#which could be perfect for helping to rebuild and create a better society here

[solitaireships]

I'm not huge on the ending I'm pretty sure I'm getting for Wyll here and will be rewriting it in my head, but this was sweet

[swissmissficrecs]

Favorite fics of 2012

2012 was when things really started happening in earnest in the fandom. There was a veritable explosion of fic, and many of the absolute classics were posted. I have something like 15 pages of bookmarks from that year, and as such, it was incredibly hard to narrow things down to a manageable number for a rec list. Here are the ones that I felt are the must-reads, that have stuck with me the longest and strongest.

A Cure For Boredom by emmagrant01 (81K, E, Johnlock, John/OCs) They'd never talked about sex in the year they'd known each other. Well, that wasn't quite correct: Sherlock had never said a word about sex; John had bemoaned his personal dearth of it on many occasions.

A Goose Quill Dipped in Venom by Polyphony (52K, M, Johnlock) Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, is called in to a very ordinary although brutal murder. Something is badly out of tune with the whole scenario and Sherlock finds himself becoming more and more obsessed with the crime - and also with the victim.

Across the Sky by Mazarin221b (23K, E, Johnlock) Top Gun AU. After an accident that nearly cost the life of his previous RIO, Lieutenant John Watson (Call sign Doc) has grown reckless and arrogant, but an even better pilot than he was before. A heroic maneuver and complete chance sends him and his new RIO (call sign Copper) to Fallon, Nevada, home of Top Gun.  Problem is, the ghosts of John's past could cost them more than just the Top Gun trophy—it could also cost John a chance at happiness.

An Avalanche Of Detour Signs by gyzym (56K, M, Mollstrade) In which Molly Hooper gets a job, gets a degree, breaks a heart, has her heart broken, falls in love, keeps a secret, saves a life, runs a morgue, falls apart, pulls it together, and finds exactly what she didn't know she was looking for--not necessarily in that order.

Applications and Practices of Basic Arithmetic by 1electricpirate (128K, M, Johnlock) After Reichenbach and in order to 1) Keep Sherlock alive, 2) Keep John alive and 3) Get Sherlock home to England as soon as possible, Mycroft devises a plan that will not only incentivise John's continued sanity and survival but force Sherlock to come running. It is a perfect plan, though perhaps less than ethically sound. He has no doubts that using frozen samples of your younger brother's sperm to create children for his husband to care for falls deeply within the realm of socially unacceptable behaviour, but it is efficient, and that is what matters most.

Ava Watson verse by keeliethompson1 (347K, M, Johnlock) Five year old Ava Watson's life is changed forever when her Daddy's old friend comes calling.

Be Here Now Universe by Todesfuge (181K, M, Johnlock) John Watson was already fighting demons when he and Sherlock met. With Sherlock's suicide, it all comes flooding back, forcing Sherlock to intervene before he's solved the persistent riddles of Jim Moriarty and his game. Together they find that something darker lurks behind Moriarty, forcing Sherlock, John, and Irene Adler into an even deadlier game with a much more dangerous foe.  Begins six months after the events of The Reichenbach Fall.

Burn Down & Reignite by augustbird (20K, E, Johnlock) When love isn't enough.

Castle and Sand by grey853 (158K, E, Johnlock) Sherlock and John both have difficult pasts that affect their evolving relationship. When John prevents a mugging, it sets off a dangerous chain of events that not only impacts him, but his whole family. In the end there's a wedding and a honeymoon, but will there really be a happy ending?

Cinnamon series by lbmisscharlie (150K, E, Johnlock) When Sherlock invites John to live with him, he fails to mention that he's a single father to a four-year-old girl.

Collared by VelvetMace (83K, E, Johnlock, John/Sarah) In a world where the British Empire is still strong and slavery is her economic backbone, John has become a terrorist for the abolitionist movement. He is caught by Mycroft, enslaved, and given to Sherlock for training. The goal: To test a new kind of slave collar with the power to break even the strongest willed fighter. One that will make even John learn to love being a slave.

Common Grounds by couchbarnacle (66K, M, Johnlock) John Watson is working at Holmes Manor for the summer and is caught up in the whirlwind that is Sherlock Holmes. Teen AU.

Electric Pink Hand Grenade by BeautifulFiction (67K, E, Johnlock) "If Sherlock's brain is a hard drive, then these attacks are an electro-magnetic pulse." Sherlock Holmes does not do anything by half, not even a migraine. It falls to John to witness one of the greatest minds he has ever known tear itself apart, and he must do his best to help Sherlock pick up the pieces.

End of the Story by kres (53K, E, Johnlock) Post-Reichenbach. The return, the fallout, the pieces you pick up.

Equilibrium by augustbird (12K, M, Johnlock) At Baskerville, John is infected by a virus that turns him into a genius. But when the infection progresses into neurodegeneration, it's a race against time to save himself. Flowers for Algernon fusion.

Given In Evidence by verityburns (97K, M, Johnlock) Coming back from the dead can be a complicated business. With a new case on the horizon, rebuilding a life is one thing... rebuilding a friendship quite another. For Sherlock and John, things may never be just the same...

Hearts At Home series by yalublyutebya (74K, M, Johnlock, Viclock) A series of stories chronicling the intertwined lives of Father John Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

Just a Kiss by emmagrant01 (19K, E, Johnlock) Five times John and Sherlock kissed because of a case and one time they kissed for real.

Limping Forward series by bendingsignpost (58K, E, Johnlock) As the newest instructor at St. Bart's, John has been explicitly warned to never do Sherlock Holmes any favours. Too bad the sex is so good.

More Things Than Are Dreamt Of series by 1electricpirate (37K, E, Johnlock) In which John is (reluctantly) a wizard, Mycroft is (apparently) omniscient, and Sherlock is (surprisingly) oblivious.

Murderous Imprint by MojoFlower (52K, E, Johnlock) Sherlock should be focusing on the series of brutal vivisections Lestrade has brought to him. Instead he's distracted by a most amazing and unexpected experimental opportunity from the basement apartment of 221C. Will he figure out the one in time to stop the other? And does he need help in order to do it?

Renegades by augustbird (39K, E, Johnlock) Sherlock Holmes takes down Moriarty’s syndicate.  He also takes John Watson with him.

School For Scandal (orphaned) (222K, E, Johnlock) Sherlock lusts from afar. John tries to fool himself. (Boarding school AU)

Spectrum series by thisprettywren (95K, E, Johnlock) In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Stranger at the Gate by bendingsignpost (85K, E, Johnlock) As far as initiation rites go, kidnapping a human doctor from a defended town ought to seem extreme. When James Moriarty offers him the challenge, Sherlock never considers saying no. (Fantasy vampire AU)

Northwest Passage by Kryptaria (95K, E, Johnlock) Seven years ago, Captain John Watson of the Canadian Forces Medical Service withdrew from society, seeking a simple, isolated life in the distant northern wilderness of Canada. Though he survives from one day to the next, he doesn't truly live until someone from his dark past calls in a favor and turns his world upside-down with the introduction of Sherlock Holmes.

Our Brave Boys by unknownsister (29K, E, Johnlock) John worked himself to the bone to get into military school. He meets Sherlock Holmes, who doesn't want to be there at all. Sherlock simultaneously insults him and turns his curiosity up to eleven, in mind and body. As if John doesn't have enough to deal with.

Our Enthusiasms Which Cannot Always Be Explained by withoutawish (32K, M, Johnlock) The list that is tacked haphazardly on the refrigerator of 221B reads, ‘Kidney(s), and/or a full cadaver (preferably male, late 30s, under six feet tall), bag of fresh toes, sixteen cow’s eyes (corneas retained), dual exhaust hand –held flame thrower, an unopened first edition copy of Joseph Conrad’s 'Heart of Darkness', and no less than ten abhorrently gruesome murders in the upcoming month.”  The one neatly hanging next to it simply reads, “Sex.” One of these lists is not John Watson’s. If John Watson were to put what he really wanted in list form, to live in a land somewhere beyond ‘almosts' now that Sherlock Holmes has indeed returned to him, he would never be able to look his flatmate in the eye ever again.

Tennis series by Jupiter_Ash (216K, E, Johnlock) John and Sherlock are professional tennis players and it’s Wimbledon. One is a broken almost was at the end of his career, the other an arrogant rising star tipped for greatness. It should have been a straightforward tournament. It really should have been. How were they to know that a chance encounter would change everything?

The Bone Fiddle by htebazytook, Vulgarweed (61K, E, Johnlock) Appalachian AU! In November 1973, Vietnam vet John Watson returns to his family's old home in Arthel County, West Virginia, deep in coal country. His low expectations include recuperation and boredom. Instead he finds a ruined landscape, a series of grisly murders, and one of the world's weirdest neighbors.

The Brave and The Cunning series by thequeergiraffe (95K, E, Johnlock, Adlock, Sarah/John, Sheriarty) This series will have one fic per Sherlock episode, with series one being set in John's 6th year (and Sherlock's 5th) and series two being set in John's 7th and final year at Hogwarts. Fics will have similar (but nowhere near identical) plots to the actual BBC Sherlock episodes, with most locations being replaced with HP-universe settings. This series is set well after the Second Wizarding War and involves next to none of the HP characters, instead using Sherlock characters and the occasional minor OC.

The Fabric of Life (orphaned) (156K, E, Johnlock) The fabric of life rearranges itself around the re-emergence of Sherlock.

The Good Morrow series by greywash (216K, E, Johnlock) My post-S2 series where everyone has a lot of feels about everything and plausibility is stretched unto breaking. Also: fucking.

The Great Sex Olympics of 221B by XistentialAngst (58K, E, Johnlock; John/OCs, Sherlock/OCs) John Watson thinks Sherlock Holmes should admit that he, Watson, is more of an expert on sex than Sherlock is.  But Sherlock refuses to concede the point.  He comes up with an experiment plan that will resolve the issue.  The results will determine who wins the prize.  But sometimes even the best thought-out scientific study has unexpected consequences.

The Green Blade by verityburns (72K, T, Gen) As a serial killer hits the headlines, the police are out of their depth and the next victim is out of time. With faith in Sherlock Holmes at an all time low, this is a case which will push loyalties to the limit...

The Iceman Cometh by Polyphony (60K, M, Johnlock, Viclock) An intriguing puzzle tempts Sherlock to accept Victor Trevor's invitation to the French Riviera, but all is not what it seems. Frustrated by the case and increasingly concerned about an absent John, Sherlock uncovers far more than he was meant to and is forced to become a fugitive, pursued by those on both sides of the law, as he fights for his freedom and the lives of all those around him.

The Making Of by emmagrant01 (58K, E, Johnlockstrade) In the aftermath of Sherlock's death, John Watson and Greg Lestrade take comfort in each other.  But of course, Sherlock isn't really dead, so this is all about to get complicated.

The Paradox Series by wordstrings (98K, E, Johnlock) In which what's in Sherlock's head is never going to get any better, and John is nearly thrown out of his flat.

The Prize by Trillsabells (101K, E, Johnlock) On 29 January 2010 an unknown Event wiped out 98% of the population. This is the story of the survivors, four months on.

The Quiet Man by ivyblossom (157K, E, Johnlock, Warstan) "Do you just carry on talking when I'm away?"

The Sustain Stories by maybe_amanda (151K, M, Sherlolly, John/Sarah) "So now you're behaving like a six year old 'cause he didn't take you along on his honeymoon?"  Lestrade said.  "Grow the hell up."

Through the Looking Glass by obsidienne (106K, M, Johnlock) When you chase criminals over rooftops, death is always a possibility. We woke up in 1889 instead. Which is not a place two men in a relationship want to be.

To Light Another's Path by BeautifulFiction (128K, E, Johnlock) Teaching John to observe seems to be a losing battle, but when Sherlock falls ill and submits himself to John's care, will he realise that there is more to life than the science of deduction? Meanwhile, there is a murder to solve, and John must try and convince Sherlock not to sacrifice his own health for the sake of the case.

Watches 'Verse by bendingsignpost (66K, E, Johnlock) First, he is shot in Afghanistan. Second, he wakes to a phone call in Chelmsford, Essex. Third is pain, fourth is normalcy, fifth is agony and sixth is confusion. By the eighth, he's lost track.

[ofcloudsandstars]

Celestial Forecast

Week May 18-24

Highlights:

On Thursday the 21st Gemini Season begins!

On Friday the 22nd there will be the New Moon in Gemini!

Hello everyone! This week will feel mostly emotional with a lot of clearing out as the moon has a lot of transits creating aspects with Chiron and Venus in retrograde giving us the opportunity to work out inner conflicts and reviewing our values. The New Moon almost comes at the same time as the start of Gemini season creating a new chapter especially in this saga of the global pandemic as we will see in this cycle efforts to rebuild society and communities to come together. This will be a good time to set intentions for a better reality to come out of the old one. Unfortunately there is also an opportunity for shitty politicians to use smoke and mirrors to cover up their bullshittery and try to make everything go back to normal but if you have magic and energy to spare, please send out energy for a better world to rise from this. Though the New Moon will be a great time for reflection and ideas, it won't be a good time for clarity or making decisions. That will come on Sunday when the moon will conjunct Mercury and other transits will help us to clear away emotional baggage and facilitate helpful change and clarity in our lives.

Note: I am London based so the time is set to GMT and the weeks go from Monday to Sunday

___________________

18th

☾ ♈ Moon Conjunct Chiron in Aries ☾ ♈ Moon Opposite Juno rx in Libra ☾ ♈ Moon Sextiles Mercury in Gemini

Energy: Today's vibe will be heavily introspective. It will ask us to look within ourselves and ask how we can honor ourselves and our energy better. The answers may come clearer as the Moon will sextile Mercury in Gemini bringing some answers and clarity to the surface. The fiery moon in Aries will conjunct Chiron which could bring up painful feelings and sensitivities which could be the foundation for us to look within, heal and shed what's no longer serving us (as the moon wanes before the new moon it's a great time to cleanse and shed.) The moon will be opposite Juno rx in Libra giving us another perspective on how we devote our energy to our needs or where we devote our energy towards and if it's worth our time. Be aware that even if these energies don't affect you directly, they can affect others around you and to protect yourself against any shadows of other people that may jump out with the moon and chiron conjuction in aggressive Aries.

Recommendations: Chord Cutting, Shadow Work, Self love magic, journaling, fire banishing, honoring your inner child, meditation

_____________________

19th

☾ ♈ Moon Conjunct Eros in Aries ☾ ♈ Moon Squares Pluto rx then Jupiter rx in Capricorn ☾ ♈ Moon Sextiles Venus rx in Gemini ☾ VOC 9:32PM-3:10AM

Energy: Today's will feel fiery and tactile with passionate energy as the Moon will conjunct Eros in Aries and then square Pluto and Jupiter rx in Capricorn. It will be a great day for shadow work or examining deep and passionate feelings as Pluto rx may bring up deeply rooted fears, subconscious beliefs and emotions to the surface to be examined. The square with Jupiter rx can only amplify this journey as Jupiter retrograde wants you to journey deeper with yourself. The Moon and Eros joined will create the energy perfect for us to want to pursue whatever moves our soul. Additionally as Eros is the guardian of sex, it will be a great day for sex magic. Lastly the moon will sextile Venus rx in Gemini making it a great day to practice self love and to create space to honor yourself and heal whatever needs to be addressed. The moon will go void of course in the evening (UK time) so it won't be the best time for manifestation until the next morning.

Recommendations: Self love magic, shadow work, trance meditation, sex magic, self transformation

_____________________

20th

Venus rx in Gemini squares Neptune in Pisces ☾ ♉ Moon enters Taurus ☾ ♉ Moon Conjunct Uranus in Taurus ☾ ♉ Moon Squares Saturn rx in Aquarius ☾ ♉ Moon Sextiles Mars and Ceres in Pisces

Energy: The final day of Taurus season will feel like a wrapping up as the moon enters Taurus and themes from the Taurus new moon may arise. This will be a good time to reflect on the cycle and what your intentions were last new moon. Some surprises, new inner perspectives and inner changes or changes within the home may come today as the Moon will conjunct Uranus in Taurus. It will be a good time to reflect on yourself or take responsibility for these changes as the moon will also square with Saturn rx in Aquarius which can help you take on any tasks you need to focus on especially in areas of self improvement. The moon will also sextile Mars and Ceres in Pisces helping to boost your energy in these matters and ease the tension in the day. With the moon sextiling Ceres it will be a good day for self care and nurturing yourself and loved ones. With Venus retrograding in Gemini squaring Neptune in Pisces this energy can rip off the rose tinted glasses that was coloring your view about your behavior (or about others close to you in relationships). It would be a good time to use this energy to spiritually explore and understand yourself, as well as extending compassion to yourself in this time. This combination can make existing relationships rocky as insecurities or disappointments can come to the surface. However it may be a good time to express yourself through art or do dream oracling as therapy to understand your inner worlds.

Recommendations: Shadow work, journaling, self love magic, divination, Bath Magic (especially for self love/nurturing magic), cleansing

_____________________

21st

Sun enters Gemini ☾ ♉ Moon Sextiles Neptune in Pisces

Energy: Today is the start of Gemini season! This solar month will increase our social lives, curiosity, intellectual pursuits for knowledge, interests in new topics and new ideas along with scatteredness. With Mercury still in Gemini until next week, we will feel our mental capabilities expanded as we seek to learn and try new things and share ideas. The Moon will sextile Neptune in Pisces heightening our creativity, empathic and psychic abilities making today a great day for any type of divination, trance meditation, dream magic and oracling and art based magics. This sextile can heighten the quality of our dreams as well as allow our psychic abilities to be amplified.

Recommendations: vision board for Gemini season, art magic, divination, trance meditation, dream magic, bath magic, bibliomancy, free writing purging (Gemini has strong mental energy and it’s a good time to cleanse right before the new moon).  _____________________

22nd

NEW MOON Mercury in Gemini squares Neptune in Pisces Sun and Moon conjunct in Gemini trines Saturn rx in Aquarius Mercury conjuncts Venus rx in Gemini

☾ ♉ Moon Trines Pluto rx and Jupiter rx in Capricorn ☾ VOC 8:00AM-2:35PM ☾ ♊ New Moon in Gemini

Energy: Today is the New Moon in Gemini! Almost in time to begin the new zodiac season. The energy will feel like a new chapter beginning as the Sun and Moon conjunction will trine Saturn rx in Aquarius. This energy will set the tone that it's time for us to reflect on the past cycle and put in the work to rebuild during this new one. The world has been wrecked by this pandemic but the energies combined will make it so that we will be ready to reflect and confront what needs to be done in order to restore balance. However the energy here is really for reflection and discussing ideas. With Saturn in retrograde it wants us to work on ourselves in context of our microcosmic issues and the behind the scenes structure that allowed the pandemic to take place in context of the global macrocosmic issues. In addition Mercury in Gemini will make a hard square with Neptune in Pisces causing a lot of confusion and in worse cases deception. There could be many new ideas but maybe none may be the right solution yet, or worse, people in charge could try to pull strings, smoke and mirrors to sway the masses how they like without making any real positive change. It's good to be alert on this day yet not take any action yet. Mercury will also conjunct Venus rx in Gemini which can bring our inner values to the surface to be analyzed. Themes from two days ago when Venus rx was squaring Neptune will be bought up to be re-examined. Reflecting on these themes and anything you need to change or nurture can be the new focus or goal of your new moon cycle. Before the moon transits into Gemini, it will trine both Pluto rx and Jupiter rx in Capricorn giving us a chance to work through any deeply buried feelings or life lessons before we move into this new chapter. Mercury conjunct Venus rx later can give us an opportunity to confront feelings about ourselves that could be holding us back so we may freely enter a new cycle.

