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qzwrites · 9 months

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Maksim has a conversation with Baroness Delara Petrov

"ani i thought this was like. a rewrite of the warrior's apprentice to be a romance novel" look, i'm clearly out in the weeds here, i've got like. spin-off novellas already written and i'm only like halfway through the warrior's apprentice plot. idk.

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Maksim had not been trying to seduce his distant cousin and his new spouse. In fact, they'd apparently been attempting to seduce him. A married couple hadn't tried to seduce Maksim since he was a great deal younger and less well-known to be effectively cut off from the Kasharik family coffers. And those couples, of course, had not been distant cousins, except in the way all nobility on this inbred planet was.

Yes, obviously he had found Jaz attractive, and obviously he had thought about the likelihood that ze would have been up to fooling around if ze hadn't been engaged and then married to Lord Petrov, or as he now insisted Maksim call him, cousin Sasha. Jaz was a good-looking ambi who had specifically sought out Maksim and his advice on how to fuck with the binarist hetero-patriarchy of this benighted planet; Maksim was Kavagoran enough to find certain types of recklessness very attractive, and queer enough that one of those types of recklessness was disregard for pointless social mores.

He was somewhat less prepared to find Lord Cousin Aleksander Petrov attractive, because the two conflicting pictures he'd had of the man since they were children were neither of them appealing. Lord Petrov's whelp, grandfather had always called him, and that was one of the more polite ways the main family talked about Sasha. Maksim hadn't needed to get too old before he doubted most aspects of that portrait--mutation was not the right word to refer to something that had happened as a result of toxin exposure in utero, after all, and only a complete fool could believe Admiral Emil Petrov's son would be feeble-minded even before you factored in the Gnillesian scientist wife--but he'd had very little reason to doubt the impression of Aleksander Petrov as a boring noble scion out to uphold traditional Kavagoran values as much as possible, as though that would ever compensate for his visible differences in a society that loathed the visibly disabled more than anything. Aleksander had his own personal bodyguard, rode around the city on a horse when he had broken legs, knew all the members of the Palace staff and upper government personally, and went immediately into the Officer's Academy after the relevant birthday. Classic boring scion of a noble Kavagoran house behavior.

Maksim couldn't deny it seemed like the smartest move available to Aleksander, since Kavagor was always going to be hostile to him, and relying on the nobility's nepotism and his father's position had a long and storied history, but he didn't think it was very interesting. Maksim, after all, also found himself a person Kavagor was always going to be hostile to despite his lineage, although admittedly the idea of sucking up to his family's political allies was a lot more distasteful than sucking up to Emil Petrov's political allies. Still, Maksim might have tried a bit harder to be less obviously queer and skated by in the finest tradition of undesirable noble spares, but the thought of doing so was just...tiresome. He thought anyone who did try that approach must also be tiresome.

But Aleksander had surprised him and a great deal of Kavagoran high society, bringing home as his betrothed Jaz, a Gnillesian ambi, and perforce outing himself as very much not a shining example of Kavagoran heterosexuality. Maksim suspected, after spending only a little time with Jaz, that his perception of Lord Petrov must have been very wrong indeed, because there was no way Jaz Arroyo, Gnillesian ambi mercenary who delighted in fucking with people's expectations, would fall for a man like Maksim had always supposed Aleksander to be.

Maksim might have had a more accurate picture of Sasha, he thought, if cousin Yakov had not always dismissed talk of him with, "Oh, Sasha," and a wave of his hand. He'd read that dismissal as agreement that Aleksander was boring, instead of what it actually was: Yakov not wanting to get into a discussion of his fascinating and potentially far more interesting cousin. Maksim guessed Yakov had heard more than his fair share of comparisons to Aleksander, who was brilliant and knew all the rules, plus how to manipulate them in his favor. In fact, Maksim now suspected Yakov had sometimes been attempting to use Maksim's brains against Sasha's, in attempts to get one over on his cousin. He had his doubts about the effectiveness of those attempts, now that he'd met Sasha.

Although it depended on the arena, he supposed, because Yakov had been a lot more successful at getting Maksim into his bed without weeks of dancing around the subject. Yakov wasn't even interested in Maksim, except as a potential source of non-judgmental dick.

(That was another thing Maksim had not intended to do, not least because Yakov was straight, but by their no-doubt appalled ancestors, it had been some of the best sex of Maksim's life. He couldn't bring himself to regret being wrung dry by a strapping young military officer, even if it was Yakov.)

Maksim climbed out of Sasha and Jaz's bed, plucked one of Jaz's silk robes from the wardrobe, and wrapped it around himself. It wasn't quite late enough for the sun to rise, but it was late enough that most people would probably call it early rather than late. However, Maksim had worked up quite an appetite in between the phenomenal dinner he'd consumed with the Petrovs and now, presumably because hours of vigorous sex with an attractive newlywed couple required lots of energy, and Maksim knew from long experience that he would be unable to fall back asleep without eating something.

He'd been attending functions at Petrov House ever since that first outing with Jaz and Helen to buy Jaz some appropriately gender-fucky Kavagoran clothing, so he knew his way around well enough. He traced his way back to the dining room, and from there it was easy to find the kitchen.

Maksim knew the Petrovs' cook had the mornings off after dinner parties, and he knew enough about traditional manners to guess that Baron Petrov still considered having Maksim over for dinner a dinner party, so he expected to be alone in the kitchen. But he was not.

Sitting at the very scuffed table that he knew must serve as the dining table for the Petrov staff was Baroness Delara Petrov herself, wrapped in a much more worn silk robe, sipping something out of a mug, reading on an old, over-sized tablet.

She looked up as Maksim stopped in the doorway, and smiled at him. "Ah," she said, "I wondered when Jaz would manage to get Sasha to just say something to you."

Maksim fought back a blush. Why Delara Petrov was so much more intimidating than any number of battleaxe baronesses that had the rest of the noble class cowed, he couldn't say, but he suspected it had to do with her operating on an entirely different set of rules that Maksim wasn't sure he knew. Oh, Jaz was Gnillesian, and Maksim had plenty of Gnillesian friends and acquaintances online, but they were all his age, not his mother's age. "Ze didn't get to," Maksim admitted. "I got tired of wondering."

Baroness Petrov chuckled. She gestured with her mug. "There's hot chocolate in the samovar," she said. "And Ma Eshman usually leaves sandwiches in the fridge."

"Whatever you pay her, it's not enough," Maksim said, making his way to the fridge.

Baroness Petrov laughed. "Enough to keep Sveta and Viktor from poaching her," she said. "Which isn't cheap."

Sveta was Yakov's mother, the pre-eminent socialite of the capital, and Viktor, of course, was the Emperor. Maksim supposed they offered some fairly stiff competition for good staff. As he grabbed a pair of wrapped sandwiches off a plate in the fridge, he said, "Well, perhaps it is enough then."

"So were you planning on sleeping with this entire generation of Petrovs?" Baroness Petrov asked mildly after Maksim had poured himself a mug of chocolate. He was glad she had waited until after he had the hot liquid set down, at least.

"Haven't I already?" Maksim asked. "Sasha and Yakov are both only children."

"Well, I know he's hardly more related to Emil than you are, but we did raise Viktor," Baroness Petrov said. "After his parents died, at any rate."

Maksim nearly crushed the sandwich he had just picked up. "Ah," he said. Yes, technically, he supposed the Emperor was a large part of both Sasha and Yakov's childhood stories. He was older than them by a few years, which Maksim thought had probably been a bigger deal as children than it was now, but how many other children had the Emperor even been allowed to spend time around?

"Although in that case, I suppose I also ought to include Helen," Baroness Petrov said thoughtfully. "Which would mean you're only halfway there, instead of two-thirds."

"I think I would rather take my chances with the Emperor than Helen," Maksim said, which he had half a second to regret before Baroness Petrov snorted.

"Jaz is right," Baroness Petrov said, still grinning. "You're the only remotely sensible Kavagoran I've ever met."

Maksim asked, "Your husband isn't sensible?"

Baroness Petrov rolled her eyes. "Does a man who gives his entire life over to Kavagoran politics seem sensible to you?" she asked.

Maksim snorted. "Well," he said, because he had often thought trying to change their ridiculous system from the inside seemed like the most difficult approach. He had a sip of his chocolate before he said, "I really should just be trying to find Gnillesian expats to befriend, shouldn't I?"

Baroness Petrov laughed again.

#kavagor #delara petrov #maksim kasharik #probably after this conversation maks is going to start calling her delara

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the-turtles-shelf · 10 months

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From Page to Screen: A Critical Look at Call Me by Your Name

A little prologue: Ha! Finally started with this one. I finished Call Me by Your Name before my sat exam, which was intended to help me perform better in the exam. And it did! I got an ideal score this time, and although there's still space for improvement, I want to express a slight appreciation for this book.

In summary, Call Me by Your Name can be described as a lament and ethereal love story that evokes intense emotions and a vivid summer atmosphere. However, despite these strengths, the book ultimately fails to deliver a meaningful message or substantial content.

Initially, my admiration for the book was largely due to its successful movie adaptation, which captivated audiences worldwide. However, upon watching the film, I was left feeling disappointed and confused. The story's sole focus on a brief summer romance between a teenager and an older man seemed superficial and lacking in depth. Nonetheless, the film's stunning visuals and impressive cinematography were undeniable, and its portrayal of a charming Italian town, complete with beaches, lakes, villas, peaches, pools, and bicycles, left me enamored. I instantly fell in love with the town where the shooting took place (I searched and it's called Crema) and bought a few posters to put them on the bedroom walls.

Despite the book's similarities to the film, nothing is learned despise the author's excessive focus on the environment and the protagonist's thoughts, and do little to advance the story or contribute to any deeper themes. Compared to classic and modern romance literature, Call Me by Your Name lacks the same level of depth and complexity. For example, novels like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, which have been a source of inspiration and spiritual guidance for me since childhood, feature independent, intelligent female characters who break free from traditional stereotypes. While the inclusion of homosexuality in Call Me by Your Name may contribute to greater understanding and acceptance of this minority group, it ultimately seems to serve as little more than a hook to draw in readers. If the main characters were switched to heterosexuality, it would not have attracted so much attention.

As a novel, character development is of paramount importance. Unfortunately, the main characters of Elio and Oliver lack the humanity and complexity that would make them truly engaging. While they are portrayed as intelligent and academic, their behaviors often seem driven more by base instincts and emotions rather than a deeper understanding of themselves or the world around them. It's hard to find any detailed description of Elio or Oliver in the entire book other than their relationship development. Their appearance, personal stories, and beliefs barely occur in the book. It's fine with their emotions, and actually one thing what I considered to be attractive and engaging.

One aspect of Call Me by Your Name that stood out to me was the book's exploration of the complexities of human desire. While the story's central romance may seem superficial at first glance, the book delves into the nuances of attraction, intimacy, and the emotional connections that can develop between people. Through Elio and Oliver's relationship, the author portrays the yearning and longing that can drive us to seek out connections with others, even when those connections may be fleeting or ultimately unfulfilling. In this sense, the book serves as a powerful meditation on the human experience of love and desire.

I am open to all kinds of criticisms and discussions, please comment below!

Welcome to follow The Turtles Shelf on Blogger and Medium! We continue to create more high-quality and helpful reviews for your book selections!

#timothee chamalet #armie hammer #call me by your name #books #books and literature #book review

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cyoc49 · 3 years

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Auto Pilot

James was 18 and already shaping up to be a disappointment in life. After spending four years of high school slacking off, doing drugs, and not caring about anything, he now found himself a freshman in college with little prospect of where to go. He was attending the local community college - he hadn’t even wanted to do that, but his parents threatened to kick him out and cut off funding if he didn’t do some higher education. Now he found himself wandering aimlessly around campus. He had no idea what his major would be, no plans of any kind, really. He wanted to stay as distant from this college experience as possible.

To be honest, James did sometimes think about his lack of aim in life. The truth was he truly did fear committing to anything in life, for the risk of making the wrong choice, and so invented a “don’t care” persona to cope with his lack of place in the world.

James arrived at his dorm, and made his way upstairs to his room. He shared it with some guy, Clide. They didn’t talk much. As he got to the door of his room, he noticed a package sitting in front of the door. He picked it up and inspected it. Relatively small, lightweight, addressed to him. Odd. Usually this type of thing would be sent to the mail room. As James entered his room, he put the package down on his desk. Clide wasn’t there, he was probably at class.

“Might as well check this thing out,” James said to himself as he opened the box. Inside was a big red button reading AUTO PILOT.

Whatever he had been expecting, it certainly wasn’t that. It was one of those comically oversized buttons like you saw in movies. He had never seen one this big in person. And what did “Auto Pilot” mean?

Looking back into the box, James found a small booklet labeled “User’s Manual”. He picked it up and read the contents:

“INCREDIBLE AUTO PILOT BUTTON

Life can be exhausting. School, jobs, bills, food, house troubles, and countless other decisions have to be made and executed every day. At the end of the day, is all the grind really worth it? Wouldn’t you rather take the easy route? The better route?

The Auto Pilot button is simple. Press it, and your life will be set to “auto pilot”. We’ve spent decades studying the behavior patterns of successful people, and have created a formula by which we have the correct response to every obstacle and issue you will ever face in your life. Job troubles? You’ll always be a hard worker who knows how to get what he wants. Social issues? You’ll have the right line for every occasion. You’ll be more outgoing, more ambitious, and best of all: you don’t have to do any of it. When you’re on auto pilot. You can sit back and watch as your body makes all the right decisions for you. One press is all that’s needed.

Enjoy your life on auto pilot!”

James checked the back to see if there was anything else. He didn’t know what to think. He almost wanted to laugh. It had to be a joke, but the tone of the pamphlet was so certain that it could also be the delusions of some eccentric billionaire. Ah well, at least he finally had something to go on his barren desk. He slid the auto pilot button to the back corner of his desk, then paused. He pressed down on the button, just to see what those big red buttons really feel like.

Unfortunately for James, one press is all that’s needed.

*click*

As the button clicked down, James’ body slumped.

His eyes went dead.

And then he suddenly smiled.

And he kept smiling.

James was 22 and life was looking pretty great. After pressing that button his freshman year, James completely turned his life around, as if overnight. He suddenly started paying attention in all his classes. He began going to the gym, and joined an intramural soccer team. By the end of his freshman year, James had gained 25 lbs of muscle, going from a boney 150 to a beefy 175. He also ended his year, with a 4.0 GPA, and used it to apply to the local state school. It just offered him more opportunities than community college, and had better networking circles. James got in handily, and that fall found himself moving across state to university.

Almost as soon as he landed on campus, James continued his life climbing. He declared majors in international business and finance, knowing the money opportunities that lay there. The course load was nothing for James, as he always worked on homework at maximum efficiency. In fact, he had time left over to join a club lacrosse team.

Through his finance classes and lacrosse practices, James came to realize the social circle he needed to join if he wanted to get ahead: The rich preps. They were the ones who exuded the aura of success he wanted to project, and the ones with the connections to jobs after college. He modeled himself after them. He began to dress like them, in khakis and pastels, and leather loafers. Vineyard Vines, Ralph Lauren, and Brooks Brothers invaded his closet. He began to manage his hair, combing it into a neat side part every morning with pomade. He researched golf news, followed stock market trends, so he would have topics to talk about with these preps.

