#with only a reference picture of Whirl and my belief that I can do it

[yirima-chai]

I made this Whirl figure as a Christmas gift for @xaraxaltaris

(How can you not just give your best friend a selfmade figure of her favorite Transformer)

↓More pictures of him down here↓

The figure is made out of paper, some wire a few beads and hot glue

That's how he looked before I painted him

[i-did-not-mean-to]

Boys and sticks - Chapter 45

Fandom: Hobbit (College AU)

Characters: @linasofia x Thorin, @laurfilijames x Fíli, me x Ori

Words: 1,7k

Warnings: reference to smut and to trauma and so on...

@laurfilijames this one is for you, have faith in me :D

Previous chapters

“Fí, are you insane? You’re too young to worry about your old age yet,” Lo laughed as he stared at her - unmoving.

“I…yes, forget I said anything,” he mumbled, covering her stomach with kisses that tickled like butterfly wings on her skin.

“You’re my best friend, you know that, right?” She pushed up on her elbows and nudged him in the chest with one knee.

“I am luckier than Jia or Tova, because we’ve been…close before,” she went on, but he shook his head, replying that the kind of intimacy they might have shared before had never compared to what they could potentially achieve here.

Lo was taken aback by that until she thought about it a second longer; to her, falling in love with Fí had been a gradual thing, like breaking in a horse until you could get up on its back and just trust another heart and soul to keep you safe, but to him, falling for her had been like a dam breaking, inundating his reality with feelings that uprooted old beliefs and washed the flotsam of trauma ashore.

“Fí? You do know that we love you, don’t you?” Funny how she had never actually thought it necessary to reply to his exasperatedly expostulated declarations of love with those three simple words; she had always thought that he’d know, that they’d be certain of that as it was so blatantly obvious to her.

His head snapped up and the expression of shocked astonishment on his face made her laugh softly.

“You’ve never said it, but I had hoped…” he nodded slowly, crawling up along her body to cup her face and kiss her tenderly.

“I thought it was understood, sorry, of course I do love you; sometimes, it feels like I might always have,” Lo sighed against his lips, her fingers plunging into the golden curls in search of purchase as the world seemed to shift to be perfectly balanced on the tip of a knife.

“What do you mean?” Fíli didn’t let go of her face, cradled like a treasure in his rough palm, basking in the light of her eyes.

“As I said, Jia has to come to terms with the fact that she is no longer merely crushing on that dude, Tova has to ease into loving someone she had barely had the time to fall for, but me? I have loved you for days and weeks,” she said and – as she met his eyes – she thought that she had never been closer to believing in fate than that day she had met him, and everything had clicked into place.

“You and me? We fit together like two pieces of a puzzle, and I have been waiting for you to see it too,” she pushed against his gasping silence, his hands frozen around her like the statues of old.

“What? You…but…” Fíli’s mind was a whirl of emotions and lust, confusion and desperate longing, fear and giddy hope.

Taking advantage of his weakened state, Lo pushed against him hard until he dropped onto his back in the middle of the bed; straddling him, she smiled: “You’re my best friend and the only person who has ever allowed me to be naughty and adventurous without thinking less of me.”

“You are a wicked woman,” Fìli sighed, “and a princess.”

“I’ll be a princess for you if you’re my knight in shining armour,” she promised.

“You’re a dragon,” he moaned as she bore down on him inexorably and shamelessly.

“I’m a bit of both,” she agreed, “and to loosely quote my friend Jia, it doesn’t matter what either of us is, you’re mine and I’m yours.”

“So, Durin’s son, how do you feel about the room?” Tova asked as she sprawled out on the bed invitingly, “Can you imagine yourself lying here and watching the world fall into darkness around us?”

Thorin could; the awful truth was that he was already half in love with this flat and entirely in love with the siren on that dusty bed. He could picture taking the bus from practice and find the girls huddled up on the couch, leftovers from their dinner on the counter that he’d put in the fridge before locking the door tight for the night; he could see himself draw the curtains and sink into Tova’s arms in the light of the funny little bedside lamp he knew she had.

She would never know how much it meant to him to hear that he could once again live in a space that was so close to his family and yet so much his own realm; they had been talking about inviting Kí and Dwalin as if it was nothing at all to invite people they had barely even met, as if he had the right to invite his kin over.

“It’s a beautiful room,” he sighed, kneeling beside her, and running his hand up and down the line that went straight from the centre of her bottom lip to her navel, “and you’re a beautiful woman. How do I deserve that?”

“You’re profoundly kind,” Tova shrugged and gasped when his hand ventured further with every pass.

“I cannot believe that we have to explicitly tell you how much we want you here,” she said – a shiver making her words almost inaudible – and that slow, deliberate smile stretched out on Thorin’s gorgeous face, pulling at the corners of his mouth and eyes.

“Oh, my sweetling, you don’t know what you’re getting into,” he sighed, bending down again to kiss her breathless.

“We want that as well,” Tova moaned as his lips wandered down her body slowly, “the instrument you hide, the iron shavings clinging to Fí’s clothes, and Ori’s endless stacks of books. Thorin?”

Tova sat up slightly and waited for him to return her gaze, “we have the house, but you could make it a home.”

Her words surged through him like a thunderbolt, electrifying and singeing every nerve, and he pressed his face into the soft flesh of her stomach to catch his breath; she had called it ‘a home’ again and his heart burst along the seams of old scars.

Tova knew that she had touched something within him when his fingers brushed – sweet and careful – over her heated flesh tenderly; as always, Thorin wrote love letters onto her skin, whispering his confessions into the tiny space between his lips and her body, and it all flowed into her consciousness in ways she could not even comprehend.

What felt like years after that first touch, his body was on hers, sliding home easily with a sigh that almost sounded like relief.

Kissing Ori somehow always felt like the first time. I held my breath each and every time before that moment where his skin collided with mine and I got sucked into a swirl of dancing warmth that tasted like winter spices and felt like home.

“I cannot wait to wake up before you once and kiss you good morning like you deserve it,” he chuckled, his eyes slightly unfocused but terrifyingly deep, as his fingers slid along the nape of my neck soothingly.

“What can I do to make this day less awful?” he then asked without interrupting his – very successful – attempt at hypnosis by tenderness.

“Say that you’ll come, and we’ll have another bath together, this time maybe with a little more success?” I suggested, snaking my own hand under his sweatshirt and up his abdomen probingly.

“Oh thank God, I have not stopped thinking about this the whole day! Is that normal?” he exclaimed vehemently, pulling me toward him until I was half crushing him under me, and still, he did not relent.

“Absolutely,” I reassured him, kissing the spot where I had left a very visible mark, and flapping my arm helplessly to shimmy off that obstructing garment that kept me from exploring the rest of him.

“So, I am a ‘this’? I’m fine with that as long as I am – indeed – your ‘this’,” he laughed as he complied with my unspoken demand for him to get rid of the sweater. There was something so alluring in bare-chested men, a secret well-kept amongst women, that made our spines shiver and jerk, and I couldn’t help nipping at the tiny specks of purest gold adorning his shoulders.

I was in the process of falling harder for this creature than I ever had before, I realised when my heart gave a painful leap upon seeing a hint of hunger break through the sweetness of his smile when my own clothes were shoved aside impatiently.

“Your father wouldn’t condone this,” he teased as my nails raked down his chest, clawing at the white skin to get to that awfully tender heart underneath.

“My father can walk barefoot into hell for all I care in this moment,” I growled, “he could stand in this very room and wag his finger at me, and I wouldn’t stop!”

“Good, because the last thing I want is for you to stop,” he sighed as he unclasped my bra and pressed his lips on the silken flesh I had kept under lock and key for so long, waiting for him.

“I could eat you up, I swear,” I groaned, inebriated with the smell of his skin that wafted – secret and delicious – into my face like the scent of a new book.

“You may try, if you care to, I won’t complain,” he grinned, doing that funny ass-wriggling again that told me that he was unmistakeably aroused by the situation and trying – out of habit more than necessity – to hide it.

And so, I did, I tried, I unleashed all the hunger I denied on his skin; Ori subverted every single expectation and idea I had held about gender and its stereotypes, because he was nothing like my father in the end.

No, his chest was heaving with throaty moans and his hand was buried in my hair without aggression or violence; he was unlike any man I had ever met, and it shocked me as much as it enchanted me.

[hushonline]

【Dettlaff/Regis】 the Clouds in Beauclair

Relationships : Dettlaff/regis ; Geralt/Yennefer; Ciri/Avalla’ch

Warning:

#Characters DEATH!!!【Dettlaff and Dutches sisters】

#ALL ABOUT REGIS’s Ring.IN THE Beginning of B&W story,Dettlaf tried to find it thorugh a Bruxae.When regis killed him,Regis was wearing this humanist ring.Both of them put the ring on their ring finger.

#I mainly use a translate app to work on this article[Cuz English is my second language].So it maybe full of mistakes,for my horrible grammer.

Summary: When Ciri's second child was born, she returned to the Corvo Bianco vineyard ,and met Regis by chance.

Wednesday afternoon, 2:00 p.m. , clear sky without rain. Ciri dismounted and took her horse's bridle,asked Baba to tie the horse next to Roach. The servants said that Yennefer had gone out after lunch, in order to collect some special herbs. She glanced at the white building .She saw two Bony Crows sunning themselves on the hot eaves. In front of the door , a gray man waved at her from a short distance, and the green leaves on the sacs swayed in the wind.

"Uncle Regis! "

She pounced cheerfully, gave him a bear hug and chose to ignore his comment that she was "much softer as a mother" . The exile in Nilfgaard had left the vampire with a dusty and weariness smell.Shouting that no one should look down on her fertile flesh, Ciri took him by the arm and dragged him into the room.

Geralt hugged her, too. Then she eagerly announced the name of the newborn child to the others.

"We decided to call him DEADRAT. The name is derived from the ancient elvish word for 'descendant of the Elder blood’ , the same as the fifth ancient king of Alen Elle world, “ she said. “Geralt, if you want to argue with Avalla’ch,just do it,I won't stop you. “

"Witchers can't breed, so I do not have any discourse power in naming aftrer newborns, " said Geralt, "Fortunately, you're an exception. Besides, I won't argue with Avalla’ch,.I'll give him an Aard attack , let him to get the hell out of my vineyard smoothly. "

Toussaint's wind is as warm as ever, It reminded her of her second son's blue elvish eyes.Ciri smiled and laid her hand on Geralt's shoulder.

"I am sure he will make you like Alvalla’ch half-a-Oren more than before. "

"Well, I'm quite sure he'll have a dark hair as a Hedgehog.Look at Emhyr, " he said. He glanced at Regis and shut his mouth at once.

Regis was stranger than whenever he was.The Higher Vampire's face had turned pale from the moment she instituted her child, up to now it finally falling into a trance state. A unseen shadow enveloped him, laid him in anxious , as if he had met a stubborn patient.

"UNCLE? " Asked Ciri doubtfully.

"For a faerie son,that ‘s the most appropriate gift, but not for ...... the vampires . "

Geralt pushed the glass up to him, considered it for a moment. "It's about the pronunciation, isn't it? " His golden pupils flashed, rarely . Regis smiled placidly, and Ciri tasted something bitter though it.

