place, without even realizing that she had been the one to treat him unfairly all the while.

“Ax—Lea,” Kairi quickly corrected herself, her tone even and sincere as she addressed him. “To be honest, I… I’m still not sure if I’m ready to forgive you just yet.”

“Hey, no worries,” Lea said with an amiable wave of his hand. “I get it. Take all the time you need.”

Kairi couldn’t hold back a small sigh at this. He really was quite hard to dislike, though not even for a lack of trying. “Thank you,” she nodded earnestly. “Still, just because I’m not forgiving you yet, doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to meet you halfway. Which means… I’m willing to be part of the ‘handy team’ that Merlin said we make,” she extended a hand out towards him, offering him a small, if not reserved smile. “That is, if you’re up for it.”

“One thing you should know about me,” Lea grinned, genuinely glad this time as he met her hand in a solid, solidifying shake. “Is that I’m up for anything. Got it memorized?”

“Yeah,” Kairi chuckled, amused. “I do.”

The former assassin’s smile widened at this, though it quickly faded out as their handshake ended and he looked down to her again. An odd sense of concentration filled his expression as he stared at her in scrutinizing silence, almost as if he was searching for something he had lost. Admittedly, his tight focus on her made Kairi somewhat uncomfortable, which was why she didn’t hesitate to speak up and address it just when it felt as though he had been staring for too long.

“Um, Lea?” she asked, tilting her head in confusion. “What are you looking at?”

“H-huh?” Lea blinked, shaking his head as if to clear it. “Uh, i-its nothing. I just… I could have sworn I saw…” he trailed off, his brow furrowing in thought before he shook his head once more. “Never mind. I think I was just trying to remember something I forgot.”

“Oh?” Kairi implored, somewhat curious. “Like what?”

Lea frowned, genuinely perplexed as he glanced back over at her again. “Don’t know,” he said truthfully. There was a hint of what sounded like sadness in his tone, though he was quick to replace it with his usual casual manner as he began walking on ahead into the woods. “I’m sure it’ll come back to me sooner or later, though. For now…” he grinned wryly as he glanced back over his shoulder at her. “The old man said this whole place was basically ours to explore. You feel like taking him up on that offer?”

“One thing you should know about me,” Kairi quipped, essentially mimicking the former assassin with a playful smirk to match his own. “Is that I’m also up for anything.”

“I’ll make sure to get that memorized then,” Lea laughed as he began leading the way onward. Kairi couldn’t help but chuckle herself as she followed after him, realizing that she was much more at ease than she had been in quite some time. When she really thought about it, it was less what the former assassin himself had said that had led them to the relatively stable place they were in now, though that had been part of it. Instead, Kairi quickly realized, what had brought about the newfound fledgling camaraderie between them had been her deciding to let go of her own resentment and anger, perhaps not entirely, but enough to make peace between the two of them. It was a humbling thought to say the least, to make some sort of amends with her now-repentant kidnapper. But for the sake of their important training, and perhaps even her own peace of mind, it was a necessary sacrifice to make, for now at least.

All the same, the thought of just how strange, perhaps even impossible it was that she was now working alongside someone like Lea, who had chased her, captured her, effectively caged her, had all but drifted to the back of Kairi’s mind as she easily walked alongside him through the woods. What thoughts filled her mind instead, was the possibility that perhaps someday, with enough time and enough effort, the former assassin might actually be able to prove to her that he deserved her genuine forgiveness. They were still quite a ways off from being anything close to actual friends, but still, there was one thing Kairi couldn’t deny when she considered Lea’s earnest attempts at apologizing and setting things right:

It was a start. A small start, but a meaningful one all the same. One that she would make sure, above all else, to get memorized.

Next: 

[the-bounce-back]

THE CONFIDENCE CHRONICLES PART I - CONFIDENCE IN THE WORKPLACE

First of all… yes, I know I said I’d spend more time writing and have this out a week after my previous post. But to be honest… I say a lot of things, and a lot of those things are pure rubbish. I’m here now, stop crying.

I’m joking, before anyone gets triggered. Life really just kept getting in the way - word to my girl Gabriella Montez. There’s been a lot going on that has had me in my feelings, and as mentioned in earlier posts I don’t particularly like writing when I’m feeling like I want to get hit by a bus. But hey, on the bright side it’s given me loads of topic ideas to write about at a later stage, so, you know… silver linings and that.

Anyways. As mentioned briefly in my previous post, I have decided to do a series of posts entirely dedicated to building your self-confidence in different aspects in life. The series will consist of five slightly shorter “bite-sized” posts, that will outline various methods, mindsets, exercises and thought processes to apply to everyday life - all of which have been crucial to myself in my own confidence jOuRnEy.

I’ve decided to do this series for a whole load of reasons, the main ones being the following:

1. For the first time in my adult life I can genuinely say that I am getting to be comfortable with who I am, what I’m doing and where I’m going (for the most part) - a feeling that I genuinely want others to experience as well.

2. Unlearning years of self-hate, constant self-criticism and your brain telling you that you’re not worthy enough/smart enough/good enough to achieve what you want to achieve is a disgustingly long and heartbreaking task. I really wish I had something to guide me along the way, but I think I’ll find comfort in knowing that someone might read this and not feel as alone during their own process.

3. Although we all have insecurities about different things, that sh*t can really isolate us and make us feel abnormal and alone. I’m hoping that writing about how I overcame/am in the process of overcoming my insecurities will aid in destigmatising these kind of feelings as a whole.

With that being said, my first post in this series will be about confidence in the workplace. Starting with the easy stuff, so to speak.

I realised recently that it’s been quite a while since I’ve given any kind of indication of how work is going, which is actually one of the main reasons why I relocated to London in the first place. My previous posts discuss a lot of the anxiety leading up to it, and my post about giving yourself accolades (again, read it here because it’s some of my best work) discusses how I forced myself to cast my humility aside in my job interview to appear more confident. This post will kind of be an elaboration on this, as I have settled in to my role and have developed this confidence further.

I’ve been at this job for a little over four months now, and a lot has changed since I was sat there in that interview making myself come across as I had Kanye levels of self-confidence and like I wasn’t absolutely bricking it. Despite it probably being the maddest test of my resilience to stress and pressure since exam season in 3rd year, I really am enjoying it in the sense that I am being challenged on a daily basis, I have a lot of freedom in terms of how I organise my work, and I have excellent means to stay motivated to keep working towards a promotion. As far as what I was rambling on about in my interview goes - this is exactly what I wanted from my new role.