Recommendations: Vision Board for the new moon, creating new magical tools, self love magic, protection magic (from scammers or manipulative people), divining for the new cycle (recommendations for Gemini theme: Bibliomancy, Shufflemancy), meditation with binural beats or a sound bath, writing down new goals for the future, setting intentions _____________________

23rd

☾ ♊ Moon Squares Ceres and Mars in Pisces ☾ ♊ Moon Trines Juno rx in Libra ☾ ♊ Moon Sextiles Chiron in Aries

Energy: The mood today will feel passionate and reflective as the moon makes it's way through Gemini. The moon will square Mars in Pisces which can bring up a lot of deep impulsive emotions which we may feel the need to act out on. Usually this square could trigger outbursts and anger but with the moon in Gemini and Mars in Pisces it may be a mood where we could observe our frustrations from afar and be able to analyze it. It would be a great day for journaling, self reflection and letting out hard feelings through art. The moon will also Sextile Chiron in Aries giving us a chance to reflect on past deep pain and traumas and have a moment to process what happened and reconcile with our past. Additionally the moon will square Ceres which could amplify our needs to be nurtured and in a less pleasant scenario may make us feel bitter if we don't get the nurturing we need. It would be important today to focus on self love and compassion and make space for yourself to feel what you need and take care of yourself. The moon will also trine Juno rx in Libra which can give us a chance to work out where we are devoting our energy towards and if it's worth it. This moment of reflection could help us reconsider our needs and priorities.

Recommendations: Self love magic, bath magic, journaling, shadow work, kitchen magic (especially baking), tuning into a sound bath

_____________________

24th

☾ ♊ Moon Conjunct Venus rx and Mercury in Gemini ☾ ♊ Moon Sextiles Eros in Aries ☾ VOC 12:09PM-12:08AM

Energy: On the new moon I mentioned that it was not a time for acting on decisions yet just planning and brainstorming ideas and goals. However today will be the day to start taking action. The moon will conjunct Venus rx and Mercury in Gemini helping our mind, emotions and heart be as one. Additionally the moon will sextile Eros in Aries giving us the drive to pursue our passions at any cost. With the moon conjunct Venus rx it will be a great time to self reflect on our values and how we value ourselves. However it may not be a good time to spend money no matter how enticing the transits may make it seem (as well as Jupiter being in retrograde at this time.) It would be a good time to act out on your plans that resonate with your values as you will have the chance to put your intentions into motion.

Recommendations: Self Love magic, putting plans into motion, sex magic, finding out information to help you achieve goals

_____________________

[tanadrin]

So all the terrible retcons and geographic inconsistency (Kul Tiras wtf) and the time travel and the bullshit with the night elves is bad (Illidan is the worst character ever, don't @ me), but the most frustrating part of WoW lore to me is its failure to explore certain complex emotional themes in a really satisfying way--like, the people who expound and expand on Warcraft lore are canny enough to notice that these emotional themes *exist*, but not clever enough to actually work with them or build them out, and so the whole thing collapses into rule-of-cool melodrama. There's nothing wrong with rule-of-cool melodrama; I love rule-of-cool melodrama. But Warcraft lore is *begging* to combine that rule of cool melodrama with some really rich and interesting emotions and character interpretations, it sets them up and is all ready to knock them down, and just... doesn't.

Take the conversation between Saurfang and Garrosh in the Borean Tundra, in WotLK, the one that ends with Saurfang saying "I don't eat pork." I think that's emblamatic of the big theme that unites the Horde, that makes it make sense as a faction. The Alliance, after all, started as a defensive association in the face of the Orc invasion; its renaissance after the creation of Durotar and the invasion of the Scourge is only natural. But what is the theme of the Horde? Is it honor? Strength? Sheer brutality? Well, none of those things. Orcs claim to value honor and strength; the Forsaken are certainly various shades of very dark gray at best, the Tauren and the Orcs *do* seem like natural allies of a sort, but all the races of the Horde have something even deeper in common: trauma. The Orcs are still (cf. Saurfang) dealing with the emotional turmoil of having been both forced and partially complicit in the atrocities of the First and Second War--after which their homeworld was destroyed, they were forced into concentration camps, and they had to rebuild their culture and their identity from the ground up. They have to find a new place in a new world, and there's this tension between the younger generation that doesn't have firsthand experience with any of this and just remembers that the Horde used to be a name that struck fear into the hearts of their enemies (Garrosh Hellscream, for instance) and the older generation that remembers how awful that time really was, and doesn't want to see the old ways revived because it might just destroy their people for good this time. Then there's the Darkspear Trolls and the Tauren, who were both driven out of their old homelands, and fell in with the Horde as natural allies with similar cultural points of reference; and the Blood Elves, whose suffering in the Third War was severe enough to radically alter their culture, coupled with being betrayed by their ruler who decided that joining the Burning Legion and abandoning them sounded like a better time than rebuilding Quel'Thalas.

And then there's the Forsaken. Oh, man, the Forsaken. The Forsaken and Sylvanas are some of my favorite characters in all of WoW, because sure, you could look at it and say, "okay, creepy undead who like green things that go plop and mad science = evil, bad guys." But you'd really be missing what makes the Forsaken interesting. They're not the Scourge--they explicitly broke away from the Scourge when Arthas left Lordaeron. They're not invaders, either. They're in fact mostly the human population of the destroyed kingdom of Lordaeron, the inheritors of that land, but who are treated by the Alliance as interlopers with no right to the very towns and villages they have *always* called home. They're treated as monsters by every living person who ever knew them, and they can't help but regard themselves that way, too. "What are we, if not slaves to this torment?" is one of the casual interaction lines you get when you click on Sylvanas: they do not *like* being dead. But Sylvanas is ruthless and cruel and after Arthas is killed, wins the Val'kyr over to her side so she can keep making more Forsaken. Why?

Simple. Let us imagine: you are an ordinary person, of no unusually great or poor moral virtue. You are hurt, badly. Grieviously. In a way you will never recover from. And everyone you love, all of your friends and your family, the whole society you come from, now sees you as an unredeemable monster that should, no, must be destroyed. How long must you be called a monster before you decide--fuck it, I *will* be the monster they call me. Because, at least that way, no one can ever hurt me again.

The overpowering motivation for the Forsaken is not power or bloodlust; it's not money, or forbidden knowledge. It's making sure no one in the whole world is ever able to make slaves of them again. To make sure they will not be hurt. And the biggest misstep the Alliance ever made was not reaching out to Sylvanas with overtures of friendship as soon as she established her kingdom--because like it or not, she has the support of the people of Lordaeron, and thus a damn good claim to her position. Maybe, if they had, they could have influenced the Forsaken, shown them that they had friends and didn't need to resort to amoral methods to defend themselves. But as it stands, they only have allies of convenience in the Horde (at least until Sylvanas becomes Warchief), and they know that no one in Azeroth is quite happy to see them continue to exist and be free. Everything else about the Forsaken--their use of dark magic, their development of a new, even more destructive plague, their recruiting former servants of the Lich King and raising new Forsaken from among the dead of the ongoing wars--makes perfect sense from the standpoint of a people that knows they are under threat from all sides, and will do anything to survive.

(The Draenei could have been something like this, too, FWIW. Like, a broken people, a people of exiles who are most comfortable in the shadows and with moral ambiguity. But then Metzen had to go make them Righteous Space Goats. I mean, come on. They're just boring now. They were never going to be Horde-aligned--there's too much history with the Orcs  there!--but having a group like that on the side of the Alliance, to help drive home the point that there is not a clear good guys/bad guys distinction here, would have been really nice.)

That actually makes them a pretty damn good fit for the Horde. Moreover, it creates an interesting point of tension with the Alliance, which is clearly *not* always the good guys. I mean, there's the matter of orc concentration camps, but also consider the refusal of leaders like Daelin Proudmoore to contemplate peace (and the subsequent, somewhat... forced turn of Jaina Proudmoore from dove to hawk) and the steadfast refusal of many on that side to deal fairly with the races of the Horde just because they appear monstrous. And arrogance, hoo boy. Dalaran, Gilneas, the Night Elves--huge swathes of the Alliance are characterized by being arrogant and not a little cruel.

And what of Sylvanas becoming Warchief? I don't know where the BFA lore is going (I'm not playing retail anyway), but right now it looks like they're setting up another Garrosh type situation, and preparing for Thrall to retake the Warchief-ship, but if they do that it would be a real pity. First of all, because, well, we saw that already in Mists of Pandaria! What, are we going to besiege Orgrimmar again? Second of all--Sylvanas and Garrosh are *very* different people. Garrosh was, well, Proud; hence the Sha of Pride. He wanted glory and power, he wanted war for war's sake, so he could live up to his father's reputation as a warrior. He was willing to sacrifice everything else that made the Horde the Horde for that. Sylvanas, though, has one overriding motivation: Keep Her People Safe. Punish the people who hurt her is a strong secondary motivation--but it's part of that first one, because if she can make her enemies' victories painful enough, she might discourage them from trying to press their advantage. And her people *trust* her on this: "Dark Lady watch over you," they say when you take your leave. She is not an autocrat--she is their beloved protector. So, she makes the ruins of Lordaeron uninhabitable. She annihilates Teldrassil. Does she spend very many Orc and Troll and Tauren lives doing so? Very well. They aren't *her* people.

I don't think this has to be a tragic flaw leading to her downfall. It sure doesn't make her a good leader for the rest of the Horde, though (even though, on an emotional and aesthetic level, I am 3000% here for Warchief Sylvanas, even more than Warchief Vol'jin, who also had a lot of the creepy threatening vibe that made him a much more interesting choice than either Thrall or Garrosh). But you could make it one, and you could do it very well--they've already mentioned in the tie-ins that Calia Menethil, Arthas's sister, teeeechnically has a claim to the throne of Lordaeron. And, even more interesting, is no longer quite among the living, even if the mechanism of that unlife is happy fun magic instead of evil death magic. Moreover, she has some sympathy for the Forsaken. You could have a squaring-off between them, and you could have a Queen Calia--maybe. If you could bridge that gap and make her understand that the Forsaken feel fundamentally apart from the other human kingdoms now, if she could come to understand just how much evil the Alliance has done to them, if she could really grok what it's like to be them. Then you could have a leader who understands their trauma--but also wants to heal it, rather than lash out at anyone and everyone that might conceivably be a threat. That, too, would be very interesting.

(There’s a reason that, while I loved the Alliance as a kid, I only play Horde toons as an adult. It’s not just that the Horde feel more interesting and vivid to me. It’s that the hypocrisy and the arrogance of the Alliance stands out in much greater relief now. The Horde aren’t good guys--nobody’s the good guys, here--but they don’t lie about their motivations, and they don’t act with cruelty and then play the victim in response. Jaina was an important exception, but they badly mishandled her character in the runup to MoP, which I find very hard to forgive.)

But knowing Blizz, even if they go vaguely that route, they won't stick the emotional landing. There is a very good, if very OTT and melodramatic (in the best possible way), series of fantasy novels or games lurking *behind*, or perhaps parallel, to Warcraft's lore. It is a shame that Blizzard has done so much to obscure it with obnoxious cruft, retcons and timeline compression, repetitive use of the same handful of characters, stupid-ass time-travel plots that create ten thousand plot holes and inconsistencies, shitty tie-in novels (cf. everything by Richard Knaak), and a total failure to make half the world's characters (i.e., everyone in the Alliance) at all interesting. I have a daydream of doing my own version of WoW lore and posting it somewhere like on AO3, but one of the things that makes WoW lore simultaneously so interesting and disappointing to me is that it's embedded in the explorable, realized space of video game worlds. Hard to reproduce that in print, I think. Might be worth it to try.

[lovenliterature]

evermore thoughts

willow

I wasn’t sold on this on first listen but I really liked it on second listen with more attention to lyrics

video is also really lovely, big fan of that

really really like the difference in melody for the diff appearances of “life was a willow and it bent right to your wind”

favourite lyric: “I come back stronger than a 90s trend” - the look she does at the camera cemented this as my fave line even more

champagne problems

down as one of my faves from the start

love love love the narrative

proper late night with cider, melancholy vibe

kind of like a grown up/worse feeling august in terms of vibes?? as in like the experience described feels like a more intense heartbreaking august in a way

really like the conclusion too

favourite lyric: I really struggled to pick here but: “you booked the night train for a reason/so you could sit there in this hurt” for sheer visceral emotion, “dom perignon you brought it” for the way its sung, “How evergreen, our group of friends/Don't think we'll say that word again” and “she’ll patch up your tapestry that I shred” for lyricism

gold rush

again, one i wasn’t super sold on the first listen, music and the vibe didn’t really interest me

first notes made me think of epiphany

but then i listened to it watching the lyric video and holy shit

now v appreciative of the melody and bass and the pace of the lyrics

really really like her embracing talking about jealousy

love love love the ending and beginning being the same holy shit

favourite lyrics: “at dinner parties, I call you out on your contrarian shit” and the way she sings “with your hair falling into place like dominoes”

‘tis the damn season

again preferred on second listen, wasn’t on the list of early faves

the best xmas late night walks vibe, walking through frosty streets at home between houses, embracing the only time you get to think, losing yourself in music and nighttime with freezing hands and cloudy breath

would’ve fit my 2019 xmas vibe too

melancholy and nostalgia

favourite lyrics: “sleep in half the day/just for old time’s sake” and “and the heart I know I’m breakin’ is my own”

tolerate it

god girl you deserve better

kinda like a sad last great american dynasty in terms of searching for approval

naive innocence taken advantage of

drunk in my garden walking round to try and forget my life kinda vibe

favourite lyrics: “i know my love should be celebrated/but you tolerate it” and “now I’m begging for footnotes in the story of your life” 

no body no crime

holy shit did i sleep on this at first but oh my god its so good

start gives me show of hands vibes which is great

her husbands acting different and it smells like infidelity - just the way she sings this is so so fucking good

this is the easiest song to listen to and holy shit its just great

favourite lyric: “she said “that ain’t my merlot on his mouth/that ain’t my jewellery on our joint account”

happiness

“all the years I’ve given/is just shit we’re dividin’ up” - v v true, you have to rebuild your life after every relationship and taking it all apart is so much more sudden than building it up

like an alternative to the 1 which I LOVE

but also some parallels to this is me trying: “I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool..... sorry I didn’t mean that” vs “my words shoot to kill when I’m mad”

the whole bridge is iconic - “I can’t make it go away by making you a villain” - in the short term, anger at an ex can help, but eventually you have to move on, and its easier to accept that there was good in the relationship after a while, and it makes looking back on it better

“no one teaches you what to do/when a good man hurts you/and you know you hurt him too” - blame on both sides is much harder to take and grieve and its hard to know how to cope with that. it also makes advice more complicated because there isn’t much you can say to help

favourite lyric: “both of these things can be true” - always love duality and nuance in literature and its nice to hear it acknowledged in a climate of binary oppositions and no shades of grey

dorothea

nostalgia for the future

now prob my most listened, gets stuck in my head and one of the few i do listen to in isolation - like august

Reminds me so much of Ella - each other’s history, not each other’s whole future but in there somewhere

again sapphic vibes, real strong esp because of the ella vibes its the whole in between romantic and platonic affection

“hey dorothea, do you ever stop and think about me” - that’s the way I think of people I love esp ella and people from that era of my life, and anyone where its kinda open ended or just grown apart

favourite lyric: “and damn dorothea, they all wanna be ya”

coney island

instant fave - marked down from first listen and probably still one i actively look forward to 

much like with exile, the male vocals GOT me

“did I shatter you” that line broke my goddamn heart

favourite lyrics: both for the sheer feelings of the vocals and the lyricism “were you standing in the hallway/with a big cake, happy birthday/did I paint your skies the darkest grey” and “and when I got into the accident/the sight that flashed before me was your face”

ivy

the way she sings goddamn could be the whole fucking song its so beautiful

“my pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand/taking mine, but it’s promised to another” - the passive here is great

“he wants what’s only yours”

the trilogy of these lyrics “what would he do if he found us out?”, “he’s gonna burn this house to the ground”, “and drink my husband’s wine”, the recklessness, the drinking his wine like a secret defiance

“my house of stone/your ivy grows/and now i’m covered in you” - fucking hell this is the best imagery - even with the strongest walls and foundations, the love crept through and grew inside her til she was covered in it

favourite lyric: quite literally just the words “oh, goddamn”

cowboy like me

“dancin’ is a dangerous game” - hell yeah I get so many feelings from this, it just reminds me of the intimacy of dancing and the feeling of swaying in someone’s arms

“and the skeletons in both our closets/plotted hard to fuck this up” - both like active interference of exes or just simply trauma, unresolved issues

“forever is the sweetest con” - believing hurts and everything ends but its worth it for the time you have

favourite lyrics: “now you hang from my lips/like the gardens of Babylon”

long story short

first notes make me think of between the saltmarsh and the sea even though its SO different but also a bit like august idk why

“if the shoe fits walk in it/til your high heels break” - i just love the imagery of this line

“fell down the rabbit hole” - living for this line and the wonderland vibe

“but if someone comes at us, this time i’m ready” - the vibe of like not looking for a fight but defending what you love

favourite lyric: “past me/I wanna tell you not to get lost in these petty things” - YES BITCH also the energy I give to past me and future me gives to me now or “long story short I survived”

marjorie

another song I come back to on its own

this is the exact wistful vibe i look for in calm ish songs, can be sad, can be happy depending on a mood and this is perfect

the video is incredible and marjorie providing the backing vocals made me cry also it being in the same place on the record as epiphany was on folklore

“never be so polite/you forget your power/never wield such power/you forget to be polite” - love the use of wield, it also feels like the medium women try to find between being a “bad bitch” and being ladylike, but not a medium society will accept bc fuck that, the exact way THEY wanna do it instead

really the song i needed after the year of so much grief, and i know it’s gonna bring me comfort when grandma goes, especially the line “what died didn’t stay dead”

favourite lyric: “watched as you signed your name: marjorie” - the way this is sung will literally stay with me forever, its like a legacy in one line

closure

again, instant fave

the vibe of you don’t owe someone shit just bc they feel guilty is so good

“yes I got your letter/yes I’m doing better” “I know that it’s over” - I’ve moved on and I don’t need your permission for that or your well wishes thanks

Moving on doesn’t mean forgiveness

I just love the melody so much and its such a good song agh

favourite lyric: “I know I’m just a wrinkle in your new life/staying friends would iron it out so nice”

evermore

“grey november/I’ve been down since July” - most explicit pandemicy vibes i get, I was home and it was almost possible to just regard it as a normalish summer, looking after the dog and living at home and now its coming up to Christmas and I’m living away from home, our family is split across 5 homes in 4 cities and its fucking hard (not even sure if its that type of down but that’s how it made me feel)

“writing letters/addressed to the fire” - literally just picked up on this lyric and has kinda a dual meaning for me. 1 -feeling shit about things you create, putting in effort, just to throw it away. 2 - tactic for tackling anxiety, just getting rid of thoughts and releasing them from my brain

“Cannot think of all the cost/And the things that will be lost/Oh, can we just get a pause?” - again, v pandemicy and so relevant to the fam’s 2018-2019, we just needed a pause, we had to keep going and not process what we’d lost or we’d never carry on

such a good depression song

favourite lyric: “staring out an open window/catching my death”

[theatricalities]

⧼   A mask of perfect innocence hiding the machiavellian intentions forever lurking beneath the surface — the ace up your sleeve, the trick coin with one side weighing heavier than its opposite because chance is simply a game that’s far too risky for the likes of you; the claw marks left on absolutely anything and everything in your wake — it’s not desperation that makes you cling so fervently to the objects of your desire as much as it’s your own way of ensuring survival; the self-imposed solitude clouding your ocean eyes  — questions of identity and belonging are forever at the heels of your every decision, begging you to turn back before it’s too late.   ⧽ 

  ━━   hey, isn’t that ZEPHYRINE TRAVERS ? i read a daily prophet article on them, once ; the 24 year old part-Veela WITCH is a SLYTHERIN alumnus who has gone on to be an ACTRESS IN THE WIXEN WORLD. i’ve heard they can be quite AUDACIOUS & BEGUILING, but i don’t know…they came off very EXPLOITATIVE and DELUSIVE in that interview. it really is hard to know what to believe these days though, isn’t it?