Slowly, by bringing up the points he now new about with classmates, and by projecting the image of a successful young preppy professional, James came to be accepted as one of their own. One of the boys. His ultimate dream. From that point it was easy: James was Mr All American, effortlessly witty and charming. By the time he was a senior, James was on fire. He had served as captain of his lacrosse team for the past 2 years, was top of his business classes. He had met several of his new friend’s fathers (all of them CEOs), and in most cases the fathers ended up liking James more than their own children. James was a professional in all aspects, and he did it all with a bright, mindless smile.

The one thing James hadn’t accomplished in college was finding a girlfriend. Of course he’d had several offers, but he never took a woman to call his own. Every once in a while he found himself staring at the guys on the lacrosse team while they changed, but these were only fleeting feelings. Certainly not the most efficient way to live his life.

But this didn’t matter to James. In just a few months he would be graduating top of his business program, and thanks to the father of a friend he had a job lined up at Plexicorp, one of the biggest marketing chains in the nation. James was only 22 and he was a consummate professional. Is this what a perfect life looks like?

James was 30 and on top of the world. After graduation he went right into work at Plexicorp, and immediately assumed the stereotype of a “young urban professional”. His work ethic was tireless, and through a mixture of countless golf matches and the perfect water cooler humor, James quickly became the most popular guy in his office, and the model employee. He rose in the ranks quickly, and was now a regional manager with a six figure salary at only 30.

With extra cash to spare, James had gone to work giving his life an upgrade. He bought clothes from extremely expensive brands, though sticking to his preppy classics. He got salon quality pomade for the classic styling of his hair (which had only gotten lighter over the years), and routinely had dermatology and dental work done to keep his face looking as fresh as possible. He bought a serene little cookie cutter McMansion out in the suburbs. Even with all this going on, he perfectly worked time into his schedule for gym and nutrition, keeping his body in peak shape even as he got older. At age 30, James was quickly approaching a DILF.

With the perfect job, the perfect clothes, and the perfect body, you’d think James would have quickly found a suitable wife, or at least someone looking for a QoL upgrade. But even over the years, James still never found himself fully committed to women, even though he knew starting a family young would be most productive in the long term. In a particular night of conflicting emotions, James made his way to a leather bar on the outskirts of town, where a nice 50 year old man with a beard and a harness taught James what he had always known. He was gay. And he loved it.

There must have been a hole in the Auto Pilot system. Certainly heterosexuality would be most efficient for a successful life, but somehow James’ base feelings came through. Of course he had no way of knowing what was going on in his body. All he knew was what was most efficient, and what felt best were in opposition to each other right now.

Eventually, with a smile, the straight James won out. After his encounter with the leather clad friend, he quickly found himself not thinking about sex at all. A life of chastity was certainly good enough for him. Letting sex be for pleasure hardly worked out, as we see. Sex should be for utility. Creating the family. And to get a family, he needed a wife.

The following weekend James took a trip to his local country club, and after a bit of scouting, chatting, and brown-nosing, James was introduced to Amber, an interior decorator. She wasn’t the most brilliant with a conversation, but she was single and looking to marry and that was enough for James. They went on several incredibly vanilla movie and dinner dates, where hand holding was the most action either of them got. After 8 months, they married and moved in together.

Now standing here at 30, James looked in the mirror. He felt his decently-sized chest push against the cotton undershirt and mint green button up sitting on top. His rotund and muscular ass was perfectly wrapped by his khakis. He looked down at the counter of his bathroom. Marble. With plenty of space. Even with his tricky sex situation, James had to admit he had a great body and a great life. He had made (almost) all the right decisions, and was reaping plenty of the rewards. As far as living life, this was a pretty good way to do it.

James was 40, and life was perfect. The shareholders of Plexicorp were so impressed by his keen business instincts and impressive management, and at only 32 offered to make him the youngest shareholder in the history of the company. From there he went from “pretty well off” to “disgustingly wealthy”. James knew how to invest his money well, and from the moment of that promotion never worried about money again. He moved into a mansion in the nice part of town and upgraded his wardrobe to suits, suits, and more suits. Now that he was one of the elites, he had to project as such. He kept his appearance as clean and refined as possible at all times. He loved to flash off in a khaki suit (a nod to his preppy roots), and with his now perfectly-blonde hair, he was the absolute image of refinement. He had certainly aged like fine wine, and there was no doubt about it: James was a DILF.

The only sore spot in his life has been Amber. After years of trying and failing to conceive due to lack of excitement, Amber eventually asked to file for divorce. James knew he had to grant her this, and handled the proceedings quietly (and generously) to let go of her gently. At 35, James was finally meeting a dead end that his Auto Pilot skills were unable to find a solution to.

Until he had an investment meeting with a local stock analyst named Robert

Robert was an image of success, beauty, and sharpness that James had seen in only one other man: himself. It was almost unnatural how beautiful and crisp Robert was. His perfectly parted hair. His well-fit gray suit and polished dress shoes. As James eyed this man up and down, it dawned on him. Robert must have made every decision perfectly in life to look like an image of success in his his 30s, because he did. Robert had help from Auto Pilot too. And judging by the lack of a ring on his finger, and the way he was eyeing James in the exact same way James was eyeing him, James had a suspicion that Robert had the same problem he had.

Robert was someone whose every value, choice, and lifestyle matched up with James’.

James knew exactly the right decision to make.

The two flashed each other perfect smiles and firm handshakes, and although the topic of their first meeting stayed on stocks, it was clear there was a mutual spark between the two. They quickly decided that weekly investment meetings would be best, which turned into lunch meetings twice per week, which turned into dinner, which turned into something much more. The two took it slow, to be safe, but it was clear they were disgustingly perfect for each other. On Tuesdays and Thursdays they met up at the gym at 6AM to exercise together. They had quickly learned they wore the same suit size, and exchanged looks on several occasions. Robert taught James just how he achieved his razor sharp part, and James taught Robert how to match pocket squares to outfits. After a few years of dating they married in a picturesque countryside summer wedding, and both knew this one would last.

Now standing here at 40, James could genuinely say life was perfect. He had gone from an aimless place in his life to the top of the world, and although it had been a bumpy road, he was now with the perfect partner living a life of gentility. Checking his suited image in the mirror one last time, James left the bathroom and walked to the front door where Robert was waiting. The two had plans to attend an orchestra show and get dinner at the nicest restaurant in town.

James flashed Robert the perfect smile, and Robert returned the favor.

“Ready to go, darling?” James asked the man of his dreams.

“Of course, love.” Robert replied in a smooth tenor. The two briefly joined to kiss, before heading outside where the driver was waiting to take them into the city for another wonderful night.

#gaytf #preppy #gay #preppy tf #preppytf #stepfordization #straight to gay #gay to straight #suittf #suitandtie

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strvngcrs · 4 years

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『 adam brody. forty. cis male. he/him. 』 oh heavens, is that DANIEL ABRAMS from FAIR LANE i see roaming around mapleview? minnie may’s always calling them -BROODING & -EVASIVE. i happen to think they’re not that bad! they’re a pretty cool HORROR AUTHOR and every time i’ve seen them, they’ve always been +DEBONAIR & +ELOQUENT. i hope i see them around again!

classically rolls in ridiculously late bc i forgot i had to work last night & then proceeded to sleep in today wooo !! good afternoon ghouls, it’s ya girl maia, finally here to deliver the definition of hot mess with good intentions.

GENERAL

FULL NAME. daniel elijah abrams.

NICKNAMES. dan, danny.

AGE & BIRTHDATE. 40 years old ; may 4, 1980.

GENDER & PRONOUNS. cis male ; he/him.

ORIENTATION. heterosexual.

MARITAL STATUS. estranged.

RELIGION. jewish ( non-practicing ).

OCCUPATION. horror author.

INSPIRATION. bill denbrough ( it ), donnie darko ( donnie darko ), lucas scott ( one tree hill ), stephen king.

PHYSICAL

HAIR COLOUR. black.

EYE COLOUR. dark brown.

BUILD. athletic.

MARKS. freckles scarcely spread across his entire body.

TATTOOS. none.

PIERCINGS. none.

HEIGHT. 5'11".

FACECLAIM. adam brody.

PERSONALITY

ZODIAC. taurus.

ALIGNMENT. chaotic neutral.

HOGWARTS. ravenclaw.

LABEL. the arcane.

POSITIVE TRAITS. cheeky, debonair, driven, eloquent, resilient, solicitous.

NEGATIVE TRAITS. brooding, evasive, inquisitive, sarcastic, stoic, stubborn.

HOBBIES. smokes like a chimney while writing until he forgets what day of the week it is, dabbles in hunting & fishing (thanks @ his dad), labels all crime / thriller genres as ‘predictable’ but continues to watch them, obsesses over & relentlessly criticizes his own work, drinks heavily & passionately plays moonlight sonata or fur elise as if he’s betoven’s disciple.

BACKGROUND

PLACE OF BIRTH. california.

CURRENT RESIDENCE. mapleview, north carolina.

NATIONALITY. american.

ETHNICITY. ashkenazi jewish.

PARENTS. judith miller & mr abrams.

SIBLINGS. mia miller.

BIRTH ORDER. eldest.

CHILDREN. penelope abrams.

EDUCATION. university of california, los angeles; bachelor of arts in english.

LANGUAGES. english, some spanish & french.

HISTORY

EARLY LIFE. born to THE judith miller and some newspaper editor, daniel was raised by the latter and notoriously abandoned by the former. well, not completely abandoned - there’s an old shoebox containing a few letters as proof - but that was the only source of communication in their otherwise absent relationship. while little danny boy didn’t fully understand why he couldn’t see his mother, he sought out an alternative solution by watching her movies. his father wasn’t aware, at first, and dan created this extravagant fantasy of the person he thought she was based on the roles she played. however, once papa abrams found out his son was watching these movies (which were probably not fit for children in the first place lmao oop), he begrudgingly revealed the bitter truth. being forced to come to terms with the fact that his own mother willingly abandoned him with his father, daniel didn’t fully understand what it meant; he couldn’t properly process why. the hurt of absent mother was expressed more out of anger, feeling as though there must have been something wrong with him. there were fewer and fewer letters sent to judith until he gave up altogether and thus, dan’s out of control behavior was born.

TEENAGE FEVER. SUICIDE MENTION TW. he struggled in school. his emotions betrayed him. instead of relishing a happy childhood, daniel found himself pushing everyone away, getting into fights, sneaking out late at night to run around the city streets with his friends and get into all sorts of trouble with them. he couldn’t count on his hands how many times the police picked him up and brought him to his dad’s doorstep. it only got worse once one of his best friends was found dead, written off as a suicide, though it didn’t add up in dan’s eyes and seemed so much more sinister. the young man was nearly deemed to be a lost cause, until he discovered his passion for writing.

language arts or literature was the last thing anyone would ever think to group with daniel abrams. but his english teacher noticed how well he could articulate his thoughts and feelings on paper, and submitted one of his pieces to a writing contest, which earned dan the win and a cash prize. bewildered by a talent he hadn’t even realized was in him, daniel embraced it. he started writing in a journal ( which he kept safely tucked away beneath the mattress of his bed ), documenting every feeling and thought as a way to express his emotions in a more productive manner. this talent earned him a full ride scholarship to ucla with a major in literature and plans of diving into some sort or creative writing career or perhaps becoming an english teacher, to follow in the footsteps of his high school teacher who he came to idolize.

mere days into his freshman year, however, his high school sweetheart showed up in the middle of the night at his dorm with a positive pregnancy test. it was then the chaotic world as he knew it turned a new leaf, revealing a silver lining in the form of their daughter, penelope, who daniel hadn’t a clue, just yet, would save him. and so a shotgun wedding was quickly planned around the pair, both families either completely supportive or in utter disbelief. it was quick, it was cheap(ish), and it was stressful as all heck. but they were young, and in love, and were looking forward to starting a family together, despite it being a little earlier than initially planned.

“ADULT”HOOD. fast forward five years, and they’re signing divorce papers. fortunately, it wasn’t messy. the two had simply grown apart as they matured in their respective ways, and remaining together was only causing a rift to develop between the two. the last thing they wanted, for the sake of their daughter, was built up resentment to tear the little family apart. his wife, who daniel initially thought to be the love of his life, blossomed into an absolute goddess; she was ambitious and knew exactly what she wanted. daniel, on the other hand, was still somewhat caught up in his ‘bad boy’ habits of drinking excessively and his career was still pretty up in the air. the two just didn’t compliment each others’ lifestyles anymore.

daniel moved out but remained in california, settling for a bachelor’s apartment where he was able to have penelope every weekend. during this time, he finally cracked down and worked on finishing a novel he’d started years prior. within a year, he found a publisher who took interest in his grotesque works, and by the time daniel was twenty seven, his first bestseller hit the shelves, changing his life for the better with the ability to provide for his daughter without stress of landing another odd job ever again.

as his fame increased, so did his desire to slink back into the shadows away from the limelight. at first, he enjoyed the wholesome book signings by day and grungy celebratory benders by night. but it grew old pretty fast and he certainly didn’t want to end up as another washed up shmuck. so, on a whim, daniel decided to move out of california completely, removing himself from the toxic lifestyle he’d grown accustomed to and shacking up on a beautiful piece of land in the rocky mountains of north carolina. the serenity and scenery certainly aided in his inspiration, as well as his unacknowledged lowkey addictions slowly being rehabilitated from his bloodstream.

OLD YELLER. now, in his utmost prime at forty years old, he’s written numerous cult classics, a few of which have successful movie adaptations. he was lucky enough to land himself in a second marriage, though.... that one is now deteriorating as well because he literally doesn’t know how to maintain a healthy relationship. he received full custody of his daughter when she was sixteen, under the unfortunate circumstance of her mother’s untimely death. although they’d been separated for nearly twenty years, daniel was still very much affected by the loss, more so empathetically for penelope. he’s still hooked on the drink, though he’s definitely calmed down quite a bit from when he was a young buck. basically a messy, depressy old soul who uses sarcasm to deflect his true feelings.

CONNECTIONS

ESTRANGED WIFE. first marriage was a bust, and the second is turning out to be no better. they haven’t hit rock bottom just yet, in his opinion (which would be finalizing a divorce lmao), and he’s unsure if they should work things out or not but also really.......doesn’t wanna go through the process of another divorce. plus he likes her and deep down adores their bickering. the reason(s) why things started falling apart between them can be discussed of course. lowkey debating on whippin this up as a big official wc but.... if anybody already here would like to snag it, i would 100% mclove it.

COLLABORATORS. literally anyone he’s worked with over the years, whether they be fellow authors, publishers/publicists, journalists, screenplay writers, etc. yeehooo the possibilities are endless !!

FOLLOWERS. anyone hooked on his books, whether devout fans from his early beginnings or people who newly discovered his fictional writings.

FORMER CLASSMATES. could be from high school or university, but he was in california for the better part of his life aka not a mapleview native. former friends to foes & anything in between. dan’s that one kid who spiked the punch bowl at all the dances and years later probably snuck in party favors to snort off the bathroom sink during their high school reunion lmao whew !!