However - as I should have anticipated, expectations almost definitely always significantly stray from reality. I think that the largest reason for my confidence wavering a few weeks into the position was definitely due to the shock of how different it was from the expectations I had conjured up in my head, and there was a period of a few weeks where I seriously started to question if I was cut out for this type of work. Consider your girl humbled.

I think the biggest shock was how fast-paced, loud and energised the working environment was - this is obviously a good thing, but considering the way both my mental state and general energy levels have been these past few months I think it’s all just been quite overwhelming, and probably ended up making me feel like I didn’t have the drive and motivation required to be successful within the organisation.

In other words… I was having a bit of a weak-b*tch-with-an-inferiority-complex moment. How embarrassing and sauceless.

Anyways, that’s all over now - I’ve been able to reevaluate my approach to the role and how to tAkE cOnTrOl of my situation by establishing a few things to be mindful of while I’m at work - small things that have really made a big difference for me, and might be able to help you feel more secure and confident in your role, too.

1, Remember that everyone there has been in your position.

So you all know by now that I’m a sucker for clichés - because they’re always true. On my first day at my new job I felt so intimidated by the size of the office, the amount of employees, the fact that my senior sales manager literally sits two desks away from me… literally everything felt so overwhelming. Not necessarily in a bad way, but my mind was definitely in overdrive from the vast amount of information. That, along with my insecurities of being the New Person™ and not knowing anything about the lingual services industry - and having to have a 1on1 meeting with the regional director within 3 hours of being in the office.

What got me through that first week of awkwardness and feeling like a complete idiot was constantly reiterating to myself that I’m definitely not the first and definitely not the last to be in this position, that I will learn tHe RoPeS over time and that we all have to start somewhere. I know this doesn’t sound like a ground-breaking epiphany, but as someone that is used to understanding/catching on to to things very quickly, not knowing what the f*ck was going on definitely swayed my confidence at the time. I used to proper hate being the only person not knowing how things work, and constantly having to ask for help - but I’ve managed to flip it around and make it a confidence booster, instead. This, in the sense that I’ve acknowledged my drive and determination to not be the clueless new person, and to excel within my field by asking loads of questions and forcing myself out of my comfort zone. Doing this successfully has definitely made me more secure and appreciative of my learning abilities, and this confidence definitely hasn’t gone unnoticed by upper management.

This even relates back to points made in previous posts - learning to be kind and patient with yourself and learning to not freak out when you’re not in control of a situation. Additionally, I confidently leaned on one of my main selling points that I discovered when evaluating my suitability for this kind of job - my ability to learn new things fast, and my ability to adapt to a new situation.

Look at me, taking my own advice for once. You know what that is? Growth. I have to stan.

2. Eliminate tentativeness when you communicate with others - regardless of seniority.

This is definitely a psychological aspect of confidence more than anything. Regardless of if you work in a soulless corporation or one of those mOdErN organisations that swears that they don’t have a hierarchical structure, chances are you have a person or multiple people that you report to.

I began to notice that the combination of not being knowledgeable of this industry and now having to report directly to senior managers that have been in the industry for over a decade made me feel very insecure about having to ask for help or even asking questions in general, because I felt that I was wasting their valuable time with things that I felt that I should have known already. As in, really industry-specific things that would’ve been really weird if I had known them at the time.

To combat this feeling, I forced myself to remember that these senior managers - after stripping away their years of experience, industry knowledge and fancy titles - are human as well, and definitely were in my position at some point. Remembering that even the CEO was once a bumbling and confused idiot like myself at one point definitely aided me in seeing the bigger picture - that without investing in recruitment, training and mentoring of new people, the future of the company is literally f*cked. The recognition of this fact definitely almost eliminated my inferiority complex, and I was able to see senior managers as equals with a lot of valuable advice and knowledge, instead of these terrifying looming dementors that were waiting for me to mess up and fire me.

So, how does this relate to eliminating tentativeness when communicating with others?

I’m glad you asked. In corporate settings, internal communication and project coordination is predominantly done over emails, and where I work almost all communications have senior managers in cc in order to provide visibility into what is happening - good or bad. Obviously I could go on for ages about how to feel more confident in having so many high-up people within the company watching your every move, but really and truly there’s only one thing that I’ve been doing that I feel is worth mentioning:

I removed the word “just” from my vocabulary.

That is, in the context of when I’m asking a question or asking for help, e.g.:

“I’m just wondering if…”

“I’m just double checking that…”

“I just wanted to ask…”

If you read those beginnings of sentences out loud, you’ll probably hear that using the word “just” inserts a sense of tentativeness, submissiveness and insecurity in one's own knowledge. Furthermore, it makes you come across as apologetic for doing your job properly or asking questions - which is obviously ridiculous.

I’m know that removing the word “just” from my vocabulary probably has little to no effect on how upper management sees me, but that’s not really the point here. The point is that when I make a conscious effort to not utilise the word, I’m very self-aware in the sense that I’m choosing to come across as more assertive and confident - which has lead me to feel more comfortable when I’m communicating with those higher up in the organisation than me.

It’s a very small change, but it has definitely affected my confidence and assertiveness in my role. The power of a simple word, eh? The mind boggles.

3. Evaluate exactly what you want to get out of this job, and do something every day that will get you closer to this goal.

This is definitely the most important point for me. For the first time in my life, I’m in a job that I genuinely see myself staying at and progressing within - and there’s plenty of opportunities, concrete targets and support to keep me motivated enough to keep grinding towards a promotion. I genuinely want to excel within the company (at least for the time being - who knows how I’ll feel a few months down the line?), and the feeling of being sure of that has made me a lot more confident alone.

Of course, not everyone is at a stage in their career where they feel like a promotion within the company they work for is the ultimate goal. The fact of the matter is that some jobs are solely means to an end for other unrelated goals, like saving up for something or to get work experience for the job you actually want. Either way, I strongly believe that knowing the purpose for even going to work every day in the first place gives you this deep-rooted determination, motivation and resilience to workplace bullsh*t that ends up manifesting itself as confidence.