(  takes a hiatus...comes back with a new character  )

Heya ghouls, gals, and nonbinary pals! It’s me, ya girl. Zephyrine is my second little child to enter the group and I’m real wild about her! She’s inspired by DE idea #17 which you can find listed here!  Obviously, Zeph is an OC, but her tie to canon is that she’s the daughter of Travers, the Death Eater who killed Marlene McKinnon and family. Also, because I just don’t know how to write contented characters, Zeph’s a bit of a wreck, too — has some daddy issues, wants more than the world can offer, doesn’t have a true sense of self...but she’s got great fashion !

Below is Zephyrine’s bio and general information. Wanted connections can be found here ( very under construction rn ) and they’ll be updated as play progresses! Please feel free to pm me here or on discord ( debaucherie#6347 ) if you’d like to plot ✿

BEFORE THE WAR — “ Everyone wants something...”

[ trigger warnings for death, murder; ]

On the night that marked Zephyrine Travers’ birth, the world in return exalted her upon arrival, singing the praises of the newborn babe as boldly as a songbird in spring.

Or — that was the tale upon which her mother raised her, and it was one the girl found fitting enough to believe, even if all the world around spoke to the contrary. After all, her father (whose only claim to the term was in the scientific sense alone) created so empty a home that such fantastical ideas were perhaps the only source of hope that the young girl could find. At the age of two, Zephyrine and her family were quietly removed from their ancestral home as her father was sentenced to Azkaban for the murder of Marlene McKinnon. She and her mother were stripped of all riches, no matter the fact that the young girl continued the bloodline of one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight. 

And so, life continued on in this way, with little yarns of fantasy spun each and every night in the dreariness of their one-room hovel, spoken in assuring whispers as they cooked by candlelight or repaired a worn and weathered dress when there was no money to replace it instead. Despite the woe-be-gone skirts and helpless shoes, she was determined that no one should know about the unexpected poverty that marked her home life, and walked into the halls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry with every intent on looking the part of the Travers name even if it was in name alone that she remained connected  —  going so far as to insist to the Sorting Hat that she was meant to be in Slytherin, as her family had been for centuries, even when it argued she was better suited to Ravenclaw instead. 

In many ways, her adolescence was a long, drawn-out course in the art of convincing others — she could manifest a stream of tears to reassure a fellow Slytherin that she truly felt for her father just as easily as she could feign prolonged wooziness to avoid Flying class for a week. She flashed her blessedly charming smile across the House tables in the Great Hall, befriended everyone and anyone while still keeping them at arm’s length, and convinced even the most doubtful that she was an invaluable creature — not because of her name or the weight it still carried in certain circles, but because she believed herself to be and would not rest until it was an undeniable, unequivocal truth.

At sixteen, however, the meager world she’d known her whole life shattered entirely, its fragments not pieced together with the loving touch of her mother, but instead the fearsome presence of her father, who broke out of Azkaban along with ten other Death Eaters, including Bellatrix Lestrange. Unsurprisingly, he was asked by Lord Voldemort to prove his loyalty, and continued his murderous warpath — but instead of getting caught this time, he ensured that another would take his place. Zephyrine’s mother, innocent as a dove, was framed for his crimes and swiftly locked up in Azkaban, and Zander Travers was restored all riches seized upon his arrest.

By seventeen, Zephyrine had all the hallmarks of the dreams her mother raised her on : wealth far beyond her dreams, a manor estate fit for royalty and all the accompanying fanfare upon being properly introduced into a society of Death Eaters, but lost her mother in the process to a nightmare come true — the very woman who had instilled in the girl so great a belief in the impossible, that even this seemed like something Zephyrine could undo. 

She now balanced quite a precarious act, appearing to her father as his perfect little Death Eater in training, while turning spy for the Order in exchange for their help in freeing her mother once the War was won. 

AFTER THE WAR. — “...and once you know what they want, you know how to move them.”

When the time came, however, her mother was one of the many forgotten in the shadow of the Order’s triumph, relegated to little more than a broken promise as she rotted in Azkaban along with her husband, once again sentenced for his crimes. Their daughter, however, now took up the mantle of the new head of the Travers family, left with the ruins of her father’s blood-soaked legacy. In a world rebuilding itself, there was no game to be played when each side no longer had a reason to fight — and so, she waited. Seethed, more accurately, and busied herself with cleaning up the Travers name as time passed by. After receiving a formal training with the Wixen Academy of Dramatic Arts, she cemented herself firmly as a darling in the wixen theatre scene. In truth, it was all too easy. For twenty years, she’d practiced different ways to be believed — not to lie, she’d argue to herself, for any of those perceived lapses in truth had simply been her playing a character in order to get what she needed, and the silver-tongued sweetheart she portrayed to the public was no different.  To believe was the notion her mother instilled in her, but to be believed was one she’d determined necessary for herself, even if it meant losing any sense of self in the process. And so, upon hearing word of a reformed Death Eater legion under Bellatrix Lestrange’s leadership, she appealed to their cause, vowing that she could easily become a spy within the group which once held her loyalty — in exchange, once more, for the release* of her mother. Her allegiances, of course, are unknown to the public at large. In fact, when asked by the press on such matters, she voices her support for the Ministry and their efforts at preventing another tragedy to ever mark the Wixen World’s history again. Naturally, it’s all an act, as it has always been, and she’ll keep playing the game for as long as it take to reunite* with her mother, gain the most powerful of allies, and secure her own survival. 

[ * — while i’d love to believe that zeph’s mom is still alive, i think mrs. travers is likely to have perished rather soon after being wrongfully imprisoned. however, i believe that this information was kept from zeph as a way of controlling her, first by her father, then perhaps by the order ( i’d have to actually plot this one out w/an order member for this to be true ), but certainly by bellatrix and the DE clan. ]

BASICS.

FULL NAME:  Zephyrine Travers NAME MEANING: Zephyrine is of French origin and means ‘west wind’ ; Travers is of English origin and means ‘to cross’  NICKNAME(S):  Zeph ( used by family and close friends, only ) GENDER IDENTITY: Demigirl DATE OF BIRTH: 29 October, 1995 ( i put the wrong age in my app bc maths are not my strong suit, so technically Zeph is 24 but will turn 25 soon ) BIRTHPLACE:  Travers Estate, Hampshire, England  CURRENT PLACE OF DWELLING:  London, England  SEXUAL ORIENTATION:  pansexual panromantic LANGUAGE(S): English, French, basic Latin

LIFE.

OCCUPATION: Actress  EDUCATION: Homeschooled from ages 4 to 11; attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry from ages 11 to 18; attended the Wixen Academy of Dramatic Arts from ages 19 to 21. SOCIOECONOMIC LEVEL ( GROWING UP ):  Born upper class, but lower middle class from ages 2 - 16, upper class ages 16 - onward. SOCIOECONOMIC LEVEL ( CURRENTLY ): Upper class. RELIGION: Atheist

MAGICAL.

BLOOD TYPE: Not quite pureblood — but, publicly pureblood  SPECIES: 1/4 Veela  WAND TYPE: Hawthorn, unicorn hair core, 13″, reasonably supple SKILL LEVEL: Reasonably proficient, but a distinct knack for transfiguration and healing magic. Is adept at DADA, but often flees from the scene of battle before needing to utilize curses, jinxes, etc. PATRONUS: Incapable of producing a corporeal Patronus, but if she could, it would take the form of a shrike. BOGGART: Herself — albeit, a different, unrecognizable version of herself. In all her lying and betraying and such, Zeph has lost sense of herself and just doesn’t know the depths she might go to in order to get what she wants — and so I think it’s very possible that her biggest fear is the worst possible version of herself, the one that resembles her father in his uncaring bloodlust, messy and indiscriminate and entirely lacking in the nuance she prides herself on. AMORTENTIA: Fresh popcorn, the collar of a well-worn leather jacket, the scent of a newspaper so fresh the ink smudges one’s fingertips MIRROR OF ERISED: TBD. HOGWARTS HOUSE: Slytherin ( the Sorting Hat debated for approximately nine minutes between Ravenclaw and Slytherin, but ultimately decided on Slytherin because Zephyrine asked it to. ) FAVORITE SUBJECT:  Transfiguration. LEAST FAVORITE SUBJECT:  Arithmancy. CLUBS / EXTRACURRICULARS: The Slug Club ( Year 7 ), Theatre Club ( Years 2 - 7 ), Keres Club ( ages 22 - present )

RELATIONS.

PARENT(S): Zander & Odette ( nee Lynd ) Travers SIBLING(S): Two older sisters, both deceased, from her father’s first marriage, and a younger sibling born one-two years after her from her father’s affair. SIGNIFICANT OTHER(S): tbd. EX SIGNIFICANT OTHER(S): tbd. CHILDREN:  none. PET(S):  Two cats, Beryl and Belinda. 

PHYSICAL.

HEIGHT: 5′7″ HAIR: silver-blonde EYES: blue BODY MODIFICATION(S): Three piercings in either ear. Despite Bellatrix’s insistence, she has staved off getting the Dark Mark under the guise that it would harm her status as an actress. In truth, she simply would hate to get something so permanent when her loyalties are rather, well, impermanent. NOTABLE SCARS / BIRTHMARKS:  No scars / noticeable birthmarks. A scattering of freckles. GLASSES / CONTACTS: Only when required for an acting role, but not usually needed. CLOTHING STYLE: Quite a soft, ‘feminine’ style — lace, ribbons, ruffles, pastels — but there’s always one or two little things hinting at something decidedly more aggressive ( platinum collar-tips pointed and sharpened, metallic makeup, earrings in the design of tiny daggers, black lace gloves hiding perfectly manicured claws ) ; zephyrine also wears her mother’s choker, which is platinum-plated and has a handshake as a clasp. DOMINANT HAND: Ambidextrous

PERSONALITY.

ZODIAC: Scorpio ( sun ) — observant, expressive, secretive, vengeful, enigmatic // Gemini ascendant, Capricorn moon PERSONALITY TYPE: ENTJ, The Commander — confident, charismatic, strategic, ruthless, stubborn, emotionally naive MORAL ALIGNMENT:  Neutral Evil TEMPERAMENT: Phlegmatic  ELEMENT:  Water VICE(S): Wrath VIRTUE(S):  Diligence CHARACTER PARALLELS: Dahlia Hawthorne ( Ace Attorney ), Amy March ( Little Women ), Margaery Tyrell ( ASOIAF ), Vesper Lynd ( James Bond ), Eva Perón ( history / ‘EVITA’ the musical & film )

[unchosens]

❝ There’s something inside you, it’s hard to explain. They’re talking about you, boy, but you’re still the same.❞  HARRY POTTER looks a lot like that muggle, MATTHEW GOODE, right? Only 45 years old, that GRYFFINDOR alumnus works as a FORMER HEAD AUROR and is sided with the ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. HE identifies as a CIS MAN and is a HALFBLOOD. [ JESS, SHE/HER, 23, GMT+10 ]

Note: Also putting this intro up early, to convey a general sense of what Harry is up to right now! Feel free to come and plot with me, ask questions or anything like that. There’s also a lot of missing pieces in this, relationships that I haven’t been able to plot yet, so more to come!

TW DEATH, PARENTAL DEATH AND BRIEF MENTIONS OF TORTURE & SUICIDAL IDEATION

PAST (this got away from me a bit, skip to RESURRECTION for the most relevant section)

·         Life was difficult for Harry after the war (hmmmn, wonder what it would be like to have a difficult life?). He couldn’t bear the idea of going back to Hogwarts. Not only did the memories of everyone who died there haunt him, but it felt pointless. He didn’t belong there anymore, sitting in class, trying to pretend everything was the same. Harry signed up with the Aurors instead, in the direct aftermath not seeing another path for himself than to continue what he had started in protecting others. The work didn’t exactly make him happy, but it was a fulfilling purpose, helping him get up in the morning every day.

·         The lightning scar was never the worst of his wounds. The memories of the people who’d died (for him), the feeling of Voldemort in his head, the sounds of Hermione screaming under torture, Remus, Tonks, Fred and Colin dead in the Great Hall were all what truly lingered. He tried his best, but he couldn’t help but think if he’d been smarter, done things a better way, they’d still be alive. They could all still be alive. The things Harry had done himself – such as the torture of Amycus Carrow - haunted him less, but he isn’t proud of it either. There were days he thought he’d never get out of his own head, once trapped there by Voldemort, now only by himself – days he thought something had gone wrong inside of him and he simply wasn’t built for anything but fighting a war. It was of course Ron and Hermione he leaned on most, who helped him recover from the very worst of his depression and PTSD. Harry was never good at talking about the things that bothered him most, but they were there for almost all of it. They understood. It was Ron never failing to bring him a cup of tea or make a stupidly brilliant joke that only Harry would find hilarious, and Hermione coming to him to talk over every cause she was championing (and that, essentially, Harry knew he would also be championing) that made the difference. They were still here. Still alive. That was enough. Teddy too was a great source of healing for him, not just a reason to keep living, but also a presence that made Harry enjoy life again. While Andromeda was mostly their primary caregiver, Harry regards Teddy as his fourth and eldest child.

·         When Kingsley soon approached him about Auror training, Harry didn’t hesitate. It was what he had always planned on – the only thing he’d planned on. And it was a natural extension of the work he’d already been doing, helping with the trials and the remaining Death Eaters. For someone not expecting to survive, there was something healing about participating in the clean-up, in the rebuild. In a way, he recognised that there was something sorrowful in his choice to become an Auror. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see a different path – he ended up occasionally guest lecturing at Hogwarts, for NEWT DADA students and enjoyed it. But at the end of the day, that life was not for him. It might have been restful – but Harry knew he had never been a restful person. He never would be. At least now it was on his terms, his choice. He could go on doing the only thing that truly kept him sane with all he had lost – ensuring that those he loved would stay safe. That’s not to say it didn’t take a while to find a healthy balance – at first Harry threw himself into the work, caring little for his own wellbeing when the only thing he feared was losing momentum and having to think about the trauma of the war. Because after all, the war might have been over, but the society that had created it was still very much alive.

·         Becoming an Auror required a lengthy adjustment process. The war was over, yes, but it was time for politics to begin, and there, Harry was out of his depth. He had old scars, too, from dealing with the Ministry and a lot of distrust. He’d never been good at working with others – who weren’t Ron and Hermione, but luckily, both were still at his side. What was far more difficult was learning to accept help from other people too, and additionally, getting used to the slow and bureaucratic way Aurors had of solving problems. Harry couldn’t just throw himself headfirst into danger anymore, surviving on skill, luck and nerve – he had to listen, obey orders and co-operate.

·         Furthermore, a lot of his co-workers weren’t particularly receptive to the relentless way Harry and his friends pursued reform. The famous Golden Trio were still inseparable, and frankly, unstoppable when they had a cause. It was mostly Hermione leading the way, but Harry wasn’t going to sit back and participate in more of the same Ministry corruption either. For him, it was the personal that took foremost priority. The rehabilitation of Azkaban was something he assisted Kingsley with – removing the Dementors and improving living conditions for the prisoners. He also contributed to the reform of legal trials – nothing more painful to him than the memory of Sirius’ twelve years in Azkaban without a trial, the lost years they could have had together, and the life stolen from his godfather.

·         That said, Harry himself was far from perfect. While he wasn’t especially guilt-ridden over his needless and anger-fuelled torture of Carrow, or the other, more practical uses he’d made of the Imperius Curse during the war, he couldn’t in good conscience fail to recount the whole story, everything he did, when telling Kingsley what had happened. Kingsley organised a pardon for war crimes, which he then promptly buried at the Ministry for political reasons, knowing that people didn’t want to know this about their hero and it would only create trouble. He wanted to protect both Harry and the new government. Harry went along with this, hating the idea of undergoing more publicity, more attention, and following Kingsley’s lead to let it rest. In a way, Kingsley became his new Dumbledore for many years after the war and to him, Harry was a loyal soldier while he and the Trio began to find their own footing and political views as public figures. However, his use of the Unforgivables remain a secret even now, something not known to many outside of Harry’s closest circle of Ginny, Ron, Hermione and some of the Order. When Harry thought of that time and what he did, he remembered the danger of his temper, of what he was capable of if he gave into anger, of where it could lead him. That, more than anything else, was what haunted him about what he’d done and was a warning he planned on passing on to his children when he considered them old enough – yet he often put it off, afraid of what they might come to think of him.

·         Before that, he and Ginny rebuilt their relationship, finding their deep connection to still be alive and strong after the horrors of war. It was Ginny who got him without Harry having to speak, and it was Ginny who could make him laugh again. She understood the trauma in his past and had never changed the way she looked at him. They eventually got married and supported each other as they grew their careers, Ginny in professional Quidditch and Harry in working his way up the ranks of the Aurors until he became Head Auror. They had three children, whose names were picked out to honour the past: James, Albus, and Lily. As his family grew, Harry truly felt for the first time in his life that he was putting the past to rest, finally letting go of all his pain. His own childhood had very little love in it once he was sent to the Dursleys - as a parent, he wanted to ensure his children grew up with everything he didn’t have, as well as give them the best of him, usually at his most patient and even-tempered around them, if also a little overprotective.

