#which (perhaps on purpose) really reinforces the argument

[letters-to-rosie]

so I feel like I'll be wrestling with this forever

This pageantry of strike/counterstrike that ensues throughout Nancy Jane Smith’s interrogation betrays a proclivity to imagine political conflict, which is to say “affilial” (meaning, political and institutional) struggles, through filial (meaning, family) frames. Questions of citizenship and state power that would ordinarily be categorized as affilial dilemmas, questions of institutional power, are displaced onto questions that would ordinarily be categorized as filial, questions of family loyalty. The interrogation weaves a tapestry of articulations, “connections, transfers and displacements,” between affilial frames of reference and filial frames of reference in which the stability of the White family becomes hegemonic throughout the interrogation, while questions of political power (Nixon’s war machine and the scourge of capitalism) become secondary, at best. What this framing mobilizes is a deep unconscious saturation and naturalization of White family authority as state authority, wherein “characteristics of the family are projected onto the social environment” in such a way as to allow for “no disproportion between the life of the [White] family and the life of the [state].” (Frank Wilderson, Afropessimism)

[queerprayers]

any tips/advice for someone who is not catholic who wants to participate in lent? like how to choose what to give up etc?

Cheers to not letting Catholics have a monopoly on Lent, beloved! Last year I answered a similar ask that might be helpful. Here are the thoughts I have right now!

[CW: discussion of eating/fasting in italics] My most important note/disclaimer: Fasting is not for everyone. It is a beautiful tradition (for Catholics and non-Catholics) that can change people's lives, but if it's going to be a part of your practice, do it on purpose, knowing yourself. It inherently changes your relationship with food--and for people who have always had enough to eat, who have never struggled with disordered eating, who have never been seriously ill, there can be a solidarity and new perspective in fasting, in realizing how sensory experiences and comfort and mortality go together, how privileged you are to have the choice to go hungry. But for those who have struggled with food insecurity, or have lived through/live with eating disorders/disability/illness, or any other experience/relationship with food/the body that changes your perspective, fasting will often be a re-traumatizing or triggering practice that doesn't change your perspective so much as reinforce unhealthy ones. Something I think about: why fast if you cannot feast? Lenten fasting brings us to Easter feasting--if that's not accessible to you, if that wouldn't be joyful or affordable or healthy, fasting probably isn't either. Okay, all that said:

There is so much diversity in what a Lenten practice can look like, and I can't tell you what will be most meaningful for you, but I'll give you some ideas and some questions that have been helpful for me to ask myself! Lent existed way before the Catholic/Protestant divide, and exists among so many diverse communities, and there is a path here for you if you want one.

"Giving up something" is the most common language used for Lent--fasting technically refers to anything abstained from--and generally that's really useful! Jesus's forty days in the wilderness was time that he had nothing but God, and during Lent we can get closer to that experience. I give things up not as punishment or a test of self-control (those ideas trigger unhealthy behavior patterns for me), but as a letting go of something that is in my life but doesn't need to be, and may deserve reconsidering. Sometimes it's a bad habit, but sometimes it's just a conscious allowing of my life to grow simultaneously smaller and bigger. There is space for grief during Lent, but we're not just making ourselves feel bad--I've never found forced emotions to be spiritually helpful. Emotions come and go--we're doing this on purpose, and whatever we feel about it, we make space for that.

Ideas of things to give up:

eating out/getting coffee/buying drinks/little treats

impulse buying/nonessentials (you could pick a category, like clothes, or go all out)

alcohol/drugs/smoking (if this would be starting a recovery journey, I am not the person to ask for advice on that but please do seek help)

social media (you could choose one app to give up, or set time limits--it doesn't have to be all or nothing)

scrolling-on-your-phone time before bed/another time when you get sucked in

another form of casual entertainment (like TV/video games--again, you can limit this rather than cutting it out)

sexual activity (I talked about this here)

makeup/other appearance-related thing (I must confess I have considered doing this and always chickened out. I know that's because it would force me to rethink too many things, which is a probably a sign I should do it one of these years.)

a social habit, like gossiping or getting into arguments online

overscheduling/not having rest days (this is often unavoidable, but rest is necessary and holy, and perhaps this is the season for sacrifice in honor of rest)

single-use plastics/another environmental choice

Note: I don't think any of these things are inherently bad things. This is a list of things we can change/investigate our relationship with or have a season without them as a distraction, not things I think we shouldn't be doing or we should feel bad about.

One of the most important things I've realized is that so often I have given something up and not done anything about it. Like I didn't watch TV for forty days and was mad about it and then Lent was over and I watched TV again. Perhaps this strengthened my self-discipline, or made my life better in a way known only to God, but ultimately nothing happened. I didn't consciously do anything else, I didn't learn anything.

Now, when I give up something, I purposely do something with whatever space it leaves. If I'm not watching TV, what am I going to do when I would usually watch TV? Am I gonna pray? go to bed earlier? call my grandmother? Am I gonna cancel my Netflix subscription for a couple months and donate that saved money? Or maybe I'm gonna give up watching mindless TV, and find stories that resonate and make me think. Don't give things up to check a box, but to reexamine your relationship with them, make everyday things sacred, fill the space/time/money/energy you now have with God, and ultimately to set this time apart.

The other way of looking at Lent practices is things you can add. Often, as I mentioned, they go together--you can pair up something you're no longer buying with somewhere to donate to, or give up an activity and replace it with a new one. I always caution against Lent-as-self-improvement--obviously I can support improving our habits, but I've seen too many people use Lent to restart their new year's workout plans, and while exercise can be a way to care for ourselves, if new year's and Lent are treated the exact same way, what's different about this season? What makes this Lent?

One of the questions I've been asking myself recently is: What are you gonna do about it? When I'm investigating a belief, or learning something new, or reframing an old thought process, I ask myself: What am I gonna do about it? Lent is a path to Holy Week--something I and many others commemorate as the week when God was put on trial and literally killed. I genuinely believe God died and was resurrected--how does this affect my life? Believing something like that and not letting it change you is, to me, inauthentic. When I'm considering a belief, I think, if this were true, how would it change me? Would it lead me to Love? Lent (and Christianity itself) over and over asks us to do something about what we say we believe. Faith without works is dead--and faith is a work, something I do.

It's almost Lent, which is preparation for the Resurrection, which fundamentally changes our understanding of what it means to be alive--so what are you gonna do about it? Not because doing something will make God love you more or make you a "better person," or even because you'll succeed or change your life, but because how can we not? We are of course welcome at Easter having done nothing, but I can't imagine knowing what's coming and not letting it change me.

Ideas of things to add to our lives:

start a prayer/Bible routine--I can now wholeheartedly recommend (as a Protestant who connects with ancient traditions but not always Catholicism) Phyllis Tickle's Divine Hours books! For Bible study, I like The Bible Project's videos.

read a book--it can be anything that connects you with God! (I had a lovely experience with Lenten Lord of the Rings last year, and this year I'm properly going through the Quran)

pick a subject to research (theological or anything else)

start to attend worship services or commit to attending more--this could include going to several different places if you don't currently belong to a church

research places to volunteer for or donate to

do something politically active, like calling your representatives, researching the next local election, or attending a protest

donate to the next [insert number here] posts you see online requesting mutual aid

start a physical practice like taking a walk or stretching

write a letter or call someone regularly, especially with people you've been wanting to connect with more or have unresolved conflict with

start/commit to more regular therapy/other health treatment

ask for help--maybe you're the one who needs mutual aid, or reaching out to, or support cleaning your house or with your kids. there is no shame in this.

These are all obviously things we can be doing year round, and certainly we can use Lent as a season to start something we want to keep with us! I'd also encourage us to have something that's only present during Lent, or something that we do more or in a different way.

You asked how to choose, and I don't have a one sentence answer to that (...obviously), but perhaps in these days before Lent you can look at your routine/habits, the places where God is present, the things you do to distract yourself from life (not a crime--just something to be mindful of), and you can see where Lent might be able to come in and change you. The thing that's nagging at you that you know might be helpful, the thing you're not in control of and just do, the time you take up or the money you spend that might not be bad but also doesn't lead you anywhere. We can't expect every aspect of our lives to be purposeful and present, or to be continuously improving ourselves (in fact, that sounds terribly stressful and unsustainable)--but we can look around us. We can have a season that looks different because everyone I've ever known has a brain that craves ritual in some way--and either we do it on purpose, or we fall into it. Do something (or don't do something) a little more on purpose this season.

Another think to think about is what Sundays will look like for you--the "forty days" don't count them. There's no fasting on Sundays--my mom says every Sunday is a little Easter. "Sundays in Lent" is such an interesting concept because it's very much Lent, but the rhythm of our weeks breaks through. When I give up soda, I'll have one as a celebration on Sundays, but a prayer/reading practice I'll continue through. It's up to you and depends on what your rhythm/habits ask of you.

Ultimately, let God interrupt you. Let Them seep in the cracks of everything you do and let go of. To be loved is to be changed. Even the smallest thing--like wearing a cross necklace every day--can cause our lives to be filled with noticing God's presence. I keep saying to do this on purpose, but know that I find Them much more often by accident.

And an obligatory note: starting Lent late, stopping your practice halfway through, not meeting a goal, whatever comes up--Easter still comes for you. Lent is for paying attention, for making space, not for perfection.

I also want to add that while a lot of Lenten practices (including most I've mentioned here) tend to be personal, ultimately what is asked of us is interpersonal. We make space in our life and be more present in the name of Love--which we cannot do alone. If a practice is not specifically about other people (like volunteering/donating), ask yourself how it will serve the ways you love others? This isn't a trick question, just something to think about. Personally, my study of the Quran this season will connect me with my Muslim siblings through time and enable me to more fully love the Muslims around me, and my rhythm of the divine hours will connect me with the wider Christian community and center me as I go about my day, allowing me to be more present in my relationships.

Easter comes whether we're ready or not--and I don't think we can be ready. But we can look at the small parts of ourselves, set this time apart, see what we can change our relationship with, and perhaps when Easter comes, we will every year have come that much closer to understanding what it means to live out the resurrection by honoring the death that came first.

Wishing you a blessed almost-Lent, and praying for you and your practice (as well as all those reading this)!

<3 Johanna

[inu-yasha]

While I agree with you and your anons on Kagome’s horribleness, how do you justify the argument that Inuyasha started things with her first and gets jealous over Koga? InuKags claim he asked her out in the chapter after they first meet Naraku, now I’m not sure how true this is because shippers are always known to distort facts in order to support their OTP - but if this is true doesn’t this mean Inuyasha was in fact two-timing both Kikyo and Kagome all along? How much blame does he have in this?

You say Kagome had no right getting jealous over Kikyo , which is true if she wasn’t in a relationship with Inuyasha, but just the same didn’t Inuyasha not have a right to be jealous of Koga then?

Perhaps both Kagome and Inuyasha are terrible people in their own unique ways and actually deserve each other while Kikyo deserves better?

Hey @/Anon, how do you feel about this?

Because he knew that Kagome is her reincarnation and he knows that this way he can have Kikyou through Kagome and I never said she didn't have the right to be jealous of him. She had no right to demand an explanation from him about where he was and what he was doing with Kikyou, as if Kagome was his girlfriend and he was cheating on her.

I never said that Inuyasha is a terrible person and that only Kikyou deserves better. Kikyou and Inuyasha deserve better and kagome got what she wanted and yet she is still jealous of the dead woman she still unhappy knowing that Inuyasha loves the dead woman more than he ever loved her.

she even admitted it herself.

I have stated many times that if it weren't for Kikyou's soul in the body of that pathetic heroine, Inuyasha would never have looked at her.

And it really doesn't matter that later it dawned on Inuyasha that Kagome was Kagome, it doesn't change the fact that Inuyasha saw Kikyou in Kagome and that's why he developed feelings for her. Kikyou is the core of everything, even Inuyasha's feelings for Kagome

Mainly it's about the fact that Kagome is simply seen as a sentient 'holy thing', that her actions and actions aren't from bad, selfish motives, but from pure intentions, which is complete nonsense, because honestly, Higurashi Kagome is the second most selfish character in the manga right after Sakura Haruno, only Sakura doesn't hide her selfish thoughts Kagome is effectively able to mask herself only kagome's manipulation moves can be easily noticed and I can simply conclude even from her reactions, body language, that she is dishonest, and her greatest enemy is not Naraku, but Kikyou because she can't have who she wants.

Throughout the entire manga she literally acts like Inuyasha belongs to her and her fan club reinforces that.

Throughout the series she does horrible things like forgiving Kouga for his horrible actions because he was good to her not caring about the fact that the monster murdered the entire village and killed Rin. She used the feelings of that wolf idiot to make Inuyasha jealous. She did it on purpose, those stupid smiles of hers.

In Inuyasha's situation is different. Inuyasha wasn't using Kikyou for purposes of making Kagome jealous, he wasn't playing with her feelings to make a love interest jealous. Kikyou and INUYASHA had a relationship and despite the betrayal they still loved each other. Which can be seen in the scene where Inuyasha finds out that Kikyou is dead and tries to hit on Kagome knowing that Kagome is her reincarnation. He didn't see Kagome then, only KIKYO IN HER.

kagome was using Kouga's feelings without loving him, and he was simply a tool to make inuyasha jealous. She was using him, while Inuyasha really loves Kikyou and his death didn't kill his feelings. That's the fundamental difference Inuyasha wasn't two-timing.

I don't know about anon and opinion in this, but in my case it makes a difference when you love someone and have managed to develop feelings for their replacement, and a person who without feelings uses others to arouse jealousy and play with their feelings.

She used Hojo throughout the series. Literally the guy could have moved on with another girl much earlier than at the end of the series.

Inuyasha and using his 'two-timing' is pointless because it doesn't fit him and his situation is different. Conversely if kagome was in this situation like inuyasha, and inuyasha in kagome's place I would think the same.

I have the impression that many people equate the situations of Inuyasha and Kagome when their situations are different and can be looked at differently.

[slapdashboard]

Yeah... as a recent history lesson to the teenagers on this website, the #YesAllWomen movement occurred in the same rough decade as the infamous #MeToo movement, specifically in response to the classic “not all men” argument whipped out every time another rape, kidnapping, trafficking case hit the news that (intentionally or not) silenced victims of sexual assault and other common aggressions under patriarchy. I strongly encourage you read into what these were and why they mattered so much if you consider yourself progressive, especially with misogyny rising back up in the left.

I know this very misogyny has made some of you shy away from feminism like it’s a bad word, but these movements (and achievements) in feminism brought hope to and helped improve the lives of perhaps the largest group of marginalized people in the world in the places where the movements made impact. It is a huge part of why we today call out and shun pedophiles, rapists, racists, Nazis, and so on in our culture when the law does not (which didn’t really happen before, unless someone from a privileged group was targeted). It also helped open the gate for the social acceptance and bolder emergence of the LGBTQIA+ community that we experience now (that was not the norm even 10 years ago, for those who take the outward pride we flourish in now for granted). Actual feminism helps so many groups of people.

But back to the old “not all men” response specifically. Making an act of oppression or hatred committed by a member of an oppressor group (men) about the image, reputation, or feelings of that oppressor group, instead of the repeated violation, feelings, and accounts of the oppressed group (women), is very poor form. It not only weakens and eventually re-silences the voices of the victims and the marginalized (while also demoralizing them emotionally and endangering them socially), it also reinforces the privilege and power of the oppressors and sends the message to society that there is nothing actually wrong with the status quo, these acts are just unpredictable outliers, rather than the normalized, allowed, repeated results of a deeper, cultivated problem. This happens in misogyny all the time, and it happens in other forms of discrimination and dehumanization too.

If you need a different set of people put in this scenario to better understand it, “not all men” is a very similar deflection/manipulation to the “all lives matter” response within racism (which was born as a status-quo-protecting reaction to #BlackLivesMatter, which you should also research if you don’t understand why “all lives matter” is poor form and not the point). Whether consciously intended or not, the “not all men” response protects rape culture, strengthens male privilege, puts women back in their place within the status quo by discrediting their voices, cuts off important conversation and call outs before they can take full flight, and perpetuates the ignorance and social inequality that is integral to keeping that oppression going, much like the “all lives matter” response does in racism. The only people who say either are the ignorant, the prejudiced/hateful, or those with an agenda they’re willing to throw a marginalized group they’re not empathetic to under the bus for.

Not everyone is misogynist on purpose, but once you’re informed enough to know something is wrong, you choose from then on whether you’re going to check yourself, proactively work on hidden discriminations, and listen to women’s voices, or continue to go on in willing ignorance and conscious misogyny.

I understand the current outpouring of vitriol and grief but be careful not to turn "I don't trust this man I used to trust" into "never trust any men ever"

There are good men, and men are capable of being good

[hawkinsschoolcounselor]

El and Morality

I don’t know about the rest of you, but the latest teaser left me with a feeling of intense dread. We see these kids playing in a seemingly carefree manner, but then Brenner comes walking in. He greets them, and they obediently respond. They’re all very used to it by this point, and they all call him Papa. He claims to have something special for them, but then we cut over to El’s isolation room and hear Brenner asking her if she’s listening.

Why does this fill me with dread? Mainly because the previous teaser showed some similar images to what we see in this one. The 8-ball, for example, is shown on one of the monitors, only it is covered in blood. It leads me to believe that something terrible happened that day. With Brenner asking if El is ready, then the shot of who appears to be El opening her eyes as if from a nightmare, has me wondering if he used her for something that resulted in the deaths of the other kids.

It’s by no means the most likely scenario for this teaser, but it’s where my mind went. The eerie music, the heavy breathing (ostensibly El’s), the fear on El’s face, it sends an ominous message. Is El remembering something from long ago? Is this a new group of kids in Brenner’s new facility? Is it just a nightmare fed with fear and guilt since she couldn’t save anyone? I really don’t know, but the idea that El may have been used to test the “worth” of the other subjects led me down an interesting road. Whether it was a “training exercise” gone wrong or a deliberate “culling” of the weak, I can’t shake the feeling that El did something that she desperately doesn’t want to remember.

If Brenner intended to use these kids to his own ends, then they should hold no allegiance to anyone but him. Emotional attachments to anyone else would be a risk in his eyes. They would need to have total, unquestioning obedience regardless of what he may ask them to do. For El to be the tool he wishes her to be, she would need to not think twice about killing. Brenner would have instilled in her, and the others, a need to garner his approval. This is why he teaches them to see him as a paternal figure instead of a doctor or teacher. We’ve seen him try to get El to kill a cat, but she refused. This upset him. Yet, we also see her have little issue killing in other circumstances. She’s somehow developed a sense of morals despite being manipulated from birth.

Morals are an interesting phenomenon. The entire concept of right and wrong really is subjective when you think about it. It’s a very abstract concept, and the way we think about it changes as we mature. However, it is also heavily influenced by external sources. In this case, Brenner would seemingly have total control over how his “children” learn to evaluate the morality of a given situation. I’ve previously spoken about El’s mental development, and how Brenner would have wanted to nurture certain intellectual domains, but restrict others. Here I want to discuss a similar process with the psychology of morality. Specifically, we will explore how El may have been manipulated into doing something that we, as viewers, would find horrific, yet come to develop a system of morals in spite, or perhaps because, of that.

Lawrence Kohlberg conceptualized the development of morality as coming in 3 levels (Pre-Conventional, Conventional, and Post-Conventional), broken down into 6 stages . These stages are more or less cumulative, as previous stages help pave the way for later ones. There’s no clear-cut ages for these stages, but level 1 generally encompasses early childhood, level 2 is later childhood and adolescence, and level 3 adulthood. The first level contains the more “primitive” or basic moral frameworks, obedience/punishment driven and self-interest driven. This is a level defined by a more egocentric understanding of the world, as it revolves around what’s “good” being what results in a positive consequence, and what’s bad being what results in a negative consequence. For children, this means learning what’s “good” as a result of an external reinforcer(i.e. “Papa) and then developing this into a sense that it can be used for a mutual benefit (”If I do what Papa says, he will be happy, and I will be rewarded.”). Since it’s still a stage defined by self-interest, there is no loyalty here, and such relationships will deteriorate once it is no longer beneficial.

This may have been Brenner’s fatal flaw. Most individuals wouldn’t move onto the Conventional level until adolescence. While these kids may have had some basic sense of loyalty to “Papa” since it’s possibly all they ever knew, it would still be easily shaken. If you offered these kids some candy, they’d probably do whatever you said unless there was enough fear preventing them from doing so. Fear, not loyalty. El was afraid of Brenner. She may have done his bidding for a long time, but it was because his approval meant better treatment, not because his approval was of value in and of itself.

Given El’s age when she escaped, she was on the cusp of adolescence. Thus, she may have been developing some early features of the 3rd stage, which we can call the “good boy/girl” stage. Here, a person would want to be considered “good” for its own sake, and would look to society for what that means. For our purposes here, Brenner and the lab could have been attempting to be the “society” that the kids would judge themselves with. They would evaluate the morality of an action based on how the others would judge them for it. This is possibly where Brenner wanted the kids to be, only with no concept of what good or bad is beyond what he instilled in them.

That may have been something of a clumsy explanation of the relevant stages of morality, but I didn’t want to get too technical. The important things to take away from this is that El’s sense of right and wrong would have largely have been defined by what resulted in her being happy and/or rewarded. She may have wanted Brenner’s approval, but only because it meant good treatment. The problem here is that El may have been getting her needs met elsewhere: the other kids. If we presume, for the sake of argument, that El developed friendships with the other kids, then we could say that these relationships interfered with the total control that Brenner would want. If she gets older and starts caring more about how they feel about her than how Brenner feels, then his power over her weakens. This is where things get potentially scary.

Let’s say Brenner noticed this happening. El is the most promising, and most dangerous, of his subjects. He must maintain total control over her. However, she is very friendly with the other kids, running the risk of developing attachments that would lead to a more conventional morality. So, Brenner sets up a scenario. He isolates El for an extended period of time, possibly even telling her that the other kids accused her of misbehavior. He tells her that they don’t care about her like he does. El, being in those early stages of moral development, starts to see them as bad since they result in her being hurt. In a real world situation, one kid would be able to do something nice for another in this situation to smooth things over, but this isn’t possible with El in isolation. Then comes the day when Brenner has “something special” in mind for the kids. He’ll see if they’re worth the time and effort, while also finding the extent of El’s obedience.

None of this means El is a bad person, as we will generally see kids acting with such selfishness. One kid gets mad at another for stealing their toy, but fifteen minutes later they’re playing together as if nothing happened. However, kids generally don’t have superpowers they can use instead of pushes and mean words. There’s also usually adults around to help mediate such issues, whereas Brenner would probably want to encourage it to ensure they wanted his approval and his alone.

It’s possible that whatever happened that day changed El and Brenner’s entire dynamic. Whether El was responsible for what (possibly) happened or was just made to witness it, it didn’t have the desired effect for Brenner. We later see El reluctant to kill unless it was to protect (or punish). It’s still unclear where that moral distinction came from, but it suggests that she no longer saw Brenner’s approval as beneficial.