ANYTHING. literally anything. i’m my groggy state of mind on my lack of creativity rn so please, i’m beggin. if daniel can enrich your characters’ lives in any way, shape, or form, hit me up and we’ll hatch a plan.

#———— 🥀 . 𝙳𝙰𝙽𝙸𝙴𝙻 𝙰𝙱𝚁𝙰𝙼𝚂 ╱ DOSSIER .#mv:intro #alcoholism tw #abandonment tw #drug use tw #mommy issues tw #suicide mention tw #i think....that covers it?? if i missed anything pls let me know & ill tag accordingly #this is awful bc i rushed a wee bit buT #HOT DOG am i stupid excited to write with yall

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1921designs · 3 years

Text

Smuggler

“Then what are you complaining about?”

“About hypocrisy. About lies. About misrepresentation. About that smuggler’s behavior to which you drive the uranist.”

—André Gide, Corydon, Fourth Dialogue

I REMEMBER MY first kiss with absolute clarity. I was reading on a black chaise longue, upholstered with shiny velour, and it was right after dinner, the hour of freedom before I was obliged to begin my homework. I was sixteen.

It must have been early autumn or late spring, because I know I was in school at the time, and the sun was still out. I was shocked and thrilled by it, and reading that passage, from a novel by Hermann Hesse, made the book feel intensely real, fusing Hesse’s imaginary world with the physical object I was holding in my hands. I looked down at it, and back at the words on the page, and then around the room, which was empty, and I felt a keen and deep sense of discovery and shame. Something new had entered my life, undetected by anyone else, delivered safely and surreptitiously to me alone. To borrow an idea from André Gide, I had become a smuggler.

It wasn’t, of course, the first kiss I had encountered in a book. But this was the first kiss between two boys, characters in Beneath the Wheel, a short, sad novel about a sensitive student who gains admission to an elite school but then fails, quickly and inexorably, after he becomes entwined in friendship with a reckless, poetic classmate. I was stunned by their encounter—which most readers, and almost certainly Hesse himself, would have assigned to that liminal stage of adolescence before boys turn definitively to heterosexual interests. For me, however, it was the first evidence that I wasn’t entirely alone in my own desires. It made my loneliness seem more present to me, more intelligible and tangible, and something that could be named. Even more shocking was the innocence with which Hesse presented it:

An adult witnessing this little scene might have derived a quiet joy from it, from the tenderly inept shyness and the earnestness of these two narrow faces, both of them handsome, promising, boyish yet marked half with childish grace and half with shy yet attractive adolescent defiance.

Certainly no adult I knew would have derived anything like joy from this little scene—far from it. Where I grew up, a decaying Rust Belt city in upstate New York, there was no tradition of schoolboy romance, at least none that had made it to my public high school, where the hierarchies were rigid, the social categories inviolable, the avenues for sexual expression strictly and collectively policed by adults and youth alike. These were the early days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when recent gains in visibility and political legitimacy for gay rights were being vigorously countered by a newly resurgent cultural conservatism. The adults in my world, had they witnessed two lonely young boys reach out to each other in passionate friendship, would have thrashed them before committing them to the counsel of religion or psychiatry.

But the discovery of that kiss changed me. Reading, which had seemed a retreat from the world, was suddenly more vital, dangerous, and necessary. If before I had read haphazardly, bouncing from adventure to history to novels and the classics, now I read with focus and determination. For the next five years, I sought to expand and open the tiny fissure that had been created by that kiss. Suddenly, after years of feeling almost entirely disconnected from the sexual world, my reading was finally spurred both by curiosity and Eros.

From an oppressive theological academy in southern Germany, where students struggled to learn Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, to the rooftops of Paris during the final days of Adolf Hitler’s occupation, I sought in books the company of poets and scholars, hoodlums and thieves, tormented aristocrats bouncing around the spas and casinos of Europe, expat Americans slumming it in the City of Light, an introspective Roman emperor lamenting a lost boyfriend, and a middle-aged author at the height of his powers and the brink of exhaustion. These were the worlds, and the men, presented by Gide, Jean Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, James Baldwin, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil, to name only those whose writing has lingered with me. Some of these authors were linked by ties of friendship. Some of them were themselves more or less openly homosexual, others ambiguous or fluid in their desires, and others, by all evidence, bisexual or primarily heterosexual. It would be too much to say their work formed a canon of gay literature—but for those who sought such a canon, their work was about all one could find.

And yet, in retrospect, and after rereading many of those books more than thirty years later, I’m astonished by how sad, furtive, and destructive an image of sexuality they presented. Today we have an insipid idea of literature as selfdiscovery, and a reflexive conviction that young people—especially those struggling with identity or prejudice—need role models. But these books contained no role models at all, and they depicted self-discovery as a cataclysmic severance from society. The price of survival, for the self-aware homosexual, was a complete inversion of values, dislocation, wandering, and rebellion. One of the few traditions you were allowed to keep was misogyny. And most of the men represented in these books were not willing to pay the heavy price of rebellion and were, to appropriate Hesse’s phrase, ground beneath the wheel.

The value of these books wasn’t anything wholesome they contained, or any moral instruction they offered. Rather, it was the process of finding them, the thrill of reading them, the way the books themselves, like the men they depicted, detached you from the familiar moral landscape. They gave a name to the palpable, physical loneliness of sexual solitude, but they also greatly increased your intellectual and emotional solitude. Until very recently, the canon of literature for a gay kid was discovered entirely alone, by threads of connection that linked authors from intertwined demimondes. It was smuggling, but also scavenging. There was no Internet, no “customers who bought this item also bought,” no helpful librarians steeped in the discourse of tolerance and diversity, and certainly no one in the adult world who could be trusted to give advice and advance the project of limning this still mostly forbidden body of work.

The pleasure of finding new access to these worlds was almost always punctured by the bleakness of the books themselves. One of the two boys who kissed in that Hesse novel eventually came apart at the seams, lapsed into nervous exhaustion, and then one afternoon, after too much beer, he stumbled or willingly slid into a slow-moving river, where his body was found, like Ophelia’s, floating serenely and beautiful in the chilly waters. Hesse would blame poor Hans’s collapse on the severity of his education and a lamentable disconnection from nature, friendship, and congenial social structures. But surely that kiss, and that friendship with a wayward poet, had something to do with it. As Hans is broken to pieces, he remembers that kiss, a sign that at some level Hesse felt it must be punished.

Hans was relatively lucky, dispensed with chaste, poetic discretion, like the lover in a song cycle by Franz Schubert or Robert Schumann. Other boys who found themselves enmeshed in the milieu of homoerotic desire were raped, bullied, or killed, or lapsed into madness, disease, or criminality. They were disposable or interchangeable, the objects of pederastic fixation or the instrumental playthings of adult characters going through aesthetic, moral, or existential crises. Even the survivors face, at the end of these novels, the bleakest existential crises. Even the survivors face, at the end of these novels, the bleakest of futures: isolation, wandering, and a perverse form of aging in which the loss of youth is never compensated with wisdom.

One doesn’t expect novelists to give us happy endings. But looking back on many of the books I read during my age of smuggling, I’m profoundly disturbed by what I now recognize as their deeply entrenched homophobia. I wonder if it took a toll on me, if what seemed a process of self-liberation was inseparable from infection with the insecurities, evasions, and hypocrisy stamped into gay identity during the painful, formative decades of its nascence in the last century. I wonder how these books will survive, and in what form: historical documents, symptoms of an ugly era, cris de coeur of men (mostly men) who had made it only a few steps along the long road to true equality? Will we condescend to them, and treat their anguish with polite, clinical detachment? I hesitate to say that these books formed me, because that suggests too simplistic a connection between literature and character. But I can’t be the only gay man in middle age who now wonders if what seemed a gift at the time—the discovery of a literature of same-sex desire just respectable enough to circulate without suspicion—was in fact more toxic than a youth of that era could ever have anticipated.

Before the mid-1990s, when the Internet began to collapse the distinction between cities, suburbs, and everywhere else, books were the most reliable access to the larger world, and the only access to books was the bookstore or the library. The physical fact of a book was both a curse and a blessing. It made reading a potentially dangerous act if you were reading the wrong things, and of course one had to physically find and possess the book. But the mere fact of being a book, the fact that someone had published the words and they were circulating in the world, gave a book the presumption of respectability, especially if it was deemed “literature.” There were, of course, bad or dangerous books in the world—and self-appointed guardians who sought to suppress and destroy them—but decent people assumed that these were safely contained within universities.

I borrowed my copy of Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel from the library, so I can’t be sure whether it contained any of the small clues that led to other like-minded books. At least one copy I have found in a used bookstore does have an invaluable signpost on the back cover: “Along with Heinrich Mann’s The Blue Angel, Emil Strauss’s Friend Death, and Robert Musil’s Young Törless, all of which came out in the same period, it belongs to the genre of school novels.” Perhaps that’s what prompted me to read Musil’s far more complicated, beautifully written, and excruciating schoolboy saga. Hans, shy, studious, and trusting, led me to Törless, a bolder, meaner, more dangerous boy.

Other threads of connection came from the introductions, afterwords, footnotes, and the solicitations to buy other books found just inside the back cover. When I first started reading independently of classroom assignments and the usual boy’s diet of Rudyard Kipling, Jonathan Swift, Alexandre Dumas, and Jules Verne—reading without guidance and with all the odd detours and byways of an autodidact—I devised a three-part test for choosing a new volume: first, a book had to have a black or orange spine, then the colors of Penguin Classics, which someone had assured me was a reliable brand; second, I had to be able to finish the book within a few days, lest I waste the opportunity of my weekly visit to the bookstore; and third, I had to be hooked by the narrative within one or two pages. That is certainly what led me, by chance, to Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, a rather slight and pretentious novel of incestuous infatuation, gender slippage, homoerotic desire, and surreal distortions of time and space. I knew nothing of Cocteau but was intrigued by one of his line drawings on the cover, which showed two androgynous teenagers, and a summary which assured it was about a boy named Paul, who worshipped a fellow student.

I still have that copy of Cocteau. In the back there was yet more treasure, a whole page devoted to advertising the novels of Gide (The Immoralist is described as “the story of man’s rebellion against social and sexual conformity”) and another to Genet (The Thief’s Journal is “a voyage of discovery beyond all moral laws; the expression of a philosophy of perverted vice, the working out of an aesthetic degradation”). These little précis were themselves a guide to the coded language—“illicit, corruption, hedonism”—that often, though not infallibly, led to other enticing books. And yet one might follow these little broken twigs and crushed leaves only to end up in the frustrating world of mere decadence, Wagnerian salons, undirected voluptuousness, the enervating eccentricities of Joris-Karl Huysmans or the chaste, coy allusions to vice in Wilde.

Finally, there were a handful of narratives that had successfully transitioned into open and public respectability, even if always slightly tainted by scandal. If the local theater company still performed Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, who could fault a boy for reading The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Conveniently, a 1982 Bantam Classics edition contained both, and also the play Salomé. Wilde’s novel was a skein of brilliant banter stretched over a rather silly, Gothic tale, and the hiding-in-plain-sight of its homoeroticism was deeply unfulfilling. Even then, too scared to openly acknowledge my own feelings, I found Wilde’s obfuscations embarrassing. More powerful than anything in the highly contrived and overwrought games of Dorian was a passing moment in Salomé when the Page of Herodias obliquely confesses his love for the Young Syrian, who has committed suicide in disgust at Salomé’s licentious display. “He has killed himself,” the boy laments, “the man who was my friend! I gave him a little box of perfumes and earrings wrought in silver, and now he has killed himself.” It was these moments that slipped through, sudden intimations of honest feeling, which made plowing through Wilde’s self-indulgence worth the effort.

Then there was the most holy and terrifying of all the publicly respectable representations of homosexual desire, Mann’s Death in Venice, which might even be found in one’s parents’ library, the danger of its sexuality safely ossified inside the imposing façade of its reputation. A boy who read Death in Venice wasn’t slavering over a beautiful Polish adolescent in a sailor’s suit, he was climbing a mountain of sorts, proving his devotion to culture.

But a boy who read Death in Venicewas receiving a very strange moral and sentimental education. Great love was somehow linked to intellectual crisis, a symptom of mental exhaustion. It was entirely inward and unrequited, and it was likely triggered by some dislocation of the self from familiar surroundings, to travel, new sights and smells, and hot climates. It was unsettling and isolating, and drove one to humiliating vanities and abject voyeurism. Like so much of what one found in Wilde (perfumed and swaddled in cant), Gide (transplanted to the colonial realms of North Africa, where bourgeois morality was suspended), or Genet (floating freely in the postwar wreckage and flotsam of values, ideals, and norms), Death in Venice also required a young reader to locate himself somewhere on the inexorable axis of pederastic desire.

In retrospect I understand that this fixation on older men who suddenly have their worlds shattered by the brilliant beauty of a young man or adolescent was an intentional, even ironic repurposing of the classical approbation of Platonic pederasty. It allowed the “uranist”—to use the pejorative Victorian term for a homosexual—to broach, tentatively and under the cover of a venerable and respected literary tradition, the broader subject of same-sex desire. While for some, especially Gide, pederasty was the ideal, for others it may have been a gateway to discussing desire among men of relatively equal age and status, what we now think of as being gay. But as an eighteen-year-old reader, I had no interest in being on the receiving end of the attentions of older men; and as a middle-aged man, no interest in children.

The dynamics of the pederastic dyad—like so many narratives of colonialism —also meant that in most cases the boy was silent, seemingly without an intellectual or moral life. He was pure object, pure receptivity, unprotesting, perfect and perfectly silent in his beauty. When Benjamin Britten composed his last opera, based on Mann’s novella, the youth is portrayed by a dancer, voiceless in a world of singing, present only as an ideal body moving in space. In Gide’s Immoralist, the boys of Algeria (and Italy and France) are interchangeable, lost in the torrents of monologue from the narrator, Michel, who wants us to believe that they are mere instruments in his long, agonizing process of self-discovery and liberation. In Genet’s Funeral Rites, a frequently pornographic novel of sexual violence among the partisans and collaborators of Paris during the liberation, the narrator/author even attempts to make a virtue of the interchangeability of his young objects of desire: “The characters in my books all resemble each other,” he says. He’s right, and he amplifies their sameness by suppressing or eliding their personalities, dropping identifying names or pronouns as he shifts between their individual stories, often reducing them to anonymous body parts.

By reducing boys and young men to ciphers, the narrative space becomes open for untrammeled displays of solipsism, narcissism, self-pity, and of course self-justification. These books, written over a period of decades, by authors of vastly different temperaments and sexualities, are surprisingly alike in this claustrophobia of desire and subjugation of the other. Indeed, the psychological violence done to the male object of desire is often worse in authors who didn’t manifest any particular personal interest in same-sex desire. For example, in Musil’s Confusions of Young Törless, a gentle and slightly effeminate boy named Basini becomes a tool for the social, intellectual, and emotional advancement of three classmates who are all, presumably, destined to get married and lead entirely heterosexual lives. One student uses Basini to learn how to exercise power and manipulate people in preparation for a life of public accomplishment; another tortures him to test his confused spiritual theories, a stew of supposedly Eastern mysticism; and Törless turns to him, and turns on him, simply to feel something, to sense his presence and power in the world, to add to the stockroom of his mind and soul.