Put it this way - if you know exactly what you are working towards in this specific role, there really shouldn’t be anything that can sway you from achieving this (assuming that you want it enough). Going into work on at least a majority of days (because let’s face it, sometimes you just want to have a chill at work) with a mission of doing something that will get you closer to your goal will not only help you stay focused on completing the tasks, but will also give you the ability to not let minor conflicts and “hiccups” along the way get to you. Trust me, you won’t even have the energy to worry about what other people are doing - and personally speaking, being this set in your own lane does wonders for feeling insecure.

Of course, it is slightly difference for those who aren’t entirely sure what their next move is, and that are doing a job for the sole purpose of paying bills and staying fed. I feel that a lot of people - myself in the past included - let the lack of direction really get to them and end up in a very destructive rut of just existing without finding their purpose, and letting it break down their self-esteem along the way. However, I honestly feel that being in this kind of position can - and should - be seen as an opportunity for growth and fInDiNg YoUrSelF outside of work. Yes, figuring out what you want to do is incredibly daunting, but I think that we often make the mistake in assuming that the path we choose is the path we have to stay on for the rest of our lives. No pressure.

With that being said, working a job you don’t care about can still be empowering and confidence-boosting in the sense that you know for a fact that once you know what you want to do, you can easily just walk away from it without feeling that you’ve made a mistake. There is something very powerful in knowing that you can just drop everything and leave at any second as soon as you’ve had enough of it, and I’ve even promised myself to apply this to my current job if I ever change my mind about it. Life’s too short to do sh*t you don’t want to do.

Anyways, there you have it - three mindsets that I’ve applied to my career plans that have made me feel a lot more confident when making decisions in the workplace. Hopefully you’ve been able to take something away from it, and that you know that you’re capable of achieving anything you wish to pursue career-wise if you’re willing to put in hard work, and committed to being happy with the direction your life is going.

Love,

Liv

[loverontheleft]

Ready to Leap (2)

Meant to have this up by 1am est; my bratty kitten had other plans. She pounced on my hands when I tried to use my phone and danced on my keyboard when I tried to use my laptop. She’s not sorry but I love her anyway. Any errors are 100% her fault. Eeeeeeeeeeeee here we go. I fucking love this. My heart. You can find Chapter 1 on my master list which is linked in my bio. 😍😍😍

—————————————————————

The bell for the end of second lunch chimes (actually chimes! At your old school, it was like the Luftwaffe had been spotted!) and you know that’s your cue to head to the cafeteria. Gina didn’t tell you much, just to meet your “partner” at the cafeteria entrance and they’d walk you through the rest of it. She also said you wouldn’t get lost after lunch duty so that’s a plus. A mysterious plus, but a plus nonetheless.

You can’t take the back way using the arts hall so you set off at a brisk pace, fairly confident you’ll find the cafeteria.

You’re only a minute late and you can see Mr. Urie - Brendon? - standing by the doors. “So sorry I’m late, I got a little lost.” He grins and waves off your apology.

“No worries. It’s a complicated school setup. Lunch duty should help though.” He gestures for you to follow him and you do.

“Yeah, you know, people keep saying that and I’m not sure I understand. How will sitting in a cafeteria making sure there’s no food fights help me?” He turns to you, smiling and handing you a clipboard with referrals on it.

“Because we’re not sitting in the cafeteria. We’re roaming the halls for skippers!” He looks almost gleeful and you suppress the laughter.

“We’re doing what?” You take the clipboard and stare at him.

“School policy is that during a student's assigned lunch period, they must be in the cafeteria. They can’t be roaming the halls, getting up to who knows what mischief. So our job is to walk the halls and look for kids out and about. Capture. Scold. Refer. Release.” He ticks off the four steps on his fingers and you can’t help but laugh now.

“That is actually not a bad system,” you admit and he nods.

“And you get to know your coworkers.” He gives you a wide smile. “Off we go Ms. Milton.”

You keep pace, matching his stride. “Yeah...about that actually...so at my old school my colleagues and I called each other by our first names no matter who was around. Guessing that’s not a thing here?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know that there’s any official policy on that. We try to keep it professional when the youth are afoot,” he casts his eyes around in exaggerated suspicion and you giggle, “but if there’s no students around, first names are usually used.” He looks down. “You were in band.” His voice sounds approving and you must look confused because he continues. “You’re on step and matching my stride.”

You smile. “Old habits die hard, and I’m with a pro right now so…” He laughs a little and you feel yourself blushing. Damn, he’s attractive. “Speaking of old habits…” you begin, and he looks at you. “I remember all of the volunteers and money my band program had to have to keep us running. So if I can ever help or if you’ve got a fundraiser going, fruit or cheesecake or cookie dough or whatever, I’d be happy to help.”

He chuckles. “You have great timing. We have a fundraiser this afternoon into the evening and all day tomorrow. It’s our Welcome Back All You Can Eat Fish Fry.” This title is accompanied by Fosse-style hands, despite the clipboard. “Ten dollars gets you in the door and access to bottomless fries, hush puppies, coleslaw, various soft drinks, and of course, fish.”

You stare at him. “You can’t possibly make money off of that. Only ten dollars?” He nods, proud.

“The entire community comes and people in neighboring towns do too. We’re legendary.” He pauses to adapt a faux-humble look and you roll your eyes playfully. God, it is so easy with him. How does he do this? “We’re making a profit after the first hundred or two hundred people and we usually sell anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred tickets. This year is a record at eighteen hundred.” You must look stunned. “I know. It’s insane. But it works and the kids don’t have to do fundraisers every other month, which I appreciate. Lets them focus on the music and not worry about money.”

“That’s incredible. Really.” You stop walking and he pauses too. “Is what I’m wearing okay? I’d love to come by tonight but I don’t want to be overdressed. An All You Can Eat Fish Fry,” you mimic his hands from earlier and he laughs, “sounds sort of...casual.” He looks you up and down, taking in your three-quarter sleeve blouse and pencil skirt and he nods.

“You look great. Don’t go home and change for us. Just come hang out.”

“Okay. I will.” You smile at each other and you’re screaming internally, so proud of yourself for not acting like an idiot in front of this gorgeous man. “So...where are we?” You look around and he laughs.