"You're a guest today,Regis, just get drunk and take it for granted, " she heard Geralt say, "It. ". Her keen intuition linked this word to Regis's reason of leaving Toussaint, the evil beast which Geralt described in a few words, with the strange talk which had been going on in the alleys, trying hard to piece them together for a fragmentary image. She is a willing learner ,whom kept eager on learning form Geralt ,including the Higher Vampire principle, four murders and the massacre. But the white-haired witcher seemed unwilling to mention a word about it, he poured the wine down his throat as if he would swallow his lungs. She urges him on, and he skipped straight to his honours ceremony: He would rather told her the death of dutchess sisters than any exploit he did. "Regis sacrificed a lot. " he retorted.He looked like a Griffin in a iron cage, claws flattened, eyes were as old as his whiskers. She pessimistic belief that Regis would die in the wasteland ,the misperception hadn’t been corrected until she met the wandering vampire in Nilfgaard last year.

"I'd love to, " Regis said, pointing to his backpack. "I suppose you won’t mind if I took some reborn potion? "

He took the leather water bag and mixed the liquid into his glass. The acrid smell of the alchemical filled the room at once. The Voice of Gerlott falls to the ground like a broken rake. “R--E--G--I--S--,You, a vampire, add black blood to your potion? SUPERIOR Black Blood? "

Regis remained a Poker Face. "Like human’s peppery wine, a slight tingling can help me stay awake ,and stay away from nightmares at the same time. Forgive me, I do not want to dream any more, my dear old friend. " He tapped his finger on the table, on the ring finger of his right hand, a ring of silver sparkles.

Gerlart responded with the same indifference, as he fingered himself -- Ciri knew he was counting the ingredients, using a pair of hands instead of one. At last, he raised his palm to Regis. "Give it to me. Yen and I will make you a new one,harmless,andfor vampire only. All Right, I think Yen's enough. "

The herbalist pinched the strap of his knapsack and rejected his offer like rejecting a brainless gargoyle. "Come on, you look much worse than last year."

Then he asked Regis why , Regis gave him little more than a runaround. They mentioned a male’s name, most of the time was referred as "he",with the duchess's dead sister .It seemed to be a royal scandal.Ciri listened attentively, arms folded, watching their quarrel as a spectator. At last, when their words faded away, she was able to say a complete sentence .

"Who is Dettlaff? " She asked. For a time, no one answered her, only the clouds flew endlessly in the sky . Her muscles were as stiff as marble, and brain cells whirled beneath them, trying hard to speak as usual instead of open a portal and slip away.

It was almost half a century before two centenarians -- one man, one vampire -- noticed her question. "My savior, " Regis replied.

The atmosphere in the room was not relieved at all, but several times heavier then before. So she raised her glass and began a toast ,trying hard to end the subject.

"To his fortunate,and health. " she said.

The mask smile reappeared on Regis's face. "It seems that you still haven't told Cilia, my friend, " he spoke softly.

Geralt struggled to reply. "I did. And only the part about the beast, because she was hurry to date a elf. "

Ciri looked away--he was telling the truth. Across the wooden table, Regis sipped his wine. "It's my duty to end it. " he whispered.

"Yes. And what's done is done. Let's have a drink, " Geraldt said. "I know you won't slaughter the city in a rage. "

They talked about the Corvo Bianco vineyard. When a bottle of Est Est ran out, Geralt opened the Mandrake wine, and Regis's words began to increase guadually. Ciri tried to find out the key to the mystery, but she filled, as if an invisible membrane separates her from the truth.a deep dark river rippling sliently, she saw the water covered with the trackless haze of Regis's side, his dark red tired eyes.A torrent of flood tore him asunder, leaving him dangling in air,helplessly,desperately.

Unwilling to see this vision of the future,Ciri turned the conversation to the wild hunt, talking loudly about the gates of the downworld, Mist Island, and, of course, Uma (her husband, actually) , ignored that Geralt was rolling his eyes.Before I gave him my love, he had burned all the pictures of Lara, she quickly gestured. When our first child was born, Avalla’ch did nothing but take care of us and paint our portraits.Less than half a month, the charcoal dust had stained our study.That was quite Nilfgaardian, after all they admired black, and perhaps I should have suggested him to paint a golden Sun up on it. She blinked her green eyes ,smiling like a sly silver Fox.

"Damn it,He IS definitely drawing Lara. " Geralt retorted.

Ciri raised her scarred eyebrow. "Lara would never be a witcher. "

Regis seemed better,he was nearly in a good mood, and the haze left him briefly.Alcohol made his face ruddy. "I... knew an amateur painter ,who... used to draw me when I was sick, " he said intermittently. "Well, at that time I couldn't even walk. He was my feet. "

Ciri took his words as a metaphor.

"You still have it, " said Geralt. He pointed to the moth brooch on Regis's chest. Regis adjusted the brooch gently to the right angle, beneath the sunlight, it seemed so alive .

"It was supposed to be mine. "

He said. As he got up to get the wine, he knocked over the cups, and the bright red liquid spilled all over the place like a spring.Ciri felt nothing but irritable. She had totally no idea what had been going wrong.Perhaps it was the Mandrake wine, or the clumsiness of her tongue----as clumsy as Geralt, turn the joyful scene into a mangled black fairy tale.She said to herself, realized the truths of the fairy tales were far more brutal than this awkward meeting.Ciri regretted that she did not have the same talent as Dandelion.

Geralt could not take it any more ,so did Ciri.The owner of the vineyard immediately decided to show Regis his underground laboratory. They walked down the hall, past the Marble steps, walk down to the wine cellar.All the daylights pulverized at their feet.

"I miss Beauclair's cloud more and more each day after I left.Because it always turns into a bat’s shape , " he said, spent a moment on inspecting the display on the shelf. As he took down a bottle of white wine ,he was bending his lips imperceptibly. "I mean, once up on a time Dettlaff got drunk, he thought the cloud was a young Katakan.He turned into smoke ,flew up, and tried to save it. "

Geralt smiled, too.

"Can't imagine his...childishness. After all, I know nothing of your vampire logic. "

Regis was intrigued. "Tell me al about it, " he made a lightly gestured to Geraldt, "I've always wanted to hear about differences between races. "

To her surprise, Gerlott froze immediantely, his lips parted like a fish in boiling water. "The body of Count De La Croix."

"Dett... Syanna murdered him. " Regis changed his tune. “SO,What is the news?”

Geralt's smile faded away , replaced by a puzzled look. "His body was laid in this cellar. In that day I killed a Bruxae.She tried to take the hand away, well, Dettlaff’s hand. Later he told me he is the one who asked her to come . "

"To tell you the truth, I don't know what Dettlaff would do with his drying hand... recycling? Or some Toussaint nobles would pay for it as a collection, a world wonder? " He said, pointing to the open iron door .

Regis's face suddenly became painful.

"For God sake, no. "

"What is it? " Ciri asked.

"He's torturing me, " Regis said. He started to drink again. Ciri looked at him through the light of the torch: As she breathed, her nostrils filled with the old stench from the depths of cellar.

She saw a thin figure on Regis’s body, black hair, wounds dried;his blood floated like a mass of red clouds , wrapped around his naked body.The clouds were more real than he was. It attached to Regis,the elder blood had pointed out his metaphorical vision of the past: this shallow man,his endless suffering.

The iron door at the top of the cellar creaked, Yennefer came in a hurry .

"The Bruxaes are coming for us, Geralt, and my barrier could only keep them out of the vineyard, " she said, crossing her waist. Regis tried to say something, but Geralt stopped him. "Yen and I will take care of everything. Let Ciri send you to Nilfgaard ."

He took the silver sword from the rack ，then he left.

Ciri slammed the door, took Regis by his hand, ran into the bottom of cellar directly. She found an empty corner. When she was managed to gather her natural power ,Regis looked at her with a sense of guilty.

"Oh, Celia, I'm sorry for my gaffe." he said, "As compensation, I'd like to tell you one more secret.You don't have to keep it for me. From this moment , it belongs to you. "

So Ciri stopped. Regis wiped his face , traced the shape of a wardrobe with his index finger. Then his voice became more and more audible.

"I fantasized about a kind of life, which my lover loves me as much as he loves Mandrake wine. When the sun-shadow flew away and the grapes withered, we will stay in a mountain cabin and lit a fire. The stove is filled with the ashes of the old paintings , and we dip the Squirrel's tail in the ashes to paint a new one. We will live happy ever after,that’s how fairy tales end."

His words filled with white-hot spotlight. Ciri opened the portal, a shade of deep-blue covers two of them.

"You... will meet her,in some day." she said, absent-mindedly thinking of her elf ,and the laboratory she had smashed all around for once.Now it had been renovated, a portrait of the female-witcher handing side by side with the bearded Elf, which seemed comical but sweet.

Regis bit his lip as if chewing on the pieces of nightmare. “One day I woke with a heavy rain,it was then he came. Even through The Raindrops , his eyes still overcomed me. He said, 'Rise up, and come away.For the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.’ But Beaclair is sunny all year round, with no rain or firestove,"he said, smiling like a cruel dream. “Soon I realized fantacy always last in vain,and I will woke up ,sooner or later ."

“I should have told it earlier.”

Ciri held him carefully, her head was in a jungle. Regis' ambiguous words puzzled her a lot, and she thought that the secret was too common to named it as a ‘secret’ ,It is far more like Yennefer’s perfume, which she could mix a dozen of it whenever she needed it, place the bitter-sweet rhyme on her raven-colored hair, or Geralt’s arms .

I'm leaving, and before I leave,I have to ask you a question, Regis said. Are you afraid of death? To leave before your lover.

Ciri scratched her hair, and her face showed innocent bewilderment.

"Well, I've been running away from it all the time. After all,elves own an immotal life. " She responded quickly. "But I'll forgive him . What about you? "

Regis shook his head.

"May he treasures you as his blood, Celia. " he crooned. His ring was dull, and there was no trace of tear on his face.

When she returned to the drawing room, Geralt was polishing his silver blade. Ciri open her hand to him. A small music box was rolling slowly on her palm.Yennefer signed in a low voice.

"Regis left it to you? " She asked. Ciri nodded for a approval. Geralt stepped forward, too, stared curiously at this tiny toy.

"I think I've heard this song before, but I can't remember where . " Said Geralt .

"Is he married? "Ciri asked suddenly,"I mean, uncle Regis. "

Geralt insisted that it was impossible for regis to deny if he trurly did. Ciri shrugged , held the toy up for an examination. The Melody of the music box was lying in the Corvo Bainco Vineyard’s floating dust without moldy smell.It’s old but clean, reflected a strange luster in the sunlight .

Where did you get this ring,She asked Regis in silcence, why did you put it on the ring finger. Have you lost your lover?You look so melancholy, as if a traveller mourned day and night,to ran after the mists which is fainter than a dream, a moth with broken wings, a phantom of death, a wandering cloud drifting all alone under Beauclair’s cloudless sky.

fin.

#Mentrake wine: The kind of alcohol drink which geralt and regis drunk upon the grave. I don't know if it is correct.

#the italics in the passage are from《the songs of solomon》

[mebongster87]

The real villains and the real heroes of Season 8: predictions and foreshadowings

Back when the character posters for Season 8 was released, a few folks in the JonSa fandom speculated about how Daenerys, Euron Greyjoy, and the Night King, were shown to be seated on the Iron Throne with the Stanley Kubrick glare. Here are the pictures of what I am talking about. 

Kubrick stare is a typical characterising feature of villainy. Given that Euron Greyjoy, Daenerys Stormborn, and the Night King all sport this, it is safe to say that Team Storm are the main villains. 

