#I’m in full finals mode which is incredibly depressing so I need this more than water tbh

[cameliawrites]

oh my god Leigh put the content clock on her latest Instagram reel and if this means we’re FINALLY getting s&b news in the next couple days… 🙏🏻🙏🏻

#Netflix we are out here BEGGING for scraps of content #a release date a trailer SOMETHING #I’m in full finals mode which is incredibly depressing so I need this more than water tbh #shadow and bone show #leigh bardugo #shadow and bone netflix

[life-rewritten]

OMG!! I just found your blog through a WBL fan sharing your post about WBL on Instagram, and I am SOOOOO happy to see that you noticed and appreciate the tutor and fighter couple from Why R U series too. If possible, please write an analysis about this couple, about any specific aspect you deem as most important or just generally, whatever you are okay with. I love reading your analysis and the insights it gives me, and I just finished binge reading all of your writings on my favorite bl (1)

Hi wow mindblown by this comment Thank you so much for letting me know that my stuff is being shared I really appreciate that and I am so grateful that you took time of your day to come speak to me. I adore Fighter and Tutor, like they’re my favourite couple ever. What happened when why r u was airing was I wasn’t yet analysing BLs at that time otherwise I would have been writing essays and essays about them. Because it’s been so long since I went back to watch them I’m going to let you see some of my drafts on how I would have broken their relationship into pieces and analysed. Because they are incredible and I really always feel sad when people see them as just like a se*ual couple when there’s more to them than that.  So I will let you see the first drafts and my ideas on them through this  ask and I hope that's okay for now. Maybe after my other shows I will like go back and rewatch them and start analysing more about them. If I do I’d probably do a youtube video about them because they’re so good. 

Here’s some of the analysis for them that I wrote: 

The theme for these two is  the struggle with internalised homophobia and self-acceptance. They both had this obstacle in themselves as they fell for each other and tried hard to avoid and run away from what they felt.  It’s been a long journey for them being into each other since the first time they met but not really realising what they felt.  Fighter did but he went into extreme panic mode and tried to run away immediately he felt that. So he tried to stay by Tutor’s side through the teasing and bullying because Tutor made him feel great and happy always but then with pressure from his father and the path he was meant to take to keep on being seen as successful, he thought his feelings for Tutor were useless and wrong. Plus he didn’t know if it was reciprocated so that caused even more fear for him which is why he just stayed with teasing and finally kater in thinking Tutor likes Hwa he chose to pull her away from him by taking her attention but also he chose to keep what they have as enemies/haters that way and avoid being near Tutor. This is why they end up hating each other a lot by the beginning of Why R U which is like 3 years later or something after he chose to stay with Hwa. 

Tutor didn’t understand fully why he got angry, jealous and annoyed, he had an inclination from the first year that Fighter liked men and he was actually hopeful about it because deep down he had feelings of wanting to also flirt with Fighter, wanting to stay with Fighter even when annoyed him and bullied him. He liked Fighter’s softness at times and he liked the way he felt even though he didn’t understand why he was so rifled and affected by Fighter’s presence when no one else has been able to do that to him before. But he became upset when Fighter chose to date Hwahwa because it was his automatic issue with IH that of course Fighter doesn’t like him but he likes girls, so he got jealous and sad and proceeded to also dislike Fighter because he had this effect on him whilst still trying to date his best friend who had feelings for Fighter.

They both have had unknowingly pent up feelings for each other, so once Fighter breaks the barrier by their first kiss, they both go into extreme panic and they both could no longer pretend any more with what they have. Which is why the first episodes they both keep struggling to keep their attraction with each other quiet because its been 3 years since they wanted each other that way. Fighter has so much pent up attraction and needs to give into his feelings that each time they have a chance to break that barrier it’s intense and crazy. Both have been longing, pining secretly for each other since the beginning of the show. What happens next is for Fighter he has to choose to finally accept that he cares a lot, a lot , a lot about Tutor, he finally starts to learn more about this person he loves and he starts to want to protect and keep Tutor happy and by his side. When it comes to finally choosing to let go of Hwa and choose to fight for Tutor and start knowing if he feels the same way. It’s a leap of faith he takes when he breaks up with Hwa. He realises he’s the one stopping his wishes from happening with Tutor because he keeps being in denial about what they are because he’s scared it’s only him that’s gay and has feelings for the other.

It’s only after tutor sister tells him that he’s holding back his feelings does he realise that it’s time to talk about their unstable relationship and Fighter at that moment had also come to terms with his break up with Hwa after making out with tutor revealed the truth, that’s why on the rooftop they do a test that ultimately breaks their walls down and choose to give in to their feelings no matter how scared they are about it being reciprocated. When Tutor looks away and loses the game it’s a symbol to Fighter that he’s also been the same as him from the start. Tutor looks away sadly thinking he’s the one who has the feelings but Fighter just loses it and lets him know its equal which is why I love that scene so much because for so long both of them because of IH has been avoiding thinking the other had the same feelings for them when they both from the start have felt love for a long time. And from then they go on a journey to learn about what this means, if it’s real feelings and not just attraction hence their beach vacation which is essentially them asking if they could love each other and be in a real relationship, and if they can take on their obstacles around them. The beach solidifies for them their feelings so they choose each other for life hence the earring and necklace. But it’s fast paced how they feel because it’s just confirmation, now Tutor starts to realise that Fighter is actually different than he thought he was and he falls so fast, he now realises how much he loves Fighter and how much Fighter made him want to fight for his happiness and life. Tutor has not had hope for happiness and ease in his life, because he’s always had to fight to survive on his own. So when Fighter shows up like a prince charming and constantly is connected to saving him time and time again, it’s exactly him realising there’s someone who does represent that hope that he’d be fine. Hence why the final obstacle is Tutor regressing and starting to think because of IH and society that he and Fighter are just a pipe dream.

They go back to face the world only for Fighters father to bring back all the fear, internalised homophobia and obstacles they had. Fighter panics and thinks he was right; the reason why he never told Tutor his feelings was because he was afraid the other would break his heart (was not gay, did not have feelings for him, would make fun of him etc) so when Tutor breaks up with him he loses his mind after trying hard to let go. When he sees that actually Tutor is taunting him and is still flirting with a guy, not him, he proceeds drunk and upset to try and get back moments from the beach scene/ past make out scenes to keep that spark alive but realises Tutor is not okay this time and he’s the one forcing it. He also acted out because with them the truth comes out each time they’re physical with other romantically. It’s a kiss that caused them to finally tell each other how they felt. That’s always been the way they break their walls down.

It’s what causes him to break down and finally reveal the truth he’s loved Tutor since he met him, he’s just been afraid of all that’s happening even if it’s happening he still wants to be with Tutor. Tutor however breaks his heart even more so he backs off. Tutor on the other hand is broken and mentally exhausted back to depression, back to having to fake being strong and deal with the futility of hope and joy in his life as he’s always been used to. He gets seen by Fighter and doesn’t have it on him to fight him away, so decides to stay in an idealistic fantasy, tells him to hold him and breaks his walls down again. Tutor is always having to fake being strong because it’s how he survives so whenever Fighter enters his world his vulnerability scares him, that’s why his sister gives him the image of a cactus. He’s tough and sharp or pretends to be with his demeanour but actually he’s just a boy who wants to be happy and be safe and survive. So when Fighter shows up at his weakest moments, as he struggles to deal with his mental exhaustion and heart break, he gives in  because again Fighter represents to him that hope. He starts to waver and want to stay in that lie for a long time with Fighter. Hence when he wakes up and Fighter is gone he thinks its all over and he finally breaks down completely.

Only when Fighter goes he breaks down in anguish truly thinking he lost him. Fighter finally comes out to his dad and fights his views, And we end up back at the beach, a place which represented authenticity and truth for them, it’s their truest realest self, but it also was their escapism. So Fighter coming there and letting Tutor know there’s no more obstacles in their way makes them both finally equally start a stable relationship with no more fear or care about anything. These twos relationship is full of tension and they both feel the chemistry, like magnets their bodies are drawn together, every scene they’re in, it’s their love language physical touch not bl fan service. They just naturally want to be in contact with each other and also their pent up feelings leads to them constantly wanting to sleep together because of hormones and well because they enjoy their se*ual life, nothing bad about that it’s realistic for couples to be that horny, that needy and that touchy.

It’s people who don’t get the context of internalised homophobia and what being in the closet is like for people with this anxiety and self hate caused by how they think society views them and treats them if out, those are the people who think there was no plot. Every dialogue these two had, their flashbacks and their acting (eyes, facial gestures, touches) showed why Fighter liked teasing Tor, why he dated Hwa but never paid her attention, why we had the beach scenes, why the break up escalated, why Tutor gave in when ill, why the non/dubious consent scene happened, why they get back together and why they told each other I love you forever immediately after they got together. Every single part adds up. It really is insane to me how people don’t see their real story to this day or see them as such a great storyline for BL. I would never get it.

#fightertutor #saintzee #fighter x tutor #thai bl #bl series #bl drama #fvete #march #wrpup #asks #why r u

[shreddedleopard]

Twelve-million more reasons Historia and Levi are part of the Endgame. With Pictures.

You can read the first post I made on this here:

10 reasons it would make narrative sense for Levi and Historia’s character arcs to end together.

(This is the mega-evolved version.)

Okay, I’m going to put this out there now, and before you judge me, please just read the posts. You don’t have to agree. This is just an idea. But it makes a stupid amount of sense, at least to me. So here's your fair warning (and now I'm being bold): If you don’t want to potentially be spoiled, Do Not Read On.

Here’s the Theory:

Historia Reiss will give birth to a half-Ackerman child, and together with Levi, from the ashes and ruins of the world Eren destroyed, they will welcome the dawn of a new age for humanity, where Ymir’s curse and the power of the Titans is extinct.

I know. I sound like some crazy, Rivahisu nut. Granted, I am, but I’m not mad enough to make a claim like this without a shit-ton of evidence, because it’s such a damn twist it feels like it can’t be true. But just humour me.

Here’s the theory, then we’ll look at why it makes sense and how it might have been foreshadowed. Please note: I have less clue how this will tie in to Eremika endgame, so I haven’t mentioned this as much, but obviously that will be the other very important side of this coin.

10 months ago (In Japan, full term pregnancy is counted as 10 months), at the banquet celebrating completion of the new railroad, Levi and Historia, having had 3 and a bit years to bond over their shared experiences and become close, may have gotten carried away together and shared one night of being a bit more than friends. She’s well into her 18th year at this point, just to clear that up. This resulted in Historia getting pregnant. Okay just stay with me; I know. I know. I sound crazy. But hear me out. So this pregnancy, contrary to the belief of the MPs and rest of the damn world, was the complete opposite of planned. Historia tells Levi, and Levi immediately panics. Because, to steal Kenny’s famous line, Levi thinks to himself ‘I can’t be some kid’s dad.’

 Levi does what he always does best, and shuts down into business mode, telling Historia she will need to cover it up somehow. Historia does as he asks, probably reluctantly, because she really has developed very deep feelings for him during the timeskip, and finds some farm hand to take the blame, likely saying she made a silly mistake with some random and the father doesn’t want anything to do with the child, and so she needs a father for the child not to be illegitimate. Which is her worst nightmare, because of course, that’s what she was. Levi watches the exchange hidden in that famous hood, feeling very conflicted, because although he cares about her, he thinks it best if no one knows that it was him that got the Queen pregnant, and of course, he’s duty bound, with a vow to fulfil, so he has no time to be worrying about a family. (Silly Levi!) 

How ironic this conversation would be if this theory were true. Remember, Historia was completely willing to eat Zeke if needed. Instead, she got pregnant, unplanned, nothing to do with any plot or selfish wishes, just the result of a spontaneous act of love by two people who’ve grown to care for one another a lot. ANYWAY.

Because we know Levi actually has a good heart, he feels immensely guilty for all of this; he's just a product of his upbringing and thinks he doesn’t know the first thing about families, so it's better for all involved if he not be. See where this is going? The old cursed history repeating? Making the same mistakes as our parents? Plus, Levi is bound by his duty. He is incredibly important to the military still, and he cannot just abandon this for any of his own selfish wishes. He’s supposed to be the one to vanquish the beast titan. 

Cue ten months of Historia looking hella depressed and hopeless, and Levi being even more of an asshole than usual to everyone, and not really wanting to say too much at all, as well as making some terrible workplace decisions (lol) poor boy be distracted.