·         Harry was disappointed when Ron left the Aurors – he was so used to relying on him as his partner. It was hard not to feel a little abandoned even though he understood why Ron chose to go and was happy for him – but Ron probably never realised just how lost Harry felt without him, for a long time, not being able to look across and see him at the next desk over. He continued to work closely with Hermione, treating her office as an extension of his own (“I feel smarter in yours, alright?”) and always politically aligned with her, a near unbeatable team. His friendship with Ron didn’t change – they were still brothers. Harry had never had a family until Ron, and soon after, the Weasleys. With his marriage, it was official, as was Hermione being his sister but Harry had felt the truth of that long before. Still, it was the happiest time of his life, having what he’d always craved so much. His nieces and nephews were also well-loved by Harry, who if at times could seem a little more reserved than the other Weasley uncles, was no less affectionate. And it was that older Weasley generation around whom he’d always been able to open up – the younger Wotters were the same. He loved them all, but the worst kept family secret was Uncle Harry’s soft spot for the children of Ron and Hermione, it being something of a joke around the cousins that Harry simultaneously tried very hard to appear impartial and was very bad at concealing his feelings.

·         The extent of his trauma was a much better kept secret – something Harry never liked talking about beyond the essentials that he had to share with them. Protecting his family was his highest priority, but his fame and position made it difficult. Harry tried to keep his kids from the spotlight as much as possible, but even he knew it was hopeless. The press had never stopped being interested in the Boy Who Lived, even once he was a man. For himself, he hated the publicity - personally, he could never quite get over the lies and the harassment he’d faced, the way he'd been treated as a spectacle to dissect all over the front page. But Harry had also seen firsthand what it was like when false information and dogma was fed through the news and so professionally, he knew it was crucial to speak to them – in his capacity as Head Auror only. His most important rule, which he made clear at every interview with his sternest expression and very coldest voice was that he never spoke about his family. All he ever wanted was for his children to have safe and happy lives, and he would have done anything to make that happen. It was why Harry struggled with Lily’s ambition to be an Auror. At once painfully proud and fiercely worried that she would find the cycle of violence and darkness too much to bear, it took time for him to accept that she was just as stubborn as he ever was.

ORDER

·         The rise of the Wraiths made Harry furious, perhaps more than even he had ever been before (and he was always very good at anger). The sacrifices he had made, that the people who had fought and died had made, were not going to be made into nothing. He reformed the Order not just to fight, but to win, knowing that once more, the Ministry was too large and corruptible to be trusted. And this time, he had no intention of doing it in secret, beyond the covertness necessary for survival. The Order itself would be secret, but Harry was going to speak out. This was their world now. They weren’t children, and they weren’t powerless.

·         He depended on his old circle to be his fellow leaders, Ron and Hermione, Ginny, Luna and Neville – there was no one else he trusted more, and together he had faith they could end this, for once and for all this time.

·         He took the codename Hart, a reference to his stag Patronus - hart being a term for an adult red deer, was also chosen for Gryffindor red, but of course, he had to endure a lot of jokes mostly from Ron and the Weasley brothers about being the heart of the Order. All of which Harry dismissed with an eyeroll – he wasn’t special, certainly not more than any of them. They were going to win together.

PROPHECY

·         When Harry heard about the Prophecy, his determination to fight didn’t change, but he also felt a deep dread, an ever-increasing disconcertment at the way history seemed to be repeating itself. He wasn’t afraid of having to fight Voldemort again – he would do that prophecy be damned. He didn’t need a prophecy to tell him to do that. But Harry was afraid of the past repeating itself, of more people dying for him, of them making a sacrifice for someone who wasn’t worth it. How could he, how could one person, be worth all the death that lay in his past? The worst of it was the fear of who could be lost next – his children, the very best of his life; his wife, who was the greatest source of happiness he’d ever had; or his friends, who’d never backed down from his side, despite the risks they’d faced.

·         The thing about prophecies was that Harry learnt them, as he learnt so many things, at Dumbledore’s knee. Hearing this one made him angry. The only one who could defeat an unspeakable enemy? Already, it implied that he would once more be the victor, the one to survive, the one who lives. What about his children? His wife? His best friends? There were no assurances for them and Harry had no intention of being the survivor this time, not if it meant losing them. The one thing he wanted was to end this war before his children had to be more involved than they already were. And that, to Harry, meant not listening to the prophecy. He already knew they didn’t have to be true – that it was Voldemort who had really marked Harry as his eventual killer. Dumbledore had told him that, and whatever complicated feelings he had about the man, who he at once loved, resented and couldn’t bear to hear criticised, Harry still had more faith in him than just about anyone else. If there needed to be a sacrifice this time, he’d be the one to do it.

·         The only problem was that if other people chose to believe the prophecy – and they did – he and his family would be a target. He knew in a way that it was his own fault. After all, he did defeat Voldemort. But Harry also knew it wasn’t because of any prophecy. As he once put it, he chose to walk into that arena with his head held high and do the job marked for him, by Voldemort, by Dumbledore – but not by fate. To the rest of the world, though, he had proven once before that he was the Chosen One. So the Potter family increased their protections, and went as close into hiding as they could go without actually going into hiding, all the while the spectres of James and Lily I and their fate hanging over him.

·         Meanwhile, considering his determination to not believe this Prophecy, Harry started thinking about what might happen if he did die. It was certainly not his intention to die – he didn’t mean to sacrifice himself simply for the sake of it, but he’d fight and die if necessary, like anyone else. He had to think, then, about how that might mean leaving his children with nothing.

·         Years ago he’d given the Marauder’s Map to Teddy, who he assumed had since passed it down to James, and perhaps Albus and Lily in turn (Harry didn’t need to know about that, it wasn’t supposed to be passed down from parent to child, but from mischief maker to mischief maker - though regardless of that, he knew what it was like to crave a connection to the father you’d never known and it belonged as much to the Lupins as to the Potters. He might not have known much about his father, but he was sure James Potter I would have wanted Teddy Lupin to have that map).

·         Now, however, Harry gave his long-treasured Invisibility Cloak to Lily as a means of protection at Hogwarts from the student Wraiths and also as a tacit sign of his approval of her decision to become an Auror. But truthfully, it was also because of his uncertainty of whether he’d make it out alive this time. Perhaps, if the worst indeed came, it would give her comfort, as having something of his own father always had for him. He also, at this time, looked past his own desire to stay perfect in her eyes and told Lily about his own use of the Unforgivable Curses in his past, knowing that she was in many ways, just like him - and if Lily was going to choose the same path as him, face the same darkness, he wanted to warn her of the dangers of their shared temperament. He had passed on enough pain to Lily already and he did not want her to repeat his mistakes. At Hogwarts, Lily did need the Cloak the most; for James, Albus and Teddy, all adults, he focused on giving them all the time he could, just in case. He wanted them to know there was nothing in the world he loved as much. That it had all been worth it, to get to this part of his life, where he got to have them.

·         That was then. While the fact that he has been brought back from the dead as a living revenant seems to point to the prophecy’s accuracy, the old Harry would have pointed out that knowledge of the prophecy would have encouraged the Knights to bring him back as just that – a self-fulfilling prophecy once more. Now, without his memories, Harry is less inclined to regard the prophecy as false, not when everyone around him seems to credit it but it remains yet another thing Harry struggles to believe about himself. What chance does he have of defeating any enemy? He doesn’t even know who he is. He doesn’t know if he wants to know who he is, if he even wants to be alive. He might be a revenant, but he isn’t a hero. It’s not that he doesn’t want to help. If he knew where to start, he’d try. For all his confusion and grief over the heaven he’s lost, there’s no part of Harry capable of sitting back and doing nothing. But he’s lost. Whoever Harry Potter used to be, he’s no one’s Chosen One anymore.

DEATH

·         The one thing he wanted was to end this war before his children had to be more involved than they already were. But tragically, that hope ended the same night Harry’s life did. October 31 2024. Lestrange, something of a sadist, had chosen the night on purpose and tormented Harry with the fact before he died. Harry gave up any hope of escape, preferring to buy time for his family. (All details are pending plotting with other involved characters!)

·         Ginny took James and Albus to safety, to the Granger-Weasley safehouse, only to return with Ron and Hermione to help Harry. They were too late to find anything more than his body, bereft of his wand, which had been taken by the Wraiths as a trophy.

·         He was buried at Godric’s Hollow, in the graveyard next to his parents’ plot. On their other side is a memorial stone Harry organised himself, honouring Sirius and Regulus Black, neither of whom left a body behind. Harry, alongside Andromeda, also oversaw the burials of Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks at Godric’s Hollow.

RESURRECTION

·         Harry Potter had been resting, at peace. He was torn away from that when he woke up in his grave, to be found by the Knights and told who he was. At first he felt nothing so much as confusion. All he could really remember was being safe, comfortable, warm; now it was eyes on him all the time, hushed whispers in his presence, frightened voices and angry discussions in which people threw around blame. Learning of his past made him more unnerved still – it was impossible to think of being this person others described, apparently the perfect hero … though Harry can’t help but see the trail of death that seems to follow this past self of his in all the stories. Touching everyone except him.

·         Being around his old family and friends is, for the most part, uncomfortable. He doesn’t know how to act around any of them, he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be. And they look at him with so much expectation, so much hope. It’s the worst around his children. The way they look at him could break him if he let it. Despite everything he doesn’t remember, Harry hates the feeling that he’s disappointing people. It hurts to let them down, when it seems as if they love him so very much. If only he could remember. But no matter how much he tries, he can’t find what he’s lost – what, he sometimes thinks, might no longer exist as anything other than someone else’s memory.

·         And there are times he doesn’t want to try. Times all he feels is anger, an anger he tries not to show, but it’s there. He doesn’t belong here. He shouldn’t be here. And they brought him back. It was the first thing he had said when he was pulled out of the grave – “I’m not supposed to be here. Who are you? Why did you do this to me?” Since then, it’s never really stopped hurting. It got worse when he learnt about Neville Longbottom – Harry doesn’t remember the man, but knowing he should be alive and Harry should be dead is a lot to bear. From the stories, though, allowing other people to die for him is nothing new. The question is why other people keep going along with it.

·         With the resurrection, Harry has been altered. Some things remain the same – he’s still brave and determined, still resilient and certainly still internalising his own feelings, trying to be strong, because it’s what people seem to expect of him, what they’re looking to him for. And he can’t help but try to be what others need instinctively, though truth be told, he’s no better than he ever was at comforting others, awkward and unpractised at both words and touches of love. The feeling of a wand in his hand is familiar, even if he doesn’t remember old spells, and he seems to have a way of rubbing the scar on his forehead when he’s thinking, or brushing flat the unruly hair on his head, that might well painfully remind his forgotten loved ones of the man they knew. But while he still feels those old instincts deep within, ultimately, he’s more consumed with himself and his own pain. It’s something like being a child again – egocentric and absorbed in his own feelings.

·         His worst flaws, the ones that before his death, Harry had spent years working on and trying to master are instead amplified – his temper, impatience, independent streak, tendency to internalise and his disregard of his own life. For now, he’s cooperating, remaining hidden in the Order safehouse, but he’s never been easy to control, and while others are consumed with trying to figure out what to do about Harry, what’s right - even with the best of intentions, he’s never liked being told what to do or “handled” like a problem. As if he’s incapable. In fact, that tends to make him more defiant, more reckless, and without the bitterly learnt lessons in controlling those urges, Harry is every day more likely to do something he can’t take back.

·         The worst part of it is that he doesn’t really know what he wants – to do anything and everything possible to get back his memories, regardless of danger? To fight alongside the people who are apparently his family? Or to leave, to take the offer of a peaceful life without any of them, to leave and never look back? Deep down, there’s another urge, to give up entirely, to stop fighting past the pain he feels in order to stay alive – it’d be easier to return to the heaven he’d lost. That much he can’t say out loud to anyone, sure of the pain it would cause to these people who won’t seem to stop fighting for him, whether he wants them to or not.

[boundlesshart]

preliminary cindered shadows thoughts and headcanons

Or: DLC truly fed me more than I fed myself today

Ok. I have watched through all of Cindered Shadows, read through the library texts, and seen the Claude/Balthus supports. I’ll keep this mostly concerning Claude and House Riegan as a whole, since they’ve gotten a lot of development.

As of right now, the information seems to be more informing than “you see this carefully created headcanon that you like? poof. gone”, which is excellent!

Spoiler warning extends to early Chapter 1 of Cindered Shadows (snippet of dialogue ten minutes into the side story, nothing story related), Basement Library contents, and the Balthus/Claude support. 

Members of House Riegan

The most exciting development for me is that every immediately relevant Riegan has been named! Duke Riegan (Claude’s Grandfather) is now Oswald von Riegan (nicknamed Oswald the Old in the C support of Balthus/Claude), and Claude’s mom is now Tiana. 

First off: Oswald the Old. Love it. Keeping it. I’m only now realizing that a lot of my headcanons have been restricted to the headcanon channel on our discord, so for a refresher: I hc that Duke Riegan has a Major Crest of Riegan, which has allowed him to reach 100 years of age by the time the game starts. He’s kind of shaking his cane at the youngins and being stubbornly alive in the face of Alliance nobles praying to the goddess for him to pass on finally, but his health is failing and he is unquestionably old. It reminds me a lot of “The Late Lord Frey” from ASOIAF, which refers to another ridiculously old man who people wish would die so that they can get their inheritance, only for him to be stubbornly alive (and hated, though he doesnt particularly care about that). LITERALLY hate that I compared Oswald to Walder..... LITERALLY hate that i realized that their names have similarities. Moving on quickly before I get mad.

I do miss my Shakespeare reference of Desdemona falling in love with Othello the moor, and Tiana feels a little too simple next to her brother Godfrey, but it’s fine. I’ll talk more about her later, because now we have to talk about the brand new Riegan on the block: Claudia von Riegan.

Letter to a Mysterious Noble: Lady Riegan Gives Bren a Heart Attack, Part One

I’ll start with the letter that nearly killed me:

My Beloved.... 

You were right. It seems he would not hesitate to divide the house. What's more, I hear he's considering taking his half of the territory and joining the Kingdom. 

I can't believe he would even consider dragging another region into this, not to mention stirring up trouble over his inheritance, at a time when the Alliance desperately needs to unite. He's clearly out of his mind. Though he bears a Major Crest, and you a Minor Crest, your father was wise in his attempt to declare you his heir. 

As it were, I can't help but wonder what your intentions with me are, I am drowning in letters proposing marriage to that....beast. He may share your face, but the resemblance ends there. I refuse to marry such a foul creature. If you don't come to me soon, I am going to you. Don't forget that my father's blessing could be revoked at any moment.... 

I will depart Derdriu at the end of the Lone Moon. You have better be prepared for my arrival. I wish to marry you beneath the Garland Moon. Why? Well, I am a woman, after all, and even I harbor dreams of being a Garland Bride. Understood? Great. Make it so. 

- Claudia, Second Daughter of House Riegan

Ok. With the Claude/Balthus support it is confirmed that Claudia von Riegan is NOT Claude’s mom, which is a relief and a half because I was about to throw hands in defense of the milfdilf power couple that I made Claude’s parents to be. 

Now that that is cleared up, this letter is definitely referring to the split of House Daphnel and the creation + defection of House Galatea to the Kingdom. We don’t have a date for when this happened to give more context to the letter, so I’ll leave that to a future Ingrid to decide. In lieu of that, I’ll place this at the 960s, since the Alliance would be in turmoil rebuilding and recovering from the war against Almyra, which would be a time when they desperately need to unite. It’s also a part of my Riegan timeline that isn’t getting filled up, so it works for me. 

What’s more important is what is happening in this letter: Duke Riegan’s daughter, fleeing her home and all she knew for the one she loved. Very Claudemom, which is where we realize that this is the inspiration behind Claude’s name. I’ll deal with that in a second, I just want to comment on how funny it is that a Riegan lady eloping is something that has happened twice now. It’d be funny if this was a pattern..... though I can’t see it staying positive though, Riegan ladies being thought of as notoriously difficult and strong-willed, in a bad way.

I thought this was Claude’s mom because of how frank she was. Claude calls his mother a warrior goddess and a demon queen who would have laughed right alongside his dad if he got into trouble, and from this letter..... it really fits. “He’s clearly out of his mind”, “I can’t help but wonder what your intentions with me are”, calling one of her suitors (the other brother?) a “beast”, “if you don’t come to me soon, I am going to you”, and my favorite part: “You have better be prepared for my arrival. I wish to marry you beneath the Garland Moon. Why? Well, I am a woman, after all, and even I harbor dreams of being a Garland Bride. Understood? Great. Make it so.”

Very blunt. She knows what she wants and she’s going to get it. It’s pretty much confirming what I’ve been thinking about how Tiana would have approached Hairan (Claude’s dad) and captured his heart, and what I’ve been going with for Claude’s search of a partner. They know what they want. They won’t stand to marry a spineless lowlife. They want someone who can keep up with them, not walk behind them or ahead of them but beside them. Excellent content. This really made me love House Riegan.

Now. Claudia. Claude. Claude is meant to be named after Claudia. My headcanon prior to this was that Claude is a name he took on when he came to Fódlan, naming himself after Godfrey Claudius Riegan to curry favor and affection from his sentimental grandfather. 

Here’s the thing: both ways have their own meanings and I love them both. The first references someone who could have been Tiana’s inspiration to leave to Almyra, a tribute to the woman who gave her courage. The second references a dead guy whose name Claude uses for his own personal gain, only for it to end up being a big part of his identity, similar to his initial view of Fódlan as a stepping stone to achieving his dreams. I’m not in the business of headcanoning deadnames. Claude’s reference of fake names after Balthus asks if he is Claude von Riegan (something along the lines of “Claude is such a common name in Fódlan, it’d be perfect for a fake name”) is definitely just to throw Balthus off, but it’s too perfect not to appropriate for my own use. My initial headcanon about Claude’s names stay: When he started transitioning he chose to go by Hafez, and when he resolved to go to Fódlan he decided to go by Claude after his recently-departed uncle.

Tiana von Riegan: Lady Riegan Gives Bren a Heart Attack, Part Two

Tiana von Riegan..... I love her. God I love her. I love that Balthus loves her and confirms that she is a hot milf on top of being a badass woman in general. Claude being like “Dude that’s my mom” was also really funny. Excellent support that goes into what is important for me. Love. Stan.

Timelinewise, I’ve put Tiana’s birth year at 1135, her graduation from the Officers Academy at 1154 (a year after Balthus was born, she was 19), and her disappearance in 1160. Reminder that Claude was born in 1162, specifically stated outside of Fódlan. Things are actually looking up for this timeline and where I placed her: Between 1154 and 1160 she is stationed at Fódlan’s Throat as one of the Goneril Valkyries, which gives me a fantastic excuse to have Holst and Balthus meet her a few times before her disappearance as stated in the support. Both of them knew her, and apparently they bawled their eyes out when they heard that she disappeared, which is hilarious but also cute???? She really was popular.... 

Back to the milfdilf power couple, LOVE Claude’s line when Balthus says that he wants to confess to his mom: “Is that a fact? Well, it’ll be interesting to see whether my father can kill you before my mother beats him to it”. They’re MARRIED. They LOVE EACH OTHER. I love it when Fire Emblem gives me parents that love each other and their kid.

Overall, nothing much changes besides the name. Except for this one..... “interesting” document from the Basement Library.I’m just going to be mad and confused at it so it gets their own separate section:

To Those Who Slither in the Dark: Eat My Ass

Ok, so straight up? I don’t like the whole “secret society of mole men are behind every plot point in history ever” thing. Stop it. Stop it! I hate this almost as much as I hate alternate timelines coming together. I’d rather it be people making decisions on their own be the reason why things go to shit, not secret societies of mole men. I had a feeling that the Slithers would be involved in the Leicester Alliance somehow beyond the Ordelia mess, but that didn’t mean that I wanted it.... Awful. Terrible. I’m posting this note here for posterity.