What happened after Brenner walked into that room? Why did he ask if El was listening? Is a present day Brenner asking if present day El is listening while she was remembering/dreaming? Or is the voice a past Brenner asking if past El is listening to his instructions? 

Now, this could all be nothing. A good teaser will try to get us hyped up without giving anything important away. The “are you listening” might not even be from that scene at all in reality, or it could just be for the teaser. Still, I thought it a good opportunity for an exploration of morality in someone raised from birth to be a tool or weapon.

Something happened somewhere to make El believe there were right and wrong times to hurt or kill someone, and I just think this may have been a pivotal moment. I think we first see her kill (or at least serious injure) when she breaks out of her isolation cell. That can be explained by her still largely being in the first level of morality. Being in that cell was not in her own best interest, and she reached a point where she didn’t see a way to improve her situation. She may not have intended to kill the orderlies, but it was also not of concern to her. However, we also see her be more deliberate with Troy. First, she merely makes him wet himself, which is a remarkably clever solution. Later, she breaks his arm, but it appeared to only be due to him holding a knife as she simply knocked James down. When it came to the agents or the demogorgon, though, she was prepared to kill again. When she went with Kali to find one of the Lab men, she was ostensibly prepared to kill him until she realized there were kids around. The only pattern I can really see is that she will kill monsters or adults, but she’s reluctant to harm (at least seriously harm) kids or leave them without a caregiver.

I feel like this shows her being caught in between Pre-Conventional and Conventional levels of morality. She’s still largely going off of her own self-interest, but she’s also starting to consider the thoughts and feelings of others, namely her newfound friends. El seems to really want to keep them safe to the point that she risks her own safety. One could say that their approval, particularly Mike’s, is of value to her. She wants them to see her as good, and she attempts to conceal anything that would make her seem “bad” in their eyes, such as the fact that she’s messing with the compass or the fact that she opened the Gate.

We don’t really know how much time would have occurred between the event I hypothesized from the trailer and when El breaks free of the Lab. It’s possible that something happened there to get El to see some sort of moral distinction. She will prank, or even disable, a kid, but she somehow sees serious harm or killing of them as wrong. This leads me to believe that she harbors some type of guilt from her time in the Lab. It could be survivor’s guilt, especially if Brenner made her bear witness to the other’s being hurt or killed. It could also be something far worse if Brenner compelled her to hurt or kill them herself. Regardless, something happened somewhere along the time to get her to no longer as seeing her life in the Lab as “good,” leading to her escaping.

I think this is another one of those posts that got away from me, but hopefully I got my point across. If I try to hard to edit this thing, it’ll never get posted. Again, I have no idea what the teasers are suppose to mean, but they got me started on this train of thought. If you made it this far, then I apologize for those minutes of your life that you’ll never get back.

[ethanhuntfemmefatale]

Um. Here we go.

ETHAN HUNT CORRUPTION RANT

Ok so anon if you’ll forgive me. Your ask is so excellent and for me it feeds essentially into like a million other things that I have on the brain so I’m going to put them all here. I’ll get to Ilsa eventually there’s just Setup. A lot of it.

Something I’ve been thinking about a ton recently is the way that Ethan’s relationship with Jim influences and defines his perception of. Trying to figure out how to put this. Who is allowed to be a hero. And who is allowed to be good. What goodness means. I want to try to set out the argument that throughout the MI franchise Ethan’s relationship with goodness and heroism is fundamentally drawn from the lessons he learns from Jim in MI1. And that especially by Ghost Protocol and onwards, Jim’s “purity rules” have transformed into personal unshakeable imperatives that Ethan is constantly negotiating with on some level. (I imagine ‘thou shalt not covet’ running on a constant loop in Ethan’s mind through most of Rogue Nation, for example.) A constant fact of Ethan’s character is that he wants more than anything to be completely good, and sees complete goodness as something he is fundamentally incapable of achieving. Nearly all of his choices in the franchise are defined by the effort to make up for, or hide, that intrinsic lack.

BE WARNED: I have been theorizing about these movies for a while now and I kinda have theories on theories on theories at this point. I have too many thoughts to lay out entirely where they all come from, although I feel confident in saying they’re all somewhere in the text—it just takes a long time to write out examples. Also, every day I get less capable of stepping back from my rants and saying “that’s just my opinion.” So to make this easier on me, let me just slap a disclaimer on this whole thing: the following is my read on Ethan, it’s my read on the franchise, heavily influenced by my own perspective.

SECONDARY WARNING: this one is going to be very, very long.

I don’t actually know if this will be comprehensible in any way. But if anybody has follow up questions or additional ideas or anything like that, just know that discussing this stuff is literally my favorite thing to do with my time, so.

Anyway, onward!

There’s a lot of defining that needs to happen here before I can really get into the meat of the discussion. MI1 sets out a lot of complicated ideas that I’ve written about before—I’m going to give my perspective here on the main concepts and the way they’re presented, the characters that portray them, etc, to set up context for the way that Ethan interacts with those ideas later in the franchise. Specifically, I’m going to delve into: moral corruption; moral purity; moral integrity; heroism. All of these ideas interact to form the tentative concept of goodness that Ethan is wrestling with constantly in later movies.

Anyway!

MORAL CORRUPTION VS. MORAL PURITY: THE JIM THESIS

In MI1, moral corruption takes a lot of forms; the contrast between the way the movie defines corruption and the way Jim defines corruption is fascinating, perhaps a topic for another post. But for the purposes of this rant, what the movie thinks is immaterial—what is important is moral corruption as defined by Jim Phelps, which is decisively linked to sex, love, and femininity.

To explain what I mean—

First, let’s talk about sex as corruption. Not sexual violence, incidentally—that’s part of the patriarchal power structure that reinforces Jim’s heroism—but sexual manipulation, sexual desire (except when expressed violently), vulnerability to sexual exploitation, are all seen as corrupting. To my mind, the reason for that is that they’re classically feminine and weak. The exemption for sexual violence solidifies it for me. Women as sexual temptation, women as irrational or gullible due to sexual desire, women as manipulators seeking to gain power through feminine “sexual wiles” rather than masculine physical dominance. By Jim’s rules, Ethan’s patdown of Claire is almost heroic, until he stops and is convinced; his seduction of Max is a corrupt act, although it’s not his first. Claire seducing Ethan is also obviously a corrupt act, although it’s not her first either. More on that later.

Second, love as corruption. This is a key element in Jim’s purity rules. I think love and sex are bastardized into one awful thing in Jim’s mind—he can’t imagine love that isn’t lustful, covetous, objectifying; I have a whole justification for this but I’ve written about it in another post and I don’t have room for it here. Still, for our purposes it’s important to distinguish between sex-corruption and love-corruption. Love, again, is linked to femininity, to weakness and gullibility, to irrationality. Ethan and Claire are corrupt from the first scene of them together, when it becomes clear that they love each other. Both of them being in love with Jim also makes them both automatically corrupt—never mind that Claire and Jim are married. Just the act of love and care is, by Jim’s rules, feminine, weak, vulnerable. Jim keeps himself physically removed from both Ethan and Claire except through acts of violence or the rare professional indulgence (Ethan leaning on his shoulder). He consistently works to establish himself as a distant figure with ultimate power and control over Ethan and Claire, and he doesn’t let his affection for them or his romantic and sexual desire for them (their “feminine wiles”) interfere with his ultimate goal of power. By his rules, he is morally pure.

Jim’s rules for moral purity vs. corruption are strongly linked to his ideas of heroism, and who is allowed to be a hero. The lynchpin of his “thou shalt not covet” argument (which, given the bastardization of sexual manipulation, sexual desire, and love that he’s referencing, is really insanely well summed up by the word covet) is not anger or jealousy, although that’s subtextually present. Really, the reason why Jim pulls that line out like a trump card the way he does is to point out that Ethan is doomed to lose. He’s throwing in Ethan’s face that Ethan is fundamentally morally corrupt, spiritually weak and sinful and feminine, in a way that makes him unfit to be a hero—to defeat Jim—to take Jim’s place. For arc, if you read this, cause you know rgu: to me, it’s the equivalent of “you could never be my prince, because you’re a girl.”

It’s time now to take a step back for a moment and look at the other moral pole that the movie presents. Ethan himself.

MORAL CORRUPTION & MORAL INTEGRITY: THE ETHAN THESIS

Ethan’s arc in MI1 is all about the ways that his moral corruption is immaterial in the face of something that, to him, is more important. I’ve written about this before and probably did a better job then than I’ll do now—Ethan willingly throws away moral purity. He doesn’t value it, he doesn’t value the power or illusion of superiority it provides. (This doesn’t mean that the loss of moral purity doesn’t hurt him, just that he doesn’t care enough about himself to let that sway his decisions. He cares infinitely more about protecting people than he does about protecting himself.) What matters to Ethan is his integrity; his integrity causes him to seduce Max, which he doesn’t think twice about. His integrity causes him to steal a NOC list from the CIA and then trust a criminal to keep it safe. His integrity causes him to try to believe in Claire, to try to bring Jim in without anybody else getting hurt.

Crucially, Ethan feels that his moral integrity is compromised by his love for Claire. To go all Arthurian nerd for a second, in Ethan’s head, he is in the Lancelot conundrum. He’s in love with Arthur, but he can’t have him; he loves Arthur’s young wife, and Guinevere loves him, but he can’t have her either without betraying Arthur completely. Cue years of self-torture. Ethan isn’t impacted by “thou shalt not covet” because of a consciousness of sin by Jim’s rules; he believes he is guilty of sin by his own. He’s guilty because he wants Jim and Claire, when the two of them are married. His love for either of them feels like a betrayal of both of them.

In a way, this ends up looping around to something that in practice looks…oddly similar to the Jim thesis. Self denial to protect others from him, versus self denial for an illusion of purity and strength. The Jim thesis and the Ethan thesis have some minor overlap. For example, they have some similar ideas about…..

HEROISM

This isn’t entirely textual, and in fact this section is probably the least textual and most speculative of this whole rant, but it’s my personal belief that Ethan subscribes to the idea of “you have to be good to be a hero” almost as much as Jim does. He just does it in a different way from Jim, with a different set of expectations and beliefs. First of all, where Jim projects his ideas outward through control and criticism of others, Ethan directs his ideas inward, controls and criticizes himself, and ends up incidentally influencing others as an inspirational figure. The other key difference between them is that Jim believes that you have to be morally pure in order to be a hero, where Ethan believes that you have to have moral integrity.

Going back to MI1 for a second with this idea. Ethan believes that in order to be able to be a hero, to save everyone, to win, he has to maintain moral integrity. He fights through the whole movie to accomplish it. But! He fails, and in the climax, his failure is thrown in his face.

In MI1, by Ethan’s rules, he does not have moral integrity. He’s compromised—not by Claire’s seduction, which was mostly just painful and horrifying, but by his love for the two of them. And so, he fails. Even though from an audience point of view Ethan “wins” MI1, succeeds in all of the movie’s goals and gets a nice neat ending…from Ethan’s point of view, the ending of MI1 is nothing less than a brutal, gutting punishment for his failure to maintain his moral integrity. Ethan didn’t want to kill Jim. He wanted to bring him in. He planned, carefully, in order to make sure no one else got hurt. And he had to watch Claire die, and kill Jim and Krieger personally.

This is the fundamental moral basis with which Ethan moves forward from MI1. He has Jim’s rules of purity (he knows he is corrupt by Jim’s standards); he has his own rules of integrity (he knows he is corrupt by his own standards); everyone he loves is dead. For Ethan, being Ethan, the oncoming conclusion is obvious. All of it was his fault. The people he loved paid the price for his mistakes. If he had exercised better self restraint—here it wraps around almost to the Jim thesis—if he had kept his distance, shut down his love for Jim and Claire more absolutely, kept better control over himself, then maybe he would have been fit to save them.

Now comes the interesting part. MI2.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2—HOT GIRL SUMMER

MI2’s portrayal of Ethan is really fucking interesting. It keeps the throughline of moral integrity, and it delves deeper into sex, sexual manipulation, and sexual violence while giving Ethan the power and control that MI1 established as a) masculine b) Jim’s domain and c) irrecoverably out of Ethan’s reach. This is the movie where Ethan decides to save a woman and then saves her! At the same time, this is also the movie where Ethan loses his entire shit trying to protect a woman he just met, not to sleep with her, but to help her get out of a horrible situation that reminds him of himself. He watches her sacrifice herself on the altar of moral integrity by injecting herself with Chimera, taking an Ethan-esque “third option”, and he yells at her. He sees her trying to handle the sexual violence and sexual manipulation of living with Ambrose, and he tells her he wants her out. And he does all of that…more aggressively, more desperately, more violently, than he does much of anything in MI1.

I see MI2 Ethan as a deeply reactionary creature. This is a guy who is shaped fundamentally by a deep all-consuming fear that he can’t let himself acknowledge and that he isn’t able to accept (if he’s scared, he’s weak). MI2 Ethan, despite still being our favorite sub boy, still believing in moral integrity, still wanting to avoid hurting anyone, has become absolutely obsessed with power. That desire, born from fear, to become so powerful that he is able to save people, leads him to…kind of try to be Jim. He wants to be James Bond, he wants to fight and ride motorcycles and scale fucking cliffs without even a rope (ETHAN), it keeps the fear of being helpless at bay. As a result, MI2 Ethan comes off preoccupied, playing a part, phoning in a loyalty to the IMF that he doesn’t feel, grabbing onto anything that could remind him that he isn’t powerless anymore.

At the same time, I think MI2 Ethan is really fucking angry in a way he can’t allow himself to properly express. I think it’s easy to see that as much as Ethan connects the action hero stuff to power, he sees violence and violent emotion on his own behalf as unforgivable. There’s no way to read shit like “THEN FEEL BETTER” (favorite line in the movie lmao) as anything but ethan being really fucking angry in a way that he cannot allow himself to investigate. Ethan being angry means Ethan was hurt, Ethan was wronged, and Ethan cannot allow himself to acknowledge hurt against himself as real hurt. So he acts out, for the whole movie—while also stubbornly playing a role. You can even see that in the hair! It’s action hero hair, it’s ridiculous, it’s dramatic, it’s hair for a role, but whether or not Ethan allows himself to be conscious of it it’s also a big fuck you to the guy he was in MI1 who let his whole team die. In my mind, although I don’t think Ethan lets himself acknowledge this at all, it’s also a fuck you to Jim Phelps.

There’s another element that’s important to address here, which is that MI2 is one of the only movies (MI3 also does this) where we have canon confirmation that Ethan has had sex. MI1 very much leaves all that behind tasteful cuts-to-black, and from MI4 on Ethan’s relationship with sex is beautifully nonexistent. In MI2, Ethan and Nyah meet—they flirt, and Ethan immediately starts with his sub shenanigans, which is fascinating to me in the way it immediately undermines the action hero role. Then they have a car chase. They kiss on the edge of a cliff. It’s all very romantic—which honestly I think could be significant. A crucial element of the MI1 sexual trauma is that the Max stuff is just business, and the Claire stuff turns out to be in a lot of ways just business, and I can see Ethan being deeply hungry for sex that feels normal, that feels romantic. And then there’s the gut punch of realizing that he accidentally seduced Nyah into an awful situation full of sexual manipulation and violence and lies.

Anyway, that’s the main body of my thoughts on MI2 Ethan. Moving on:

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3: HOUSE HUSBAND ERA

Ethan overcorrects again! This movie breaks my heart for a ton of reasons. One of them is that in this movie I feel for the first time that Ethan is trying very hard to be Good, or I guess what I mean is pure. The purity he’s looking for isn’t Jim purity, although it does stem from an awareness of his corruption, which is always tied to Jim. Ethan is looking for a more classic kind of purity, innocence and simplicity and mundanity and honesty and uncomplicated affection. It’s essentially his solution to “thou shalt not covet,” where he finds someone he’s allowed to want and then he marries her.

And this is also the movie where he betrays his own moral integrity so fucking much. He lies to someone he loves, over and over. That’s a big deal! Ethan to my knowledge doesn’t ever lie to a loved one beyond Claire and Jim in the final act of MI1, and Julia. I might be forgetting something, but I don’t think I am. And the reason why he lies to her, you ask? Simple, and heartbreaking! He betrays his own moral integrity so that he doesn’t have to reveal to Julia that he is impure.

This is my MI3 argument. I think about it all the time.

At the point of MI3, the IMF is so fundamentally tied for Ethan to violence, sexual violence, manipulation, betrayal, power struggles…when Ethan meets Julia, he works very, very hard to excise that part of himself. Consciously, he does it to protect her from him, the same old reason why he does everything; unconsciously, I think he believes that the only way Julia will ever love him is if he pretends to be someone else. This is another movie where Ethan canonically has sex, and the contrast between Ethan seducing Max and Ethan kissing Julia once on each shoulder is so stark. Ethan wants to be someone else. He wants to erase the past. He wants to be pure, and he wants to have a pure relationship, an innocent, romantic, “normal” relationship free of the sea of lies. Ironically, in order to get that, he ends up lying…so much. That’s because he sees his true self as fundamentally impure! Fundamentally incompatible with purity! Fundamentally corrupt. So he lies. This is also the movie where he suffers Immensely for his loss of moral integrity. He comes very close to losing Julia, and I think he takes it as a warning.

(Important note: this is the only movie where Ethan Wants things openly. And again, he comes very close to losing Julia, and again I think he takes it as a warning and doesn’t make that mistake again.)

There’s another way to look at this, which is that this is the movie where Ethan sacrifices his ideals of moral integrity (dangles a man out of a plane, lies to his fiancee) for a last desperate grab at the purity he never got to have. In his mind, by his rules, this means he’s quite literally giving up being a hero, because he doesn’t want to be corrupt anymore.

GHOST PROTOCOL: HOT PRIEST ERA

The beginning of McQuarrie’s involvement, and the beginning of a more stable code of behavior for Ethan that changes and solidifies over the course of the next movies. By Ghost Protocol, Ethan has adopted a policy of what I’ll call “radical emotional self-denial”, or maybe a more accurate term is self-removal. In order to be able to be a hero again, he cuts himself from the picture. He does his best to become a non-entity, to become—not another role, but a tool. He becomes the job. In practice, this translates to subtly keeping the entire team at arm’s length. Everything personal to Ethan enters this movie against his will—until the very end of the movie, Julia only gets brought up by others; there’s no Luther until the end, either, which is mostly a deep tragedy but happens to work well for the movie where Ethan doesn’t want to be a person anymore.

That drive, to keep himself far away from the personal stakes and squabbles and irrationality of the others (the contrast between Ethan and Jane is insane) in order to cling to an illusion of control…it’s very…Jim-ish! It’s an adaptation of thou-shalt-not-covet that basically prescribes that in order to be good Ethan has to not covet…anything. Obviously, unlike Jim, Ethan’s conscious motivation is selfless, but I would argue his unconscious drive is actually not too different from some of the shit Jim has going on in MI1. This is Ethan’s way of getting power. It’s his way of protecting himself (unconsciously) from ever again experiencing the kind of hurt that has blindsided him over and over for three movies. He keeps himself apart from everyone, he tells himself he doesn’t want anything, he treats himself as a tool and not a person, and he treats the other members of the team as agents (who he still cares about a little too much) and not people, for as long as he possibly can until the walls start to crack in the final act.

The most telling dynamic for this, to my mind, is Ethan and Jane. Jane has a fucking personal stake in the narrative and she leads with it. She wants revenge. This is actively worrying to Ethan, and he insists over and over that she deny herself, that she put the mission first. She doesn’t. She compromises the mission to accomplish her own goal. And Ethan basically goes…okay.

There’s a lot of complicated emotion going on there, when he interrupts Brandt and goes after him, not Jane. Brandt made the worse mistake because he broke Ethan’s rule of moral integrity by concealing important information, not Jim’s rule of thou-shalt-not-covet. Also, Ethan…gets it. He’s deeply familiar with what it means to lose a loved one. It has to be cathartic for Ethan, who hasn’t let himself get really angry in years, whose only act of violent revenge was an orchestrated cover up to put him in jail for the good of the IMF, to see someone be so emotionally compromised over a death—and still be strong. Capable. A hero.

Ugh they’re important to me. Anyway.

There’s something else crucial going on in this movie, and this is where we start to get into the actual theory behind what you’re talking about, anon. GP is the first movie where Ethan starts to really come into his own as a leader—and that brings up a whole other element of Jim-related unconscious reactions and emotional maneuvering. I think it’s not a coincidence that the movie where Ethan becomes a leader is also the movie where he seems to be constantly living with the image of Jim in his head. There’s two main things going on for me.

First: I think Ethan is subconsciously imitating Jim as a leader. This is pretty straightforward. Jim’s the only real leader Ethan’s ever known—Swanbeck and Brassel don’t count, and aren’t much better. He doesn’t have other role models. There were good parts of Jim, or there were in Ethan’s mind, things like his competence, reliability, professionalism. Those come through in GP.

Second: I think (this is not textual, it’s just in my head) that GP is the movie where Ethan starts to become aware on some level that there was something inappropriate in the way Jim treated him. I genuinely don’t believe that’s something that occurs to Ethan before GP at all. But I can see Ethan’s leadership role bringing up a lot of old buried feelings around that. The way Ethan handles the seduction scene with Jane is fascinating to me when thinking about Jim—he’s at the gala with them, first of all, for better or for worse. And when he sees that he has to kiss Jane to make the seduction work, he communicates (not a ton, but way more than Ethan’s usual), he does it, he leaves. There’s no lingering, suggestive gaze, no implications or what-ifs. Thinking about the psychosexual mind games of MI1 and the plausible deniability, the push-and-pull emotional withdrawal, the was-that-what-I-thought-it-was, the what-did-that-mean. It’s interesting to imagine, although I don’t necessarily think it’s intentional in the text, that Ethan is consciously trying to be way more straightforward with Jane than Jim and Claire ever were with him. (I can only imagine how much they fucked with Ethan’s head on seduction missions.)

Last thought on GP—I really love the bit where Ethan storms out to go meet the guy associated with Max and doesn’t tell anybody where he went. To me that’s so indicative of Ethan’s ongoing effort to “keep boundaries” (one of the only ways Ethan ever sets boundaries for himself) between his current hero life and his corrupt past. Really means that he still hasn’t gotten over the idea that he can be corrupt and flawed and human and still loved/worthy/heroic.

Those are my main thoughts on GP. Rogue Nation takes those ideas and expands on them in a different, more explicit way that I really like—and there’s Ilsa! Finally, I can start actually answering your ask, anon!

ROGUE NATION: HOT LONE WOLF ERA

MI5 is the movie where people start noticing that Ethan is holding them at arms length. Specifically Benji, bless his heart. The “I am your friend” moment drives me insane for many reasons not least because it is a (intentional?? I wouldn’t put it past you mcQ you sly bastard) very striking parallel to Claire’s speech in MI1, “if I’m not dead, I’m with you.” And you can see it hit Ethan in that same way, and instead of distrusting that emotion, he accepts it.

It’s a weakness by Jim’s rules. It saves him in RN.