We are led to believe that this last form of manipulation is, in its effect on poor Basini, the cruelest. Later in the book, when Musil offers us the classic irony of the bildungsroman—the guarantee that everything that has happened was just a phase, a way station on the path of authorial evolution—he explains why Törless “never felt remorse” for what he did to Basini:

For the only real interest [that “aesthetically inclined intellectuals” like the older Törless] feel is concentrated on the growth of their own soul, or personality, or whatever one may call the thing within us that every now and then increases by the addition of some idea picked up between the lines of a book, or which speaks to us in the silent language of a painting[,] the thing that every now and then awakens when some solitary, wayward tune floats past us and away, away into the distance, whence with alien movements tugs at the thin scarlet thread of our blood —the thing that is never there when we are writing minutes, building machines, going to the circus, or following any of the hundreds of other similar occupations.

The conquest of beautiful boys, whether a hallowed tradition of all-male schools or the vestigial remnant of classical poetry, is simply another way to add to one’s fund of poetic and emotional knowledge, like going to the symphony. Today we might be blunter: to refine his aesthetic sensibility, Törless participated in the rape, torture, humiliation, and emotional abuse of a gay kid.

And he did it in a confined space. It is a recurring theme (and perhaps cliché) of many of these novels that homoerotic desire must be bounded within narrow spaces, dark rooms, private attics, as if the breach in conventional morality opened by same-sex desire demands careful, diligent, and architectural containment. The boys who beat and sodomize Basini do it in a secret space in the attic above their prep school. Throughout much of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, two siblings inhabit a darkly enchanted room, bickering and berating each other as they attempt to displace unrequited or forbidden desires onto acceptable alternatives. Cocteau helpfully gives us a sketch of this room—a few wispy lines that suggest something that Henri Matisse might have painted—with two beds, parallel to each other, as if in a hospital ward. Sickness, of course, is ever-present throughout almost all of these novels as well: the cholera that kills Aschenbach in Death in Venice, the tuberculosis which Michel overcomes and to which his hapless wife succumbs in The Immoralist, and the pallor, ennui, listlessness, and fevers of Cocteau. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, a later, more deeply ambivalent contribution to this canon of illness and enclosure, takes its name from the cramped, cluttered chambre de bonne that contains this desire, with the narrator keenly aware that if what happens there—a passionate relationship between a young American man in Paris and his Italian boyfriend— escapes that space, the world of possibilities for gay men would explode. But floods of booze, perhaps alcoholism, and an almost suicidal emotional frailty haunt this space, too.

Often it is the author’s relation to these dark spaces that gives us our only reliable sense of how he envisioned the historical trajectory of being gay. In Cocteau’s novel, the room becomes a ship, or a portal, transporting the youth Cocteau’s novel, the room becomes a ship, or a portal, transporting the youth into the larger world of adult desires. The lines are fluid, but there is a possibility of connection between the perfervid world of contained sexuality and the larger universe of sanctioned desires. In Baldwin, the young Italian proposes the two men keep their room as a space apart, a refuge for secret assignations, even as his American lover prepares to reunite with his fiancée and return to a life of normative sexuality. They could continue their relationship privately, on the side, a quiet compromise between two sexual realms. But Musil’s attic, essentially a torture chamber, is a much more desperate space, a permanent ghetto for illicit desire.

Even those among these books that were self-consciously written to advance the cause of gay men, to make their anguish more comprehensible to a reflexively hostile straight audience, leave almost no room—no space—for many openly gay readers. The parallels with colonial discourse are troubling: the colonized “other,” the homosexual making his appeal to straight society, must in turn pass on the violence and colonize and suppress yet weaker or more marginal figures on the spectrum of sexuality. Thus in the last of Gide’s daring dialogues in defense of homosexuality, first published piecemeal, then together commercially as Corydon in 1924—a tedious book full of pseudoscience and speculative extensions of Darwinian theory—the narrator contemptuously dismisses the unmanly homosexual: “If you please, we’ll leave the inverts aside for now. The trouble is that ill-informed people confuse them with normal homosexuals. And you understand, I hope, what I mean by ‘inverts.’ After all, heterosexuality too includes certain degenerates, people who are sick and obsessed.”

Along with the effeminate, the old and the aging are also beneath contempt. The casual scorn in Mann’s novella for an older man whom Aschenbach encounters on his passage to Venice is almost as horrifying as the sexual abuse and mental torture of young Basini in Musil’s novel. Among gay men, Mann’s painted clown is one of the most unsettling figures in literature, a “young-old man” whom Mann calls a “repulsive sight.” He apes the manners and dress of youth but has false teeth and bad makeup, luridly colored clothing, and a rakish hat, and is desperately trying to run with a younger crowd of men: “He was an old man, beyond a doubt, with wrinkles and crow’s feet round eyes and mouth; the dull carmine of the cheeks was rouge, the brown hair a wig.” Mann’s writing rises to a suspiciously incandescent brilliance in his descriptions of this supposedly loathsome figure. For reasons entirely unnecessary to the plot or development of his central characters, Baldwin resurrects Mann’s grotesquerie, in a phantasmagorical scene that describes an encounter between his young

American protagonist and a nameless old “queen” who approaches him in a bar:

The face was white and thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream; it stank of powder and a gardenia-like perfume. The shirt, open coquettishly to the navel, revealed a hairless chest and a silver crucifix; the shirt was covered with paper-thin wafers, red and green and orange and yellow and blue, which stormed in the light and made one feel that the mummy might, at any moment, disappear in flame.

This is the future to which the narrator—and by extension the reader if he is a gay man—is condemned. Unless, of course, he succumbs to disease or addiction. At best there is a retreat from society, perhaps to someplace where the economic differential between the Western pederast and the colonized boy makes an endless string of anonymous liaisons economically feasible. Violent death is the worst of the escapes. Not content with merely parodying older gay men, Baldwin must also murder them. In a scene that does gratuitous violence to the basic voice and continuity of the book, the narrator imagines in intimate detail events he has not actually witnessed: the murder of a flamboyant bar owner who sexually harasses and extorts the young Giovanni (by this point betrayed, abandoned, and reduced to what is, in effect, prostitution). The murder happens behind closed doors, safely contained in a room filled with “silks, colors, perfumes.”

If I remember with absolute clarity the first same-sex kiss I encountered in literature, I don’t remember very well when my interest in specifically homoerotic narrative began to wane. But again, thanks to the physicality of the book, I have an archaeology more reliable than memory. As a young reader, I was in the habit of writing the date when I finished a book on the inside front cover, and so I know that sometime shortly before I turned twenty-one, my passion for dark tales of unrequited desire, sexual manipulation, and destructive Nietzschean paroxysms of self-transcendence peaked, then flagged. That was also the same time that I came out to friends and family, which was prompted by the complete loss of hope that a long and unrequited love for a classmate might be returned. Logic suggests that these events were related, that the collapse of romantic illusions and the subsequent initiation of an actual erotic life with real, living people dulled the allure of Wilde, Gide, Mann, and the other authors who were loosely in their various orbits.

were loosely in their various orbits.

It happened this way: For several years I had been drawn to a young man who seemed to me curiously like Hans from Hesse’s novel. Physically, at least, they were alike: “Deep-set, uneasy eyes glowed dimly in his handsome and delicate face; fine wrinkles, signs of troubled thinking, twitched on his forehead, and his thin, emaciated arms and hands hung at his side with the weary gracefulness reminiscent of a figure by Botticelli.” But in every other way my beloved was an invention. I projected onto him an elaborate but entirely imaginary psychology, which I now suspect was cobbled together from bits and pieces of the books I had been reading. He was sad, silent, and doomed, like Hans, but also cold, remote, and severe, like Törless, cruelly beautiful like all the interchangeable sailors and hoodlums in Genet, but also intellectual, suffering, and mystically connected to dark truths from which I was excluded. When I recklessly confessed my love to him—how long I had nurtured it and how complex, beautiful, and poetic it was—he responded not with anger or disgust but impatience: “You can’t put all this on me.”

He was right. It took me only a few days to realize it intellectually, a few weeks to begin accepting it emotionally, and a few years not to feel fear and shame in his presence. He had recognized in an instant that what I had felt for years, rather like Swann for Odette, had nothing to do with him. It wasn’t even love, properly speaking. I can’t claim that it was all clear to me at the time, that I was conscious of any connection between what I had read and the excruciating dead end of my own fantasy life. I make these connections in retrospect. But the realization that I would never be with him because he didn’t in fact exist—not in the way I imagined him—must have soured me on the literature of longing, torment, and convoluted desire. And the challenge and excitement of negotiating a genuine erotic life rendered so much of what I had found in these books painfully dated and irrelevant.

I want to be rigorously honest about my feelings for this literature, whether it distorted my sense of self and even, perhaps, corrupted my imagination. The safe thing to say is that I can’t possibly find an answer to that, not simply because memory is unreliable, but because we never know whether books implant things in us or merely confirm what is already there. In Young Törless, Musil proposes the idea that the great literature of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and William Shakespeare is essentially a transitional crutch for young minds, a mental prosthesis or substitute identity during the formlessness of adolescence: “These associations originating outside, and these borrowed emotions, carry young people over the dangerously soft spiritual ground of the years in which they need to be of some significance to themselves and nevertheless are still too incomplete to have any real significance.”

It’s important to divorce the question of how these books may have influenced me from the malicious accusations of corruption that have dogged gay fiction from the beginning. In the course of our reading lives, we will devour dozens, perhaps hundreds, of crude, scabrous, violent books, with no discernible impact on our moral constitution. And homosexual writers certainly didn’t invent the general connection between sexuality and illness, or the thin line between passion and violence, or sadism and masochism, or the sexual exploitation of the young or defenseless. And the mere mention of same-sex desire is still seen in too many places around the world today as inherently destructive to young minds. Gide’s Corydon decried the illogic of this a century ago: “And if, in spite of advice, invitations, provocations of all kinds, he should manifest a homosexual tendency, you immediately blame his reading or some other influence (and you argue in the same way for an entire nation, an entire people); it has to be an acquired taste, you insist; he must have been taught it; you refuse to admit that he might have invented it all by himself.”

And I want to register an important caveat about the literature of same-sex desire: it is not limited to the books I read, the authors I encountered, or the tropes that now seem to me so sad and destructive. In 1928, E. M. Forster wrote a short story called “Arthur Snatchfold” that wasn’t published until 1972, two years after the author’s death. In it, an older man, Sir Richard Conway, respectable in all ways, visits the country estate of a business acquaintance, where he has a quick, early-morning sexual encounter with a young deliveryman in a field near the house. Later, as Sir Richard chats with his host at their club in London, he learns that the liaison was seen by a policeman, the young man was arrested, and the authorities sent him to prison. To his great relief, Sir Richard also learns that he himself is safe from discovery, that the “other man” was never identified, and despite great pressure on the working-class man to incriminate his upper-class partner, he refused to do so.

“He [the deliveryman] was instantly removed from the court and as he went he shouted back at us—you’ll never credit this—that if he and the old grandfather didn’t mind it why should anyone else,” says Sir Richard’s host, fatuously indignant about the whole affair. Sir Richard, ashamed and sad but trapped in the armor of his social position, does the only thing he can: “Taking a notebook from his pocket, he wrote down the name of his lover, yes, his lover who was going to prison to save him, in order that he might not forget it.” It isn’t a great story, but it is an important moment in the evolution of an idea of loyalty and honor within the emerging category of homosexual identity. I didn’t

discover it until years after it might have done me some good.

Forster’s story is exceptional because only one man is punished, and he is given a voice—and a final, clear, unequivocal protest against the injustice. The other man escapes, but into shame, guilt, and self-recrimination. And yet it is the escapee who takes up the pen and begins to write. We might say of Sir Richard what we often say of our parents as we come to peace with them: he did the best he could. And for all the internalized homophobia of the authors I began reading more than thirty years ago, I would say the same thing. They did the best they could. They certainly did far more than privately inscribe a name in a book. I can’t honestly say that I would have had even Sir Richard’s limited courage in 1928.

But Forster’s story, which he didn’t dare publish while he was alive, is the exception, not the rule. It is painful to read the bulk of this early canon, and it will only become more and more painful, as gay subcultures dissolve and the bourgeois respectability that so many of these authors abandoned yet craved becomes the norm. In Genet, marriage between two men was the ultimate profanation, one of the strongest inversions of value the author could muster to scandalize his audience and delight his rebellious readers. The image of samesex marriage was purely explosive, a strategy for blasting apart the hypocrisy and pretentions of traditional morality. Today it is becoming commonplace.

I wonder if these books will survive like the literature of abolition, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—marginal, dated, remembered as important for its earnest, sentimental ambition but also a catalogue of stereotypes. Or if they will be mostly forgotten, like the nineteenth-century literature of aesthetic perversity and decadence that many of these authors so deeply admired. Will Gide and Genet be as obscure to readers as Huysmans and the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse)?

I hope not, and not least because they mattered to me, and helped forge a common language of reference among many gay men of my generation. I hope they survive for the many poignant epitaphs they contain, grave markers for the men who were used, abused, and banished from their pages. Let me write them down in my notebook, so I don’t forget their names: Hans, who loved Hermann; Basini, who loved Törless; the Page of Herodias, who loved the Young Syrian; Giovanni, who loved David; and all the rest, unnamed, often with no voice, but not forgotten.

TIM KREIDER

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spookyboogie3 · 4 years

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MY FAVORITE AH MOMENTS W/O R*an H*yw**d

Also keep in mind some of these moments i picked Bitch Face r*an may have been present for but this aint about his stupid ass.

The straw bit on Off Topic

Fiona and Trevor’s “Look at us” “Look at us” “Look at us” in TTT

Drunk Jeremy inhaling helium, followed by Jack and Trevor on Off Topic

“Krusty KrAYAYAB!!!” TTT

Jeremy trying to slam his face through a table, followed by Michael doing the same thing

“my god…… the munchdew” “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!” Minecraft: Skyfactory

Actually all of Simple Farmer Geoff from Skyfactory

Whatever those sounds were that Jack was making in the beginning of GTA video

Alfredo screaming as he continues to fall down a steep tube in a GTA race

DESTROYING THEIR OFFICE DEAR LORD

“How did he drown though?” “UNDERWATER, MATT!”