Look at his face 😭

Yes Levi. A month. Which means Historia is now due and you’re still stuck with beardy, without a solution and pretty soon no reason for the MPs not to turn the mother of your child into a Titan.

That’s what that face is. I thought he looked a bit weird first time I read these panels 🤔 He didn’t know about the wine. We see that later. Anyway, I keep getting distracted, stop. I’ll come back to this.

But fear not; Levi will have a choice to make. 

So this is where it gets a bit more iffy for me, because I'm not sure how it would work, so this could be a way off, BUT. I believe it will come to light that the combination of Royal and Ackerman genes will somehow cancel out a person’s ability to turn into a titan and connection through paths, thus making them truly ‘free.’

The founding titan has the ability to change Eldian physiology, according to what Zeke learned from professor Xavier. 

EDIT: Okay so here’s where I’ve had to tweak this a bit in light of there latest chapter. So we just had Zeke in PATHS. With none other than our second resident genius, and as proclaimed by Eren, the saviour of humanity: Armin. What do our boys have a conversation about? Reproduction and the importance of the small moments in life - it’s these little moments which matter, regardless of the desire or need to recreate. Interesting how both the leaf and baseball link back to what their ideas of ‘family’ became. If Historia and Levi were to be in the same scenario in PATHS, what would their items be? What truly means family to them both? 

Perhaps Armin and Zeke realise what is needed to lift the curse of the titans - maybe a blueprint for genes which can cancel out the connection to PATHS and the founder? If only they had a child with a new type of Royal-Ackerman DNA which might fit the bill ... 

Here’s Levi’s moment. He, with Historia, has created such a child - completely by accident, because of one of those ‘moments’ that both Armin and Zeke mention - moments that are simply just about enjoying what you have with no sense of how it might relate to anything bigger - a real rarity for both of them, considering their roles and constantly being asked to think about the good of humanity as a whole. What a beautiful irony, that in the moment they chose to be selfish and, to use freckled Ymir’s own words, really live for themselves, they set a chain reaction in motion that would ultimately save humanity. 

Where does this leave Eren and Mikasa? Good question. I believe Eren will die once the curse is removed, because tragically he is the character that has been forced to choose humanity over his own personal relationships. As Isayama has said before, Eren is a victim of the story. Mikasa will be the last thing he sees, hence the original dream at the start of the manga, where he wakes up crying. Something like this. But probably a lot better. Yeah.

Out of the ashes of the old world, a new one will be built, but through Historia’s kindness and love, and Levi’s guilt and understanding of what was sacrificed in the past, society will not repeat the same mistakes. The final panel could be Jean holding his child, perhaps with Mikasa, if she ever manages to get over losing Eren. That would be vague enough so that Isayama was able to show it to us already without spoiling much. Or maybe Jean’s dead and it’s not him at all. I don’t know. 😭

Right. Okay. So now you’re going, sweet story, but uh, there’s no way Levi could be the father. He’s so much older. Isayama wouldn't write a moment of romance like that. Not with him and Historia. YOU’RE JUST CRAZY.

Well this is where it get’s interesting. LET ME SHOW YOU. It’s foreshadowed literally everywhere. Right under our noses.

There is so much symbolism.

Dedicate your heart to what? has been Levi’s question recently. What are they all fighting for? What is he fighting for? How will he give meaning to his dead comrades sacrifices? Is killing Zeke really the extent of it? Is vengeance the true meaning of their sacrifices? Or is it something a lot more hopeful?

The answer is shown to us in the opening credits. And the ending credits. Several times. 

Levi says so himself - he keeps messing fulfilling the vow up - why? Why is he so worried about killing Zeke? 

Eren has the same questions to consider. Which PATH is the right one to take - revenge and violence with the rumbling, or love ... with Mikasa. We are literally shown what their choices will be in two virtually identically designed panels, which I’ll show you. Tragically, Eren’s choice is taken from him. He is a victim to the story - he must chose the path that saves humanity. Levi and Eren have been bound together through the theme of choices, and taking the ones which leave you with the least regrets, throughout this entire manga.

The upcoming anime episodes literally plot out the timeline of Levi and Historia’s changing attitude to one another, and then Historia’s pregnancy, it’s just so cleverly subtle. Isayama even tells us when/ during what event her child was probably conceived by just dropping dates in from other, seemingly unrelated plot lines.

Zeke gives pointed comments to Levi constantly - every other line of his is either a different jab at Levi about Historia’s pregnancy, a veiled question, or a reminder that he’s under the pressure of a 10 month time limit to do something about him, or Historia will have to eat him once she’s given birth. We start to see Levi unravel because of this, and make mistakes over and over.

It’s in official art. It’s in the soundtrack. Its in music videos. There’s interviews from Isayama that, when read in light of these ideas, suddenly take on a whole new meaning.

Isayama even trolls us. He’s laughing in our faces, the madman. Like, gotchu 🤣 suckers. While we’re all on Reddit and Twitter like, ‘Levi’s character has become so stagnated! He’s making such poor choices or not giving anything to the plot at all. All that’s left for him now is to give up and die! Be at peace, your story is over.’ OOF. Or, ‘Historia has just been forgotten! She’s become such a pointless character. Isayama just got bored with her and sidelined her.’

I’m going to try and write stuff up in the rough categories below, but these might change. I’ll link them when I’m done, and then pin this post. I’m a bit of a rambler so heads up - this may take a while 😅

There’s also a ton of people I have to mention who have contributed to this - I didn’t spot it by myself. I’ll tag them in the finished post too.

Historia and Levi’s Miscalculation: A manga tale featuring the Jaeger Bros., Pt. 1

Historia and Levi’s Miscalculation: A manga tale featuring the Jaeger Bros., Pt. 2

Historia and Levi’s Miscalculation: A manga tale featuring the Jaeger Bros., Pt. 3

Ackerman-Royal Bloodline and Levi’s Choice Pt. 1

Levi’s Choice Pt. 2

Suns, Moons and Songs

Akatsuki No Requiem - Right theory, Wrong guy

The Farmer and The Cattle Farming Goddess, or WHAT’S IN A NAME.

Mistakes of our parents and breaking the cycle

Memories from the future & Levi’s Guilt

Watch this space. And hold on to your pants. If I’m right, I’m getting very drunk.

#shingeki no kyojin spoilers #shingeki no kyojin manga theory #historia pregnancy #snk #shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #aot #levi ackerman #historia reiss #rivahisu

[singofsolace]

I’m crying and it’s all your fault! This is so soft and heartbreakingly beautiful! You couldn’t have found a more perfect title! And the way you portray Zelda drowning in depression as well as being plagued by PTSD (which she refuses to believe she has in her classic Zelda way) is painfully accurate. The inability to focus, the drifting, disassociating mind, the flashbacks all just hurt! It’s so realistic that she would be overwhelmed after all the trauma she has experienced in such a short

(continued) time and hasn’t really had the time or ability to work through.

Hilda’s well-meaning but overbearing presence makes so much sense for her character. She’s just lost her niece and goes into full on caretaker mode in order to make sure she doesn’t lose Zelda. And even if her words come across harsh and painful, it makes sense since she doesn’t really know or understand what happened with Marie and how bringing up Zelda’s trust in her would be painful. And Hilda not realising that her forcing Zelda to get out of bed and to eat and to help pack, her choosing Zelda’s outfits and dressing her and keeping her things from her, her dominating Zelda without realising what a trigger it is fits the story and her character well and is just so heartbreaking. In her helping she’s also hurting and Zelda doesn’t know how to talk to her about it. 😭

Comparing Faustus’ roughness to Marie’s gentleness and how now zelda can’t trust either was just so tragic! Marie was supposed to be different. She made Zelda feel safe and loved and the realisation that it was all a lie and that she was being used would be so traumatic. She can’t trust gentleness any more than she can trust violence. It’s its own kind of violence.

You do a brilliant job of capturing Cerberus’ sweet, silly charm. He is able to be more considerate with Zelda because he isn’t eaten up with grief and fear as Hilda is. His non-threatening, respectful gentleness with Zelda is just the sweetest thing. I love that he is able to intervene both to relieve Hilda of the burden and to provide Zelda with some measure of independence and autonomy.

Thank you so much for this beautiful review of even losing you (the joking voice, the gesture I love)! As always, I feel incredibly in your debt for how much you support me and keep me motivated to share my stories. You reassure me that I’m doing something “right” with my fics, because if someone can glean all of these things that I’m trying to say so successfully, I must be finding the right words to say what I mean, at least some of the time.

I especially appreciate when you say, “She can’t trust gentleness any more than she can trust violence. It’s its own kind of violence.” That took my breath away, because you’re so right! Zelda is so used to having romance without any element of love or gentleness, and then Marie came along and she finally was able to feel what that was like... only to have it all turn out to be a deception on the part of Baron Samedi.

And poor Hilda is just trying to get through her grief in her own way, which is by pointedly ignoring it and focusing on helping other people. The parallels to the Caligari Spell are so heartbreaking but I imagine Hilda doesn’t even notice them. Her heart is in the right place, but just because she’s well-intentioned doesn’t mean she isn’t hurting and triggering Zelda.

I hope to write a few more sequences of Zelda and Dr. Cee getting to know each other better. The one that we spoke about, where Zelda tries to see if she can provoke Dr. Cee into a rage, is already in the works! I think Dr. Cee might turn out to be just the sort of person Zelda needs right now: someone who cares for her and expects absolutely nothing in return for that care.

This is starting to get long, so I think I’ll leave it there. Thank you so much for this comment! I know I’m going to be re-reading it over and over again whenever I feel down about my work.

#zelda spellman #mambo marie #hilda spellman #dr. cee

[arofili]

saved post, ignore this

(don’t reblog this)