“This is downstairs of the science wing. Think of the cafeteria as your starting point. It’s anchored to the main office by the media center. Everything else sprouts from the anchor points in triangles or squares. End of the art hall connects to the English hall, across the yard is the math and science triangle, social studies is upstairs above math, and computer-related electives are above science.” He catches your eye. “I think we lost a bet when we hired the architect for the school. Because...the look on your face? Yeah. It’s a mess. Also we’re almost done with our patrol and we’re right on schedule.”

“I’m going to get so lost. If you hear a pathetic cry of ‘help’ echoing down the halls, it’s me. Come find me.”

“You won’t get lost. Much. But if you need me, do give a shout. Oh.” He pauses. “The other side of the building has PE and ROTC and weight training.” He looks at you seriously. “We don’t go over there. We are soft artsy people who like to read books. We don’t go there.” You can feel your face and understand why he starts laughing. “I’m kidding. Kind of. I don’t go over there much.” You both start walking again.

“I’ve heard you don’t leave the band room unless it’s for band practice or duty.” You slide your eyes over to watch his face.

“My reputation precedes me, I see. Whoever you heard that from isn’t wrong. I have a large office with a bathroom in the band room, the back doors of the classroom lead to the practice field, I have a parking spot right by the back doors, and this band program is my life so…” He looks a little embarrassed. “Yes, you can call me Urie the Hermit.”

You giggle. “I refuse to call you that. I was just curious.”

He spreads his arms wide. “Ask away, Ms. Milton. I’m an open book.”

You can’t help it, it’s too easy. “I’m really good with books.”

He smiles softly. “I kinda hoped so.” You hesitate, not sure where to go from here. Fuck. His eyes are sparkling and you are like a deer in the headlights. He saves you though. “We’re back.” You’re outside the cafeteria again and he takes your clipboard and drops them off inside. “I’ll walk you back to your room so you don’t get lost,” he offers and you nod faintly. It is a short walk, you realize, when you don’t get lost, and you’re there sooner than you’d like. “Home safe and sound. See you tonight Milton. I’ll save you the good fish.” He gives you a little wave, a small smile, and walks back to the art hall.

You haven’t moved yet. Was he flirting? You think he was flirting. Fuck. That last part, he kinda hoped you’re good with books - that sounded like flirting, right? And he walked you back to your room. Fuck. He’s really hot. Fuck. It’s fourth lunch which is your assigned lunch so you hurry back to the English lounge to join your hall-mates and try to ignore your thoughts of a certain tattooed, dark-haired colleague.

Lunch is fun, fourth block goes smoothly, and before you know it, it’s the end of the day. What a good first day, you think. You go back to your desk and sit, trying to organize everyone’s interest surveys and their writing samples. There’s a hesitant knocking at your door and your head shoots up.

It’s a student you don’t recognize (admittedly that’s all of them at this point) and he’s holding a small piece of paper in his hand. “Mr. Urie asked me to bring this down to you.” He crosses the room hesitantly. You don’t know this kid but he’s a freshman. You can see it in his walk. Ah, freshmen. You accept it and read the post-it note attached.

“Milton - all of the fish is good. Would have brought this myself but I’m assembling the troops. Hope to see you tonight.” It’s attached to a ticket and you blush. The student shifts awkwardly.

“Thanks!” You smile at him, and he reads on your face that he’s free to go, nothing more is required of him. He bolts. You read the note attached to the ticket again, and smile to yourself before shaking your head a little. No. Down girl. He’s being friendly to a new coworker. Don’t read into this. Fuck.

The doors don’t open til 5:30 and it’s only 3:45 now. You decide to start evaluating writing prompts. That’s good. That’ll distract you.

And it does. You grade meticulously, eyes scanning the page, different colored pens flying and coding. Without moving your head you shift the paper to the ‘finished’ stack and bring the next over. When you finally look up, it’s dark out. You check your watch. It’s 6:30. They’re going to be there until 9, but still. The ticket tells you to head for the cafeteria and you’re pleased. You know how to get there!

When you walk in, you’re amazed. The smells, first of all. God bless whoever invented fried food. But also, all of the people. He wasn’t lying. It’s packed. You approach the student taking tickets and hand her yours and a ten dollar bill. “No, you don’t need to pay,” she protests, “you have a ticket.”

You shrug and smile brightly at her. “Consider it a donation then.” She shrugs too.

“Okay, thanks! You’re the new English teacher right?” You nod. “My older sister has you. Emily. She likes you. She’s sitting over there with our parents. Do you have anyone to sit with? You can sit with us. My shift is done in twenty minutes. I’m Becca.” You rack your brain. Emily. Emily. Emily. Ah, yes. Emily. Emily is on a 504 plan for ADHD. It’s genetic, it would seem. They’re sweet girls.

“Thanks so much Becca. I appreciate that. I probably will come sit with your family.” She beams at you and hands you a styrofoam cup and tells you to grab a seat, someone will be over to take your order shortly.

You work your way through the crowd (and that’s not an exaggeration) and pause at the table with Emily and her family. Her face lights up when she sees you. “Ms. Milton! I didn’t know you were coming! Sit with us!” You accept the offer and introduce yourself to her parents. As promised, a band student comes by to take your order and you’re content. Emily’s parents are lovely, the families around you are lovely (some of them are the families of your students so you’re particularly happy to meet them), the food is good, and you’re at peace. You can see Brendon walking around, greeting each table. You can’t hear what he’s saying but you can read his expression and you’re sure he’s thanking them for coming. He’s changed out of his dress shirt (today’s was a soft pewter; it reminded you of a storm above the ocean but you didn’t mention this) and into a band polo shirt. More of his tattoos are showing but you can’t quite make them out at this angle. Good lord. Emily answers the question you haven’t asked. “Mom, Dad, be cool when Mr. Urie comes over. He’s really cool. Just. Don’t be weird....please.”

You make eye contact with her mom and you both grin. Emily is 17? Seems about right. And you’re pleased, he hasn’t been to this table yet. You’ll see him.

He sees you first though and smiles when your eyes meet. “One second,” he mouths and you blush. He didn’t need to...but you’re glad he did.

Time. Fucking. Drags.

And then, he’s there. He’s shaking hands with the parents, greeting Emily and Becca, who has returned by this point, introducing himself to other families before turning his focus to you. Those eyes. Fucking hell he can probably read your mind. “Ms. Milton, thank you so much for coming. It means a lot to the students to see their other teachers supporting them.” Becca and Emily enthuse behind him and you smile. “And it means a lot to me, to see my colleagues supporting the program,” he adds and you feel warm and tingly all over. You’ll support any program he’s running, shit.

