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jadekitty777 · 6 years

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The Hero’s Road

Warning: Definitely has spoilers up to Volume 6, Episode 4

Rating: K

Word Count: 3.5k

Ao3 Link: The Hero’s Road

Summary: Though every reincarnation was new, their role was always the same. This time around, Ozpin was set to be the guide, Oscar the driving force and, as always, Ozma was the spirit.

Things just… weren’t exactly going as planned right now. [Set sometime after Volume 6, Episode 4]

Notes: So this is completely dedicated to @undeadwicchan who’s post here inspired me to do a character study on the three Oz’s (Ozma, Oscar and Ozpin). Beyond briefly utilizing the idea of Ozma coming to the rescue for Oscar, it doesn’t actually have much to do with the framework of the post itself - which, all the kudos to you for such a kickass headcanon; it would be seriously awesome to see executed in true canon. Nevertheless, with this volume making me all sorts of fond for the precious trio, this was just the jolt I needed to get writing something of my own!

It had been a long time since Ozma had been required to surface to the full forefront of control.

But Oscar, young and inexperienced as he was, could not handle the swarm that overtook Brunswick Farms. Roused by the cries for help, he swiftly took the reigns and joined the fight alongside team RWBY and Qrow. Yet, hindered without Ozpin’s melee experience, he relied entirely on his magic to combat the force – tipping them all off that he was neither of the two they had come to expect to see.

As soon as the last Grimm faded, they turned on him, as he expected they would.

“What are you doing here?” Sir Branwen’s voice was as sharp as his weapon. Unlike his kin, fear did not shake him; he stood taller in the face of adversary. Were the man a true bird, one might believe such a valiant personality would go up against even an eagle. It was a quality that was hard not to admire.

But when faced with it in opposition, even dug deep in their mind as he was, he could feel the pang from Ozpin’s heart. He fathomed that no matter how many times he was reborn, there would always be those select few that their desertion would strike hard enough to unbalance them. It was just unfortunate that those around them often forgot the fact they were still entirely human themselves.

“Do you know how many lifetimes I have led?” Ozma questioned. He turned to face them, their combined ire doing nothing to weigh him. “Ninety-three. The ninety first and second were the closest we’ve ever gotten to unifying humanity. A hundred years to end a war and bring about comradeship among our kingdoms. To create technology and advancements the world had never seen before. To build the schools and raise a defense force for the many less-abled.” He stepped forward, his voice rising with his righteous fury, “And one night was all it took to see so much of that undone. One night for irreparable damage to be done.” He looked to Lady Xiao Long as he said this, watching as her gaze averted. He turned to Lady Belladonna and Lady Schnee next, “For fear and uncertainty to halt us.” Finally, to Lady Rose and Sir Branwen, “Or for those to be lost that could never be returned.”

The snow crunched underfoot as Qrow challenged him, “That’s not-”

“One mere hour for you all to lose your confidence.” He swept his cane in indication of them, stalling it to point to the man. When only silence reigned, Ozma placed it down, crossing his hands over the top. “I am not naïve to what the power of destruction can do. It is in it that has my former love so lost.” He shut his eyes, briefly seeking the one locked away; but Ozpin still was not ready to give up the key. “It is in that, I find myself lost as well.”

“Then how can you ask us to fight an enemy we can’t beat?!” Yang snapped, her fire refueled. Another quality that was easy to admire, but when misdirected, became her greatest obstacle.

“Then I will not.” He replied simply. “I instead ask you to fight for what is right. Every moment we delay is a chance for Salem to continue her advance. Atlas and Shade are no doubt her next targets. Every life we can save by merely intervening is worth it. However, whether you stand by me for that end or not is only a choice you can make.” He walked past them, heading back for the farmhouse they had come to make their own.

“Where are you going?” Asked Lady Schnee.

“To lie down. I used a tad too much magic. Oscar will need time to recover.” He paused, glancing over his shoulder. “And he, like all of you, needs time to consider what he truly wishes to do.” He continued onward.

What I wish to do? Oscar repeated faintly.

Did you truly not believe you had a choice? He thought back.

Silence was his only answer.

Ozma quickened his step just so. It seems he had more work to do.

When Oscar awoke, he was neither on the couch he had laid down on nor in the farmhouse at all. Above him were the branches of trees, sunlight streaming through and dappling along the ground, confusing him with their lack of snow and cold. As he sat up, it was with a start he realized he was not alone.

Ozma sat on the ground a few feet from him. He may have been meditating but at the sound of movement, his eyes opened. “Ah, it was much easier to call you here than I feared.”

“What’s going on? Where are we?” Oscar demanded. Things were already weird enough in his head; if he found out he had some crazy super ability to astral project, he was done.

“Calm, young one.” Ozma replied, raising a hand. “You are still asleep. This is merely a mental space in which we can talk. As for where we are…” He looked about. “You’ll have to tell me. It is your psyche after all.”

He looked around, realizing the other man was right. He did know this place. “It’s one of the forest trails that leads back to my farm.” It was the same one he’d taken to leave.

There was a rattle of armor as the other stood. “Then perhaps we can take a walk together. I’d enjoy to see it.”

Yeah right. Still, Oscar allowed himself to be helped up, doing his best to keep up with him as they walked down the dirt path. As they did, he could not help but sneak glances at the man. He truly appeared as if he were someone who stepped right out of a fairytale, with armor meant for a knight and a cape befitting a superhero. Even his body language seemed strong, with his shoulders and head high, his stride long so that it forced Oscar to take two steps to his every one. How could he walk with such confidence when everything in his life had gone so wrong?

Ozma caught him staring and smiled at him. “Are you alright?”

“Y-Yea!” Oscar looked down, his face heating. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Whatever you would like. I’m sure you have a lot on your mind.”

He thought of asking the one he’d just thought, but quickly shook it aside. He went for something safer instead. “Why do you want to see my dingy old farm? I’m sure it’s nothing nearly as amazing as the stuff you’ve seen.”

Ozma chuckled. “You know, I always loved adventuring. It was what made me decide to set off from home. I wanted to see the world. Experience everything to its fullest.” He waved his hands outwards, encapsulating a sight Oscar could not see. “My travels brought me to so many places. Grand castles. Beautiful canyons. Stunning oceans. And yes, even ‘dingy’ old farms.”

“And you left, as easy as that.” He shook his head. Figures.

“I never said it was easy. My father was furious. Every night he told me I was throwing my life away. And my mother cried and cried.” Ozma looked away and though his smile stayed, there was something sorrowful there. “I don’t think I could have ever disappointed them more.”

Like a Grimm to a mourner, he couldn’t help but wonder what his own parents would have said, had they still been around. He felt something settle against his gut uncomfortably. A weight he hadn’t felt in years, but its presence was as agonizing as ever. He ran a hand over his face, trying to act like he was brushing away an itch and not the burn in his eyes. “So why did you do it?”

“It was all I wanted. I didn’t want to live with the regret I hadn’t tried.” Ozma placed his hand over his heart. “It just felt right.”

His feet stopped, the sentence striking a painfully familiar chord in him and words spilled out before Oscar could help it, “Is that why I felt that way when I left? Was it you!?” So many emotions were filling him he didn’t know where one began and another ended, but anger seemed to take the helm, raising in a great tidal wave inside of him. “Huh?! Was it?! How many other things haven’t been me?! What else is just you or him or, or someone else!!”

Ozma reached for him, “Oscar-”

“No!” He smacked the hand away, stumbling backwards. “When I was younger, I used to dream about it, you know? Setting out on my own big adventure. Becoming a hero like the ones we saw on TV. I thought that was what I wanted.” He looked away, his fists so tight at his side they shook. “But now I get it. I never had it in me to leave. It’s… it’s always just been you, hasn’t it? And that’s what it’s going to be like, isn’t it?!” He bowed his head, fighting down tears but not the other’s approach this time, or the hands that laid on his shoulders. He let his head thunk against the metal breastplate. “I didn’t even get a choice! It’s not fair!” Metal rang as he slammed his fist against the other’s chest. “It’s not fair!!”

The arms that encircled him tightened. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s not.”

He hit him again, strength waning. By the third strike it was barely more than a weak knock. He slumped against him. “I’m just going to disappear, aren’t I?”

“Of course not.” Ozma’s voice was soft, almost fatherly in a way he’d almost forgotten, as he spoke against his hair. “If Ozpin nor I have disappeared, why would you?”

Oscar snuffled, tilting his head up, “But Qrow, he said…”

“An injured heart will say much in an effort to ease its own pain.” He stepped back, just enough to look at him properly. “I will not lie and say that the lines do not blur at times, but there will always be a distinctive you in here and your input is always as important as ours. And you will always have the right to choose.”

“What about at Haven?” He bit back.

Ozma laughed softly. “The same can be said about Jinn.”

His eyes widened. “I- That was- I was just-”

There was a shake of his head and a hand on his shoulder once more as the man lent down to his eye-level. “I apologize, it was not an accusation. Merely an observation. None of us have been very fair to each other. But while the past can’t be undone, we can change moving forward. If this coexistence is to work, that is.”

“So what if I said I wanted to go back home?” He challenged.

He expected him to blanch or backtrack. But Ozma only smiled and said, “Then I’ll help you buy the train ticket this time.” The hand on his shoulder squeezed; a reassuring touch. “Is that what you want?”

Oscar looked away, wiping away tears. “No. I dunno. Maybe.”

He rose. “What is it that makes you uncertain?”

A sigh heaved from deep in his chest, focusing on the dirt between their shoes. “I’m… not like you guys. I’m no knight running out to save damsels from towers. Or some wise professor who can motivate a whole school of people to be these great fighters.” He laughed bitterly as he threw up his hands. “I couldn’t even get that guy to shut off those stupid turrets! I’m not particularly smart or skilled,” Finally, he looked up at other. “Or brave.”

An eyebrow rose like a startled exclamation. “Are those the things that you believe a hero to be?”

“Of course they are!” When Ozma’s expression did not change though, Oscar felt uncertain suddenly. “…Aren’t they?”

He hummed thoughtfully as he waved to the trail before them. As Oscar took his place beside him again, he was given his answer, “They are good qualities, certainly. But one can be skilled, yet never use them to assist others. One can be smart, but remain uncaring to other’s plights. One can be brave, but recklessly so.”

“So then, what does make a hero?” He asked.

Ozma’s eyes glittered merrily. “What is it about Lady Rose that impresses you so?”

Ruby? “Well she’s… amazing.” He thought back on the train, how easily she got Dudley to listen to her when he couldn’t. How she commanded her team to focus. How even now her words to him back at the house at Haven still inspired him. “She can motivate others.”

“What do you think it is about her that gives her that ability?”

As he tried to think it over, he found he couldn’t pin down something tangible. It just seemed to be something that was inherently there. A piece of her that made people want to stand beside her. Something in the way she viewed the world, with such a bright and kind spirit, that made others want to do the same.

… Oh. “Her heart.” He said finally.

“Yes.” Ozma nodded. “A good, strong heart is first thing a true hero needs.”

Oscar placed a hand over his own. Did he have that?

“If I may be bold,” He added, tone amused. “I do think it is also worth saying that I do not often witness fourteen-year-olds rushing across the top of speeding trains. I believe what you lack is not any of the things you think you do, but merely your own self-belief.”

“What do you mean?”

“To have faith in others, first you must find it in yourself. Though, I will admit, in the face of failure, it can be one of the hardest things to hold onto.” As they reached towards the end of the trail, the world grew dark and grey as storm clouds hovered overhead, blocking out the sun. Ozma’s expression seemed to do the same as looked into the distance. “No matter how strong they are.”

Oscar stared as well, discovering that they had not entered the plains that would lead to the farm, but a courtyard leading to a school he had never seen in person, but recognized as if it were his own home. “Beacon.”

“How curious. I did say before this was your psyche we were traveling in. So why do you think it brought us here?” Ozma quipped.

He gazed upwards slowly, to the office he had once been able to mentally photograph perfectly, and knew exactly who was hiding within it.

Oscar squared his shoulders and held his head high just like his companion. “I think it’s telling me it’s my turn to rescue someone from a tower.”

He walked forward.

A quiet, familiar ding roused Ozpin from his stupor. He lifted his head from his arms, finding it as heavy as the rest of him felt. He could hear the gears around him turning, and realized where he was. Asleep in his office again? Then no doubt it was Glynda coming to chastise him. He reached for his glasses, slipping them on to at least appear more presentable – and with it his hazy vision cleared, startling him when instead of his dear assistant, it was two familiar gentlemen approaching.

Right.

He was dead.

(How was Glynda doing? And… how long would it be until the truth got to her? What would she think of him then?)

“Ah, time for The Walk?” Ozpin asked, willing himself not to sink back to sleep.

“Wait. This is a thing?” Oscar asked.

Though he couldn’t muster a laugh, he could not help but be lightened by the boy’s simple innocence. He was going to go on to be a great reincarnation.

“It’s a practice I sometimes perform once my new host learns the full truth. I find it helps to uplift the spirit.” Ozma replies. “Though, it’s usually not this soon.”