Smut4Smut Prompts

I didn’t intend to write an actual letter, I just wanted to paste my prompts into the description box for this exchange, but then I got long-winded (as usual) so here are the prompts that were too long for AO3 to handle! If the prompts did fit into the box they’re not going to be here, and I am not restating my DNWs/Likes/etc; that’s all readily available in my AO3 signup.

~~~

Canon Russingon Prompts

(These are optional - if you have a different idea, go for it!)

This is my “Russingon in canon” request, though if you’ve got a canon divergence AU, be my guest.

BDSM - A doms B into being nicer to/taking better care of themself: This just screams Russingon to me. Maedhros asking for Fingon to be cruel to him and Fingon using kindness as the greatest cruelty because Maedhros hates himself so much...

Character Bottoms Who Normally Tops, Character Tops Who Normally Bottoms, Role Reversal: I’m a sucker for role reversal, especially with these two. I lean toward Maedhros bottoming more often than not, but however you prefer their dynamic is completely fine.

Can't Stop Thinking About It - A Accidentally Sees B Naked, Can't Stop Thinking About It - A Hears B Masturbating and Moaning A's Name: I think I’ve written both of these scenarios for these two but I would LOVE to read another take on them! Mutual pining in Valinor? :)

Characters mutually pining finally get together and have amazing sex, Filthy Sex With Feelings,: I just love this in general, and Russingon having filthy but extremely loving sex is my very favorite thing <3

Characters Experiment With Sexy New Ways To Use Detachable Body Parts: Maedhros’ prosthetic. Enough said.

Characters React To In-Universe Smut Written About Them: Listen, someone has GOT to have written some Russingon smut in-canon, that’s just statistically likely. The sillier and less accurate it is, the better, especially if it’s countered with them having the kind of sex they prefer in...protest? Or maybe trying out some of the dumb things, lol.

Cock Slut, Slut Praising: bottom!Maedhros tbh.

Crown kink, Fealty, Throne Sex: The “Fealty Kink” tag is literally half Silm fics, and half of those are Russingon fics. Add some more?

Dom/sub - not 24/7 but reflecting RL power roles: Very much related to the above. Liege/vassal kink? Yes please!

Domesticity - Sex In Bed Before Sleep: Just. Soft married Russingon. ;-;

Devotion: THEY JUST LOVE EACH OTHER SO MUCH AND WOULD (AND DO) DIE FOR EACH OTHER. AHHH.

First Time: I am SUCH a sucker for first times. Could be their first time together at all, or their first time doing a specific sexual act, or their first time in a certain situation (post-Angband, post-rebirth, etc...)

Getting Together: Another thing I really really love in almost any form, especially if there’s been mutual pining before this.

Fluff and Smut: Russingon just loving each other SO DAMN MUCH...bonus points if there’s some baby Gil-galad fluff involved before/after the sexytimes?

Hurt/Comfort Sex: Their lives are so depressing that there’s so many times this could apply. Right before Formenos? Right after the Darkening or the First Kinslaying? Post-Angband/Ice? Post-Bragollach? Or any other time things get angsty (aka all of canon)?

Magic - using telepathy to cause other person to orgasm: Soul bonds. Dom Fingon. Yes please.

Morning After (Incredible Sex the night before): Fluffy good times. Maybe after their first time, back in Valinor?

Mutual Masturbation With Intent to Watch Each Other in Lieu of First Time Sex: Another fic I have definitely written before but would LOVE to see again! This would make the most sense in a LaCE context, I think.

Mutual Pining: I’ve mentioned this a billion times already, you get the idea.

Praise Kink: Maedhros has a praise kink, that’s just canon. This can be fun and slightly embarrassing in Valinor...or really intensely emotional post Angband. Or post-rebirth...oof.

Pregnancy - Sex to Conceive Heir: Just where DID Gil-galad come from, hmmm? (Trans mpreg is wonderful; I’m not interested in cis mpreg. Either one of them could be trans, I enjoy both.)

Reunion Sex: They’re basically in an LDR in Beleriand, give me some Fingon visiting Himring or Maedhros visiting Dor-lómin and just how horny and desperate they are for each other after being separated for awhile.

Scar Worship: Finno post-Angband finding Mae’s scars Extremely Sexy?

Secret relationship between members of feuding families: This is literally just canon. Lean into the Romeo and Juliet style Valinor shenanigans!

Sex After Taking Revenge on Someone Who Wronged Their Partner: Husbands who murder orcs together and then fuck while still all nasty from battle :)))

Sex Toys - Character Fucks Themselves on a Dildo While Performing Oral Sex: I just think Mae giving Finno a blowjob and fucking himself at the same time would be really hot, okay?

Size - Size Difference: I do love bottom!Maedhros, but I also love size queen!Fingon, and I think they both really enjoy the size difference :))

thank god you're/we're alive sex: I bet this happened SO many times after battles in Beleriand. This could also apply to right after the Darkening, and would be just HEARTRENDING right after the First Kinslaying...

Soul Bond - Sharing Physical Pleasure Through Soul Bond: I am very fond of this trope! Also like. Them feeling how much they are loved through each other’s eyes. Ahhh. But also like, Mae getting off on how good he’s making Finno feel. Or vice versa.

Character A hurts Character B (at their request) during sex but Character A immediately regrets it, Character Thinks Rescue Has a Price Tag, Sex gets paused to deal with PTSD then maybe returned to, panic attack during sex: These are some angstier options! I would love a fluffy/happy story (or a hurt/comfort story) but if you wanted to go a bit darker route here’s some ideas. Just. Post-Angband Mae with no self worth and/or consent issues, Finno having a hard time dealing with Mae being masochistic, Mae flashing back to Angband...all of these are some really juicy ideas.

~~~

Modern Russingon Prompts

(These are optional - if you have a different idea, go for it!)

This is my “Modern AU Russingon” request - though if you see a tag here that you think could be applied to canon, that would be awesome too.

Trans Male Character: Lots of these tags would have at least one of them being trans, which I’m also super happy to see in canon-compliant fic, but I know for me it feels a bit easier to me to write about trans stuff when I don’t have to worry about terminology not fitting the setting, so I put them here.

Cunnilingus to relieve period cramps, PiV With Trans Male Character, Sex Toys - Character Fucks Themselves on a Dildo While Performing Oral Sex, Sex Toys - Giving a Blowjob to a Dildo or Strap-on, Sex Toys - Strap-On: Just all some very excellent stuff if you want to go the trans route. I imagine the strap game would be next level with these two.

Characters mutually pining finally get together and have amazing sex, Filthy Sex With Feelings, First Time, Fluff and Smut, Getting Together, Morning After (Incredible Sex the night before), Mutual Pining, Praise Kink, Size - Size Difference: I requested all these tags for the canon prompt too, this is just the same stuff but modern, where they get to be dorky about how much they’re in love, minus most of the angst.

Character with Low Self-Esteem has Self-Worth Affirmed Through Tender Sex: ...but not minus ALL the angst. Just. Mae having had bad experiences in previous relationships and Finno being extremely tender and loving to him, AHHHH.

Getting off on how much partner trusts them: And this could be the other side of the previous request - Mae is trusting Finno even after all the bad stuff he went through and that’s very sexy to him.

Good Boy/Good Girl Kink: This could apply in canon too but if you want to do the trans thing, it could also be a gender affirmation thing.

Impact - Friendly ass slap unexpectedly turns character on: Mae is mortified that he’s into spanking, Finno is delighted.

romantic sex: This didn’t fit into the previous request but YES PLEASE. Just. They love each other SO much.

~~~

Russurgon Prompts

(These are optional - if you have a different idea, go for it!)

OKAY wow I love this ship, it’s so incredibly fucked up and angsty, hell yeah. This is one request where you really don’t need to bother with anything fluffy or a happy-ish ending, just go full on angst mode, please! Basically, I just think it would be very fun and horrible if Mae seduced Turgon for political reasons post-Nírnaeth when they’re both grieving Fingon :)))))

Character Bottoms Who Normally Tops: I can see Turgon having a hangup about bottoming...which Mae is fine with but one day they get into a Very bad argument and Mae like, puts Turno in his place. (No non-con though. Dub-con would be okay here.)

Characters about to kill each other decide to fuck instead: Kinslaying averted by sex!

Dirty Talk - Character A Gets Off on B Relaying Their Sexual Exploits: Just. Mae growling in Turno’s ear all the filthy things he would do with Fingon and Turgon HATING it and especially hating how hot it is.

Enemies to enemies who fuck, Enemies With Benefits, Frenemies with Benefits, sex between enemies, Sex between rivals: Basically all the same thing. These guys do NOT like each other but they’re fucking anyway.

Fucked with the hilt of a weapon: Look idk man just. Turgon being really mean to Maedhros after a post-battle argument or something?

Grudging/Horrified One-Sided Attraction To Someone Who Annoys You Deeply: I think this would be funny if Turgon realized he was into Mae (honestly, at any point in time, not just post-Nirn?) and that maybe the reason he was so mad about Fingon dating Mae is because he was jealous...lmaooo

Hate Sex Turns Unexpectedly Tender: Like. A moment of understanding between them. That they both refuse to talk about after it happens.

lord/retainer, Political Alliance Confirmed with Sex, Political Debate as Foreplay, Sex as a Negotiation Tactic, Sex As Part Of Diplomatic Negotiations: POLITICAL SEX. It’s showing that they’re serious about this alliance...nothing else, just that...right?

sex as self harm, Sex as Unhealthy Coping Mechanism, Sex as Grief Processing: This could work for both of them but I think it especially works for Maedhros. He unlearned a lot of fucked up shit with Fingon after Angband, but now Fingon’s dead and it’s all coming crashing back down on him...and Turgon hates him so much that if he can tell, he doesn’t care.

A using B as replacement for C who is not present: This is exactly why Mae would fuck Fingon’s brother.

~~~

Anairë/Fëanor/Fingolfin/Nerdanel Prompts

(These are optional - if you have a different idea, go for it!)

OKAY so I don’t like sibling incest EXCEPT for Fëanor/Fingolfin, pretty much, just because the love-hate stuff with them is SO juicy. But I also hate how most FëaNolo fics depict their relationships with their wives, so I would just love it if they were all a polycule or had a foursome or something that didn’t end up with Fëanor and Fingolfin leaving their wives.

Bisexuality: They’re all very hot and they’re all very into each other. Gender who?

Breeding Kink - as dirty talk without risk: Look Fëanor and Nerdanel had SEVEN kids, I think there was probably some kind of breeding kink there...Fëanor applying this to Fingolfin, though? That’s hot. Or maybe he’s dirty talking with Anairë while Fingolfin is Right There.....yesss. But again, no risk, because elf pregnancy is always very intentional.

Character A and Character B Mutually Pine For Each Other While They Fuck Other People Together: Fëanor and Fingolfin just absolutely refusing to acknowledge their feelings even when they’re having sex with each other’s wives.

Double Anal Penetration, Double Penetration - Vaginal and Anal, Double Vaginal Penetration: I just think it’s hot. You can mix up who’s penetrating who, give the ladies some strap-ons or mess around with gender, if you like.

First Time - Getting Pegged: Fëanorians get pegged, it is law, so probably not Fëanor’s first time but... Nerdanel pegging Fingolfin? Or Fëanor and Nerdanel showing Fingolfin and Anairë how it’s done? OR since let’s be real Fingolfin ALSO probably gets pegged regularly, Anairë and Nerdanel fucking each other while their husbands watch, and it’s their first time with another lady.

First Time Having Sex Postpartum: I imagine Nerdanel is unfazed by what pregnancy does to the body, but maybe Anairë isn’t, and her lovers all get together to show her how much they still love her after like, Argon is born?

Fucking Someone While Being Fucked By Someone Else: All the fun things you can do with multiple partners...

Grudging/Horrified One-Sided Attraction To Someone Who Annoys You Deeply: I must admit I missed the “one-sided” part of this when I picked this tag - but maybe they think it’s one-sided but it turns out that it’s not? Regardless, this is exactly how I see Fëanor and Fingolfin if they’re in a ship situation.

Sexy Shenanigans at a Masked Ball: Anonymity allowing a secret relationship to be slightly less secret!! Everyone is like “wow who is that tall fellow dancing with Prince Fëanáro?” or something like that!

~~~

Taeglin Prompts

(These are optional - if you have a different idea, go for it!)

Now this is my rarepair that I completely understand why it’s a rarepair, but also like MATCHING CURSED SWORDS. I generally think of this ship in the context of a “Túrin goes to Gondolin with Tuor” AU, BUT it could also be a “Aredhel and Maeglin go to Himlad, and then follow Celegorm and Curufin to Nargothrond and stay after they get banished” AU, but that’s a bit more convoluted. Or you can have them meet each other on one of Maeglin’s journeys away from Gondolin, or whatever other take you’d like to explore.

Both parties are pining for someone else: Túrin missing Beleg? Or both of them being in love with Idril and upset about her choosing Tuor instead, lol.

In Captivity Together, Bad guys think they made them do it but they really just enabled them: Túrin gets captured alongside Maeglin...or maybe Maeglin gets captured earlier, at the same time Túrin is after Amon Rûdh? (In that case it would probably just be “Bad guys made them do it” without the qualifier because they haven’t had the chance to Pine.) Basically, they finally have an excuse to fuck, and it’s not ideal, but hey they’re gonna take it.

Realizing romantic feelings mid-sex: “Oh FUCK I actually like this guy. Shit. Goddamnit.”

Mating Cycles/In Heat: Maybe heats are an elf thing, and Túrin remembers how Beleg would get, so he knows how to help Maeglin...and it’s not like Maeglin was going to ask anybody for help, he was just planning on suffering through it (again?)...

~~~

eta: an anon asked about smut likes and i was like oops i didn’t make that list so here’s some stuff i enjoy. otherwise just see the kink tags i requested

anal sex, vaginal sex, oral sex (basic but yknow)

fingering

frottage

very romantic sex (especially for russingon)

nonromantic sex (i like aro takes on characters)

trans characters whose gender is affirmed during sex

trans characters without much physical dysphoria

reunion sex

first times!!

hurt/comfort sex

political sex

fealty kink, liege/vassal dynamic

mutual masturbation

double penetration

russingon stumpfucking

dirty talk

healing from trauma through tender sex

dealing with trauma through rough sex

teasing, begging

dramatic miscommunications that get cleared up (such as mutual pining, very brief worries about consent, etc)

praise kink (especially for maedhros)

size kink (especially for fingon)

telepathy/osanwe

dom fingon/sub maedhros

hair kink

possessiveness but ONLY for russingon

sharing a bed

maedhros getting spanked......

role reversal, switching

#tmi anna #exchange letter

[fretened]

Celeste (2018) - pushing game design to new heights (Developed by Matt Makes Games)

Reviewed on PS4, playable on:

Steam

Itch.io

Epic Games store

Nintendo Switch

PlayStation 4

Xbox One 

Introduction

Celeste is a game about a girl called Madeline who decides to climb a mountain to overcome her depression and anxiety, as well as the other characters she meets along the way. Little does she know that Celeste mountain is more than what it seems and, in order to confront the challenges she will face along the way, Madeline will have to come face to face with a part of her that she would have much rather avoided. Celeste uses mostly linear 2D platforming across groundbreakingly designed levels, all with a gorgeous 16-bit art style  which, along with a cast of charming characters and wonderfully written dialogue, delivers a truly moving story about self-reflection and overcoming anxieties despite all the odds. Here are my thoughts and feelings on the 2018 critically acclaimed ‘best independent game’ and ‘games for impact’ Game Award winner, Celeste.