The Crypts of Winterfell teaser provided us the real heroes of this season and they are these three:

Jon Snow, Sansa Stark, and Arya Stark, poised to face the threats of Ice and Fire with their best weapons, and are the real heroes of Season 8 and the story at large.

Longclaw for Jon, Sansa has her wits and charm, intelligence, and realpolitik, I mean I could go on but you get the point. Last but not the least, Arya Stark, newly minted Night King Slayer, with her Valyrian steel dagger, with which she killed the NK and Needle.

Thanks to Arya being the NK Slayer, this picture makes a whole lot of sense now and I believe we will have Jon and Sansa take down the other two villains in the story. 3 villains vs 3 heroes.

Daenerys Stormborn:

The show actually teased that Jon and Sansa will stand against Daenerys Stormborn back in Season 6.

The S06E09 Battle of the Bastards Inside the Episode commentary by David Benioff, where he says:

“If you are one of the Lords of Westeros or one of her potential opponents in the wars to come, and you get word of what happened here in Meereen, you have to be pretty nervous because this is an unprecedented threat. You’ve got a woman who has somehow formed an alliance where she’s got a Dothraki horde, a legion of Unsullied, she’s got the mercenary army of the Second Sons, and she’s got three dragons, who are now pretty close to full-grown. So if she can make it all the way across the Narrow Sea and get to Westeros, who’s gonna stand in her way?”

over shots of Daenerys about to destroy Meereen and burning people, is immediately followed by this shot of Sansa and Jon, from the tent scene, prior to Battle of Bastards, where they discuss how to defeat Ramsay (another villain).

Sneaky.

In Season 8 so far, we have seen Sansa go toe-to-toe with Daenerys, either by making her displeasure known in feeding the “greatest army the world has ever seen” with the limited food and resources that Sansa has managed to gather for the North, or derisively asking “what do dragons eat anyway” or outright defying Daenerys in Jamie’s trial. I do not see this abating in the upcoming episodes. Sansa knows that the Dragon Queen is a threat to her home, her family, and the entire North and she will be using her smarts and political prowess to outplay Daenerys.

Jon, on the other hand, will be the one to go fight Daenerys in a Dance of the Dragons 2.0. Whether Jon kills Daenerys remains to be seen. The show has buried enough clues to allude to this happening. I have written about it here and here and I think there is a strong possibility that Jon kills Daenerys, irrespective of your beliefs in those alleged leaks. 

In fact, these lines from ADWD, Jon XII, may have foreshadowed this:

Burning shafts hissed upward, trailing tongues of fire. Scarecrow brothers tumbled down, black cloaks ablaze. 

"Snow," an eagle cried, as foemen scuttled up the ice like spiders. 

Jon was armored in black ice, but his blade burned red in his fist. As the dead men reached the top of the Wall he sent them down to die again. He slew a greybeard and a beardless boy, a giant, a gaunt man with filed teeth, a girl with thick red hair. Too late he recognized Ygritte. She was gone as quick as she'd appeared. The world dissolved into a red mist. Jon stabbed and slashed and cut. He hacked down Donal Noye and gutted Deaf Dick Follard. Qhorin Halfhand stumbled to his knees, trying in vain to staunch the flow of blood from his neck. "I am the Lord of Winterfell," Jon screamed. It was Robb before him now, his hair wet with melting snow. Longclaw took his head off. Then a gnarled hand seized Jon roughly by the shoulder. He whirled …… and woke with a raven pecking at his chest. 

Here we have Jon armored in black ice, which is very reminiscent of Daenerys’ dream from ASOS, Daenerys III:

That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper's rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now awakened.

Jon kills Ygritte, a love interest, and Robb, his kin/cousin within the same dream. Daenerys is both a love interest and his kin/aunt. 

Jon has also been referred to as the “shifting shadow” from Daenerys’s chapters...ASOS, Daenerys II.

“Sometimes she would close her eyes and dream of him, but it was never Jorah Mormont she dreamed of; her lover was always younger and more comely, though his face remained a shifting shadow.“

Melisandre in her visions sees Jon as a shifting shadow as well:

“The flames crackled softly, and in their crackling she heard the whispered name Jon Snow. His long face floated before her, limned in tongues of red and orange, appearing and disappearing again, a shadow half-seen behind a fluttering curtain. Now he was a man, now a wolf, now a man again.”

-ADWD, Melisandre I.

What’s interesting is that the show actually uses a “shadow” to allude to Jon.

Notice the focus on the shadow of Jon, right before he goes to behead Janos Slynt, someone who betrayed Ned Stark and was an enemy to House Stark. And dare I say, this reminds me of the shadow of Jamie from Bran’s visions right before he shoves the sword in the back of the Mad King Aerys. 

Since Jon and Jamie are foils, Jon could end the story as a kinslayer and Queenslayer, just as Jamie started the story as the Kingslayer. We shall see whether it does come to pass or not. Additionally, Jon has refused to kill a woman twice before (Ygritte and Melisandre), maybe he ends up having to kill a woman this third time. Notably, Ygritte was a love interest, Melisandre tried seducing Jon, and now he is in a relationship with Daenerys.   

Euron Greyjoy:

I would’ve loved for Theon to be the one to take down Euron but since he is dead, someone else will have to step up to bring this guy down.

Could Jon be the one? Or Arya?Or Yara?

Since both Euron and Daenerys have been associated with “Storm”, here are some clues that I found that I thought were interesting.

This next part is just wild speculation on my part. 

Euron is introduced to us in S06E02 Home, where he kills his brother and King Balon Greyjoy and these are some of the things he says...

And this is what Jon says before he gets crowned KITN in S06E10 The Winds of Winter...

Littlefinger needles him in the crypts before Jon leaves for Dragonstone in S07E02 Stormborn and says this...

While Daenerys Stormborn has been associated with storms, Euron has been called the Storm and in this same episode called Stormborn, we see both Daenerys and Euron but not the Night King. Interesting don’t you think?

In fact, LF’s line could be applicable to Jon being the last best hope against either or both of these two “Storms”. 

In fact, I think we may get a Daenerys Stormborn and Euron Greyjoy “Storm-Storm” alliance mainly because of this throwaway line from Yara while she is captive in the Silence at KL in S08E01...

to which Euron replies:

Now on the surface, this may seem that Yara, an ally of Daenerys is confident of Daenerys’s win over Cersei and Euron, who are current allies. To which Euron talks about sailing his fleet elsewhere??To Dragonstone maybe??? I believe the show is cluing us to the fact that Euron could possibly switch camps. I mean he is wild, unpredictable and who knows what his next move is?? However, he wants to marry the most beautiful woman in the world and just wants to side with the winning team.

In the promo for Episode 4, we see Euron going down on his knees and looks like he is proposing Cersei. If Cersei rejects his proposal, maybe he will switch sides over to Daenerys, whom he thinks has a better chance of winning and is the most beautiful woman in the world.

However, in the subtext, do we really think Daenerys’s side is the winning side????

If she is the main antagonist, then she has to lose, right? So what could this mean....that Euron switches Cersei’s camp and goes over to Daenerys’s camp thinking he is picking the winning side, only to end up on the losing side, when Daenerys finally loses. 

Euron is a wild card and hopefully, next episode provides some solid clues regarding what’s going to happen.

There is also this scene from S07E05 Eastwatch, where the maesters of the Citadel are discussing Bran’s letter about the AOTD and one of the maesters mockingly says...”Don’t forget the prophet Lodos, who said that the drowned god will rise up and destroy Aegon the Conqueror”

Prophecy twist is when Aegon the Protector aka Jon Snow who has risen from the dead, destroys the Drowned God aka Euron Greyjoy.

Or the Drowned God aka Euron Greyjoy allies himself with Aegon the Conqueror come again aka Daenerys Stormborn to attempt to destroy KL???? It remains to be seen.

Why will Jon need to kill Euron??? Maybe just maybe Euron will be involved in kidnapping Sansa to KL. And Jon has already said (to LF) “Touch my sister and I’ll kill you myself”. That Chekhov’s gun is still waiting to go off.

I can’t help but think that the scene in the godswood in S08E01 Winterfell, in front of the heart tree, when Arya and Jon reunite and they talk about Sansa and Jon says that “I am her family too”, Arya says “don’t forget that” is foreshadowing for Jon to remember his first vow after he was brought back from the death that he made to Sansa...”I won’t ever let him touch you again, I will protect you, I promise”. Jon’s vow to protect Sansa will come into play in a moment when Sansa’s safety and her life is compromised. If Euron/GC come for her, then Jon’s vows to protect Sansa are applicable here as well. 

This Jon/Arya scene then transitions to a shot of KL, where we think Sansa will get kidnapped to, and then we have shots of Cersei and Qyburn, the Golden Company with Euron and, finally we have scenes where a “sister” is held captive by Euron. And who comes to rescue his “sister” Yara?? Theon, who is a foil to Jon...I think these are interesting scene transitions. Again, since it’s rescuing one’s sister, it could be that Arya is the one who comes to rescue Sansa, together with Jon, and ends up being the one to kill Euron.

Having said all of that, I am really not sure. Mainly because I don’t think the show will let Jon kill both Euron and Daenerys. That’s a bit much for one guy, even if it’s Jon. And this is primarily where I think Arya may play a part and be the one to kill Euron. If Jon kills Daenerys, then Arya will kill Euron, again the objective remains the same, protect Sansa. That shot from the crypts teaser where Sansa is flanked by Arya one on side and Jon on the other side, with their weapons drawn in a protective stance, makes me think that both Jon and Arya will have to protect and save Sansa at some point.

Or the show could give this kill to Yara, Jamie, or even Brienne, who knows. Like I said, this part is pure speculation on my part so I could be totally wrong.

And finally Cersei Lannister:

I am counting on the show giving us a Sansa vs Cersei showdown, I feel like those two characters need to meet to complete the YMBQ story arc. 

If the kidnapping plot does not happen, Sansa could come to KL to parlay with Cersei to strike up an alliance to take down Daenerys and defend the 7Ks.

These character posters have the same energy about them. Two Queens.

The show has been teasing us a Stark-Lannister alliance through its promos and teasers.

I could see Sansa and Cersei forming an alliance together to defeat Daenerys’s forces. The Golden Company will fight on behalf of Cersei and Sansa against Daenerys’s (and maybe Euron’s) armies.

In terms of Cersei’s demise, I am not putting too much stock on the Valonqar prophecy being actually true. Yes, Cersei has to die eventually, but D&D are Lena fanboys and I don’t think they will give her a gruesome on-camera death. In fact, I think Cersei will commit suicide or maybe poisoned.

When cornered, Cersei has either always managed to pull out an ace in the hole and outwit all her opponents in one fell-swoop like she did with House Tyrell in S06E10 when she blew up the sept 

OR 

she turns suicidal and threatens to do something rash.

Case in point:

1. She was willing to poison herself and Tommen with the essence of nightshade poison at the Battle of Blackwater Bay when all looked lost until Tywin came and saved her.

2. When Tywin was forcing her to marry Loras, she threatened to “burn our House to the ground”.

The only thing Cersei loves is her children, Jamie, and her throne. The fact that she is drinking wine again means that she probably is no longer pregnant. Jamie, if he ends up with Brienne, is gone from her. Her throne is under attack from Daenerys’s forces. All of these may just force her to do:

Foreshadowing from S03E10 Mhysa, where she is talking to Tyrion to give Sansa a child so that she may have some happiness.

She does not have any more children left, so she may just throw herself from the highest window in the red keep.