Oscar turned to him. “I learned sooner than you?”

Ozpin crossed his hands, smiling to the boy. “Four years, to be exact. I was also twice your age.” He focused on one of the larger cogs underneath the glass surface if the desk, watching it turn. “I’m embarrassed to admit I purchased a one-way ticket to Vacuo that same day.”

“…What made you stay?”

What indeed. “As luck would have it, whether it be good or bad, a rather… problematic student was sent to my office that day. If I recall, this time around he had intentionally set the dust lab on fire.” Though, it could have also been the time he clogged the drain of the courtyard fountain. The record had become quite extensive. “Most of the other facility believed him to simply be a destructive sort. But I suspected different. Yet no matter how many times he was sent to my office, no matter how many conversations we had, I couldn’t get him to speak a word. He would just ask for his punishment in his crude way, pay it, and be back in a week.”

Ozpin rose to his feet, heading to his window that overlooked his former school. “That day though, on what I thought would be my last, I took a chance and acted on my suspicions.” His eyes darted to Oscar’s reflection as the boy approached. “You see, Beacon was always a school designed to have a low entry requirement. It was a school meant to train the best of the kingdom, but also be a shelter many could seek refuge in. Quite a few enrolled were those thrown from their own homes. So, I questioned him if that was what had happened to him and I learned more than I thought he would offer.”

He shut his eyes, still able to picture so clearly the seventeen-year-old Qrow that had eventually dissolved into tears, angry and pained by a world that didn’t want him and so full of hate at himself for a semblance he could not help. It seemed to be an impossible problem. Fortunately, Ozpin knew a bit about those. It was surprising to realize just how much of a difference a little empathy could go to heal a hurt soul.

“I did not stay that day for the war. I stayed because he helped remind me why being a professor could be so rewarding. I enjoyed having a part in my students’ lives, to help guide them into finding better ones.” He sighed. “I realize now that I’ve repaid him rather poorly for that.”

“So then, how are you repaying him any better by hiding away here?”

Ozpin turned to the boy, unsure if he was more surprised by his gall or his bull-headed honesty. In the background, Ozma started to chuckle.

“I did not lie before. I – we – do not know where to go from here.” And after so many lifetimes trying, maybe it was time to admit they just weren’t cut out for the task.

But it was Oscar, despite how he often quivered in the face of Grimm, who nodded and said. “Yeah, I know. And that’s scary.” He shifted on his feet, admitting softly, “But it’s even scarier facing it alone.”

That, more than anything, snapped him into wakefulness. You are meant to be guiding him Oz. What are you doing?

He placed a hand on his shoulder, knowing how much weight it was already carrying and much, much too much for one so young. “I’m so sorry, Oscar.”

“I am sorry too.” Ozma finally spoke, crossing over to them. “To both of you; that you must bear the burden of my mistakes as if they are your own.” He looked to each of them. “But if it is something we must bear together, then let us bear it equally, as we too should be.”

Oscar’s eyebrow rose in confusion, looking towards him for help. “Uhh…?”

He smiled. “He means that I need to stop treating you like a child."

“Oh.” He replied, seeming to take that newfound growth in. Whatever conclusion he came to made him nod once more, before he spoke again, “I’m sorry to both of you as well. I thought I was doing something right, with Jinn. I thought I was helping but all it did was end up hurting everyone.”

“You are certainly not the only one.” Ozpin agreed. The more he let those words sink in, the more he realized he was not the only one who needed to hear them. “Oscar?”

“Yes?”

“When we awaken, there’s someone I’ll need to speak with.”

The boy frowned. “Okay. But if he punches us again, I’m hitting him with the cane.”

Ozpin finally found it in him to laugh again.

#Oscar Pine #Ozpin #ozma #rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby6 #rwby6 spoilers #fanfiction #Chase Firekitten's Tale

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philosopherking1887 · 6 years

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Thor’s character development and types of morality

@foundlingmother, I’m making this a separate post instead of reblogging because this is getting well off the trail of the original post and I don’t want to keep dragging poor writernotwaiting into it. Here is the thread of discussion and here’s what you said in your reblog:

That’s an interesting distinction between compassion and respect. I think I would say, taking into account @illwynd‘s explanation of the ways Thor shows that he’s compassionate, or at least trying to be, that part of Thor’s character growth may be that he feels worthiness is tied to, to use the Nietzschean terminology, a slave morality (the contrast between being a good man and a great king, for instance).

That might be some of what’s going on; Thor is probably picking up some (post-)Christian moral ideas from all the Western-educated humans he’s hanging out with. And of course I don’t expect most of the MCU writers to have a very thorough understanding of when certain moral ideas developed and where they came from. So of course to most writers and audiences, “becoming morally better” is going to be more or less synonymous with “becoming more selfless and altruistic.” That said, a noble value system certainly doesn’t preclude caring about other people, and the kind of narcissistic selfishness we associate with people like Trump is still an ignoble mindset, a way of being bad or contemptible according to noble value systems like those of ancient Greece or feudal Europe.

As I’ve said before in discussions of various philosophical issues in the MCU, I think the “good man vs. great king” issue is actually more about deontological vs. consequentialist modes of moral reasoning (I discuss the contrast a bit in this post on Thanos and Ultron and a bit more in this follow-up; apparently I also touched on it in this weird exchange). That’s a distinction that mostly comes up within what Nietzsche calls “slave morality” -- the standard examples are Kantianism and utililtarianism, both of which are secular adaptations of Christian morality -- but it can actually cut across the slave vs. noble morality distinction. So there can be deontological or consequentialist ways of implementing a noble morality. The reason I think that’s what Thor was talking about is this line: “The brutality, the sacrifice, it changes you.” I think what he had in mind was Odin’s willingness to sacrifice many Asgardian lives (and Malekith’s willingness to sacrifice most of his people) for the sake of victory. The reason this is relevant to ruling is that when you’re making decisions about large numbers of people with different needs and interests, you’re always going to have to trade the well-being of some for the well-being of others. I think we all saw the stupidity of Steve’s “We don’t trade lives” claim in Infinity War, because he was trading lives: in order to buy time to save Vision, he knowingly risked a whole bunch of Wakandan lives. In trying to keep his deontologist conscience clean, to remain “a good man,” he just hid from himself that he was being a bad leader making an indefensible trade, sacrificing many lives for one instead of vice versa.

This got very long, so I’m putting most of it under a cut.

A note on terminology, because it’s clearly very loaded: the “noble” and “slave” labels on moralities/value systems refer to whom the value system ultimately benefits. A noble value system is posited and maintained by the noble class (which may be either a knightly or a priestly caste) and works to justify and preserve their dominant position in society. A slave value system may or may not be invented by the lower classes of society (Buddhism, which counts as a slave morality in Nietzsche’s sense, was invented by a prince), but it definitely works to their advantage, because it protects the vulnerable and promotes social equality. The terminology is unfortunate in a context where the word “slave” immediately brings to mind the American system of Black chattel slavery; that is definitely not what Nietzsche had in mind. He was a classicist before he became a philosopher, so he’s usually thinking about slavery in the ancient world as well as serfdom in pre-modern Europe. This is definitely unorthodox, but I’m going to start using “serf morality” instead of “slave morality” to avoid irrelevant racial connotations.

The main difference between noble and serf morality, on the issue of caring for and helping others, has to do with the way you think about the obligation to do so. The type of serf morality that Nietzsche calls “the morality of compassion” or “the morality of suffering” says that you have an obligation to relieve all suffering, and to care about all others who suffer. (Sometimes an exception is made for those who make others suffer and you’re allowed to hate them and want them to suffer; sometimes you’re supposed to pity and help them too.) You’re supposed to make the happiness and/or well-being of other people your primary goal in life, and you’re supposed to care about everyone, regardless of their relationship to you. Some forms of (post-)Christian morality permit you to prioritize people to whom you have special relationships (family and friends), but the purest form of this morality requires you to care about everyone equally, and ascetic or monastic Christianity discourages forming special relationships because that will inject an element of selfishness into your desire to benefit certain people. The purer forms of this morality -- philosophical Christianity, with or without God -- also consider the salvation of one’s own soul to be an unacceptably selfish motivation for helping others. Ideally, everyone’s entire motivation is to eliminate the suffering of others, not because of anything particular about them or their relation to you, but simply because they exist and they suffer. The morality of compassion is universalistic, egalitarian, and outward-focused.

Noble value systems allow agents to be selective in whose well-being they care about. Special relationships are extremely important. Traditionally, this usually means family relationships and comradeship-in-arms because aristocratic societies have conventionally been very heredity-focused and martial. But it also includes what Aristotle scholars call “character friendships”: friendships formed with kindred spirits because of mutual admiration for each other’s qualities and abilities. The standards of a noble morality only apply to a small class of people, namely, the nobility; it’s largely silent on how non-nobles should behave, and different versions have different rules about how nobles should treat non-nobles. Respect is reserved for other nobles, but some noble moralities, especially medieval hybrids of Christianity and Roman/pagan noble morality, also encourage benevolence, generosity, and forbearance toward commoners. Under certain circumstances, nobles can be obligated to care about the well-being of certain non-nobles, but it’s virtually always a matter of regarding them as your own, as your responsibility. Lords are supposed to care about the commoners who live in their lands and are obligated to protect them and provide for them; Christian knights are supposed to care about other Christians. In the ideal city described in Plato’s Republic, the guardians (the warrior class) are compared to guard dogs who are friendly to their master’s family but hostile to strangers. Their responsibility is to all the citizens of their city, even the lower-class ones; to that extent, all citizens are their own in the same way family members are. Caring for others in noble moralities is selective and is always a matter of regarding certain others as an extension of oneself and, therefore, regarding their well-being as part of one’s own well-being. Noble moralities also don’t preclude sacrificing yourself for others -- that would be very silly in a warrior’s code of conduct -- but self-sacrifice is not selfless when you’re sacrificing a part of yourself (your life, your body) for another part of yourself: the people who matter to you, your family, your comrades, your countrymen. There’s also the understanding that those who sacrifice themselves in such a way will be remembered and honored; you exchange a brief life for long-lasting glory.

(To be clear: Nietzsche was not in favor of going back to a Homeric-style warrior noble morality; he was very aware of the many cultural changes that have made that both impossible and undesirable, mostly involving the internalization and intellectualization of human life and activity. He was imagining communities being constructed and battle lines drawn on the ground of ideas, not geography or ethnicity, which can no longer defensibly be said to have the significance they once did. Nationalism, he thought, was a spasm of an outdated worldview. But he also questioned the value of selflessness and wondered about the end goal of a moral system whose primary motivation is the alleviation of suffering.)

So... I’m not sure if Thor’s moral improvement was a matter of moving toward serf morality or just becoming a better representative of noble morality. I definitely think Odin’s goal was the latter. “Humility” considered as an absolute value, as in the more of it the better, definitely belongs to serf morality, but there is a place for humility as a balancing quality in noble morality: Aristotle places magnanimity, or “greatness of soul,” as the virtue at the mean between vanity or arrogance -- claiming more honor than you deserve -- and an excess of humility or “smallness of soul,” which is effectively meekness, laying claim to less honor than you actually deserve. Thor was arrogant and vain; he invited adulation, he overestimated his own abilities and (as we saw in the deleted scene) the amount of credit he deserved for victories he shared with others. He needed to be shown that he isn’t invincible and that he sometimes has to rely on others, but the goal wasn’t for him to become self-effacing. His maturation also involved a greater awareness and sensitivity to the needs of others: contrast his complete obliviousness to the danger his friends are in during the Jotunheim battle with the slow-motion sequence in the Puente Antiguo battle where Thor looks around and really takes in how much his friends are struggling. That -- along with his acknowledgment that he might have done something to wrong Loki and his attempt to apologize -- might be considered an increase in empathy and/or compassion; in any case, it’s definitely doing a better job of caring for the people with whom he has a relationship, and for whom he is responsible. Making friends in Midgard does seem to have done something to widen the scope of his compassion and/or benevolence, since he now sees a problem with wiping out the Jotnar.

#moral philosophy #noble vs. slave morality #deontology vs. consequentialism #consequentialism vs. deontology #noble morality #slave morality #consequentialism #deontology #mcu #mcu meta #thor meta #nietzsche #thor #thor 1 #avengers infinity war #philosophy

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spectreblanc · 7 years

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Why Episode Ignis SUCKS!

So, here I am.

Episode Ignis is morally corrupt AND bad for the gaming industry. I'm serious. This kind of catering to the fans could seriously ruin the gaming industry if it isn't ruined already.

I wasn't originally going to say anything about what I thought of Episode Ignis, and I'm aware that this will probably earn me a steady stream of hate on this blog, but I don't care because I really hate the way Tabata just keeps vomiting out whatever he THINKS we want to see. And when said "vomit" comes in the form of some VERY disturbing themes- not only within the narrative, but in story-telling itself- that's when I just gotta say something.

None of this is fan theories or trying to figure out what's really happened or trying to fill in plot holes. It's clear both endings have plot holes. This blog is just WHAT'S WRONG WITH EPISODE IGNIS AND WHY I HATED IT. And why, in my opinion, it didn't fix anything.