Anytime Fiona starts to RAGE in TTT (bonus if others join in)

The time Gav was the phantom in TTT and he kept dying and being brought back and Jack spitting water and then trying to catch it

Alfredo’s Magoo moments in Minecraft

Geoff laughing in the background of a video hes not in

Lindsay fucking around with Chef Mike on Harecore Minigolf

Lindsay fucking around in general

Gavin and Fiona playing Animal Crossing and laughing at the stupidest shit

The Fish Tempura incident on Wheel of Fortune

Lindsay’s reasoning for why her and Michael should have 4 kids

Geoff’s fucking ad reads (my favorite is 23&Me)

The whole thing during Push the Button where everyone especially Michael gets mad at Fiona because she said the best candy to get while trick or treating was lollipops

Matt’s fucking desk in the corner of the room

Anytime Millie is in a video

Everyone falling off the pink ladder during TTT and dying repeatedly because of it

Alfredo “the two-time champ” Diaz dying very early in YDYD 3

Gavin and Michael fucking up almost every game they play on Play Pals

RAY OR NO and then RAY OR NAY on Off Topic

Reddit Roasts Geoff

Gavin asking if someone could kill 20 cows with their bare hands and the proceeding so say he could rip out a cow’s veins by reaching into its neck

Ify’s narration during Let’s Roll Ave Caesar

The internet losing its shit when Jeremy shaved his head years ago

“We need a knife” Gavin comes back with a hammer

Griffin chain sawing the Off Topic table up

“How do I put the boat in the water??” “Right click you animal”

As of 2020, 8 years of playing Minecraft, certain people still do not know how to play the basics of this fucking game.

Honestly it took over 200 episodes for some of them to figure out how the compass worked. You know after they decided that the sun was setting in the wrong direction. (this was in 2016??)

Flynt coal still is a joke they make

So is Day 2

Whatever happened in that GTA lets play where someone called a mugger or a hit on someone and the game glitched and 50 guys showed up and lined up on the street below from where they were playing

Anytime Gavin gets mugged, it’s an old running gag but it’s a classic

The time a mugger fucking started driving the fire truck away after mugging Gavin with Michael and Jeremy still in the truck thinking the other is driving and it takes them like 2 minutes to realize what happened while Gavin’s yelling “come back”

They got a water jug and immediately started water boarding each other

“It pinged and went dingle”

“Hey Trey-Boi” “Hey Gay-Boi” Immediately realizes what he has said

Jeremy’s website puns

(OLD) Ray jerking off in the corner during a let’s play

(OLD) the world in Minecraft never loading and everyone screaming about as Geoff says its fine for him

Jeremy’s “I AM MONSTER TRUCK”

Jack taking AH to Disney……in Minecraft

On Twitter, Gavin asked about recommendations for a computer mouse and Fiona starts sending him pictures of actual mice.

“Its not ghey, if its on the moon”

Literally anything Fiona does as Po

Jeremy saying the heterosexual flag is boring

UNO THE MOVIE!

Geoff fucking cackling the whole time.

“here’s looking at you kid”

the video was almost 3 hours long

“you know what my favorite color is? blue” “oh really? You know what my favorite hand is? Yours

They all want it to end but no one wants to lose and so they fuck each other and that prolongs the game. Also they put on more rules, so they just keep getting more cards if they don’t have a card to match the previous

Alfredo saying he won’t participate in ghost hunter because he knows what happens to people of color in horror movies

Fiona walking in on Off Topic with a protein shake and Gavin asks if shes drinking milk and she says without missing a beat “ah no that’s cum” and everyone laughed not expecting the answer

(OLD) “SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER” *falls in hole*

(OLD) Ray and Gav running in a panel dressed as X-Ray and Vav and Ray running the whole way around the room before he got to the stage

Duck taping Jeremy to the wall

(OLD) All of Minecraft Episode 3 Plan G (This was the very first AH video I watch and why I know who they are)

Geoff and Gav creating Achievement City and giving everyone houses just to prank Jack into burning house down with lava.

Ray’s house is a dirt block with no furniture and single torch

Geoff’s giant ass house next to Ray’s tiny house

Jack tries to destroy everything with lava throughout the episode

“lets be honest, I realistically didn’t lose anything”

Michael stealing art from Gav’s house “NOO! I want nice things”

The sign to Michael’s says “Awaiting Approval, Awaiting Approval, Awaiting Approval” he runs into house and say “I’m home”

Ray also steals this sign at some point

Plan G – The failsafe.

“Oh whats this? Is this a button? Whats this? (pushes button) Yeah it was a button”

“Did you push the button?”

“Yeah”

“okay”

“wh-what does it do?”

“uh…”

Cue Achievement City beginning to explode as Michael starts screaming

Rays reaction “NO, MY SHITTY HOUSE JUST GOT EVEN SHITTIER!”

Not something funny but something VERY IMPORTANT. AH admitting that they all fucked up and how shitty their behavior was when dealing with harassment in the fanbase. People were racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic, and just downright horrible to a lot of the employees at RT and AH. This came up after Mica Burton left the company and talked about it publicly and how nothing was done about it. Fiona who also experiences these same things, along with Lindsay and other employees, but Fiona took the charge on the Off Topic talking about people can’t continue to get away with that behavior. She got to sound off her feelings to a group of white men who all respected her and LISTENED to what was saying and how she felt. She cried; Geoff cried. They all want to do more, so this doesn’t happen in the future and they’re not tolerating the racist and horrible comments. AH taking a mature moment to talk about how they failed to stop these comments and Geoff was right when he said the company has a long way to go.

Outside of AH each member has more to them than just all of the comedy and laughs and dumb shit they do

Geoff helped found Roosterteeth and Achievement Hunter. He has a beautiful daughter in Millie who is awesome in her own right. He’s a recovering alcoholic. Currently doing F**k Face podcasts. Was in the fucking army. Takes accountability for every mistake he makes.

Jack also helped start Achievement Hunter. He does so much work for charity. His twitter is full of things to help people go vote. He’s like the dad to AH, especially Fiona. He’s happily married to his wife Caiti.

Michael was an electrician and has a lot of handy man experience. He made a few videos online about him raging at games and that got the attention of RT. He’s currently married to Lindsay who he met because of RT. They have two kids together.

Gavin is an expert at high speed filmmaking and know how use and edit footage from a slow-motion camera. He has worked on actual films. One of the creators of the Slow Mo Guys. Worked his ass off to get to work for RT. Currently dating model and cosplayer Meg Turney

Lindsay flips between being the mom of the group and a complete chaos queen and we all love her for it. She started as an editor for the RT podcast and then AH stuff. She is an incredible voice actor, most known for Ruby Rose (RWBY), Space Kid (Camp Camp), Hilda (Xray & Vav) just to name a few. She also has a degree in finance

Jeremy started as a fan who made videos on the community page. He took over Ray’s place after Ray left to do Twitch full time. He is a self-published author and a skilled rapper and singer. He’s currently married to his wife, Kat.

Matt also started as a fan making videos on the community page. He actually interacted and made stuff for the guys in really early Minecraft episodes. Seriously this guy is like king of Minecraft. He has a degree in electrical engineering. He also has pretty decent singing voice.

Trevor is THE BOSS. Has a degree in aero-space engineering and is getting paid to babysit AH. Currently dating Barbara Dunkelman, RTs queen of puns.

Alfredo worked at IGN before RT and is a well-known streamer. He is the best when it comes to first person shooter games. He and Trevor look so similar.

Fiona. Po. Her majesty. Host of This Just Internet. A Twitch streamer. Baby of the bunch. Grew up in Europe. Her and Gav act like a pair of siblings. She has stated and showed time and time again she will fight for people to have safe spaces for anyone who needs them.

Ify, our new guy. He is wonderful and I want to stay forever. He’s a comedian, a writer, and an actor. Co hosts F-ing Around with Fiona. Has his own film podcast, Who Shot Ya? I look forward to more content with him in it, cause everything he’s been in so far has been great.

Were all hurting but well make it through this

We have all these wonderful moments and a lot more that I didn’t list and this incredible team of personalities with their own accomplishments and achievements. Not to mention old team members who were also great additions and the entire crew behind the scenes editing and making videos look the best that they can.

Here’s to Achievement Hunter and to this community. We need to be here for each other in times like these.

@theonyxranger gave me the idea for this based on their own post they made about the fans giving their favorite moments without bitch face and there were just too many. Oop.

#Achievement Hunter #Jack Pattillo #Gavin Free #geoff ramsey #michael jones #lindsay jones #alfredo diaz #trevor collins #fiona nova #jeremy dooley #matt bragg #ify nwadiwe #roosterteeth #yes im calling him bitch face now

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silenthillmutual · 4 years

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I beg your pardon! It’s me who is going mad.

So, I know I did a Twitter thread about the ways Daniil is manipulated in Classic, and I thought I’d put it on here too.

I’m going to stop short of calling it gaslighting here though, because too many people are using that term who don’t really understand what it means. Gaslighting is specifically a form of abuse where the intention is to make the victim feel they are going insane. Not all manipulation or abuse is gaslighting - which doesn’t make it less bad, just...not gaslighting.

That being said: in Classic, there are quite a few times where Daniil can say that he thinks he’s losing his mind, and there are times when the game seems constructed to make you feel this way. Particularly I had in mind the ending of the game, and not just the part where you find out you’re a toy and always have been (that falls more under cosmic horror). What bugs me about the end and how that fits into things, is the fact that the Sand Pest and its outcomes have been chasing you - the clouds, the angels, the muggers, the firestarters, the rats, literally chasing you through houses and through town, only for all of it to completely vanish without a trace on the exact day you’re meant to give a solution to it all. I made a point on Twitter about how people attempting to gaslight you will submit you to a large amount of damage - physical, verbal, emotional, take your pick - and then remove the abuse and any signs of it just before they’re caught. it’s how they show to others that it’s you who’s the problem, not them.

Regardless of whether you think the intention is to make Daniil feel he’s losing is sanity or not, the question would be who is manipulating Daniil, and why? There are a couple answers.

The first answer is the Town. The first playthrough as the Bachelor of the game is probably the closest fitting to psychological horror as the game gets. Like Silent Hill, the Town is full of horrors that seem tailor-made to torture Daniil specifically: most of these people are uneducated (the Town doesn’t even have a school), their cultural beliefs (mostly appropriated from the steppe culture) actively prevent him from doing his job as a doctor, his word and name are constantly weaponized by people with ulterior motives, and men run around on the first two days beating women to death or burning them alive and intervening actively costs you reputation - which you need to do anything. He arrives with the hope of finding evidence to keep his lab opening and, as we later learn, keep himself from execution, only to find that both the man who would serve as this evidence and the colleague who informed you of his existence have been murdered just before your arrival. You have a lot of things riding on your success, and everything about where you are is actively working against you. The government wants you to find a cure single-handedly, but the Town has other plans for you.

And those plans are: errand boy, and scapegoat. People throughout the Town will inform you that they are scared of you when you’ve barely interacted with them, let alone in ways that should inspire fear. It doesn’t matter how good your reputation as Daniil is (and through the course of the game, there’s very little you’re made to do that lowers your reputation, and it never gets bad enough for you to be attacked on the street or refused sale from shops), what matters is the fact that everyone in Town, from the nameless NPCs to the rulers, are putting every bad thing they’ve done down as being your fault.

But the Town has another way it’s manipulating Daniil, by almost making him a member of it. I don’t think I got a screenshot, but I’m sure that somewhere along the line Daniil comments that he’s starting to talk like one of the townsfolk. You can see this happens to Andrey, too, later in the game; he talks in what Daniil calls “Griefisms”.

You have been sent here to fight an adversary that inherently cannot be beaten - in foolish hopes that a miracle would happen and your outstanding mind would stumble upon a once-in-a-million chance. And just so that you wouldn’t give up, they kept insisting that the adversary must be destroyed. Do you see how insidious the Powers That Be are? > But why? Their motives are becoming less and less comprehensible to me by the day.

The second answer is the Powers That Be.

Three people enter the Town that the Powers That Be want to get rid of: the Bachelor, the Inquisitor, and the Commander. It wants them all to fix or solve or demolish something in the town, and doesn’t really care what happens to any of them. Pathologic 2 spells it out clearer for you that Aglaya, Block, and Daniil will all be executed upon return to the Capital if their answers are not what the Powers That Be want to hear. And for the time that you are in the Town as Daniil Dankovsky, the Powers That Be - like the town itself - actively work against you. The trains that are meant to bring food and medication never, to my knowledge, arrive, and most days bring about a new letter from the Powers spelling out for you how disappointed in you and your progress they are. Some of the ways they attempt to manipulate Daniil through these letters are subtle, but most of them are unsubtle suggestions that what he’s been able to accomplish is not good enough, that he was meant to work alone.

Even one of your first letters from them is suspicious; early on in the game, they write to let you know that they are in no way responsible for the outbreak, which is an incredibly suspicious thing to say. What is the point of sending such a letter? Would the player have really thought that they were if they hadn’t suggested as much through denial? After all, what called you to Town was a letter from Isidor Burakh. But yet, the Powers That Be are the ones who leave you stranded in the Town with limited resources, no help, and constantly shifting goalposts. Aglaya makes this clear to you when she arrives: you were never supposed to be successful.

The letters from the Powers That Be do not serve any purpose other than to upset Daniil, and most if not all of them contain lies: that a train will be arriving, that they don’t mind if you have help in carrying out your plans, that Thanatica still exists, referencing conversations you’ve never had, signing drafts of letters you didn’t consult on with your name. One of the reasons i had put this down as gaslighting is because people who gaslight like to keep you off balance and emotionally fragile so that you’re easier to manipulate. You’ll do whatever they want to make the feeling stop, because you just can’t handle the stress anymore, and in the process you come across to others as unreasonable, unhinged, crazy, dangerous, so that no one will trust you. And that’s exactly how Daniil starts to come across to the townspeople: deranged, strung out, dangerous, untrustworthy.

You can contrast all that to a different letter they send you where they claim to be proud to call you one of your own. Combine the two, and you get honeymooning. They want to remind you of the good (or at least, not-as-bad) times you’ve had with them. This behavior serves two, sometimes three purposes: to keep you off balance from the violent back-and-forth, dizzying nature of what they’re doing to you, and so that you’ll defend them to people who can see what’s going on and want to get you out of it. You’ll even convince yourself that you’re not really being mistreated. If you were being abused, would they be so nice to you?

You are the last friend our family has. I hope our attachment to you doesn’t look obtrusive. > It requires too much from me. I’m not comfortable with it. > No, not at all.

The third answer is the Kains. Specifically, Georgiy and Maria repeatedly manipulate Daniil, though I’ve no doubt in the text above Victor stating their attachment to Daniil is also a manipulation, and one possibly planned by either or perhaps both of them. The text above probably looks normal, but think about the purpose it serves: to reinforce that Daniil is friendly with the Kains. Your only two options are to say that it doesn’t bother you, or to express that you feel your boundaries are being violated by their attention. But I even thinking about picking that option... Well, it feels mean.

Throughout the game, people will comment on Maria’s attachment to you and what they feel is your predestination to be romantically paired with her. All this, despite the fact that you don’t really interact with her that much. I’ve seen this be explained as forced heterosexuality, but I think it also is a way of the Kains manipulating Daniil into doing what they want. Daniil gets upset whenever people cry; when children cry, he tries to calm them and fix whatever’s upset them - there’s an entire sidequest after the army arrives in which Daniil kills a group of soldiers, spurred into action by upset children. Whenever he encounters Maria crying, he reacts with discomfort, and she uses these tears and upset to manipulate Daniil into thinking Aglaya has lied to him, effectively distancing him from one of the only people in the game with a rational mind to show him support and tell him the truth. I don’t think the two are in any way unconnected. Something abusers, manipulators, gaslighters love to do is isolate you so that you only have one source of information to go to. If they cut you off from other people, they can continue to feed off of you. You’ll never have a chance to question if what you’re being told about yourself or others is correct, you’ll just be a constant supply of drama for them.