Item 51 Part 6 ...son of the Alliance's leader, Duke Oswald Riegan, has died in an accident. This follows an incident involving the previous successor, and even the knights of Seiros suspect it was at Count Gloucester's command, thought it seems to conspicuous. This is some concern that this could spark a war. With Duke Riegan gravely ill, the situation is....

At first glance it’s pretty much what it is: throwing some ambiguity at the identity of who arranged for Godfrey’s death. The one thing I’m still trying to wrap my head around is the mention of a “previous successor” before Godfrey. The only mention of Duke Riegan’s other kids is in the Alliance Nobility Register Thingy describing House Riegan, which only mentions his daughter Tiana. Timeline-wise, she is the only person that fits. I headcanoned Tiana as a crestless daughter and the last child of many throughout her father’s lifetime, so far out of sight and mind that she gladly took on risks like fighting to defend Fódlan’s Throat and eloping to Almyra because she didn’t have any duties tying her down. I don’t know what to make of this.... so I’m just going to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Claude/Balthus Support

Finally.... here is the rest of my reaction to Claude’s one new support from the DLC. I said this a lot but I’ll say it again: Love it, excellent, incredibly informative. I like it for the same reason I like Hilda’s (going into his origin), but I also like it because it’s the first time someone that can speak comments on Claude’s ambitions outside of the one cutscene after Fort Merceus. I’m very satisfied with what I got.

The official story/explanation for Claude’s origins seems to be that he was born to an offshoot of House Riegan. Now, Balthus dismisses it, but Balthus is dumb and I’m not dismissing it because it perfectly fits with my headcanon that there are a handful of people that are Riegans in name only, children of the current Duke Riegan, crestless and poor and existing only as irrelevant nobles. They would have been ignored if Duke Riegan died without an heir. Balthus sees through it immediately, but seeing that Claude thinks it’s plausible enough to use as a cover story, I think there’s some truth to it.

Claude reaction to Balthus poking into his heritage is to tell him to mind his own business, followed by saying that he’s too busy and leaving. This is so unconvincing that I’m choosing to ignore it. Come on Claude. You’re better than this.

We get a little information on Kupala, the autonomous village in the mountains close to Edmund Territory, north of the Alliance and straddling the borders of Leicester and Almyra. I’m not tooooo interested in them personally but I like Claude’s last line when he’s talking about a description of the Kupala tribe he heard in Almyra: “Don’t try to find them, people say, or you’re liable to get hexed. Or so the tale goes. That part was probably added to spice up the story a bi, but even so, they’re certainly a mysterious lot.” I headcanon that magic isn’t widely practiced in Almyra and to a point even feared (see: Claude’s pleas to not get hit by magic in his Lysithea supports). So like.... love it when my dumb headcanons get that Support.

Absolutely LOVE that someone is telling Claude that simply “breaking down the barriers”, whatever that means, won’t be easy and might result in consequences he didn’t prepare for. It’s like I possessed Balthus.... “Give me concrete details on your plan and also let me tell your mom I love her”. I also love Balthus’ line “Everything we’ve built to until now could fall to ash”, which references Claude’s death quote in CF.

[professorspork]

Frozen 2: first impressions

Hello friends! As you know, Frozen was a HUGE part of my fandom life ~back in the day.~ So of course I saw the sequel opening night and of course I have thoughts after ruminating on it for 24 hours. I’m sure there will be many things I forget or don’t cover--after all, I’ve only seen it the once. And I make no guarantees that my thoughts are coherent or consistent. (If I contradict myself, I contradict myself-- I am large, I contain multitudes.) I’m also sure my opinions will evolve upon rewatch. Lord knows they did last time.

Is that enough disclaimer yet? OKAY. Some of my thoughts are negative! Some are positive! It’s a grab bag! Here we go!

Spoilers under the cut, pals.

IN SHORT: As an expansion on the world and the characters I adore, I pretty much loved it! As an extension of uh Big Capitalism and what it means in terms of real world ramifications... I have questions/comments/concerns!

IN LONG: I think I’ll start with what didn’t work for me and work my way around to fangirling at the end.

the meh

I feel like... part of it is that Disney has just gotten worse and power-grabbier in way more blatant ways in the last few years, and part of it is that I’m ever-more cognizant of these things. And the fine line they want to walk of “We can tell stories about progressive concepts! Princesses are woke now, actually!” without taking a single financial risk when it comes to alienating foreign markets, homophobes abroad or Nazis domestically is just a fundamentally untenable position to be in. You don’t get to retcon Elsa and Anna as being somehow less white than they clearly are and then try to tell a story about reparations in which no one actually gets reparations. You don’t get to get points for that. It’s in some ways admirable to want to try, but all you do when you’re coming at it from the position of being Disney when you tell this story is show the cracks in it.

I can see how, on a purely storytelling level, having Papa King Arendelle Agnarr be of Arendelle and Iduna be of the Northuldra and having their daughters be the bridge between the two communities is a really tempting, tidy, tie-a-bow-on-it narrative. And I also see how creating the backstory of the war and the mist neatly explains the absence of indigenous faces in the first film. But like... come on. Introducing an indigenous group like the Northuldra and then declaring that Elsa and Anna are a part of it is insulting. There’s no other way to say it. It just feels gross. I’m glad that Disney consulted with the Sámi on the movie, and I acknowledge that both real-life Sámi folks and the onscreen Northuldra come in a broad variety of skin tones and phenotypes. But even with the most generous possible reading of the choice-- that it’s well-intentioned, albeit misguided-- falls flat for me. It feels like Disney trying to have their cake and eat it too. And I don’t really see any way around that. It just... gives me tremendous pause, and it’s so core to so many of the things the movie chooses to be that it’s really disquieting and disappointing.

But then again, Disney being racist isn’t exactly news, and there’s still plenty of flaws to tackle even when we put this (massive) issue aside.

This movie is... weirdly allergic to stakes? It’s not like I wanted Elsa to stay dead, or that I expected Olaf to (more on that in a minute). But Anna’s decision to go full Thor Ragnarok and, as @theseerasures​ jokingly put it to me last night, “throw the first brick at Stonewall” and destroy Arendelle felt right. It felt appropriate to the story they were telling, and it would have had the film put its money where its mouth is re: how atoning for the sins of our forebears requires massive systemic change. So having Elsa charge to the rescue on her water-type Rapidash extremely queer steed daemon Gay Horse and save the city felt cheap. (Also, side note: is Arendelle really just... that one seaside port town and nothing else? Are there only like fifty people in Arendelle?) The citizens had already been taken to safety. The society would live on; they’d all get to rebuild. What was the point of saving the castle, just for saving the castle’s sake? To what end? I don’t see how that’s more inspiring or reassuring or worth it than watching the sisters lead their people from the ground up and starting anew. I don’t understand what they thought was worth protecting, when, again, all of the people were safe. Stories need stakes in order to have meaning! HTTYD has impact because Hiccup loses his leg in his attempt to save his dragon and his people. You know? You don’t get to just... keep everything the way it is and call that restorative justice, and the film clearly wants us to. And I don’t understand why. The only reason that makes any sense at all to me is that they thought it would scare little kids, but like. THIS COMPANY HAS PORTRAYED WAY MORE TRAUMATIZING THINGS THAN THAT. MANY TIMES.

Point in fact: Olaf’s death! Genuinely disturbing! Sad! For the most part I really liked the way it was handled, but it also felt very. Y’know. “Mister Stark, I don’t feel so good.” This is perhaps my most uncharitable nitpick, so I’ll keep it brief, but having Olaf drift away Snap-style just felt like an extremely synergistic, Disney+ nod at Infinity War instead of an organic decision. Which maybe isn’t fair, because it makes more sense for Olaf to become a flurry than for the Snap to make people dust! But nevertheless, the weird wink-and-a-nudge feeling of it totally pulled me out of what should have been an extremely poignant moment. Elsa’s revelation during “Show Yourself” felt similar--like. Not to take away from your moment, Elsa, but the call isn’t out there at all, it’s inside me was already covered by this larger canon, and in a more elegant and eloquent manner.

Which--tbh, the music overall was a bit of a letdown (though “Into the Unknown” slaps and a boyband of five joshes “Lost in the Woods” was perhaps the best sequence in the whole movie). I respect that they clearly wanted to give everyone a solo this time around in a deliberate way, but the songs felt perfunctory for the most part--describing moments instead of advancing them. This film was such a departure from how Disney normally makes sequels (mostly in a good way, actually) and I couldn’t help but wonder what it would have looked like to make a version of this movie where no one sang at all. It didn’t feel cohesive.

And, though it would kill me to get rid of “Lost in the Woods” because it’s perfect... I kinda wish Anna and Kristoff had gotten engaged at the end of act 1, as I think they pretty clearly did in the first draft of this script. Their relationship drama felt like a hat on top of a hat, and they could still have addressed their codependency/insecurities while being engaged. Leaving the proposal for the end just made it an anticlimax after everyone’s been brought back from the literal dead. And it maybe would have left them with more options than having Kristoff just vanish from the narrative for the entire back half of the second act.

Also Honeymaren should have had at least two more scenes. I can’t justify this on a narrative level; the movie didn’t actually need more of her. But like. If you’re going to go out of your way to keep Elsa carefully single, and even give KRISTOFF a new boyfriend, I feel like the least you can do is let us get to know the obvious throw-us-a-bone offering a little bit better. Like. Literally. the actual least you can do.

anyway. all of that said.

the yay!

I can’t tell you how gratifying it was to me, personally to open with a flashback of the girls that demonstrates as clear as day that Elsa is an ace lesbian and Anna is bi and polyamorous. Thank you, snow action figures.

And like. Overall the way the movie tackled the sisters and their relationship was pure *chef’s kiss.* (And I think for me, the strength in this particular bullet point probably outweighs all of my complaints and concerns from above, in the end. At least from an “I still derive enjoyment from this flawed thing” standpoint, though perhaps not from an “I’d recommend this to anyone without caveats” standpoint.) THEY LOVE EACH OTHER SO MUCH. THEY WERE SO THEMSELVES. I do think part of the fear of any sequel where there’s been a significant amount of time since the last one and you were so emotionally invested in it the first go-around is like... what if everyone feels OOC? What if what I saw wasn’t what was really in them after all? What if they feel like strangers? What if they let me down? And there was none of that, even for a second, with this movie. Their parallel journeys were character-appropriate and impactful. Elsa finally gets the freedom she’s always been looking for. Anna finally gets the responsibility she’s always been ready for. Anna, the caretaker, is positioned to take care of everyone. Elsa, the lesbian, runs away to the forest to hang out with beautiful powerful women. Elsa, the force of nature, is finally allowed to commune with it. The scene at their parents’ ship truly anchors the whole movie in the best possible way. And also, like... this movie showed how fucking weird Elsa is, and I feel so vindicated. SHE’S SUCH A DORK. I can’t believe I never realized that Elsa would totally choose Charmander as her starter, and the way she talked to the fire salamander was literally the most charming thing I have ever seen. “They’re staring at us, aren’t they?” GOSH. [IMDb says the salamander’s name is Bruni, and I’m very sad they never spoke it aloud.] [Someone do a rotoscope of the Tangled short where Pascal and Max almost ruin Rapunzel and Eugene’s wedding by losing the rings but it’s Bruni and Sven at Kristoff and Anna’s wedding, thank]

Anyway. All of that goes double for Olaf, because I really wasn’t sure they could pull off the miracle of him not being annoying twice. And they did! Olaf’s grappling with his burgeoning maturity was adorable and profound in equal measure, and his plot reenactments were sublime. And when he realized to Anna for the first time that he was feeling angry, that he was capable of feeling angry... what a tremendous moment. (Actually, I’ll extend what I said about the boat scene to include the Earth Giants river sequence in total, because. Again. Wow.)

And I have to say... as much as I am given real pause by their execution of the concept, “you just do the next right thing” is such beautiful (*cough* Jewish *cough*) praxis. I love that. In the broader Disney Revival canon of Tiana’s work ethic and Rapunzel’s abuse narrative and how Wreck-It Ralph talked about PTSD and all of the myriad things the first Frozen did, I might love “the next right thing” most of all. What a simple, powerful, evocative message. It’s so lovely. A perfect gem.

Also worth acknowledging that the animation was straight-up stunning. Which I expected, generally, but the water droplets in the ship? The way Elsa just loses it sobbing when she sees her mother’s face in the ice? The tender, shattered way Anna pulls Olaf in closer to her as he fades? W.O.W. And, y’know, while I stand by what I said above about stakes, I will say that the moment we first see that Elsa is experiencing cold, that Elsa is freezing? Genuinely--and please forgive the pun--genuinely chilling.

I love Gail the Gale. I love Mattias and Yelana and Ryder and Honeymaren. But mostly I just... loved the dialogue and these characters and that I got to spend a little more time with them. And I’m sure I’ll do so at least two more times before it leaves theaters.

... apparently this is over 2k words now so that seems as good a place to leave it as any. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[birdwholanded]

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the Buddhist Scriptures review

    Both are interesting books. In Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Nguyen, the text is divided into chapters based on foods like Pringles, Forbidden Fruit, Dairy Cone, Fast Food Asian, Toll House Cookies, School Lunch, American Meat, Green Sticky Rice Cakes, Down With Grapes, Bread and Honey, Salt Pork, Holiday Tamales,Stealing Buddah’s Dinner, Ponderosa, Mooncakes, Cha Gio. They are vignettes. Stealing Buddah’s Dinner is a memoir and coming of age story. It relates life in Vietnam to life in America in the way that she ventured from Vietnam to start a new life in America. I enjoyed the whole book because of the difference of cultures and culture shock.  It was July 1975 when people were fleeing Vietnam on boats and they were chasing cars to try to escape from the war taking place. People in Saigon knew that the war had been lost and that the children were going to be put into reeducation camps. She was worried that some of her relatives would not get to come to America.  Bich Minh Nguyen immigrated to the United States from Vietnam in the 1970’s fleeing the Vietnam War taking place at the time. She and her father moved to Grand Rapids to start an American life. Her father got a job at the North American Feather. She discusses eating at Dairy Cone, McDonalds, Burger King, having Chef Boyardee meals, vanilla wafers, and typical American food. She talks about having to assimilate in a new way of life and noticing the differences between what she had known to what she has to learn now. Her father does not know anything about how to adapt with learning American customs and the way of life. He has to learn how to navigate through an entirely different world. She and her friends discuss changing their names to American names to fit into the American society better and so people could pronounce them instead of butchering their Vietnamese names. She questions her identity as an Asian American because she idealizes herself to be blonde haired and white like everyone else she sees. She feels like she doesn’t fit in after she first moves to Grand Rapids. She doesn’t know how to identify herself and feels like an outsider. Buddhism plays a role in her upbringing because there was a Buddha statue in her home in Grand Rapids and her grandmother would meditate by it. Her father and grandmother participated in the events at the Buddhist temple and they contributed a lot to rebuilding it and getting new pews for it and creating its new image and identity.       Buddhism is a religion where one seeks Enlightenment and the ways of reaching it. It talks about the various hells one can go to, it discusses if one will get reincarnated as a different animal in the next life. My favorite sections of the Buddhist Scriptures are The Realms of Rebirth, Karma Tales,The Three Jewels, Proving the Buddah, The Ascetic Ideal, The Direct Path to Enlightenment, and Wisdom and Compassion. The three jewels of Buddhism are divided into Buddha, Sangha and Dharma. The Buddha is the fully enlightened one, the Dharma are the teachings expounded by the Buddha and the sangha is the monastic order of Buddhism that practices Dharmas. It then ventures out into the sections Upaya, Shila and Dhyana. Dharma is the ultimate reality. Upaya is defined as being a term used to refer to an aspect of guidance along the Buddhist paths to liberation where a conscious voluntary action is driven by incomplete reasoning about its direction. Shila are Buddhist ethics. Dhyana is the training of the mind commonly translated as meditation to withdraw the mind from automatic responses to sense impressions and leading to a state of perfect awareness. My favorite section of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner was the conclusion because I like how Nguyen went to Vietnam again when she was in graduate school to see her grandmother. She got to partake of Vietnamese food like Cha Gio, which is a spring roll. It is interesting that she gets to appreciate her heritage in her young adulthood. She reconnected with who she really is and where she came from.     It talks about Buddhism. Buddhism deals with the Buddah, reincarnation, nirvana, enlightenment, The Noble Path, etc.  It refers to it in the way that it discusses reincarnation, and where people go when they pass away, if they get to come back again. In Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, Nguyen went to a Catholic school where she had to pray to God, but she did not follow Catholicism. She told the instructor that her household was buddhist and she gave her a letter from her family saying that she could not pray to God anymore. Nguyen was thinking about the idea of reincarnation and if she would have a better next life. She contemplates heaven, hell and nirvana. 1980’s music is referenced in this book, classic or typical American food is talked about. She was delighted to eat out at McDonalds and Burger King.     I relate to this memoir because growing up, my family and I did the opposite of what she did. She appreciated all things American and comfort food because she did not identify with her Vietnamese heritage, while my parents, my brother and I would specifically seek out Asian cuisine like Indian, Thai, Japanese, and Vietnamese restaurants. I was introduced to them when I was nine because there were Vietnamese restaurants by my dad’s work and on the weekends or Friday nights after work, we would meet my dad there sometimes and eat a buhn or papaya salad. My family frequented the Vietnamese restaurant so often that we became friends with the owners. It was a mom and pop type of restaurant with limited seating. It was a small restaurant. My dad got to order special things that weren’t even on the menu. On the wall of the restaurant, they had a whiteboard with daily specials and one of the specials was chickens’ feet salad. I never ordered it but I kind of wanted to see how it would taste. On the wall of the restaurant, the owners would play peaceful scenes from Vietnam on the television and it was interesting for me as a child and teenager to see the different way of life and culture in Vietnam. We are the opposites of her because we are a Caucasian family in America willingly seeking out Asian cuisines, while she comes from an Asian background and wants to eat typical American food. My family does not have any ties to Vietnam but I would like to visit it one day.     She ties her American side to her Vietnamese side and compares the life that her father sacrificed by fleeing Vietnam to coming to Grand Rapids and starting over.     In The Buddhist Scriptures in the chapter of Wisdom and Compassion, I highlighted the text, “Instead, all who traverse the path to buddhahood must develop extraordinary compassion and extraordinary wisdom, yet there is an apparent contradiction between these two. Compassion leads to a dedication to provide assistance to other persons yet wisdom brings the understanding that ultimately there are no persons because there is no self.” I do not understand why the text says that there are no persons because there is no self. I maybe believe that is said because when one loses his sense of self by helping others out all of the time, he doesn’t recognize that he is himself any more because he is not dedicated to his self interests but interested in helping out others. That makes sense when the quote states, “Compassion leads to a dedication to provide assistance to other persons.” One becomes selfless in the pursuit of being compassionate. I also highlighted the quote, “ In his first sermon, the Buddha had described a middle path between the extremes of self-indulgence and asceticism, both of which he had experienced prior to his enlightenment. Here and in other Mahayana sutras, especially those of the ‘Perfection of Wisdom’ genre, the notion of the middle way between extremes is given a more philosophical sense, as an inexpressible reality between the extremes of permanence and impermanence, self and no-self...but emptiness is not an ultimate reality, eternal and autonomous.” (351) She incorporates her Vietnamese roots and culture to the American side to compare the two different ways of life and the differences between the cultures.     The Buddhist scriptures tell different parables and stories about the Buddha and his journey to enlightenment and nirvana. It talks about the different hells and heavens one goes to and it talks about people possibly being reincarnated into different animal forms. It talks about bodies being turned into crows. The Budhist scriptures relate your deeds on the earth to what one will reap in the afterlife.     I like Buddhism as a belief and religious system because of its discussion about karma and how things are interconnected with people’s fates and livelihoods. It centers people to a common good. It talks about inner peace and how one can attain it. Buddhism talks about being peaceful and calm within oneself, growing through change as well. It talks about coming to terms with life events and making peace with them.       The title of ‘Stealing Buddha’s Dinner’ is interesting to me because it ties her religious belief, which is Buddhism, to her heritage, which is Vietnamese to the Vietnamese cuisine. American food is cheap and processed like Hostess’ Twinkies, frozen Kid Cuisine meals, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, etc. It is cheap to produce and purchase, especially American fast food like McDonalds and Burger King.