I've compiled my reasons into one little...big blog. Divided into chapters for organization.

(I'm not borrowing anybody's opinions or theories, btw. I wrote this blog before I even knew anyone had similar fan reactions to mine about the alternate ending.)

The date I started writing this in One Note was Dec 14, in case anyone is interested. No? Okay.

So buckle up, and don't say I didn't warn you...

HEAVY SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT

CHAPTERS:

1. IGNIS IS OUT OF CHARACTER 2. IGNIS IS A SELFISH PRICK 3. IGNIS TAKES OVER EVERONE ELSE'S ROLE 4. THE ORIGINAL STORY'S BUILD-UP AND CLIMAX IS GROSSLY OFFSET 5. WHY THE ORIGINAL STORY IS BETTER 6. COMPARING FFXV'S STORY TO OTHER GREAT EPICS 7. BAD MORAL/MESSAGE 8. THIS ENDING IS NOT CANON 9. PURE FANSERVICE 10. LINGERING QUESTIONS 11. OTHER THINGS I PERSONALLY DIDN'T LIKE 12. IN CONCLUSION

Okay, saying episode Ig sucks is kind of shameless clickbait, I admit. The episode proper was actually great and I really enjoyed it. It was compelling, exciting and answered enough questions. The alternate ending part... Not so much.

Keep in mind that most of my criticism is directed toward the Alternate Ending, and from a story-teller's vantage point, but there is a bit directed toward the main episode as well. And this is just STORY criticism. The gameplay elements of Episode Ignis and the visuals and music were great. No complaints there.

So, let's get started!

1. IGNIS IS OUT OF CHARACTER

We're all familiar with the bespectacled, level-headed, pensive advisor that is Ignis Scientia. With his cool logical methods, he is the one the bros- and most importantly Noct- rely on as their anchor. The voice of reason in the medley of chaotic situations which they often find themselves. But, watch out! Throw a magic ring and a prophetic vision into the mix, and he becomes a one-man recipeh for disaster, who's ready to literally burn the world! See what I mean:

-Ignis doesn't use any of the cool decision-making skills we've come to expect from him in the main game. He's all raw emotion and flights of fancy now.

-He's never shown signs of obsessive protectiveness over Noct before. He cares, yes, but one little vision makes him completely lose his ability to examine the situation and think clearly. This is a direct contradiction to everything we've previously learned about his personality!

-The creators of episode Ignis also based the alternate ending on the comradeship that was built up in the story parts that THEY CUT OFF. The close bonds that the bros come to forage during the later parts of the game never happen, thus making their actions (and especially IGNIS'S actions) unrealistic. Remember, all that's happened to the bros at this point is a few hours on the road trip in the regalia, they've captured a few summons, collected a few weapons... Nothing has really happened. No death, no vision loss, Ignis and the others act like the story proper has already taken place.

2. IGNIS IS A SELFISH PRICK

The alternate ending seems innocent enough. Ardyn threatens to kill Ignis, and he has little choice but to put on the ring and defend himself. But it's what Ignis says first that is highly disturbing. Ignis's words are at best emotionally compromised-- at worst, EVIL. Let's listen in on some quotes:

-"This world means nothing to me. Do with it as you wish!" (To Ardyn) (TO ARDYN!!!!)

-"A world without him isn't worth saving!" ??? What about Prompto and Gladio? What about Iris, Cindy, Cid and Aranea, you BLATHERING BOBBY-SOCK??? ...Actually they never make nice with Aranea if this happens, do they... Huh.

-"I refuse to let Noctis sacrifice himself!" Again, "I refuse to do this." "I refuse to do that." Ignis isn't thinking about what is really best for Noct and the others. He's thinking about himself and what he wants or doesn't want. Isn't that Noct's choice? Did you ask him? Ig only wants it to go HIS way. Like, Dude, just because your bud might die, you'll let the world burn? That's not your choice!

And I'm sorry, this isn't self sacrificing or beautiful. It's DANGEROUS for Ignis to be thinking this way, much less get praised for it. He's willing to throw away everything everyone has sacrificed up until that point. Regis, Luna, Nyx, EVERYBODY. Ignis didn't 'rebel against fate'. He acted selfishly without consulting any of his friends, and only by the good grace of Tabata did it work.

-Ignis doesn't believe in Noctis. Regis and Luna both believed in him, but Ignis sees one vision and freaks the hell out. He is like: "No, I will make all these decisions for Noct. I will not allow him to decide if he wants to go through with it. I'll risk burning the world down instead." Whatever happened to "Stand by Me"?

-after he learns of Noct's potential death, Ignis tries to make Noctis discontinue his journey. Even though he knows now that Noct is the only one who has the power to save the world! And just as Noct is beginning to realize how important it is! Just on the heels of Luna's death! He's only thinking that he doesn't want Noct to die because he's SELFISH.

-Ignis treads dangerously close to the same path as Ardyn in the alternate ending and it's NOT RIGHT that he can do the same thing, yet have a better result. Selfishness ALWAYS leads to harming those we wish to protect most.

-I CAN'T BELIEVE THE LUCII FOUND HIM WORTHY OF THEIR POWER WHEN HE JUST DECLARED HE WOULD LET ARDYN BURN THE WORLD DOWN! Sense made: 0%

3. IGNIS TAKES OVER EVERONE ELSE'S ROLE

Say hello to you new protagonist everybody! Ignis Scientia effectively usurps the lead position from Noctis. (And everybody else's positions too.) Watch this:

-Ignis takes over Noct's role of the game's protagonist/hero.

-Ignis takes over Gladio's role as Noct's guardian. He says something like: "I swore an oath to protect him!" No, Ignis. That's Gladio's job. You are a cook, remember? Now be a good boy and come up with a new recipeh for us.

-Ignis takes over Prompto's role as Ardyn's hostage in Gralea.

-Ardyn reveals his true identity to Ignis (a complete stranger) and Noctis never finds out??? Idk.

-Ignis takes over Ardyn’s role as the guy who’s gonna burn the world.

-Ignis takes everyone's role for himself except his own, which was to be the pensive, intelligent and dependable advisor. He totally takes leave of his brain!

4. THE ORIGINAL STORY'S BUILD-UP AND CLIMAX IS GROSSLY OFFSET

-The train ride to Gralea, Noctis coming to terms with Luna's death, finding the strength to wear the ring-- all this character development and story arcs NEVER HAPPEN! Noct just decides on the spot that he's gonna hop right into the crystal and... That's basically it. No doubts or fears or hesitation like he had in the original story. Nope, we skip all the development and cut right to the chase. The previous build-up made him a human, relatable and interesting character. It made us stand up and cheer for Noct. Now, just the sight of Ignis messed up on the ground and BOOM! Skip straight to the ending. Character development and struggles be damned! Such an immediate decision as Noct makes is not only highly unrelated to his character, but doesn't even make for a good story. I don't know how people say it does.

-Everything becomes too easy. Luna's death and Iggy's vision loss stirs up some serious turbulence that the bros have to work out before they continue their journey. All this is skipped in the alternate ending.

-Ignis's vision loss becomes just a tease.

-There's no penalty for using the ring's ultimate power to banish Ardyn for good. Noctis's survival doesn't make any sense. It's kinda easy to defy fate when there's no consequences for any of your actions, eh? Seriously, there's no consequences to putting on the ring and summoning the Knights of the Round to defeat Ardyn and restore light. This is wildly out of whack with every way the ring's magic has worked until this point. (That is: draining life force in exchange for magic.)

-Noctis doesn't die defeating Ardyn now? Just because Ig used the ring on him ten years ago, doesn't mean he's still weakened all this time later. And if it does, then we should just do this all the time. There's no good explanation for this that I've seen.

-And why would Ardyn still go through with his plan. I mean, you can't exact revenge on your own bloodline and the crystal if you're not strong enough to at least take him down with you, Ard.

-Luna and Noctis's "love story" (big fan) is stepped all over. Not that it was well written to begin with, but now her death has no effect on Noctis or anything that comes after. I guess Tabata's no good with commitment to relationships.

-Ignis trying to "change fate" is like saying every other character didn't try to figure out EVERY possible way to save Noctis. Do you think Luna wouldn't have tried to find a way to save her only friend? DO YOU THINK REGIS WOULDN'T HAVE TRIED TO FIND A WAY TO SAVE HIS OWN SON?? No, they were basically stuck-up bigots who were willing to sacrifice Noct because it was convenient. Yep. Not buying it. I mean, Ravus looked for years for another way for Luna to fulfill her calling without spending life force (even selling his own soul in the process) and couldn't do it, and suddenly Iggy just snaps his fingers and BOOM! "I've come up with a new way to fix everything!" Imma call bogus on that one.

-Now the Genesis artwork makes no sense, because Noct never had a blind companion.

-Luna's t- t-...tr...TRUE feelings for Noct are never disclosed via Gentiana/Shiva.

-Ardyn is now on the losing end for the bulk of the game. Horrible dramatization!

-The world of darkness now has reduced meaning because everyone now knows Noct is gonna be back and kick Ardyn's backside in a bit.

5. WHY THE ORIGINAL STORY IS BETTER

I say "story" and not "ending" because it's pretty obvious how much of a change there is to the story, depending on which ending you choose.

So, there's a generally accepted fan theory that Noctis never had a choice in his destiny and was basically funnelled down the path to complete it by the prophecy and/or the Astrals and/or the Knights of the Round. Not going to name any names, of course, but there's this thing that the FFXV fandom says: "Noctis never had a choice but to sacrifice himself. That he was the slave of the prophecy and the Astrals were using him." That he was a victim of circumstance. That it "wasn't fair". Like somehow the prophecy and Astrals were forcing Noct to kill himself.

I've never seen any real evidence to support this. On the contrary, no one is forcing Noctis to do this. The prophecy's not something you can rebel against. A prophecy is just a foretelling of something that is to come. It doesn't force anybody to do anything. In fact, it's only fair that Noctis know what's coming if he chooses to go through with his destiny. A last chance to turn and run from it if he so wishes. In fact, it would be unfair if he had no warning whatsoever.

The magic of the ring is what kills Noct. We know that the more magic one uses, the more life force is drained (see KG and ep Ig). Like simple Physics: what goes up must come down. He who uses the magic must sacrifice life force. That's what magic runs on. (like king Regis ages more quickly as he uses magic to keep up the new wall) It's nobody's fault. As the only one with the power to use as much magic needed to defeat Ardyn, (even the Astrals can't) Noctis has a choice to make. Surrender his life force to kill Ardyn, or give up and run. THAT is Noct's choice.

And he makes conscious decisions to sacrifice himself many times throughout the story. This is what makes our heroes and heroines worth looking up to. Putting aside their own desires and doing the best for everyone.

"I think I can do it... I won't let you down!" He tells Luna.

Still, Noctis had many chances to run. He could have turned from his responsibility and turned back. But he knew his Dad and Luna and the bros and the WORLD was counting on him. By the time he emerges from the crystal we see his resolve. He's made his decision and he'll see it through. Because only HE can. Only the chosen. By the ending campfire scene and when he takes Prompto's photo as a keepsake, it's clear he'd made his choice. And the bros RESPECT IT. They STAND BY HIM. There's none of this second-guessing stuff or making decisions for Noct.

As for being a victim of circumstance, aren't all heroes?

Ardyn, for one. Here we have an example of a man who could have been a hero, but his jealousy of his brother led him to do things that led him to hurting those he once swore to help. Noctis didn't let this responsibility drag him into the depths of despair and spite like Ardyn did.

The important thing is that Noctis makes the right choice. If he didn't, he would have ended up like poor, corrupted, jealous Ardyn.

As I said before, Ignis treads dangerously close to the same path as Ardyn in the alternate ending, and it's NOT RIGHT that he can do the same thing, yet achieve a better result. Selfishness ALWAYS leads to harming those we wish to protect most.

A direct corruption of morals.

6. COMPARING FFXV'S STORY TO OTHER GREAT EPICS

Seems like a good time to reference Lord of the Rings, since it's obvious Final Fantasy gets a lot of inspiration from there:

For example: It was never Frodo's choice to inherit Sauron's ring of power, but as the story progresses, he learns to accept his burden, because he understands that if he can't destroy it, then no one will. Even as it becomes abundantly clear that it will cost him his life. It's the doubt and fear that Frodo overcomes that makes him a true hero. He's faced with a situation no one would choose, but isn't that how all heroes are made? In the end he chooses to do what's right.

Likewise Noctis: As the chosen King of light, Noctis finds himself in a situation no one would choose. But it's how he handles it-- forces on in spite of everything -- because he knows it has to be done. And like Frodo, he finds himself the only one who has the means to do it. And he does it because it's the RIGHT thing.

And that's the ONLY kind of hero worth looking up to.

Other elements of the two stories match up too, like four protagonists set out on a journey, one with a very special mission, although they all will have to sacrifice part of themselves to see it through.