Level design

Celeste’s fundamental mechanic is Madeline’s dash ability which propels her in a straight line in a chosen direction for a set distance. The dash can only be interrupted by objects in the environment and it can only be used once in mid air -  it recharges as soon as Madeline touches the ground; this is represented intuitively on screen by Madeline’s hair turning blue when her dash is used up and turning back to orange when the dash becomes available. This core mechanic is explored in a different direction in each of Celeste’s 8 chapters. If you explore these levels you can gain access to the far more challenging B and C side versions of the levels which push the exploration further in it’s respective directions, however, you may not even feel inclined to touch these levels as Celeste’s main game alone is likely challenging enough for a lot of players.

Celeste’s side-scrolling levels are broken up into stages/sections that you have to pass to progress through the game. I felt as though each section was designed to push and improve my ability at the game and make me practice and experiment with my approach to each section’s unique challenges. 

Each screen/section would have maybe 2-5 challenges you had to pass, one after another, and the game’s instant deaths, fast respawn times and the ability to save anytime meant that there was no repercussion for my trial and error and I could keep trying and trying until I would find faster and faster ways of progressing and, often, hidden shortcuts that I hadn’t seen the first few times round. The gameplay promotes developing a mastery of it’s mechanics. These shortcuts are often found by thinking outside the box and playing around with levels’ systems and mechanics. For players looking for a challenge, as well as cassette tapes with B and C side levels, Celeste’s 8 main chapters are full of collectible strawberries which present a whole load of extra examples of really clever game design. For example, some of these collectible strawberries have wings and will fly straight up and out of the level if you use Madeline’s dash and so you have to think outside of the box and grab the strawberry without using the dash which is usually vital for getting from A to B. It’s this kind of design that stops the game from ever feeling dry or formulaic. Celeste’s levels constantly feel fresh, well paced and engaging. 

I’d also like to note that at the start of each level in the loading screen, Madeline receives a different postcard with useful information on it. Two stood out to me: one saying that you should be proud of your death count because it shows that you’re making mistakes and you’re learning; I found this message incredibly uplifting because at times frequent deaths had made me feel a little embarrassed or made me wonder if I was getting something seriously wrong. The other was that the collectible strawberries are entirely optional and only for showing off to your friends if you really want to. I think this was a brilliant move because it gives the player a little more control over the game’s pacing. You get to decide whether you’ll spend some time trying to grab this tricky strawberry or whether you’ll push on with the game and move into the next section.

Accessibility

Celeste is rightfully celebrated for it’s range of accessibility options, from it’s tactful and unobtrusive assist mode - for players who need to fine tune the game to their specific needs in order to get the same enjoyment out of the game, to it’s picture settings that reduce flashing and particle effects for people with photosensitive epilepsy or motion sickness. For more on Celeste’s assist mode, check out Game Maker’s Tool kit’s video on ‘What Makes Celeste’s Assist Mode Special’, you can find the link to that at the end of this post.

Soundtrack

Lena Raine’s soundtrack to Celeste is an audio marvel. Whether it’s daunting, uplifting, mysterious or moving; the soundtrack made me feel tied and invested to every moment. The music was just as much a journey as every second of gameplay. The soundtrack plays to the gameplay perfectly and occasionally leads to some really incredible moments. As well as Lena Raine’s marvellous score, Celeste’s B and C sides have a range of tracks and features by other artists like lo-fi artist ‘In Love With a Ghost’.

Narrative

Celeste deals with heavy subjects like depression and anxiety without ever being tasteless or insensitive but simultaneously the game manages to deal with these subjects in an uplifting way, much in line with the game’s core message. Each level feels rich with meaning and the games narrative is tightly interwound with it’s settings, characters and mechanics in a way that feels seamless and engaging.

Celeste uses profound metaphors to deliver it’s story and discuss mental health in each chapter of the main game. One of my favourite’s was Chapter three - ‘Celestial Resort’ - which had you help skittish spectral maître d’ clean away the clutter in his abandoned hotel. As you tidy away the hotel you find him seeming less anxious than the last time because you’re helping him order the clutter in his mind so he can finally have some peace. This also happens to be what Madeline needs at this point in her story and helping the maître d’ provides her with th clarity she needs to move on. This is one of the ways the game deals with heavier subject matter without dampening the player’s experience of the game and keeping an ‘upward momentum’.

The game’s narrrative, characters, environments and soundtrack all made me feel engrossed in my ascent of Celeste mountain. The mountain has a real sense of place, mystery and history that unveils itself to you as the story unfolds. I felt fully engaged in every setting because it felt like I’d come across something that nobody had seen in a long time. Even with Celeste’s generally fast paced gameplay, it never felt like I was ‘just passing through’ a location because the drive to explore and overcome challenges kept me searching every corner and taking time to explore when I wanted to.

Everything about Celeste contributes to it’s narrative. It’s gameplay pushes you to reflect and overcome challenges. Lena Raine’s soundtrack fits every scene like a glove and fills each moment with emotion in a constantly moving way. Characters will climb out of their Dialogue boxes in some scenes as if they’re really coming to life. Even the ‘chapter complete’ screens, at the end of each level, push the story forward and tell you where Madeline is going next. Celeste is a beautiful and important story,told in an ingenious way, unlike any other game I’ve played.

Is this game for you?

I would suggest Celeste to anyone looking for a new and different gaming experience and an uplifting story. It feels consistently fresh with perpetually ingenious level design and a really wonderful story. I’ve had more fun on Celeste than any triple A game I’ve played in a long time. I’d recommend Celeste to people looking for a hopeful story in what feels like quite a hopeless time because this is a story about never losing sight against all odds, friendship and support, and self-acceptance. It’s clever, inventive, charming and moving and I just love it and I’m pretty damn sure that you will too. Celeste is a permanent fixture of my PS4 library.

Can’t afford it?

I completely understand that lots of people may not have the funds right now or in the foreseeable future to get this game and if you choose to engage in piracy or any kind of swashbuckling then I’ll reserve my judgement but personally I would always rather support the developers so I’ve put togther some links to some ‘let’s-play’ series and videos about the game so you don’t have to pirate the game if you want to get the closest thing to the experience without having to take it illegally and get into legal trouble, damage your computer/console or promote activities typically detrimental to the developers.

Watchlist & sources

Here I’ve put together a semi-curated list of videos, articles and other resources about the game as well as some ‘Let’s Play’s and speed-runs:

GMTK - Mark Brown from Game Makers Tool Kit made two videos about Celeste which were really useful resources for writing this review. It was actually these videos which introduced me to the game in the first place so it’s only fair that I recommend them to you.

Why Does Celeste Feel So Good to Play? https://youtu.be/yorTG9at90g - This video talks about the design of Madeline’s controls and what makes Celeste such a satisfying to play.

What Makes Celeste’s Assist Mode Special https://youtu.be/NInNVEHj_G4 - This video looks at how the developers have confronted a fundamental problem in game design: balancing the design intentions and accessibility as well as player preferences.

More videos - Here are some more videos about this game that I love. The first two are a lot more focussed on the level design and how the game showed you the ropes and guides you to mastery and they’re both really well produced and written and really entertaining. The last one is a short and sweet documentary about Celeste’s development from pre-game to the design and how the story started to fall together.

How Celeste Teaches You It’s Mechanics - Good Game Design (Snoman Gaming) https://youtu.be/lZoQ9a7oPvo

Celeste: Breaking Down Level Design (OK Beast) https://youtu.be/w_aWMxcHrgw

The Story of Celeste’s Development (Noclip) https://youtu.be/c3mbELVqAmo

Let’s plays and speedruns

Celeste: Fruit Brute - PART 1 (Game Grumps) https://youtu.be/iB4KG2wABPA - This series by Game Grumps is really funny but it only covers the earlier parts of the game so if you’re only looking for a bit of gameplay then this is for you!

Celeste Let’s Play [Playlist] (TenMoreMinutes) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn5okaoIT7P5KvGs25IWmGPcM5kvowqqh - This series covers pretty much the whole game so if you’re just looking for something to watch then here it is!

Celeste Any% Speedrun in 27:31.4 (TGH) https://youtu.be/g2KqMYWviYk - A really impressive speedrun. This guy’s just trying to finish the game as fast as possible without worrying about the strawberries or the B and C sides.

Celeste All B Sides Speedrun in 26:46 (TGH) https://youtu.be/I76TcmlsRIk - This is another complete marvel by the same guy. This time he’s doing all the B side levels; the B sides really are substantially harder than the main game.

The Celeste Speedrun That Wasn’t Humanly Possible (IGN) https://youtu.be/yEKku8S5-fo - This is a short video about an AI designed to Speedrun games that did a super human run of Celeste.

Links

Celeste game accessibility guide http://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/celeste-assist-mode/ - This is a great website if you’re interested in accessibility in games, I used it for the accessibility section of this review.

Notes

I may eventually write a piece in more detail about aspects of the game design that I really enjoyed but in the interest of keeping things spoiler free - this is all for my Review of Celeste. This is my first game review and there will be things I’ve done well and, in greater likelihood, things I’ve done not so well and I’d love to do better in future so share your thoughts with me! I’m on Instagram under @Fretened or you can contact me here on Tumblr, I’d love to hear what you think.

If you got this far, thanks for reading Xx

[deathdoors]

𝐇𝐄𝐘  𝐆𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐒  !  meredith  here.  nineteen twenty,  they/them  or  she/her,  the  best  admin  in  the  world.  it’s  why  i’m  using  manny  for  my  gif  for  this,  when  he’s  the  best  and  my  mascot  on  the  main  <3  if  it  ain’t  broke  don’t  fix  it.  so:  a  little  about  me  !  i’m  a  libra,  from  new  jersey,  in  my  second  year  of  college,  use  a  lot  of  emojis,  have  recently  and  embarrassingly  been  both  playing  fortnite    (    i  know    )    and  reading  like  2  books  a  night,  which  might  seem  like  it  makes  me  smart  but  actually  just  makes  me  go  to  bed  at  seven  in  the  morning.  which  also  makes  me  a  dumb  bitch.  on  to  the  show  !

name:  emma  phillips age:  thirty occupation:  preschool  teacher trope:  the  wide  eyed  idealist aesthetic:  fresh  baked  chocolate  chip  cookies,  wildflowers  in  a  vase,  half  empty  bottles  of  pink  wine,  stopping  to  pet  every  dog,  happy  tears,  rom-com  movie  nights,  coffee  with  too  much  cream  and  sugar.

emma  was  born  and  raised  in  the  suburbs  outside  springfield,  missouri.  her  mother  was  incredibly  anxious  and  doting,  disliking  emma  riding  bikes  in  the  streets  with  the  other  kids  and  climbing  trees,  etc  she  was  thus  much  closer  to  her  dad:  camping  trips,  bedtime  stories,  the  works.  she  adored  him,  and  when  her  twin  younger  siblings  were  born,  emma’s  mother  interpereted  being  a  daddy’s  girl  as  hating  her,  and  started  ignoring  emma  when  she  wasn’t  scolding  her,  instead  focusing  a  much  more  positive  attention  on  the  twins.  

then,  of  course,  because  life  sucks,  her  dad  got  sick  of  it  and  left  without  so  much  as  a  goodbye.  ran  off  with  his  secretary  when  emma  was  twelve,  leaving  her  with  a  toxic  mom  and  two  little  toddler  twins.  she  entered  mom  mode  when  her  mom’s  anxiety  turned  to  severe,  don’t  get  out  of  bed  depression  ...  emma  was  cooking  for  the  twins    (    and  failing  miserably,  most  of  the  time  it  was  pizza  and  frozen  dinners.  to  emma’s  credit,  that  did  include  frozen  vegetables.    )  helping  them  with  schoolwork,  getting  them  to  and  from  school,   etc.   

her  grandparents  were  semi - well  off,  and  sent  some  money  to  the  phillips  clan,  but  emma  got  a  job  as  soon  as  she  was  able.  the  combination  of  the  two,  and  her  mom’s  on  and  off  working  was  enough  to  not  go  hungry.  the  twins  could  go  on  some  field  trips,  there  was  enough  for  new  clothes  when  they  grew  like  weeds  ...  but  obviously,  no  pre-teen  /  teen  wants  to  constantly  care  for  little  kids.  it  sucked.  