Joffrey and Myrcella were poisoned, Tommen committed suicide by throwing himself from his window. Maybe Cersei will do the same. We shall see.

Thoughts and comments??

[lunaschild2016]

Dark On Me - [Wraith/Eric] Part 1

A/N: A little something cooked up, brought to you by a monsoon, chai lattes and a sleeping five-year-old!

Rating: M

Genre: Romance, Angst, Drama

Summary: Summary: ‘You’re the cause, the antidote. The sinking ship I could not let go. Who led my way and disappeared. In the dead of night, you went dark on me.’ Wraith and Eric were well known for their dislike for each other, or so everyone thought. So he thought. Her death tormented him, just like she did in life. Love or hate? Enemy or soul-mate? What is the truth?

Eric: Jai Courtney

Wraith/Lexa: Kate Beckinsale (First Underworld)

Trip: Jacob Elordi

Tris: Shailene Woodley

Four: Theo James

@kenzieam  @pathybo  @jaihardy @every-jai@ericdauntless@beautifulramblingbrains@bookgirlthings@jojuarez26@oddsnendsfanfics@offroadinjandals @singingpeople@iammarylastar@irasancti@captstefanbrandt @clublulu333@fuckthatfeeling@tigpooh67@ex-bookjunky  @jughead-wuz-here wuz-here @badassbaker@beanzjellly @beltz2016@meganbee15@affabletimelady @scorpio2009@gylisaa@geekybeyondallreason @violetsonthelam@kyloswarstars@emmysrandomthoughts@kgurew@beltzboys2015-blog @slytherin-princess-25273@whatwouldbuffydo666@jaiboomer11@holamor@wealwayskeepfighting @original46 @blakefc@xtheserpentx@artisthedgehog  

Third Person

The scene of the attack was a gruesome one. The pictures captured all the gore in vivid detail. 

The bed covered in blood, the trail of it leading from the apartment. 

The wounds on both of the attacks participants. One of these being far more gruesome than the other after the body, battered beyond recognition, was finally located.

What wasn’t caught in the pictures from the camera after the guards arrived on the scene was caught on the vidfeed in the control room. 

In that, a young female was seen stumbling from the male’s apartment, clutching her side as blood continued to drip from her wounds. That blood left a clear trail all the way to The Chasm. It was there that the young woman was seen last on the feed. Wobbling her way until she dropped halfway across the dangerous metal bridge, unable to continue further.

He watched the feed in morbid fascination and with a chilling emotional disconnect as the girl looked around frantically. One would think she was looking for help but he knew she was looking for an escape.

What wasn’t showing on this particular feed was that the guards were closing in on her. The body of the male had already been found in a pool of blood in his apartment. 

She couldn’t know that the guards weren’t considering her the aggressor of the event. Not given the reputation of the man involved and their well-known dislike for each other. 

She couldn’t know that, with him being completely unconscious and slowly bleeding out, it was assumed he got what he deserved after he attacked her and it was self-defense.

But it was her next actions that shed doubt on that particular theory though there were plenty that never lost the first assumed belief even with the evidence.

A look of defeat and hopelessness crossed her face before she crawled to the edge of the bridge. She struggled, using the last of her strength most likely, and just as she made it the guards finally appeared.

They were too late.

No matter how many times he watched this damn scene play out, it always ended with the same thing.

Her lunging over the side with a sick smile on her face as she stared straight at the camera. She never even screamed. She just smiled until the abyss swallowed her from sight.

His hand slapped down onto the console to hit rewind until he reached the same point he’s watched a hundred times by now and he would continue to watch until someone put a stop to it.

“Jesus Christ, Eric. Give it a fucking rest already.”

The outburst coming from an ashen-faced Zeke Pedrad as he grimaced and jerked his eyes away from the large vid screen that was displaying the enlarged image of the girl's death.

Eric grits his teeth and turned his head ever so slightly to glare at Zeke who raised his hands in surrender and shook his head. “I’m just saying. I get that you have a right to see this shit if you want to. I mean, I guess if it had been me…”

He trailed off when he saw the slightest tick developing at the edge of the man’s eye and swallowed the fear at what he knew that usually signaled and continued on. “It’s been three weeks, Eric. You aren’t going to find the answers to why she attacked you there, and dead women tell no tales.”

Eric let out a hiss of breath and focused on the screen one more time, unable to look away until there was nothing left to see.

He didn’t hit the rewind control, even though his hand itched too. He hated the hollow feeling it left him with every time her face disappeared from his view. It didn’t make sense why he was feeling that way and that made him even angrier.

A dull ache throbbed through his body as the still healing wounds seemed to respond to that loss at the same time. Another thing he couldn’t explain, why he continued to refuse the serums that would heal and erase any trace of those wounds.

‘How can I explain that erasing them would be like erasing the last bits of her?’

He spun around to start to walk out but stopped when he heard the relieved expelling of breath from Zeke Pedrad. He whirled back around and stomped over to get close to him.

“Do you think this was me?” He hissed out while bending closer to the other man’s ear. “Are you one of those ready to parrot fucking number boy and assume I’m responsible for her?”

Zeke never turned his head, nor did he flinch away even though he desperately wanted to. Eric had always been one scary motherfucker but after the attack and being forced to be the one to give the funeral speech for her, he’s almost unhinged.

“Who? Wraith?”

Eric gritted his teeth so hard the sound reverberated in Zeke’s ear loudly and he could feel the anger boiling in the other man at the mention of the name. “Yes.” He hissed. “Wraith.” He finished with disgust dripping from every syllable.

He swallowed and shook his head in the slightest, speaking without ever looking at Eric. “Everyone saw you two in the pit that night, Eric. I saw you. I know you were wasted and said something insulting. But that was normal for the two of you, always exchanging insults. It never got physical before, but that night I saw her react and almost attack you. I was one of the ones that were going to step in and stop her. It was completely out of character for her, I know, so that might explain why we didn’t stop her from leaving with you. We were all pretty drunk, I guess. It’s the only reason I can think of why we let her be the one to take you to your apartment after that. We don’t know what happened behind the door of your apartment, but I can’t help but think it shouldn’t have even made it there.”

This time he swallowed out of grief and not fear as he closed his eyes. “I guess what I’m saying is, we’re all responsible in some way.”

He opened his eyes and turned his head slightly to look the man straight in the eye and was confused by what he saw. The tension eased slightly but his blue eyes were filled with an expression that is completely unlike the ruthless leader. There looked to be, remorse, in them.

“If you ever thought of her as a friend you will never fucking refer to her by that name again. Her name is Lexa and she should be remembered that way. Not as some fucking living ghost.” He snarled this out before flinching and straightening up. He left Zeke Pedrad behind, mouth hanging open in shock and blinking as if he thought he was imagining things.

‘Let him think whatever he will. Let them all think whatever they want, they always have. I’ll find out what happened that night and then maybe I can understand why it feels like I just lost the love of my fucking life.’

[bumblingorcs]

Orsimer Afterlife - Malacath doesn’t encourage sexism, in this essay I will

Ooops, okay, I decided that last post was a mess so we’re doing this over again, this time with a masterpost about Orc Afterlife---

We have, like, two whole written sources in the Elder Scrolls mentioning Malacath’s plane of Oblivion and the afterlife, so

The first one, the Doors of Oblivion, has a very brief description: 

“ 'Dust,' he whispered to me on the first day of his voyage. Despite the inherent dreariness of the word, I could hear his excitement in his voice, echoing in my mind. 'I can see from one end of the world to the other in a million shades of gray. There is no sky or ground or air, only particles, floating, falling, whirling about me. I must levitate and breathe by magickal means …' 

Zenas explored the nebulous land for some time, encountering vaporous creatures and palaces of smoke. Though he never met the Prince, we concluded that he was in Ashpit, said to be the home of Malacath, where anguish, betrayal, and broken promises filled the bitter air like ash.”

Considering this is an eyewitness account of a mage who actually, physically entered the Ashpit, I’d say it’s pretty accurate and reliable. Of course, he never actually visited or saw the Ashen Forge; he only saw the surrounding areas, which is made of smoke and ash, with no ground or air or anything else of the sort. He had to use magic to breathe and levitate. 

The other source is On Orcs and the Afterlife, which I’m going to have to break down into different parts. It’s worth noting that this text apparently only exists in Elder Scrolls Online: Orsinium; I have never played ESO, but to my knowledge, the player character never actually visits the Ashpit or the Forge itself. 

The first few paragraphs are essentially a disclaimer: 

“I have never found it difficult to get an Orc to talk about his or her beliefs when it comes to religion and the afterlife. As each Orc clan and stronghold has a rich and vibrant oral tradition, this should come as no surprise. What did surprise me was how hard it was to form a coherent picture, as no two oral traditions agreed on even the most basic of concepts.

In this time of conflicting faiths vying for the Orcish soul, I found many of the tales I heard to be both extremely moving and extremely disturbing at the same time. Furthermore, I have been unable to locate a single tome related to the topic, or find a reference in any other books on related subjects...”

What this part points out is that, in her research, the author discovered that Orcish folklore is entirely oral and passed on via the spoken word. She also directly points out that tales of Orsimer religion vary greatly depending on who is telling them. They’re inconsistent, and pretty much reliant on how the individual storyteller chooses to share them. This is the case with a lot of older religions, and the reason why some mythologies ( such as Celtic, Norse, and Greek ) contain plenty of their own little inconsistencies. Before being converted into writing, ancestors basically played a game of telephone. 

“The only way to learn about the Orcish concept of life after death or a place of reward or punishment in a world beyond was by asking the right questions and listening to the various oral traditions. For after much research and countless interviews, I finally uncovered the Orc equivalent to the tales of the Far Shores and Sovngarde. Indeed, it was the only thing that the various oral traditions seemed to agree upon. And through them, I have discovered the Ashen Forge.”

It’s pretty obvious here that the author intended to discover and record a generalized version of Orsimer afterlife that could be understood by most human readers - i.e, the ‘Orc equivalent of the tales of the Far Shores ( Yokudan / Redguard afterlife ) and Sovngarde ( Nord afterlife )’. She looked for an afterlife that adhered to a common theme of being rewarded for the ‘good’ deeds performed in life. She also looked for common themes among the countless tales she heard, tales that likely varied greatly even between individuals. Therefore, her description of the Ashen Forge ( you can read that part in the source, it’s still pretty neat ) is a combination of only the most basic, common themes gathered from the tales she heard, picked and chosen to fit a version of the afterlife that made more sense. So, the details of her interpretation... Probably aren’t as accurate as they could be. 

It’s also worth noting that, even with all of the verbal tellings of Orcish afterlife being taken at face value... The only way to know, for sure, if any of them are true, is to either have actually died and been accepted into the Ashen Forge, or to have visited it by magical means. The latter, to my knowledge, hasn’t been achieved. So... We don’t know for sure what it looks like, what occurs there, etc etc. 

“But Jessie, what does this have to do with Malacath and sexism?” Well, this was all sparked from me being irked from the phrase “every Orc is a chief, every chief has a thousand wives, and every wife has a thousand slaves to cater to their every need,” being used in reference to the Orsimer afterlife. Reading this, it’s obviously... blatantly sexist. A chief’s wives are pretty much being compared to slaves, in this scenario, and that in no way corresponds with our experiences of strongholds ( in Skyrim, at least ). Orc women are incredibly valuable to their stronghold. There are so much more than the chieftain’s belongings, or playthings; they are hunters, blacksmiths, warriors and mothers. A chieftain’s wives are intended to mother strong heirs and a healthy, sustainable, stronghold. If they don’t marry, they might become a tribe’s wise woman, who is essentially the overseer of the stronghold’s religious activities. Even if they aren’t a wise woman, they still serve their stronghold with the same importance of any average male orc within it. The idea of their reward for all of that in the afterlife being that they would be reduced to nothing more than a male orc’s reward, just... Not only grossed me out, but made no sense at all. 