Speaking of which, let's take a look at the similarities between the theme songs:

In Dreams, by Howard Shore:

When the cold of winter comes, Starless night will cover day, In the veiling of the sun , We will walk in bitter rain, But in dreams, I can hear your name, And in dreams, We will meet again,

And now Stand by Me, by Ben E. King:

When the night has come, And the land is dark, And the moon is the only light we'll see, No, I won't be afraid, Oh, I won't be afraid, Just as long as you stand, Stand by me,

As you can see, both songs tell of the world being enveloped in darkness, but the bravery of the heroes spurs them on to complete their task with the help of their friends, because the world and all good things in the world DEPEND ON IT.

And, yes it's nice if there's an easy way out. A quick way to escape hardship and possible death. And in real life this even happens a lot, but those are the stories you never hear about because there's no sacrifice, effort and determination in them. For instance, if the Great eagles were to grab the ring of power, fly over to Mt. Doom and plop it in the lava, that wouldn't be a real story worth listening to.

Likewise, if Iggy were to put on the ring of the Lucii FOR Noctis, and defeat Ardyn halfway through the game, pretty much skipping the journey and the evolution of the characters, then that wouldn't be a good story, would it?

Why do you think you're so heart broken when Noctis finally does decide to sacrifice himself? Because, you got to know him and his friends throughout their journey. Their struggles. You felt like you were actually there through the ups and downs, observing all their actions. Taking part even. Through their hardship you learned to LOVE these characters and care about the choices they make.

That's how it should be. That's what makes every good story GREAT.

Look around. All your favourite stories follow the same pattern. It's not something we can dispense with to make ourselves feel better. It's OUR responsibility not to.

Okay, that got a lot deeper a lot faster than it had to, but you have to see, that Noct's sacrifice is in no way unfair or bogus. It's HIS choice.

7. BAD MORAL/MESSAGE

-So, the message the alternate ending portrays is basically: "Just act irrationally and irresponsibly on your own whims and desires. Without consulting your friends and the people who's decision this REALLY is. Things will come up aces ;)"

-Throw out your rational-thinking self-sacrificing heroes boys and girls, because here's one hot-head who NONE of the rules apply to!

-Heroes are made by the great deeds they do, and the obstacles they overcome. I guess heroes don't overcome their struggles anymore. They just go berserk and look for the quickest, easiest way out. And yay! They find it! What d'ya know. ;p

-The theme of Final Fantasy is not necessarily to "rebel against fate, or the powers that be". The theme of Final Fantasy has always been to overcome your obstacles, push forward and to do WHAT'S RIGHT, no matter the circumstance. No matter what the cost. Even if it's your own life. That's what's always been important about the Final Fantasy games I'VE played. That's the message I've always taken away from not only the Final Fantasy stories, but all great adventures in general. That's the true message to be learned.

8. THE ALTERNATE ENDING IS NOT CANON

-People have noted already that the ending is called "Possibilities" therefore indicating that you can take it or leave it. Like something that might have happened if Ignis had taken Ardyn up on his deal to come to Gralea.

-You can only play the alternate ending if you ALREADY played the first one, which leads one to believe that that's how the game is supposed to be played.

-You're seriously gonna make me invest in a DLC to get the "Canon" ending? (A whole year after the game came out?)

-Square Enix has even confirmed that the ending is not canon, but rather a 'possibility'.

9. PURE FANSERVICE

-Just because fans bugged hard enough for an easy way out. A blatant suck-up! At a time when fan service is butchering the industry! Calling this disaster "canon" is giving Tabata an easy way out of his responsibility. A responsibility to do it right the FIRST time, not just patch all your mistakes later. (If you can call this "patching") We paid for the GAME, not fan service.

-We all wish for that perfect ending where nobody dies and everything turns up roses, but at the cost of proper development, REAL heroic sacrifices and grievances and battle scars, I say NO.

10. LINGERING QUESTIONS AND PLOT HOLES

-So, remember that part when Noctis is lying there on the ground, and Ignis is lying there too and Ardyn offers to take Ignis to Gralea to lure Noctis to the crystal...? The key words were: Noctis is just lying there... Yep.

-What's up with those visions? Luna sending them? There's no way she would send those to him, because why? He's a random stranger who will just freak out and burn down the world if he sees them. It seems only to set up the alternate ending. And that makes me really mad. There's no way Luna would give Ignis the idea to turn from his path. Not after how strongly she and Regis and everybody believed in Noct. There's NO reason Ignis needs to know this. UGH!

-Why does the ring hurt when Ig puts it on? It didn't hurt Nyx.

-Ardyn reveals his true identity to Ignis (a complete stranger) and Noctis never finds out??? Idk.

-Why does Ardyn taunt Ignis (a total stranger) into thinking he's going to kill Noct? What purpose does that serve?

-Why was Ardyn shocked to see the ring in the alternate ending, but in the main episode he wasn't worried?

-Why could Noctis command the crystal so easily in the alternate ending, when it was ignoring him in the main game?

-What happened to the Niflhiem Empire? Did Ardyn still kill Iedolas?

-Why doesn't Ardyn kill Ravus/turn him into a demon? So much for wiping out the bloodline of the oracle. :p

-How come in the original story, Ravus is fooled by Ardyn disguising himself (as Noct),and Ardyn then kills him, but in ep Iggy, he sees right through the fake Gladio?

-And to top it all off, Iggy walks up to Noct at the end and mouths "Your Majesty", which is already starting to spark theories that that was ARDYN! Personally, I don't buy into the theory, but why the tease?????

11. OTHER THINGS I PERSONALLY DIDN'T LIKE

-It was short. Come on, we waited until December for and hour and a half of gameplay? Episode Prompto was way longer and fuller. (And raised a lot less questions...)

-All fangirl squealing aside, Iggy's outfit changes were kinda lame.

-All that money spent on an alternative ending when the main game is starving for patches...?

-Throughout the episode proper, we get dumb clips that intentionally set up the alternate ending. Like those visions and Ravus not dying/turning into a demon. They don't even serve a purpose into the main story.

-The blatant disregard for commitment to a story.

-The voice acting was a bit off in parts. Like, sometimes Iggy is just standing there screaming. Lol

-Ignis didn't come up with ONE new recipe!

12. IN CONCLUSION

-Tabata is spineless!

-Ahem, sorry. So yeah. Everything in this new ending is pretty messed up. The first one had it's issues, but this one to me is 10,000,000,000,872.5 times worse. It's hollow, with no backbone, and plays out like a cheesy fan fic I would pass up on AO3.

-Look, I love sweety, fluffy, nonsensical endings and happily ever afters and shippy ships too, but if Tabata sees the rate at which we're lapping up this sugar and rainbow vomit, he'll wonder why he should even waste time developing fleshed out characters with real struggles and cohesive stories, and we'll be stuck in this cheap fan service HELL forever! And that's disrespectful to true story tellers and well established character arcs everywhere! Disrespectful to the name of Final Fantasy!

-So yeah. That's all I wanted to say. I'll say no more on why I hate the alternate ending, because I know a lot of people liked it. I just wanted my friends to know why I'm won't be hopping up on this alternate ending train any time soon. ^^

Thanks for reading. Stay epic, you guys!

#Episode Ignis #spoilers #ignis scientia #final fantasy xv #ffxv #Spectre Writes

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kisetsukaze · 7 years

Note

What sleeping positions do the Royal Knights couple make (Not in the R-18 way! As in fluffy way)?

Okay I got around to answer this one but sorry if my words doesn’t make sense I tried my best. This answer is also base on the drawing I made which can be found here. Take it as a visual aid I guess! I will only list my 4 RK OTPS here and this is my personal interpretation so if your ship is not here, sorry about that.DukemonxOmegamon

I believe their sleeping positions would be “the Nuzzle” or “The Sweetheart’s Cradle”. Like this position stated, it is a snuggling position that has a high strengthening sense of comradeship and protection. One that requires a high level of trust in one another. Duke and Omega are already close friends since the early RK days and they really trust each other both knowing each other strengths, faults, and insecurities. I mean Omega killed him one time in that movie and get depressed about it and Duke came back alive with no grudge against him. If that’s not love IDK what that is.

DuftmonxGankoomon

Okay this one is tricky mainly cause I cant find the exact word for this sleeping position. Duft really values his space as he’s not use being in a relationship with someone and Gankoo willingly give the space he needed. But overtime after their relationship and trust grew, Duft will start asking for his lover’s attention and being the inner softy he is, Gankoo will gladly give. Let it be a cuddle, a kiss, or a simple stroke of the hair as long as they are happy that’s all that matters.

MagnamonxUlforcemon

Hmm their sleeping position would be a mix of the two mentioned above. While Ulforce craves the attention of his lover, Magna would be somewhat the opposite. Not to say that he doesn’t like that Ulforce fawns over him but more of feeling embarrass off the PDA but that feeling stems of the feeling of insecurity towards himself. Magna values his independence and space of the relationship and it would take some time for Ulforce to adjust and making a compromise between intimacy and independence, allowing the best of both worlds in their relationship.

Lord KnightmonxDynasmon

Lord Knight and Dynas likes to spoon whether its before or after their lovemaking. They take turns being the big or small spoon or in some cases, doing the loose spoon it doesn’t matter as long they are entangle and having close contact with one another. Like the sleeping position states, it demonstrates a dynamic where one partner is protective over the other and it goes without saying that Lord Knight and Dynas really trust each other and willing to put their lives at risk to protect the another.

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konigsberggg · 7 years

Text

“Prussia’s Reflections” is a piece I wrote as if it was one of Gilbert’s diary entries to practice not only first person writing but also to practice writing as Gilbert would. In this piece, Gilbert talks about his reflections of his rise and decline in power, German unification, reunification, militarism, and other such things. It is not a formal piece but instead I imagine Gilbert is just getting his thoughts down. If he actually wrote this, it would be in German, and most likely formal German therefor this is why there are not many colloquialisms at all in this piece. Enjoy.

Many would think that I would have given up by now, considering my situation. I have given up scant few times in my life before and this was not due to my own wanting but for the sake of my men, my people. I will carry on until I am dead, and this perplexes those around me. Nations thrive off the fall of those around them, so of course they want me to give up. But I won't, I like to see them squirm and suffer, to see their anger rise like bile in the back of their throats when they see me, when they realize that no, I am not dead and I have no intention of dying for quite some time. This gives me a great sense of satisfaction.

I do not say, however, that I face no difficulty. But I am a hard worker and this has always carried me through any times of crisis. One day my work will pay off and the East German people will no longer have to beg for the scraps of industry and economic growth that the western Capitalists are so reluctant to give. My glory will come again, but I am perfectly fine if it is no longer under my old flag and my old name. To survive this long means having to reinvent yourself, and I will do whatever it takes to see my people succeed. The work is hard, however, as my power has long since been stripped of me and I myself have to beg for work, beg others to bring their industry and their workers to my lands. Perhaps had I known, back when I roped together the German states and unified Germany, that this event would one day fuck me over, I would have not done the same. But, Germany has prospered, my brother has prospered, and my own sacrifice has been worth it. Without the successes of my brother, my future would not have been secured and I would truly be dead. In the end, all has worked out fine and I am still here to see another day. I can push aside my bitterness and nostalgia for the glory days long enough to recognize this. However I shouldn't have let that fucking wall be destroyed. Opened, yes, but not taken down, I should not have let the West eat the assets of the GDR and I should not have sat passively aside as the Soviets fell. Not only due to the fact that I have barely any power anymore, but my people suffered and suffer still due to this event, and I will say again that my people have always been my primary priority.

Fate is a tricky being to tame, but I am sure she has something in store for me. I will not die until I have regained glory again, just to see the smug smirks of those around me wiped off their faces, and to see my people rise. The Prussian spirit must be adapted to the times yes, but there will never be any destroying it. I built Germany, I beat the states into submission, I warred and fought and toiled and worked for Germany and the effects of this are seen in the every day lives of the German people. It is no inaccurate stereotype to say that Germans are disciplined and orderly, as this is something I ensured. I have never gone wrong with applying militaristic ideals to my interactions outside of the military, and this is why I was always so successful. Those who did not have perished or sat on their asses and let others build their country for them. I worked for everything I had and everything I have now today. Prussia was built from no man's land, from the ruins of the crusades, surrounded by hostile territories and in infertile, unwanted land. No one wanted Prussia except for myself, and I did a damn good job building that country from the fucking ground.

When reflecting on my rise to power, I have to think about God. If not for God who knows how long I would have been a barbaric pagan. I do not say I regret those times, in fact I am quite fond of those memories and they shaped me into the man I am today. If anything I am angry on that life being ripped away from myself and my people, but I cannot do anything about it except spit on the Polish and that is the most I will do. However, I know that without the Teutonic Knights I would have died a savage, and there would be no Kingdom of Prussia and there would be no Germany today. In the end, it was all worth it even if at the time there was nothing I wanted more than to return to my days of paganism. God sent forth a mission for me, and I fulfilled that mission. The gods I worshipped in those old days had no fate destined, and for this reason I see only the one true God.