The other focal point of rogue nation is Ethan’s relationship with Ilsa, and I feel very strongly that by Rogue Nation Ethan has enough distance from the events of MI1 to be able to quietly accept that his relationship with Jim was kinda fucked, in a way that wasn’t entirely Ethan’s fault. (Baby steps, people.) The difference between the stuff with Jane—no romantic tension at all, a businesslike kiss with no other implications—and the stuff with Ilsa in RN, is that Ethan and Ilsa are clearly drawn to each other strongly from the very first time they meet. It’s not romantic or sexual per se, I read Ethan as acearo generally but especially in later movies, but it’s this powerful sense of familiarity, and recognition of an equal, that has some dimension of “oh it would be fun to kiss you, and we’d probably have really good sex.” And let me now take a second to refer back to Ethan’s current code of conduct.

He has his own integrity rules, that are basically just “treat people well, sacrifice yourself at every opportunity.” He has Jim’s purity rules, thou shalt not covet, that he’s personally adapted and intensified into thou shalt not covet anything. Based on these rules, combined with the burgeoning sense that Jim took advantage of him using their age gap and power difference, Ethan having these feelings about Ilsa is…basically breaking every single rule he’s set to keep himself Good, to keep himself in line, to keep himself heroic and to keep himself from becoming Jim. That last is more and more of a concern, in the later films.

To his credit, he doesn’t freak out about it. It’s a tribute to his well developed intricate system of compartmentalization that he’s essentially able to file that Very Strong Interest away and treat her almost normally. He interacts with Ilsa with this very vague, professional warmth and kindness even when she hits on him pretty blatantly—he’s well accustomed to seduction as a defense mechanism, so he doesn’t put too much stock in that. There’s still this intensity between them, but from what I can tell after the initial shock of meeting her Ethan tries very hard to avoid acknowledging it.

The climax of RN is absolutely insane for my Ethan/Ilsa/Benji thesis AND my Ethan Hunt touch log AND my Ethan Hunt corruption thesis because it features all of Ethan’s psychological barriers absolutely crumbling at once. Hiding what you see as intrinsic moral corruption from your friends? How about you have to ask them to help you kidnap the Prime Minister! Distancing yourself physically and emotionally from your friends to protect them from an unspecified and often-imagined Terrible Fate? How about you do Everything Right, and then one of the most important people in the world ends up abducted with a bomb strapped to his chest! This is the only example I can think of in the franchise so far where Ethan follows his own stringent moral rules To The Letter, and one of the people he loves still gets put in horrific danger. And in the scene at the restaurant, it all comes crashing down. The shoulder touch Ethan gives Benji at the restaurant is so significant to me because it comes after Ethan spends an entire movie trying to keep Benji away, and he’s tired and he’s done and he’s scared and he wants to comfort his friend. And then there’s the incredible physicality of the fight scene with Ilsa! It’s so beautiful and satisfying to watch. There’s this absolute comfort and joy that Ethan clearly gets from accepting her as an equal, someone he doesn’t have to keep away or twist himself inside out to protect from himself. He and Ilsa have a different dynamic than his with Jim, and besides he’s not Jim. He’s not going to take advantage of her.

On a different topic: to go back way to the beginning of this rant, this is the movie where Ethan wins through his FEMININE TRICKERY, which is such a thrilling fuck you to the Jim purity rules!! He wins through his MI1 skill set, he feigns weakness, he plays with Lane’s fascination and (let’s be real) attraction and vendetta to get him right where he wants him. It’s excellent stuff.

In case this rant wasn’t already long enough….now it’s time to talk about Fallout.

FALLOUT: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (DILF ERA)

Fallout to my mind is Chris McQuarrie’s treatise on literally everything I’ve been talking about in this rant. It has sexual manipulation! It has patriarchal action hero stereotypes! It has combination sexual manipulation and patriarchal action hero stereotypes!

I knew I was going to lose my mind over Fallout from the moment Ethan looked at Luther and said, “Did we get it?” And Luther said, “we got it.” And then they opened up the set. Christopher you magnificent bastard. It’s an MI1 callback, it’s a Claire callback, and it puts Ethan in the Claire position, the feminine temptress pretending to be stabbed. And this is only the beginning.

A lot of Fallout’s focus is on making Ethan relive the trauma of MI1 indirectly. Thank god it’s indirect because it makes it so much more interesting, especially when you remember the fact that Ethan is not letting himself notice that any of this is at all similar to anything that has happened to him before, no way, and it doesn’t have any traumatic associations whatsoever. Elements I am thinking of specifically:

-Ethan being forced to embody the character type of the masculine action hero, ruthless, controlling, power-hungry, physically imposing and sexually violent. Basically all the things he associates with Jim. Basically everything he’s put himself in a cage to keep from becoming for five movies.

-Ethan facing a living embodiment of Max, who may or may not be a living embodiment of the one time he and max fucked in the back of a car during one of the worst parts of Ethan’s life, and realizing that in this situation, He Is Max.

-the living embodiment of Max kissing him without warning on the lips.

-MCQ I AM IN YOUR WALLS

There’s another element of the movie that doesn’t feel like an intentional MI1 callback but works along similar lines just cause so much of this movie is about MI1’s corruption thesis. That is, the Solomon Lane Julia dream, which feels to me like nothing so much as…another accusation of sin. This one is way more along Ethan’s moral lines—you betrayed this woman by caring about her, you hurt her by getting too close—because this is Ethan’s dream, about Ethan’s guilt. But it falls neatly into Jim’s purity rules too, with the same interesting overlap of selfish-versus-selfless self-flagellation. Ethan loving Julia compromises her, Julia loving Ethan compromises her, all of it puts Julia’s safety and the safety of the whole world at risk because if Ethan loves somebody too much he loses them, he can’t save them, he can’t a hero.

But Fallout also focuses on the ways that Ethan can’t get away from love anymore. He’s surrounded by people who love him, heroes in their own right, Luther and Benji and Ilsa and also Julia! And they aren’t going to let him push them away, which is good, because Fallout Ethan is getting way too old to deal with all this bullshit on his own.

Another way Fallout combats the Jim thesis of love-as-weakness/corruption is through the French cop. Ethan nearly fucks up their whole operation trying to save her, but the movie argues that he is a hero Because he does that, not in spite of it.

Phew. Last movie. Here we go.

DR1: CRIMINALITY & FATHERHOOD (HOT LAWYER ERA)

I have only seen DR1 once and most of that was spent experiencing absolutely catastrophic levels of serotonin so I can’t speak on it as well as I would like. That’s probably for the best considering how long this fucking post has gotten.

My main thoughts on DR1 is that by DR1 Ethan has let go of so much of his shame and guilt around corruption. I think Fallout helped a ton with that. I also think that as Ethan gets older and is faced with a figure like Grace, his own guilt takes a backseat to doing what he can to help her not feel that same guilt. There’s an immediate protective instinct that Ethan has when faced with “corrupt” young people in bad situations that speaks to a healthier relationship with himself, an easier ability to love people and try to protect them, and to accept failure and loss when or if it comes. He feels really human in DR1, even more so than Fallout—he’s trying hard to be nice not out of fear of the alternative but because he wants to have positive relationships with people! He meets Grace and he wants to be someone she sees as trustworthy, he wants to be her friend, and that’s an instinct he lets himself pursue.

There’s something about the casual way the DR1 lore drops in the beginning of the movie that also suggests a new relationship between Ethan and his own past. That he’s able to talk about it openly, a past that under Jim was probably unspeakable and shameful, is really important to me.

Aaaand those are my DR1 thoughts. OK HOLY SHIT WE’RE DONE!!!!!!

Final wrap-up ideas:

-It’s probably not necessary but feels important for me to specify that in my mind ethan is Deeply Good from the beginning of the franchise to the end. He’s dealing with a shitshow of trauma including horrific sexual trauma that fucks with his self perception and self esteem, but he is not corrupt, he is perfect.

-I genuinely, deeply, truly do not know if this rant makes any sense at all. If you have made it to the end, I salute you, you have earned Undying Loyalty and Friendship although you probably already had it.

-Ethan Hunt is everything. <3

One thing I’m always rotating in my mind is that the age gap between jim and claire is very close to the age gap between ethan and ilsa. Which makes it even richer to me personally that ethan has yet to make a completely romantic move on ilsa

OK ANON I AM HUGGING YOU I THINK ABOUT THIS LITERALLY ALL THE TIME AND IM GOING TO FORMULATE A WHOLE RANT ABOUT IT NOW HOLD FOR THAT BUT FIRST I JUST WANT TO TELL YOU THAT YOU ARE BRILLIANT

[infinite-xerath]

Runeterra Retcons: Ruination Episode (Targon)

Targon Part I

You awaken the next morning to find everyone in somewhat dour spirits. Olaf looks to be training alone, Shen is meditating, Riven is idly inspecting her blade, Gwen and Vayne seem to be watching the waves outside, and Lucian and Senna look to be in the middle of a rather heated argument.

Senna: “How many times do I need to say it, Lucian? I’m not staying behind!”

Lucian: “You’ve seen what he can do, Senna! We’re not in any position to take him on!”

Senna: “I know that, Lucian, but that’s all the more reason why we all need to be out there.”

Lucian: “Damn it, Senna, he’s targeting you! You’ve got one of those soul fragments in you too, which means we need to keep you out of harm’s way.”

Senna: “Oh? And what about Gwen? She’s a fetter too, and you don’t seem to want her to stay behind.”

Lucian: “Gwen’s got the Hallowed Mist protecting her!”

Senna: “And I’ve got you protecting me, or do you not have my back?”

Lucian: “That’s… You know that ain’t fair!”

Senna: “Oh really? So it’s fair that I get to stay behind and worry about my husband while you go hunting all over the world for fetters? Lucian, we swore we would always have each other’s backs. You have to stop letting what happened with Thresh hold you back!”

“Who’s Thresh?”

“Uh, is that a bad time?”

Lucian response 1: “…Someone you should pray you never meet, Rookie.”

Lucian response 2: “…No, I’d say your timin’ is perfect, Rookie.”

Senna: “We were just getting ready to set out on our next mission.”

Suddenly, Riven approaches to join the conversation.

Riven: “So… Where are we going next?”

Shen: “Mount Targon.”

Riven: “Ah! Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

Shen: “Mount Targon is the gateway between the earth and the heavens; a bridge into the Third Realm, that of the Celestials. Their power is often revered as godlike, so acquiring their favor may be the key to tipping the scales.”

“Wait, so we’re going to try and recruit the gods?”

“Isn’t Mount Targon like, really high though?”

Senna: “I know it’s a longshot, but either way, the Black Mist is gathering around Targon as we speak.”

Olaf: “Hmm! The gods you say? Perhaps there is a worthy foe among them!”

Senna: “Everyone, gather round! Rookie, fire up the Wayfinder!”

You wait as everyone gathers to the map table, then unleash the Wayfinder’s light to carry you to your destination. You emerge in what looks to be not a Sentinel outpost, but some manner of temple filled with carvings of Celestial bodies.

“Uh, I think something went wrong.”

“Please don’t tell me this thing is on the fritz.”

???: “Halt, trespassers!”

You turn around to see figures in peculiar armor emerging from the shadows, wielding brandishing peculiar silver weapons at you.

Lunari Soldier A: “Who are you? How did you find our sacred ground?”

Lunari Soldier B: “They must be with the Solari! Capture them!”

Gwen: “Um, pardon me, I think there’s been a misunderstanding! We’re not-”

Lunari Soldier A: “Silence! We won’t be deceived by your lies! Lunari, ready your weapons!”

Vayne: “A fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Rookie…”

Targon Part II

The Sentinels fend off their Lunari attackers, the light of their weapons clashing against the silver light of moonsteel.

Shen: “We are not your adversaries! Please, stand aside!”

Lucian: “Damn, they ain’t listening! Looks like we’re just gonna have to blast our way through!”

Lunari Soldier A: “What is this? I have never seen Solari weapons like this before!”

???: “They are not Solari! Everyone, stand down!”

Suddenly, every Lunari soldier halts, turning their attention to the entrance of the temple. A woman with long, pale hair strides into the room, clutching a large curved blade.

“Who are you?”

“Reinforcements?”

Diana: “Forgive them, travelers. My name is Diana, chosen Aspect of the Moon.”

Riven: “Aspect? You don’t mean…”

“You’re a god!?”

“You lead the Lunari?”

Diana response 1: “In a sense… Though I am only a vessel for Her power.”

Diana response 2: “A leader? No, not quite… I only speak the moon’s will to Her people.”

Olaf: “Ha! The gods of the Freljord are said to be titans! Are all of Targon’s god so tiny?”

Gwen: “Olaf, manners!”

Diana: “The moon towers above even your gods, Freljordian! Do not speak ill of her so readily.”

Lunari soldier B: “My lady, these Solari agents-”

Diana: “They are not Solari. These travelers have come far to aid us in our current plight, is that not so?”

Senna: “Actually… You could say that we’re the ones looking for help. There’s a world-wide Harrowing going on, so we hoped you Aspects could lend us a hand in dealing with it.”

Diana: “I see… In the past, Aspects would stand together to fend off the forces of darkness that threatened this world, but now we stand divided. The sun’s faithful, the Solari, persecute the Lunari as heretics! Their Aspect is…”

Diana hesitates. For a moment.

Diana: “She is difficult to speak with. As for the others: War has been killed, Justice is fragmented, and Twilight is nowhere to be found. Only the Protector remains to guard Targon’s peak from the encroaching darkness.”

“Guess we can’t expect any help from the gods…”

“So basically, you’re saying the Aspects can’t help.”

Diana: “…Not quite. It was by the Moon’s will that I came here to greet you. I know what it is you seek, travelers, and I can guide you to it.”

Vayne: “Oh, now this is a familiar set-up. Sorry, but we’ve already fallen for that trap once. It’s not happening again.”

Shen: “It is no trap. She speaks the truth.”

Lucian: “And how the hell do you know that?”

Shen: “The Eye of Twilight is not so easily deceived.”

Diana: “Time is short, travelers. Even as we speak, the Mist scours the mountain, searching for the Ruined King’s prize.”

Senna: “Damn it… I guess we don’t have a choice.”

Vayne: “…Fine, but the moment I even suspect Moonbeams here is going to turn on us, I’m putting a bolt through that glowing forehead.”

Diana: “You have nothing to fear. Now, come with me!”

Targon Part III

You follow Diana out onto the slops of Targon. The skies above you shine with the cosmos, but the land below you is obscured by a thick blanket of Black Mist.

“I can’t even see the bottom…”

“Just how high up are we?”

Diana: “Mount Targon soars into the heavens. Most would perish in an effort to make it this high, but you are fortunate to have had a means to bypass much of that climb.”

Lucian: “Come to think of it, why DID the Wayfinder bring us into your temple, anyway?”

Diana: “That temple did indeed once serve another purpose, but it has since become yet another hiding place for the Lunari to flee persecution. Those accursed Solari… They will forsake any light that isn’t the sun, forcing others to live in shadow.”

Diana descends further toward the Black Mist, leading you all closer to the howls of wraiths.

Vayne: “Seems like the shadows are where we’re headed.”

Gwen: “Um, are we quite sure about this?”

Before anyone can respond, several wraiths leap out of the Mist, ascending the mountain toward your party. You tense up, preparing for another fight, but Diana moves with inhuman speed to block their path. With a single swing of her blade, she lets loose an arcing bolt of moonlight that tears through the wraiths.

Diana: ��The Moon’s silver light cuts through even the blackest darkness. You are under my protection now, so you have nothing to fear.”

“That was impressive!”

“Maybe I could get behind this whole moon-worship thing.”

Diana ignores your comments as she leads you further into the mist, wrapping herself in a silver barrier. More wraiths come your way, but Diana makes short work of those that would impede your path. The Sentinels fend of what few manage to sneak by her.

Lucian: “Hot damn, this moon lady ain’t half-bad!”

Senna: “Oh? Taken an interest in the goddess, have we, Lucian?”

Lucian: “Uh, I mean…”

Olaf: “Wait! Look there!”

You look past Diana to see a figure cutting through the Black Mist, striking down wraiths left and wright. His spear and shield glisten with the light of the cosmos and his helmet burns with pure starfire.

???: “Back, foul beasts! Your grotesque forms dishonor the fallen!”

“Who is that?”

“Another Aspect!?”

Diana response 1: “Atreus, formerly the Aspect of War. He fights with the remnants of Pantheon’s power that still linger inside him.”

Diana response 2: “Once, he was Pantheon, the Aspect of War. Now, however, he wields only a fragment of the fallen god’s might.”

Atreus: “Indeed, I am no more than a man! And no less! Whatever remnants of the god may linger, my strength is my own!”

Olaf: “Hmm! You seem like a worthy foe! Perhaps you will be the one to grant me a glorious end in battle!”

Atreus: “Glory comes not from how we die, berserker, but how we live. Now, enough talk! We share a common enemy this day, do we not, Diana?”

Diana: “Yes. We go to the dead god’s temple to find the artifact hidden within. We must keep it from the Ruined King’s grasp.”

Atreus: “So be it! Charge ahead, travelers! I will be the shield and spear at your backs!”

Without another word, Atreus rushes past you, slamming his shield into a wall of wraiths to scatter them.

Gwen: “Oh my, I hope he’ll be alright by himself!”

Vayne: “If I were you, I’d be more worried about the wraiths… Not that I’d ever spare any sympathy for these monsters.”

Diana: “What we seek lies just ahead. Come, Sentinels! We must hurry to the temple!”

Targon Part IV

After a long and arduous trek through the Black Mist, Diana finally brings you to the doors of an ancient, dilapidated temple.

“Phew… What a workout!”

“I need… A minute…”

Lucian: “Shake it off, Rookie! Our job’s not done yet.”

Riven: “So the fetter is in there?”

Diana: “Yes, that is what the Moon tells me.”

Vayne: “Let’s hope the Moon is a reliable informant.”

The Sentinels push the doors open to find the interior of the temple utterly abandoned. Tattered banners hang from nearby pillars and a heavy layer of dust lingers in the air. In the center stands a grand statue of a helmeted warrior clutching a familiar spear and shield.

“I don’t get it, why would a fetter be in a place like this?”

“Somehow, this place is even creepier than the Mist outside.”

Diana response 1: “For centuries, warriors from across Runeterra have come to make offerings here. It must be fate that one such offering would house the remnants of the Lost Queen.”

Diana response 2: “A god never truly dies. Their presence lingers in those whose lives they have touched, and where their memories are preserved.”

Shen: “I sense a growing imbalance. We should not dwell here for long.”

At Shen’s urging, fan out and scour the temple. You find many old offerings on display: trophies plucked from battlefields all over the world across the span of centuries. At first, none of them seem particularly noteworthy, but then your eyes fall upon an old, faded crest resting on a pedestal. You feel compelled to take hold of it and examine it more closely.

???: “I’ll be taking that.”

Suddenly, a shadowy hand snatches the crest from your grasp. You wheel around to see a familiar yordle standing by one of the pillars, her shadow clutching the crest behind her.

“It’s you! Um… What was your name again?”

“What the- How did you get here!?”

Vex response 1: “I never told you my name, but because I know you’re going to keep asking: it’s Vex, got it? Try to remember it.”

Vex response 2: “Ugh, more questions. Look, I’ve got ways of getting around, in case you’d forgotten.”

Hearing the commotion, the other Sentinels race to your aid. As Gwen and Senna draw near, the crest starts to emit a familiar glow.

Senna: “She’s got the fetter!”

Lucian: “Take her down, Sentinels!”

Vex: “Uh oh! Time to bale!”

Vex narrowly evades the bursts of Sentinel light that come for her, using her shadow to dart between the pillars of the temple for cover.

Riven: “She’s making a run for it!”

Senna: “Cut her off!”

Vex’s shadow carries her swiftly toward the exit, but Diana closes the distance in an instant. A massive circle of pale light surrounds her and draws Vex back into the temple.

Vex: “What the!? Hey, no fair!”

Diana slashes at Vex’s shadow, knocking the fetter from its grasp. The crest skids across the floor, landing by your feet.

Lucian: “Rookie, grab it!”

You bend over to do as Lucian says, only to be interrupted by a massive boom from outside. The whole temple trembles and knocks you off your feet.

“What was that!?”

“It wasn’t me, I swear!”

Vex: “Hey, if you guys are gonna bring a god, then so can I!”

Suddenly, the ominous presence you felt in the temple before grows heavier. A familiar figure strides into the temple, his flesh and weapons warped by the Black Mist. A look of genuine fear washes over Diana’s face.

Diana: “It can’t be…”

“Atreus!?”

“Pantheon!?”

Pantheon response 1: “No. I have reclaimed what is rightfully mine! I am Pantheon, and you are intruders upon my temple.”

Pantheon response 2: “Indeed. I am war, I am change, and I am reborn!”

Vayne: “So the Black Mist can even turn a dead god undead…”

Shen: “The scales of tipped even further!”

Pantheon: “Come then, mortals! You will be the first to receive my judgement!”

Targon Part V

Pantheon rushes into the temple, engaging the Sentinels head-on. Diana moves to intercept him, but she is quickly thrown back by the force of his spear into the base of his statue. The entire monument shakes and crumbles, burying Diana under a pile of rubble.

Lucian: “Stand strong, Sentinels! We’ve got him outnumbered!”

Pantheon: “Fool! I am an army unto myself!”

You watch as Pantheon engages your allies, effortlessly deflecting their attacks with his weapons. Shen, Riven and Olaf engage him at close-range, while Senna, Lucian and Vayne support them from a distance. Gwen does her best to support the party with Hallowed Mist, though this proves little more than an annoyance to the war god.

Senna: “Rookie! Grab that fetter and fire up the Wayfinder! We need to get out of here!”

You look to the ground to see that the crest is long-gone, along with Vex and her shadow.

“Damn! She got away with the fetter, again!”

“So, uh, I can follow exactly half of that order!”

Pantheon: “Your fight ended long before it even began, Sentinels!”

With a single swing of his spear, Pantheon knocks all of your comrades to the ground, lashing out with an unholy mix of Ruined and Celestial power. Just as the situation beings to seem dire, however, the statue behind Pantheon explodes into a burst of pale light.

Diana bursts from the rubble, swinging her moonlight-empowered blade at the war god. He turns just in time to block her strike with his shield, though the impact still causes him to stumble a little.

Diana: “Your time has passed, Warrior! Return to your slumber!”

Pantheon: “War is eternal, as am I!”

The two Aspects clash in an inhuman Celestial might, their battle causing the very temple around to you tremble. You and your allies watch, transfixed, at this deadly dance between gods in human form. A silent understanding arrives that any attempt at intervention would only result in a swift and inglorious death caught in the crossfire.

Diana dashes around with inhuman speed while Pantheon pushes with back with titanic strength, though you can’t help that something seems off about the war god’s movements. It looks to you almost as though he’s struggling to raise his spear…

Senna: “Rookie! We gotta go! This isn’t a fight mortals can play any part in!”

You snap back to reality and rush to your allies, Wayfinder in hand. Everyone musters the strength to join you, though just before you can teleport back to headquarters, a scream cuts through the temple. You look back to the battle, horrified to see Pantheon’s spear impaled through Diana’s torso.