DANIIL: Was there any particularly notable backstory? I’m deadly tired of all these people. They’re inhuman. They tell the future, believe in walking zombies, and die in all manners of painfully abnormal ways.

AGLAYA: Your line of thinking is obviously fallacious - and I was implying something rather mundane. I promise you no one can really tell the future around here and neither are deaths inspired by third parties uncommon. Mysterious phenomenons do occur here sometimes... but hardly more often than anywhere else.

You can see, first, the effect all this has had on Daniil, how dispiriting the past several days have been to him. But you can also see here exactly why a family that prides itself on multi-generational reincarnation and manipulation through “fortune-telling” wants to keep its blunt instrument in the dark.

That is, ultimately, why they are manipulating Daniil. Georgiy knows full well when he tells Daniil at the beginning that everyone, even himself, will lie to Daniil, that being that honest upfront is more likely to lead Daniil to trusting him. They want to sway him to their cause; this is why you are told that your success here depends on the wellbeing of the people Maria considers useful: herself, her father and uncle - who she gets out of the way later on to come into her power, the architects of the Polyhedron - which she will use to ascend to power, and the theatre director who has pledged himself to be her loyal servant. Eva’s on the list, too, but her inclusion was deliberately set up to make you depend on the Kains later in the game, considering that it’s Maria who convinced her to commit suicide:

DANIIL: Why did Eva die then? AGLAYA: I have a distinct suspicion she was made to die. DANIIL: By whom? AGLAYA: One of the Kains. I’d even go so far as to claim that they may have performed human sacrifice.

It’s a two-for-one deal: try in vain to make a Focus of the Cathedral, and remove from Daniil the last piece of influence who was not totally in love with Maria. Maria “cries” and is “upset” at you for thinking Eva’s death is her fault, but no one directly tells you Maria is responsible - all Aglaya does is tell you the Kains are at fault. The rest is just you remembering how nasty Maria was about Eva at the beginning of the game. I wouldn’t even say that Maria was removing a rival for Daniil’s affection. She really does only view Daniil as an object: if you speak to her on day 12, she assumes that you’re leaving, and doesn’t even ask you to stay (for kicks, contrast this with either ending of Pathologic 2 when you speak to Daniil as Artemy, where he’s supposed to be your rival. what was all that about Maria being in love with you...?); he’s not even present in his own ending cutscene. Even Mark Immortell says you’re leaving -

And actually, that’s a really fascinating conversation you can have with him on day 12. It’s where the game outright admits exactly what Aglaya told you: it’s all fake. Maria cannot really see the future, you’ve just been manipulated the entire game to achieve someone else’s goals, and unless you’ve gone around and saved Artemy’s or Clara’s bound, it’s too late for you to turn back and make a different decision. If you’ve picked Daniil’s ending, you just destroyed an entire town on the basis of outright lies.

#icarus.txt #pathologic meta #ok to rb #plato plays pathologic #nori writes #pathologic spoilers #stu don't look #long post #icarus.docx #mine

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in-dire-need · 4 years

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Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge- My Chemical Romance

The only 2004 album that could even come close to giving American Idiot a run for its money is Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. My Chemical Romance’s second full-length album shot the band out of its familiar water. Its numerous hits continue to reach billboard charts, such as opening track “Helena” and world-renowned “I’m Not Okay.” According to frontman Gerard Way, Revenge stands as a “pseudo-conceptual horror story”. Every track on the album ties into this twisted and supernatural story of the two lovers featured on the cover, which was created by Gerard Way.

“Helena (So Long and Goodnight)” opens this story of Three Cheers with a heartfelt yet twisted dedication to the Way brothers’ grandmother, Elena Rush, had passed away under circumstanced unknown to the public during the band’s tour of I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. Elena had heavily influenced the brothers from a very young age and inspired them to pursue their dreams. When she passed, Gerard Way was sent into a spiral of anger and self-destructive behavior. He wrote the song to be somewhat of a letter to himself, expressing the hatred he felt for himself at the time. Despite the dark theme behind the lyrics, “Helena” continues to be a radio classic on rock stations everywhere.

The story element behind the album begins during the second track, “Give ‘Em Hell, Kid”. A man has been divided from his lover after the devil resurrects him from the dead and, in order to resurrect his wife as well, he must kill one thousand evil souls and present them to the devil. While he ventures out to accomplish this, his wife wonders where he has gone and is clueless of his plans. She is livid at him for wrecking their marriage that began when they were young and dumb. In the next few tracks we listen as the protagonist crashes a wedding in order to kill the guests. He begins to question his sexuality and if his wife is worth one thousand souls. Continuing the double-meaning, the “To The End” is also based on the short story “A Rose For Emily” by William Faulkner. In this story, a rich wife begins suspecting that her husband may be a homosexual, so she poisons him before he cheats on her or leaves her.

“You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us in Prison” features Bert McCracken, frontman of The Used, with whom all of My Chemical Romance was extremely close with at the time of Three Cheers’ release. Gerard was also featured on their 2004 album, In Love and Death, which toured with Three Cheers after its debut. Since then, the bands had a falling-out and didn’t speak for years before heavily hinting that The Used would be opening for My Chemical Romance’s reunion tour that was scheduled for 2020. This information was never officially announced, though, seeing as COVID-19 has ruined every hope and dream that it could lay its greasy paws on. Anger aside, “Prison” continues the protagonist’s journey to kill one thousand evil souls to resurrect his wife as he is arrested in a restaurant gunfight. Once in prison, he begins falling for an inmate of the same sex, which confuses and upsets the protagonist who had assumed he was heterosexual for his entire life. He still dreams of his deceased lover, whom his journey is all for. The other inmates begin to take advantage of him, forcing him to dress in drag and give blowjobs to accommodate to their sexual desires. He begins to lose his sanity and believes that he might as well be executed since he will not be able to fulfill his mission from prison. He decides that when he leaves, he will burn down an entire hotel to quickly raise his body count.

Another track that has gone down in history is number four, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise”. It follows a girl who struggles with dealing with the problems in her life. She vents and complains to her boyfriend, who is dealing with his own problems. He puts them aside to comfort his girlfriend time and time again. She does not take this into account and simply continues to wallow in her own pain, attempting and failing to relate to sad songs with deeper meanings. He has finally had it with her by the end of the song and explodes, telling her that he is not okay and he is done with her melodrama. “The Ghost of You” is another smash hit produced by this album, which continues the story already present. The protagonist expresses the grief he experienced after losing the lover he is trying so hard to save. Later tracks emphasize this as the protagonist begins to doubt his ability to bring his lover back.

Standing as a message of inspiration and a sign not to give up, “Thank You For The Venom” has become very popular within its target audience. Critics began to blame My Chemical Romance for making music purely to become famous, to which the band responded saying that the fans are a huge impact on their music. They never wanted to be on the front covers of magazines and at the head of the rock scene, but at a certain point they could no longer fight the inevitable. The song narrates what is possibly a nun attempting to convert a horrible sinner, then being murdered by the man. The sinner could be the protagonist continuing his killing spree, knowing that no amount of preaching could save him. In the following tracks, he questions again if his lover is really worth kill one thousand evil souls. After a woman representing his lost love holds him at gunpoint and tells him to stop his killing spree, he considers shooting himself and therefore dying for her instead of killing. He trudges on still and vows revenge on this woman as his story nears its end. After killing nine-hundred ninety-nine evil souls, he realizes that the last one he must take is his own. He begins hallucinating that his wife is there with him and even holds conversations with her before remembering that she is not there. It is heavily suggested that his lover committed suicide after getting drunk, though the means are unknown. The protagonist finally comes to terms with the fact that he is destined to die and that he would never have been able to resurrect his wife.

In the final track, “I Never Told You What I Did For a Living”, the man completes his transaction with the devil. He accepts his fall from grace, but knows that once he is with his love again it will all have been worth it. Once he kills the last soul, himself, it is revealed that the devil tricked him. As a result of his astounding body count, he has been damned to hell instead of being reunited with his lover. His final realization is that it was all for nothing and that he has simply become a monster.

Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge’s final lines are a callback to the group’s first album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, or Bullets for short. Dozens of lines throughout the album reference Bullets, and the lovers featured are even referred to as two “Demolition Lovers”. Initially, fans and critics believed that the two albums were linked as one continuing story, but that theory has been denied. Past its horrific tale, many songs actually send a buried positive message- keep going. Specifically “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” and “Thank You For The Venom” have worked to debunk the band’s stereotype of being a suicide cult. Ironically, these songs have also become symbols of this said suicide cult, given the references to death and self-destruction, which leads many younger listeners to fall prey to this cult mentality that the media has created. That very concept was something that My Chemical Romance vehemently spoke out against, seeing as the very reason they began making music was to help people. Even despite being twisted and forgotten by the media, that is still exactly what they did. Although fame wasn’t what they wanted, in the end they achieved exactly what they wanted: to help people. Their worldwide fame simply allowed them to reach farther and wider than ever imagined.

As previously stated, all tracks on the album not only tie into the crazy narration of two dead lovers, but into the real lives of the bandmates, specifically Gerard and Mikey way. For example, “The Jetset Life is Gonna Kill You” personifies Gerard’s struggle with alcoholism and cocaine addiction in the form of a woman. He says that he could stay with her for hours even though she will eventually kill him. He was able to sober up and toured for Three Cheers during his first full year sober, which he described as extremely difficult. “The Ghost Of You” helps paint the picture of how the brothers were grieving after the loss of their grandmother, Elena.

Elena was one of the most powerful influencers behind the creation of My Chemical Romance and continued to inspire them throughout their entire career. Thanks to her, the band went on to inspire millions of young adults worldwide. Had she not supported her grandchildren like she did, so many more influencers would have never developed the confidence to take their first steps into the sunlight. These influencers include Palaye Royale, Twenty One Pilots, Post Malone, and Yungblud. Who knows how many more celebrities truly are that wouldn’t be where they are without the influential messages of My Chemical Romance? Who knows who the next possible star will be? I guess we’ll just have to wait and find out. Go enjoy yourselves, internet.

“And we'll love again, we'll laugh again We'll cry again, and we'll dance again And it's better off this way, so much better off this way I can't clean the blood off the sheets in my bed!”

#three cheers for sweet revenge #my chemical romance #music

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bobasheebaby · 4 years

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Amy Farrah Fowler Prompts

1 “I gave you one job! Keep an eye on him/her. How hard is that?”

2 “Thank you for understanding.” “Of course I understand. NAME, there's something else I've been wanting to say, but before I do, I just. I want you to know you don't have to say it back. I know you're not ready and I don't want you to say it just because social convention dictates —“ “I love you, too.” “You said it.”

3 “NAME does not get lucky.” “You and me both, brother.”

4 “Do you have any idea how hard it is to laugh at a knock knock joke that starts ‘Knock Knock Knock, NAME. Knock Knock Knock, NAME. Knock Knock Knock, NAME’?”

5 “It's too late. He's/She’s been murdered by someone in this room. Welcome to another classic NAME murder mystery dinner.” “I'm leaving.”

6 [knocks three times] NAME 1, NAME 2, NAME 3. [repeats three times] “He's/She’s never going to stop doing that, is he/she?” “I don't mind. I'm hoping to put his/her love of repetition to good use someday.”

7 “Do I really force you to do things you don't want to?” “Yeah, but it's okay.” “How is it okay?” “I promised myself if I ever got friends I'd do whatever they said. Really, I'm lucky you found me before a cult did.”

8 “You are aware that your ritualistic knocking behavior is symptomatic of obsessive-compulsive disorder?” “Is not. Is not. Is not.” “Denial. Denial. Denial.”

9 “What is your problem?” “It's Valentine's day. We're supposed to be having a romantic weekend.” “Oh, really? 'cause I remember you saying this trip was going to be something we could both enjoy. Did you mean that or were you just trying to trick me?” “Fine, it's true. I deserve romance and I didn't know how else to make it happen.”

10 “Well, wait. What if, just this once, we suspend the date night parameters and you stay later?” “Well, as long as we're suspending the parameters. I could stay really late and we could have our first sleepover.” “That's a big step.” “It's a big fort.”

11 “NAME, that was beautiful.” “If you didn't press record —“ “I pressed it!”

12 “Hi, NAME.” “Hello.” “Are you feeling any better?” “Physically, yes, but I'm upset because everyone's mad at me for no good reason.” “Why don't you tell me what happened, and in a gentle, loving way, I'll explain to you why you're wrong.”

13 “How's your life?” “Like everybody else's, subject to entropy, decay and eventual death. Thank you for asking.”

14 “Yes, dirty. Dirty, dirty, dirty. Which brings me to our next order of business.” [Kisses them] “Fascinating.” “I hope you don't take what I'm about to do as a comment on what we just did.” [Runs to bathroom and vomits]

15 “You know, its a tad old-school, but my father was not one to spare the rod when my brother would sneak into his truck and drink his driving whiskey.” “You want to spank me?”

16 “I don't have (Valentine's) plans, which is why I booked time on the big telescope that night.” “An evening looking at the stars, that's still kinda romantic.” “Except I'd be alone.” “I'm trying to put lipstick on a pig here. Work with me.”

17 “I have a sorta kinda boyfriend/girlfriend at home playing with a model train, but you don't hear me bitching about it.”

18 “You better watch that attitude, buddy. You're dating the popular boy/girl now.”

19 “I'll let you in on a little secret. Originally, we were painted nude. But I had him add clothes cause I thought it was an unnecessary challenge to our heterosexuality.” “Yeah, good call.” “But, if you ever change your mind, all it would take is some warm, soapy water and a couple of sponges.” “You're talking about the painting, right?” “Sure.”

20 “NAME 1, I think you might find the support you're looking for if you realize relationships are a give and take. He/She can only be there for you as much as you are for him/her.” “Thank you, NAME 3.” “And NAME 2, you need to be patient with NAME 1 and stop pressuring him/her into accepting intimacy on your terms.” “You should probably go.”

21 “You know if we did a shot every time they said something embarassing, this would be one hell of a drinking game.” “Little early for alcohol, isn't it?” [On the radio] “You know, I don't just say smart things about science, I also yodel.” [Yodelling] “I'll get the vodka.”

22 “And action.” “And cut! You realize I'm doing this for free, right?” “Yes, and so far we're still not getting our money's worth.”

23 “Stop it! Today is not about you, it's about NAME and NAME, and me!”

24 “Where are the kids?” “Oh, NAME’s helping NAME give them a bath.” “Hmm. So you really think you can trick NAME into liking babies?” “I slept with him/her. I married him/her. You want to bet against me?”

25 “Coming. Yup, that's good. Wine glasses should have handles.” [Answers the door] “Keeping accurate track of your alcohol intake. Smart idea considering how trampy you get when you've had a few.” “You heard what I did?” “I heard who you did.”

26 “I don't want five dollars, I want my dignity.” “So, what are we talking, like ten bucks?”

27 “Come on. Let's get you to bed. You've had a lot to drink.” “No more than NAME.” “That's what I'm saying.”

28 “How could you do that?” “I'm sorry, but you know what it's like when you're with your man/woman and one thing leads to another.” “I do know what that's like. I really do.”