The Teutonics were the ones responsible for transforming me from a barbarian warrior to a soldier, and their lessons have never left me. Godliness, discipline, loyalty, courage- all lessons that have never left me since the Knights showed me their ways. Since that age, I have always been a soldier. There truly is nothing that makes me happier than leading my men into a great battle. The Calvary charges, the gunfire, the struggle between soldier and soldier as all fight to survive and push forward, to beat the enemy into submission. These are things I love, but unfortunately I will never see war again the way I did before. Modern warfare has become corrupt and cruel, and the Great War is who I blame. Trench warfare ruined war for everyone, and now with all the mass weapons of destruction it is not a matter of personal skill nor strategy, but about who has the bigger bomb. I for one long for the days where all I needed was my sword or my musket, my bare hands, and a large military at my disposal. I miss my men and our times together, I miss the fraternity and the comradeship of the military. I am no longer allowed to have much affiliation with the German military, but I ensured that we at least fucking had one. If it was up to me more spending would go to the military rather than upholding the European Union, but unfortunately I can't always get my way.

I don't much like to analyze my life, I am no psychologist, and I do not like psychologists very much because all the ones I have met have been pompous assholes. I speak directly about Freud. Regardless, a good soldier analyzes battles both won and lost and learns from them, and this is what I have done. My analysis has led to two conclusions: everything happened for a reason, and this reason was merely the path God had chosen for me. In the end, I can look back and my numerous accomplishments and my few failures with pride because I know that it has all been worth it. Germany is strong and lives to see another day, the Prussian people may not exist anymore but I, Prussia, do.

#ooc #this was actually REALLY fun to write #lmao #if u wanna give me feedback ur welcome idk #ive been meaning to write gilbert just in the first person #n i thought him just talking abt shit would be fun #hes very narcissistic #this is what i have really gotten from writing htis lmao #writings

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thinkofduty · 7 years

Text

Monolith

It did not take long for Orella to lose count of how many hours she spent in the cells.

She wasn't counting to begin with. The moment the Garleans burst into the throne room she'd known all hope had been lost. Not when there were so many of them, and only two left to defend the city.

Berend had been among the first to flee after they'd seen the king. The Kingsguard had argued, then, cursed each other and exchanged choice words and choicer insults for their king and country

- and then they had made their choices

- and so many of them threw down their arms without further thought

- and even those she was closest to only spared a glance back at their home

- and if she had been possessed of more sense she'd have done the same

But she had not been possessed of anything other than fear and anger, and with Ingvald's desperate plea still echoing in her mind, she had drawn her sword and waited for them to come instead.

- and it had been the two of them alone against the Empire

- and no longer was there a king, nor any reason to keep on fighting

- and Theodoric was so tiny in death, pitiful, cowardly

- and the noose he'd made for himself left much to be desired

- and she found herself wishing that her hands had choked the life from him instead of the hempen rope

- and she had followed this man, and proudly

So soon were they overwhelmed. At their best, the Kingsguard may well have had a chance against a legion or two of Garlemald, but so far were they from their best. They had nothing. They had a knight and the man that served under her, fresh from arguing, and a dead tyrant twenty yalms from where they stood.

She'd thought herself good at swordsmanship once. When the plate's weight became normal to her shoulders; when she'd taken part in a tourney; when she'd been given her own understudy - all these things served to bolster her confidence.

- and then the sword had been knocked from her hands so quickly

- and so soon was Ingvald subdued also

- and then it was over

Ingvald had suffered less at first. Less sure with a blade, he was disarmed easily, and then just another body to force to his knees. He'd removed the helmet to better talk Orella down of following her coward brothers out of the palace, and she'd seen them push him down before the world went dark. There had been two of them, one on either side, one gripping his hair as though he meant to rip it out, the other with steel at his throat. He'd been pushed so far forward he was almost kissing the tile.

That selfsame tile had known her well. Orella woke upon it, fingers still numb from the shock of her blade having been torn from her grasp. Everything felt wrong. The taste of blood was strong on her tongue, her head heavy, the world spinning, everything wrong, wrong, wrong.

And then the pain had made itself known. It beat its way through the fug that surrounded her mind - and no stranger was she to a little pain, a little hardship, and then the Garleans had their awful way with her. Heavy sollerets found their way to her face, to her ribs, and the pain was like no other she'd ever known. It blossomed in her head like some kind of warring rose, exploded into something worse than a migraine, took over her mind and her body, and she could not cry out or inch away or beg or plead or

- and when they stopped she barely had the strength to breathe

- and Rhalgr's own lifesblood beat in time with her raging pulse a tattoo of rage, the destruction twisting her up from the inside, the shooting pain his streaking star

Having had their fill, the soldiers dragged them unceremoniously from the chamber. Her charge, so young - too young - had at least left on his feet, with some semblance of dignity intact. Soldiers remained at his shoulders, twisting his arms behind his back, their fists still in his hair, and far more distinguised than she. The guttural Garlean tongue forced its way behind the agony, into her ears before they took her, too, limp and unable to resist, bowed and beaten and bleeding freely.

So fierce was the pain that she kept her eyes closed against the throne room as they dragged her from it, and never did she see the way her blood smeared behind her on the tile.

- and then no longer was she Ala Mhigo's

- and yet Ala Mhigo yet knew her

- and the men and women thrown into the cells because of her recalled her name with startling clarity

- and they called for her as ghosts she never knew she had

(how far you've fallen, Steelhand, blackblood, king's own cur! suffer with us! suffer like you made us suffer! see how your cursed royal cape protects you now!)

- and then she'd been alone

Left in the dark to rot, she had nothing to do but think. At first she counted every breath, every heartbeat, wondering why they had not yet come for her.

- and then she'd heard the screams

After that, all she'd been able to think of was Ingvald. His agonised cries were bad, but not so bad as the silence, for her mind laboured hard to fill in the gaps. She could imagine only the worst, could not banish the thoughts from her mind, worried they'd pushed him too far, that they'd hurt him irreparably, that they'd murdered him-

But then they'd start anew and she'd hear him scream and the relief was heavily tinged with guilt as she heard them chip him down piece by piece, hour upon hour, day after day after day

- and she could put a halt to none of it, could not even be there

- and she ought to be, as his commanding officer, as his equal, as his friend

- and they would tell her nothing more than who the screams belonged to

- and when they finally broke him they came for her

Orella learned humiliation in that cell. They stripped her down and bled her further, tore the breath from her lungs and banished all thoughts of peace from her mind. Soon enough, she stopped caring about anything. It did not matter they made her sleep upon the very floor they made her soil. It did not matter that the Empire took over the palace, or her home, or that the Kingsguard were cravens.

Nothing mattered except remembering how to breathe once they were through with her.

Each battlefield upon her skin is revisited time and again, each war replayed until she's certain the map will never fade.

When they have taken everything from her - every part of herself, every whispered plan the Kingsguard had been prive to, every tiny detail no matter how minor - they start again.

- and it goes on

- and on

- and then it stops

They make her scream so much that it takes time for her voice to return. The soldiers do not come for her in that time, and she does not know what to make of the respite. She thinks perhaps they will kill her when they return, and finds she does not mind the thought.

But that does not happen. She is not permitted to die, and instead forced into an accord. Once the idea would have rankled her, would have made her sick to the very stomach.

No longer. Once, she was strong, with her shield, with her sword. Once, she was proud, with the crown at her back. Once she was young, unbent, unthinking, unashamed. Now she is nothing.

Nothing.

Beaten. Broken. Shattered into a thousand thousand pieces and outfitted in Garlean steel to boot, once they have her word. A mockery of her former self. Less than a shadow. Less than nothing.

- and forced to dance to a Garlean tune

- and is made to build herself anew

- and she has nothing with which to build with

So she starts with her name.

Orella aan Steelhand. Aan. She's reminded of the addition so many times a day. When they call her for food, when they tell her to step forward for duty, when they give her poorly made arms and armour. They call her by her new title as they would a dog, and she, useless, worthless, responds without a fight. They stop short of needling it into her skin, and that is something of a relief, for looking into mirrors is bad enough now.

The time spent in the cells did her looks no favours. Never was she beautiful, but once was she at least bright-eyed. Alert. Ready for every day. No longer. Her eyes now lay sunken in her face, the skin below them dark as though bruised. Creases wrinkle the corners of her eyes and her forehead in a way she does not remember, and her mouth feels tight when she tries to grimace at herself.

Not once does she bother attempting to smile.

An aan at the mercy of her Garlean overseers, she is made to work herself to the bone each and every day. Garlemald does not seem to know the concept of a day of rest, and it does not take long before her cheeks are ever more gaunt, the bruised skin under her eyes ever darker. She is made to sweat and bleed with the other raw recruits, and mentions not a single time her suffering. When she strips off at the end of the day, too often are her tunics too stained to save.

- and not a single person knows

- and she keeps her mouth tightly shut

The aan sleep together as Eorzean anchovies, shoulder to shoulder after a day's drills. too often, Orella lays awake long after the bodies either side of her snuffle and snore, cataloguing every ache and pain, wondering what it means to be alive now. There is no pride, no comradeship within the Garlean ranks. Instead there are bruises aplenty that she presses her fingertips into; many shallow slices from old wounds and new; grazes and welts and weals too many to count.

- and she wonders night after night if she will survive

- and if she does, for how long will the scars remain?

Two moons wax and wane before she breaks again. No Garlean hands are involved this time - not directly. It comes and goes in fits and starts until she lays there between two conscripts, in too much pain to fall asleep despite her desperately tired mind, and she thinks:

I can do this no longer.

It comes to her unbidden, but she knows it to be true. She has lost count of the days since Ala Mhigo fell, lost count of the beatings, of the snide remarks and the side glances and of being under Garlemald's thumb so tightly that she can barely breathe.

The more she thinks of this - and she cannot wrest her mind from her predicament - the more her throat tightens, the more her vision fogs. Hot, dangerous tears slide down her cheeks before she can stop them.

No longer.

No longer can she stay here. No longer can she remain wedged between these soldiers. No longer can she pretend that being broken suits her.

With difficulty, she gets up and pulls her shoes on. She yet cries, but silently, that she does not wake either man beside her, and takes a moment before she stands to wipe at her eyes. She cannot be seen showing weakness. Not around the Empire.

And the Empire is everywhere. To and from their drills are they marched, and watched while they sleep and eat and clean, besides. It came as dull surprise not to be accompanied to the privy.

For how many green aan slumber together, there is only the one Garlean on the night watch, behelmed and armed as though expecting all of Gyr Abania to march upon this very room. He steps aside to let her leave without a single word. She does not want to know what he sees that he does not feel the need to mock her, however softly.

- and the hallways stretch ahead of her, endless, empty, like her future

- and she walks them, feet numb, mind number

- and despite the late hour there are yet Garleans on patrol

Habit keeps her back straight and her eyes forward, marching as though she has somewhere to be. No man stops her, nor demands to know her route, and she does not think of how wretched she must look as hard as she can possibly manage.

Her feet stop of their own accord outside the washroom to let two men pass. She can smell the soap on them and knows it to be the same hard cake that she tossed to Gisfrid not three weeks prior to the invasion by the scent alone. The memory is strong enough that it roots her to the ground.

- and then she must needs enter the washroom, must relive the memory as best she can, must pretend she is not who she is

One shower yet pumps out water hot enough to steam, and the tiles are slippery despite her shoes' grip. It's hot enough to make her sweat anew, as though the day's drills were not enough to exhaust her, and she feels a dull ache strike up residence behind her brow.

She is not alone in here. Nor would she be. These showers are for all to use as they see fit, for the aan and oen and even the pyr to come and go as they please. Even with the moon high above the land there are bodies to wash, people readying for sleep or for duty.

Garlemald is much like Ala Mhigo in that regard.

She does not think the body will give her trouble. It's a Highlander with skin a touch lighter than hers, lying on the tile curled up on his naked self as though to ward off beatings. She stares at the man's back for one moment, two, and then turns her attention away from him to strip off. She cares not for her nakedness. Shame was ripped from her in the cells, after all, and she was not so modest before this life that she worried over the baring of her breasts.

The water is hot enough that it stings on contact. Each wound she bears hurts under the spray; she ignores every protest her body makes and puts her head under the water, drowning out the rest of the world. With her eyes closed, she can pretend she is anyone but herself. No aan is she, nor Garlean soldier, nor even of Abanian blood. All she can hear is the rushing water. Her lungs sting for breath, and she does not move, keeps her head under the spray, thinks that maybe she could drown herself and be better off for it.

A hand startles her out of the shower and her thoughts. It's warm. Broad. Gentle.

Heart hammering, she looks up, up into the face of Ingvald Bloodhound.

- and for a long second she thinks her own heart might stop

- and the breath catches in her throat and her vision swims

- and they do nothing but stare

- and stare

He looks like hell. His nose is bloodied from someone's attempt to smear it across the rest of his face. He's lost bulk, as she has; she can see his ribs, and plenty of scars that she does not remember seeing in the showers before. Little wonder she did not recognise his frame upon the tile. His eyes are haunted, no longer as warm and welcoming as once they were, and deeply lined, besides.

He was too young to join our ranks.