Then, I actually read this account in full, and it was painfully obvious to me that this was a very, very general summary of countless stories, passed on from generation to generation, that were probably very different from the original tellings. Even those original stories probably weren’t as accurate - after all, what living orc can say that they know for sure what their afterlife will be like? 

In conclusion: We pretty much don’t have any solid confirmation on what an orc, who is loyal to Malacath, will be like. 

[kimanda]

Hello, hello! It's the Ambassador for Carpathian Ruś here! I have a (long passed, sadly) great grandmother from Ireland, and apparently she did Irish stepdancing! Would you be able to tell me more about it, please? Thank you in advance!!

Hello there! :D

Aaah well, I don’t really consider myself to be a big expert on Irish dancing or to be very knowledgeable on the technicalities of Irish step dancing. However since I’m a big history nerd, I can offer you a brief history on Irish dancing and how step dancing fits in the whole picture?  ;w;

(video of step dancing from 1972)

There is surprisingly not much that is known of Irish dancing in medieval Ireland and earlier. Therehave been quite a few references to it in written records throughout the centuries, but we know little of how these dances would have looked like back then.

We are first able to start working with known dance forms from the 12thcentury onward. Withthe Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century, various Normancustoms were introduced to the country. Among them was the Carol, a type of dancein which the leader sang in the middle of a circle of dancers who would reply tothe leader’s song. This dance was often performed in Irish towns that had beenconquered by the Normans. It is believed that the Carol introduced the concept of circledances in Ireland, although it isn’t completely certain that native forms ofcircle dances didn’t exist previously. However the Carol seems to have stuckaround for some time and perhaps popularized the concept of circle dances.  

 In the 16thcentury there were three types of Irish dances that were the most oftenmentioned: the Irish Hey, the “Rince Fada” (Irish for long dance) and the Trenchmore. 

- The Irish Hey was a type of circle dance that involved dancers wounding in andaround their partners. It was a forerunner of the reel, which is stillperformed in Ireland to this day. (the video above is an example of a treble reel, one of the evolved dance forms of the Irish Hey)

- The Rince Fada was typically done in two longlines, one line with women and the other with men. Hence the name “long dance”. :P The video is a pretty good example of how this dance would go, though usually there are more participants.

- The Trenchmore was apparently an Irish dance that was adapted for the Englishinvaders, being derived from an older type of Irish peasant dance. This dancewas very popular with the English, to the point that they brought it back tothe court of Queen Elizabeth. This video is a reconstruction of how it would have looked like, to my knowledge the Trenchmore hasn’t survived otherwise.

By the 18th century the jig was well established inIreland. Other popular dance steps included slip jigs, double jigs, slides,mazurkas and polkas. From around the 1750s to the early 1900s, travelling dancemasters were going from village to village, teaching various forms of dancesand steps. Step dancing in particular was widely taught in all parts ofIreland. Another type of dance that was taught during thistime was the reel, the whirling or spinning dance. Travelling dancemasters usually would spend a couple of weeks in each village, staying with alocal family. In return for the lodging, they would teach dancing free ofcharge to the family members.  

Inthe 19th and 20th centuries, the most popular dancesthroughout Ireland were sets and half sets. A good example of a set dance canbe seen in this video:

Setdances were brought over to Ireland and England by the armies of the Duke ofWellington returning home from the Napoleonic wars in 1816. This militaryorigin can be seen in the names given to certain dance movements. Beingoriginally derived from the French quadrille, set dances in Ireland developedfurther to better suit native Irish rhythms.

Dancesused to be commonly hosted in people’s houses but this practice would decreasewith the appearance of commercial dance halls and changes in travel,communication and lifestyle by the mid-20th century. However anotherfactor that is thought to have majorly contributed to the decline of housedances was the passing of the Public Halls Dance Act in 1935, which made thehosting of unlicenseddances illegal. House dances as they hadbeen known previously would disappear almost completely afterwards. A survivingrelic of this custom is the Irish word “céilí”, which refers to “an informalsocial gathering (at a neighbour’s house)” but now the word is mostly used to describean organized dancing session.

TheGaelic League, in their goal of re-establishing the Irish language and culturein the country, went on to ban their members from participating in dances thatwere regarded as being foreign introductions. One of the dances that werebanned was set dancing, which was regarded by the Gaelic League as being tooEnglish.

Stepdancing would instead be encouraged by the Gaelic League and this form ofdancing would become heavily popularized during the 20th century. Throughout the 20th century,the competitive solo form of step dancing would evolve. This would lead to step dancing becomingcodified and certain styles being standardised. (particularly styles from thesouthern areas of the country) Informal competitions for students of variousdance masters were held between towns for several years but the Gaelic Leagueheld the first organised competition in 1897. The Gaelic League would create in1927 An Coimisiún Le RincíGaelacha (The Commission of Gaelic Dances), a separate body that would be incharge of organising dances and contributing to the further standardisation ofIrish dances. This organisation wouldalso start holding examinations and giving certifications to dance teachers. 

Inthe recent years, older and freer forms of step dancing have started to betaught at summer schools and festivals. Showslike Riverdance would also revolutionize Irish dancing by returning to moretraditional step dance forms and move away from the rigid competitive forms. The video below shows the interval act of the 1994 Eurovision show, which is considered to be truly historic as it introduced Irish dancing (particularly step dancing!) to a global stage. This act not only managed to attract new fans to this dance form, but it also reinvigorated traditional Irish dancing and has contributed to the bright and vibrant culture it is today.   

Whereare the arms in Irish dancing?

So this is probably a question that has baffled many people when on the subject of Irish traditional dancing: Why is there little to no arm movement in Irish dances, particularly in step dancing?

Aaaahif only there was a straightforward answer to why arm movements became absent fromIrish dancing. The silliest explanation I’ve seen states that when the Englishbanned the Irish language and other forms of cultural expression, the Irish decidedto not only dance inside their houses, but to do so without using their arms sothat any Englishman passing by wouldn’t know the Irish were dancing.

A more likely explanation is due to lack of space back then. Local venues wereusually small, so travelling dance masters reportedly taught the steps bydemonstrating on tabletops, or even on top of barrels! If this was the case,these masters would have had to hold their arms rigidly at their sides and wereunable to do any kind of lateral movement. Later when there were larger venues,various regional styles evolved to include more movement of the body but armmovements never fully caught on.  

Anotherpossible explanation relates to the state of the stage, or a lack thereof. Mostplaces lacked a hard surface to dance on properly, so people often unhingeddoors and lay them on the ground to dance on. Doors didn’t offer a lotof space and so due to having a small “stage”, it didn’t favour using the armsmuch. Instead, people would favour dances that showed off the quick and intricatemovements of the feet.

Addingon to this explanation, there is a belief that in earlier competitions a danceteacher decided to have his students perform with arms purposefully heldrigidly to the sides to draw more attention to the steps. According to thisbelief, those students were praised for their movements and won thecompetition, which led to other teachers and dancers adopting this trend and iteventually became part of the standard of Irish dances.

I’mnot certain about the validity of this last explanation as we are not givennames, dates or any kind of specifics for that matter. But I could believe thatthe trend of not using the arms grew gradually and not one, but several danceteachers began to forgo arm movements completely and it eventually became thestandard.  

Inany case, we don’t have a straightforward answer to why arms fell out of use inIrish dances. The most likely explanations show that lack of space (and/or lackof a proper stage) led to arm movements being an underdeveloped aspect intraditional dances and with the establishment of dancing competitions, thenon-usage of the arms probably became deliberate. 

Inmodern Irish step dance, arm movements have started to be integrated more often thanks to showslike Riverdance but many regard it as non-traditional and dancing competitionsstill maintain the “no arms” rule. 

[jokerownsmysoul]

Ever since you first mentioned this idea to me and what you were going to write, I was sure that this piece was going to be one of my absolute favorite of yours of all time and God knows if I was right 😭😭😭 it's wonderful and you spoiled me so much with this. 🥺 Warm and cozy and intimate, mutual teasing, a dance and Patricia showing up. I couldn't ask anything better. 🤧🤧🤧 I love everything you write but you know what I mean. Cozy and intimate it's just the easiest way to end me, and if you set up everything in the early morning I just‼️ugh 🥺❣️and one of the most beautiful smut you've written, I really love the way you wrote it and their interactions so much. To see them talking and laughing throughout it, how you blended teasing desire and domestic tenderness is just 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 🥺🥺🥺 read more for my incoherent rambles 🥴

I love so much how the story picked up the pace, and the change of settings between Patricia's birthday first and their morning after ❣️❣️ I love when she shows up and it was sweet to see her being the focus of a whole scene. The way you described her house is wonderful and I could see it so clearly, and the colors are just 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻

Both shook Arthur's hand when he offered it, and he felt a little thrill whirl his stomach when Y/N laid claim to him by telling the woman, "This is my husband." - this got me like 👉🏻👈🏻 I love it. And I also loved how you described his inability to interact like the others do, how little he knows about parties when it comes to being a guest but how good he is when it comes to Carnival, I love those paragraph ❣️

The first party he’d been invited to since being the weird kid in class who’d rotated between three worn out sweaters and could never afford a gift. - I love when you write of his childhood. This broke my heart but it's always spot on 🥺🥺🥺

Cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches were light and airy, a good match for his iced tea. Only the artichoke and spinach dip gave him pause. Its beans and hot sauce made his taste buds wince. - I always enjoy those paragraphs about Arthur's taste in food, we know so little about it and we barely got to know that he likes coffee, so I'm always very curious to read what he likes and always wonder what you base those opinions on, which I can always picture clearly 💙

Arthur, having successfully kept the secret of her light smoking from Y/N, chuckled at Patricia fibbing she'd put candy in it. - the way you connect the pieces to each other is always so flawless and you know I love when you put those little references here and there 🥺🥺 I'm going into nostalgic mood🚀

She reached further and patted Arthur's knee. "I'm glad an old dame like me gets to call you all friends." His throat clenched in gratification, though he wasn't daring enough to squeeze her hand and thank her for deciding he was a friend. - girl 😭😭😭

Arthur took a bite absentmindedly, wondering how long it would take for him to save the money to surprise Y/N with plane and concert tickets. - this made me think of the new year's eve piece 🥺🥺🥺

Dr. Sally had said marriage could be difficult, and Y/N's first hadn't survived the ripples of her life. / Or back in Missouri, when he'd told her to stop shielding him and trust he could take anything she had to give. - I adore when you mention Dr. Sally ❣️ and the Missouri story ugh 🥺🥺🥺🥺 going into nostalgic mood again I love all those references what can I say 😭

She was the only woman for him. That was as certain as his cigarette habit. - I just 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 i love the imagery with cigs involved, what a sweet kind.