29 “Is that book called ‘Lies I tell to get sex’?” “Is that a real book? I would totally read that book.” “Can I borrow it when you're done?”

30 “Then I met NAME and look at where we are now.” “You've kissed like once in three years.” “That's true. Do whatever you want.”

31 “Are you sure your moth-like personality won't be drawn to this blazing fire that is myself?” “More and more sure.”

32 “Your husband's weird and his clothes are ridiculous.”

33 “Did he/she say she didn't like you?” “Of course not. Nobody ever says they don't like you straight to your face.” “Heh, we have led different lives!”

34 “You know there was a time when I was alone and had no friends. I'm starting to miss that.”

35 “You're acting odd. Why?” “I'm odd all the time. Everyone knows that. Just last night, I tried to see how many Fava beans I could fit in my mouth.” “Tell me the truth.” “28.” “Come on.” “56.”

36 “Uh-oh.” “What?” “I left the food out.” “You afraid it's gonna go good?”

37 “You know how, when you're sick, you're allowed to be cranky and say whatever you want and other people's feelings don't matter?” “Ooh. Gentle and loving. This is gonna be tricky.”

38 “Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you want as a dinner guest?” “I can honestly say NAME.” “Aww, then I choose a janitor, because I'm about to throw up.”

39 “Please pass the butter!”

40 “Why can't there just be one week each month for famous people to die?” “Well, they've already arranged to die in threes. What more do you want from them?”

41 “I miss this.” “How can you miss a game you've never played before, silly?” “I guess sometimes I'm silly.”

42 “You don't know what it's like to feel completely frustrated. To have a desire build up within you and be denied any opportunity for release.” “Yeah, sounds like a drag.”

43 “Look, I know this is your wedding, and you can do whatever you want, but if you think anyone but me is gonna be your maid of honor, then you're an idiot because you are my best friend.” “Too late, NAM—” [pushes person b out of the way, rushes to hug persona a] “Bestie!”

44 “You and I never hang out like this. Why is that?” “I know, it's weird, right?” “Yeah, we should do it more often.” “Oh, no. I mean this is weird right now.”

45 “It actually was kinda fun.” “You're just saying that.” “Yeah.”

46 “If Harry Potter's wand can make decisions, why can't Thor's hammer?” “Okay, if you are going to start comparing wands and hammers, I can't even take you seriously.”

47 “I made your favorite oatmeal — plain.”

48 “Hi, NAME. What's new?” “Our friends are jerks, and I'm mad at all of them.” “I said, ‘What's new?’ but sure.”

49 “FYI, I had a donut for breakfast, you jerk.”

50 “Can you stop breathing so loud? I can hear your nose whistling.” “I can hear your face talking, so we're even.”

#amy farrah fowler #big bang theory quotes #big bang theory prompts #writing prompts #dialogue prompts #i live in covid 19 hell #quaratine sucks and making these keeps my mind busy

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josy72 · 4 years

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Adèle Haenel ✨

You shared your story three months ago and haven’t spoken publicly since then. How was your testimony received?

My story was like the last gram in a chemistry experiment that made everything fall out of solution. It resonated because French society had gone through a thought process about #MeToo.

I am part of the film world, but today I want to hear from women from other spheres, in academia, in organizations. The enormous number of handwritten letters, messages, emails — from women, but also from men — who had been moved by my story also made me realize that we lacked media stories on survivors of sexual violence in France

How would you describe how #MeToo has unfolded in France?

There is a #MeToo paradox in France: It is one of the countries where the movement was the most closely followed on social media, but from a political perspective and in cultural spheres, France has completely missed the boat.

Many artists blurred, or wanted to blur, the distinction between sexual behavior and abuse. The debate was centered on the question of [men’s] “freedom to bother,” and on feminists’ purported puritanism. But sexual abuse is abuse, not libertine behavior.

People are talking about it, though, and #MeToo has left its mark. France is boiling over with questions about it.

How did that help you tell your own story?

It helped me realize that mine was not just personal, but one of many women and children, that we all carry. But I didn’t feel ready to share it when #MeToo emerged. It took me a long time to make the personal journey to look at myself as a victim. I also don’t think I moved any faster than French society.

Some politicians in France criticized you for sharing your story in the media without pressing charges initially. Why did you do that?

We have a justice system that doesn’t make violence against women a priority. Some public figures expressed their surprise, but do they know what it takes, today, for a woman to face the judicial system in France? Does anyone take into account the huge challenges that lay along the path of a female victim of sexual violence?

My case is now being treated in an ideal manner, with trained police and investigators who are attentive and well-meaning. I wish all survivors could have treatment like this.

Some women have complained that their cases didn’t receive the same treatment.

Under French law, rape is a sexual act committed with violence, surprise or under constraint: It is centered on the method used by the abuser, not the absence of consent from the victim. But what if during the assault a victim is in total shock? How do you seek justice?

We also have to believe all the women who speak out: Whenever a woman has less power than a man, one suspects her of wanting revenge. We have nothing to gain from coming forward as a victim, and the consequences on our private life are very negative.

President Emmanuel Macron has called French society “sick with sexism” and has vowed to combat violence against women and promote gender equality. How do you see the government’s actions in this regard?

There isn’t enough funding dedicated to changing the situation, and we have in our current government a representative who has been accused of abuse by different women. Keeping him in position sends out the signal that it isn’t so serious.

The government’s sluggish reaction to the #MeToo phenomenon makes you think that the state tolerates an amount of violence against women. It remains accepted to a certain extent.

Many recent conversations about sexual violence in the film world in France have focused on Roman Polanski, who has been nominated for the Césars, the French equivalent of the Oscars, for his latest film “An Officer and a Spy.” You’ve been nominated, too.

Distinguishing Polanski is spitting in the face of all victims. It means raping women isn’t that bad.

When “An Officer and a Spy” was released, we heard outcries about censorship. It isn’t censorship — it’s about choosing who one wants to watch. And old rich white men, rest assured: You own all of the communication channels.

No, real censorship in French film is how some people suffer from invisibility. Where are the people of color in film? The directors of color? There are exceptions, like Ladj Ly, whose film has had enormous success, or Mathi Diop, but that doesn’t reflect the reality of the film world at all. They remain a minority. For now, most stories take the classic white, male, heterosexual point of view.

But “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” offers a different vision of love and human interactions.

We don’t apply a traditional playbook, which is “falling in love without understanding why.” That usually includes domination and unequal power relations that are often considered like a motor for eroticism.

This film frees itself of that. We offer something that politically, artistically, makes us less submissive. It is a new version of desire, a cross between intellectual, carnal and inventive excitement.

What are you plans now? Are they affected by the impact of your story?

It is too early to say, but it doesn’t really matter if it harms my career. I think I did something good for the world, something that makes me feel upright. I am going to act in a play at the end of the year, but I don’t know yet how it has affected the way people see me.

I walk around Paris on foot — I don’t live in a bubble. Sometimes people thank me for speaking out when they see me in the street. When people thank me, it moves me, since the goal was to help. It makes me proud and joyful.

#portrait de la jeune fille en feu #incredible women #amazing #strong #womansday #strongwomen #adele haenel #portrait of a lady on fire #retrato de una mujer en llamas

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hotgirlsforsexservice · 2 years

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What Is Sex: Causes And Types Of Sex

There are tons of life hacks and tips online for making sex hot and passionate. But before jumping into bed, you need to find out what sex really is.

The sexual act was conceived by nature as a way of reproduction not only for humans, but also for animals. However, only people get such incredible pleasure from him and have sex not only for the sake of offspring. Also, our ability and desire to have sex does not depend on reproductive function. Get more information about sex.

So, sex has evolved from the principle of procreation to the entire set of mental reactions, attitudes, actions associated with the manifestation and satisfaction of a person's sexual desire. For each person, sexual behavior is individual.

The main form of sexual activity for most people is sexual intercourse (sex), which can be engaged in regardless of sexual orientation. If the relationship is heterosexual, then the man's penis enters the vagina - this is a classic form of sex. If homosexual, then the couple practices anal, oral sex or masturbation.

Fondling the genitals with the tongue and lips is called oral sex. So, the caress of a woman's vagina is called cunnilingus, and a man's penis is called blowjob or fellatio. Anal sex is the process of penetration of the penis into the anus, and its oral stimulation is anilingus.

Recently, French scientists have explained how sex came about. As it turned out, multicellular organisms first reproduced asexually, that is, they themselves produced offspring. But because of this, their genetic diversity was low, and diseases began to spread quickly. That is why sex arose, which saved organisms from extinction. Looking for a couple and having sex had to spend more energy and resources, which was problematic and unprofitable. However, during such reproduction, offspring with new genes were formed, as a result of mixing material from two parents.

According to research by scientists, sex strengthens our health, effectively fights headaches. After making love, the mood improves, the level of anxiety and depression decreases. Anyway, extra hugs and pleasant touches of a loved one are the best medicine in the world!

So, in a family with an authoritarian parenting style, there are no exceptions to the rules, and the boundaries are extremely rigid. And they will be reluctant to talk about sex in such a family.

In this family about sex, most likely, if they do, it will be a taboo topic, and parents will pretend that sex does not exist, just like in the Soviet Union. And if there are, then in the regulations of strict rules. God forbid you lose your virginity before the age of 18 . Or they can speak, but ironically, and irony is latent aggression. The child will have to hide that he has an interest in this topic, and he, of course, will be ashamed, - says Olga Borisova.

And the worst thing in such a manner of upbringing is that the child is taught that the authority of an adult is indisputable. And, unfortunately, it is the children from such families that most often become victims of sexual violence.

“These children are more likely to be sexually abused because they are used to obeying an adult unconditionally, because the adult’s task is to achieve complete obedience from the child. And when an adult approaches a child on the street, he does not even have a thought that an adult can be said no. Especially if the adult demonstrates goodwill. After all, the child practices the ability to say no with his parents, - says the psychologist. - So it turns out that a person cannot say no to a pedophile, a boss because of overtime work, a wife who rides around his neck ... He completely loses any initiative and responsibility for his life and becomes either a rebellious rebel or very obedient and a diligent person, which is also nothing good.

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moodboardinthecloud · 2 years

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The Feminist Magic of the Older Witch

SAM GEORGE-ALLEN

There is a woman in my life for whom I don’t have a title. She’s just Joan. Old enough to be my grandmother, she’s not related to me at all—she is, in fact, my mother’s former schoolteacher, who took her in when she got kicked out of home and has remained a dear friend ever since. I guess the right term for her is “family friend.” But for my whole life those words have felt inadequate to describe her, and the fullness of what she provided—provides—to my life. As a small child, I spent every afternoon after school with her, in the small garden outside her flat, where she would shuffle tulip bulbs around and I would arrange forget-me-not leaves into fairy beds. She took me to the local lake to feed the ducks, taught me about goslings and defended me from angry swans. She attended my music recitals and school graduations, she fed and housed me when my parents couldn’t, and she indulged me in endless, sprawling games of make-believe, in which I was a mermaid or princess, and she was always a witch.

Joan never married or had children. As a child, it seemed to me that she existed purely for my benefit: to tell me stories from the olden days, to buy me books, to generously play the witch to my heroine. She was like my grandmother, but she was not a grandmother; she was a role model, a quiet, thoughtful, endlessly knowledgeable presence, whose experiences and understanding of the world were vastly different from my own.

“Grandmother” seems to be the only role we let older women play, but it is inadequate even for the grandmothers I know—my own and others’—with its reductive connotations of docility and bland kindness that don’t even begin to touch on the real wealth an older woman can share with those younger than her. But there is, maybe, another role for old women—one we tend not to mention in polite society. Witch. More specifically: crone.

The witches in fairy stories are almost invariably old women. The crone—withered and malevolent—is what we grow up thinking of when we think “witch.” What’s so scary about an old woman? Why has she held on so tenaciously to her role as children-frightener that we still recognize that terror long into adulthood? Maybe the same thing that made Joan perfect for the witch role in my make-believe is the same thing that made her so important in my life: her untethered wisdom. That Joan was unattached to a man always felt daring, somehow. She has an aura of asexual freedom from the boring trappings of compulsory heterosexual courtship. For me, that’s exhilarating; maybe for others it’s a step too far outside of the narrow roles of femininity. Old women no longer have to contend with the vagaries of the desiring gaze, and without an inherent eroticism a woman is a creature even less knowable than before. Or maybe the monstrousness of the crone is that she’s visible at all, when we prefer our old women to disappear completely. Many post-menopausal women complain of becoming suddenly see-through, as people bump into them with shopping trolleys and ignore them in conversation. Maybe the crone, appearing at a christening to which she was conveniently not invited or materializing unpleasantly in the window of a candy house ripe for the snacking, is shocking just for making herself known.

Helen Garner’s wonderful essay on growing old and doing away with the irritating trappings of decorum expected of women, “The Insults of Age”—now this is a real crone tale. The glee with which she yanks an impertinent schoolgirl’s ponytail, her brusque dismissal of simpering publicity agents, her cheerful but steely demands to be taken seriously are all classic witch behavior. As is the popular poem “Warning” by Jenny Joseph, which I’m sure my mum forwarded to me several times back in the days of luridly formatted chain emails. The promise of a gleeful, unencumbered old age is the promise of hard-earned cronehood. I’d like to think I see it on my horizon, too: a moment in my life where I cross the membrane into that realm of invisibility, and find myself somehow weightless and free.

Being a witch promises us a lodestone: a legacy, a lineage of women, weird and wise, who came before us.

Although the witches from fairytales might all be crones, current witch discourse remains obsessed with—and targeted at—youth. And the witch definitely is having something of a cultural moment, though it’s by no means her first. Her popularity seems to experience a perennial revival alongside surges in women’s rights: the revitalization of Wicca in the 1970s, the boom in magic-adjacent popular culture in the 1990s, and now, the era of the digital witch, where many magically inclined young women find their communities in the ether of the internet. Vice is chock-full of witch-themed content, some of it fascinating, most of it self-consciously shallow. (The best features are about visiting renowned forest witch Susun Weed, who lives in upstate New York, or about modern-day brujas engaging in the rituals of their ancestors after decades of colonial displacement from their own traditions. The mini-documentary on Romanian witches who accept payment to cast love spells and predict the future is also a must-watch.) Sites like HelloGiggles, Zooey Deschanel and friends’ foray into fluffy women’s media, have articles called things like “Witchcraft 101,” with instructions on how to make a sufficiently mystical-looking grimoire. Rookie had a similar series on witchiness, with crystal guides and tips on how to set up an altar. And make-up giant Sephora recently courted controversy by advertising beginners’ witchcraft kits, containing a bundle of sage, a rose quartz crystal and several mystical scents. (The kits were eventually pulled from production after an outcry from the witch community.)

The enduring figure of the teen witch is evidence enough of a youth-obsessed witch revival, as is the recent reboot of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, reimagined as The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina with a distinctly less bubbly and more Beelzebub-centered storyline. Focusing on the teen witch makes sense considering girls’ historical association with uncanny events (Salem, Joan of Arc, the long tradition of pubescent girls attracting poltergeists and hauntings), and our continuing uneasiness over teenage girls’ near-supernatural powers of change. But I’m no longer a teenager, and I won’t be in Vice’s target demographic forever. The appeal of identifying as a witch now, as I look into my future, is much more complex than when I was a 13-year-old first toying with Wicca.