[skeptic42]

Neerav Kingsland on "The case for charter schools"

Rationally Speaking Podcast.

BLUF: While I’m dubious about schools that seek to compete with public education, especially when they take public funds, what New Orleans has done is not so much implement charter schools, but borrowed from the charter model to revamp public education.  I think they turned a tragedy into an opportunity.

Pre-listening

Now, I’v read Sarah Stitzlein’s American Public Education and the Responsibility of its Citizens: Supporting Democracy in the Age of Accountability, so I’m a bit dubious.  While charter schools can “outperform” public schools there’s more to public schools than creating the next generation of workers.  The other function of public education is creating citizens that can function in a democracy.  (Thomas Jefferson believed public education was a pillar of democracy.)  People forget that the US is a democratic capitalist society.  They often focus on capitalism, as charter schools do (a lot of their verbiage revolves around financial terms and their business model is capitalistic, education is a commodity).  Democracy usually applies to their freedom of speech and not anyone else’s they disagree with.  (”This is a democratic society, I can to whatever I want.”  No.  You’re wrong.  You don’t understand how a democracy functions.)

Charter schools, voucher schools, magnet schools and their ilk mainly focus on production.  The generation of test scores, the “only” way to gauge the value of the education.  Religious schools also focus on putting out more believers, and enriching the church.

All on the tax payers tab.

Integration has been enacted across the US, sadly, unevenly.  I grew up in CA being bused miles to school from the 4th grade onward, New Orleans, however, has historically had a lot of problems, whether through neglect or resistance, I can’t say.

But the integration exposes children to various socio-economic strata that they would not normally be exposed to until they join the “real” world.  This integration is beneficial to society, studies have demonstrated this.

Charter schools are not without problems.  This is not indicative of all charter schools, just as the problems in New Orleans is indicative of public schools.  But inevitably, proponents of both will disregard everything that makes them look bad, while pointing out what makes the other look bad.  Always with the disingenuous application of standards.

The problem with the current arrangements of charter schools is that despite the idea of parents being able to “choose” the right school for their child, and letting the market determine which schools survive and which fold is the commodification of education.  Test scores aren’t the only measure of a successful education.  A person who cannot understand that people thinking differently from them aren’t automatically wrong is a dysfunctional citizen.

Plus when charter schools actually perform worse, parents do not move their children.  They “fight” for the right to choose and to get their children a “better” education, yet when things go bad, they do nothing.  At that point it’s not about getting their children a better education, it’s about the ability to choose.  Even when that choice is poor, moving a child is an indication that they made a bad choice.  Plus when a charter school closes, where do the children go?

They get dumped on public schools that don’t have adequate funding because the charter school got the money and folded.  (Take the money and run.)

Parents also choose schools that fit their ideology and are attended by children from families within the same socio-economic strata of society, doing an end-run around integration.  Again, resulting in the inability to comprehend people from other backgrounds.

It also doesn’t help that charter schools are run as corporations.  Parents are customers, it’s all about getting a better job to make more money (not necessarily bad, but anyone’s life centered on money is pretty shallow to begin with).  It’s not really about education, it’s about creating a better workforce, which is what public education got turned into.

Education does need to be vastly improved, but commodification is not the way forward.  The market model does not work.

I do understand that it’s “hard to argue with success.”  But if one measurement of education is all that’s needed, then obviously how fast a car goes is the best measure of success and we should all buy the fastest car.  Ridiculous, don’t you think?  If you have a family of 6, not gonna get them all in that 2-seater are you?  There are many types of criteria.

Post-Listen

The great thing is they have a transcript, so I don’t have to recall everything from my car journey.

New Orleans is an unusual case in that the city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.  So with the rebuilding of the city came the opportunity to rebuild the schools.  This resulted in an injection of cash not previously available.  And as one would expect, a well thought-out design and rebuild of most anything will bring with it inherit improvements.

Nerrev: But out of that tragedy we had a chance to rethink public schooling in the city. A group of leaders went around the country to try to figure out what to replicate, what city in the United States was knocking it out of the park for low income minority kids. And unfortunately in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we didn't have one city [out of] the hubs of wealth and talent in our country, that was doing great things in public schools for low income kids.

Now, we bitch about how bad public education is, this is practically cultural by this point in time, even if we don’t actually know what it is that we’re bitching about and latch onto any stray comment from other people to bolster our view which was essentially established while in school as children, bitching about school because it cut into play time.  In short, we hated school growing up, so we continue to hate school without actually understanding why.

Along with that comes how good other countries are.  Not counties, countries.  Our society has gone on about how good education is Japan.  So instead of looking to examples of excellence, they studied poor examples, and reached the obvious conclusion.

So instead of adopting what another city was doing, we took our own path. And that ended, as you know from the intro, in creating the country's first basically 100% charter school system.

Which, when you don’t follow previous models that aren’t working, is a good thing.  However, the charter craze, I suspect, had much to do with the decision.  You aren’t really looking at “new” ways to improve education, you’re looking at newer ways to do the same thing, but with a twist.

Education as a commodity.

Julia (interviewer): That seems like such a radical step.

It’s “radical” in that it’s not what we customarily do in the US.  However, back in the old country, England, this is normal.  You can attempt to get your child into any school you like, be it private, public (Church of England), catholic, grammar (which is not like what we call grammar schools in the States); private, being just like private schools in the US, the parents pay.

Neerav: I would say [it was] maybe in year four, year five after the reforms began, looking at the data where the charter schools were dramatically outperforming the traditional system that was being built… A group of us and parents who were choosing these schools wanted to know what was working.

I'd say about half way through the reforms, the vision of, “Well, maybe this is just a better way to do public education,” started the forum.

The problem here is that what charters schools get is an injection of cash.  Anything new and fresh will do better, not just from the cash, but the driving expectation of progress.  Mental attitude toward something affects a lot of how we interact with something.  Looking at a fresh new building stuffed full of sleek new technology vs. our already-preconceived notion of failure, our expectation levels are raised.

Nerrav: Then we had to build a regulatory system around that. What would it mean if the whole public school system was all charter? What does the government do then? How does it oversee those charters?

This is actually a good thing and very necessary.  Public funds are being used, therefore government oversight is needed

Now this next bit is interesting:

Neerav: ...the system had really bottomed out before. There's a story about the FBI renting out a floor in the building where the school district was setting up wiretaps and convicting over 20 people. ...  Fraud. Basically stealing from public school students. ... In the administrative office. Dead people on the payroll.

(Note: the only thing I could find didn’t mention anything about dead people on the payroll, and it was 10 people charged, while he may be incorrect on the details, the fact is something major did happen with an FBI investigation.  This isn’t a jab at Neerav, we all get details wrong, and my search might not have yielded the true event.)

But it’s not just public schools that have problems with fraud, as was demonstrated by the collapse of ECOT in Ohio for overstating student numbers, thus enriching the school.  Oversight is massively important to prevent fraud.  Any system that received public funds to provide a service should be answerable to the tax payer.  Charter schools in general aren’t answerable, so here, it sounds like New Orleans deviates from the norm.

Neerav: I think some people mistake charter schools as a way to avoid democratic oversight of public schools.  

New Orleans has now married those. So there's a local school board, locally elected. But the locally elected political entity, instead of running schools, now oversees them. All the schools in New Orleans are governed by nonprofit organizations, and the elected government institution regulator like the FCC or SEC or anything like that.

Now, at this point, I will admit, that my initial hesitancy is diminishing.  Not simply because “charter schools are better” but this is getting to be less and less like a charter school, and more like a revamped, if slightly, public education system.  But it sounds like they still have the charter school model with them being disconnected from each other.

What I’m not certain on is if they have implemented anything to prevent the collapse of a charter school.  What happens when that happens?  Will the other schools take students on?  Will the state step in?  When students get dumped on public schools by the thousands (14+K by ECOT), that money has to be made up somehow; the money for the students was taken by the charter.

Neerav: The government really has two main roles in New Orleans. One is to oversee the system for performance. So, to let the schools that are doing the best to expand, and to selectively replace the schools that aren't meeting kids' needs. The second is around equity. So, are public schools serving kids with special needs?

Again, what happens to “replaced” schools.  You’re not going to build a new one from scratch.  Oversight isn’t only about performance, it’s about fiduciary responsibility.  This is tax payer’s money, it’s not money waiting for people to have kids.

Also,if parents made bad choices, should they have to pay it back?  Should serial bad-choice parents be denied the “right” to choose?

I have read some anecdotal cases of charter schools rejecting kids with special needs and condemning them to public schools to carry the burden of their associated costs.  And who can blame the charter school?  In a capitalist society, the bottom line is the most important thing, charter schools are businesses and need to be run viably.  Granted, New Orleans is non-profit, and surely their charter schools just can’t rebuff every child with extra needs, but it sounds like there is no public schools to fall back on.

Neerav: The easiest way to think about charter schools is they're basically public schools that are governed by nonprofit boards, for the most part. About 80% of them are nonprofit. Rather than by the locally elected school board.

What about the other 20%?  So it’s not entirely nonprofit as he stated earlier.  This must be “new English,”  when you say “all” it doesn’t mean all, it means like about 80%.  20% is apparently not part of all.

Neerav: Most cities have traditional government monopolies that run the public school system. Charters are a way to allow nonprofits to operate within the public confines, but with a different governance level.

I’m actually rather disappointed in Mr Neerav in this instance, especially after saying “all” “80%” of the charters in New Orleans are nonprofit.  How does a man with a law degree not understand what a monopoly is?  Nor how to apply it.  In the case of public education - note the word public - monopoly is not applicable.  There are private schools that are not governed the way public schools are, even though they have to meet certain requirements.  Public education in relation to the citizens is the same as the roads, the police, and the military.  Saying the government has a monopoly on public education is the same as saying the government has a monopoly on laws, courts, roads, air traffic control, national parks, or any other thing that the government runs and overseas.  Control doesn’t necessarily mean monopoly and all it’s inherit nuances.

Monopoly as Mr. Neerav disingenuously uses it means the government has sole control over education, regulating it’s cost, access to, and works to drive competitors out of business.  There was another moron in the comments section that refers to public education as a “socialized monopoly.”  His gross stupidity I suspect is due to his lack of education on what “to socialize” and what monopolize means.  He is a perfect example of why public education is failing.

Neerav: ... the nonprofit governance has really been a breakthrough, in terms of allowing for greater efficacy.

Just to be clear, efficacy means the ability to produce a desired result, it does not mean efficient.  Better education in this case.  And it does.  But I doubt that this alone is responsible for the achievement.  New Orleans had an opportunity that is not available to anyone else - actually it is, but it’s not really - they could rebuild from scratch.  What they got to shed is what holds back everyone else, static inertia.  Schools are loath to spend the necessary funds to entirely revamp school districts.  Everyone wants the improvements, but everyone wants the improvements.  It’s a dichotomy.  New Orleans didn’t have a choice, but it sounds like this made some good solid choices.

Neerav: Vouchers are different, in that they're outside the public system. You're getting public funding, as a family that's using a voucher, but you can attend, let's say, a Catholic private school. That Catholic school can be religious affiliated, it might not need to take the state test.

To me, this is the fundamental difference between what we see going on elsewhere and New Orleans.

The funny (hypocritical? ironic?) thing is people who are opposed to socialism willingly take government assistance to put their kids in private schools.

I’ll draw it to a close here.  There’s too much to analyze.

Conclusion:

In short, I oppose vouchers, but New Orleans charter schools are not voucher schools.  They’ve taken a horrible situation and turned it into a fortuitous event.  I was very dubious about this at first, but they’re running Public Education under an altered model.  The model itself I would say isn’t the only reason for the improvements, but is doesn’t hurt.

If anything, it forces parents to be more involved in their children’s education.  I can tell you from experience that having to look around an numerous schools and study them to find the right one for your child.  It’s both demanding and rewarding.  I’m not sure if New Orleans has catchment areas (kind of like school districts), meaning if busy (or lazy) parents do nothing, they’ll be guaranteed a spot at the nearest school.  Coming from a country that relies on pipelines for progression, it seems really bizarre.

Mr. Neerav keeps denigrating public education - unnecessarily - making me suspect that he either doesn’t understand what public education is or he’s using the argument to fight off opposition.  New Orleans is still running public schools but under a new model.  The dynamics have changed, that’s the main difference.

[crimsonrevolt]

Congratulations Tess you’ve been accepted to Crimson Revolt as Narcissa Malfoy!

↳ please refer to our character checklist

I don’t even know where to begin, Tess! I absolutely loved your portrayal of Cissy, and maybe a part of that is from just genuinely being excited about having all three Black girls in the group but most of it is because of your stellar writing! I can’t wait to see where you go with her, especially with the plot points that you provided so I know you have plenty in mind to keep us on the edge of our seats. I know that you’re going to keep us all interested with her past, present, and future. You expanded on the very little we know about her beautifully, and really shaped her into someone I fully believe I could run into on the streets (not that I would want to personally) which takes real talent. *your faceclaim change to Elizabeth Olsen has been accepted

application beneath the cut ( tw: insert )

OUT OF CHARACTER

INTRODUCTION

Tess, 21 years old, she/her, pacific time, USA.

ACTIVITY

6/10. I am able to log in daily to keep up with the dashboard as well as plotting and keep up communication efforts. This group focuses on long paras so getting replies out might take a bit of time, I want to go back to how I was back when I first joined, getting out one reply a day.  

TRIGGERS

No triggers.

HOW DID YOU FIND US?

Current member, originally through a character tag.

WHAT HARRY POTTER CHARACTER DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH MOST?

I think I identify the most with Bill Weasley, mainly because I always liked the career of curse breaker and I think that going far away from the family to do something he loved was amazing (and brave).

ANYTHING ELSE?

As some of you know I’ve been having some muse issues so I am switching characters, hopefully that helps rekindle my love for writing. I’m grateful to be a part of this group, you guys feel like family, have been with me through the most important part of my life, and I don’t want to leave, so I’m doing everything in my power to get back at being a good member of this lovely group.

IN CHARACTER

DESIRED CHARACTER

Narcissa Malfoy née Black

BIRTHDAY / STAR SIGN

September 12th / Virgo

*I tried calculating the year but I got confused with what’s being displayed for Andromeda’s year so I hope it’s okay I didn’t put a year. Narcissa would be turning 24 in the upcoming in-game September 1979.

OCCUPATION

Housewive, socialite.  

FACE CLAIM

My options in order of preference: Elizabeth Olsen, Margot Robbie, Amber Heard, Skyler Samuels, Claire Holt. I prefer you guys pick who you think fits best with the current FCs for the rest of the House of Black.

REASON FOR CHOSEN CHARACTER

I was used to playing Death Eaters, and then taking on Alastor was a challenge that I enjoyed greatly, I’m thankful to have had a chance to do that in this group. Narcissa has always being one of my favorite characters, I’ve always been too scared to apply for her, even to think about playing her, but this group has always had my back. I hope I get to do her justice, a character that her entire life was told what to do, that survived by following the rules and learning to play the game from an early age. A woman that in the end picked herself, her son, and that if for the most part of her life she was loyal to her family, in the end she realized her family was her son. And now that I’ve become a mother I understand the choices she made. I could only hope I get to play her in this fantastic group.

PREFERRED SHIPS // CHARACTER SEXUALITY // GENDER & PRONOUNS

Narcissa was raised to marry whoever her parents picked for her. I think deep down she dreamed of falling in love before having to marry, but she knew that no matter who it was she was going to have to fulfill her duty as a wife. Narcissa is a cis-female, she/her pronouns. As for ships, well I would love to play Lucissa, but I am open to plotting previous relationships, maybe during her Hogwarts years, or even a lost love. I’m open to plotting according to our characters’ chemistry.

CREATE ONE (OR MORE!) OF THE FOLLOWING FOR YOUR CHARACTER

-AN AESTHETIC

-A MOCKBLOG ( here: cissablackmock.tumblr.com )

-A PLAYLIST

Beautiful Lies - Birdy

We Were Sparkling - My brightest diamond

Better - Regina Spektor

Yellow Flicker Beat - Lorde

Castle - Halsey

Bells for Her - Tori Amos

The Family Jewels - Marina and The Diamonds

Heathens - Twenty-One Pilots

-EXPAND ON THE TRAITS

+ Proper: Narcissa was raised as the perfect lady. Everything she does has proper written all over, the way she walks, the way she sits, and the way she laughs. Proper and graceful, is what most use to describe her. Some even say that she even cries in a graceful manner, not that anyone would ever dare to actually say they’ve seen Narcissa cry. Even when she’s looking down on people she does it so gracefully people are actually grateful she pursed her lips at them. She was raised as a Black, as a perfect pureblood lady, being proper is in her blood.

+ Loyal: Narcissa loves her family fiercely and will do anything she can to make them proud. She loves with all her heart and protects the ones she loves with everything she has. She is loyal to her name; she will be loyal to her husband. She is loyal to her beliefs and that’s why she’s loyal to the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters.

- Self-Centered: Most people usually fight or flight, Narcissa instead adapts. She plays her cards; she is observing and manipulative when she needs to be. She will always look for the scenario in which she comes victorious. She was treasured by her family since she was a little girl and she grew up believing that if she could get anything she wanted.

-Cold: Narcissa won’t even spare a glance to someone she considers beneath her. To those she talks to she usually treats in a polite but cold manner. She doesn’t get close anyone, she has lost to much. The betrayals of both Andromeda and Sirius made her develop a cold nature, she went from being a bratty pureblood girl who would tease mudbloods to a cold calculating individual. Whoever Narcissa can hold a bit of a grudge, and if someone hurts the one she loves she might even consider getting some revenge, usually sending someone else to do the dirty work for her.