“Well, thank you for the ticket. It was generous. How could I possibly refuse?” Your eyes connect and he smiles, saying he has to greet others but he’ll try to come back. This last part is directed to the table but you’re pretty sure it’s for your benefit. You hope. Fuck.

It’s been an hour. You can’t take another single bite. You’re down for the count. Emily laughs. “Ms. Milton, two plates? That’s weak. That’s not even close to the record.”

You look at her, amused. “I didn’t come to break records. I came for good food and to support the band program.” You pause. “What is the record?”

Brendon’s voice comes from behind. “Mr. Taylor, the chemistry teacher, holds it. It’s 28 plates.”

Your eyes widen and Emily and her family laugh. Brendon drops down into a now empty seat next to you. “That’s impossible.”

He shakes his head. “Nope. Served him myself. He came in and said he wanted to break the record and I said I wanted to see him break it, so I would serve him.” There’s a question bubbling up behind your lips and he anticipates it. “The record prior was 12. I just wanted to see how far he’d go. He never asked what it was, so I just let him go for it.”

Everyone at your table is laughing. “That’s evil,” you manage and he shrugs, giving you that stupid, heartstopping crooked smile. “But amazing.”

“I have to entertain myself sometimes.” His eyes meet yours and you can’t breathe. Those lashes. Those lips. Did he just bite his lip? No. Surely he didn’t. But he did. Fuck. Fuck. You’re sitting with parents and students, you’re not alone in an empty hallway, you cannot flirt with him. Fuck.

“Well, you seem to do a good job of it.” You smile and stand, stretching a little. He stands too and you file that away. A gentleman, okay Urie, noted. “I need to head home. Day two is always more tiring than day one!” Your voice is cheerful though, and you say your goodbyes to everyone, give Brendon the same little wave he left you with earlier, and start working your way towards the exit.

[ofnailbatsandaxefives]

it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, but in preparation of s5 here’s a giant post about the The 100 panel at Wonder Con

Before the panel they played the first 15 minutes of S5. No spoilers, but it reminds us just how good Eliza Taylor is

Then they announced the moderator of the panel. King Roan himself, Zach McGowan

Chris came out with a plate of celery? It looked like celery. I would expect nothing less.

For each panelist Zach had his own question as well as one provided for him about season 5.

Zach's personal question for Jason - "Why'd you kill Roan?"

"Priorities change. Spacekru is a family, on the ground Clarke and Madi are a family, and the bunker is batshit crazy" - Jason when asked if anything has changed when it comes to the notion of tribalism/my people/and the new crews.

Zach - How come everyone gets to grow facial hair but you? 

 Chris (jokingly) - I actually grow the most and have to shave multiple times a day. 

"Space is a bit of respite and peace. I can't imagine he'd want to go back too soon" - Chris when asked what's changed for Monty 

Even if Monty and Harper don't last, Chris hopes that they gave it their best shot.

Lindsey said that Raven always felt like Q (James Bond) to her, and that she feels like in s5 Raven is more of Bellamy's right hand man. She gives her input, but gives it to Bellamy to make the call.

She would be interested to see how Raven would be as a leader "maybe she's bad at public speaking"

Zach continued to ask the hard-hitting questions we're all dying to know the answers to, such as "How long did it take Bellamy to grow that beard in space?"

Bellamy makes sure everyone has a job/routine to help them not lose their sanity up in space.

Richard mentioned that saying "See you on the other side" was all he'd hoped it would be, and added on that the line has even more significance for the show because of Jasper

"Not as a leader...He's just as hard on himself as the audience has been...He might judge himself (in regards to the type of person he became to survive) waking up in the morning isn't always the easiest" - Richard when asked how Murphy sees himself.

Zach officially unbanished Tasya from Azgeda. Now she just needs to find Marie to unbanish her the rest of the way

Friendship in space is a novelty for Echo, and this is the first time she's ever had friends 

SPACEKRU JOBS

Bellamy delegates

 Echo and Emori teach Trig lessons 

Echo teaches fighting 

Monty teaches farming 

Raven teaches Emori

 Murphy doesn't do much 

"I grew my beard out of respect for Roan" - Sachin Sahel 

the one thing Sachin really wanted us to know about the bunker story line is that 'we are not prepared for what we're going to see'

Jarod notes that Miller might have been desensitized early to things like violence and death (going back to s1), but that he got to play vulnerability partly due to love.

Sachin jokes that it's "Terrifying Love"

Jason says there is a merging of minds when it comes to Skai Kru and the grounders, but that "Wonkru is not a good force when they come out"

The Eligius crew is from our time

The fan questions started up, and I realized I have a voice recorder app I can use instead of shorthand speed writing notes  (so from here on out things are more detailed)

Fan 1 - Bellamy and Clarke are my favorite characters of all time, and Bob Morley you are amazing. 

 Bob - aww shucks thank you. 

 Sachin - he is dreamy

 Bob (to Sachin) - no, no continue. Keep talking

Fan 1 (cont'd) - in s4 there were a lot of separations of the major characters, by the end of s5 is it going to be like that where there are more separations or are the main characters going to be coming together and united?

Bob - We obviously can't answer that....Sachin?

 Sachin - so the bunker is terrible

Bob passes the question over to Jason "I think you'll be happy."

---

Fan 2 - Do they keep in touch with any of the former cast, and is it possible to see them come back in some way or another? 

 Zach - Nope. I haven't seen these guys in  so long

Lindsey mentions they keep in touch a lot, and throws the question of coming back over to Jason. 

"Dead on the show is dead, so ultimately it's sad. We have flashback sometimes, so it's always possible, but I can't really specifically say anybody's that's dead will come back." 

Jason - Zach, want to do a flashback to when you were little? 

 Zach - do I get to be a little boy? ... (alters voice to go up a few octaves) this is my little kid voice. 

 Sachin - I'd watch it.

Fan 3 has a request from another fan for Bob to wear his Bears shirt at the con in Melbourne. Which leads to jokes about Bob taking wardrobe requests, and Sachin asking if he can wear the shirt 

Fan 4 - I have a question for SpaceKru, if you guys had free time, what would you guys be doing? We know Bellamy's staring out a window all the time, what else do you do for fun? 