"Don't. Say that." Arthur crinkled the can in his grip and glared up at him. - I'm always so impressed by your extraordinary ability to put the quotes of the movie in your pieces, they always are so spot on and fit so well with the scene. I could totally see him. Also, ngl but to see Arthur pissed off its always a pleasure 👌🏻

Even with his complete faith in her and his firm belief that they were meant to be together, the possibility that she'd stop wanting him hurt. - my heart 😭😭😭😭

A new song started. An oldie that sang of Jupiter and Mars, playfulness among the stars. He cupped her cheek, thumb sweeping the corner of her mouth. "Dance with me," he said. Before accepting his proffered palm, she laid a sloppy kiss on him. With a flutter of her eyelashes, she grinned, and his smile grew to match her own. As he held her side, led her in a slow, swaying circle, he marveled at her. At her ability to soothe every molecule, every lingering ache. Self-assurance welled in him, chased away his earlier dejection. He cradled her to his lanky frame, trembled and felt himself blush. She was the only woman for him. That was as certain as his cigarette habit. - this paragraph is PERFECT just perfect. It makes my heart swoon its just 💗💗💗💗💗💗💗

I loved so much this part. Even though there was a party you managed to create another dimension detached from it with only the two of them. I love how she approaches him and the soft small touches to reassure him 🥺💙 when she touches his wrist I was just ‼️‼️‼️ idk it's such a tender kind of touch. so tender and soft and u g h. They are too pretty together 💗💗 Plus picturing the skin along his arm left exposed by the red sweater made me yearn a little bit. 😳😳😳 Sarah is so relatable

Though Arthur would have preferred they take their leave an hour earlier, being allowed to smoke inside blunted his grumbling. The disarming flirtations she bestowed on him also didn't hurt - this made me chuckle 😂

Had she intended a pun? Or had Y/N's spare caresses caused the interpretation? - girl 👀👀👀

Yawning, he put dish soap and hot water in the crockpot, scrubbed burned bits of sauce from its rim, turned it upside down on a towel to dry. Once he'd brushed his teeth for one minute rather than the recommended two, he tossed his sweater, trousers, briefs, and socks in the hamper, and went to the bedroom. He found his blue pajamas in their usual spot, the chair in the corner, and slid them up his skinny but toned legs. - I loved to read about their nightly routine 💙💙💙 and to read of Arthur washing dishes and brushing his teeth is so lovely. I simply adore those little snapshots of ordinary life 🥺🥺 the first time I read this sentence I was like. Mr. Fleck where is your underwear. Did you forget it or what 😳😳😳😳

Nimble fingers edged lower, loosened the tie of his pajamas before dipping beneath the loose elastic to lace through his dark brown curls, darker than the chestnut hair on his head. Her knuckles ran over him, lazy caresses full of intent. Up and down, up and down. Delicate. Deliberate. The blood racing to his groin, the pleasant swelling, made his abdomen twitch. Soon full and heavy, the sensitive tip straining the cotton seams, he pressed his lips together. When she skimmed the tender skin resting on his inner thigh, he flexed the muscle at the base of his erection. It bobbed and hit her wrist and she let loose a girlish giggle, more intoxicating than wine. - this is one of the best smut ❣️❣️❣️❣️❣️ I loved the descriptions SO much. Your way with words is unique and as I said this is the best balance between hot and soft, and you describe body language like no one else does. This paragraph is just 💯💯💯

It bobbed and hit her wrist and she let loose a girlish giggle, more intoxicating than wine - this was so sensual and sweet I was like 😳🥺😳🥺😳🥺😳🥺😳🥺😳🥺 Which is pretty much the summary of the piece 😂

He was reminded of last night's playfulness, her endless teasing. The way he'd held the crockpot as a shield to fend off her advances on the train home, her forwardness to the point that he would've preferred having a laminated card to present on her behalf. Forgive my wife: she has a condition. It causes frequent and uncontrollable displays of affection. - this is absolutely lovely 💙💙🥺 I adore the imagery you write about them on the subway whenever they come 💗

Touching herself. She was touching herself. She'd just been all over him, acted like he was some sort of model on the cover of Vue magazine, and now she was touching herself. Right beside him! Ecstatic to have inspired such brazenness, he grinned and fisted the pillow. Her fleeting, stifled moans tangled him in knots, implored him to give her what they both burned for. - I love how you described his reaction and the pride of knowing that he inspired this in her, and it also made me chuckle. 😂 But also I just 😳😳 also also, it's so rare to read about it in pieces so I really love this take 💙 it shows that they're comfortable with each other and there's nothing more important, really.

He flipped in her direction, his hand shooting under the sheet to grab hers. "Gotcha." - girl 😳👉🏻👈🏻 YOUR 👏🏻 MIND 👏🏻

"Finishing what you started on the subway, hm?" / "Me?" Y/N brought his knuckles to her mouth.  "You're the one who came to bed without any underwear." - yes tell him. 😂 I love his boldness here.

"Well, it was a late night." The pad of his thumb tugged at her bottom lip to reveal the pink tip of her tongue. He bent to claim it. "I was lucky to find my pajamas." - once again. YOUR. MIND. 😳😳😳😳😳😳 In this house we like soft shy Arthur but in this house we definitely like also bolder teasing Arthur too 😳 what a perfect way to describe it. This line is perfect

"Patricia loved having you there. She thought you were very sweet." A pause as she mapped a dimple. "Matt said he'd upset you. Something stupid about breaking up?" - "A pause as she mapped a dimple" this made me SWOON. Where do I sign up to map his dimple too omg 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 Sarah is always so relatable

(She’d ordered it from a mail catalog, both of them a bit too bashful to walk into an adult shop, even together.) - I've been wondering when they will finally use it since you mentioned it 👀👀

A hint of scandal glimmered in her irises. - this sentence got me all 😳😳😳😳😳😳 Arthur igniting scandal. I like it 👀👀👀

Their gazes met but didn't hold for long; hers dropped to where they were joined. She caressed right above his pubic bone. "I love seeing you like this." Her fingertips walked a line up his sternum to his chest. "And touching you like this." She wrapped her arms around his middle and drew him to her, locked their lips in a greedy kiss. "And making love like this." - girl 😭😭😭😭😭 one of my absolute favorite quotes ugh. I love it so much. 💙💙💙💙💙

"Don't you dare." She tugged at his loose curls, wore her best pout. "What else would I hold onto when we're doing this?" - please tell him. 😂 I stan Sarah speaking the truth

But they'd remained a warm comfort nonetheless, a place that felt like belonging. And now he belonged with her. - this whole paragraph was perfect 😭😭😭😭

She fit as though she'd been made for him. / He supposed she was. - 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

His grip a vise that wrested its corner from the mattress - this detail got me like 😳😳😳😳😳😳😳

Bliss shot through him, from the tips of his toes to the follicles on his scalp, and his back stiffened as he whimpered and poured into. Fever engulfed his frame, sublime in its frenzy, leaving him in a heady stupor. Aftershocks made him tremble. Once, twice. Until, sated and spent, he landed on top her. He closed his eyes, ribs rising and falling as he forced air into his lungs. - this paragraph is so beautiful. I love so much the descriptions of this smit and the imagery you picked 💙💙💙 "Aftershocks made him tremble" just WOW

made him wish, with mild amusement, that he could be an unmedicated young man again. He would've gladly taken her a second time. - this was so lovely 🥺🥺💙💙💙💙 I'm sure Sarah wouldn't mind 🥴

He brushed her hair back and grinned, completely smitten, like the first time he'd heard a joke and understood the punchline. - girl stop my heart can't take it 😭😭😭😭 that was so sweet holy cow

The light brown picture frame on his nightstand caught his attention, and he regarded the wallet size photo in it, one of the shots of Y/N from the booth at Amusement Mile. The last thing he looked at before turning in each night. He lay his head her shoulder and hummed, listened to the drum of her heart. - ughhh this reminded me of Fun and Only 🥺🥺🥺🥺 I also thought about your other piece Photo play and my heart was so full and it was so sweet ❣️❣️❣️❣️❣️

One of the things that made me love so much this piece it's their interactions in the smut part. To see them laughing and talking was so beautiful, it's unparalleled to be with someone you can make love and laugh with and laughing in bed is just 🥺🥺🥺 and the fact that they teased each other, that the kept making each other laugh. It's just so full of sexual desire and you can see how much they want each other, and there's also so much happiness and lighthearted laugh and tenderness, and those things walk together. I just love it 💙

Her nightie had been reduced to a crumpled stripe of lilac cinched about her waist. It felt tawdry and shameless and he wanted to see her in it for the rest of the weekend - 😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳

The sun had risen higher, its beams slanting across the covers. He basked in it, catlike, then swung his legs over the side of the bed. He pulled on his pajamas, got a new pair of socks from their dresser, and made his way to the kitchen. - I loved this description 💙💙💙💙💙

He washed off the remnants of Y/N's arousal from his fingers, popped open a prescription bottle and took a tablet. He poured water into the coffeemaker, grabbed the can of grounds from the second shelf, added three scoops to the paper filter. - I LOVED this paragraph for so many things. First the imagery of the sunlight, then I loved that you mentioned him taking meds, something we all know but somehow we never write about it in pieces and I really love it. I guess it's kind of his routine to take meds each morning, and I loved so much to get to know him so intimately.

Their three-tone brown mugs sat in their spot next to the machine, waiting to be filled - and then this ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️ I'm such a sucker for these imagery, kitchen is so filled with inherent romance and domestic bliss I just love it so much. 🥺🥺🥺

Do you have any idea how dull this morning would have been if we'd never met? I'd have read the Sunday paper, had a drink. Probably worked on a file." He handed her a couple dessert plates, watched her put a donut on each one. "I wonder where you'd be. What woman you'd have breakfast with, what jokes you'd be writing, what magic tricks you'd have learned." - this made me tear up so bad I don't want to think about it either 😭😭

No matter how appealing, how extraordinary she found him, his gut told him there wouldn't have been another woman. - 😭😭😭😭 this paragraph is too much. He should take a look at tumblr to see that Sarah he's clearly wrong 😂

She sidled up to him and pulled him to her side. Rubbed his flank soothingly and pecked the corner of his mouth. "Don't worry." She took his chin and guided him to look at her. The intimate comfort of her smile helped him believe her next words, even before she spoke them. "I'll always be here." - ‼️😭‼️😭‼️😭‼️😭‼️😭‼️😭‼️😭‼️ Don't do this ‼️this piece is so unique ugh girl. Just perfect 🥺

Coffee & Donuts

Summary: Arthur’s thrilled to be part of a crowd. Though the evening doesn’t go perfectly, Y/N’s flirtations make it sweet.

Warnings: Smut

Words: 4,602

A/N: Alright. After the heart wrenching angst of my last piece (which I love, by the way; don’t get me wrong! 😂), I had to write another story in which Arthur and Y/N are happy and together. It’s inspired by one of Arthur’s visions during their kiss. I hope you all like it! Special thanks to @jokerownsmysoul for beta-ing!

If you have any thoughts or questions, please comment, feel free to message me, or send me an ask. Requests for Arthur and WWH are open!

Parties and celebrations weren’t foreign to Arthur. He’d worked plenty, enough to make him realize what he’d been missing out on. He was well-versed in pin the tail on the donkey, musical chairs, and balloon animals. But as an adult, those activities didn’t satisfy. He wanted to be included rather than paid. Connect with people, introduce himself. Discuss his experiences and pursuits. Feel sufficiently at ease to loosen up a little and have a good time.

Now he was a guest - a certified guest - at Patricia Gorman’s fifty-sixth birthday party. The first party he’d been invited to since being the weird kid in class who’d rotated between three worn out sweaters and could never afford a gift.