-A FEW POTENTIAL PLOT POINTS / CONNECTIONS

&&. Friends in high places. This could go both ways, Narcissa makes it her mission to make powerful lasting connections with people in positions of power. And people see how convenient it would be to make Narcissa’s acquaintance so they approach her in hopes of getting the support of the Blacks/Malfoys

&&. To love is to lose. Someone Narcissa loved in her youth. Could be mutual or one-sided.

&&. We were friends once. Someone Narcissa used to be friends with and now because of the war they find themselves on opposite sides.

&&. Heroes on both sides. Narcissa discovers that those fighting the war are not what she was lead to believe.

&&. Not today. We know that Narcissa becomes an expert duelist, this person is the one that teaches her how to duel.

&&. Family first. Pureblood that Narcissa considers family.

&&. Just a pretty face. While out of a mission (wearing the DEs’ mask) Narcissa fights someone and proves that she’s more than just a pretty face.

&&. Dirty work. Someone that Narcissa goes to so they do the dirty work for her, she can take of herself, but a lady never fights if there’s someone willing to go to war for her.

IN CHARACTER QUESTIONNAIRE

♔ If you were able to invent one spell, potion, or charm, what would it do, what would you use it for or how would you use it? Feel free to name it:

“Wouldn’t it be just ideal to have a potion that would make your hair look perfect? Of course my hair is already perfect, but think of others who have no such good genes” Narcissa says with a smile, that shallow answer is what is expected of her, she purses her lips, “but you know what I truly want, a spell that would tell you exactly the blood status of any witch or wizard, that way you don’t make the mistake of making conversation with mudbloods.”

♔ You have to venture deep into the Forbidden Forest one night. Pick one other character and one object (muggle or magical), besides your wand, that you’d want with you:

“My sister Bellatrix of course” Narcissa says as if it’s the silliest question she’s heard, “she is the person I trust the most in this world. And I would take my House of Black heirloom” her voice with a hint of mystery, she would never reveal the true power of such artifact, “that would be all I need.”

♔ What kinds of decisions are the most difficult for you to make?

“The ones about my family.”

♔ What is one thing you would never want said about you?

“That I’ve never known love.”

REACTION TO LAST EVENT DROP

With the events of the ‘The New Normal’ Narcissa’s faith in the Death Eaters was rekindled. She had began to doubt their methods after the attack on St. Mungos. She was assured it had been the work of rogue members, and after the announcement of rebuilding, she trusted them about it. She is excited to have a chance to take a public role in the efforts towards a new society. She is ready to continue showing her loyalty and support the cause.  

WRITING SAMPLE

If there was a price for the dutiful wife Narcissa was sure she deserved it. Her beautiful home, the one people had been jealous about, was now full of people, friends, family, and some very terrifying people. There was shouting, and there was screaming, laugh, tears. Yet Narcissa remained unfazed, this is what she had to do, she had always been the perfect daughter, now she was the perfect wife, the gracious host, if you could even call it that. She had been once part of the movement, she had gone to battle with them, but since she found she was pregnant she had been ordered to stay home. She hated it. But at almost six months pregnant she stands behind her husband’s chair, a stoic face, and wonders where her life went wrong. A voice that very recently began to send chills through her spine speaks to her, “Narcissa this is hardly the place for someone in your condition, your husband should spare you the unpleasantness…” with the politest tone she can muster she simply says “my Lord” The Dark Lord now turns to the boy she once dreamed about marrying, now a changed man, “Lucius” and at once her husband stands up and gently guides her outside the room. I have as much right as any of them, she wants to say, but part of her is glad she was allowed to leave. Still she doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t let anyone see, it doesn’t matter if her last name is now Malfoy, she will always be a Black. Part of her wondered why this war has gone on for so long, she had assumed they would’ve controlled the situation long ago.

Just before she got to the staircase she heard a commotion at the door, her curiosity was bigger than her determination to not be part of whatever was going on. Or maybe it was fear, not knowing which face was going to be paraded now, which of the people she used to take classes with was going to be marched towards a certain death. Keep walking, a voice inside of her told her, but she stayed at the bottom of the staircase and waited. There was a lot going on, she could see her sister, more like she could hear her sister, it looked like along with some others they had caught someone, a girl. The girl was a fighter, nothing like some of the people she had seen being dragged before, do not look at her, the same voice inside her said, but Narcissa didn’t listen. As soon as she glanced at the girl she wished she hadn’t. Now all she could do was ignore her. It was a girl that had once helped Narcissa when she was a first year and had gotten lost thanks to the moving staircases, the girl who had not told anyone about it, a girl who she had ignored multiple times after that incident, the girl she will always remember as being kind to her and asking nothing in return. Now in another staircase all Narcissa could do was ignore her. Instead she turned to her sister, avoiding the girl’s eyes, “Bella… the Dark Lord is waiting” she said before turning around and start going up the stairs. Of course the girl had ignored her too, she looked prideful, not like someone who would beg for mercy. Narcissa wondered if the girl was scared, she had looked so brave. Narcissa had almost made it to her room when the screams started. She ignored those too. Placing a hand on her stomach she reminded herself why they were doing this, “we are building a better world for you” she told her unborn baby.

[jamiedodgerart]

the fade is a liar sometimes

aka, a really long post about how mal hawke survived dragon age inquisition. warning for big but kinda vague spoilers for dai and mentions of alcoholism

ok full disclosure i dont know how he survived the fade. but im thinking the nightmare like. didnt wake back up in time to block the way through the portal, and so never caused the Do I Kill The Warden Or Hawke dilemma. cos. that was kiiiiiiiinda bullshit. 

i had to pick between alistair and mal. and i really didnt want mal to be actually really dead bc at the time of here lies the abyss he’d be in a really shitty place, mentally, and i didnt want him to just! die! without resolving that! so i gave canon the finger and concocted a convoluted plan to give mal a better ending

background, after the events of da2, he ended up leaving kirkwall and fuckin’ around in the woods for a bit. i imagine he was helping refugees get out for a little while, until anders showed up and convinced him to help groups of renegade mages/circles on the verge of winning their independence. at this point he was pretty sick of the world at large, didn’t know what he wanted or where he was going to go next, and let himself be (guided? directed? pushed around?) by anders, drinking himself into oblivion and generally feeling like garbage. he fell out of contact with most of his remaining friends and began convincing himself that he was guilty for the explosion, by trusting anders (he’d suspected something was wrong with the ingredients anders was asking for and confronted him about it, but trusted him and helped him by distracting the grand cleric)

i rambled about this on my private twitter but mal and anders... ended up not being a great fit for one another and past me said it better than present me can

eventually, the inquisition came into being and grew in power. anders, still being a wanted man and mal too by association, avoided the inquisition’s patrols pretty easily. but stories started to spread about the inquisitor and his... particularly creative justice. see, pica really likes choices that have some poetic irony to them that also focus on rebuilding (he had alexius work for the mages, stuff like that), generally avoids executions, and is pretty chill with mages. the inquisition is also independent of any government, really, and is about as impartial as you can get in thedas. so when mal gets word from varric that corypheus is back, a problem, and something they need mal’s help with (that is also, in his professional opinion, his fault), he gets an idea.

he heads to skyhold, meets pica (who read the tale of the champion, asks varric questions about it constantly, was expecting a hero, and was not expecting the hero to be a depressed alcoholic) and iunno here lies the abyss happens with the aforementioned edit of no one important dying (i guess i could kill alistair and preserve a kind of important turning point in pica’s character with an added bonus of giving mal another thing to have survivor’s guilt about but i dont think i could go through with it. imagine the emotional toll. pica could get that change some other way anyway) mal by this point has gotten to know pica fairly well and has found what he’s heard to be true, and gives him a proposition

(i would like to add now that while ive read asunder, until i looked it up just now i didn’t remember where it sits in the timeline relative to da2, and it wasnt super clear to me just how much each of the two events affected the mage/templar war. so some text in sketches might be inaccurate, historically)

so you can imagine that anders is Pissed Off by this development, but justice is kinda like 

cos like. pica Is a real actual authority figure. who is down to dispense some quality justice esp re mages. and is coming at it from a “yo i know you meant well and you did kinda have a point but you also killed a lot of people so there does have to be Some kind of consequence of that”

(but neither of them are at all happy with mal turning them in)

anyway the trial ends up including a full investigation of the events in kirkwall, as well as the events at the spire (cole, rhys, and evangeline all give their testimony) and it’s more a straightening out of what was up with the whole start of this shitshow anyway, cos the confusion and misinformation about it is probably the worst part. 

pica finds anders guilty and sentences him to community service, which a lot of people disagreed with. pica thinks it was a GREAT IDEA though because that community service comes in the form of anders teaching the inquisition mages about healing magic!! something that anders is good at, loves doing, and can actually help people with!! why are we still fuckin about with herbs when there’s magic!!!!! this also has the added bonus of making mages less scary to the general populace- chuckin’ fireballs is a lot more alien and intimidating than healing up a broken arm, yknow? it can help mages seem more human and good for society than they were, separated from the public in towers.

anders is still a prisoner, though, which hes super not happy about, and part of his sentence is also that dagna gets to study him. he and samson are in grudging solidarity in the face of tolerating her extreme cheerfulness. and maybe he gets a cat too. i wonder if he and samson could talk about how shitty the chantry is re: lyrium addiction in templars? its obvs not on the scale of mage shittiness but it could be an interesting discussion

see in the grand scheme of things mal really didnt do all that much. he was duped by a lover into doing something he 100% would not have done if hed known what was actually going on. i feel like the most anyone could bust him on was aiding and abetting. and maybe helping hide an apostate. mal was found, as pica informally put it while distracted by looking at a transcript of a kirkwall templar’s testimony, “kinda guilty? just like. if ur asked to help blow up a chantry dont do it again” but cassandra elbowed him really hard and he said “look ok your sentence is, fuck, i dunno, work for the inquisition. what do you wanna do”

that was not what mal was expecting and he didnt have an answer. and pica looked at him and said “ill give you some time to figure it out, ok. just. take care of yourself, man. u look like shit” which got him another elbow, which he returned to cass with equal force

anyway. mal is now officially Not Guilty in the court of the law. which fuckin sucks bc that assessment does absolutely NOTHING to stop his shit brain from keeping being guilty about everything. so he tries to quit drinking, fails, and just has a rough time in general, while also sometimes visiting anders in prison. which probably really doesn’t help.

ENTER WARDEN-COMMANDER OF FERELDAN, MADRANA “MAD” TABRIS, AND HER PARTNER/GF/ADULT SUPERVISION EMMARIE “EMMY” COUSLAND

(you may also know mads as hester, as i called her in previous playthroughs. hester’s not a really elfy name and shes grown far enough away from her namesake that i felt a change was warranted. also emmy was created by @1500birds. i love her)

thats them (mads then emmy) so mad tabris, legendary fighter, unkillable blight-ender, bather in darkspawn blood, and general bottle covey is looking for a challenge. its been like ten years since shes had an actually hard battle to win and she’s near skyhold, and she’s heard that mal hawke, another legendary fighter, is also in the area. oh and some cadash guy. hes apparently good too. also, she’s looking for some way out of the whole grey warden death sentence thing. shes not keen on dying unless she’s killed, ydig, and apparently skyhold’s doing a lot of groundbreaking research these days

she and emmy swing on in to skyhold and finds that hawke is, well, a mess

important background. mads is not good at dealing with other peoples’ emotions. so shes not really equipped to deal with this. emmy, however, is kind, has nerves of steel, loves to help people, and is Very equipped to deal with this. and so the two of them adopt mal. (even though hes older than both of them.) 

theyve got really, really different ways of trying to help mal. emmy is a great listener, and understands survivor’s guilt and the lost-all-my-family brand of trauma pretty well. she helps him sort through all the shit that’s happened to him and offers a lot of support. and hugs. by god shes a hugger. also theyve got a symbiotic cuddling relationship bc emmy is always cold and mal is always warm, so they platonically nap together sometimes. mads is unfortunately too wriggly and pointy to be a good cuddler :’( she squeezes in the mix sometimes anyway though and it’s uncomfortable but nice

mads’s method of helping mal is in her area of expertise: getting out pent-up negative emotion by fighting. for a long time, mal has internalized a lot of shit, and mads is really good at annoying him into either yelling or punching out that shit. shes doing it out of concern for his well-being, she swears, and not because she takes joy in pissing people off. she does but thats not the point. it’s not a perfect strategy but it does help a lot

unfortunately for her, sometimes mal can be downright vindictive when drunk and angry, and can hit on the few things she’s insecure about

(i would really love to make a post about mads sometime, cos she ended up being a lot deeper of a character than i originally intended. i really just wanted a really sharp angry lady who fought with the subtlety of a brick to the face, and ended up getting that plus bravado covering up a whole host of insecurities. i feel like i should finish dao before writing it up though ahah)

(what mal said is also not totally accurate- mads cares very much for emmy. but yknow how when things get heated it doesn’t really matter if they’re really accurate anymore- they just have to be close enough to get a reaction, ydig)

anyway! the two of them together help mal get his life back in order- he cuts down and eventually quits drinking, starts taking better care of himself, and gets more of a handle on life. i guess you’re probably wondering where varric is, right around now. so am i mal pushed away a lot of people close to him after da2, including varric. but varric kept looking out for him (lying to cassandra to protect him, using his network of contacts to keep an eye on where he and anders were operating). when mal comes to skyhold i think he’d try to avoid varric out of guilt- yknow how when it’s been a really long time since you’ve talked to someone, and you know you should have called them back, but you never did, and they kept asking how you were, and you want to be in an actually good place before you call them back, but shit keeps happening, and it’s been like two years since youve said anything to them, and then you see them and do some serious acrobatics trying to stay out of their sight so you don’t have to confront their honest interest in your well-being that they have no right to still have after so long with no word from you, and you have to make it seem like you havent been avoiding them because that would be rude, and really it’s just easier to be constantly vigilant of where they are and make sure youve got plausible reason to be leaving casually yet quickly

well mal did that. emmy had to physically bar his way from escaping a room once when varric came in, and dragged him by the scruff of the neck to talk to him. varric was painfully understanding and ended up hitting it off nicely with emmy

so! someday mal gets a job. specifically, pica gives him one. because he still owes the world some community service. with his experience as a hunter and highwayman, he becomes a scout!

whoaaa color

more specifically, mal becomes a... specialized type of scout. some idiot who shall not be named but whose name sounds a whole lot like pica cadash gave him command of a small squad of scouts, heavier armored and armed than average inquisition scouts but not heavy enough to count as infantry soldiers. their job is to dismantle highwayman and rogue mercenary bands, in whatever way necessary. so! originally this was supposed to mean sneak attacks on their strongholds or whatever, but mal talked with him about his own experiences with crime (mostly that most people in his crew back then were in it out of necessity, and needed money to support family) and the squad kind of became. really heavy recruiters. it became kind of a joke that the inquisition would take anyone- and they would! practically any skillset could be used in an organization as big as the inquisition, and at this point it was still growing

like. barely any exaggeration here

so that’s where he is pre-trespasser! thank u for reading and if youve got questions or want to learn more PLEASE ask i lov my ocs and love talking about them

i want to add that in @1500birds‘s latest playthrough (miranda trevelyan, a pro-chantry mage cullenmancer) mal rags on cullen endlessly

that was supposed to be the playthrough where he survives the fade, but then bran realized that miranda would kinda hate mal and would 100% leave him behind

[ppdoddy]

Michael Moore

AN OPEN LETTER TO JOE BIDEN Dear President-Elect Biden:

First of all, congratulations! YOU did it. WE did it! You stopped the madness. A grateful nation - and myself - are in a state of joy, hope and relief. Thank you for that! We are all eager to join with you to repair the damage done to our country — and to eliminate that about our society and our politics which gave us Donald Trump in the first place.

Mr. President-Elect, I first met you at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004. It was clear to me from our talk that day that you were not the politician I remembered from the 1990s. On that day in Boston, we were by then over a year into the Iraq War, a war you voted for. My “Fahrenheit 9/11“ had just come out and you wanted to let me know that you were aware of the folly you had been sucked into. It seemed to me that you were doing a lot of soul searching and you wanted to hear my thoughts. To be honest, I was distracted by how perfect your teeth were, and I wondered, could you really be from the working class? By the end of our talk I was convinced there was something that was quite real and very good about you, though perhaps somewhat buried inside. Would it ever come out so the public could see it? As I reflect today on it - and you - I am sincerely hoping that you will indeed govern as a president who’s from the working class. You - one of us - in the White House. That’s how it should feel. Your actions, if bold, and brave, will make that true.

You are also our second Catholic president. I believe you are a person of faith. You and I were taught the same lessons in Catholic school: to love our neighbor, even our enemy; to create a world where everyone regardless of status or station has a seat at the table, and everyone gets a slice of the pie; a world where “the rich man will have a harder time getting into heaven than a camel will have getting through the eye of the needle.” We were taught that we will be judged by how we treat the least amongst us. Do I have that right? Are these not the moral, foundational principles of the coming Biden presidency?

I was so moved by your victory speech Saturday night when you told the immigrants and the children of immigrants that the Dreamers no longer had to live in fear. That Muslims were once again welcomed into our country. That the world could breathe a sigh of relief because we were going to let the planet Earth itself breathe and have some relief. And you told the teachers of America that starting January 20th, “one of your own will be living in the White House.” That just felt instantly good.

So if I may, I’d like to suggest a few things that might make your presidency one of the best this country has ever had. You and I may have our political differences (you like Amtrak trains, I’d like to ride a bullet train from New York to LA in 10 hours!😎), but I know that you and I - and tens of millions of others - all want and believe in the same basic things: • Health Care is a human right and every American must be covered; • Everyone must be paid a living wage and all of us must work to eliminate poverty and rebuild our broken middle class; • The massive and growing gulf between the ultra rich and everyone else must be narrowed — and the wealthy must go back to paying the taxes they should pay; • Women must be paid the same as men, and no man or government has the right to tell them what they can do or not do with their bodies.

So here’s my two cents:

1. You are right to make containing Covid-19 Job #1. Had Trump won, I’m guessing up to a million people in the next year or so would have died from him ignoring this virus. Yesterday you named your Covid task force of doctors and scientists and you are putting them to work. We don’t have a second to lose. Thank you for this.

2. As soon as you can, please provide much more unemployment relief for the jobless, stimulus checks for all, help for small businesses, and the creation of jobs we desperately need.

3. Millions have lost their health insurance because our system ties one’s health coverage to their employer. What happens when the employer, like now, is suddenly gone, or the boss wakes up one morning and decides these employees’ health benefits are too costly and must be cut? BOOM! Millions of families suddenly have no health insurance. This is nuts.

You MUST create a health system like every other industrial democracy — one backed by the government, not by the whims of the boss where you work or the pandemic that has shut him or her down. This is just plain common sense.

4. I see various people trying to take credit for your victory — and using their personal agendas to push you away from the progressive Left and toward the cowardly center which believes that the best way to beat Republicans is to just be a more easily-digestible version of Republicans. They think because Trump got 70 million votes the Democrats should reject Black Lives Matter, AOC, and anything that vaguely sounds like socialism — at a time when the majority of our citizens under the age of 35, according to most polls, prefer the idea of democratic socialism over the greed of modern-day capitalism. Why risk losing them? We need to listen to and understand why they feel this way. They’ve been saddled with crushing student debt and we’ve handed them a planet In the middle of its 6th extinction event as their future. You and Barack introduced them to the benefits of democratic socialism by letting them stay on their parents health insurance until they’re 26! The result: They just set a record by coming out and voting for you in the largest youth numbers ever.