Pantheon: “Now, you too will know what I felt at the Darkin’s blade…”

Lucian: “Rookie, do it now!”

In spite of Lucian’s orders, though, you find yourself unable to summon the light of the Wayfinder. Pantheon pulls his spear from Diana and shoves her toward you before approaching.

Pantheon: “It does not matter where you flee to, Sentinels. There is nowhere you can run, nowhere you can hide, from war. I shall storm your fortress and lay waste to your bastion, bringing a new era of war!”

“Atreus, wake up!”

“Is that really what you want, Atreus?”

Pantheon: “You speak again of my vessel, but he is back where he belongs: under my control.”

“You said that it doesn’t matter how we die, but how we live! Do you want to live as a slave in your own body, Atreus?”

“You’re wrong, Pantheon! You’re the one under Viego’s control, but Atreus wouldn’t submit so easily!”

Vayne: “Rookie, what are you-”

Pantheon: “Enough of this! I… I… Ugh!”

Suddenly, Pantheon’s form begins to flicker, the Black Mist ebbing flowing from his body to show the man underneath.

Atreus: “I am no slave, Pantheon! Not to you OR the Ruined King!”

Pantheon: “What!? You dare defy me, mortal!?”

You watch as Atreus and Pantheon wrestle for control as Black Mist floods into the temple behind you, carrying with it a swarm of wraiths. Suddenly, the Ruination gives way to Celestial light once more, but the Black Mist still clings stubbornly to Atreus’s body.

Atreus: “Go! I shall hold these abominations back, including the one within me!”

Senna: “You heard him, Rookie! Use that damn Wayfinder!”

This time, you do as you are told, calling forth the power of your Relic to carry you and your comrades back to safety. You reappear in Sentinel headquarters, far away from Mount Targon.

Lucian: “Rookie, I don’t know whether to be furious or impressed right now.”

“I know, I lost the fetter.”

“I know, I can’t believe I actually got through to him!”

Riven response 1: “Hey, it’s not your fault. We all know how slippery that yordle and her shadow can be.”

Riven response 2: “I just hope Pantheon doesn’t take control again. I really don’t want a rematch with a god.”

Gwen: “Um, speaking of whom…”

You all turn to see Diana struggling to her feet, clutching her side.

Diana: “Ngh…”

“Are you alright?”

“Hey, take it easy!”

Diana: “It was not I who suffered Pantheon’s spear, young one, but the Aspect of the Moon herself. I… Can scarcely feel Her now.”

Vayne: “So what, you’re telling us that undead god killed the moon?”

Diana: “No… She still lives, but her power is weakened. It will take many nights for her to recover.”

Lucian: “If things keep up like this, I don’t know how many more nights we have.”

Shen: “The balance grows more precarious still.”

Senna: “So much for divine intervention…”

Diana: “Ngh… Though my connection to the heavens is diminished, I can still feel Her will, however faintly. She… Wishes for me to accompany you, if you’ll have me.”

Riven: “You’re saying you want to join us?”

Diana: “I am saying that... I have little choice. I cannot return to the Lunari as I am now. I am the Moon’s voice, her vessel. Without her, I can do little for my people. All I can do is take up arms and aid you in your fight, in the hopes that doing so will drive the Black Mist from the slopes of Targon.”

Gwen: “Ooh, how marvelous! The moon lady is going to join us! Oh, follow me, and we’ll tend to your wounds as well as your wardrobe.”

Gwen leads Diana back into the Sentinel base. Though it takes slightly longer than normal thanks to Diana’s injuries, she soon emerges with the Lunari leader in tow.

Gwen: “Apologies for the wait, everyone! I now present to you all: Sentinel Diana!”

Diana: “May Mother Moon watch over us, and may we all fight our own path through the darkness.”

Lucian: “That’s… Not exactly the standard oath, but good enough, I guess.”

Senna: (Another new Sentinel, but we’re still no closer to turning things around…)

[cant-blink]

My Gigan’s Backstory

Gigan hardly knew his real parents. He still has memories of them, vague memories deep in his data banks. He knew enough to have imprinted on his own kind; he knows he’s a space-duck.

His Masters, the Nebulans, has taken him from his nest before he was even old enough to leave it. They took him in, fed him, raised him. They took lots of pictures of him, in all his babu floof glory, and made sure to save those photos for future use...

Gigan as a babu was damn near the cutest thing in existence, a cottonball with a face. He would instinctively seek cuddles for warmth and would waddle after anyone he laid eye on, chirping and peeping the entire time. He quickly won the hearts of every Nebulan that came in contact with him, and a great bond was formed between him and his adoptive ‘family’.

But good things don’t last long in my universe and when Gigan began approaching pubescence, he became increasingly more aggressive and violent. Tis a normal part of space-duck development, as the young start to learn how to hunt and fight amongst themselves. 

For Gigan, though, this natural change would become anything BUT natural. His Masters not only placed him in complete isolation in a ready-made enclosure, but also placed a ‘mind-control’ chip in his brain. A weak one, just there to ensure he doesn’t turn that aggression towards them. They deprived him of physical company, but still spoke to him through the chip. Although obviously, the conversations were rather sparse and one-sided. Most of Gigan’s days were spent sleeping or restlessly pacing around the enclosure. His only source of entertainment was when the Nebulans would teach him how to ‘hunt’. Aka, to attack anything that went through The Door. 

The Door was Gigan’s only contact with the outside world beyond his enclosure. The Nebulans would give him whatever he needed through The Door. Food, toys, or (his favorite) live prey to serve as both. He lived like this for many years, until he was a fully-grown adult. Then the Nebulans, his ‘parents’ that he came to look up to, told him that it was time for the Change. He didn’t know what this entailed, but he was excited and ready for this Initiation!

He was put under, and the modifications were made to his body, his senses, his brain. They took his natural weaponry and made them even more deadly by coating them in powerful alien alloys. They gave him power, in the form of lasers, fire, flight, teleportation, and a buzzsaw implanted into his chest. They gave him knowledge in his brain, able to access whatever information he could possibly desire (that they already had on record, of course). And most importantly....

... They downloaded his baby pictures into his memory bank. Just to humble him a bit, remind him of how cute he was.

Gigan was quite overwhelmed at first. His body stayed mostly the same in appearance, but the changes made took some getting used to. After giving him recovery time in his room, this overwhelmed feeling only increased as they FINALLY began letting Gigan out of his enclosure to practice in a training room.

This overwhelmed feeling quickly went out the window when he learned he was going to fly for the first time. He also began learning how to control his powers, and he took to the lessons pretty well. So many new ways to kill his prey, it’s great! He loved every moment of it!

Once he mastered his skills, he was finally allowed to venture into the real world to carry out missions. Much death and destruction was waged at his claws, all in the name of ‘peace’ as the Nebulans called it, and he loved every moment of it. After being confined to his room damn near his entire childhood, it was like he was able to release all that pent-up aggression on something other than his prey. And once it was all over, and his mission was a success, he would retire back in his enclosure and rest. Despite having been a prisoner in there for the longest time, he still took comfort in his nest. 

He was content living with his Masters for a while; he had food and shelter, and a purpose in carrying out whatever missions the Nebulans sent him on. 

But as time went on, he began to find that he wanted something more. He didn't know what he was missing, but something was wrong. There was a need in him, ever since he grew to adulthood, that he couldn't fulfill. It got so bad that just the sight of anything colored gold got him bothered and only agitated his aggression further.

Taking note of Gigan's increasing frustrations and unhappiness, the Nebulans came to the conclusion that he must have a mate. He deserved it and they pulled strings to obtain the finest specimen they could find, only the best for their pet space-duck! Importing the specimen, they let her into his room using The Door, and for the first time since being taken from his parents, Gigan saw another of his own kind. The Nebulans had their hopes up, for the interaction seemed peaceful as the two curiously met. All Gigan had to do was fluff out his feathers, fan his sails, and strut his stuff!

But that never happened. For this bioweapon did not court her and instead tried to force himself on her. It’s typical behavior for male space-ducks without a mate, but to not even try courtship? What's worse, when the female rejected his advances (who did this cyborg asshole think he is?!), Gigan only got increasingly more violent and with his enhanced strength and weaponry, it got real bloody really fast.

So fast, the Nebulans couldn’t even stop it from happening when Gigan killed his potential mate. It was horrified silence from the roaches, as their beloved pet finally found release on the corpse. He continued this until he tired himself out and turned to cannibalizing the remains.

Now that... was not normal.

But maybe the Nebulans did something wrong? Perhaps using The Door triggered Gigan to view her as a toy, as live prey? They tried again, and again, with different locations but with the same results. If anything, Gigan only learned how to keep his toy alive for longer. Kept in isolation most of his life, and trained to choose violence at every opportunity, Gigan had no real social skills among his own kind. His instincts to court and breed like a normal space-duck was severely stunted and the Nebulan’s repeated efforts only really reinforced in Gigan’s psychopathic mind that other creatures existed for his own personal pleasures.

They did come to accept that trying to breed their prized weapon was a lost cause. If anything, they’ll reward him with an opportunity to mate if he does a good job at his missions. Whatever makes him happy.

This arrangement made him very happy, and for a while, he thought he needed nothing more in life.

But one day, was the day something new awakened within Gigan.

It was an unusual mission; the Nebulans wanted him to help them capture a target, alive and unharmed. Their target was another bioweapon, just like him, created by a long-extinct race and flying around the cosmos destroying worlds. That kind of power could be useful, and best of all: it came with a mind-control chip of its own.

His name was Ghidorah. King Ghidorah.

The pictures did not do this dragon justice, as Gigan and the Nebulans tracked down the mind-control chip’s signature, and found the massive asteroid. From it, emerged the three-headed dragon. The GOLDEN three-headed dragon with MASSIVE sails that caught the light beautifully.

Setting his eye on the creature woke something in Gigan, for the very first time. He... He WANTED this creature, all to himself. Alive. And he can have him, once they brought this creature into Nebulan control. That was all the motivation he needed.

The battle was a dangerous one. The dragon’s intentions to kill were obvious, and for once in his life, Gigan had to hold back. He had one goal in mind, to incapacitate the dragon and bring him into Nebulan captivity. A swift and powerful strike to the middle head was all that was needed to finish the job.

The Nebulans went right to work with that mind-control chip. Gigan wanted something else, but was forced to sit out while the dragon was prepared. And when they finally did meet, the dragon spoke not a word to him. He just needed time to adjust, the Nebulans reassured the cyborg. They’ll be spending plenty of time together once their plan was ready to set in motion.

Their first mission was to Earth, to dispose of a creature called Godzilla. Ghidorah apparently already had run-ins on this planet, but was swiftly outnumbered. But now with Gigan at his side, surely the odds will lean in their favor.

And it very well nearly did. Together, Gigan, Ghidorah, and the Nebulans almost killed Godzilla. 

Until...

Something went terribly wrong. All of a sudden, Gigan lost contact with the Nebulans, for the very first time. The mind-control chips in both kaiju was de-activated, and Gigan was left on his own. Unfortunately for Godzilla, Gigan was no innocent victim under the control of malicious aliens. Mind-control or not, he functioned largely of his own accord and he quickly resumed torturing the fuck out of Godzilla.

Even dragging him to Ghidorah’s feet like a proud suitor showing off prey. 

Which Ghidorah promptly rejected and punted the fat Earth lizard away...

That’s okay, it was funny watching Godzilla fly anyway.

However, it quickly became obvious that Ghidorah was no team player and had a great disdain for Gigan. He made little effort to involve himself in the fight, beyond warding off Anguirus’s advances. This hatred even seemed to outweigh his beef with Godzilla as Ghidorah ignored his Earth-side enemy to argue against Gigan. Such vitriol from the dragon for what was an accidental collision- Wait, this wasn’t about Gigan accidentally flying into him. No, Ghidorah was blaming HIM for this whole entire mess?! THE FUCK!! 

This argument costed them the mission, Gigan attempting and failing twice to retreat back to the Nebulan ship. Only when Ghidorah was allowed to retreat did Godzilla finally let the cyborg flee alongside him.

It was a bitter blow to Gigan’s ego; not only was his attempt to impress such a beautiful mate a complete failure, but he never lost a mission so miserably. But things go from bad to worse, when Ghidorah followed him back to the ship and to his horror, proceeded to destroy it. Revenge for keeping him hostage.

It was at that moment Gigan had to choose, between his Masters, who were essentially his parents, or this beautiful dragon that he wanted so badly but whom didn’t seem to return the favor...

He chose his Masters and, despite being injured, he rushed to defend the ship with everything he’s got. Ghidorah seemed reluctant to engage in teeth-to-claw close combat, and when the hydra saw that it would take more than Gravity Beams to keep this cyborg at bay, it was what allowed Gigan to chase him off. The Nebulans were safe...

... For now.

For it was barely over a year later, after yet another failed Earth mission with an ally named Megalon, that Gigan returned to his Masters even more damaged than last time. And that’s when Ghidorah, lying in wait for the perfect opportunity, decided to strike.

The Nebulans were defenseless and a weakened Gigan could do nothing but watch as his Masters were destroyed. His home... The sight of it all was horrific, and yet... somehow beautiful, seeing this dragon’s full destructive power unleashed first-hand. After the carnage, Ghidorah turned to him, regarding him with six blood-red eyes. Gigan was ready to go down fighting, but to his surprise, the dragon turned and flew off into the void. Leaving him alone for the very first time.

His mind-control was lost completely. No orders, no reassurance that everything was okay. Nothing but silence. With everything he’s ever known gone, Gigan knew not what to do. Is this what it feels like to finally leave the nest? Was he ready?

........

Of course he was. His Nebulan ‘parents’ taught him all he needed to know in life, and he went forth to make his own path. He forged his own way, making a living as an assassin and a pirate. He met with old friends, recruiting Megalon into his crew, and made new ones, meeting a grumpy ol’ centipede. He also took those same friends and threw them under the bus when the law finally caught up with them.

He was totally going to come back for them, honest....

His career as an assassin came to an end, however, when the worst day of his life happened. It was like any other, coming to meet those who wanted a job done. However, this turned out to be nothing more than a means to trap the cyborg and put him through another Change...

This one, for the worst, as it completely stripped him of his space-duckness, his feathers gone, his sails tainted red. His new ‘Masters’ wishing to enslave him...

Needless to say, it didn’t end well for them, when they learned the mind-control chip was only ever mild and served more as a means of communication than anything. The Nebulans never needed complete control, like Ghidorah’s mind-control chip was designed for. They had Gigan’s loyalty because they were all he’s ever known. Like hell, he’s letting his freedom go for some no-name low-lives who think they’re hot shit.

Still, the whole experience left its mark. He quit the idea of working as an assassin, and went full-time pirate. Taking out all the anger and frustration on innocent ships, innocent worlds. Stealing their most important resources to sell on the underground space-market. Accumulating riches in the most dishonorable of means.

But every so often, the thought of a dragon would enter his mind. Those gold scales, those massive wings, a complete disregard for life. Everything he could ever want in a mate...

... He would have extra fun with his victims whenever he got that bothered.

Until one day, he decided he was finally going to act on those desires, make those fantasies a reality. He had the tracking information on Ghidorah, he just needed to catch up to him. Not too hard when the dragon would spend so much time destroying any life-bearing worlds he came across.

When he finally did meet his Master’s killer once more, he... didn’t really know what to do from here. His new Final Wars form made him a freak; even if he were to do a proper courtship, he was certain it wouldn’t be successful. Maybe play off his new look like it was an intentional change, something he labeled a “work-in-progress”? 

Would Ghidorah even recognize him?

Turns out, yes, yes he did. Despite Gigan’s attempts at friendly re-introduction, Ghidorah seemed just as hostile towards him as before, making it clear that he was still holding a grudge against the cyborg. But the dragon never really escalated that hatred into an actual fight.

This was something he can work with. 

And he was nothing if not persistent. Unlike all those other females the Nebulans would try to pair him with, this one was special. He wanted him, forever and not just for the night. For that, he knew he had to earn Ghidorah’s forgiveness. Maybe then, the dragon will be willing to give him a chance.

Worst case scenario, he still remembered how to activate that mind-control chip... 

[telehxhtrash]

Hi! Thank you for all your killugon meta posts, you are really doing the lord’s work. I was just wondering what is your exact reasoning for why you think Palm was solely created by Togashi to be a foil for Killua’s feelings?

Hi ! You’re very welcome, thank you for reading !! 

I’ll try to answer as well as i can but this might be messy so I hope it’s ok hahah 

To me, to be able to come to the conclusion that Palm is a foil to Killua’s feelings, we need to ask ourselves a few questions : what are palm's defining traits ? why are they useful in the story ? what's palm's purpose in the story ? why was she created as mainly a romantic interest for gon? why did togashi make those feelings romantic, and not friendship? and ALSO, why did he not make her a viable love interest ?

First of all, Palm's defining traits : it's a no brainer that Palm's defining traits are her INTENSE feelings of love for any man who looks her way, from the moment she introduces herself and instantly talks about her love for Knov, to when she asks Gon out on a date, we can see how her character reeks of love. Ofc I'm not saying that's the ONLY thing that characterizes her, but when you think of Palm you instantly think of "this weird psycho who took Gon out on a date"

Now, for Palm's purpose in the story : I believe Palm's characterization to have been created to foil/be a catalyst to Killua's feelings. The reason for this is, when I think of Palm's journey as a character, what she went through and where she ultimately ended in relation to the themes that CAA talked about, I only see her culminating scene as her confrontation with Killua. To me, everything she's been towards Gon and Killua lead to this specific moment of the arc : this is where her characterization truly comes into play.

Togashi could've created Palm as a regular character, who would never have wanted to get involved romantically with Gon, while still keeping her strong feelings of love towards Knov : that kind of characterization would've worked in the story. So why did Togashi make the deliberate choice to make her have romantic feelings towards Gon?

To me, it's because CAA is heavily focused on Killua's feelings towards Gon. This arc is basically about Killua, showing that he wants to do anything he can to help Gon and prove that he's worthy to stay by his side. For the first time in the entire manga, we are allowed to see Killua's feelings. From the "Gon you are light" scene, to him willing to die by his side, Killua's character arc in CAA is one where he does everything he can for Gon, because he loves Gon.

To emphasize those feelings, Togashi needed a character that could act as a catalyst, making Killua question his feelings, and to me, that's what Palm's character is about. Togashi needed that character to act as a "rival" towards Killua, so that he could fully explore his feelings, and so that we, as the audience, could understand where Killua stands.

To Killua, Palm is this crazy psycho that asked his best friend (and probably crush) on a date. We saw Killua act rather hostile towards Palm, especially when she asked Gon out on a date. Killua believes that Gon and Palm are somewhat close, if not romantically involved, and since he's questioning if he's worthy to stay next to Gon, he thinks that Palm is more important to Gon than him.

Before the Palace Invasion, Killua notices Gon worrying about Palm, and him pretty much wanting to stray from the original plan to be able to save Palm, thus further cementing the idea that Gon cares about Palm a lot, and probaby making Killua feel even more insecure.

Killua's insecurities are further reinforced when he questions whether Gon meant the sentence "let's go" as a friend or as a teammate, and all his self-confidence and feelings of self-worth are crushed when Gon tells him that the whole Kite ordeal has nothing to do with him.

At this moment, Killua feels like he's really no one to Gon. He's been through hell to show his worth, always being at his side, always wanting to be at his side, we saw him contemplating how much Gon means to him multiple times in the arc, and now to him, all his efforts are getting rejected.

And now enters Palm, whom we haven't seen in a LONGGGG time. When Killua sees her, he immediately remembers how much Gon was worried about her before the assault, and he thinks that perhaps, since they went on a date and Gon seemed fairly concerned about her, she can help better than Killua can, because she's Gon's ""romantic partner"" (that's what Killua thinks), so she's more important to Gon. 

And to me, THIS is exactly why Palm was written as having romantic feelings for Gon. For this exact moment, where Killua ponders his place next to Gon. All of the dating stuff, all of the romantic feelings, all of Killua's fears that he's not enough for Gon, all culminated to lead to this moment. The moment where Palm tells Killua that the one that's the most important to Gon is him. Not Palm, not the ""romantic partner"", but him. And that's why Killua is so shocked, because he was questioning his place next to Gon for a while, and now Gon's "love interest" comes in and tells him that he's the one that Gon wants the most in his life.

Palm admits that she's nothing to Gon compared to Killua, and that's a beautiful moment because that's the exact moment where Killua's fears are put at ease. His "rival", whom Killua believes is romantically involved with Gon, reassures him that he's wayyyy more important to Gon than her. 

Making Palm, the character who only wanted romance from Gon, face Killua, who we have seen struggling with his feelings for Gon and for the right to stay by his side, is a deeply symbolic choice from Togashi.

Togashi could have written Palm as Gon's friend, he could've made Palm hang out with Gon platonically while still making Killua jealous, that would've worked too. But he decided to make her have romantic feelings for Gon.

Imagine that Palm was a completely different character, with like I said earlier, only feelings of friendship towards Gon. You can even picture Palm as a man if that helps ! In this scenario, we would see Palm 2.0 hanging out with Gon platonically, but Killua would still feel jealous and threatened by that. Then would come the reassurance scene : Killua would see Palm 2.0, think that she's a much more important friend to Gon, and that she could help him in this situation more than Killua ever could. But Palm 2.0 would comfort him, telling him that out of the two, he's the most important one to Gon. This situation would basically be Palm 2.0 telling Killua that he's a better friend, more important friend than she is. It would be her stepping down her role of "most important friend to Gon" and giving it to Killua.

This scene would basically be Palm 2.0 telling Killua that contrarily to his belief, she was never a threat to his friendship with Gon, because Killua always was the most important.

You see where I'm going with this ? With Palm having not platonic feelings but ROMANTIC feelings for Gon, and putting her in the same situation where she reassures Killua about his place next to Gon, the same thing happens. 

Thematically speaking, it's Palm stepping down her role of "Gon's most important person romantically" and giving it to Killua. Telling Killua that she was never a romantic threat, and that he had no reason to worry because Killua was always the most important person to Gon, even more important than a supposed romantic relationship.

And to me, that’s why Togashi wrote Palm as having romantic feelings for Gon. Because if Palm was written as a character only wanting friendship, and Killua getting jealous of that friendship, the scene where she reassures him it wouldn't have had the same impact. Togashi needed his character to have romantic feelings for Gon to pinpoint exactly the extent of Killua's feelings. He needed a character to mirror Killua's feelings, only for the purpose of having this character reassure Killua when he feels jealous and threatened by their place next to Gon.

THIS WAS SOOOO MESSY i'm so sorry i'm not even sure i argued correctly HAHAHA but i hope this was still kinda clear and that i still have some decent arguments !

Tbh the entire reason I believe Palm is a foil for Killua's feelings is because of this wonderful post, which I truly recommend reading (it makes so much more sense than my reply LOL)

But thank you for asking for my opinion on this matter, I'm glad I was able to talk about it !!