 Lindsey - doing a lot of puzzles  

Tasya (who was talking to Richard) - what were we doing? ... I was busy giving Murphy advice 

Richard - she's become my best friend in space over the years. She's my therapist.

Bob - Jason had mentioned training, I think that Echo and Emori give trig lessons. (to Richard) I'm not sure what you're - I mean I was a janitor, so I can teach...

Lindsey - Murphy gives jerk lessons 

 Richard - that's a low blow... I do what I do. Sometimes I just want to hang out and be by myself... (to Tasya) Echo I need to talk to you right now people are being really mean to me

Jason - a lot of people have sex in space

--

Fan 5 - What's the strangest thing they ever ate on set?

 Lindsey and Tasya - Monty's algae (it was like oatmeal and green juice) 

 Chris - the jello 

 Lindsey - the chip! the chip was like a hard gelatin wafer

---

Fan 6 - the last season we saw how Clarke dealt with you guys being gone (mentions radioing Bellamy) I wanted to know if we would see how Bellamy dealt with this and Raven, cause you guys were close to Clarke, and the original sky crew too

Bob - I kind of feel like he's carrying guilt about leaving Clarke behind. I mean it was Raven's schedule that kind of - 

 Lindsey - It was my fault... Which is why it's even worse that it's taken me 6 yrs to figure out a way to  get back. That's embarrassing

Bob - I think, also, everyone in SpaceKru is kind of dealing with their own form and grief, and I think that being occupied and yoga classes, as Jason put it, and Trig classes have had them not falling too deeply into their own grief

Lindsey - we talked about giving Raven a tattoo and having something for Clarke in it as a memoir 

 Jason - then you chose like the biggest raven bird for your back....it would have taken 18 hrs to do in make up 

 Lindsey - I had other choices too.

Bob - they gave me the blue henley shirt, which you saw Clarke wearing in s1

 Lindsey - oh, so you're wearing her shirt?

 Bob - Well, no, not her shirt exactly, but I always felt like season 1 people in the blue shirts were the good guy, and the black shirts were the bad guys

Lindsey - we actually had a mop that we just set up on the kitchen table and talked to it.

Bob - Monty's obviously grieving and Echo and Emori. I think we're all trying to deal with it, and at the same time trying to stay sane with routine, whether it be mundane or not.

Jason - they're also trying to, I think, honor her for what she gave up to get them to space.

---

Fan 7 (last question) - What was the best improv moment that you had? 

 Lindsey - Not me, it was Devon. Remember when Devon at the beginning of season 4, he slides in, right? He does the Tom Cruise 'Risky Business' slide. It's great. It's great. It was pure Devon

Jarod mentions he and Sachin getting the "too sweet" hand gesture in

Lindsey - I think I bit someone at some point. I think I bit Eliza real one time when we were doing the ALIE thing

Chris - how closely have you watched the pilot? When Jasper lands on the other side I get a little double fist pump in the air. So, in Mt. Weather when I crack the code, in like 2x08, I threw in, like, 7 or 8 fist pumps

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/blood-creator-theres-something-naturally-funny-about-tragedy-den-of-geek-uk/

Blood creator: 'There's something naturally funny about tragedy' - Den of Geek UK

Writer Sophie Petzal struggles with humourless TV drama. “I find it really difficult to watch crime shows where everyone’s bleak and frowny and sad.” We’ve seen too much of it, she says – dilemma-led thrillers full of grave characters whose awareness that they’re in a crime drama saps the entertainment value. “If I don’t get a sense of what you’ve lost and the joy that’s been taken from you, I don’t know what I’m rooting for.”

Besides, she adds, there’s just something naturally funny about the combination of tragedy and family dynamics. “There’s humour in the fact that it’s very inconvenient to be trying to chop sandwiches for your mother’s wake while suspecting your father of her murder.”

There’s humour too, in serving an only-one-left-in-the-bakery children’s train cake at a wake, as youngest son Michael does in Petzal’s drama Blood. There’s also comedy, and pathos, in a pair of siblings sharing a box of Bourbon biscuits—their mother’s favourite—at her graveside. Blood may boil down to “a great tragedy” says Petzal, but it’s beautifully rooted in family banalities. 

Blood is the story of Cat Hogan (Carolina Main), a middle child of three who returns to her childhood home following her mother’s death. Very quickly, Cat begins to suspect her father of keeping secrets, and a satisfyingly compact mystery emerges from there. It was envisaged as a family drama rather than a thriller, but its cliff-hangers, question marks and the odd pulpy flourish give it a foot in both camps.

The series, which aired in its native Ireland in October and was stripped across a single week of November on Channel 5 here in the UK, is Petzal’s first solo drama. She’s written previously on The Last Kingdom, Medici, Riviera, Jekyll And Hyde and CBBC’s Wolfblood, but this project belonged to her and producer Jonathan Fisher, with directors Lisa Mulcahy and Hannah Quinn. 

It’s been a busy twelve months—Blood was story-lined in a fortnight after being green-lit this time last year, and filmed in Ireland this summer—followed by a nerve-wracking few weeks as it aired. Petzal had convinced herself that the Irish broadcast would be the most anxiety-inducing hurdle to clear and that the UK airing would be “much of a muchness” but found that not to be the case.

“The UK is my home and it’s also one of the biggest players in television,” she explains. Airing on Channel 5 as a quality original drama, Blood attracted press attention for marking a recent shift in the station’s programming. “Suddenly you realise you’re not just going to go calmly under the radar and no-one will notice.” It felt as though there were eyes on Blood, says Petzal. “That Monday afternoon before it went out I was sort of unhinged,” she laughs. She locked herself in her flat and watched Disney clips on YouTube just to calm down. (Which ones? Out There from personal obsession The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. “I’m the biggest fan of composer Alan Menken.”)

The response to Blood was hugely positive, with good reviews appearing across the national press and even, to Petzal’s delight, on Fern Britton’s Twitter feed. “That was a funny moment, we thought ‘oh, we’ve made it now!’” Petzal laughs. She’s saved a screenshot, of course. “Then I just spent the rest of the week madly overstimulated and unable to sleep because it was too exciting and nerve-wracking, because what if the next episode is the one where they realise it’s actually shit?!” she laughs.