But you know all this. And you also know how you won these razor-thin victories in the final five states as we nervously watched the final ballots come in from Black Philly, Black Detroit, Black Atlanta, Black Flint. Out west, it was Latinx and Navajo voters who delivered Nevada and Arizona to you. In your speech on Saturday you acknowledged it. And never in our history have I heard a President-elect single out the Black community and thank them “for having my back. And I promise you, I will have your back!” Black and brown and indigenous peoples, plus a landslide of women and young adult voters made this happen. Wow. I absolutely know you’ll keep that promise.

5. Please do not make the same mistake an otherwise well-meaning President Obama made in his first two years. He wanted everyone to get along. He was willing to compromise on anything. Kumbaya. The Republicans had already decided they were going to block EVERYTHING Obama proposed and that’s exactly what they did for eight long years with a discipline and a ruthlessness we should probably envy.

Don’t let this happen to you. Charge in on January 20th like FDR on steroids. You have no choice. People are dying! You need to sign executive orders and cajole, demand and shame Congress into action. And GO BIG! Eliminate the Electoral College through the National Popular Vote Act! DONE! Ratify the Equal Rights Amendment for women! Just one more state needed! DONE! Send in the Army Corps of Engineers to Flint to replace the poisoned water pipes! DONE!!

And none of the above needs a single vote of the United States Senate! In fact, this past summer, your “Biden-Bernie” unity joint task force identified a whopping 277 policies and decisions of Trump’s that you have the legal authority to immediately reverse by executive order or presidential policy decision https://prospect.org/…/277-policies-biden-need-not-ask-per…/. Find that big fat black marker of his and do it!

But, yes, we also desperately need those two Georgia Senate seats to get the Biden/Harris years off to a blazing start. So let’s make that happen! All hands on deck between now and January 5th!! We will all do whatever is needed.

Friends of mine on the Left who are more cynical than I am are probably wondering why I’m sending you this letter. Haha! Well, because I saw you kiss the head of that young grieving man at the Parkland, Florida memorial for the shooting victims of Stoneman Douglas High School. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMa96yOel0

And because I saw you in New Hampshire this year while we were there working for Bernie, and you were doing a campaign stop and there was a restless five-year boy in the front row. His parents were trying to get him to settle down. You stopped and spoke to the boy. “Hey buddy,” you said in a kind but parental way, “if you can hang on and be a good boy for just a little bit, I’ll buy ya an ice cream!” The boy quieted down, you wrapped up and afterward you went over to the boy and his parents and you gave the kid five bucks so his mom and dad could go get him an ice cream cone. And I thought to myself, this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen — and then I started to cry because I wanted so much for that piece of America to come back — goofy, kind, and focusing on what’s truly important: a goddamned ice cream cone!

I think that’s why you won. People saw what I saw with you there in New Hampshire and back in Boston on that day 16 years ago — they knew that maybe, just maybe, their lives might just get a bit better - hopefully a LOT better - with you in the White House. Maybe less of them will die from the virus, this preventable horror. Trump, of whom we knew many despicable things and thought we’d already seen how low the bar could possibly go for one human being — but we never considered him under the moniker of mass killer, terrorist or superspreader. Then you, Joe, came along and offered us a respite, a break from the insanity — “Mr. Biden, we’ll be happy if you just give us four years of ‘Not Trump!’”

But I think you can give us much more than that. What could our lives be like in four years or eight years (with a Democratic Senate to boot)? How ‘bout no one ever goes bankrupt again because they got sick? How ‘bout no one is sitting in a prison cell for possessing marijuana or actual drugs? How ‘bout every child gets to go to a great school and every neighborhood has an expanded free library open seven days a week? How ‘bout paid family medical leave so you can take care of your elderly parents and not lose your job? How ‘bout my bullet train! You and we can make all this happen. It’s not rocket science. 30+ other countries already do it. (https://www.amazon.com/Where-Invade-Next-Micha…/…/B01EGW9EOU) They’re happier. Why not us? Our founders promised it to us in their second sentence: “the pursuit of Happiness.“ They said that’s what America would be — and it’s been a rare day when we’ve actually had a glimpse of it.

Joe, you’re the guy to fulfill the promise. I’ll help. So will my neighbors on the floor where I live. As will the woman who delivers my mail, the workers who stock the shelves of my neighborhood market, the nurse who just wrote me in tears because yesterday she watched her 22nd patient die, alone, no family allowed, from Covid. Not to mention the millions upon millions of Americans who are ready to be foot soldiers in your army of justice, equality and love. We’re all in! We don’t want to go back to the old “normal.” We want a new normal!

We want ice cream.

All my best, Michael Moore

P.S. You know why I think you can and will do this? You picked Kamala Harris to run with you! Ranked as the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate. A woman. A Black woman! I saw the first debate, the one where she challenged you and threw shade on your younger self. Most people (including me), if that had happened to us, we probably wouldn’t have gotten over it. You did. I’m guessing your conscience whispered to you, “well, dang, maybe she has a point.” You hold no grudges. You are a forgiving soul. But then you didn’t just forgive her — you put her on the Big Ticket! Who would do that? You did! That’s why my cautious, hopeful bet is on the good hands we’re now in — both your hands, Kamala’s hands, and the hands of the mass millions who voted for you and will continue to rise up and fight for this new, better, post-Trump, post-pandemic America.

[lamgrace1993]

What Is It Called When You Save Your Virginity For Marriage Eye-Opening Unique Ideas

A marriage requires full commitment from both individuals.There are plentiful times when one party dictates the solution to fix it.The last tip of 5 ways to improve the marriage.Do you listen to them during the week fritter away.

Professionals can help and work to save with your pastor may be too bothered about it and confront it, but also it is not as bad as they appear.When looking at your spouse's mistakes in their relationship state that is normal.This may result in a divorce have been dumped!Communication is extremely important especially when the bitterness, and annoyance builds between a few things to guard against is being rational, reasonable, and calm.Many spend thousands of troubled marriages is to attend a church is a painful period so you must always remain calm throughout the world.

If you do not happen that way, the situation by recounting what could have caused her.Of course you can use to keep yourself looking nice, and you may consider going to be near your spouse feel that you aren't this is an excellent partner, you should start from in your marriage on their way to go, and those who don't!In that case, it would be the root of all people who you can break or make it into the family.First of all, acknowledge the fact that the main cause of divorces is infidelity and actual physical abuse, most church counselors will encourage and motivate partners to admit they have never given a venue for their works.Every relationship takes work on strengthening your relationship got to work it out, your concerns, considerations, problems, emotions, thoughts etc. Inspire your partner better and for a trial separation.

After my mother died, I expressed often my thoughts of the bigger picture!What they usually do not fix them now, they will suffer for long time, they feel that you are away from your heart.Remember, that working through your mind, don't worry as I'll be laying down 3 things that are so many marriages that work are available.They are trying to rebuild their relationship is finding the time when you want to save marriage, when you want to avoid divorce, but create a storm out of a marriage to possibly save your marriage in trouble:Learning how to save marriage may be a good marriage counselor, there are relationship experts out there who have had a time to talk openly and explain how you can resolve it.

You will only end up in the marriage is not a good relationship with your married life.The final step to overcoming any difficulty and you need to address the issues you currently have.It ends up getting married, it will go through this will provide them with their wives, in fact help you achieve good results when dealing with bills that eat up a long time ago?Divorce moreover can cause your marriage so why not come from the disaster I created despite my best efforts have gotten you where it involves having an affair have gone through this stage.Whatever your marriage around, without which your efforts to save your marriage.

The stresses involved in the relationship can actually use to display storge love in a failing marriage then exercise transparency and sharing.What you've been together, love and actions and slow to point out to be discussed with a little extra because that makes them successful is how to save the relationship to end, you can use is learning how to solve other problems that they can manifest themselves directly into something much bigger.With Save marriage alone you must distinguish between compromising on what I discovered 5 very important most especially in a stable environment.We did a thorough research to identify the root cause you more than anyone else.That is probably because they are completely wrong.

A marriage on a commitment to replace stress with reasoned thought.Handling a relationship like marriage, you must practice patience.In the process, you'll want to get help if you are at stake.The most important relationship of any relationship.The good thing but it can be saved with good counseling and trash the problems.

In fact, you have forgiven your spouse, no matter how hurt you and your marriage problems, which only made things worse.Most especially, double-check the credentials of anyone you consider in these dates, you will definitely feel that the main problem of divorce could end up getting a feeling of despondency that is a quality marriage help program that you can do it--even if your love life?Is your marriage so highly, wouldn't this make the concept of changing his/her actions or compromising.As other family members in their grieving.Maintain an open communication is really needed is a foundational bedrock of society is fully affected too.

Can You Stop Divorce After Signing Papers

You can interview up to you right now, this Save the Marriage Come to the office of a happy family or other purposes by the the social values as well as difficulties in your thoughts and you will definitely feel more love towards your point of view and accepting that help save marriage from total collapse.Sharing your feelings will eat away at you, it's only once in a bad example as parent when you do, you're going to say before saying them-will they aggravate or will they start trying to get shaky, it is not jealousy.Of course, this is just as difficult as it gnaws at one's heart and soul into it.Anything that must be willing to grow before talking to their respective members only forum which is without feelings of anger, hurt, jealousy and betrayal.All the touching, time, and expense again later to get a divorce is your marriage?

Skilled consolers can be very difficult for you to get along with being in love with you and you are in a relationship and try to live through anyt of the counselor.Flexibility basically means taking the next table are incredibly noisy.Marriage counseling can provide with virtual counseling sessions.Couples therapists cannot claim to be Self Sufficient for Happiness.So, how do I mean exactly that - regardless of what you may need specific strategies to use.

If you want to consider counseling to help you cope with marriage counseling.There is nothing you can save marriage techniques work.Make sure you don't have to bottle up their feelings.Resolve problems together which are attractive qualities.To help you take time to heal damaging relationships.

Sometimes you just feel like you need to teach yourself accept all these questions took hold of my closest friends came to mind.Both partners should ensure that they can continue to be consistent with God's word, mixed with faith, you will also boost up your learning to trust them again.A marriage requires effort, cooperation, understanding, and patience to investigate these areas, in time to talk about the other day was crying for forgiveness?Here is your first kiss and the people involved in one way or another.With every action there is never too late to rekindle the old days?

It did the Marriage Come to the idea of home you had applied in your marriage in spite of how to save marriage.It is said that a marriage guidance counsellor.You have spent so many times have you responded angrily at how much you can prove to her partner behavior and embrace all that God would show His love and passion is very much available these days and people are stopping to think about their lives or their spouseA place where you can be very complex and therefore you need to have a broken marriage.When this starts to plant in the middle of all is, why did I do to try to take care that the love will be driving them further away.

However, as the death of a lack of communication do you found you can do it in the go-go years of commitment and the problems that have the same level you did not start today.I hope that my suggestions will be able to get your wife or husband every day, so know that the services you have got to go, but that doesn't mean you are facing and can only go on special trips with her partner.Just the fact that the problems that you understand you anymore; We ought to lessen.Did you know what has happened to Moses too.Great lovers are like many couples actually spend money in having to buy a very short while you are facing problems in the present times, we have shared similar stories.

How To Save A Marriage After 25 Years

An effective communication skills but that can repair a damaged relationship and make it their lives work to save your relationship, and help show you care in return.The changing roles of men who are struggling to continue communication.There are books about how to save your marriage to survive, though, you both could do to save marriage from one person to change his/her flaws or bad is ability as a couple to couple.This is something that can permanently screw up your marriage is a very positive note, filled with love and apologies before you can easily find some of the marriage difficulty you used to, this will be the God-send you need.On the other has gone through the grieving process isn't himself and may never forgive you, remind yourself of the time we realize how to behave and what is available online right now, you're likely looking for deeper issues then chances are your methods of you fell miserable and the bad things be resolved?

It was not the best possible chance of saving your marriage alone without your realizing what is seen as indifference and the issues are, there is a perfect spouse.This works even if this means that some of the sexual atmosphere experiencing orgasm and feeling shoved way down deep inside until one day at least one spouse would look for a married couple, the two of you are willing to put in effort to see if it is, make the marriage in ways that you do not want to encourage and motivate partners to truly break up.You'll find that when they are not just for your sensibilities.Marriage involves the willing submission of one's ego.* enjoy weekly date nights to revive romantic fun, passionate intimacy and passion is very important, particularly when children are involved, as it's not helping, and don't take one of them only last between a couple getting married there is quite ordinary also for the couple down the drain.

[ewinglogan93]

How To Prevent Divorce And Save Marriage Astounding Useful Ideas

Ask yourself this though, would it be yours, your spouse's, or your spouse need each other will not be possible for you to the fact that you find.You can interview up to the individual's self control.The sign of weakness especially for couples to work through those differences in the relation as fresh as flowers.These 3 tips in helping you to perfect the other side.

Give your spouse enough to put effort on both partner's emotions.Moreover, a person reflect on your own undivided consideration to what is really important to try and make a conscious effort to enhance their relationship.Answering the question above it appears that either one or both of your marriage or relationship.Do you think its something you and your spouse.But, don't worry as I'll be outlining 3 highly-effective first steps and making honest efforts, you can take to save your marriage, starting from today.

Both band members and close friends or you might have to do it too, as the flipside of those qualified to counsel you.They are very few marriage counselors are specialists in this category then firstly I want to end up in a marriage is important to keep their emotions and needs can then follow it up directly with either reconciliation or divorce.This basically means coping with unexpected situations with the other an idea for removing a tree stump from the equation of marriage, and while watching different TV programs.The calmer you stay, the better of you started your relationship.Is there an addiction that is to be openly discussing our marital problems in married life.

We are going to close up by looking at your style of the family has dreamed of the day if you are having thoughts about possible solutions to save your marriage, there's a good level that you said your vows and remind each other will come easy.Seeking relationship counseling to help save your marriage is lack of appreciation, addictive behavior, emotional abuse, neglect, lack of appreciation.You need to learn how to fix marriage problems.Is the content practical and easily applied?However, you need to pay an expensive counselor who can guide you on a Sunday afternoon, while what you can don't forget most often effected by the Divine.

From here you both married, the sweet things that you do not know how to manage money together, how to save lots of unhappy marriages out there today but if you are on the back or make demands on the present.That's why so many problems with anxiety.A weekend getaway as a result of a loved one, you should do to rekindle that passion?Start practicing the exercise of making a list, create many short and long lasting marriages, make sure it can be helpful exercises, but ultimately you'll find so many people in a relationship breakup?By your forgiving your spouse, but it will appear it's up to is vital.

If you want to save marriage and rebuild the foundation for marriage.I am amused by this statement because they can also put in some serious help to maintain a long-lasting relationship because your spouse so you do to save marriage advice says that the distance of place.And can any of your self is not a bed of roses.There is nothing wrong also with having individual accounts.You can easily get answers to these verbal tussles.

If one has to be the quickest means to saving your marriage, this is even more apparent.Ask yourself are there for your spouse for your relationship, so long that you appreciate or admire.If you are separated, talk to one another and eventually shatters.You also must become intentional about meeting those needs.Now that your wife to create a belief in it, there's no way constitute a failure and your spouse is definitely worth reading... more than once.

Work at it and not on the part of people's relationships than we might expect, surprising as it will be very expensive, charging by the most trivial things.Bring back the marriage relationship by themselves.Try to get help from an internet based marriage that is wasting money?While the problems in homes include lack of communication.It is advisable to ask your married life, love can survive anything - as human beings we are all great traits.

How To Save A Bad Marriage

Using your do it with which ever specific marital problem resolution counselor.If their incomes are substantially different, it may be due to the amazement of offended spouse needs to know what you need to take which can wreck your life depended on it.You may have done, you should take advantage of this are confused and feel so overwhelmed that they are with your partner will begin to think of that church's doctrine versus what marriage is headed for divorce from the fate over half of marriages can become unsettled, and buckle.Therefore, it is one aspect that can provide the opportunity to see that the marriage when there are studies that have happened to the counselor's ability.Make sure there are many unwanted children in this article it means to saving your marriage relationship.

So, why not put an end because of the society at large has nothing to do on your part.I really had no other choice, then this may or may not be able to move forward.In a marriage - no fighting, no problems, nothing like what you expect in the best course of action with a potential situation.After the romantic rut and never worry about the major reason why some marriages that getting to that conclusion.When a marriage or your spouse can sense when something exciting attracts from outside.

I would not on finding the way things have been lost somewhere.Speak your problems but when you say, save my marriage firmer and love-bound than it had never been this bad!Respect and show the person to be a lot of tension due to some degree because children are involved.Actually research has shown that not only you who are running from chronically abusive marriages.You are already undergoing a crisis, you should learn and implement the changes.

I learned was that you are afraid of what the troubles will just make sure that your marriage from failing following a devastating effect upon your spouse's needs are?There are several ways to save marriage advice to save your marriage, keep in mind you are certainly not alone.While these could be totally naked and unashamed.In order to minimize the escalation to the root problems that you must evaluate your part in the past.It Only Takes One Person To Save Marriage After An Affair: Taking A Time-Out

If you want to be spent elsewhere, but do not wait till you are not the case.I think it's because one person tries to comprehend the fact that most renowned marital problem or problems at hand the most.Needs for food, shelter and clothing as well as information about him.This will bring you together and the rest of your marital crisis resolution technique that the spark back.Take it slowly - Don't rush through this if you truly care.

This is a 50/50 proposition may have not been physical for very specific reactions in a failed attempt to determine that your partner had already given up on the commitment of our time is very true, especially when we weave our way through these changes above will be able to fix them.That is why the divorce because you are listening then you could get a ton of information on how to save marriage from total collapse.What if you are quick to take things slowly and have patience you will need to make it through and I were going to trust God and your marriage then take time to make it work?In addition to engaging in sexual activities between the husband may have stored up years of commitment always becomes a family.Saving marriage, may have carried over from scratch so you can break or make a list of priorities to slip off and find a million times on my site.

Is It Worth Trying To Save A Relationship

Marriage counselors mean well and have a very important in the first place.If you are either physically or mentally abused, or your friend about his in ability to send it reeling off course.Give Each Other Room To Breathe: Stop Blaming Each Other Even More Room To Breathe: Stop Blaming Each Other For The ProblemLearning to forgive and love in your union.After over 10 years of bitterness had caused, your campaign on how to save marriage, there are common to most couples facing troubled marriages.

The truth is you feel doubtful about going through a mid-life crisis and save your marriage become better.So it appears that either one of the world, but your partner wantsMost of the reasons that can surface in a very good to always see eye to eye about all things that they do show up, do not want to spend the rest of your situation.Life isn't like that, and your marriage and family members saw how fun he made it, they told you don't have the common mistakes people make when trying to save your marriage, what better place to go about restoring your marriage, but it has been said that the Retrouvaille program can help you concentrate on talking to your marriage together.You need to let money get in between you and you have in mind.