[purkinje-effect]

The Anatomy of Melancholy, 75: Paper Weight

Table of Contents. Third Instar, Chapter  6. Go to previous. Go to next. TWs: Religion, joint issues, diet/appetite weirdness, brief transphobia adjacent anxiety, minor dehumanizing ghoul treatment. Uh. Not in that order. A slightly longer groundwork chapter, and continuing evidence that I am, in fact, criminally insane. [Updated 2021.07.12.]

“...[F]ixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.” -- Orwell’s 1984

______________________________

‘Choly woke to Sticks gently stroking at his long dark shock-streaked hair. He could not discern the time of day without any light sneaking in around the edges of curtains, and recalled their inn room did not have windows. The ghoul drew his attention back to him with a drowsy smile.

“Ready to start the day?”

To resist the draw to curl up into Sticks, ‘Choly stretched out with a yawn, only to jerk his eyes open. He laid on his back for some time. In the night, one of his shoulders had separated and dragged his neck out of alignment.

“--I’m not ready, but let’s start anyway. Angel, be a dear and turn the lights on, please.“

The Mister Handy puffed to life again. Reignition of its pilot light cast dim outlines to the space. Unveiling the Burlington glass fixtures returned the room to unnatural illumination by that strange red-green light which ‘Choly disliked intuiting as gold. By the time Angel had completed the task, Sticks had thrown himself out of bed to dress.

‘Choly managed to sit up, and palpated at his errant joints, using the mindful pressure of his fingertips to coax things back into place. Not dislocating his fingers in the process required what little focus he could summon without coffee or his reinforced gloves, but he could barely move let alone think straight with the strumming stitches radiating through his arm and neck. He squirmed inside, knowing he couldn’t help but force Sticks to bear witness to the strangled hisses and cartilaginous pops.

Angel presented ‘Choly a can, which he accepted half-awake. He put on his glasses one-handed.

“A canister of fresh water to start your day, Sir? I’ve only got the one at present, if you’d like to split it. More is on the way.”

“Would you be able to open it...?”

“I have no sharp implements,” it apologized.

“Give me that.”

Sticks snatched it playfully and held it between his knees while he reattached his Pip-Boy and left hand. He hadn’t quite got to buttoning his shirt just yet. He slipped the glove off his mechanical prosthetic, and produced a sort of multitool from the armature of the region analogous to the metacarpal bones. As the ghoul made use of the folding implement, ‘Choly watched the hand’s exposed mechanical parts in motion, intimating tendons and ligaments, not always attached to something resembling a bone. A dull pop liberated the can’s lid. Sticks took a few swigs and handed it to ‘Choly helpfully, before hiding the tool again and slipping the glove back on. He moved on to finishing with his shirt so he could tie his bow-tie blind, humor to his breath.

‘Choly simply sat there and observed Sticks at length, nearly altogether forgetting gratitude or thirst. Words failed him. Sticks ran his right hand over his one surviving curl of hair. The blond ghoul noticed him staring and sat up straighter.

“What?”

“A pocket knife? That’s allowed?” He kept turning his neck, head held at deliberate angles, seeking that last tweak of alignment his cervical vertebrae wouldn’t yield him.

“See’s never asks me to show my hand,” he shrugged. “Half the time, they don’t even notice it’s not flesh.”

“This isn’t about your hand, and you know it.”

“Hey now. They’re fine with utensils. It’s got to be scarier than a butter knife to make them skittish. Really, though. Don’t mention it. It’d probably risk ‘em taking my whole hand, especially now that it’s wired into this thing.”

Sticks huffed a bit. Angel leapt to assist when his neckwear wouldn’t cooperate.

“Oh, do let me help you with that, Sir.”

“Thanks, chap. Hard to do without a mirror.”

“I brought in a hand mirror.” Unappeased, ‘Choly gestured to Angel for his hairbrush, which he set to using with his head dipped between his knees, desperate to couple the inversion of gravity with cadence of his brushing. Once he sat up again, he looked to Sticks. “Which, would it be all right if we brought in some things from the car? I figure that even if we get lucky today, we’ve paid for a week, so we may as well stay for a week. No sense in rushing things. Might miss something, if we do.”

Sticks tilted his head.

“I could warm to that. What all would you even need to bring in, though?”

“Little things,” he reassured a little too quickly. “Toiletries. Some spare clothes. Nothing too elaborate.”

“I don’t see why not.” He gripped his own knees. “Let’s knock that out. After, we can head to breakfast. Now. You want my help with your corset and stuff?”

‘Choly’s shoulders folded in as he worked at unbuttoning his shirt. His reservations came not from distrust but self-consciousness. Despite having partook in several kinds of sex acts with him already, he still preferred that the ghoul only see him naked from behind, if at all. But, he didn’t care to parse any selfishness or perversion in the offer: he wanted Sticks’s help. He’d be a hypocrite, anyway, to find fault in Sticks’s own enjoyment of the activity, when his very physiology provided the same passive delight for ‘Choly. He pulled the corset to him, and removed his shirt so he could hook the busks. Only then, holding it up against his front, did he relent to receiving help stringing the back. The more pieces Sticks helped him into, the more straightened out and held in place he felt. More clearly than usual, he craved the full-body orthotics set, in the expectation that with them he might feel normal again. Functional again. In any sense. In every.

He objected, mostly internally, that his brain would thrust heavy self-reflection on him so soon after waking. The idea of returning to bed enticed him again. No. Sooner than do so in the bathroom mirror, he pinned up a french twist blind and loose.

The two finished off the water before leaving the room.

They first stopped at the restrooms, where Angel waited just outside. ‘Choly flinched at the doorway, only to scold himself for even thinking he shouldn’t use the men’s room. He remained aware of others the entire time, relieved to go unnoticed and unremarkable. He insisted to himself that the night before had been a fluke.

Exiting the mall made ‘Choly wish he’d brought his visor inside. The garage’s luminosity wasn’t significantly greater than inside the mall, but the shift in hues to natural lighting pulsated in his right-sided cervical migraine. He didn’t think he’d gotten used to the limited color spectrum indoors so soon, yet here he was, nearly thinking seeing any color besides red, green, and gold signified he was seeing colors which didn’t exist. The intensity with which he saw cyan, magenta, and even white, he approximated to an aura migraine. The edges of his vision felt over-illuminated and blurry. If this sensitivity overload would take place every time he adjusted to and from Burlington glass lighting, he decided he would avoid going inside and out with any frequency for the remainder of their stay.

In the garage, mostly only the children paid any attention to the trio. So early in the morning, many inhabitants shared cinder block campfires to prepare community breakfast. On the way to Little Boy Blue, they passed through delectable aromas of sweet breads and pan seared meat.

Sticks opened the trunk for ‘Choly. Once he could tell ‘Choly intended to make use of Angel’s storage compartment to carry his things inside, he tossed in few of his own clothes too. He smirked at yet another of ‘Choly’s outdated behaviors:

“You packed like you’re on vacation.”

“A vacation with a purpose, perhaps. I’m grateful for it, though. It doesn’t seem this hotel has complimentary soaps.”

Sticks snickered.

“To broach a veritable elephant,” Angel stressed, “I must point out that while we may be booked for a week’s lodging here, you only have four Melancholia remaining, Mister Carey. In addition to our primary goal, we should stay on the lookout for toothpaste and mouthwash today. And we may no longer require them for first aid, but do recall that Stimpaks are the most important part of that recipe.”

Stimpaks. 'Choly paled at his oversight.

“Surely four of those things will get you through the week,” Sticks muttered. “You can’t swear off food now, with the biggest restaurant cluster in New England at the other end of the building.”

“...If I can help it.”

Sticks puffed up.

“Not if I can help it.”

The Mister Handy and chemist turned down the invitation to argument.

On their way back inside, ‘Choly saw Maury eating with a group of other settlers. He didn’t want to interrupt their meal, but he still waved. When See’s screened them, ‘Choly showed them Angel’s compartment again. Everything passed muster with security, albeit thoroughly rifled through. ‘Choly welcomed their return to the clear, dark uniformity of the mall interior’s red-green glow. They dropped off their things at the room, then went into the mall proper.

The Concourse seemed to only just be waking up by this hour. Most walked southward like them. Only half the stores looked open for business. ‘Choly looked to his Pip-Boy for the time. Just after nine. He accepted it and slouched as comfortably as he could atop Angel.

He figured most of the people headed to the food court were Laners, while the rest were probably visitors, or at least lived outside the mall. Along the way, he people-watched, eventually making a visual distinction between Laners and everyone else less by their routine and more through their attire. The fashion of mall denizens seemed to posit some commixture of Irish crochet, beaded silk, and embroidered tweed, bakelite and astrakhan, plus-fours and long trailing skirt hems, chemisettes and dickeys tethered with layers of scarves and shawls.

More people packed into the boisterous food court for breakfast than had for dinner. Even getting to the counter with the shortest line took patience, with hundreds seeking their first meals. Sticks ordered himself carrot pancakes, then turned to ‘Choly.

“Are you sure I can’t interest you in breakfast? With the lines like this, I’m not ordering twice.”

Fatigued lyric traced his reply as he patted at Angel’s storage compartment to retrieve his Billerica Golf Course mug with a smile:

“You can interest me in a cup of coffee.”

The ghoul impatiently resigned to a smaller order than he’d liked, and flashed his inn room key fob to net a discount. He requested a plate from Angel, and took it and ‘Choly’s mug to hold out for the server, who confirmed, yes maple syrup, black no sugar, before plating up as requested. Twenty-seven pulls lighter, Sticks let Angel locate their seat with its higher passive senses.

‘Choly sat with his coffee warming his gloved hands for some time, content to let the aromatic steam roll over his face while he watched Sticks dig in with knife and fork. Angel set a Melancholia bottle on the table. Eventually, Sticks’s bites slowed, and he stopped to finish chewing. He cut off a forkful and held it out with a cupped hand beneath, optimistic the craving spurred ‘Choly’s attention.

“The maple syrup makes up for it being carrot.”

‘Choly eyed it. Sooner than admit due impropriety, he let him stuff the bite in his mouth. He had expected the syrup and apple compote to provide all the sweetness, but the finely grated root vegetable mixed into the batter contributed both sweet and savory. Against his better judgment, to quash any question altogether, he mooched a second bite as well with interest.

“Don’t you like carrot?”

“...Blueberries aren’t in season,” Sticks eventually smiled. “Now, I’d happily split these with you... or are you actually happy with that damn silt flour smoothie?”

“I’m only happy with my Melancholia, in that it doesn’t upset my stomach.” He opened it with his reinforced gloves, and thought to himself, This batch isn’t even cherry. It’s mint. “If you want my full faculties, you’ll have me with Mentats, Melancholia, and a cup of black coffee.”

Brow raised, Sticks frowned into his plate as he scrutinized where to cut off his next bite.

“Far be it for me to come between you and your faculties.”

Angel used the dish station at the far end of the food court to rinse their plate, mug, and utensils. Then, they got to skimming stores.

Beginning just outside the Customs House, they poked around any open store which appeared to carry armor or apparel. ‘Choly went by cane for the most part, and tried not to let interesting garments distract him or his cash from his goal. He wasn’t about to spend anything until he knew the price tag on liberating the leather orthotics from whoever might have them. Neither their descriptions nor the product photos in the catalogue produced results.

In one shop, Sticks unhelpfully described the item to the clerk, who immediately pointed them to an array of girdles and brassieres. Beet red and speechless, ‘Choly had to nearly shove away the salesmanship, no matter the young man’s encouragement or respect. Sticks didn’t know whether to find ‘Choly’s reaction revealing or amusing.

They passed crossway between the main entrance and Sutter Grove, only for ‘Choly to stop cold. Like some strange airport reunion, a loud, excited group of Laners fawned over a black woman with a shoulder-length white bob--white all the more stark in contrast to the red-green golden mall-sea. When Sticks noticed ‘Choly had stopped, he backtracked, eyes on the woman sooner than him.

“You need me to help you up on Angel?”

“Such accolades. What do you suppose she means to them?”

“From the look of her, she must travel a lot. They probably just haven’t seen her in a real long time. It’s not important. They’re going to Burlington Glassworks. They won’t have what we’re here for. Now come on.”

Head askew, ‘Choly watched the gaggle drag the overwhelmed yet pleasant woman across the Concourse and to the lighting store.

“I... I want to go in there.”

“Didn’t think you were particularly religious, but whatever. We can take a break and play tourist or somethin’.”

‘Choly almost objected, but figured he’d understand if only he satisfied his curiosity. If he recalled anything from the time before he’d stepped foot in the United States, he knew with certainty he’d been raised to abhor religious observance. At least, outwardly...

Myriad strange shapes the luminescent space, but the motif repeated in the glass art filled with glowing golden red-green fluid, that the neck swirled and looped around the body, then somehow reentered it. Bulbs were hung by these loops from the ceiling, some in knotted strings, while most other bulbs rested in metal fixtures reminiscent of egg cups. If not for the artistic shapes and the hue of light they cast, ‘Choly and Sticks almost considered it like stepping into the lighting department of a hardware store.

“Hierosacristan Fresnel!” The group begged, both in English and what ‘Choly could only presume was French. “Hierosacristan, tell us of your orbit!”

The staff had abandoned their posts in fascination of their visitor. Some showered her with sunflowers. Here, ‘Choly could see the woman wore an ornately embroidered shawl, fur-lined metal armor, and an all-black bodysuit. The woman could only oblige her admirers with a humility strained smile. A dozen or so stone park benches furnished the deeper half of the store, in two neat rows facing the back wall. ‘Choly sat at the last bench to watch, transfixed. Begrudgingly, Sticks joined him, and Angel, behind them.

As she spoke, Fresnel’s deep, silvery voice alternated between English and French, limiting ‘Choly and Sticks’s full comprehension. Her audience seemed more captivated by anything she didn’t say in English.

When she told them, “Qu’Atom vous garde,” they mirrored it in kind. ‘Choly filled in any gaps in the language barrier with presumptions of what little he knew of Orthodoxy.

“Much of my year I have studied in Thomaston... XXXXXXXXXX I wandered the Nashua ruins a bit before coming to the Lane proper... XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX I come to greet the granite... I must travel West before I return to Five Sisters. To report my findings to Grand Mother Skwodovska. But, I savor a leisurely return. My discoveries dictate my orbit. XXXXXXXXXX I Winter at the Lane for the first time... XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX ”

At some point in her speech, she took notice of their visitors. She broke away from sermonizing for the dozen or so practically clutching for her attention, to approach. ‘Choly straightened, expecting her to scold him. But she bowed to Sticks with grace, and held his hand in both her own. The ghoul fell speechless when she smiled up at him.

“What a blessing, that one of Atom’s beloved attends us. I never get the chance to speak with any Undying.”

Sticks let her hold his gloved hand, too, and laid on his charm.

“I’m impressed at our timing. We happen to be at Ant Lane right when such a highly esteemed Child of Atom has popped in.”

Again struggling with humility, she withdrew to stand. Taken aback by the sight of Angel, she hemmed into her fist.

“Forgive my start from the robot. One of my past orbits took me to the Commonwealth, and since my visit to the Cambridge Polymer Labs, I haven’t much liked the company of Mister Handies.”

“Cambridge!” Angel blandished. “Such worldliness.”

She appreciated that it did not take exception with her.

“My brothers and sisters show our devotion in a commitment to travel.”

“Forgive my stupidity,” ‘Choly asked, voice cracking, “but what exactly is a hiero...?”

The intense, robust woman half-sat on the back of the next bench to form her reply. Up close, ‘Choly could make out her face tattoo, of many concentric rings, emanating outward from one eye. Sooner than wonder what it signified, he could only imagine how much it must have hurt. The white bob was a wig.

“You speak Keb? No?” She became more particular in her words. “Among the Children of Atom is an order of scribes, historians, cartographers. We are the Daughters of Radon. We hail from the Rock of Ages. We document and research Atom’s holiest substances, such that any of Atom’s children can safely trace a path and greet everything She has touched. The rank bestowed of Daughters of Radon is Sacristan, keeper of holy spaces. Hierosacristans are the Daughters’ Zealots.”

‘Choly strained to follow along, teetering between looking lost and unintentionally judgmental.

“What interest, then, in granite? I heard correctly, that you intend to greet it? It’s very pretty, but really, I want to understand what has you all so enchanted. Is there correlation between granite and these glass lights?”

Fresnel smiled broad and beaming, nearly sarcastic in a way.

“A visitor from the Commonwealth. I see. The answer is Atom’s touch. We concern ourselves not just with nuclear bodies, but with large sources of granite, marble, and limestone. Anyone could observe these structures, both man-made and still-buried, but it takes the devotion of Daughters to listen to their histories.” A sigh and slouch announced her travel weariness. She pointed above them, to the hanging glass. “Everything is a vessel. We carry our world-soul. Nuclear bodies carry the Holy Light of Atom. And certain stones can carry recorded memories of the worlds which formed this one through Division. The Daughters are committed to documenting these memories, so that the Children can celebrate everything from the past which went into the creation of the present.”

‘Choly fumbled as carefully as he could. It fascinated him, that it seemed more and more that religious devotion tied directly into the creation and maintenance of the increasingly supernatural glowing glass fixtures--let alone that it had anything to do with radioactive material.

No wonder they appreciate Sticks. “And you... listen to the granite here?”

Sticks poorly hid his annoyance with a shift in posture and a grunt.

“Most granite is quite loud. The granite here... whispers.” Fresnel admitted. “The Children often call this place The Quiet Granite. You’re very new, and so eager to learn of Atom’s Kingdom... Are you here to let in Her Holy Light?”

“Until I stepped foot in here, I had no idea this place was a church. I know it sounds stupid, but I wanted to come in to see the lights up close. I’m fascinated that a substance could sustain luminescence without external excitation.”

Though his admission dulled her enthusiasm, his verbiage still held her interest.

“I’m not directly involved in glassblowing, so I know very little of it. The Glow is most remarkable, n’est-ce pas? Even if you’re here merely to marvel at our blessed work, you can still take a piece with you. You should speak with my brothers and sisters here. If you’re more than a scholar or tourist, the local Confessor can direct you to our body of scripture as well. I’m far better suited to geography than sermons.” Fresnel’s attention warmed back to Sticks. “Be no stranger to our space...”

“Sticks.”

“Be no stranger, Sticks.” She smiled, mirthful. “You and your odd friend here are welcome here.”

Before the game of Twenty Questions could continue, Fresnel stood to pat Sticks’s hand... and the top of ‘Choly’s head. The chemist frowned as she excused herself.

“Fresnel spoke directly with you,” a devotee said, behind them. They looked over their shoulders at the nervous man. “Is there anything I can do for you, Undying?”

“It’s Sticks,” he repeated, quickly growing tired of it. “We’re sightseeing, you could call it. I think this fella wants a souvenir.”

The man looked ‘Choly over and nodded, motioning for them to follow him to the counter. He produced an egg-crate tray of walnut sized glass baubles, and picked them up to swirl them around in visual demonstration.

“We’re blessed to meet a Hierosacristan.” He poorly contained his delight. “I wonder if she would permit that I be in her caravan when her orbit carries her onward.”

“Where is she headed next?” ‘Choly asked, moreso making conversation than wishing to know.

“The standard path for all caravans from Ant Lane to Burlington is Route 89, straight through the mountains. But, she mentioned traveling West. The Daughters of Radon follow the orbit of their heart. She may intend another orbit yet uncharted. --Forgive my gushing. You’re interested in a prayer armillary?”

“How much are they?”

The potentially inappropriate question caught in ‘Choly’s throat.

“Fifty-one pulls.”

“You don’t happen to take cash, do you?”

“Certainly. Our caravans do trade with more than just Ant Lane.” The Child picked up the tray’s edge to look at a note on the side. “One hundred fifty dollars.”

So deep in, he didn’t feel like he could say no thank you and just walk away. Not that he wanted to walk away empty handed after such a bizarre interaction.

“Tell me more about them. What makes them glow?”

“There are two aspects to Burlington’s glass artistry. We’re beholden to conceal our craft, but it’s perfectly safe for all Atom’s Children, blessed with the Endurance to withstand Her Light or no.“

In the remark, ‘Choly stifled a shiver at the possibility that the entire mall might be a religious settlement.

“The craftsmanship is remarkable.” His voice cracked. “How long do they last?”

“Years, if they must. But these smallest vessels are intended ephemeral: We encourage that you use them to seal a prayer, then shatter it someplace consequential to disperse the good will into the universe.”

“Are they... still safe if broken?”

“They are not grenades. And to drink its contents would be ill advised, foremost on account of the broken glass.”

“I would never have considered the fluid potable,” ‘Choly lied, having had the thought gifted him. He shakily produced the requested cash, and the Child let him pick one of the egg-like baubles. “Thank you.”

“Anything for you?” His beseeching, bleary eyes suggested more than simple commerce. “Do you require any arrangements? Any accommodations of any kind?”

Sticks eyed the tray with near disappointment, and rocked a bauble around in its cup with one finger.

“...You said they were fifty-one?”

“Take one, gladly!”

Feigning pleasantry, he picked one for himself. It exasperated ‘Choly that Sticks had not attempted to influence the price tag on his trinket, but only his frigid shoulders said as much.

“Thank you. Get to take a piece of this place with me, then.”

“But of course!” The Child nod-bowed to them both. “Qu’Atom vous garde.”

They mirrored the nod, caught in the uncertainty of pronunciation, and the uncertainty of appropriateness that they repeat it back.

‘Choly held his prayer armillary at his chest as they exited the Glassworks. He had no intention of ever break it. The thought crossed him as he glanced down at it, that he could place it in Angel’s storage for use as a perpetual light source, like the light to a glove compartment.

“...Angel,” he asked it, spellbound by the strange, vaguely oily, fluoresceinesque fluid, “you’ve got French programming, haven’t you? That was French, yes? What was she saying?”

“I believe it’s French, Sir. At least, partly. If I’m to understand Miss Fresnel, these Children of Atom worship gamma radiation... as well as something they regard as ‘foreign.’ ”

“Cultists, basically.” Sticks snorted.

'Choly didn’t care whether the Children’s religious motivations made any rational, scientific sense. It still burned him, that they’d given Sticks his trinket for free. The ghoul handed him his with only a vague smirk.

“I, you didn’t want one, then?” He had only starry-eyed gratitude. “Are you sure?”

“Why would I? I let them give it to me so they’d knock it off and let us leave.” The ghoul blurted out an abrupt chuckle and slung an arm around ‘Choly’s shoulders, to grip him a little too forcefully. He kept his voice down, cracked lips inches from ‘Choly’s ear. “Don’t make me go back in there. I get enough of that from you.”

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

A/N: I anglicized the maiden name of Polish-French Marie Skłodowska-Curie, in the expectation that oral tradition would follow phonetically. (I also wanted to differentiate the Grand Mother from both Mother Curie III and FO4′s Curie, while still nodding to the historical figure.)

A/N: I’ve thus far gone all my life not knowing it’s pronounced Freh-nel or Fray-nel. Even my science teachers all pronounced it Fresnel. Hm.