“It was the fact that we’d gotten away without being called frauds,” she tells me. “The fact that we’d got through the week without being torn apart by a national newspaper or somebody saying ‘this is naff as old fucking boots. What is this?!’ It felt like we’d gotten away with it.”

That sounds unnecessarily harsh on yourself, I say. “I’m not riddled with inadequacy!” she explains, but this being her first solo project made her feel “brand new all over again, in a weird way.”

“Working on other people’s shows, all you learn from that is that you’re good at working on other people’s shows and turning things in on time. You only start to work out what your style and worth and value as a writer is when you’re doing your own thing. I feel like I’m only just at the start of that.” The critical and public response to Blood, she concludes, validated all the hard work.

In Ireland and here in the UK, the drama owes a great deal to actor Adrian Dunbar, who championed the project. “I really don’t think we’d have got that early exposure and press interest had he not been in it and talking about it.” Dunbar is a deeply beloved presence, Petzal says, particularly for his work on BBC drama Line Of Duty. 

Petzal is “a massive, massive fan” of that show. She and her producer re-watched all four series while filming Blood. “We’re massive fanboys and girls, which is kind of embarrassing but Adrian loves it,” she laughs.

Dunbar’s insights into his character, patriarch Jim Hogan, were a great boon to the Blood, she says. “Adrian approaches his characters with a really forensic, academic head on.” Petzal being on set during the shoot enabled conversations to take place that helped the characters evolve. 

“Adrian was always pushing for Jim’s softness,” she explains. He wanted his character to be “a bit more honest and empathetic,” which worked perfectly to the drama’s advantage, says Petzal, because “the more honest and empathetic Jim is, the less people believe him!”

“One news article described Jim as having a smile that never quite reaches his eyes, which is an incredible testament to Adrian’s ability. He was able to play the menace and nuance that we wanted just in the way he stands and looks and delivers lines, which means I didn’t need to go to such an extent to reflect that menace in the lines themselves. It has a far more powerful effect for it.”

She gives “unending credit” to the cast for trusting in the project. “I’m not a known quantity, this is my first gig, I couldn’t point to a load of other things and say ‘my things tend to be a bit pulpy and weird’. Everyone had to hear me say a thousand times ‘Tone. It’s just the tone of it.’ ‘Why am I jumping out at her in a corridor?’, ‘Because it’ll look great, it’s the tone, it’s funny, it’s weird, it’s ridiculous, but go with it.’ No actor likes to be told ‘it’s just funny, do it!’”

The funny moments in Blood build character, helping to bed the drama’s more outlandish genre elements in naturalism and recognisable human behaviour. The aim, says Petzal, was always to avoid having Cat and her family act “like super-clever TV characters.” One trick, she says, was to mine her own behaviour in similar situations. It’s an exposing approach, but one that really pays off in terms of naturalism.

“When characters are arguing—and in Blood there are a fair few heavy conflicts—it’s so easy when you’re writing disagreements for one character to be clearly right and for the other to be clearly wrong.” 

“I found I was writing Cat being incredibly clever and battling the family and withholding all this information that she’s learned. She was keeping the cards close to her chest and was going to play it just at the right moment… then I thought ‘That’s not what I would do.’ That’s not what any normal human being would do.”

That willingness to show vulnerability in the writing, and to include sometimes unflattering honesty makes Blood stand apart from some other dramas. 

“In my heart I’m thinking, if I’m being honest, if this were me, I’d say this really hurtful thing. But often as a writer you’re thinking ‘no, the character is better than me. They’re a TV character. They’re going to do proper TV things.’ When Cat says the wrong thing, or when any character says the wrong or hurtful thing, that’s usually me putting bits of myself in there and echoing arguments and conversations I’ve had.”

One real-life conversation Petzal had that ended up in the finale in flashback involved the strange mating habits of domestic dogs. On screen, it’s a laugh-out-loud moment between husband and wife Jim and Mary, and it comes after one of the show’s most emotional sequences. The idea was to disrupt the dull cliché about women on TV suffering from serious illnesses being “these saintly frail figures. I wanted to give a sense of how Mary is this bright spark who’s hilarious and has a filthy sense of humour and what an unjust robbery this disease is. Funny bright sparks going too young.”

Making fun of serious things comes naturally to Petzal, she says. She wanted to avoid the tragedy becoming too overwrought or earnest. “It’s in human nature to make jokes.”

Knotted in with Blood’s humour and tragedy is a moral. “Without wanting to sound too pretentious, I wanted it to feel almost like a parable at the end.” 

“I’ve had people say ‘why wasn’t so-and-so just honest from the beginning?’ and I have to raise an eyebrow and ask, ‘have you had parents? Are there times in your own family when things would have been simpler if family members had just told the truth?!’

“The moral of the story—which is a rather on-the-nose line delivered in episode five—is “why can’t we all just talk to each other?” and because we can’t, this is what happens.” 

Blood is available now on DVD.

Source: https://www.denofgeek.com/uk/tv/blood/62160/blood-creator-there-s-something-naturally-funny-about-tragedy

[cryptocleveland-blog1]

I used to have a blog here.    

I spent hundreds of hours pouring my heart into long posts that hardly anyone read.  Some were just text, like this one.   Some were elaborate, multi-installment series laced with photos and detailed graphics.  The effort that went into these posts, and the lack of response, was both highly therapeutic and soul crushing at the same time.   It was a way for me to feel creatively stimulated, and to participate in a community at a time when I was unemployed and socially isolated, but not yet cynical about my future prospects.  

I had just finished grad school, studying urban planning, and I had also just fulfilled one of my long-term ambitions, to appear in a feature film.  As a way of promoting the movie, the director of that film had begun a blog where he talked at length about film theory, art, and contemporary culture.  One of the other actors in the film started a blog about her life as an aspiring actress so I followed suit, choosing to concentrate on that subject which I knew best, and was, at that time, most passionate about: Real Estate Development in the City of Cleveland; with the occasional post devoted to my main hobbies, acting and photography.  

I was really proud of some of those early posts,  they were written with the confidence of someone who thought that the years of hard work were behind him and that life could only get better from here on out.  But months went by, and years went by.    It became obvious that my big break was never going to happen,  the movie was never going to find distribution, it was never going to be the stepping stone to my next project.    