The thought hits her like Reaper cannonfire. Without thought to her nakedness - or his, she realises dimly - she pulls him close, holds him carefully, rests her head against his shoulder and closes her eyes tightly against the world again.

She does not know what to say, nor does she trust her tongue enough to say it. There is so much she wants to apologise for. For not giving into his request to retain her honour. For not cutting him down in kindness instead of letting the Garleans take him. For what the Garleans did to him. For not finding him sooner.

The embrace hurts, and she must let go. The shower on her back is still hot enough to steam, and no amount of feeling wretched will cure her.

"You're bleeding," Ingvald says, and she would laugh, if she could remember how. His own blood lines the cracks of his lips. Slow and gentle, as though he thinks she might break under the weight of his fingers, he brushes beads of blood from a graze on the top of her breast. His thumb is bright red when it comes away, and he takes the time to cup his hand, fill it with water, splash it gently against her skin to wash the cut.

Orella lets him do all this before she wipes his mouth against her wrist. She succeeds in smearing his blood against his cheek; it does nothing to improve just how beaten he looks.

"I'm sorry," she whispers thickly. The sound of the shower disguises her words, but from the way Ingvald's expression softens, she suspects he gets the meaning. "I'm so sorry."

#p00 #orella #ingvald

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kwa-mii · 7 years

Text

Le Chat Noir

SInce exams are over it’s time for me to write again! yaaay!! I missed this!!!

Since it’s Marichat May I decided to Get In On The Action and so here’s a fic for day 19 - identity reveal - which I’ve been planning for ages and it was pretty fun to write tbh

The title is a lazy reference to Le Chat Noir in Montmarte, which was one of the first cabarets. Titles are not my strong point, but eyyyyyyyy it’s doubly relevant

Also feel free to pop to my ao3

Le Chat Noir - a reveal fic with a bit of humour amidst the fluff (1959 words)

Chat was a self-proclaimed charmer. Self-proclaimed, because he considered his pun-based flirting to be the epitome of seduction and would often brag about his 'way with women'. Charmer, because it was somewhat true.

Marinette, weird as it was to admit it to herself, had been slowly falling under his spell. Yes, she'd always liked her teammate - he was reliable, good company, kind to her - but she'd never allowed herself to transgress that boundary. It would make their partnership weird after all, and Ladybug wasn't ready to make mistakes because of some silly crush. But as Marinette that had changed slightly.

When he was around her civilian self, Chat lowered some of his walls. Lolling on her bed and enthusing about his favourite anime, playing videogames, salivating over freshly-baked pastries, he seemed less untouchable hero, and more human - and an undeniably cute one at that. Without an akuma to distract her, she could really admire his tousled golden hair, his bright green eyes, the gorgeously toned body beneath the suit. (Stop it Marinette! Don't think about that! That was a violation of their sacred comradeship! He was Chat, and she was Ladybug and)

Chat really wasn't making it easier on her. His effusive, natural flirtatiousness, concentrated like that on her, was an indomitable force. Every time he sprung onto her balcony with some freshly plucked roses, or bought another small plushie to fill her bed, or, damnit, hit her with that confident, toothy smile, she could feel that partnership-relationship boundary becoming less clear. And sometimes, when they cuddled in bed and watched movies together, she couldn't help but wonder how it would feel to kiss him, to entwine their bodies more deeply. His heat was enticing and his arms were strong - but Marinette was strong too, and unerringly loyal to the thought of Adrien.

So, in the end, it didn't matter. She could not afford to fall in love with Chat. She could not afford to admit that parts of her, great and persuasive parts, wanted to.

Even so, as Chat sprung into her room that evening, she couldn't stop her heart's flutter. Light in step, and light in voice, he bounced over to her and pressed a kiss to her cheek. Though many people in France did this in greeting, Chat made it feel more... charming, she supposed, amorous. Then, pulling away, he beamed at her, "Did you miss me?"

She gestured towards her homework, "Oh, desperately. Has my knight come to rescue me?"

Marinette was not naturally flirty, at all, but there was something about Chat (there were a lot of things about Chat, it seemed) that was different. She felt a bit nauseous every single time she batted her eyelids, but it was definitely fun.

He leaned over her to look - his smell so cosy, like home - and smiled, "Oh, it's science. I could help you with that."

"That's not the kind of rescuing I was thinking about."

"I can't condone slacking, Marinette."

"Bummer," she muttered, turning back to her work, her pencil tapping aimlessly against the edge of the desk.

"However," he purred, spinning her chair back to face him, "It's bad manners to ignore a guest."

"Are they a guest if they climb in through your windows? I'd call that an 'intruder'."

"Semantics."

There was a pause here. With Chat leaning over her, his hands placed either side of the chair's back, Marinette felt herself beginning to blush. She wrested herself away, getting up abruptly, and turning on the radio, "Well, you have a point. You can help me later, I guess, if you still want to. I need a break."

He grinned, "Alright! What's the plan?"

"Uh, I assumed you had one, considering you were so eager..."

"It's all a front, princess. I just wanted to get you away from that desk; you looked half-dead."

Princess again. She'd heard it a few times now, but the pet name still got to her, in its delightful intimacy. It made her warm and fuzzy, knowing he thought of her like that - or, at least, pretending to. She wasn't sure how she felt about his just saying it for the sake of it... somehow, it was important to her that he meant it, at least partly.

Wishing to shut out these traitorous thoughts, she turned the knob on the radio louder. Chat's eyes widened, "Oh, I love this song!"

Marinette's eyes widened too. Somehow, despite their shared evenings together, she had never pictured him liking music like this - sweet, cutesy, romantic. She loved it too, but, "I would've thought your taste would've been way different. Stromae, or something."

"Oh, I like him too, I listen to pretty much everything. But I have a special place in my heart for romance."

She wished he wouldn't look at her like that when saying such things. Especially when he was starting to move in time to the music, swaying and tapping his feet. Chat was beginning to transcend cute and had become irresistibly so, mouthing the words to the love song at her with an earnest expression: ‘I always liked to seduce but it's OK if you're the only one who likes me.’

She could laugh. She could swoon. She could kiss him!

At least, until he started actually singing. Maybe it didn't help that the singer was at a range well above his own, but it was clear that Chat had not been made to sing. Instead, he yowled, like the cliché of a cat, every note landing far from its mark. His voice strained at the edges. He was a mess. She could laugh, and so she did, unable to keep the giggles in at his genuine attempt to serenade her.

It seemed even Chat had flaws. Just like that, it had become a little easier not to fall in love with him. As long as he kept serenading her, she was safe; they could be Just Friends.

In the end, Marinette did not finish her science homework. She had spent the evening messing around with Chat, singing karaoke, and dancing goofily until they were flush and breathless, in a heap across Marinette's bed. Her mum had come in to ask about the noise, but she had managed to hide him beneath a blanket just in time - she wasn't ready to answer those questions just yet.

Luckily, the homework became unimportant, overshadowed by the news that their year would be putting on a musical. Every year put on a show around this time, but the fact that it was going to be a musical was especially exciting.

Nathaniel wished to do nothing more than make the sets - "I couldn't... I'd rather not be on stage" - and Marinette, though she wasn't a terrible singer, would rather be in charge of the costumes. However, there were certainly many others who wanted to act.

Alya was enthusiastic, "I wonder what it'll be! I love West Side Story, or maybe it's Phantom? Les Mis, perhaps. There are so many good musicals out there - ooh, what about Wicked? No, no, Grease is a classic."

Nino was interested, "I don't know how good I am at singing, but I'd like to do something, y'know. Music is my jam, so this should be cool. I'm pumped."

Chloe was confident, "Oh, I'll have to get the leading part. Daddy says I sing like an angel, and besides, I was born to be centre stage. None of you losers had better audition for the main part. It'll be me and Adrien up there together, right, Adri-kins?"

Adrien did not look particularly taken with the idea. However, there was no two ways about it - his looks and his natural stage presence meant he was the ideal lead. He had proven his talent in their class film, and there was no other boy quite as handsome or as charming as him. As romantic interests go, he was the perfect match. Besides, "I'm not a bad singer," he shrugged.

Alya nudged her neighbour, "Yes, but Adrien's probably just being humble. When he says 'not bad', he probably means 'amazing'. I wouldn't put it past him. Kid is perfect."

Marinette nodded, leaning forwards in her seat as Adrien stepped up to sing for them. She could imagine he was singing just for her, if she just pretended there was no one else in the room. Adrien, with his eyes like emeralds, and his hair like spun sunbeams, and his voice like -

Like nails scraping on a chalkboard? Like the clatter of old machinery? Like a primordial screech?

She winced. She noticed everyone in the class, from the corner of her eye, had been similarly affected. Faces paling, mouths dropping, Chloe on the verge of tears. No one had expected this. That perfect, beautiful Adrien, with his perfect, beautiful soul, should have such an ugly voice when he sang. A voice like -

A voice like Chat?

Her small wince turned into a minor coughing fit as she spluttered on the thought. That was ridiculous. Chat couldn't be Adrien. Chat was dangerous, Adrien was gentle... but had Chat not shown his gentleness to Marinette? Ok, ok, so they shared a characteristic or two. And ok, so they were both blonde, green eyes, beautiful body - as his partner, Marinette knew Chat's body well, as his covetous fan, she had studied Adrien's, and admittedly they bore remarkable similarities - but those were superficial traits. And, like, fine, they both had an abysmal singing voice, like a crying cat, but what did that mean? Nothing.

Except face it, Marinette. The chances of two people in Paris singing that badly was infinitissimally small. That was a god-given voice, a rarity. Forced with this truth, reminded of others, she had to accept the possibility that Adrien was the boy under the suit.

She relaxed now. Watched him. Despite the assault on her eardrums, it was actually quite cute. He didn't seem to realise, sang with abandon, with his whole body flung into song. He always had been eager.

Perhaps now she could afford to fall in love. With the both of them, with each part of the wonderful whole. She didn't need to forsake Adrien for Chat, she didn't need to hold Adrien on a distant pedestal when she knew and loved him in different skin. But, there was still the chance... she needed to check her theory.

Adrien came to the end of his song, and saw that the class were staring at him without a word. Not a single reaction, not a single sound. Slightly fazed, he went back to his seat. He whispered over to his friends, "How was that?"

Only Marinette had the wits about her to reply, "It was an interesting experience."

"Interesting doesn't always mean good," he said self-consciously.

"Semantics."

He didn't catch the hint, looking still a bit awkward. Obviously she had to be more blatant, to check if her idea was right, "You know, even though there were a few technical faults, you looked like a perfect knight up there."

He jerked to attention, looking her in the eye, seeing some meaning hidden there, "You think so?"

She nodded, "I can imagine you climbing in through the window to rescue someone."

Alya looked baffled at her friend's new bravery. Adrien looked coy, "Ah, damn, there goes my secret."

So it was true! "I have one or two of my own I think I could trade for that," she smiled. It was only fair after all, he should know the face of his partner. Friends across both identities - and perhaps, with more brewing beneath - she could only see that their teamwork would improve now. He'd all but confirmed it. Adrien was Chat Noir and there was no more perfect person it could be.

But meanwhile, "Hey, I was thinking, could you maybe help me with my science homework? I didn't get a chance to finish it last night since some dumb stray cat distracted me."

He laughed, fixing her with his intense green gaze, and brilliant smile, "I'd love to, princess."

Alya all but screamed.

[BTW this is the song I was thinking of when I wrote this]

#marichat may #marichat #chat noir #marinette #miraculous ladybug #ml fanfic #adrien agreste #adrinette #playing with the cliche boyyyy #kwa-mine

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bluewatsons · 5 years

Text

Ruth R. Wise, A Yiddish Poet in America, Commentary Magazine (July 1980)

The decline of Yiddish in America among all Jews except the Hasidim has had important consequences, some of which have only gradually come to light. Initially, the sacrifice of Yiddish, the internal vernacular, was a relatively small price for European Jewish immigrants to pay in return for English, which gave them direct access to the material and spiritual opportunities of America. Jews, after all, have managed innumerable linguistic adaptations throughout the millennia, and while Yiddish enjoyed a longer history and fostered a richer culture than most other Jewish languages, it was only one of several Diaspora vernaculars created by Jews and subsequently, in altered circumstances, abandoned. In the modern period, wherever political emancipation promised civic equality, Jews learned and adopted the local language, always more responsive to the carrot than to the stick, to the proffered opportunity than to any punitive measures against them. Nowhere was the carrot more enticing, the promise more golden, than here in America.

Only a false nostalgia for the bad old days would suggest that the adoption of English was not worth the risk to Yiddish, or that linguistic assimilation was a cultural mistake. Nevertheless, now that American Jews have become Anglicized, one can afford to recognize the debit side of the ledger. The abandonment of Yiddish within a single generation meant the loss, not of some antique property, but of a highly developed contemporary resource, the national storehouse of consciousness and expression. Though the loss of Yiddish is often mourned sentimentally, as if some beloved grandmother had died leaving one last anecdote unrecorded, its decline is actually of more immediate and personal consequence. Yiddish is the crucible in which most of the modern Jewish experience was forged. The complexities of the Jewish encounter with modernity are recorded in Yiddish folk and formal culture and in the language itself. Without Yiddish, descendants of European Jewry are without their 19th and early 20th centuries, bereft not merely of the traditional past but of the setting of their own immediate experience.