Go to Next »»»

[padawanlost]

What was your take on Dave Filoni's speech on the Duel of Fates & Qui-Got Jinn?

I’m surprised people were shocked by that. I mean, he didn’t say anything new. 

His take is the same take that has been explored since TPM came out. I don’t know if people shocked by it are new fans who weren’t around when the movies came out or didn’t have access to the interviews/EU or of if they are in deep denial about the characters portrayed on screen.

“What’s at stake is really how Anakin’s going to turn out, because Qui-Gon is different than the rest of the Jedi.”

FACT since 1999. We know Qui-Gon was a ‘rebel’ since TPM came out. He’s even known as a ‘maverick jedi’ for that very reason, with multiple novels and comics exploring that side of him. Hell, he was Dooku’s apprentice, a guy known for being one of the Council’s biggest critics even when he was still a Jedi Master.

“Obi-wan:  Do not defy the council, Master, not again. Qui-Gon: I shall do what I must, Obi-Wan. Obi-wan:  If you would just follow the code, you would be on the council.” The Phantom Menace, 1999.

You get that in the movie, and Qui-Gon is fighting because he knows that he’s the father that Anakin needs, because Qui-Gon hasn’t given up on the fact that Jedi are supposed to care and love and that that’s not a bad thing. 

FACT since 1999. 

He was angry that the Jedi Master would dismiss him so abruptly in favor of the boy, but he realized, too, the depth of Qui-Gon’s passion when he believed in something. Training this boy to be a Jedi was a cause Qui-Gon championed as he had championed no other in Obi-Wan’s memory. He did not do so to slight his protégé. He did so because he believed in the boy’s destiny. Obi-Wan understood. Who could say? Perhaps this time Qui-Gon was right. Perhaps Anakin Skywalker’s training was a cause worth fighting for. [Terry Brooks. The Phantom Menace – published in 2000]

That Filoni himself reinforces in 2013 during an interview about TCW’s season 5: “I’ve always felt that one of Anakin’s downfalls, like it’s never that Anakin was innately going to be evil, but the people around him, the Jedi, in their lack of compassion, in being so selfless that they almost forgot to care.” Dave Filoni

The rest of the Jedi are so detached and they’ve become so political that they’ve really lost their way and Yoda starts to see that in the second film. But, Qui-Gon is ahead of them all and that’s why he’s not part of the council, so he’s fighting for Anakin. 

FACT since 1999. 

“With Episode I, I didn’t want to tell a limited story. I had to go into the politics and the bigger issues of the Republic and that sort of thing. I had to go into bigger issues.” George Lucas

In The Phantom Menace one of the Jedi Council already knows the balance of The Force is starting to slip, and will slip further. It is obvious to this person that The Sith are going to destroy this balance. On the other hand a prediction which is referred to states someone will replace the balance in the future. At the right time a balance may again be created, but presently it is being eroded by dark forces. All of this shall be explained in Episode 2, so I can’t say any more!- CUT interview 09/07/99?

“The first film starts with the last age of the Republic; which is it’s getting tired, old, it’s getting corrupt. There’s the rise of the Sith, who are now becoming a force, and in the backdrop of this you have Anakin Skywalker: a young boy who’s destined to be a very significant player in bringing balance back to the Force and the Republic. George Lucas - from the American ANH VHS tape in the making of Episode II in the 2000 release.

[The Jedi] sort of persuade people into doing the right thing but their job really isn’t to go around fighting people yet there are now used as generals and they are fighting a war and they are doing something they really weren’t meant to do.They are being corrupted by this war, by being forced to be generals instead of peacemakers. – George Lucas for E! Behind the Scenes - Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith

That’s one of the few times in history when the bad guys were very clearly delineated for us. There really was a fight for survival going on between pretty clearly good guys and bad guys. The story being told in Star Wars is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not. . – George Lucas

That’s why it’s the duel of the fates, it’s the fate of this child and depending on how this fight goes, Anakin, his life is going to be dramatically different. 

If good and evil are mixed things become blurred - there is nothing between good and evil, everything is grey. In each of us we have balanced these emotions, and in the Star Wars saga the most important point is balance, balance between everything. It is dangerous to lose this. – George Lucas

"So, Qui-Gon loses, of course, so the father figure, he knew what it meant to take this kid away from his mother when he had an attachment and he’s left with Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan trains Anakin at first out of a promise he made to Qui-Gon, not because he cares about him. Obi-Wan trains Anakin at first out of a promise he makes to Qui-Gon, not because he cares about him.

FACT since 1999. We literally see this in the movie.

He stopped his pacing and stared momentarily at nothing, thinking of Qui-Gon Jinn, his Master, his teacher, his friend. He had failed Qui-Gon in life. But he would carry on his work now, honoring him in death by fulfilling his promise to train the boy, no matter what. [Terry Brooks. The Phantom Menace]

When they find Anakin on Tatooine, he says, “I feel like we’ve found another useless lifeform.” He’s comparing Anakin to Jar Jar. And he’s saying, “This is a waste of time. Why are we doing this? Why do you see importance in these creature like Jar Jar Binks and this 10 year old boy? This is useless.”

FACT since 1999.

So he’s a brother to Anakin, eventually, but he’s not a father figure.  

“He is like my brother. I cannot do it.” Obi-wan Kenobi in Revenge of the Sith.

This, then, is Obi-Wan and Anakin: They are closer than friends. Closer than brothers. Though Obi-Wan is sixteen standard years Anakin’s elder, they have become men together. Neither can imagine life without the other. The war has forged their two lives into one.  [Matthew Stover. Revenge of the Sith]

[With Ahsoka] I wanted to develop a character who would help Anakin settle down. He's a wild child after [Attack of the Clones]. He and Obi Wan don't get along. So we wanted to look at how Anakin and Ahsoka become friends, partners, a team. When you become a parent or you become a teacher you have to become more respnsible. I wanted to force Anakin into that role of responsibility, into that juxtaposition. I have a couple of daughters so I have experience with that situation. I said instead of a guy let's make her a girl. Teenage girls are just as hard to deal with as teenage boys are. - George Lucas

That’s a failing for Anakin, he doesn’t have the family that he needs. He loses his mother in the next film. He fails on this promise that he made to his mother that 'I will come back and save you.' So he’s left completely vulnerable and Star Wars is ultimately about family.

FACT since 2002.

“Love people. That’s basically all Star Wars is.” — George Lucas

So, that moment in that movie, which a lot of people diminish as a cool lightsaber fight, but it’s everything that the entire three films in the prequels hangs on, is that one particular fight and Maul serves his purpose and at that point died before George brought him back.But he died, showing you how the Emperor is completely self-serving. He doesn’t care, he’s using people and now he’s gonna use this child.

FACT since 1999.

Each Sith has an apprentice, but the problem was, each Sith Lord got to be powerful. And the Sith Lords would try to kill each other because they all wanted to be the most powerful. So in the end they killed each other off, and there wasn’t anything left. So the idea is that when you have a Sith Lord, and he has an apprentice, the apprentice is always trying to recruit somebody to join him — because he’s not strong enough, usually — so that he can kill his master. That’s why I call it a Rule of Two — there’s only two Sith Lords. There can’t be any more because they kill each other. They’re not smart enough to realize that if they do that, they’re going to wipe themselves out. Which is exactly what they did.” George Lucas

Everything that Filoni said has been part of the lore and movies for 20 years now, so I really don’t get why people are so shocked by it. Also, context people! People have been using Disney canon to ‘prove’ Filoni wrong but these movies and the clone wars were written with long before Disney came into play. Filoni, like so many of us, grew up with Star Wars belonging to George and that colors how he look at the franchise and the characters. And don’t get me started on the ‘the EU doesn’t matter’ argument because it absolutely does. 

“And then George Lucas tells me one day, ‘We’re gonna put the Mandalorians in the Clone Wars.'  And I go 'Oh boy. That’s interesting. Cuz, lemme show you this.'  And I move this big pile of material over and I said 'This is everything. This is everything that the Mandalorians are right now.’ And so George and I do what we always do when we come across something that I know exists well in the EU, we go over it all.“ Now, all the history of Mandalore you prior to The Clone Wars it does exists. It absolutely exists.” — Dave Filoni

There’s actual behind the scenes footage of Filoni and George Lucas working on The Clone Wars and checking the EU to keep everything as cohesive as possible. The guy literately had thousands of conversations with George Lucas – the guy who actually created Star Wars – about these characters but somehow people are now trashing him because he said they should’ve know already?

Look, anyone who knows me know I’m not a Filoni stan but I believe in respecting people’s work and giving credit where credit is due even when I don’t agree with them 100%. If they don’t like his take, fine, that’s their right but please tone down the outrage fest because it’s entirely unjustified (and, to be completely honest, a little desperate for validation). He’s an actual person, not a fictional character there for you to hate or stan.

There’s a lot I don’t agree with it in this life but I don’t go around attacking real people and their jobs. But maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised, considering the people going after Filoni are the same people who have not problem whatsoever with star wars authors receiving death and rape threats.

[bestworstcase]

anyways race to the spire is my favorite episode of season three but i think in terms of cassandra’s villain arc and the cass/zhan tiri manipulation dynamic, once a handmaiden is the strongest.

fictional portrayals of “master manipulators” / the chessmaster archetype often get two things wrong: 1) they depict successful manipulators as meticulous planners, and 2) have them emotionally fall apart if their plans fall through, often by becoming enraged and violent. the second is not unrealistic per se, but it does shove the character out of the “chessmaster” category and into the “garden variety emotional abuser” one for me. 

the first, however, i think speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way skillful, chessmaster-level manipulation works. there is no plan, and there shouldn’t be a plan. people are much too complicated and unpredictable for any plan built around manipulation to reliably succeed; thus truly successful manipulators have a clearly defined goal, a solid understanding of human nature, and an exceptional ability to improvise. this is zhan tiri to a T, and once a handmaiden showcases this more than any other episode in season three.

let’s break it down.

it’s difficult to say whether zhan tiri intended for cass to find the mirror shard or not. it would have been good for her if cass never saw the missing piece of that memory, because then cass would have continued to trust her; on the other hand, zhan tiri spun the fallout of cass finding the mirror shard to her benefit so effortlessly that it’s conceivable she prepared for it ahead of time. in the end, i think i come down on the side of zhan tiri just didn’t care, because by now she knows cassandra so well that it honestly did not matter whether cass found the shard or not. +1 for zhan tiri. 

so here is our starting position. cass realizes that zhan tiri lied to her and manipulated the situation in gothel’s cottage, and she’s furious. she storms up to her throne room to confront zhan tiri about it. what happens?

not only is zhan tiri not bothered, she seems almost pleased that cassandra has finally figured it out. instead of explaining herself as cassandra initially demands (“Do you want to explain to me how this got here?!”) or trying to make up an excuse, she calmly waits for cassandra to finish ranting. her only interjection is actually to goad cass into following the evidence to its natural conclusion:

CASS: Back at Gothel’s, I thought Rapunzel was hiding the one memory that proved my mother loved me.

ZHAN TIRI: And...?

CASS: And you manipulated that memory, didn’t you?! You took this piece out. You tricked me into abandoning Rapunzel!

zhan tiri also physically waits for cassandra to approach her, implicitly positioning herself as the one with all the power in this scene. note her relaxed posture here, also:

then, instead of answering the accusation directly, zhan tiri calmly flips it around to be about cass instead and again positioning herself as an authority, someone who knows cass, and what’s good for cass, better than cassandra herself: “Perhaps. Or perhaps I merely pushed you to become what you were always meant to be.”

this reaction lays the foundation for everything else zhan tiri does in this episode. she shifts the fulcrum of the conversation such that everything rests on cassandra’s identity rather than zhan tiri’s manipulation. she also reveals her true identity to cass in a manner that implies they are fundamentally alike by visually linking them together.

in race to the spire, both cassandra and rapunzel directly touch zhan tiri without getting any “glimpses” like this, so we can conclude that everything here is something zhan tiri consciously showed to cassandra. things to note: 

1. the line between what is zhan tiri and what is cassandra in this vision is intentionally blurred. is the reaching hand at the beginning zhan tiri attempting to grasp the original ancient power, or is it cassandra claiming the moonstone and emerging from the sundrop’s shadow as the next piece of the sequence would seem to imply? 

2. zhan tiri is depicted as appearing from within cassandra herself, visually implying that cassandra’s inner nature is similar to zhan tiri. this connection is further emphasized by the similar style in which they’re both drawn, silhouetted with glowing white eyes. 

again, the purpose of this is to change the course of the conversation so that it centers around who cassandra is, rather than what zhan tiri has done, and zhan tiri’s argument here is that fundamentally, she and cassandra are The Same. 

cassandra is shocked, and it is at this point that zhan tiri starts to lay on the emotion; switching from tolerant amusement to chiding cassandra: 

ZHAN TIRI: Oh, quit pretending you’re horrified. We’re not so different, you and I. We were both cheated out of our destinies. In fact, we’re more like sisters than you and Rapunzel ever were! We even want the same thing, and we can get it, if you continue to let me help you.

in this little speech, zhan tiri: 1) dismisses cassandra’s fear, casting it as just another lie she’s telling herself that is stopping her from achieving her full potential, 2) leans hard into associating cassandra’s nature with her own, and 3) continues to position herself as not just cassandra’s ally but also her friend—a better friend than she had in rapunzel, even. on the face of it, this may seem a little silly. you may be wondering how zhan tiri could possibly have imagined this would be at all convincing to cassandra. 

but the thing is... zhan tiri clearly doesn’t expect this to be at all convincing to cassandra. her goal here isn’t for cassandra to suddenly be all, “you’re right, ancient evil demon who’s been stringing me along for months, we ARE the same.” it’s to provoke cassandra into having an identity crisis. 

and it works.

see, the thing is, as soon as cassandra found that mirror shard, it was game over for zhan tiri’s ability to lie to her effectively. the breach of trust was just too egregious. but rather than cling to her old strategies even though they’re no longer functional (as she might do if she were a ‘planning’ manipulator with the inflexibility that implies) or fly into a rage and attempt to force cass to do what she wants (as the possessed-cass theory anticipated), zhan tiri simply moves seamlessly into a different strategy. 

she knows cassandra. she’s spent months digging into her brain, learning her weaknesses, familiarizing herself with what makes cass tick. she knows exactly how fragile cassandra’s self-justifications are, she knows how insecure cassandra is, knows how difficult it is for cass to be vulnerable and trust people. and she also knows, because she cultivated it, exactly how volatile and dangerous cassandra’s temper is.

so this:

CASS: ...No. No, I’m nothing like you. Just because I’m pursuing my destiny doesn’t make me a bad person!

ZHAN TIRI: [laughing] Doesn’t it?

is cassandra playing directly into zhan tiri’s hands. this is the Ideal Outcome, from zhan tiri’s perspective, of this confrontation, and that is why when cassandra turns around and sprints out of the tower to have a panic attack in the woods, zhan tiri just laughs and calls after her: 

ZHAN TIRI: Run, Cassandra! But you can’t run from who you are!

simply watching the rest of the episode demonstrates precisely why zhan tiri provoked cassandra into having this identity crisis. not only did it divert cassandra’s focus away from zhan tiri’s actions (and motives), it also enabled zhan tiri to exploit her insecurity and volatility in order to get cassandra to snap, destroying corona, forcing an eventual confrontation with rapunzel, and getting zhan tiri one step closer to achieving her ultimate goals. 

now let’s skip forward to the the scene in the tent, which i’m just going to quote in full here: 

ZHAN TIRI: You didn’t really think your plan to make things right would work, did you? 

CASS: What are you doing here? 

ZHAN TIRI: I don’t understand. You could have just gone up to her and apologized, face-to-face.

CASS: I said, get away from me.

ZHAN TIRI: You’ve had more than a few opportunities, and even still you haven’t done it. Why is that? I think—

CASS: Because I’m scared she won’t forgive me!

ZHAN TIRI: You’re right to be scared. I’m guessing she hasn’t told you about Project Obsidian. A weapon that was designed to destroy you. Rapunzel just authorized it yesterday.

CASS: What?! No, I don’t believe you. She would never— 

ZHAN TIRI: You can ask her yourself if you don’t believe me. You might want something to defend yourself against her; this potion may be your only protection against the princess when she inevitably turns on you.

the brilliance of this is that nothing zhan tiri says here is untrue. she is one hundred percent correct in her assessment of cassandra’s actions in corona: pretending to be someone else while doing vague nice things in no way makes up for what she’s done, and she has been purposefully avoiding the riskier but correct course of action ie to plainly apologize and accept whatever comes. 

by playing evil therapist here, zhan tiri goads cassandra into articulating her exact fear that her actions are unforgivable. this is something that cassandra needed to express, instead of continuing to run away from her feelings. it’s a vital moment in her redemption arc, and like zhan tiri’s little speech in the tower it can seem silly or even outright counterproductive for her to push cassandra in this way. after all, she’s literally encouraging cass to go make up with rapunzel for real. 

but what she’s also doing here is drawing cassandra’s subconscious fear into the open and putting that at the forefront of cass’s mind. she is forcing cassandra not just to articulate this fear but to intently feel it, which is the key to everything that comes next. this is why, after cassandra admits that she’s scared, zhan tiri moves right into reinforcing that fear—again, by bringing up objective facts. project obsidian does exist, it was created with the intention of destroying cassandra, and rapunzel did indeed authorize it yesterday. cassandra doesn’t trust zhan tiri anymore, but the beauty of zhan tiri telling the truth now is that cassandra’s doubt becomes a weakness rather than a strength.

because she no longer trusts zhan tiri, cassandra immediately goes out to “prove” zhan tiri “wrong” by doing the opposite of what she appears to want cass to do: from cass’s perspective, it looks like zhan tiri is making up lies to get cass to give up on reconciling with rapunzel and go back to following zhan tiri’s plan, so the most logical thing to do is to try harder to reconcile with rapunzel instead (despite the tiny grain of doubt that convinces her to take the potion anyway, just in case). 

except project obsidian isn’t a lie, which means that cassandra is actually placing herself in an even more vulnerable position, by walking outside and approaching rapunzel so that they’re right next to each other when zhan tiri pulls the cloak away. and then, when the gun is fired, and cassandra finds herself encased in amber it creates this terrible moment for her of zhan tiri was right. and it’s that that makes cassandra snap. and that’s exactly what zhan tiri intended to happen, and that’s the outcome zhan tiri is working towards from the instant cassandra reveals that she found the mirror shard. 

(i think in the end this manipulative strategy wasn’t 100% successful, because zhan tiri’s Ideal Outcome in plus est seems to have been that cassandra really would buy what zhan tiri was selling re: she and zhan tiri being The Same, and that didn’t happen. but again, zhan tiri knows cassandra well enough to see her betrayal coming, and swiftly and easily changes her tactics when it happens.)

so, more than any other episode in season three, i think once a handmaiden shows us not only that zhan tiri is manipulating cass, but how she does so, and just how skilled she is at manipulation in general. it also very neatly avoids the two biggest pitfalls of writing manipulation in stories and in general is a masterclass on how to write it well. 

also here is a bonus picture of zhan tiri and her grapes

in conclusion i love gremlin baby and once a handmaiden isn’t about cassandra flip-flopping it’s about zhan tiri seamlessly switching from manipulation with lies to manipulation with facts and cassandra not being able to keep up with the change of tactics and thus falling victim to them again

[the-headbop-wraith]

3 _ 43 _ Rekindling

  As ever when all was well and right the garage was a cacophony of sounds, from hydraulics humming off the rotary lifts and power drills, to the squeal of impact wrenches. Each car port had one vehicle tended to, with a technician toiling away with the task of repairing or renovating an assigned vehicle. Outside, the carport had more automobiles parked up with numbers slipped onto dashboards.

 On the work floor, Uncle Lance was lending an extra pair of arms to the diagnostic work of a utility van, a lot more teched out than his usual forte of labor. However, a tech savvy guy was left to the task of breezing through the more specialized work of the Bluetooth incorporated hardware. This was not the issue it was brought in for, but double-checking the software was procedural. The undercarriage of the vehicle needed a total overhaul and realignment, a time-consuming task.

  Familiar barking rang through the garage.

“Gimmie a moment,” he grunted, to the operator in the passenger seat. He moved back from the open driver side of the van and cast his view across the open floor of the garage. There he was, a black and white streak trotting around supply carts, head held high like he carried an important purpose. In tow was Vivi, momentarily preoccupied by the phone in her hand, and some sort of satchel was draped over her shoulder.

 “A bit early, are yu?” he posed. Lance took the end of the rag pinned to his pro-wrestler belt and rubbed some of the grim off his fingers.

 “Work rooms locked,” Vivi replied. “Is he in today?”

 “Course.” Lance nodded toward the direction of his office. “Shouldn’t be too long, ‘e’s meetin’ with a ‘‘client’’.” He did air quotes.

 “Ooh,” Vivi groaned. They moved off the work field and relocated to the wall, beside where empty boxes from parts were stacked. “How do they keep finding him?”

 Uncle Lance shrugged. “People post them pics to ‘em nosey sites, and they git the info where’n he works. Ye’know, that societal medium thing.”

 “Social media?”

 Mystery yipped, frowning behind his spectacles. This was very tiresome, tedious, and tumdum.

 “Whatever ya call it. Nuisance, they are – dragging him off work.” Lance grumbled under his breath some phrase, which might’ve been a curse or a Curse. “Think they’re them first to come by, offerin’ this biggest, best deal. Arthur could git ah’lot done with them gadgets, but I understand his privacy is important.”

 Vivi set the satchel down on one of the boxes, and looked the way to the doors to Uncle Lance’s office. “It’s not so much the anonymity he wants, but the builds and designs… they’re not, how do I say? General public applicable.”

 “Applicable-micable,” Lance mumbled.

 “Even the housing for the collar to shoulder hookup is specialized.” Vivi leaned over and rubbed Mystery’s head. “Eventually, he might try for a patent, but the models… even the college is thirsting over the incorporation. Anyway, it’s his business.”

 Lance took a deep breath and sighed. “Yer right. Pisses me off still, need tu get a sign out there. Pisses me off, ‘ee’s too nice.”

 Vivi leaned up rummaged through the satchel, revealing bags with containers. She selected a small box and handed it over. “You seem more, um… gruff than usual. Everything okay?”

 Lance popped the lid and examined the small treat within. “We’re backlogged fer parts, work is comin’ through, and I got fancy suits in mah office tryin’ be clever. An’ I gotta get through the client list, before thay start callin’ me.” When Arthur strolled over, he raised up the little food box. An unspoken gesture fortifying break.

 “I can work some over time,” Arthur began. His arm was not attached. “An hour or something, just to get some of these vehicles prepped for the morning shift.” Lance whipped around to face him fully and squared up his shoulders.

 “Arthur. When five o’clock rolls around, the doors close and the shift winds down.” He waved the food box like a school teacher threatening their student with the ruler, and probably a firm algebra lesson. “No one, and no one ever built a better car while exhausted.”