the  money  continued  when  her  grandfather  died  when  she  was  sixteen,  and  then,  a  little  while  later,  right  before  emma  graduated  high  school,  her  grandmother  died,  leaving  them  her  house  in  fort  elms,  washington.  

the  phillips  clan  moved  there,  with  a  month  left  of  high  school  for  emma.  as  soon  as  she  turned  eighteen,  a  mere  month  after  graduation:  emma  was  kicked  out  of  the  house.  her  mother  wanted  nothing  to  do  with  her  anymore,  saying  emma was  tearing  her  away  from  the  twins.  for  the  rest  of  their  childhoods,  emma  was  not  allowed  to  see  either  of  her  siblings,  with  emma’s  mother  telling  them  that  she  had  left  on  purpose.

thus:  she  went  to  college,  moved  out  of  the  house  into  a  new  apartment, fell  in  love  and  pined  boyfriendless  for years  like  some  kind  of  loser,  was  incredibly  on  and  off,  got  cheated  on.  she  hasn’t  been  able  to  land  a  mans  since,  despite  wanting  a  storybook  romance.

while  all  that  was  happening,  she  got  a  degree,  teaching  at  the  fancy  private  preschool  school  in  town.  remember  when  i  said  she  entered  mom  mode  when  her  dad  left  ?  yeah.  she  never  left  it,  apparently.  she  loves  her  job,  though.  lots  of  stickers.

tl;dr:  toxic  mom,  dad  left  when  she  was  12,  effectively  raised  her  younger  siblings.  moved  to  fort  elms  when  she  was  about  to  turn  18,  finished  out  high  school,  and  was  kicked  out.  she  became  a  preschool  teacher,  inexplicably  staying  in  fort  elms.

     personality:  emma  is  kind  hearted  and  optimistic  —  she's  a  little  bit  of  a  people  pleaser,  and  a  lot  a  bit  of  a  hopeless  romantic.  she's  pretty  friendly  /  chatty,  and  considers  people  her  friends  approximately  .5  seconds  after  meeting  them.  she's  a  little  naive  in  the  sense  that  she  believes  everyone  is  good,  or  can  be  good  with  just  a  little  effort,  and  is  pretty  forgiving.  she's  much  more  of  a  go  with  the  group  kind  of  person,  and  hates  being  alone.

tw alcoholism, depression; 

name:  philippa  “pippa”  espina age:  twenty-two occupation:  unemployed trope:  fallen  princess aesthetic:  bottles  of  vodka,  half  burnt  cigarettes,  red  lipstick,  shattered  glass,  parties  going  late  into  the  night,  adept  fingers  rolling  joints,  sleeping  in  late,  the  twinkle  of  a  chandelier.

in  retrospect,  pippa  was  destined  to  be  spoiled:  she  never  got  attention  as  a  child,  and  her  parents  had  money,  and  anyone  who's  seen  a  movie  about  rich  kids  knows  that's  a  cocktail  for  disaster.  california  born  and  bred,  pippa  was  used  to  two  things  by  the  time  she  could  toddle:  the  sun,  and  getting  what  she  wanted.  

her  father  was  a  successful  ...  something  with  a  desk  and  lots  of  people  reporting  to  him,  she  never  even  payed  attention.  her  mother  was  more  focused  on  tennis  practices  and  galas  and  book  clubs  where  they  just  drank  wine.  a  series  of  nannies  raised  her:  not  one  or  two  where  she  could  bond  with,  cling  to  the  maternal  attention  she  desired.    

instead,  her  frequent  temper  tantrums  and  outbursts  lead  to  them  either  quitting  or  getting  fired  when  pippa  made  up  stories:  she  was  so  mean  to  me,  i  think  she's  stealing  from  the  jewelry  box,  she's  been  drinking  your  fancy  wine.  she  didn't  know  why  she  was  doing  it.  maybe  it  was  the  way  her  mother  would  stroke  her  hair  gently,  eyes  blurry  with  drunkeness  saying  they'd  work  on  finding  someone  better  to  take  care  of  her.  for  all  her  twisted  lies,  pippa  could  be  brutally  honest.  yet  she  never  asked  her  mother  why  she  couldn't  take  care  of  her.    

by  the  time  pippa  had  hit  the  sixth  grade,  she'd  been  kicked  out  of  two  of  the  private  schools  in  the  area.  her  third  was  all  all  girl's  school,  full  of  catholic  sensibilities  and  a  headmistress  that  refused  to  dismiss  pippa,  no  matter  how  much  she  acted  out.

she  was  twelve  the  first  time  she  was  the  one  breaking  into  the  liquor  cabinet,  little  sips  of  sweet  liquors  that  made  her  head  feel  fuzzy.  a  lock  was  placed  on  it  three  weeks  later,  and  she  didn't  get  drunk  again  until  high  school.  but  pippa  decided  she  liked  that  feeling,  and  more  importantly,  she  liked  the  feeling  of  her  parents  finally  looking  at  her.  

at  one  of  the  rare  family  meals  a  month  after  her  thirteenth  birthday,  pippa  said  i  don't  want  a  nanny  anymore  at  the  same  time  that  her  father  said  we're  moving  to  washington.  some  business  deal  her  father's  company  had  made  with  the  military  base,  it  was  a  wonderful  town.  she  didn't  want  to  hear  it.  another  tantrum  she  was  far  too  old  for,  a  slap  across  the  face.  selfish  brat.  

they  moved  to  washington  three  days  later.  she  didn’t  have  a  nanny.

pippa  was  never  popular  in  high  school,  nor  unpopular.  she  was  a  bit  of  an  outcast:  mean  and  pretty  only  got  you  so  far  if  you  were  already  top  dog,  and  she  wasn't.  she,  however,  threw  big  parties  that  drew  the  attention  of  high  schoolers  and  the  lamer  end  of  the  college  crowd.  holidays,  breaks,  every  weekend:  an  unlimited  supply  of  all  the  weed  and  alcohol  at  pippa's  house,  combined  with  the  loud  thunk  of  music  and  no  one  to  get  mad  at  you  if  you  broke  a  vase  or  woke  up  on  the  floor  the  next  morning.  her  parents  were  rarely  ever  home.

when  they  were,  however,  things  weren't  pretty.  slammed  glasses  on  tables,  shouts  so  loud  they  made  voices  sore.  pippa  would  stand  there  and  she  would  cry  until  her  face  was  red,  and  say  sorry  for  breaking  things,  and  the  next  day  her  parents  would  give  her  a  new  allowance  and  a  kiss  atop  the  head.  that  was  their  apology.  she  never  accepted  it.  she  kept  the  money  and  embraced  back,  of  course.  but  she  never  meant  it.  she  would  do  the  same  thing  again,  and  again,  and  again.  

attention  was  better  than  any  drug,  and  almost  as  good  as  the  bottom  end  of  a  bottle  or  a  shot  glass.  she  was  mean  and  she  was  catty,  sure,  but  then  she  was  warm  and  fun  and  bought  you  lunch.  by  the  time  she  had  made  stronger  connections,  latching  on  to  the  only  two  people,  the  only  two  friends  she  had  was  easy.  they  were  her  friends,  and  thus  everyone  else  was  her  enemy.  

after  high  school,  she  didn't  do  anything.  no  college,  no  job.  her  parties  persisted,  and  so  did  kisses  behind  locked  doors  and  afternoons  spent  sleeping  off  a  hangover  until  she  woke  up  and  did  it  again.  she  was  still  mean,  still  catty,  still  desperate  for  attention:  growth  had  been  stunted,  immaturity  and  a  desperation  making  her  miserable  to  be  around.  

she  doesn't  know  why  she  does  it.  not  even  deep  down:  sometimes,  it's  like  she's  staring  down  at  her  own  body,  watching  herself  be  cruel  or  unkind,  sparking  up  a  joint  to  call  someone  a  bitch  and  someone  a  cow,  or  taking  another  shot  and  whispering  into  the  nearest  fellow  partygoers'  ear  that  they  should  go  upstairs.  sometimes  she  wakes  up  and  feels  like  she's  the  worst  person  in  the  world.  especially  after  one  of  those  partygoers  is  the  ex  of  one  of  those  two  friends.  she  feels  like  the  worst  person  in  the  world,  and  she  likes  it  better  then,  she  decides.  at  least  then  she  feels  something.

tl;dr: rich bitch, loves partying, classic mean girl. not so functional alcoholic, hooks up with a lot of people. turbulent relationship with her parents, desperate for attention. definitely needs a therapist and a psychiatrist.

personality:  pippa  is  very  ...  sugar  and  ice.  or  more  aptly,  sugar  and  fire.  as  long  as  you  follow  her  my  way  or  the  highway  mentality  and  give  her  plenty  of  attention,  she'll  drag  you  along  on  all  her  plans,  lavish  you  with  attention  ...  until  she  doesn't  anymore.  she's  reckless  and  self-centered,  but  she's  a  hell  of  a  lot  of  fun.  if  you  manage  to  get  into  her  inner  circle,  she'd  take  a  bullet  for  you,  but  ...  well,  as  mentioned  before  she  still  might  sleep  with  your  ex  <3  or  ur  current  bf,  honestly.

tw bullying, anxiety, depression, suicide; 

name:  theodore  "teddy"  larsen age:  twenty-three occupation:  graduate  student trope:  shrinking  violet aesthetic:  pages  and  pages  of  notes,  shiny  comic  book  pages,  freshly  sharpened  pencils,  home  cooked  meals,  deep  shaky  breaths,  science  fiction  movies,  100%  exams,  thick  books  full  of  knowledge

theodore  larsen  came  out  of  the  womb  miserable.  he  was  a  colicky  baby,  born  to  a  loving,  young  american  mother  and  a  his  british  professor  father  in  england.  he  was  a  quiet  child,  once  he  grew  out  of  the  constant  exhausted  crying:  much  preferring  the  company  of  his  mom  than  other  kids.  he  was  smart  though,  and  a  heavy  reader.

when  he  spoke  was  when  the  trouble  began:  as  his  vocabulary  began  to  grow  and  he  talked  more  and  more,  a  stutter  came  with  it.  he  spoke  kindly  and  eloquently  for  his  age,  but  he  struggled  sometimes  to  get  words  out.  kids  were  cruel,  naturally,  and  it  only  made  teddy  more  reclusive.  

out  of  isolation  came  anxiety:  he  was  an  intensely  worried  child,  mostly  involved  with  his  parents  rather  than  people  his  age.  an  investment  in  books,  comics,  nonficiton,  novels.  teddy  was  perfectly  content  with  books  as  his  friends,  and  of  course,  his  mother,  his  favorite  person  in  the  world.

 and  then  his  world  came  crashing  down.  nothing  horrific:  no  one  died,  no  one  was  sick.  but  when  the  only  thing  that  brings  you  comfort  is  security  and  repetition,  your  father  cheating  on  your  mother  and  moving  across  the  world  is  a  pretty  far  crash  to  the  bottom.  port  elms,  washington:  his  mother’s  hometown,  where  teddy  would  finish  out  high  school.

he  was  relentlessly  bullied,  still.  the  label  of  new  kid  paired  with  a  lack  of  social  grace  and  nerdy  dispotion,  there  might  as  well  have  been  a  target  painted  on  his  back.  he  had  one  friend,  endlessly  kind  to  him.  she’d  saved  his  life,  figuratively,  and  he  saved  hers  literally,  an  appearance  at  her  house  shortly  after  her  suicide  attempt.

it  made  sense  that  he’d  have  one  too.  depression  was  a  dark  shroud  that  hung  over  him,  exacerbated  anxious  behaviors.  that  was  months  ago  now.  a  secret,  locked  inside  him,  not  quite  ready  to  come  out.  therapy,  once  a  week.  maybe  twice.

 he’s  not  excited  about  finishing  his  degree,  not  really.  he  feels  good  about  teaching,  it’s  what  he  wants  to  do.  but  the  idea  of  being  back  in  fort  elms  high  isn’t  exactly  leaving  a  good  taste  in  his  mouth.  he’ll  cross  that  bridge  when  he  comes  to  it,  no  matter  how  much  it  makes  his  heart  beat  faster  and  his  palms  sweat.  he’s  got  all  the  time  in  the  world

tl;dr: nervous mess, bullying target, has one real friend. very sensitive mama’s boy. british accent, moved to fort elms when he was in high school. sad. doesn’t like his dad very much. 

personality:  the  nerdiest  mf  alive.  teddy  is  a  total  sweetheart,  very  socially  awkward,  and  pretty  damn  smart.  he  know  a  lot  about  typical  nerdy  shit.  superheroes,  star  trek.  he  LOVES  star  wars.  he's  also  in  a  band,  playing  bass.  fun  times.  he's  nervous  as  hell  —  also  super  cautious,  he  never  likes  to  do  anything  without  it  being  meticulously  planned.  total  mamas  boy.