He’d been a tad apprehensive about going to Burnside. Gotham’s nicest borough had a reputation for high rents and low tolerance. When Y/N and he had entered 2E, however, Patricia’s greeting (“You made it!”) and the apartment were thoroughly welcoming. Crocodile brown walls and forest green shag carpet made the spacious living room a cozy hideaway. Marigolds leapt across the polyester of the T-cushion sofa and its easy-chair companion. The floor lamp’s amber, crimped glass shades cast the spacious living room in a glow borrowed from warm autumn days.

Continua a leggere

[nancygduarteus]

Placebo Effect of the Heart

A doctor stands over you and feeds a long wire up the inside of your body, from your groin into your heart. You are conscious and comfortable, if not necessarily calm.

For nearly half century, cardiologists have been performing angioplasty, or percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). The point is to open up arteries that have become clogged and hardened by years of life—to reverse and improve the symptoms of heart disease. Today the procedure is done around a million times each year in the U.S. alone. In the span of 45-minutes or so, the looming cardiologist watches a screen as real-time X-ray images show the wire going up to the heart, traversing vessels to reach the coronary arteries. The cardiologist then feeds a small balloon over that wire and inflates it, forcing open the blood vessels at the point of narrowing. The vessels can be held open with a metal tube that expands over the balloon, known as a stent. Immediately, the vessels look better on the X-ray images. The narrow area is wide open, and blood is flowing freely.

“When we tell a patient, look, we ‘fixed’ you, this has an immense positive effect,” said John Mandrola, a cardiac electrophysiologist in Louisville, Kentucky.

He and many others have watched as their patients tend to report less chest pain, more energy, better stamina, and “all sorts of benefits.” As the Mayo Clinic tells readers of its site, “Angioplasty is used to treat a type of heart disease known as atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is the slow buildup of fatty plaques in your heart’s blood vessels. Your doctor might suggest angioplasty as a treatment option when medications or lifestyle changes aren’t enough to improve your heart health, or if you have a heart attack, worsening chest pain (angina), or other symptoms.”

“Your doctor” may be wrong in doing so, though, according to a controversial study published last week that, if widely accepted, has the potential to change the course of medicine. Data in The Lancet showed that among people with severe blockage of the coronary arteries, the procedure did not improve angina—the reason for nearly 500,000 PCI procedures worldwide every year—or ability to exercise on a treadmill. Now after 40 years, millions of procedures, and billions of dollars, doctors are questioning whether the common procedure is, in most non-emergency cases, doing much less good than previously believed, if any.

Though many patients and doctors swear it works. Mandrola describes a typical case: A patient is told they should have this cardiac catheterization because of chest pain and a cardiac stress test that suggests disease. Patients come to understand from friends and the internet that if a blockage is found, the doctor will “fix it.”

“Blockages are deadly and must be fixed, goes the thinking,” Mandrola explained. “So they do the PCI, and they bring the family into the lab or show them pictures of the blockage. Everyone is happy. Doctors, nurses, patient, and family. That whole scenario creates a whirl of placebo effect. And the patient feels better.”

“I’ve been saying for many years that we don’t know if patients feel better from stents, or if they feel better because patients always feel better when we do an invasive procedure,” said Rita Redberg, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “That’s how the mind words.”

Knowing that this procedure’s effect is based heavily in placebo, it would seem, will diminish its effect. Reading this article may cause people to have more chest pain.

If stents to open clogged coronary arteries indeed don’t help people in non-emergency situations, this would be among the highest stakes disappointments in medicine to date, when more than anything else, people around the world die of heart disease. It usually involves blood vessels getting progressively clogged up and then totally blocked. This causes the heart muscle to die, and so the person dies.

“This is a hugely disruptive study,” said Mandrola. “The implications are huge. Billions of dollars have been spent, and many hundreds of thousands of patients have been exposed to the risks of PCI, without any documented benefit.”

Redberg went even further. “I think this has shown definitively that there was no benefit on exercise time, no benefit for angina, no benefit for functional status—it was pretty definitively negative.”

So are there any reasons—outside of an acute heart attack—to do PCI?

“I can’t think of one,” she said. “Why have a person undergo the risk of the procedure?”

Mayo Clinic makes these risks clear: The abridged version includes blood clots, heart attack (the wire can displace some of the plaque inside the wall of the artery and actually cause a heart attack), coronary-artery damage (recall that there is a wire and force-inducing balloon being inserted into the three-millimeter vessels on the surface of the heart), abnormal heart rhythms, kidney failure, and stroke. These are rare outcomes, but they become increasingly relevant as the benefits of the procedure become less clear.

* * *

Really, how could angioplasty not be effective?  

The problem highlights the disconnect between how the world should be and how it is. This disease seemed so straightforward. It required no genius to suggest that the blockage of vessels could be fixed by opening up the vessels. In much the same way that a plumber removes a ball of hair and a shower is instantly new again, a cardiologist might remove years of living hard and restore the flow of blood to the heart.

The first and larger shock to doctors on this subject came in 2007, when results from the landmark COURAGE trial appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers had compared PCI with medications alone and found that the procedure, surprisingly, did not reduce a person’s risk of subsequent heart attacks. It turned out that the heart was not as simple as a toilet.

Still, that study did find the procedure provided some degree of relief from angina (the chest pain associated with heart disease), though even that effect waned after three years. Despite the modest benefits, and high cost of the disease, many cardiologists continued to do the procedure. “It was already in the culture,” said Redberg. “We’ve been doing PCI for so long.”

Doctors believe it works, or patients want it, and they may leave bad reviews for doctors who don’t do the procedure. Or worse, doctors might fear getting sued if they don’t do a procedure that’s still considered a standard of care.

More than that, the new study also “teaches clinicians the crucial value of placebo effect—and it’s ugly cousin, the nocebo effect,” said Mandrola, referring to the concept wherein a belief that something will bring about a negative effect results in an actual negative effect. “When we frighten people about their disease or possible side effects of a drug, this, too, has immense negative effects.”

Because the placebo effect is such a powerful force in medicine, researchers in the Lancet study had to devise a way for patients not to know if they had gotten a stent or not. That meant using a “sham procedure,” in which patients with severe disease would go into the operating room, have an incision made, and have a wire inserted—but there would no ballooning, and no stenting. The entire procedure was an act, and the patient was kept in the dark as to whether they actually had a metal cage in their artery or not.

“The methods are as beautiful as I have seen. So so so good,” said Mandrola. The pictures in The Lancet show severe blockages among these patients’s coronary arteries. These were not the sort that many doctors would hesitate to treat with PCI. When I showed the images to Mandeola he said, “No one—I mean no one—in the U.S. doesn’t fix those sorts of blockages in patients who are still having chest pain despite taking three medications.”

But the doctors in the study didn’t; they sent the patients home with ghost stents. And lo and behold, there was no statistical difference in the amount of time people lasted on a treadmill, or in quality-of-life scores.

“This study will begin to change the mindset of cardiologists and patients that focal blockages need to ‘be fixed.’” said Mandrola. “Instead, these findings help doctors and patients understand that coronary-artery disease is a diffuse systemic disease. A focal blockage is just one manifestation of a larger disease.”

* * *

Many cardiologists have come to see coronary-artery disease in that way over the years, as the benefits of angioplasty have fallen away one by one. Still, even among those that agree with this general model, not everyone was convinced by this study.

“The study has a lot of warts,” said cardiologist Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute. He was Twitter-critical of the study in the minutes after the The New York Times sent out a push alert last week with the headline: “‘Unbelievable’: Heart Stents Fail to Ease Chest Pain.”

“I wouldn’t have started with ‘Unbelievable!’” Topol said. “I laughed when I saw that. Yeah, it is unbelievable—that such a small study would lead people to talk about changing guidelines.” (An editorial published in The Lancet by Redberg and David Brown of Washington University School of Medicine said, “All cardiology guidelines should be revised.”)

“I’m not trying to defend PCI in stable patients. It’s overused,” Topol continued. “I don’t do stenting, but I did for many years, and I saw many patients have marked relief of their angina. So this study is inconsistent with clinical experience, but my biggest concern is the flawed design. This trial is very tiny—200 people. That means beta error.”

Beta error is an increasingly common refrain in scientific criticism, noting that a study did not have enough subjects, and so poses a risk of being falsely negative. If you only flip a coin twice, you have a one-in-four chance of concluding that coins never land heads-up. Flip it 10 million times and your finger gets very tired and also the chance of beta error is effectively zero.

“This is such an important issue that if you’re going to study it right, my contention is you need to do it right, with a larger sample. Maybe if it had 600 or 1,000 people,” Topol said.“What the study suggests is really a poor comprehension of clinical-trial methodology. You can engineer a negative result of anything if you design the trial that way. Beta error is the most common error in clinical research, and the title of this paper could’ve been ‘A Trial to Highlight the Beta Error Problem.’”

Mandrola, too, had caveats. “This one small study should inspire confirmatory studies,” he said. “Confirmation is key.” He also noted that the study enrolled patients who had low levels of angina and were low-risk in other ways, and this means we can’t generalize the findings to higher risk groups.

Redberg had no caveats at all. I asked her about the sample size, and she said, “I have no qualms about considering this definitive.”

* * *

So what stops medicine from changing over night?

This raises the fundamental question of what the burden of proof needs to be to change practice. Guidelines are slow to change, and even once guidelines are issued, doctors are slow to change what they do. What does change things is when payers stop reimbursing hospitals for procedures that aren’t supported by evidence. What does that process look like going forward?

“That’s a sensitive question,” said Redberg. “When the American College of Cardiology came out with their latest guidelines on PCI for patients with no symptoms, they changed the wording from ‘inappropriate’ to ‘rarely appropriate,’ because their concern was that payers would stop paying for something that was deemed inappropriate. I would say it is not appropriate to do PCI for stable angina. There is no benefit, and there are risks, so I would think that the American College of Cardiology would change the guidelines now, based on this study.”

So it’s up to the American College of Cardiology?

“Well, payers don’t have to read guidelines,” she said—though often guidelines do turn the tide on behavior. They have in other cases of procedures that turned out not to work and we stopped doing them, like transmyocardial revascularization and renal denervation, and may soon affect the widespread practice of ablation for the abnormal heart rhythm known as atrial fibrillation. It has been widely adopted over decades and costs tens of thousands of dollars, yet has not proven to improve health or prolong life.

“I think going forward we should demand that there is data for these sorts of procedures before they get widely adopted,” said Redberg.

“People can nitpick the study as much as they want, but burden of proof should be on the procedure to show an advantage,” said Haider Warraich, a fellow in cardiovascular disease at Duke University. This is a growing sentiment in medicine—that to minimize the exorbitant costs of health care, we must move to a system where it doesn’t take 40 years of doing a procedure before we figure out its not worthwhile.

The challenge only stands to grow as new, expensive technologies play ever-larger roles in medicine. Does fee-for-service make it impossible to change the system for adopting new procedures? Will they always be assumed worthwhile until proven worthless?

“Look, fee-for-service means you get paid just as much to do something totally unnecessary, even harmful, as you do for a life-saving procedure,” said Redburg. “And patients are not in a position to distinguish between those.”

She points to the role of FDA, then, in approving medical devices for doing these procedures. Under the current administration, Redberg said, the FDA “wants to approve things faster and faster, requiring less data, and so allowing riskier procedures—instead of waiting for the studies to know that something is safe and effective.”