 Arthur rolled his eyes, “But—”

 “I dun car with how enthused yu are, there’s a chasm in the ground to distinguish between work and recharge time. Your brains a battery, and batteries need recharge – or they get replaced. Aw’right?” Lance jabbed at Arthur’s chest, getting the point across the way Lance did when he was cross. “Down time is still werk, yu werk hard restin’. It’s important.”

 Arthur droned out, “Yus, Uncle Lance.”

 Vivi swooped in and threw an arm around Arthur’s shoulders. “And that’s why we’re gatherin’ at my place. Nothing but ‘no doing’ going on there. No cars, or parts, or pieces to tinker with.” Arthur nearly tumbled but Vivi kept him upright. “Complete bores-ville.”

 A thin smile tugged at Arthur’s cheeks. “Whatever you say.”

 Lance nodded, as if he won an argument – which he probably did. “Yu see to that.” He was about to move away, but leaned back toward the two. “Ah, and no work on the van, either.” Then, he took his leave.

 Arthur stuttered and quivered as his Uncle left. “But… the tools need to be reconditioned, or they might turn against it!” Vivi pulled him by the collar, hauling him off. On the way, she grabbed the satchel off the boxes.

 “You can still look at it. They did a fine job, you’ll never know it was crushed once they get the paint redone—”

 A distant roar bellowed out from the owner’s office, “WHAT?!”

 “Exaggeration!” Vivi hooted back. “C’mon Art, nourishment awaits!”

 Arthur hadn’t gotten his feet squared off or organized, he skipped on his heel as she dragged him across the work room. “Whoa, hold up! Vi! Mercy! Mercy!”

 The Mystery Skulls van sat at the back of Kingsman Mechanics, the location used primarily by delivery and staff parking. In the lead paced Mystery, with Vivi and the screaming Arthur trailing. Once Arthur spied the vehicle with its refurbished side, he magically regained his balance and began leading Vivi by her sweater. He had stars in his eyes, for once.

 “Oh wow, you can hardly tell it was crushed.” Arthur’s phone chimed, and when he stopped dragging the blue girl to fish the device from his vest pocket to check the screen. The message read:

 “WHAT?!??!?!?!?!?!?”

 Arthur coughed and texted back.

 Beside the van, Vivi raised the hand holding the packages. “I dunno, it might be more seamless when we get the new paint done.” She posed beside the side, arms flung high. “I can’t wait to see the design.”

 Arthur cringed down, with a grin. He slipped the phone back into its pocket. “Yeah, can’t wait to show off the new colors. Hmm.” He looked aside.

 Off and away from the two, Mystery was sniffing around the parking lot. Once he gave the clear, he barked and rejoined his colleagues.

 “And look, we got windows in the back now.” Vivi escorted Arthur to the aforementioned updates, showing the windows. “Surprise!”

 Arthur gaped. “Oh, awesome. Now we can witness the angry mob chasing us out of town.”

 Vivi waved a finger. “Don’t forget, the creepy monsters we can’t deal with. Won’t that be fun?”

 “Ooh-dles.” The back doors swept open, and Arthur retreated back five steps.

 Lewis leaned out. “You guys are really loud.”

 Arthur shuffled over to the doors and examined the fitted panel. “One way?”

 “And reinforced,” Vivi chimed. She handed off the satchel to Lewis. “Is it okay?”

 Arthur shrugged. “I’m not opposed to it. Hey Lew.”

 “Sup.”

 Inside the van and along both walls laid long, flat boxes. The label read industrial shelving, and one was already opened. Metal bars and packing sheets littered the floor. On the end of one box, Lewis set out the food cartons from the package.

 “I’m gunna miss the cuvees,” Arthur mentioned. Vivi was busy wiping his hand off with a rag and some ninety-nine, even though he didn’t work on the floor since his meeting.

 “Yeah,” she hummed. “But we lost inventory, and stuff would get crammed in the back and forgotten. We never cleaned them.”

 He toed one of the boxes with his sneaker. “I’ll modify these, so nothing goes flying off while you’re driving.” Lewis had relocated to the front seat and snorted, a little flame curled off his shoulder. “Someone did bring in catering today. You didn’t have to come abduct me.”

 Vivi was already digging in, eating some chicken with sauce. “I wanted to show off the van. And we had to dump it off anyway, so you can load up supplies.” She pulled over the portable ice chest and popped the lid. “You gunna be able to do that on your own?”

 There was no sound, but Arthur did catch the faint movement of Lewis as he glanced over the bench seat. “Yeah, I’ll be good. I didn’t feel like wearing it today.” He leaned over and snagged a drink from the cooler, the ice was melting and the canister damp. “I was replacing a servo and Gally, bless his hamster instincts, decided to gnaw through the circuit board.”

 Vivi nearly choked. “He what?! Is he okay?” Mystery had curled up beside her, and raised his head, horrified. “He’s usually such a good helper.”

 “Yeah. I must’ve fucked up the current or something. He hates that.”

 Mystery rested his chin back onto his paws. Yeah, that sucks. Arthur made that mistake once before, and it turned Galahad into a round fluff.

 While they ate, Vivi pulled out a notepad and wrote out what equipment they could use tonight. Their meetup wasn’t directly off the work lane, there would be movies and not much else going on but ignoring the movies – or complaining how unrealistic the movies were. For the most part, she wanted to discuss more work centered stuff, and perhaps do something about the cluttered closet that held predominately junk stuff. She insisted on using the words ‘stuff’ and ‘things’ without remorse.

 There was likewise a separate list for movies they could stream or buy, or pirate.

 “You can put more down,” Arthur mentioned, as he tried to work through the veggies someone insisted he have. “Uncle’ll help me. He’ll be working late tonight.”

 “Lemme get this straight,” Lewis spoke, “he won’t let you work overtime, but he will.”

 “It’s his business. He can do whatever he wants,” Arthur retorted. “And people had better not start seeing your spooky shadow ‘round. We get enough problems with jackasses showing up trying to get copycrap over my spec designs, I don’t want Spectral Seekers showin’ up, harassing Uncle Lance for a crummy show.”

 Lewis leaned back over the bench seat. “I was bored, okay?”

 “Bored?!” Arthur spat. “Was that today, or when—”

 Mystery barked.

 “Art! It’ll be fine,” Vivi proclaimed. “That was one time, we figured it out. After this, we’re goin’ straight back to my place to set up. Cool?”

 Arthur made a face and deflated. He poked at his food and sipped his drink, but just a bit. He avoided raising his eyes or checking the front of the van. “Hmm. Yeah. We’ll just… the guys need to stay focused.”

 Lewis hunched down in his seat. “I wasn’t tryin’ to be a ‘presence’, it’s hard being all cooped up.”

 Arthur fixed his legs, readjusting them along with his hunched posture. “Sure. I get that.”

 Once everyone got settled, or stewing, Vivi relaxed and resumed poking at a salad. That wasn’t too bad, but she wondered if it was always like this, or when this all started. They were talking again, the progress was slow but any amount she appreciated. Then again, maybe it wasn’t them. Maybe it was… her.

 Before the break could be called a success, Vivi helped Arthur bring down one of the boxes packed with equipment and stowed it in the van. The spare bike was stashed in the van, and Lewis helped Vivi pull her eco-friendly, short distance transport out before he evaporated in a plume of flames. Likely, to attach himself to the flashlight stored in the side pocket of her backpack. She clicked on the light to confirm for Arthur, Lewis wasn’t hanging around.

 “Let me know if you’re running late or anything comes up,” she stated, while Arthur double checked that the van was secure and latched tight.

 “I’ll remember,” Arthur replied. They said farewells, and he returned to the garage of Kingsman Mechanics, with Mystery by his side.

 The remainder of Arthur’s shift whirred by in a steady momentum, cranking out the vehicles on his roaster. It was a little before closing when he scrawled out the end time of his last assignment, on the task chalkboard on the work floor wall. He might actually make it to Vivi’s before she began with the texting. It’d be fun to wait outside and just hang out, until the first one chimed off.

 Following one brief shower, Arthur got busy in his work room packing some fresh clothing for the next day. A separate bag sat reserved for parts, if he got around to the easier aspects to his arm and trying out the new cooling system – it was rather clunky and added weight – though, keeping the circuits at a controlled temperature kept rotors from overheating. A vent would be a nice benefit, but he needed a sealed compartment; a difficult feat in a multisegmented apparatus.

 While Arthur went around the work room browsing for items he needed, Mystery was satisfied with dozing on the couch. It was only when Arthur hauled out the travel cage for Galahad, that spurred interest from Mystery. Arthur went to the hamster terrarium and located his caramel colored companion in his nest.

 “Well get this stuff downstairs and get that flatcart,” Arthur explained.

 Mystery was already nosing the door to the room open. He glanced back at Arthur, ear twitching. You got that okay?

 “Lead the way.” He claimed the terrarium under his one arm and went with Mystery, to the ground floor.

 The lights around the corner blazed bright, but the sounds from the work floor approached subdued. By now it was well past five, and shutters barred out noises from the open road across from the carport. He hardly saw anyone as he went for a flat cart parked by supplies. Mystery hopped onto the panel and rode it, while Arthur guided it back to the corridor. Loading up his gear was a piece of cake, and he was making good time. He’d park the flatbed cart by the employee access and bring the van around, and leave the cart in parts for whoever needed it next.

 Only a last cluster of technicians remained in the garage, upon his departure. A few closing out some diagnostics or working with one of the trainees. Arthur exited through the back and locked the employee access. The last order of business was a quick text to Uncle, reminding him to lock the deadbolt.

 Score! No messages from Vivi, yet.

 __

 It was almost a shock for Arthur when he arrived at the door to the apartment, and it opened to reveal Vivi. He shouldn’t really be surprised, why would someone not ‘living’ in her apartment answer the door. The fragrance of sugar and popcorn swept out.

 “Holy cakes, I was about to start texting,” she cheered. “Did Uncle Lance kick you out?”

 “Naw,” Arthur grinned. Mystery nudged the back of his legs. “Did you need any help setting up?” He and Vivi had to give space for Mystery, the dog shoved his way on through and went straight for the kitchen. “More important, do you ever feed him?”

 Vivi sighed. She was already gathering up Arthur’s bags. “He had a whole chicken today.”

 Arthur grabbed the terrarium and stood, the cage nestled under his arm. The Plexiglas box wasn’t heavy nor cumbersome, even so, he lingered at the threshold watching as Vivi retreated within. He glanced away and toed at the edge of the door jam. When he raised his gaze, Vivi was still there and quiet, a patient smile tugging the edge of her lips. She nodded toward the living room.

 His feet shuffled across the entry. Noises came from within, the sort you’d expect to curl forth from a kitchen. “A whole chicken? Wow. Isn’t that something.” The sounds didn’t pause or hush a bit, as he scooted through the corridor.

 Finally, he poked his head into the kitchen. “Are you doing spicey stuff?”

 As expected, Lewis was at the stove with a pot and spatula looking guilty. “No?”

 “I’m gunna start sneezing.”

 Lewis shrugged. “It’ll clear up your allergies.”

 “I don’t have allergies.”

 Vivi relocated to the living area to deposit Arthur’s gear, and swung back. She was dressed casually, not her typical skirt or sweater, but her clothing was certainly on the poofy side, and clearly comfy. “Are you gonna start arguing again?”

 Woof?

 “We’re not arguing,” Lewis defended, swinging the spatula.

 “This is a conversation,” Arthur affirmed. He went ahead and followed Vivi. He set Galahad’s terrarium under the end table in the corner of the room and popped the lid.

 “Whatever you call it, I’m not refereeing.”

 Lewis cackled. “Purge initiated.”

 Off center of Vivi’s living area, the other end table was situated with a television on top, with wires hooked from it to the laptop sitting on the floor. In the corridor to the bedroom, the closet door was open and some of the boxes within left on the floor. The door was pulled back fully, permitting Arthur to view some of the items left out of containment, wedged on the shelves within. He shuddered.

 A cacophony of popping erupted from within the kitchen, and Lewis swished around the large pot upon the burner. “Wanna get a movie going, and we can start looking through the stuff?” he proposed. “I did some homemade candy.”

 “Mmm!” Vivi hummed. “These gummies are really ugly, but they’re tasty.”

 “That’s what happens when you don’t use molds.” Lewis brought up a plate with wax paper, and little colorful globs topped. They were ugly as heck, Arthur noted. In a large bowl, Lewis poured out a whole kettle of corn from the pot he was using. The fluffy kernels were still glistening with melted sugar, steam shimmered across the lumpy peak.

 Likewise on the counter, there sat two fire extinguishers. Arthur supposed they could pack one or both in the van. He wondered if she bought both, or if one came with the apartment.

 “Arthur.” He shook his head and looked to Vivi. “Can you get a movie going? I gotta boot up my laptop.”

 The couch was already dressed with blankets and extra pillows. It kind of reminded him of the old times, like nothing changed. He took his seat beside the chair arm, near where he put Galahad’s travel cage. He took the ball of fluff from his little nest and set him up on the back of the couch. Mystery thundered onto the couch and gave the hamster a close look over.

 Opening credits ended for the introduction, and the movie began. Vivi planted herself beside Mystery, and Lewis was last to join with the bowl of popcorn and plate of gooies. Vivi took a handful of popcorn and started eating, along with one of those gooey treats from the plate now set on the back of the couch. Galahad was wheeling his way over, but Mystery lay his head in the way.

 “I was thinking,” she said, and swallowed. Lewis left the popcorn in her care and revisited the kitchen. “We’ll be off on another assignment, and doing whatever cases we want on the way. But we have all this stuff, and it’s kind of starting to pile up.”

 “Right,” Arthur muttered. “You could just dump it off on Duet.” He took the bowl she passed and tried the popcorn. It was good, salty and sweet. Lewis came back over and handed off some drinks to him and Vivi. “Uh, thanks.”

 “Don’t you think I tried?” Vivi licked her fingers and went to typing on the laptop. “We get duplicates and we got fake crap, some of it is legit. Yeah Lew?”

 He nodded. “Some of it gives me the heebie-jeebies. Don’t like that.”

 “I’ve been checking some blogs and people,” Vivi went on, tucking the unopened bottle beside her hip. “I have harmless crud, that’d make for good props for research. That stuff can go to whoever, but Duet doesn’t want duplicates or reproductions.”

 Arthur popped the cap to his beverage and took a sip. “I’ll leave that to you bunch then. I didn’t want much to do with it then, and not really much now.”

 “That’s cool,” Vivi assured, with a smile. “You had some heavy run-ins with some of this crap, and I don’t blame you.” She plopped the laptop onto Arthur’s lap and got off the couch.

 A timer went off, and Lewis made his way over to the kitchen. “Should be good to say farewell, though? Eh, Art?”

 “Yeah.” He reached over to the popcorn bowl and grabbed a kernel, which he delivered to the hamster sitting on Mystery’s head. “No goo junk,” he commanded. “We don’t want to give Mystery a haircut, ‘cuz of some gummy stuff.” Mystery delivered and expression of utter petrification.

 Then it hit Arthur, while Vivi was pulling out a plastic crate from within the closet. “Shit. I forgot the equipment.”

 “Que s’eso?”

 “The equipment.” Arthur took the plate of small, browned marshmallow meringues Lewis handed over. “Um, I was supposed to finalize it. Make sure I’ve got it all stabilized and tuned.” He and Lewis held a painfully long stare. “I wasn’t planning on testing that crap on you. Though, it’d certify if my handywork was thorough.”

 “No.”

 Vivi set the crate down on the floor and browsed through a few clay figures, among them bundled tissue paper and bubble wrap. “That’s fine, we’ll get to that another day.”

 Arthur sucked in some air beside his teeth. “Meh. It was my thing to do, while you guys did yours. Fuck.” He sat a moment, debating if there was something else he could do if he wasn’t preoccupied with his go to task. There was the tinkering work on his arm, but he recalled some of the tools for that was left in the boxes he meant to pack. Aside from eating, which he now was not in the mood for, he didn’t have much else to do but watch bad movies.

 “It’s not late, I can swing over and grab ‘em.”

 “Or you could just let it go, and have a weekend to relax,” Vivi indicated. She leaned on the couch beside his legs. “I wasn’t serious with getting a head start on this, so that stuff can wait. Right?”

 Lewis took the plate of gummies off the couch back, before Galahad could crawl into them. “Is this gunna be a bother for you all evening?”

 Arthur sighed. “Yeah. Threw off my groove and everything.” He pouted. “It won’t take any time at all. Zoom over and back. It’s not a lot to gather up either, I don’t wanna put it off though.”

 Vivi stood up. “Fine. I’m not like, your other boss or anything.” She tried the meringue thing. “Are these burnt?”

 “They fucking are,” Lewis rasped.

 “But they’re good anyway. I love burnt marshmallows.”

 “Not helping.” Lewis pointed down at Arthur. “I’m going with.”

 “Why?” both Arthur and Vivi exclaimed. Mystery woofed. Lewis looked from Vivi to Arthur.

 “To… help? Is there… a reason why I shouldn’t?”

 Vivi stuttered, “No – not… it’s up to Arthur.”

 All up to him. Yay. Arthur set the laptop aside and got off the couch. “Sure, fine, it’s cool. Let’s go so we can get back.” He went to the entry way, twirling intermittently through his strides to call, “Keep an eye on Gally, huh? I want him eating normal hamster things.” Lewis nearly ran into him on their way down the corridor.

 They were already headed out the door, when Vivi answered, “He’ll be good— Gally! Mystery! Not the gummies! No!”

  __

 By all appearances, the garage was vacant of life and sat with impenetrable silence, scarcely an aura of habitation. Vehicles huddled abandoned, the tools cold and still at long last following a brutal and arduous workday. Upon one soldering table stood a partially drained Styrofoam cup, a stray draft teased a greasy rag hung over the handlebar of a flat cart. Light flickered over the listless machinery, in the deepest reaches of the shop strange shadows carved burrows into deserted spaces. Aside from those minute scraps of animation, nothing stirred within Kingsman Mechanics. However, appearances are deceitful.

 The small access doorway for shipments betrayed the established stillness. The knob twisted one way slowly, then the other gradually, a faint tick-tick twittered from the key chamber. Tick-tick… tick! The dead bolt swept sideways with genuine dedication, and the latch barked loose.

 A brief reprieve followed, insisting that nothing was amiss and all was complacent, ordinary, and drab. Then, the faithful metal panel eased an inch, enough to allow a swollen lump to squeeze through. The squishy bulb observed the blanket of unremarkable matter. Off from the doorway, the blocky stacks of supplies and barren pallets, a tarp and some other obscure items, industrial shelving and other blocky shapes.

 Through the doorway extended a small cylinder, and with a click the glaring slate of light glittered through the interior room, skewering the gloom and incriminating the present occupants. Hubcaps, a flatbed cart, opened boxes and packing materials strewn on the floor. Cold metal sleeping in the dark, oblivious boxes, and not a conscious soul in sight.

 The vague shape eased through the slither of doorway and let the panel whisper shut at their back. Once within fully, they doused the light and let their eyes adjust to the swollen murk. With practiced grace they moved from delivery, and inched onto the work floor. Some dull glow did enter through the front windows of Kingsman Mechanics, illuminating the barest of outlines upon workstations and patient vehicles. They moved through the garage meticulously, pausing only to listen and grasp their environment through hearing, and their intuition. It hadn’t failed them yet.

 Parts and easily mobile machinery were everywhere, some adding up into the thousands if packed carefully into the duffle bag slung over their arm. None of it had substantial value, only a temporary check to drop in the bucket. They followed the wall, clicking on the flashlight and capping the front to stifle the blast of light. There was no rush, if they couldn’t find it tonight, there was always next week. It would mean stake out and observe for changes, but a task amended without issue or too much delay. Better safe than sorry. Maybe the gear wasn’t here at all, and this was a waste of time. They wouldn’t know until a thorough search was launched. But all night lay ahead.

[moriganstrongheart]

On Firefly, Mediocrity and Problematic Media

When I first set to writing this, I intended to write a review of Firefly. I had recently rewatched Firefly and its tie-in, semi-sequel movie Serenity with my fiancée, and I wanted to express my thoughts on it. But I put the original first draft aside after writing two sentences and did not revisit it until months later. By then, I found I was no longer interested in reviewing Firefly, opting to explore issues of underlying misogyny and mediocrity in media instead. I think that Joss Whedon’s work is a good case study for these problems, as he exists simultaneously as a folk hero of sorts when it comes to speculative fiction, and as the harbinger of the now divisive Marvel Cinematic Universe. And Firefly being so beloved by its fans, I think it's worth diving deep into its problems to illustrate my points.

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate Firefly’s problems is in how it appeals to its fans. While I find the character interactions the best aspect of the show, I’m sure that quite a few fans—primarily young, white males—are attracted to the space western setting of the show and all the trappings that come with it. The Verse is filled with guns, alcohol, rape, savages and prostitutes—everything a new frontier needs, or so I expect is the intent. I don’t think these are ever the focus of the show, nor are they something Whedon ever places on a pedestal as ideals to strive for. But they are a part of the worldbuilding, and so were included with intent. There has been a debate for several years among fans of speculative fiction on whether worlds inspired by historical periods or specific cultures should include these so-called “less favourable” aspects of that period or culture, or if the speculative nature of the fiction should allow for their exclusion. I want to make it clear that I am in the second camp; I don’t believe that just because a fantasy world is set in a medieval time period that women shouldn’t be allowed to be knights, or that aliens or people of colour have to necessarily be slaves in a colonial space opera. It is speculative fiction after all, and we are under no obligation to hold ourselves to any supposed cultural or historical accuracy.

This is, of course, ignoring the fact that the cultural and historical accuracies being strived for have flawed origins, having been decided by academics with their own bias, or even maybe their own agenda. I would make further arguments that historical fiction and literature are themselves often coloured by the author’s intent, and so certain aspects are accentuated while others are ignored or downplayed in order to tell a specific story—often to the detriment of minority groups. It’s impossible to divorce bias from one’s work, no matter how objective the work claims to be. This has been proven time and again, evidenced by the revision of textbooks throughout the years.

Regardless, counter arguments to the exclusion of “less favourable” elements are normally that doing so waters down the source material, diminishing its authenticity and, more interestingly, it represents a disagreeable emotional sensitivity on the part of the opposition. This point of view assumes that the opposition is averse to certain perceived realities in the world, and that the narrative they want to ascribe themselves to would be unrealistic and, as such, not entertaining. In reality, all parties are involved in some form of escapism. The outcry for realism is a smokescreen for the desire to keep a specific form of escapism, one which can only be described as a violent, misogynistic power fantasy. The source of this outcry—again, predominantly young white males—sees the inclusion of bigotry and sexual violence as essential to their viewing experience, as they take enjoyment out of them. That isn’t to say that having violence, sexual themes or social inequality don’t have a place in fiction; they just need to have a purpose. Without purpose, they are only there to service the twisted fantasies of the target audience.