[diffractor]

So, there’s several different aspects of punishment that the criminal system is trying to do, none of them well. I’ll try considering how to best optimize them individually, and then mentally expose them to other considerations to arrive at something not totally evil (something still feels a bit off about my results, this is a first draft). Only reblog if you’re going to do a dry effortpost about crucial considerations left out and a better way to do things taking those considerations into account.

The aspects: 1: Retribution: Someone hurt you, so you want them to suffer. 2: Deterrence: Preemptively prevent people from doing [thing] by guaranteeing that bad things happen to them if they do [thing]. 3: Prevention: If someone does [thing], you do something so they don’t do [thing] again. 4: Reparation: If someone does [thing], you take resources from them to pay back for the damage caused. 5: Preemption: Do stuff that makes [thing] less likely to occur in the first place, like after-school programs or something. For maximizing retribution: Well, that’s just called torture. For maximizing deterrence... well, certainty of punishment plays a bigger role than magnitude of punishment, so some 100% certain moderately bad thing is visited upon you when you commit a crime. For maximizing prevention... idk, a magic rock that when you touch it, it instantly wipes any desire to commit crimes. Or a teleporter to extradimensional australia where someone walks in and they don’t come out. For reparation... fines seem pretty sensible. And for preemption, that’s just structuring society in ??? way s.t. there’s no incentive to commit crimes in the first place. Now, a lot of the earlier-mentioned stuff is pretty evil when taken to extremes, so let’s try throwing a moral parliament at this. Retribution: Ok, this one gets a whole lot of shit as not a morally valid motive, and I think there’s a lot of people who, if given a magic criminality-wiping rock, would have “touch the rock” as their only legal consequence. I don’t know about that, desire for retribution is pretty clearly a terminal value. If a man shot someone’s dog, and then they touched the magic rock and were remorseful and would never do something like that again... then, according to my personal sense of which worlds are better, it’d be clearly better if they also got kicked in the nuts by the dog owner, even though that doesn’t affect anything going forward. With that said, however, there’s still all the other moral considerations about. Disproportionate retribution like Hell or Azkaban or spending a decade or two in prison gets a very strong veto from the rest of the moral system, and it isn’t even that satisfying to the retribution value. If someone burns down my house, I don’t want them to spend several years in a dreary place with their life on hold, either no or bad company, a high risk of rape, and then find it impossible to come back into society, that’s just depressing, excessive, and not even that satisfying as punishment. Retribution-Value says it’d be much more awesome to just beat the shit out of them with a stick, or sting them with a bullet ant. I also think that, if given a choice between the latter options and prison, I’d take getting beat up in a heartbeat. There’s a tremendous amount of risk with the legal system having retribution as a purpose, because there’s no incentive for mercy there. The prisoners cannot vote, and the people voting for what to do with criminals are not going to go in the direction of “more mercy”, signalling is going to take it to really bad extremes. Also (Retribution-Value says), hurting someone yourself is way better than having someone do it for you, and (Mercy-Value says), there’s a possible check in the latter case that isn’t present in the former case, namely, the person doing the punishing feeling bad. There is, however, still a slippery slope of being permitted to come up with increasingly nasty retributions to do to people. So, the best option for retribution seems something like “if you were greatly wronged, you get a chance to personally beat up the person, someone’s nearby to ensure you don’t do permanent harm”. For stuff like imposing a bullet ant sting, that’d take a great deal more care because past a certain point, increased intensity of pain doesn’t make someone look like they’re suffering more, so you’d need incredibly strong restrictions on not adding additional painful options (example of failure mode: “yo we found this one species of centipede that hurts like 3x as bad as a bullet ant, let’s add that to the allowable retribution list”), or a rule like “you’ve gotta personally go through a quarter of what they’re going through, choose your retribution accordingly” to give more of an incentive towards not being too cruel for really vengeful people. I don’t trust any civilization to be able to stick to those rules, so I guess “you get to personally beat up the criminal, but not cause permanent damage” is about as good as you’d get. Retribution-Value says this is awesome, and other values don’t object too hard. 2: Deterrence. Magnitude of punishment isn’t as important for deterrence as certainty of being caught, so I guess just ramp up the number of police, and do the Singapore thing of caning. I’d definitely take that over prison and it seems like a pretty effective deterrent. Or maybe “eat this ghost pepper”. Having devastating punishments that are infrequently applied is just the exact wrong way to go about this. 3: Prevention. I don’t really know what works for this one, having not done a literature review. I will, however, observe that putting someone in a place stuffed with repeat criminals and then tanking their ability to get honest work once they get out is a uniquely awful way of preventing future crimes. An aspect of this is incapacitation, where a repeat offender has to be kept in prison because otherwise they’d totally do [thing] again. If you need to incapacitate someone, prison seems like an uneccessarily cruel way to do it, just design, like, a big apartment, throw in an unlimited supply of video games and weed, and drop the solitary confinement part. Or, if you really really need to make sure someone stops interacting with others, period, just cryopreserve them. Thinking about it a bit more, these two feel unsatisfactory, there’s probably better options. Also, I’d be quite worried about using crime-stop magic rock for this one, because we have instances of moral progress (legalization of weed, gay rights) which relied on people breaking the law, so sufficiently advanced deterrence or prevention may shut down lawbreaking for bad laws. I’d take a bullet ant over the magic rock if the magic rock enforced compliance to the laws of the US, because there’s a lot of really dumb laws. 4: Reparation. Idk, fines? Community service seems like a way of doing reparation, but I’m a bit leery of it because it saps time instead of money. 5: Preemption. Again, I don’t really know what’d be effective here, and there’s the aforementioned issues with sufficiently advanced deterrence/prevention/preemption taking away the recovery mechanism for bad laws. And there’s one last thing that hasn’t really been discussed but also feels like a terminal value. The desire for the person to realize how bad the thing they did was. I think one of the original motives for prison back in the 1700′s-1800′s was that the time of solitary reflection would prompt a realization on the part of the prisoner that what they did was wrong (source: half-remembered Focault book), and... it doesn’t really seem like that works. The ideal would be something like the ending of the Eragon series (major spoilers ahead!) So, there’s an evil king who’s been making the land pretty terrible for a while, the hero confronts him, is just about to lose, and then in the last moment manages to fire off a  wordless empathy spell born from the desire for the king to just... understand that what he’s been doing is wrong. And so, he mentally experiences all the consequences of what has happened to all the people of the land since becoming king. Needless to say, full awareness of all the consequences of one’s actions minus scope insensitivity is a pretty severe thing to think about, and the king shortly thereafter commits suicide. Minus the suicide part and the full removal of scope insensitivity part (because wouldn’t that be as bad as all the stuff that has happened up to now?), that just feels deeply right. That there be something to bring awareness of the full ramifications of everything you’ve done and realize that it was wrong. We’re probably not getting that, but it feels like an unusually pure form of justice. So, summary: current penal system sucks, more police, less prison, more minor corporal punishment (for deterrence/punishment), more fines (for reparation), ??? (whatever works) for addressing the cause of crime/somehow ensuring that people don’t do their crime again, if you need incapacitation then you don’t need to be cruel about it, just go for something Lotus-eater-like. You don’t want to be too effective at shutting down crime, because some crime is good when the laws are dumb. Retribution is a terminal value, fite me on this, but it’s best done on a personal level without lasting harm instead of being put in the hands of an impersonal organization with no incentives for mercy. Finally, full awareness of what one has done is something that’d be awesome if it existed.

[thisgirlhastales]

Simon and Baz Carrying On, like Wayward Sons ...

I’m here to write more about Wayward Son because @apostrophe-philosophy got me thinking with the wonderful additions made to my first lengthy post about it :)

Honestly, I’m loving the book more upon reflection, though I still have my same issues with it. I think the initial shock of the cliff-hanger had to die down for me (though, again, still have some things that irked me about said cliff-hanger). I’ve got more ranting to do, so, ah, here we go again, and warnings for spoilers beneath the cut!

Apologies for any repetition but this is mostly a ramble with less organization than my previous semi-essay post, and a little more in-depth on the characters, I think.

Carry On, as @apostrophe-philosophy stated so wonderfully, is a book that shook up all those tropes we know and love (when they’re executed well) of the Chosen One narrative, and I was so very pleased that Wayward Son kept that going — in fact, were Carry On the typical Chosen One type story, we would never have gotten a sequel because all’s well that ends well, right? (See: HP Epilogue).

But Wayward Son didn’t feel like a sequel to me, so much as … letting the cameras roll after the movie is over? (Er, assuming the characters are real people, so forgive my crap analogy.) We see how very broken these people are despite (or because of) their victory. We see that there are years of healing ahead of them, assuming they can even come to terms with all the things they’ve done and seen. It’s very much a life goes on and on story; as in, life doesn’t stop after a narrative goal or milestone are achieved. It just goes. On. Without needing permission. It is relentless.

And it doesn’t care if you can’t keep up.

Which is what I believe is happening to Simon, Baz, and Penny (and Agatha, to an extent, though she really feels like she has her shit together way more than the others do, and who’d a thunk?).

Simon Snow, Former Chosen One, Saviour of Watford and Conqueror (?) of the Insidious Humdrum, Now Retired and Mage-Less

Ooof, let’s start with the guy whom the series is named after, because oh Simon. My dude, your problems are as vast and deep as an ocean, and I feel like you never really learned how to swim properly ‘cause your mentor/father-figure (who was your actual father, and won’t that be an agonizing reveal?) really messed you up by nearly drowning you repeatedly. Metaphorically. Or literally?

Simon Snow was neglected in many ways as an orphan child growing up, moved around and ignored, until he met the Mage. Then he gets a huge destiny shoved upon him, and he’s taught how to fight with a sword and with magic, although, ah, the latter he really sucks at because for all his immense power, he lacks control. Many, many near-death experiences later, and he’s finally hit a point where everything he came to know as his reality crumbles beneath him because the Big Evil he’s fighting is a piece of himself (nice bit of trope subversion), and he has to figure out what the hell to do with it … Oh, right, fill in that hole and give up all his magic, the thing that saved him. And incidentally, the way this happens is that he witnesses the death of one of his closest friends/older mentor figures, and the Mage is the one who did it. Furthermore, the Mage refuses to accept reality, i.e. that Simon needs to give up the power, not give it to someone else (him). Penny and Simon inadvertently kill him … And it hurts me when, after Simon begs Stop hurting me! as a magic spell, that Penny has to tell Simon that the reason the Mage died is because the magic dealt the final judgement — the only way the Mage would be able to stop hurting Simon is if he were dead.

Simon is gonna have to contemplate that crap for a while … But we don’t see too much of it in Wayward Son because Simon is a disaster (but “still so lovely” as Baz says) who won’t think too hard about why he’s such a disaster — he’ll just torment himself over it, and thus break all our hearts (and Baz’s) …

As @apostrophe-philosophy delightfully stated, what seems like a happy ending “can very well feel empty when your mental state is in fucking shambles.” And, yeah. I think Simon’s lost magic and resulting lack of direction in life are part of why he’s so depressed and feeling “worthless” now (although, he is not worthless). The other reasons are all the myriad ways in which his childhood did not prepare him for life, and in fact, damaged him in several ways (thanks for nothing, Mage). It’s all hitting at once. I’m sorry, Simon.

What we do see in Wayward Son is that he still reflects on the Mage somewhat fondly. He can never forget everything he was taught, particularly when he still uses it to keep himself and his friends alive. He switches back into soldier mode so easily (Baz notices, realizes what Simon’s life must have been like while the Mage had him under his thumb). Simon in the United States is a Simon who plunges headfirst into adventure and the unexpected and the good fight, but not into anything that involves speaking to Baz and/or Penny. Good grief, please, Simon.