It so happened that among the immigrants to America were many budding Yiddish writers who would use their vernacular to interpret their individual and communal reorientation, and in doing so, bring their literature to new heights of excellence. But by the time they were at their best, much of their natural audience had become actively indifferent to Yiddish, and their children even more so. Modern American Yiddish culture was left without heirs, and the heirs without a culture.

There was something remarkably raw in the immigrant dedication to the future, an abandon not usually associated with the Jews, but characteristic of them nonetheless. No one captured this hard streak in the American Jewish immigrant character more effectively than the Yiddish poet, Moishe Leib Halpern (1886-1932), who was both its exponent and victim. An uncompromising realist, Halpern recognized that the pragmatism of the Jews seeking refuge in America was the necessary cost of their legendary national talent for adaptability. Yet he recoiled from the coarseness of the immigrant struggle for survival. He did not share the immigrant optimism, the faith in a better future as a reward for present hardship. As a writer, one of that select group of immigrants for whom the native language was indispensable and non-negotiable, Halpern saw in the weakening of Yiddish his own personal doom for which there could be no social compensation. Frayed by the practical difficulties of eking out a Yiddish writer’s living, and progressively estranged from the society of transplanted Jews, Halpern exposed the most painful and desperate aspects of making a new home, both for those who successfully managed the feat and for those, like himself, who did not.

To some degree, of course, all the Yiddish writers in America were sooner or later affected by the evaporation of their language. The greater persistency and intensity of Halpern’s sensitivity to the problem derived, as he was aware, from the circumstances of his childhood. Long before he came to America, an earlier process of uprooting and adaptation had already organized his contradictory feelings about belonging and estrangement. His coming to New York at the age of twenty-two followed a previous period of disorientation which foreshadowed his immigrant life.

Moishe Leib Halpern was born in 1886 in the Galician market town of Zlochow, which had been under Austrian rule since 1772, and which comprised about 10,000 inhabitants, just over half of them Jews. His father, who came from a family of merchants in Odessa, ran a local general store. In raising his only son, this traditional Jew embarked on an unusual plan. Having sent the boy to cheder and to a local Polish school, he then took Moishe Leib, at age twelve, to Vienna where he enrolled him in a course of applied art so as to guarantee his professional independence. Though the boy showed talent as an artist and sign painter, he thwarted his father’s design by gravitating to literature. He began a study of German verse and took his own first tentative steps as a German poet. Halpern also frequented the Vienna catés, where the arguments of the Jewish socialists and Zionists successively won his allegiance.

By the time he returned to Zlochow, at the age of twenty, he was effectively without a career and a cultural stranger to his birthplace. His boyhood friends could not follow his political arguments, delivered as they were in German or in an impossibly Germanic Yiddish. Having strong literary ambition themselves, they persuaded him that as a would-be writer he was wiser to use his native Yiddish tongue, which was anyway evolving into a lively artistic medium. Somehow the cosmopolitan finish of Vienna did not suit the indigenous cultural ferment of his birthplace, and it was he rather than his provincial school chums who gave way. He turned back to Yiddish and submitted his first poems in that language to the Galician Yiddish press.

But there was a second area of expectation in which Halpern could not comply. Some of his contemporaries were already in uniform in the Austrian army, where he would also have to serve. Rather than submit to induction, he set out for America, arriving in New York in the latter part of 1908. He had found himself a stranger in his home, and was now twice a stranger in the city of Jewish ingathering.

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Halpern’s arrival in America coincided with a great cultural upsurge on New York’s Lower East Side. He became associated with a movement of fledgling writers called Di Yunge, the young, in deference to their audacity and innovativeness. These were young men from a diversity of backgrounds and from various cities, towns, and villages that spanned the map of Eastern Europe. Coming together in the common insecurity of immigrants and with the common ambition of becoming great writers, they stimulated one another in comradeship and competition. Most of them were without special training or profession, and the regular jobs they found to support themselves—in small factories, as house painters, newsvendors, paperhangers, waiters, even shopkeepers—eventually drained the energy required for steady writing. But there were enough among them who succeeded in bringing fame to the designation, Yunge: Mani Leib, the handsome lyricist from the Ukraine; Zishe Landau, poet, scion of a Polish rabbinic family; Reuven Iceland, poet, one of the chief chroniclers of the group; David Ignatoff, energetic novelist and short-story writer from the hasidic heartland of the Ukraine, who edited the group’s first major publications; Joseph Rolnick, an unassuming, evocative poet of moods and landscapes; I. I. Schwartz, the most learned Jew among them, epic poet and gifted translator; Joseph Opatoshu and Isaac Raboy, experimenters in long and short forms of fiction; H. Leivick, escapee from a sentence of lifetime exile in Siberia, poet and dramatist; Moishe Nadir and Moishe Leib Halpern, from neighboring towns in Galicia, the mischievous rebels within this movement of self-declared rebels.

The group—actually, like most literary groups, an informal cluster of like-minded writers who would soon go their individual ways—was overtly rebellious only in its initial phase. Its members opposed the national and social orientation of the work of their predecessors, the commercial impulse of the Yiddish press, and the sense of communal responsibility that was expected of Jewish writers in a Jewish language. Like knights of a medieval romance, or like the Symbolists whom some of them acknowledged as models, they vowed to serve di sheyne literatur, belles-lettres, with pure aesthetic passion and undivided loyalty. Preferring (for the most part) poetry to prose, they turned from the public spirit of Yiddish writing to subtler, intricate explorations of the individual self in all its moods.

Although most of the young writers originally subscribed to this mild aestheticist position, they were caught up before long by local and international events, and they responded, no less than the mass of their fellow immigrants, to pressures from the very movements they had tried to resist. Several of the Yunge had been members of anti-czarist revolutionary organizations before coming to America. When the revolution of 1917 appeared to actualize their youthful dreams, they were inevitably affected, and in some instances moved to political alignment with Communism. Three almost simultaneous events—the eruption of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the issuance of the Balfour Declaration—in one way or another claimed the allegiance of them all.

Halpern was generally less sociable than his literary colleagues and everyone who met him in the early immigrant years commented on the solitude which seemed particularly pronounced in him. His fellow poet, Mani Leib, recalled that “we, his friends, like all other Jewish immigrants, also bore the fear of this wondrous unknown called America. But somehow we . . . gave in, adapted ourselves, ‘ripened’ and gradually became . . . real Americans. Not Moishe Leib. He could never compromise or bend.” Though he contributed to the group’s many publications and little magazines, he was slightly apart from the others, the lone wolf, or, as the play on his name suggested, the brooding Lion, Moishe Leib. Almost alone among his fellow writers he failed to find steady work in the small factories, manual trades, or editorial offices where most of the others eventually made their living, and this economic precariousness, which continued practically without interruption until his death, contributed to his image as a troubling nonconformist, and to his artistic distance.

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Moishe Leib Halpern’s poetry was as distinctive as he. Against the general mood of literary quietude and resignation, of nostalgic reminiscence and submissiveness, Moishe Leib was strident and mocking, equally impatient with the past and the present. His verse sought out the disjunctive rhythms and the coarsest idioms of everyday speech. His images were shabby or grotesque. His first book, In New York, published in 1919, which established his reputation as one of the most interesting voices in the post-classical phase of Yiddish literature, took for its setting and subject the new world—the metropolis ironically reinterpreted as a modern garden of Eden.

The grass in this paradise can be seen only under a magnifying glass; its trees have scarcely seven leaves; the watchman throws you out before you have even done any wrong, and no birds sing.

Is this to be our garden now Just as is, in morning’s glow? What then? Not our garden?

The book opens with this guarded celebration of morning and concludes with a phantasmagoric epic, “A Night,” in which the horrors of World War I storm the poet’s consciousness until they elicit from him a broken series of dirges.

The range of contents of In New York, from romantic lyrics and dramatic narratives to parodies and apocalyptic visions, confirmed not only Halpern’s artistic maturity but the sudden authority of the new American Yiddish literature. Beginning in 1919, and largely because of Halpern’s work, the tide of influence in Yiddish poetry flowed mostly outward, from America to Europe, reversing its earlier direction.

In the same year Halpern married a young woman whom he had courted for several years, and for whom he continued to feel a lifelong, if not exclusive, affection. During the war, he had somewhat isolated himself by his firm stand against conscription, attacking even those Jews who joined the Jewish Brigade of the British army. But in 1922, in the golden afterglow of the Russian Revolution, when the Communist daily newspaper, the Freiheit, began publication in New York, Halpern entered upon a brief, heady period of popularity. From the first issue of April 2, he was a regular contributor, with a ready forum for his poems, incidental essays, occasional theater reviews, and literary criticism.

The association with the Freiheit did not solve Halpern’s financial worries because the newspaper paid little and irregularly. As its featured poet, however, Moishe Leib enjoyed a wide audience and an acknowledged importance. He was sent on Freiheit-sponsored lecture tours to Detroit, Boston, Toronto, Winnipeg, Cleveland, and Chicago, speaking on the question of a proletarian literature and trying to drum up subscribers. With the help of admirers in Cleveland he put out his second book, Di Goldene Pave (“The Golden Peacock”), in 1924. These poems, far more aggressive in tone and explicit in their social criticism than the earlier works, were praised or condemned, depending almost entirely on the political orientation of the reviewer. In Warsaw, a literary column sponsored by the influential weekly, Literarishe Bleter, asked leading Yiddish writers to name and discuss their favorite author. Moishe Leib Halpern figured prominently among the contributors’ nominees—indeed, it was rumored that the frequent appearance of his name in this column was the newspaper’s main reason for suspending the series, since its editors did not share the enthusiastic opinion of their contributors.

By the mid-20’s relations between Halpern and the editors of his own newspaper, which had grown increasingly strained, reached the point of mutual repudiation. As Soviet authority exerted ever greater control over local American activities, the Freiheit was expected to toe the party line, and its contributors were put under similar pressure to conform. Halpern’s poetry was becoming so complex that the “proletarian” readership for whom it was ostensibly intended complained of its incomprehensibility. On his speaking tours, Halpern said exactly what was on his mind. With some regret and some relief, he was dropped. This left Halpern without any steady income, and, in a period of polarization among the various Yiddish newspapers and cultural organizations, without a base of support. With his wife and three-year-old son, he moved to Los Angeles in 1927, but was back in New York before the year was out. He was caught in political limbo between the Left whose militancy he was among the first to recognize and repudiate, and the anti-Communists, whom he could not join because to do so would smack of careerism and “selling out.”

In 1929, when the Freiheit’s condoning of the Arab massacre of Jews in Hebron shocked many of its supporters into rebellion, a new nonaligned weekly, the Vokh, was briefly launched. Despite the inclusion on its editorial board of such well-known writers as H. Leivick and Lamed Shapiro, and despite a host of prestigious regular contributors, of whom Halpern was one, the paper was never able to achieve financial stability and folded after a year. Halpern, plagued by poverty and ill health, both of which he camouflaged as long as he could, died suddenly after an undiagnosed stomach ailment on September 2, 1932. His death, in the throes of the Depression, and against the background of European political dangers, touched off a moment of anguish that had Moishe Leib at its center but encompassed much more. Once he was dead, beyond the squabbles of Jewish cultural life, it was easy to recognize his marvelous talent. At the same time, his death, as if momentarily exposing the dreary backstage of art, revealed the pitiful isolation of American Yiddish writers, the ugly effects of Communist dogmatism on Jewish intellectual life, and the weakness of Jewish culture in America once it was no longer receiving fresh infusions of European immigrants. The shock of Halpern’s death momentarily illumined both the unexpected achievement and its impermanence, like a comet’s bright flash.

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By the time of his death, Halpern’s image as a poet had achieved an almost autonomous life, much as Sholem Rabinovitch’s fictional self-representation as Sholem Aleichem had done in the preceding generation. He was the smart-aleck immigrant, Moishe Leib, restless as a wolf and stagnant as a bear in his new surroundings, pursued by memory, spurred by a rage of conscience, and claimed by a talent that stuck to him as doggedly as cow manure to a bare foot. Though his language was startling and occasionally crude, Moishe Leib himself was discomfitingly familiar: he was the unassimilable element in the process of self-adaptation, the coarse particularism that could not be smoothed over, the mocking disclosure that the masquerade of refinement was uglier than what had gone before, and doomed to fail besides.

For most of the Yunge, poetry was a means of transforming their harsh and often degrading circumstances into something of intrinsic worth. Yiddish, a language heretofore associated with the rough prosaic task of daily survival, would be their instrument of purification, the inner flame of the poet’s aesthetic heat burning away the dross of experience to create perfect expression, a still life of distilled beauty. With the naive folk song as one model of purity, and the rarefied idealism of Russian mystics like Fyodor Sologub as another, the poets tried to bring their private perceptions and visions to sublimated expression.