We’re at a cultural turning point where it feels like real change is at once within reach and about to be snatched away for good. Even as the #MeToo movement powers on, toppling predators from their thrones, the most powerful man in the world has made his predatory nature part of his brand and his platform. Women are spurred into solidarity with one another by the eerie plausibility of “The Handmaid’s Tale” just as much as they are by the aspirational fantasy of “Wonder Woman.” The world, not just for women, but for everyone, seems to have gone awry. Scientists tell us we have 12 years to undo a century of climate destruction. People are choosing to remain childless rather than bring new life into an uncertain world. Nazis are a thing again. A sense of unreality permeates everything, and for women, who have spent generations locked in a grim battle for rights—at our jobs, in our bedrooms, on the operating table—that other reality is a dark one. We teeter on this precipice; we could go either way; things are not in our control on any plane of the familiar. We’re simultaneously the vectors of change and the bodies upon which it’s wrought. It is a perilous place to be, in this uncharted terrain.

Being a witch promises us a lodestone: a legacy, a lineage of women, weird and wise, who came before us. It gives us a context in which to fit our suspicions, fears, superstitions and our new, unexpected lateral power. It provides meaning in an otherwise barren spiritual landscape, without demanding the sacrifice or cognitive dissonance of most mainstream religions. It suggests a connection to a broad, if invisible, network of other women practicing the Craft. And it promises a compass with which to navigate the unknowable territory of growing older.

This excerpt from Witches: The Transformative Power of Women Working Together by Sam George-Allen (Melville House, 2020) appears by permission of the publisher.

https://www.yesmagazine.org/health-happiness/2020/10/30/feminist-older-witch?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR12XlqoYPLMzLHBf9FrTOIkCy_iv3C7RktI0FKoJat_EI5iMGuAfYtT0jI#Echobox=1633504738

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bunnythemonsterlayer · 6 years

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The White Rabbit

Because I have been dragged back into WATCHMEN fandom Hell and @social-justice-waterbender wanted it, I dug up the corpse of my vigilante’s profile I wrote up almost 10 years ago for a WATCHMEN AU and edited it so the timeline worked and actually made some lick of sense.

If anyone has further questions about her they can totally ask but here’s the jest of what was in the document I found all prettied up. Enjoy

General

Identity: Alice Darlene Early

Alias: The White Rabbit

Years in Service: 1966 – 1977, 1985

Born: September 12, 1945

Died: November 2, 1985

Relatives: Ernest Early (father, deceased) and Cynthia Grant (mother)

Affiliation: Former Crimebusters member

Base of Operations: New York City

Status

Alignment: Good

Identity: Secret

Citizenship: American

Marital Status: Single

Occupation: Former waitress at Mr. Charles's Diner, Saboteur

Characteristics

Gender: Female

Height: 5'8”

Weight: 150 lb

Eyes: Brown

Hair: Black

Race: Mulatto

Origin

Universe: WATCHMEN AU

Place of Birth: San Fransisco, California

Place of Death: Antarctica

Skills: Acrobatics (Gymnastics), Martial Arts (Defensive, Fall Recovery) Charisma (Morale Boosting), Mechanics (Fix-it, Disassembly), Thievery, Medical Knowledge (Basic First Aid), Acting

Advantages: Loyal, Quick Reflexes, High Stamina, Determined, Privileged Upbringing

Disadvantages: Impulsive, Emotional, Stubborn, Insecure, Attention Hungry, Secretive

Equipment: Pocket Watch, Trackers (2), Flash Grenade (1), Steel “Toed” Boots, Blast Resistant Visor, Audio Scrambler

Motivation: Upholding the Good/Thrill Seeking/Self Validation

Background

Born in San Francisco, California, Alice moved to New York in 1962 at the age of seventeen in the hopes of finding a place where she could get a different perspective on life and make something more of herself. After years of civilian living unable to think of an effective way to achieve her goal of self fulfillment, she made the decision to become a vigilante, using information she would overhear from customers she waited on during her job as a waitress. She teamed up with Rorschach and Night Owl II in 1966 after they begrudgingly allowed her to stay due to her constantly showing up and 'helping' them.

Outside of her vigilante lifestyle she had no contact with any of the other Crimebusters, only finding out their identities later after the Keene Act with the exception of Rorschach till his arrest in 1985. She did not reach out to any of them and as a result is the only vigilante to stay completely anonymous after her forced retirement.

Character

Alice is subdued and even headed compared to her vigilante counterpart. She treats people the way she wishes to be treated, believing that such behavior will prompt others to treat her the same way, even going so far as to give them the benefit of the doubt should they wrong her the first couple of times. Her reasoning being that everything is gradual and to expect things to instantly change is ignorant and foolhardy.

Being so far from home and often feeling alone, Alice will subtly cling to people she has regular contact with. Usually by catering to their needs and going out of her way to do things for them that will cause them to favor her positively. To further the pleasant image of herself, she is very secretive about her past and deeper feelings, fearing a negative response; something that can be attributed to her growing up in a Nuclear Family setting and having to keep up a certain image.

Fueled by adrenaline and anonymity, Alice's White Rabbit persona is extremely hyper active and allows her the freedom to express herself in ways she can't during her day job. Although the constant exuberance can be uplifting it more often than not leads to impulsive behavior, over stepping boundaries and a needless exhaustion of effort. A believer in never dying loyalty, White Rabbit will stick with her colleagues to the point of complete stubbornness even when it's to her detriment.

Out of costume, Alice shows no outstanding physical ability aside from being able to balance multiple objects such as trays of food during her waitress hours and lift her own weight to climb up things.

Politically Alice doesn't tie herself with any specific party, choosing to just go with what she feels is fair and just. However, due to growing up in California there are hints of subconscious leanings towards more liberal beliefs, though her level of patriotism boarders on pure nationalism.

In regards to her sexuality Alice appears to be heterosexual. Her attitude towards romantic conquest comes off as blasé and worrisome, not making any effort to even attract a mate. Reasons for this being the possibility of someone finding out too much about her, resulting in a broken heart and abandonment. This, however, coupled with her clingy tendencies usually ends up resulting in anxiety, mental exhaustion and distress when she does find herself developing feelings for someone. When pressed to describe her perfect man, Alice states that anyone is fine as long as he is a good man and someone she can be proud to stand by.

Costume

To keep her identity a complete secret The White Rabbit's costume has head to toe coverage, including a wig to conceal her natural hair color. Fashioned after the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, the costume consists of a visor, mask, tailored jacket, undershirt, gloves, high waist shorts and leggings that also act as her boots. The entire outfit is made by herself. The toes of her boots are fitted with solid steel toes designed to look like rabbit feet, which were meant to give a hand up for climbing and inflicting damage when delivering kicks. To further hide her identity, The White Rabbit fakes an exaggerated Northern Jersey accent on par with Betty Boop, meant to be distinctive and agitating.

Skills and Equipment

Having grown up with a stereotypical home life, Alice possesses skills in various gendered activities such as sewing, cooking, baking, dancing and penmanship with a plethora of knowledge in classic literature. School activities such as gymnastics and other light sports helped prepare her for her life as a vigilante helping hone her reflexes and reaction times as well as her ability to recover from falls. All her martial arts 'training' was taught to her by travel buddies she met on her way to New York, originally just starting out as a fun activity to do during pit stops. Realizing that she couldn't stand up against most men, she focuses on defense, evasion and using her opponents weight against them. These stops as well played a part in teaching her how to fix and disassemble things due to the many car issues that happened along the way. She often uses this knowledge to sabotage get away vehicles.

The visor over her eyes is made of a same material used for police riot shields, the origin of how she acquired such material is not something she's willing to reveal. It is solid enough to protect against a hard hit to the face and tinted enough to hide her eyes while giving her semi clear visibility. While able to buff and fix small chips and cracks in it, it would most likely be impossible to recreate if broken.

Her costume, contains no armor besides her visor and padded knees and elbows to break falls more efficiently.

After teaming up Night Owl II gifted a number of things to assist her, including a reconstruction of her boot 'toes' to make them lighter and work in more efficient ways. Redesigning them to be separate parts instead of one solid piece allowed them to operate more like an actual foot, now giving them the ability to spread open for better balance.

Lacked a belt or anything for inventory carry, what little White Rabbit holds is either light enough to hook onto the waist band of her shorts or small enough to be kept in the breast pocket of her jacket. The 'tail' on the back of her costume is a small flash grenade to be used only as a last resort or quick escape. An audio scrambler is built into her pocket watch producing 5 minutes of interference to hinder calls for back up or keep surveillance mics from listening in on covert conversations. The trackers are standard and used to track targets.

Relationship with Walter Kovacs and Rorschach

The most influential person in Alice's life in New York, Alice met Walter Kovacs years before she became a vigilante. The diner she worked at was near his job and catered to many of the employees during the lunch rush. Walter would come every now and then to have coffee, food and sometimes read the paper. Their communication was sparse, only expanded through her own efforts to build a friendly connection with him as a regular customer. He was polite to her within his ability, eventually answering her in full sentences. It was only after her request for him to walk her home from the diner one day to avoid a heckling customer she worried would follow her that their relationship evolved in any way. With Walter being thankful that she was direct with her request and demeanor instead of trying to sweet talk him like other women. Pleasant, long conversation being proven possible, the two bonded and grew into being good friends.

Not aware they knew each other out of costume, Rorschach and White Rabbit would often get into small squabbles, spawning mostly from White Rabbit's too familiar attitude towards he and Night Owl II, giving them pet names like 'Rory' and 'Nighty', bumping into and touching them casually, as well as having a sense of humor in serious situations. Although this was explained as a way to lighten the mood and ease tension the behavior caused Rorschach to often become angry, accusing her of making a mockery out of their work. White Rabbit would often try to soothe him, but this only worked some of the time and more often than not end in Night Owl II having to break them up. Many nights ended in both parties being bitter towards each other. As time passed White Rabbit gained more experience in her vigilantism, gaining the two the ability to work together more smoothly even to the point of being able to go on patrol and stakeouts together without incident. It was at these times they'd talk about their motivations, eventually coming to an understanding. Some conversations would ironically consist of them talking about their encounters with each others day time alias's, oblivious to the fact that they were the same people.

As the years passed, it became clear that Walter's mental state was begining to deteriorate. Unaware it was his nights of vigilantism causing it, Alice began offering and request he spend time with her more frequently; hoping the interaction would help with whatever was troubling him. At this point however, watching the slow, descending sanity of someone she cared about happen right her eyes began to work against her own well being. Forced to come to terms with the fact that she indeed had strong, romantic feelings for someone, Alice weighted her options and in December 1974 she finally confessed how she felt to Walter. Trying to cushion the heaviness of her sudden admission, she quickly tagged on the reassurance that it was okay if he didn't feel the same way. She would later describe his face looking placid but his eyes looking terrified. In 1975, after not seeing Walter for almost a week, Alice went to the garment factory he worked at looking for him. When she asked to see him she was informed he had quit suddenly and they hadn't heard anything since. Not knowing his address or any way to contact him, Alice became inconsolable and sank into a sever depression.

At this point White Rabbit also began to notice a change in Rorschach's behavior. Becoming more brutal in his actions he started working alone more often and interacting less and less. After weeks of this environment and still wrecked with worry over Walter's disappearance, White Rabbit asked Rorschach for his help. Begging him through tears she gave him Walter's full name and former work place in the desperate hope of tracking him down. It was at this point that Rorschach figured out who White Rabbit really was, but continued to withhold his own identity. He agreed and told her he would look into it and to meet him in a couple of days. At their meeting place, Rorschach informed White Rabbit that he had found Walter and was 'alive' but refused to give any other details. Ignoring further pleading and tears, he left her in the spot, telling her to be satisfied with what she got and let Walter go.

In 1977 after the Keene Act was put into effect, White Rabbit refused to retire and continued to patrol the city. Working to stop what small crimes she could alone she as well tirelessly searched for Rorschach, who had refused to retire as well. When she found him in a fight with some local thugs she joined in to help him, suffering a blow to the face from a metal bat that shattered a large chunk out of her visor. After disposing of the criminals, White Rabbit confronted Rorschach, berating him for not asking for help. Insisting he couldn't handle the entire city on his own she assured him that she was there to help no matter what. Rorschach began to leave, coldly telling her that he didn't need her weighting him down, to which she grabbed him by the arm and demand he look at her and tell her what was wrong with him. A fight ensued, with White Rabbit demanding Rorschach accept her help, proclaiming that she wasn't going to retire as long as he stayed active as well. Finally grabbed her and staring her in the face, Rorschach ordered her to quit and go home, calling her by her real name in the process. Rattled and enraged by the fact that he never told her he knew who she was, Alice fought back harder against him, turning the entire affair into an all out brawl between them. No match for Rorschach but still refusing to abandon him Alice declaring he would have to kill her before she would leave him to die alone and cold. The fight was ended with Rorschach smashing her head into a wall, breaking her visor fully and concussing her. She plead for him not to do this, thinking of both Rorschach and Walter and who was going to take care of them if she couldn't before loosing consciousness and waking up in her own bed. The remains of her visor sat on her bedside table with a note reading 'Thank you for all you do' and bearing Rorschach's signature.

Dejected and without the use of her visor anymore Alice was finally forced to retire.

Rorschach refers to this event as 'the night the White Rabbit died', most likely as a way to continue to protect her anonymity.

The Events of Watchmen

Finding out that Walter was Rorschach via news report, Alice visits Walter in prison where she uses her audio scrambler to mask their conversation. She confronts him about never telling her who he was when he knew about her, to which Walter replies that it was for their own good. The meeting ends with Walter placidly confessing that he was fond of Alice long before finding out she was White Rabbit.

Although telling Walter and Long that she wouldn't be back, Alice still dons her vigilante costume again on Halloween night to try and get Rorschach out herself. Luckily coming in during the riot and Night Owl and Silk Specter's own rescue mission, White Rabbit gleefully joins them.

After loosing Silk Specter to Manhattan, discovering Veidt's plan, and Rorschach mailing his journal, White Rabbit finally asks Rorschach on the way to Antarctica to tell her what really happened back when he forced her into retirement. He tells her and apologizes in a less awkward fashion than he had with Night Owl. White Rabbit accepts his apology and reassures him “I won't let you die cold and alone. Well...alone at least. We are going to Antarctica.”

Death

White Rabbit witnesses the deaths caused by Veidt in his attempt to create a utopia. Everyone decides to keep it a secret except Rorschach who tries to leave and inform the world of the truth. White Rabbit loyally follows him and tries to assist him with getting the hoverbikes to work when they are stopped by Manhattan. Rorschach tells her to go back with the others to escape the price of trying to ruin Veidt's utopia, to which she refuses, repeating her promise to not leave him to die alone. Taking off her mask, White Rabbit seconds the prompting of Manhattan to kill them. Embracing Rorschach, their silhouette takes the shape of the Hiroshima Lovers before disintegrating.

#Watchmen #au #oc #White Rabbit #comics #sorry this took so long #i wanted to draw a picture to go with it

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