Here the epidemic of heart disease comes back to politics. When people argue that the “free market” will eradicate bad medical practices—from worthless drugs to ineffective devices—they may be right. Keep the government out of regulation. But that process of eradicating bad health care from the market once it has been introduced can take decades, as the case of cardiac stents seems to be showing. And the harm and waste incurred in the process are never undone.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/placebo-effect-of-the-heart/545012/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

Placebo Effect of the Heart

A doctor stands over you and feeds a long wire up the inside of your body, from your groin into your heart. You are conscious and comfortable, if not necessarily calm.

For nearly half century, cardiologists have been performing angioplasty, or percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). The point is to open up arteries that have become clogged and hardened by years of life—to reverse and improve the symptoms of heart disease. Today the procedure is done around a million times each year in the U.S. alone. In the span 45-minutes or so, the looming cardiologist watches a screen as real-time X-ray images show the wire going up to the heart, traversing vessels to reach the coronary arteries. The cardiologist then feeds a small balloon over that wire and inflates it, forcing open the blood vessels at the point of narrowing. The vessels can be held open with a metal tube that expands over the balloon, known as a stent. Immediately, the vessels look better on the X-ray images. The narrow area is wide open, and blood is flowing freely.

“When we tell a patient, look, we ‘fixed’ you, this has an immense positive effect,” said John Mandrola, a cardiac electrophysiologist in Louisville, Kentucky. He and many others have watched as their patients tend to report less chest pain, more energy, better stamina, and “all sorts of benefits.” As the Mayo Clinic tells readers of its site, “Angioplasty is used to treat a type of heart disease known as atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is the slow buildup of fatty plaques in your heart’s blood vessels. Your doctor might suggest angioplasty as a treatment option when medications or lifestyle changes aren’t enough to improve your heart health, or if you have a heart attack, worsening chest pain (angina), or other symptoms.”

Your doctor may be wrong in doing so, though, according to a controversial study published last week that, if widely accepted, has the potential to change the course of medicine. Data in The Lancet showed that among people with severe blockage of the coronary arteries, the procedure did not improve angina—the reason for nearly 500,000 PCI procedures worldwide every year—or ability to exercise on a treadmill. Now after 40 years, millions of procedures, and billions of dollars, doctors are questioning whether the common procedure is, in most cases, doing much less good than previously believed, if any.

Though many patients and doctors swear it works. Mandrola describes a typical case: A patient is told they should have this cardiac catheterization because of chest pain and a cardiac stress test that suggests disease. Patients come to understand from friends and the internet that if a blockage is found, the doctor will “fix it.”

“Blockages are deadly and must be fixed, goes the thinking,” Mandrola explained. “So they do the PCI, and they bring the family into the lab or show them pictures of the blockage. Everyone is happy. Doctors, nurses, patient, and family. That whole scenario creates a whirl of placebo effect. And the patient feels better.”

“I’ve been saying for many years that we don’t know if patients feel better from stents, or if they feel better because patients always feel better when we do an invasive procedure,” said Rita Redberg, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “That’s how the mind words.”

Knowing that this procedure’s effect is based heavily in placebo, it would seem, will diminish its effect. Reading this article may cause people to have more chest pain.

If stents to open clogged coronary arteries indeed don’t help people in non-emergency situations, this would be among the highest stakes disappointment in medicine to date, when more than anything else, people around the world die of heart disease. It usually involves blood vessels getting progressively clogged up and then totally blocked. This causes the heart muscle to die, and so the person dies.

“This is a hugely disruptive study,” said Mandrola. “The implications are huge. Billions of dollars have been spent, and many hundreds of thousands of patients have been exposed to the risks of PCI, without any documented benefit.”

Redberg went even further. “I think this has shown definitively that there was no benefit on exercise time, no benefit for angina, no benefit for functional status—it was pretty definitively negative.”

So are there any reasons—outside of an acute heart attack—to do PCI?

“I can’t think of one,” she said. “Why have a person undergo the risk of the procedure?”

Mayo Clinic makes these risks clear: The abridged version includes blood clots, heart attack (the wire can displace some of the plaque inside the wall of the artery and actually cause a heart attack), coronary-artery damage (recall that there is a wire and force-inducing balloon being inserted into the three-millimeter vessels on the surface of the heart), abnormal heart rhythms, kidney failure, and stroke. These are rare outcomes, but they become increasingly relevant as the benefits of the procedure become less clear.

* * *

Really, how could angioplasty not be effective?  

The problem highlights the disconnect between how the world should be and how it is. This disease seemed so straightforward. It required no genius to suggest that the blockage of vessels could be prevented by opening up the vessels. In much the same way that a plumber removes a ball of hair and a shower is instantly new again, a cardiologist might remove years of living hard and restore the flow of blood to the heart.

The first and larger shock to doctors on this subject came in 2007, when results from the landmark COURAGE trial appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers had compared PCI with medications alone and found that the procedure, surprisingly, did not reduce a person’s risk of subsequent heart attacks. It turned out that the heart was not as simple as a toilet.

Still, that study did find the procedure provided some degree of relief from angina (the chest pain associated with heart disease), though even that effect waned after three years. Despite the modest benefits, and high cost of the disease, many cardiologists continued to do the procedure. “It was already in the culture,” said Redberg. “We’ve been doing PCI for so long.”

Doctors believe it works, or patients want it, and they will leave bad reviews for doctors who don’t do the procedure. Or worse, doctors might fear getting sued if they don’t do a procedure that’s still considered a standard of care.

More than that, the new study also “teaches clinicians the crucial value of placebo effect—and it’s ugly cousin, the nocebo effect,” said Mandrola, referring to the concept wherein a belief that something will bring about a negative effect results in an actual negative effect. “When we frighten people about their disease or possible side effects of a drug, this, too, has immense negative effects.”

Because the placebo effect is such a powerful force in medicine, researchers in the Lancet study had to devise a way for patients not to know if they had gotten a stent or not. That meant using a “sham procedure,” in which patients with severe disease would go into the operating room, have an incision made, and have a wire inserted—but there would no ballooning, and no stenting. The entire procedure was an act, and the patient was kept in the dark as to whether they actually had a metal cage in their artery or not.

“The methods are as beautiful as I have seen. So so so good,” said Mandrola. The pictures in The Lancet show severe blockages among these patients’s coronary arteries. These were not the sort that many doctors would hesitate to treat with PCI. When I showed the images to Mandeola he said, “No one—I mean no one—in the U.S. doesn’t fix those sorts of blockages in patients who are still having chest pain despite taking three medications.”

But the doctors in the study didn’t; they sent the patients home with ghost stents. And lo and behold, there was no statistical difference in the amount of time people lasted on a treadmill, or in quality-of-life scores.

“This study will begin to change the mindset of cardiologists and patients that focal blockages need to ‘be fixed.’” said Mandrola. “Instead, these findings help doctors and patients understand that coronary-artery disease is a diffuse systemic disease. A focal blockage is just one manifestation of a larger disease.”

* * *

Many cardiologists have come to see coronary-artery disease in that way over the years, as the benefits of angioplasty have fallen away one by one. Still, even among those that agree with this general model, not everyone was convinced by this study.

“The study has a lot of warts,” said cardiologist Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute. He was Twitter-critical of the study in the minutes after the The New York Times sent out a push alert last week with the headline: “‘Unbelievable’: Heart Stents Fail to Ease Chest Pain.”

“I wouldn’t have started with ‘Unbelievable!’” Topol said. “I laughed when I saw that. Yeah, it is unbelievable—that such a small study would lead people to talk about changing guidelines.” (An editorial published in The Lancet by Redberg and David Brown of Washington University School of Medicine said, “All cardiology guidelines should be revised.”)

“I’m not trying to defend PCI in stable patients. It’s overused,” Topol continued. “I don’t do stenting, but I did for many years, and I saw many patients have marked relief of their angina. So this study is inconsistent with clinical experience, but my biggest concern is the flawed design. This trial is very tiny—200 people. That means beta error.”

Beta error is an increasingly common refrain in scientific criticism, noting that a study did not have enough subjects, and so poses a risk of being falsely negative. If you only flip a coin twice, you have a one-in-four chance of concluding that coins never land heads-up. Flip it 10 million times and your finger gets very tired and also the chance of beta error is effectively zero.

“This is such an important issue that if you’re going to study it right, my contention is you need to do it right, with a larger sample. Maybe if it had 600 or 1,000 people,” Topol said.“What the study suggests is really a poor comprehension of clinical-trial methodology. You can engineer a negative result of anything if you design the trial that way. Beta error is the most common error in clinical research, and the title of this paper could’ve been ‘A Trial to Highlight the Beta Error Problem.’”

Mandrola, too, had caveats. “This one small study should inspire confirmatory studies,” he said. “Confirmation is key.” He also noted that the study enrolled patients who had low levels of angina and were low-risk in other ways, and this means we can’t generalize the findings to higher risk groups.

Redberg had no caveats at all. I asked her about the sample size, and she said, “I have no qualms about considering this definitive.”

* * *

So what stops medicine from changing over night?

This raises the fundamental question of what the burden of proof needs to be to change practice. Guidelines are slow to change, and even once guidelines are issued, doctors are slow to change what they do. What does change things is when payers stop reimbursing hospitals for procedures that aren’t supported by evidence. What does that process look like going forward?

“That’s a sensitive question,” said Redberg. “When the American College of Cardiology came out with their latest guidelines on PCI for patients with no symptoms, they changed the wording from ‘inappropriate’ to ‘rarely appropriate,’ because their concern was that payers would stop paying for something that was deemed inappropriate. I would say it is not appropriate to do PCI for stable angina. There is no benefit, and there are risks, so I would think that the American College of Cardiology would change the guidelines now, based on this study.”

So it’s up to the American College of Cardiology?

“Well, payers don’t have to read guidelines,” she said—though often guidelines do turn the tide on behavior. They have in other cases of procedures that turned out not to work and we stopped doing them, like transmyocardial revascularization and renal denervation, and may soon affect the widespread practice of ablation for the abnormal heart rhythm known as atrial fibrillation. It has been widely adopted over decades and costs tens of thousands of dollars, yet has not proven to improve health or prolong life.

“I think going forward we should demand that there is data for these sorts of procedures before they get widely adopted,” said Redberg.

“People can nitpick the study as much as they want, but burden of proof should be on the procedure to show an advantage,” said Haider Warraich, a fellow in cardiovascular disease at Duke University. This is a growing sentiment in medicine—that to minimize the exorbitant costs of health care, we must move to a system where it doesn’t take 40 years of doing a procedure before we figure out its not worthwhile.

The challenge only stands to grow as new, expensive technologies play ever-larger roles in medicine. Does fee-for-service make it impossible to change the system for adopting new procedures? Will they always be assumed worthwhile until proven worthless?

“Look, fee-for-service means you get paid just as much to do something totally unnecessary, even harmful, as you do for a life-saving procedure,” said Redburg. “And patients are not in a position to distinguish between those.”

She points to the role of FDA, then, in approving medical devices for doing these procedures. Under the current administration, Redberg said, the FDA “wants to approve things faster and faster, requiring less data, and so allowing riskier procedures—instead of waiting for the studies to know that something is safe and effective.”

Here the epidemic of heart disease comes back to politics. When people argue that the “free market” will eradicate bad medical practices—from worthless drugs to ineffective devices—they may be right. Keep the government out of regulation. But that process of eradicating bad health care from the market once it has been introduced can take decades, as the case of cardiac stents seems to be showing. And the harm and waste incurred in the process are never undone.

Article source here:The Atlantic