Always in opposition, Moishe Leib reinvented himself instead as a street musician, drowning out the humiliations of immigrant life with his own raucous, aggressive ditties:

Children laugh in sport and fun But I don’t want to be undone Shake a leg, kids! Hop on by One more punch then, in the eye. One more spit! In spite of it With one jump everything is quit. Inured to all with an evil name From my pocket I pinch some bread And swig from my flask, down from my head The sweat pours and my blood’s aflame. So as if to break The drum, I bang And then I make The cymbals clang And round and round about I spin— Boom! Boom! Din-din-din! Boom! Boom! Din!

—(Translated by John Hollander)

The disharmonious drummer, recklessly uncouth, tears away at every false façade, especially at the romantic idealizations of his contemporaries.

Chief among Halpern’s targets was the ubiquitous nostalgia for the old country, the gilded memories of home. Actually, before World War I, Halpern’s first major published work had been a ten-part poem tracing the voyage of a young man In der fremd (“Away From Home”) and using sanctified images of Polish Jewry to cushion the encounter with the great stone city. But even as this poem was being celebrated as a masterpiece of the new exilic literature, Halpern turned against his erstwhile source of solace. The ruinous scope of World War I, with its destruction of so many home communities, opened in Halpern a new range of anger. While others began to invoke forgotten grandmothers in idyllic landscapes, and as popular Yiddish culture settled into sentimental longing for “Mayn shtetele Belt,” Halpern recreated his shtetl, Zlochow, as a den of hypocrisy, where the local pious man would sell the sun with its shine like a pig in a poke, and parents would expose their own daughter to public humiliation because of an indiscretion (whose issue is the angry speaker of the poem). It was as if Halpern were deliberately resharpening the original satiric edge of the 19th-century Yiddish literature, and recalling the restrictive harshness of traditional Jewish society against which the immigrant generation had rebelled.

Paradoxically, though these poems were attacked for their callousness, Halpern’s rough images were a better instrument of commemoration than the pastel reminiscences they mocked. The freshness of his antipathy made the shtetl come artistically alive, endowed its petty villainies with the ring of actuality. It was the elegy that Halpern hated, the hushed respect that comes into being only after its subject has died. In a not unusual poem by Halpern, a man watching a prostitute undress for him is sourly reminded of the way his grandfather used to pull his shirt over his head in the bathhouse, even though he had been given buttoned shirts that could be taken off less dramatically. The introduction here and there of these original, irreverent analogies were small, deliberate acts of sword-crossing within a general literary atmosphere of pious enshrinement.

The provocative nature of Halpern’s verse sometimes obscured its emotional and thematic profundity:

Evening sun. And, in evening cold, all the flies In the corners of the panes are numb, If not already dead. On the rim of a water glass, the last Is alone in the whole house. I speak: “Dear fly, Sing something of your far-off land.” I hear her weep—She answers: May her right leg wither If she plucks a harp By strange waters Or forgets the dear dung heap That had once been her homeland.

—(Translated by Nathan Halpern)

Despite the reduction of everything—of the globe and the journey across it, of the poet and his poetic tradition, of the Jewish exile and the eternity of Jewish longing—an unexpected compassion stirs. Diminished, corrupted, and almost extinct, a parody of former grandeur, the Jew and the poet still sing of their yearning. The swollen rhetoric must be deflated by Halpern’s impious effrontery before feeling can once again emerge.

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If the prettification of a national past provoked him to mockery, the denial of contemporary social reality stirred Halpern to even greater rage. He had no consistent, discernible social philosophy, but from the flow of his sympathies and antipathies a line of argument emerges. The acknowledged tyrant over earth’s creatures is the stomach. People, no less than mice, go to great lengths to protect their rations. It is therefore necessary, in any judicious assessment of the human condition, to recognize the daily marketplace scramble for “onions and cucumbers and prunes.” The crudity of this struggle is admittedly disheartening to aesthetes and other idealists. But as long as it remains the basis of life, the primacy of matter over spirit cannot be gainsaid. This is as close as Halpern comes to an outright endorsement of Marxism.

Halpern’s fierce independence precluded any fixed loyalty to system or party. There were times when he blistered like Mayakovsky, hurling insults at the goddamned intellectuals with their white hands and at the cowardly enemies of the great experiment of dictated social equality. His poem on the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the anarchists whose trial for murder was used by the Communists as a rallying point against the American system, is exceptionally poignant, an expression of genuine outrage. There were also poems like “A Striker Song,” echoing the old sweatshop complaints of oppressed workers against their bloodsucking bosses, which were set to music to be sung at union rallies.

But essentially, Halpern looked up the skirts of every orthodoxy. The Russian Revolution was an accident. “Had Lenin been the father of a child, or better yet of five children, as he was himself one of five, the Czar would still be ruling Russia.” This certainty, based on Halpern’s exceptionally powerful instincts of paternal love and responsibility, gives the lie to historical determinism. Though Halpern enjoyed his reputation as a “proletarian poet,” and took pride that the landlord’s painter, sent in to touch up his apartment, knew of his work, he had no confidence in the proletariat as such, scorning anyone who could make a virtue or accept the harness of steady labor. All absolute claims are comical, whether human or divine. In “The Tale of the World,” a great king ordains the conquest of all the world, only to discover that it is far too large to fit into the royal palace:

The courtiers, meanwhile, hold that the world Should be kept out there under guard. But the king has turned a deathly gray, Fearing the world will get wet some day When the rain falls hard. But the plow in the field, And the cobbler’s leather sole, And the mouse in his hole, Laugh till they cry, Laugh till they nearly die. The world’s still there, outside.

—(Translated by John Hollander)

Reality defies metaphysical or political systematization, and the spirit most authentically attuned to life must be duly profane.

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Halpern’s resistance to the accepted sentiments and postures of his time comes to sharpest expression on the national question, not so much because of Halpern’s identification as a Jew, which was forever touched by irony, but because of his passionate distrust of the “goyim.” His unkind views of Christians were disturbing to every segment of the Jewish readership: to those with faith in American tolerance who did not want to be reminded of religious divisiveness, and to those preaching the international brotherhood of workers. But for Halpern, the pretense of brotherliness where none existed was a particularly corrupting form of self-deception. It required, first, a falsification of the past; then, a willful stupidity in the present. What is more, it was inevitably accompanied by self-hatred, of which the modern Jew already had more than his fair share.

In his own case, the poet traced his encounter with hostile Christianity back to childhood incidents, such as the special treatment he was accorded by his Polish classmates:

A golden cross was thrust at me to kiss A second classmate smeared a cross over my back. And when my youthful heart could tolerate no more, The teacher noted it, and turned me out the door.

Halpern acknowledges that after this and similar incidents he went out into the world and learned that Jesus brought his blood as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind. But even so, he could not learn to love those pious folk whose faith in Jesus’ blood expresses itself in the pursuit of his.

Eventually Halpern’s intuitive rebellion evolved into a philosophical distaste for Christianity’s justification of suffering and death. Christianity is seen to be doubly deceitful: theoretically, because it falsifies the absolute distinctions between life and death; practically, in its violent exercise of the religion of love. Some of Halpern’s poems poke gentle fun at Christian spirituality, as when Jesus speaks to the children, explaining that all in the world is his—with the single exception of them. Elsewhere, in poems like “The Jewish Blacksmith,” the Christian is the wanton and stupid murderer of the Jew, refusing his civil companionship and repudiating his assistance:

He’s got himself an alehouse where he whoops it up and drinks He’s got himself a churchhouse where he suppli- cates and stinks And that’s all he needs—that lout, my neighbor.

Appalled by such blunt characterization of European peasantry, the Communists accused Moishe Leib of fomenting pogroms, a charge that seemed only to fuel his attack. His style grew more crabbed, but his aim remained sure:

In the Soviet Union . . . no sooner does the rooster crow than someone must begin worshiping the red divinity, blessed be he, because otherwise no one is allowed to hang around with his hands in the mud—like the Israelites in Egypt. There is only this difference: there, they kneaded children into the walls, whereas in Sovietland you have only to reshape yourself. You become a new Adam—without even a figleaf. For the robust goyim this is surely a piece of good luck, but for our kind . . . well, I’ve heard that they skulk around with their hands over their genitals, more atremble now before the puniest little Gentile than they ever were before.

This was Halpern with his gloves off, striking out in both directions at once. Seeing matters plain, “without even a figleaf,” he recognized under the revolutionary camouflage the persistent hold of despotism and anti-Semitism, and the modern forms of Jewish enslavement and self-enslavement.

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Outside the tiny island of his wife and son, Halpern did not make his peace with very much, least of all with himself. Unfortunately, his reputation as an upstart and rebel itself became something of a cliché, so that even his most attentive readers did not note the deepening strain of pessimism that went along with the increasing difficulty of his later work. The similes and metaphors which had always been an important feature of Halpern’s style began to take on a life of their own, growing homerically, and overshadowing narrative or thematic development. At the same time the poems came to be set out along a line of rational argument, with prepositions and conjunctions—although, because, despite, notwithstanding, but, if only, yet—like so many signposts, pretending to guide the poem to its firm, logical, inevitable conclusion. The tension between the reasoned form of the discourse and the wild density of its images, between the homey, old-world stock of references, and the bleak, modern situation to which they were applied, heightened the anxiety of this poetry, as if it were straining to achieve clarity against an overwhelming emotional tide.

Indeed, there seems little doubt that Halpern was struggling for clarity. To those who told him they could not understand his latest work, he answered with incredulity but tried with rough patience to explain. Many of these poems take the form of exhortations, public lectures, notes of advice to his son, where within the thickets of private allusions he warns against war, mourns poverty, and decries its corresponding evil, petty greed.

But the futility of this effort was also his theme. Halpern had been drawn to Yiddish in a milieu of cultural vitality, when writers were prized, perhaps not with sufficient critical detachment, but personally, for what they represented to particular segments of emerging modern Jewry, and to the emerging image of a modern Jewry with a literature of its own. It was within this nurturing atmosphere of literary relevance that Moishe Leib matured, only to find that he had overshot the mark. His dazzling complexity was lost on his fellow American Jews, who grew plainly pragmatic under the pressure of local and world events.

Who was responsible for this failed opportunity? Halpern saw that the widening gap between the artist and his natural constituency could be attributed to the artist. He made merciless fun of the poets who want “the words they sing to be as delicate as the church carvings of the Middle Ages, and as pure as the yearning of a flutist in the evening.” When he turns to the housepainter sitting beside him in the subway and asks whether this is what he too wants, the man moves nervously away. Halpern speculates that had he asked the painter whether he wanted a hot bath after work, the man would have known how to respond.

Nevertheless, Halpern understood from his own failed experiment as a public poet that however he might frame his questions, he was beyond the reach of the housepainter. Yiddish had developed a high culture at the moment when its speakers were riveted, as never before, to the struggle for survival. In America, the comic impotence of Yiddish before the hegemony of English cast the language into the role of “the little Jew” within Judaism itself. To put one’s faith in Yiddish was to play the fool, to withstand the reality of acculturation. As one of the chief chroniclers of the immigrant marketplace, Halpern knew the revealed helplessness of his language, and with it of his writing. He quotes a fictitious uncle who says that “if he were a diplomat, he would demand that all declarations of war henceforth be issued in Yiddish only. This would fairly guarantee lasting peace in the world.” In the foreground of this self-mocking statement is the powerless Yiddish utterance. In the background, less humorously, are the actual nation-states, with all too much power for their evil ends.

Despite his grim appraisal of the fate of the poet in modern times, of Yiddish among the Jews, and of Jews among the Gentiles, Halpern stayed almost free of self-pity. The energy of his anger and hatred gave wings to his imagination, made him endlessly inventive. Halpern sharpened the teeth of American Yiddish literature. Having cut himself loose from Jewish pieties, he did not seek shelter among any of the alternate orthodoxies, whether aesthetic or political. In a sense his work reflects the energy of the immigrant generation that went out “on its own” with all the impudence and improvisation of those with nothing to lose.

Unlike English writers like Abraham Cahan, whose work undertakes to interpret the Jewish immigrant to the non-Jews, Halpern was unshackled by any external constraint. In him one can find the boldness and self-reliance that was so much in evidence among immigrant Jewish businessmen, but so little manifest in their cultural spokesmen. There are those who found him too aggressive, arguing that his joy in combat ruined the finer judgment required of art. What makes Halpern unusual, even among the aggressive Jewish writers, is that his opposition to others remained appreciably greater than his antagonism toward his own.

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Note

For the English reader, the best examples of Moishe Leib Hal-pern’s poetry can be found in A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969; Schocken [paper], 1976). The Golden Peacock, edited by Joseph Leftwich (Robert Anscombe & Co., 1939), contains some translations of Halpern by the Canadian poet A.M. Klein. Ruth Whitman’s Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry (October House, 1966) includes three poems by Halpern with the Yiddish text and facing translation. Individual poems by Halpern have appeared in COMMENTARY (November 1947, October 1949, and June 1950, translated by Jacob Sloan), and in the Kenyan Review (Winter 1979, translated by Kathryn Hellerstein).

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