For an example that brings us back to Firefly, it never really feels like Irana’s career as a courtesan serves any other purposes than as an excuse for partial nudity, sex scenes and for Malcolm to call her “whore” on the regular. There are times where her position as a high-ranking courtesan opens doors for the Firefly crew, but this is a contrivance of how courtesans work within the Verse, and not a part of the skillset she has accrued to become a courtesan. The only true exception to this—that I can remember—is her role in grooming the magistrate’s son in the episode Jaynestown, which directly affects the primary conflict. Apart from this instance, none of her meaningful contributions to the plot necessitate her being a courtesan. She could have just as easily been someone with social or political clout. However, this wouldn’t have allowed for her to be the ship’s prostitute, there only to drive Malcolm up the wall and have someone he could call “whore” without guilt. As such, it became necessary for Whedon to not only make her a sex worker, but to create an entire system around her which would give her importance to the plot. In essence, he wanted his cake and eat it too. It’s disappointing, as the idea of having a sex worker being an important member of the main cast is interesting enough as a concept to explore. Ideally, this person would be treated with respect by others for their work, and their value should come from them as a person, not from a fabricated social status.

As a side note, I acknowledge that most people in the show respect Inara, but it is because of her fabricated social status and not because of who she is as a person. The only people who respect her for who she is and what she does are women and the one person of colour on the crew.

There are a lot of other small decisions within Firefly that show Whedon’s intent, such as the characterizations of River’s mental illness and Jayne as a character. I can’t help but wonder if Firefly were produced today on HBO or Netflix, if the showrunners would have allowed the inclusion of far more sexual violence and bigotry in hopes of attracting a larger audience. Because while we have collectively become much more cognizant of issues like diversity and the portrayal of women in media, shows with portrayals of sexual violence and bigotry tend to perform better overall. Unfortunately, the vocal minority shouting their preferences on social media only helps to reinforce this trend.

However, I don’t want to make the wrong impression. Sexism, racism, violence and bigotry are not the focus during Firefly’s runtime. In fact, Whedon generally does a good job of representing healthy relationships, strong female characters and positive representation of people of colour. For example, Zoe and Wash’s relationship is very admirable, and Kaylee is perhaps the best character on the show. The problems exist beneath the surface, informing everything from story conflicts to character motivations. Whedon comes off as a guy just wanting to have some fun, someone who is cool and trendy, just rude enough to be interesting, but knowing where to draw the line. Really though, he’s just the best of a bad lot within the entertainment industry. A lot who are, unsurprisingly, white men catering to their younger selves.

As a white man myself, I am constantly checking myself and the works I create to ensure I am providing a compelling story while avoiding trappings indicative of a male power fantasy. Because of the environment I grew up in, it can be easy to rely on tired old tropes instead of thinking of meaningful and interesting things to write. Does that mean that catering to the needs of a diverse audience is too difficult, and as such, is detrimental to the creative process? I don’t believe so, despite what many may believe. If anything, it forces writers to think of novel, more captivating stories that don’t rely on tropes and power fantasies to work. I believe that the reason people have become so weary of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and similar works is because they all rely on a power fantasy to function. I myself have grown tired of seeing the same story over and over, and it is only in the last decade that I realized the reason for this is that most people behind the works I consume are—again—white males catering to their younger selves.

This has led me to question if it’s right for me to have my voice heard at all. Would I not just be another straight, white male entering a space already filled with the same? Perhaps, but I don’t think the intent of fostering diversity in media is to exclude white people. In fact, if people like Whedon were the worst in terms of what white males have to offer the entertainment industry, I think we’d be in a better place. The problem is that the majority of the media we consume today is problematic and doesn’t allow for any variance from what’s trending among a young white male audience. All I can do is hope that shows like Firefly can be used as a learning experience for creating more compelling and varied stories. Stories should rely on interesting characters, worlds and the interactions in between them to be entertaining, and not on fulfilling the twisted power fantasy of the audience under the guise of realism.

[rocknvaughn]

New Review of Colin's play A Number

Link here:

(some plot point spoilers, but mild)

The Bridge Theatre is having far greater success with revivals than it has with new plays, and no problem attracting talented cast and crew to star in them. Both of its immersive Shakespeare productions – Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – have been excellent, while big productions are on the programme for later in the year including wunder-director Marianne Elliott’s version of They Shoot Horses Don’t They and Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. First though, the Bridge joins both the National Theatre and, as of last week, the Donmar Warehouse in celebrating the work of Caryl Churchill with a short but superb performance of A Number.

It’s notable that two theatres have chosen to stage One Act pieces that, unusually in our era of three-hour-plus marathons, stand alone allowing audiences to be well on their way home by 8.30pm. Far Away at just 45-minutes practically feels over before it has even begun, while here at the Bridge, A Number is just an hour long. Perhaps surprisingly given ticket prices of up to £55, nothing else is scheduled alongside it, with both venues choosing to allow the singular work to speak for itself. It may not feel like value for money based on time spent in the auditorium, but in this case Churchill’s play is definitely small but mighty.

Yet, her work can have a marmite quality, creating quite divisive effects on audiences, so much of the time either you get it or you don’t. But A Number is one of her most straightforward pieces, a fairly simple narrative about a family discovering their eldest son has been cloaned. While the science-fiction surface is an examination of the effects of science on society, a premise Churchill uses to think about the apocalyptic nature of man’s own self-destructive impulses, A Number is really about lies. Across just five scenes, the writer explores the nature of deceit as a father (Salter) betrays his sons in several different ways as information about the true circumstances of their birth and early life is drip-fed to both men and the audience.

It is a clever and well executed premise, one designed to wrong-foot the audience at every turn, opening with an affectionate conversation between father and son taking place soon after the latter has discovered that clones exist. This first scene suggests a terrible miscarriage of justice in which an unknown other has effectively stolen cells from the boy and used them to make unauthorised replicas now living openly and blindly in the world, unaware of each other’s existence. Nothing about this early interaction is suspicious and it seems that Churchill’s intention may be to examine the faceless demands of scientific progress that harvest humanity’s innocence for nefarious purposes.

But that is only half the story and it soon becomes apparent in Polly Findlay’s thriller-like staging that nothing is quite what it seems in this household. A similar tactic occurs in Far Away with book-ended scenes set in a familiar domestic normality that hides (and lies about) the seamier activities beneath the surface, where the corruption of innocence is a major theme. The same occurs in A Number as the son referred to as B2 is forced to know more of his father’s choices as well as the existence of his duplicates which has terrible consequences.

Findlay quite effectively uses a square-shaped rotating set to explore the play’s themes with each new scene set at a 90 degree angle to the one before. In doing so, the audience sees every perspective on the single room in which the entire piece is set, and crucially, each of the four walls that provide the limitations to this domestic sphere in which Salter has maintained a bounded span of control for some years. Designed by Lizzie Clachan the room is exceptionally normal, a living room / diner filled with soft furnishings, family photos and some tiger prints on the wall, all warmed by a bar fire, and unlike previous adaptations that veered towards the clinical, this is a domesticated tragedy in progress. Churchill is interested in the casual monstrousness that lurks beneath the chintzy surface of suburbia, the banality or perhaps more appropriately the thoughtlessness of evil.

Findlay and Clachan’s rotating set does two important things, it changes the audience’s perspective as each new scene brings further revelation that build into a clearer picture of the people it concerns. So by the end of the play we have seen the room and the circumstances of family life from every angle. But it also reinforces the much discussed effect of cloning in which the created being is the same but different. Salter is asked by each of his children about comparisons with their brothers, and we see they are quite different personalities in the same form. And so it is with the rotated set, what we see in each scene is the same room from a different perspective, creating an increasingly disorientating effect as the story unfolds.

Findlay’s control of the tone is particular impressive, there is something unnerving about the scientific discussions being had in this bland and unexpected environment in the first scene, yet the affectionate relationship between the men seems genuine, encouraging us to feel concerned that their rights have somehow been violated. Over time, Findlay changes the temperature introducing darker notes that build into something far more sinister as the result of the initial revelation is felt across the play. As each new slant is revealed, the mood shifts with it, so worry turns to desperation, anger and foreboding as Churchill slowly and often unceremoniously reveals one crucial revelation in each scene. The return of the room to its original position in scene five is a reset in every sense, with what now seems so clearly a cycle of hope and destruction ominously about to begin again.

At the centre of A Number is the ambiguous figure of Salter, a man who seems racked with concern for the pain his sons newly endure and whose initial instincts are to comfort while demanding legal justice for the misuse of his son’s DNA. Yet, it is never entirely clear whether Salter is telling the truth or why he tells the specific lies he chooses, so many he can barely keep track of them; which son is the original, the fate of his wife, his knowledge of the cloning process and the exact chronology of his son’s childhood are all subject to interpretation as he continues to give deliberately evasive responses. He appears to lack any genuine remorse for his mendacity and there are also suggestions of cruelty to B1 whose night terrors he ignores, a child that Salter decides is not up to scratch by the age of four and simply replaces with an improved copy.

Yet, Salter is also sympathetic, a father desperate for a second chance to put things right – an outcome at the start of the play he appears to have achieved as he and B2 express a mutual love for one another and happy life to date. Salter’s later confrontation with his original son B1 leads to revelations of grief at the death of his wife and a loneliness that haunts the play as a father grapples with his own positive legacy, a need to create a good relationship with his son to guarantee his own future. The momentary pauses between the five scenes which leaves Salter alone in each room configuration offer a contemplative pause, a man isolated and perhaps even abandoned with little left to lose.

The pairing of Roger Allam and Colin Morgan is a savvy one, two dedicated and respected theatre actors who have found a valuable chemistry well ahead of this week’s press night. Allam easily connects with the many conflicting layers within Salter’s character, he is at once a man trying to find a good outcome from past mistakes and someone who lies with astonishing ease. Under pressure, Allam’s Salter runs on, saying almost anything to dilute the confrontation and his culpability for the existence of multiple children, Allam ever treading that fine line between selfishness and parental love by mixing half-truths and outright lies with genuine emotion and bewilderment.

The audience never quite knows if Salter is a good man led astray by grief and a good sales pitch decades before, selling the soul of his child to answer some deep call of fatherhood, or a mercenary man using a disarming scattiness, a failure to remember exact details to malevolently excuse himself from blame while perhaps willfully bringing about a wider destruction to rid himself of the problem. Allam is careful to offer both interpretations within his performance, that keeps the audience guessing about his real motives.

As his antagonist throughout, Colin Morgan offers an equally layered presentation of character, rising to the challenge of playing three different versions of the same man. In each of the five scenes, Morgan alternates between personas, changing accents from two variations of London to play B1 and B2 as each man separately confronts Salter. And it is a play that wastes no time, with Churchill introducing the characters post-revelation requiring the actors to begin mid-argument, already at a pitch of exasperation and confusion.

Each man is given distinction by Morgan with B2 the nervy innocent, trying to accept the new-found truth about his cloned-selves and, at first, trusting his father’s explanation with a credulousness that is increasingly naive. The confounded approach hardens in Morgan’s creation of B1 who introduces an important note of latent violence, of the possibility of physical harm as he intimidates the father who betrayed him. Each of the characters is given two scenes so Morgan finds consistency in his characterisation, switching between them relatively quickly as the responses of both men to their father creates further tension once the brothers become aware of each other’s existence. The subtle hints of the Cain and Abel struggle in Churchill’s work and man’s desire to be somehow individually unique are brilliantly elucidate by Morgan in a varied and gripping performance.

A Number packs a lot of themes, meaning and ideas into just an hour of stage time in a production that asks big questions about scientific progress, human regeneration, parenting and legacy. Churchill is concerned here with the mysteries lurking beneath a sheen of civilisation and how quickly things unravel once the veneer is shattered to reveal further deceits. With performances by two very fine stage actors, Findlay’s production asks us to look beyond the simple dichotomy of nature or nature because the advent of medical interventions into the reproductive process, designer babies and genetic modification leaves us wondering whether human individuality exists at all, and how do we control who we become?

[letterboxd]

Bong Hit!

Today Parasite overtook The Godfather as the highest-rated narrative feature film on Letterboxd. We examine what this means, and bring you the story of the birth of the #BongHive.

It’s Bong Joon-ho’s world and we’re just basement-dwelling in it. While there is still (at time of publication) just one one-thousandth of a point separating them, Bong’s Palme d’Or-winning Parasite has overtaken Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning The Godfather to become our highest-rated narrative feature.

In May, we pegged Parasite at number one in our round-up of the top ten Cannes premieres. By September, when we met up with Director Bong on the TIFF red carpet, Parasite was not only the highest-rated film of 2019, but of the decade. (“I’m very happy with that!” he told us.)

Look, art isn’t a competition—and this may be short-lived—but it’s as good a time as any to take stock of why Bong’s wild tale of the Kim and Park families is hitting so hard with film lovers worldwide. To do so, we’ve waded through your Parasite reviews (warning: mild spoilers below; further spoilers if you click the review links). And further below, member Ella Kemp recalls the very beginnings of the #BongHive.

Bong Joon-ho on set with actors Choi Woo-shik and Cho Yeo-jeong.

The Letterboxd community on Parasite

On the filmmaking technique: “Parasite is structured like a hill: the first act is an incredible trek upward toward the light, toward riches, toward reclaiming a sense of humanity as defined by financial stability and self-reliance. There is joy, there is quirk, there is enough air to breathe to allow for laughter and mischief.

“But every hill must go down, and Parasite is an incredibly balanced, plotted, and paced descent downward into darkness. The horror doesn’t rely on shock value, but rather is built upon a slow-burning dread that is rooted in the tainted soil of class, society, and duty… Bong Joon-ho dresses this disease up in beautiful sets and empathetic framing (the camera doesn’t gawk, but perceives invisible connections and overt inequalities)—only to unravel it with deft hands.” —Tay

“Bong’s use of landscape, architecture, and space is simply arresting.” —Taylor Baker

“There is a clear and forceful guiding purpose behind the camera, and it shows. The dialogue is incredibly smart and the entire ensemble is brilliant, but the most beautiful work is perhaps done through visual language. Every single frame tells you exactly what you need to know while pulling you in to look for more—the stunning production design behind the sleek, clinical nature of one home and the cramped, gritty nature of the other sets up a playpen of contrasts for the actors and the script.” —Kevin Yang

On how to classify Parasite: “Masterfully constructed and thoroughly compelling genre piece (effortlessly transitioning between familial drama, heist movie, satirical farce, subterranean horror) about the perverse and mutating symbiotic relationship of increasingly unequal, transactional class relationships, and who can and can’t afford to be oblivious about the severe, violent material/psychic toll of capitalist accumulation.” —Josh Lewis

“This is an excellent argument for the inherent weakness of genre categories. Seriously, what genre is this movie? It’s all of them and none of them. It’s just Parasite.” —Nick Wibert

“The director refers to his furious and fiendishly well-crafted new film as a ‘family tragicomedy’, but the best thing about Parasite is that it gives us permission to stop trying to sort his movies into any sort of pre-existing taxonomy—with Parasite, Bong finally becomes a genre unto himself.” —David Ehrlich

On the duality of the plot: “There are houses on hills, and houses underground. There is plenty of sun, but it isn't for everybody. There are people grateful to be slaves, and people unhappy to be served. There are systems that we are born into, and they create these lines that cannot be crossed. And we all dream of something better, but we’ve been living with these lines for so long that we've convinced ourselves that there really isn’t anything to be done.” —Philbert Dy

“The Parks are bafflingly naive and blissfully ignorant of the fact that their success and wealth is built off the backs of the invisible working class. This obliviousness and bewilderment to social and class inequities somehow make the Parks even more despicable than if they were to be pompous and arrogant about their privilege.

“This is not to say the Kims are made to be saints by virtue of the Parks’ ignorance. The Kims are relentless and conniving as they assimilate into the Park family, leeching off their wealth and privilege. But even as the Kims become increasingly convincing in their respective roles, the film questions whether they can truly fit within this higher class.” —Ethan

On how the film leaps geographical barriers: “As a satire on social climbing and the aloofness of the upper class, it’s dead-on and has parallels to the American Dream that American viewers are unlikely to miss; as a dark comedy, it’s often laugh-aloud hilarious in its audacity; as a thriller, it has brilliantly executed moments of tension and surprises that genuinely caught me off guard; and as a drama about family dynamics, it has tender moments that stand out all the more because of how they’re juxtaposed with so much cynicism elsewhere in the film. Handling so many different tones is an immensely difficult balancing act, yet Bong handles all of it so skilfully that he makes it feel effortless.” —C. Roll

“One of the best things about it, I think, is the fact that I could honestly recommend it to anyone, even though I can't even try to describe it to someone. One may think, due to the picture’s academic praise and the general public’s misconceptions about foreign cinema, that this is some slow, artsy film for snobby cinephiles, but it’s quite the contrary: it’s entertaining, engaging and accessible from start to finish.” —Pedro Machado

On the performative nature of image: “A família pobre que se infiltra no espaço da família rica trata a encenação—a dissimulação, os novos papéis que cada um desempenha—como uma espécie de luta de classes travada no palco das aparências. Uma luta de classes que usa a potência da imagem e do drama (os personagens escrevem os seus textos e mudam a sua aparência para passar por outras pessoas) como uma forma de reapropriação da propriedade e dos valores alheios.

“A grande proposta de Parasite é reconhecer que a ideia do conhecimento, consequentemente a natureza financeira e moral desse conhecimento, não passa de uma questão de performance. No capitalismo imediatista de hoje fingir saber é mais importante do que de fato saber.” —Arthur Tuoto

(Translation: “The poor family that infiltrates the rich family space treats the performance—the concealment, the new roles each plays—as a kind of class struggle waged on the stage of appearances. A class struggle that uses the power of image and drama (characters write their stories and change their appearance to pass for other people) as a form of reappropriation of the property and values ​​of others.

“Parasite’s great proposal is to recognize that the idea of ​​knowledge, therefore the financial and moral nature of that knowledge, is a matter of performance. In today’s immediate capitalism, pretending to know is more important than actually knowing.”)

Things you’re noticing on re-watches: “Min and Mr. Park are both seen as powerful figures deserving of respect, and the way they dismissively respond to an earnest question about whether they truly care for the people they’re supposed to tells us a lot about how powerful people think about not just the people below them, but everyone in their lives.” —Demi Adejuyigbe

“When I first saw the trailer and saw Song Kang-ho in a Native American headdress I was a little taken aback. But the execution of the ideas, that these rich people will siphon off of everything, whether it’s poor people or disenfranchised cultures all the way across the world just to make their son happy, without properly taking the time to understand that culture, is pretty brilliant. I noticed a lot more subtlety with that specific example this time around.” —London

“I only noticed it on the second viewing, but the film opens and closes on the same shot. Socks are drying on a rack hanging in the semi-basement by the window. The camera pans down to a hopeful Ki-Woo sitting on his bed… if the film shows anything, it might be that the ways we usually approach ‘solving’ poverty and ‘fixing’ the class struggle often just reinforce how things have been since the beginning.” —Houston

The birth of the #BongHive

London-based writer and Letterboxd member Ella Kemp attended Cannes for Culture Whisper, and was waiting in the Parasite queue with fellow writers Karen Han and Iana Murray when the hashtag #BongHive was born. Letterboxd editor Gemma Gracewood asked her to recall that day.

Take us back to the day that #BongHive sprang into life. Ella Kemp: I’m so glad you asked. Picture the scene: we were in the queue to watch the world premiere of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite at Cannes. It was toward the end of the festival; Once Upon a Time in Hollywood had already screened…

Can you describe for our members what those film festival queues are like? The queues in Cannes are very precise, and very strict and categorized. When you’re attending the festival as press, there are a number of different tiers that you can be assigned—white tier, pink tier, blue tier or yellow tier—and that’s the queue you have to stay in. And depending on which tier you’re in, a certain number of tiers will get into the film before you, no matter how late they arrive. Now, yellow is the lowest tier and it is the tier I was in this year. But, you know, I didn’t get shut out of any films I tried to go into, so I don’t want to speak ill of being yellow!

So, spirits are still high in the yellow queue before going to see Parasite. I was with friends and colleagues Iana Murray [writer for GQ, i-D, Much Ado About Cinema, Little White Lies], Karen Han [New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The Atlantic] and Jake Cunningham [of the Curzon and Ghibliotheque podcasts] who were also very excited for the film. We queued quite early, because obviously if you’re at the start of a queue and only two yellow tier people get in, you want that to be you.

So we had some time to spare, and we’re all very ‘online’ people and the 45 minutes in that queue was no different. So we just started tweeting, as you do. We thought, ‘Oh we’re just gonna tweet some stuff and see if it catches on.’ It might not, but at least we could kill some time.

So we just started tweeting #BongHive. And not explaining it too much.

#BongHive

— karen han (@karenyhan)

May 21, 2019

Within the realms of stan culture, I would argue that hashtags are more applicable to actors and musicians. Ariana Grande has her army of fans and they have their own hashtag. Justin Bieber has his, One Direction, all of them. But we thought, ‘You know who needs one and doesn’t have one right now? Bong Joon-ho.’

And so, you know, we tweeted it a couple of times, but I think what mattered the most was that there was no context, there was no logic, but there was consistency and insistence. So we tweeted it two or three times, and then the film started and we thought right, let’s see if this pays off. Because it could have been disappointing and we could have not wanted to be part of, you know, any kind of hype.

SMILE PRESIDENT @karenyhan #BongHive pic.twitter.com/Dk7T8bFYtv

— Ella Kemp (@ella_kemp)

May 21, 2019

But, Parasite was Parasite. So we walked out of it and thought, ‘Oh yes, the #BongHive is alive and kicking.’

I think what was interesting was that it came at that point in the festival when enthusiasm dipped. Everyone was very tired, and we were really tired, which is why we were tweeting illogical things. It was late at night by the time we came out of that film. It was close to midnight and we should have gone to bed, probably.

Because, first world problems, it is exhausting watching five, six, seven films a day at a film festival, trying to find sustenance that’s not popcorn, and form logical thoughts around these works of art. Yes! It was nice to have fun with something. But what happened next was [Parasite distributor] Neon clocked it and went, ‘Oh wait, there’s something we can do there’. And then they took it, and it flew into the world, and now the #BongHive is worldwide.

I love the formality of Korean language and the way that South Koreans speak of their elders with such respect. I enjoyed being on the red carpet at TIFF hearing the Korean media refer to Bong Joon-ho as ‘Director Bong’. It’s what he deserves!

I like to imagine a world where it’s ‘Director Gerwig’, ‘Director Campion’, ‘Director Sciamma’… Exactly.

Related content:

Ella Kemp’s review of Parasite for Culture Whisper.

Letterboxd list: The directors Bong Joon-ho would like you to watch next.

Our interview with Director Bong, in which he reveals just how many times he’s watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

“I’m very awkward.” Bong Joon-ho’s first words following the standing ovation at Cannes for Parasite’s world premiere.

Karen Han interviews Director Bong for Polygon, with a particular interest in how he translated the film for non-Korean audiences. (Here’s Han’s original Parasite review out of Cannes; and here’s what happened when a translator asked her “Are you bong hive?” in front of the director.)

Haven’t seen Parasite yet? Here are the films recommended by Bong Joon-ho for you to watch in preparation.

With thanks to Matt Singer for the headline.