I was okay with other aspects of his journey being hinted at — curious and excited to see how it all plays out. @apostrophe-philosophy, you mentioned that water spirit recognizing him? So interested to see where that goes! The fact that Simon impacted magic all the way around the world? Does this mean he touched every corner of the globe with his explosions? With the Insidious Humdrum? How many more creatures know of him? Is he kinda part dragon now? He “gave back more” than he took? What? How? What?!

All of that is left for another book, and I’m cool with that. Less cool with other things being left hanging …

Simon is loved so profoundly by Baz and Penny, but that alone cannot fix him — it can keep him afloat at times, but those underlying issues are not going away because he has an awesome boyfriend and best friend. It is so damn gratifying to read a magical adventure tale that actually acknowledges this. I don’t mind my fluff when I can get it, but Carry On wasn’t about that life, and it would’ve felt disingenuous if Wayward Son was … but it wasn’t, so yes.

I agree with you, @apostrophe-philosophy, when you say that Wayward Son feels more mature. It’s not just that these characters are now “growing up” and trying to figure themselves out — it’s that they’re all such huge damn messes (love it), and that they’re mad at themselves (and sometimes each other) for not having their shit together. Mostly they’re angry at themselves and despairing of each other. And if that ain’t adult life, y’all … Geez.

“Yes, Carry On was full of life and magic. Wayward Son is, in the words of the humdrum, what’s left when you are done.” Well said, honey!

Ah, there are so many ways that Simon broke me — when he talks about how easy it is to kiss Baz, but being kissed  “suffocates” him? It felt like he couldn’t stand the loss of control again — it’s allowing something to happen to you, it’s revealing in ways you can’t control, which is the story of his entire life. When he and Baz are kissing in the aftermath of battle, when Simon feels the most like himself, when he doesn’t care and he’s just overjoyed to be awesome and alive and with Baz — he’s all over his boyfriend and loving both sides of that intimacy (that he initiates). But when that isn’t the case, when he’s back in that negative headspace, back to depression and anxiety and all the consequences that the Mage wrought … He needs control, and kissing is easier than being kissed. Easier than allowing yet another thing happen to him, being vulnerable and seen in his vulernability, particularly with Baz, who knows him and can see past his defences.

(The great irony, of course, is that Baz actually can’t see what’s going on with Simon. It’s entirely in Simon’s head, holy crap, boys, fucking talk to each other.)

That part where Penny thinks about Simon: “I don’t really care if you feel crazy—because crazy isn’t dead.” That part where Simon has to compromise his Mage-taught morals to fight with vampires against other vampires and he has to keep rationalizing why being in love with Baz is okay, and the proper ways to rescue people because that’s all he did as a child soldier in the Mage’s army, and as Baz has said about the Mage — may he rest in pain for so thoroughly fucking with Simon’s head when he was a child and in awe of him and just … gah. Fuck you, Davy.

Simon being ready to die, to live to the last second as the saviour because that’s all he thinks he’s good for — taking one more enemy down for his friends, for Baz … Damn it, Simon. I know he sucks at words, he’s admitted as much himself, but wow, any words would do, Simon. Any.

I live for aftermath, and watching Simon (not) deal is giving me all the feels. He really believes he’s less now that his purpose is fulfilled since he has no magic. And since he has/is less, he feels he should “set Baz free” and all that. He only feels like himself when he’s being a sword-fighting badass, rescuing people, being a soldier (again, fuck you, Davy) — and yeah, he is very skilled, even incredible at that, but that’s not why Baz and Penny love him. Simon, oh Simon. If you would just open your mouth and start talking about all of this, the world of good it would do you …

But, hey, you know who else stressed me out?

Tyrannus Basilton “Baz” Grimm Pitch, Fail Vampire (Except When Kicking Ass), Powerful Pitch Sorcerer, General Posh Representative of UK Mages

Baz, my crappy vampire, my brilliant pyro-mage. You need help as badly as your boyfriend does. Baz’s arc kills me in a different way than Simon’s — everything Simon is dealing with is somewhat expected, and I understand it well. I get what his issues are, and the ways he is (but more often, isn’t, so very much is not) coping with them (and definitely not actually healing from them).

Baz? Oooh man. There were the things I expected — being on the outside, watching Simon slowly go to pieces, feeling completely helpless and lost, not knowing what Simon wants or needs, and that includes whether Simon wants or needs him anymore …

And yes, dealing with striking out on his own, in defiance of his family and all other magical society expectations, which puts him on a rather solitary path (apart from the world he knew — at least he has Simon and Penny, Messes Though They Are).

But the other aspects of himself — as in, his vampire nature and how that plays on his mind? He was suicidal in Carry On because he believed that’s what his mother would have wanted, that the vampires in the UK were so low and beneath him, and he was a Pitch, so how could those pathetic creatures like Nicodemus also be him? I was hoping we would get into all of that that here … and man. Oh man.

How devastating was it to find out that Baz is actually physically unhealthy because he doesn’t feed properly? Because he had no one to teach him how to eat without killing or turning someone? How to eat non-blood food without his fangs showing? When Lamb didn’t quite believe that Baz was twenty, like, legit, he’s twenty, he’s a baby vampire … How small is the world of mages back in the UK? Baz wasn’t even allowed access to the Internet. Good grief, this guy is smart as a whip, but he knows almost nothing and it shows, but it wasn’t until he met the American vampires that it felt painful. I just want him to learn all the things. Simon wants that for him (albeit for reasons that amount to you’re better off without me), and it’s just … Give Baz some true vampire knowledge. Let him feed without killing or turning. Please, cut this boy some slack.

My heart broke to see all the ways Baz was just … missing vital parts of himself. It was killing me to watch him hungrily take in everything Lamb was telling him … He needs something or someone to inform him (who isn’t a raging douchebag like Lamb). There must be some half-decent vampire somewhere who can help. I feel like we’re in for a conflict with his Aunt Fiona, since she’s been vampire hunting this entire while … So, you know, more pain on the way.

I’m sure I’m not the first to say this, but I truly believe we have hints that Baz is more than just vampire or mage. The fact that he aged from when he was bitten, the fact that he can use magic (Nicodemus couldn’t, and we have it confirmed that vampires can’t) … Pretty sure there’s something going on there. He’s a hybrid? He’s a new species entirely? He’s something that NewBlood wants so badly, but they can’t get because it can’t be recreated in a lab?

Baz needs his own long, long period of coming to terms, and then doing something about all those things boiling beneath his skin, because, my dude, you are more than you realize, and that’s not just the vampire stuff I’m referring to, Baz. More than his family’s expectations. More than his magical world. More than Simon’s boyfriend.

Penelope Bunce also gave me feels — “I was never invincible. I was just in the vicinity.” Again, @apostrophe-philosophy, you nailed the issues surrounding her so well: “But Penelope A-Plan-And-Backup-For-Everything Bunce? Hitting the literal end of her rope? Letting us see that she’s perhaps the biggest fraud, who doesn’t know how to fake it till she makes it once her belief in her own abilities has started to waver, because she had never known failure before and is now confronted by it on so many fronts?” Much like you, I am totally on board for her coming into her own, learning from her failures and becoming that much capable and hopefully healthier as a result.

And Agatha Wellbelove, oh, Agatha, realizing that she is magic. That she can’t run from herself, but she can learn — I loved every cynical bit of her in this, but she still had the capacity to realize that she could do something, and she did something, and it was awe-inspiring. It was coated in regret, in self-flagellation of the highest order, and every belief that it would all end in flames, but she did it. Bless her for becoming the saviour of that day.

So we Carry On, Wayward Sons, But There’s No Sign of Peace Yet For When You’re Done?

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: I still feel like the lack of partial resolution to any of the emotional/psychological arcs drives me up the wall.

That being said, upon re-reading a few of my favourite passages/chapters, and re-reading the last quarter of the book … I will say that there’s a touch more resolution than I realized. Particularly for Simon

“It’s time for me to stop pretending that I’m some sort of superhero. I was that—I really was—but I’m not anymore. I don’t belong in the same world as sorcerers and vampires. That’s not my story … I think I’d rather get a job. Earn something for myself. Pay my own rent. It feels good to think about. It feels like—shit, I’m crying. It feels awful, but it feels clean.”

There’s a mess in that realization as well, but there’s also some clarity. No, Simon is not a superhero — nice, good! Also, he can belong with vampires and sorcerers, maybe, (Shepard is proof), but he doesn’t need to be the be-all-end-all hero/soldier of everyone around him, so there’s that realization at least.

But then it gets cut off shortly after (like, a couple of pages), so … I’m sighing big time here.

Baz gets even more heaped onto his shoulders. But I feel like for all he knows that he’s lacking significant knowledge on half of his identity, i.e. being a vampire, he knows that he doesn’t want to be either like NewBlood or like Lamb’s people. So. There’s that.

Penny gets brought low at the start and is … pretty much still there by the end, though saving Agatha is a plus one in her healing column, maybe? But everything else is just … there. It’s a shorter book — there was room to have one or two conversations? About one or two of these many issues? I’m not even saying those conversations had to go well — but at least informing the characters on a few of the problems that we, as the reader, can so clearly see? The plot was interesting, but sometimes it did feel a bit like a contrivance to keep the emotional arcs in suspension. Because they spent so many days on the road together, nights in motels, they were basically almost never apart for a significant amount of time and not once, until the end, did they try to talk out their shit in a real way.

Again, l love this book. I love so many things. I’m cool with cliff-hangers. But I feel like I needed at least partial resolution on a couple of things — a cliff-hanger after we got Simon acknowledging some parts of his issues and speaking them out loud to Baz? Or vice versa? Because they would be able to see each other’s problems more clearly — the misunderstandings might have continued, but along a different vein? Because, the thing is, acknowledging the problems is a thing, yes, but the healing from them part is the bigger, longer, more painful thing, and I feel like it’s just … so much to cover, and I would’ve liked a better grip on that healing process before the next book?

The third book may endear this second book to me further, but as of right now, it doesn’t quite stand alone for me. It feels a tad unfinished. Again, love so many moments in here, love the characters, including our new disaster friend, Shepard, but the book just feels like it cuts off far too abruptly.

But, to quote again from @apostrophe-philosophy: “I really just want a cast of characters who have actual fucking problems they can’t fix with love and friendship alone and to watch them get what they deserve by claiming it of their own accord. Not because it falls into their hands.”

I want that too, so badly. And I think we’re getting it — we definitely got a piece of that, a solid beginning of that in Wayward Son, and I am so, so hoping we get even more (way, way more) in the next book! (Books?)

Whew. And that is where I am stopping! That might be the end of my meta rope for this novel. Man, I love this book, and if anyone made it through this massive post, you’re amazing. Again, many thanks to @apostrophe-philosophy for adding onto to my previous essay with a beautiful and beautifully worded series of thoughts! *hugs* :)

#wayward son #wayward son spoilers #simon snow #tyrannus basilton grimm pitch #snowbaz #penelope bunce #agatha wellbelove #carry on #rainbow rowell #rants and ramblings

[fabulousquel]

GreedFall: Tips + My Review

So I picked up this game out of curiosity because I’m currently working on an RPG style historical fantasy that draws inspiration from a similar time period. I wanted to see how someone else handled the ‘flintlock’ genre and told a story with elements of this era. I am in no means a pro game reviewer but I completed the entire game yesterday and I have a lot I want to say.

There are some spoilers in this, so if you’d like to avoid reading them, don’t read the "Story” section. 

Tips:

Do your companion quests early and as soon as they pop up. There are some incredible lore bits and development of your character as well as your companions within them. Also if you sideline a companion for too long, they might leave your party in ways that might surprise or unsurprise you.

Certain dialog options will give you more quest content. For example, you’ve caught a criminal and you are given the choice to kill them on the spot, or capture them for trial. If you kill them, your quest line ends there. If you decide to trial them, another quest line opens up and you get a lot more flavor.

You can essentially just follow the main quest line if you want to speed-finish the game, but you lose a lot of context and additional dialog options if you do so. You will also wind up fighting the final boss at a much lower level, thus making the fight harder, but not impossible. They may have made this an option for people coming back wanting a challenge or to try a different build. But in my opinion, they should’ve made the side quests a mandatory thing because it’s a huge disservice to the context of the main story without them.

Don’t forget to give your companions gear upgrades- especially if you’re playing on more challenging modes.

If you want to avoid bloodshed and sneak into a camp, make sure you put on a chest piece of that faction. 

Put some skill points into Stasis no matter what build you roll with.