Eventually people stopped commenting on my posts, and I ran out of things to talk about.   My blog became less regular and more introspective.    The director and actress followed suit, refocusing their blogs onto current affairs and personal interests.   I started getting into disagreements.    I argued with the director over his political positions,  I alienated the young actress by teasing her a little too frequently about her favorite band.  

It became clear that I was beating a dead horse.   My illusions were starting to fracture.  My acting career was stagnant, the only film work available where I live was in cheesy local commercials and I was too poor and too indebted to move elsewhere, nor was I brave enough to move away from my family and support network.   In my professional career things were no better, the rejection letters were starting to add up, and the longer I’d been out of school the fewer interviews I got.  

I started using this blog to vent my frustration.   After a couple internships that led nowhere. I accepted a job I hated, that I wasn’t any good at, and that I got fired from within six months.   That didn’t help my resume.    I started working part time minimum wage jobs just to have an income.  One night on the news I saw that a local school district was paying $180 a day for temporary substitutes during a teachers strike.    I’d worked as a sub before and enjoyed it so it seemed like good opportunity to make some money.    

I had planned on being there for two weeks, but the strike lasted eight.  It was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, but I was fired from that job too.  I had been taking night classes at a community college, and the lack of sleep caught up with me. I was sad when it was over because there was one student in particular who I became emotionally attached to and I’d never gotten a chance to say good bye.  

I wish I had, because then I might not have gone to visit her place of work a few months later,  I might not have tried to stay in touch with her, I might not have deluded myself into thinking we were friends or that she cared about me half as much as I cared about her.  I could have just tied a nice happy bow around the relationship for being what it was and moved on to the next thing.   But its hard to move on when you have nothing to move on to.  

When you wake up feeling like a failure every morning its easy to get obsessed, your thoughts naturally drift to the last thing you can remember making you feel happy and important.  I shared these sentiments in posts I made on this blog, and other darker thoughts. After the fact I felt ashamed and decided to remove them, in an attempt to clean up my online fingerprints.

Its all gone now, good and bad; I’ve long since lost access to the email address I originally signed up for a tumblr account with and so my original account was deactivated, along with all its content, when tumblr updated its TOS a few years ago.    I miss it dearly.  

I don’t miss the toxic anxiety dump it became, I miss the escapism, the potential it once had to remove me from a hopeless situation and allow me to pontificate about how things ought to be.  I miss the ability to express myself anonymously, warts and all, and not fear being held accountable or publicly shamed for feeling angry and resentful, for admitting that I wanted more than I was entitled to.

When I stopped blogging I tried to find new communities to immerse myself in. I stopped auditioning for the local agency and started training with a local stunt coordinator because the stunt guys seemed to be the only locals getting any work whatsoever.   I switched from Tumblr to Youtube and started down a rabbit hole about Historical European Martial Arts.  I grew my hair and beard out, attempting to assimilate into that subculture.   I stopped applying for jobs and started my own consulting business doing drafting and 3d printing.

I’d like to say that my efforts have improved my situation, economically or otherwise, but alas its more of the same. More auditioning for parts that were already cast long before you ever saw a breakdown.   More skeptical looks and rejection letters whenever I convince myself that I’m broke and have no choice but to find a real job. I’m still treading water, and badly.  

A couple of years ago I started having panic attacks.  I’d gone to visit the highschool girl (now in college) one too many times; panicked because I suddenly felt that I was crossing a line, and abruptly broke off contact .   Then I felt bad about it and started following her on social media, which eventually confirmed my belief that I had hurt her.   I felt guilty about that too, and had another panic attack, so I tried to contact her again and offer an apology, which obviously backfired.   Then every few months I’d have another panic attack and make another ill conceived attempt to fix the situation.

Things came to a head about a year ago.   Each time I tried to reconnect and failed to repair the relationship, my anxiety got progressively worse.  In a last act of desperation, I reached out to a mutual acquaintance who immediately outed me as a crazy person and posted the conversation online.   Nothing had happened, but being forced to confront my own inappropriate behavior and to acknowledge that Google was no longer my friend was embarrassing enough that my anxiety jumped an order of magnitude overnight.   I went from merely not being able to sleep, to not being able to breath or speak.   I wasn’t just depressed, I was  physically ill.  

This convinced me to seek treatment.  About six months ago I started taking medicine for insomnia, anxiety and depression, and also ADHD which I think is the root problem.   The jury is still out as to whether any of its working or whether I actually have any of those issues.  I did switch medicines a while back because the cocktail was making me feel like a listless zombie.  And I have seemed more productive in the past month, but that could be attributed to my impending birthday.

As I’ve reflected over the past few months, I’ve determined that I’d never really given myself a chance as an actor, I’ve always treated it as an embarrassing secret that I don’t like to talk about, and that was one of the things causing me anxiety and potentially caused me to self sabotage any hope of finding full time career with my degree.  

I thought I had long ago made peace with the fact that I was never going to find success as an actor because only those who were born rich, in LA, and with the right connections ever got the opportunity to make movies for a living. But then the young actress I was in a movie with once proved me wrong. She’s not the only one,  I now have a number of acquaintances who work regularly, but in the time since I originally started this blog she has made the leap from depressed, socially awkward, nobody living in their parents house in Cleveland, to something more than that; while I’m still spinning my wheels.   Its a humbling thought and rather than be jealous of her success I’d like to try and emulate it.  

I wanted to make a good faith effort to put myself out there before I turned 35, so I spent the last month filming a demo reel to submit to managers.   If I get no response, that means I suck and I should move on.   And that knowledge is infinitely better than continuing to surround myself with people who tell me what I want to hear but have no power to help me achieve my goals.

Yesterday was my birthday.   I decided it was finally time to watch the movie.    I’d put it off because I didn’t want to burst my bubble.  Originally I was holding out for the premiere,   I wanted to watch it for the first time on the big screen.   Eventually it just became a crutch,  I didn’t want to see it because its my only credit and I’m barely in it.   The reality is the film is good, but the acting isn’t going to win awards.   I can be proud of it as a good first film, an excellent learning experience, and a stepping stone to greater things; which is all it was ever meant to be.   The rest is up to me.

I’ve decided to rededicate this blog to my documenting my career as a struggling actor from Cleveland Ohio.