The Soundtrack:

It’s amazing. The snare drums going off in combat sequences create a very distinct and powerful mood. The zone music is very well orchestrated. It’s now up on spotify as well! 

Combat & Talents:

Of the RPGs I’ve played, this most reminded me of a combination of Red Dead Redemption, Final Fantasy with the option to semi-turn style with spells & traps, and a very versatile talent tree system that is really...fun. It’s the first time in a while that I felt I could make an effective solid build and playstyle around what I wanted to do most. Combat takes getting used to but I set up my keybinds to be a lot like ESO and I adapted very quickly. I went shortsword / gun tactical and it was immensely satisfying. 

The Story:

[SPOILS AHEAD]

The difference between historical fiction and historical fantasy is that a historical fantasy does not seek to retell history accurately, but rather take inspiration from it. How heavy this inspiration goes varies from story to story. This is how I approached interpreting the story, even in its very realistic parts. As I played through, there were several themes that became very clear to me. Keep in mind that I played through the game with De Sarde taking the Neutral Good alignment choice in most dialog options. 

The Elephant in the Room: Colonialism. This is one of the big criticisms I see with the game, and truth be told, it is a point of criticism for myself. The game treats the colonizing factions exactly like colonizers of real history, and it’s a subject that still rightfully touches nerves. One faction seeks to profit, another nation seeks to convert, and another seeks to experiment on. While there are subgroups of these factions that are more extreme than their leadership- the leadership seems complacent about it until condemning evidence is brought up. While extremely problematic this is, it is very true to what has happened in history surrounding colonialism, and places you in one uncomfortable situation after another in a frighteningly realistic way. It makes your decisions as De Sarde in some instances painful but it can be satisfying to see how your actions affect justice in these matters.

Some critics have said that De Sarde’s choices do not always condemn truly objectionable events enough. I agree that more depth could have been added. But in my playthrough, De Sarde’s role starts out as a truly neutral party looking for truths, and they gradually became more adamant on stances as the game progressed. By the end, my De Sarde was about to 1v1 Theleme, and drag out the Bridge Alliance governor. So I am unsure if this is a perspective coming from those who haven’t completed the game in its entirety with all side quests which influence reputations more & seem to flesh out more dialog options. 

Humanity Has a Sickness This was written both physically and metaphorically in how humans are as susceptible to committing atrocities as they are to growing ill. Throughout the story as De Sarde, you play almost a detective in uncovering the truth about the people you were raised to believe were benevolent. De Sarde does not take these accusations of corruption lightly, but they also treat it very seriously. Piece by piece, De Sarde learns more about each factions true intentions, and the lies, corruption and greed that intertwine. But at the same time, the story attempts to reveal the potential for all people to ‘do better’ and change- and some of this is seen when you use De Sarde’s charisma + intuition dialog options. This theme especially became clear in the arc when De Sarde finally gets to speak to the god of the island, En on mil Frichtimen, who expresses to him that the malicor (sickness) is a result of them poisoning their own land with their lack of care or concern for it.  En on mil Frichtimen urges that the colonists need to listen and learn from the Islanders’ ways if they wish to heal the sickness.

Where to Draw the Line at “For The Greater Good” I feel like this is a theme that crops up with any story involving Utopian ideas. GreedFall does a good job of backing up each faction’s actions with their point of view, whether it is morally misguided or not. This truly emphasizes the human element in the mix, underlining that no perspective comes without its flaws. As De Sarde, one thing you are constantly faced with as a detective is defining a line of where something has gone too far. It is sobering and somewhat frustrating to watch factions step over a line that could have easily remained morally sound. But it is also equally satisfying to see how much influence you can have in swaying others to make a different choice. This theme becomes the summit of De Sarde’s character progression when he is forced to make the choice of taking your dear cousin, Constantin, out of power, or joining him. And when you’ve done all the side quests there are in the game, the decision becomes far more meaningful than this just being the final boss fight.

This theme also seems to come full circle by the end of Petrus’s quest line, when you discover your true origin- how your mother was kidnapped from the island in a rash attempt to bring a healer to the continent. This realization that everything you’ve known has been a lie and kept secret from you...all for the “greater good”. 

Things I Liked:

I appreciated how much love and care went into the worldbuilding- especially with the native Islanders. From what I understand, a linguist was hired to write a language for them that was a mash-up of Flemish, Breton, Gaelic and Irish. I appreciated that they brought forth inspiration from the Gauls and Celtic nations of the Iron Age in Western Europe before they were subjected to Christian Missionary activity.

The art & atmosphere was amazing. While there are a few clipping issues with hair, even big AAA games have them. The level of detail put into the game art wise is just very visually pleasing.

The devs did a good job in making a fantasy world that was LGBTQ+ friendly, and giving us diverse character customization. Anyone from any faction had a diverse set of features.

Things I am Critical of:

While I understand that there is a point of growth to watch De Sarde go from neutral to invested in a cause, I really do think they should have been given less complacent responses earlier in the game. I understand limitations but I don’t think it helped with handling colonialism in a truly neutral way.

I wish you could start the game as someone from a faction of your choice, rather than only the Merchant Congregation, especially considering how your origin is written.

IT’S DEPRESSING. A lot of the game is depressing... which maybe makes all the little things you do that shine some shred of goodness still in humanity all the brighter. But it definitely hurt my soul in places and back to point #1, I wish I could have been more aggressive with De Sarde earlier in the game.

Recycled assets: there were quite a few of them- mostly noticeable with buildings in the main cities, which is probably what marks the difference between an AAA game and a more independent studio.

Potential Triggers:

There’s a lot of heavy subjects in this game including religious abuse, manipulation, some body horror (though it’s not super grotesque), one instance of suicide that I know of, xenophobia, and general violence. 

Features I Wish it Had:

You can’t ‘jump’...but you don’t really need to. I still wish I could though.

For all this beautiful scenery, I wish they gave us better screenshot taking options.

Different fights for the different Coin Arenas and a meta achievement for completing all of them.

I wish I could play it with friends.

More armor options!

I wish the companions had better and more in-depth romance options. They fall a little flat in diversity of personalities.

Final Thoughts:

I personally enjoy diving into stories that we should be morally critical of, and I like it for what it reveals in the best and worst of humanity. Colonialism has done and continues to do irreversible damage to peace and prosperity among people and nations in real life. Spiders picked a topic that nearly everyone has been affected by in one way or another and it’s understandably a heated subject. Some folks do not want to dive into such deep subjects, just as there’s some stories I cannot stomach comfortably. So I respect and understand that.

Overall, GreedFall exceeded my expectations but there’s definitely some hiccups. It’s a fun game if you’re into a detective-style RPG, political intrigue, history, and interested in exploring this sort of setting. While I think the story could have been written better in places, I was satisfied with the outcomes I triggered, even if that satisfaction took a very slow build up to. It left me feeling hopeful? That perhaps people still have a chance at treating each other better than they do.

#greedfall #review #just thoughts #big post

[lilith-lovett]

Found Families - Home is Where the Hart is - Chapter Three

Third chapter. Here it is, this chapter has definitely been my favourite to write so far because I love family dynamics so if anyone has any fic recommendations I would greatly appreciate them to help me through my upcoming exams.

Masterlist

Summary: A look inside the Hart household.

Word Count: 5483 (I’m so sorry this is so long I got a little bit carried away)

Warnings: Child abuse mention, self-deprecation, homophobic parents mentioned, anxiety, ADHD, depression, PTSD, OCD, therapy mention, minor panic attack, blood mentioned, sympathetic Deceit. If anything needs to be added please let me know.

Patton Hart. His name suited him, thinking more with his heart rather than with his head. He had always been a empathetic person feeling much more deeply than most. Back then, he had been a sensitive and fragile boy constantly seeking out his parents approval but now since they revealed to him how they truly felt about him he changed. He was no longer that delicate, helpless boy but a man who now had a family of his own to care for. No partner, as his parents would have expected of him but three extraordinary kids who he loved whole-heartedly despite them not being of blood but yet their connection was undeniable. Patton loved his famILY.

Patton upon opening his front door after his visit to the Orphanage was met immediately with his two year old Declan sprinting - as fast as a two year old could -  full force towards him. His mismatched heterochromic blue and hazel eyes sparkling with joy as he threw his tiny body into Patton’s stomach knocking him onto his behind burrowing face sticky with jam - Crofters most likely - into Patton’s chest clearly pleased to see him.

“Hiya Dee, did you miss me?” Patton said ruffling Dee’s inky black curls as the toddler purred beneath his touch but not failing to notice that he was still dressed in his green and yellow coloured snake printed pyjamas despite it nearing three o’clock in the afternoon.

“Dee missed daddy,” Dee mumbled stumbling slightly over his words still not fully confident with his slowly developing speech “Up up,”. Finally meeting Patton’s gaze making grabby gestures with his mitten-clad hands which prevented him from scratching and irritating the large, painful burn scars stretching down his entire right side including a portion his face.

“Okay, up you go,” Patton said lifting Dee with minimal effort balancing the toddler on his hip “Did you have fun with Uncle Emile?”. He received mischievous giggles in response and felt instant sympathy for his best friend. Dee was certainly a handful and chasing an energetic two year old around the house for any length of time definitely required a lot stamina and endurance something which Emile did not have.

Patton with Dee balanced on his hip he trudged his way into the messy living room with toys strewn across the floor, the furniture out of place and his best friend Emile sprawled across the sofa fast asleep snores and grunts escaping every so often and in his hand what appeared to one of many cup of coffee evident from the several used mugs sat on the coffee table. Looking visibly dishevelled from his unexpected play-filled day with Dee his shirt crinkled, tie undone hanging limply from his neck, trousers stained red presumably with Dee’s favourite jelly and his pink highlighted locks an unruly mess unused to the demanding nature of young children, taking the lukewarm coffee from his hands Patton jostled his friend who woke with a jolt rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Oh hey Patton,” Emile mumbled his voice still heavy with sleep stretching his arms over his head Patton audibly winced at the sound of the pops and clicks of his spine, Emile pushed himself off of the sofa drawing up to his full height a few inches above Patton exhaling a sigh of relief at the sight of him.

Patton and Emile had been the best of friends ever since their school days, spending more time with Emile’s family than his own and after he was kicked him out because he came out as pan-sexual to his less than supportive parents Emile was the one he ran to for help. He gave him a place to stay supporting him until he finally found his footing and even now was still figuring out ways to repay Emile and Emile’s parents for their kindness during the most difficult time in his life. Patton didn’t think he ever could.

“Have fun today Emile?” Patton chuckled gesturing to his scruffy appearance and considerable number of cups of coffee sat on the table in front of him. Patton couldn’t comprehend how Emile could drink such large quantities of the bitter tasting liquid, he after a mere sip was vibrating with energy and it left a rotten taste in his mouth.

“Yes, me and Declan had lots of fun today, didn’t we Dee?” Emile said forcing a smile at Dee while attempting to neaten his appearance brushing both crumbs and stains from his clothes, scowling at the jam smears shaped like a tiny pair of hands on his trousers.

“Ucle Emmy fell asleep,” Dee chirped giggling at Emile’s mock look of hurt as he poked Dee’s stomach playfully careful not to aggravate his burns inducing further giggling. Patton couldn’t help grinning at playful encounter between his son and best friend, praying that he would continue experiencing moments like these with his family for many years to come.

“Demon child,” Emile muttered underneath his breath contrasting the minuscule smile that crept involuntarily upon his face. “So Patton how was the adoption day, which poor soul was unfortunate enough to catch your eye?”. He had only told a single person his plans regarding adopting again, that person being Emile, unintentionally but ultimately he was glad he did. It had always been a dream of his to become a father and now that dream was a reality though not in the way he anticipated it but he wouldn’t change it for the world.

“Oh Emile, he is incredible his name is Logan and he is so smart and mature and the way his face lit up when he was talking about his books. My god Emile I love him so much already,” Patton rambled on and on about Logan. It was obvious the moment he met him he was the one simply by the look in his eyes, his straightforward attitude and the subtle glimmer in his eye made Patton believe he was worth it but he had walls. Walls built to protect himself from strangers preventing anyone from getting to close which made Patton all the more determined to care for him. “But…he reminds me of Virgil,”.

“He has a past,” Emile said lowering his voice to a whisper not to disturb Dee who had buried himself beneath a mountain of blankets undoubtedly exhausted from his busy day. His former light-hearted jokey nature faded away replaced by professionalism and an earnestness, Emile’s therapist mode as Patton liked to refer to it but yet a faint smile could be seen on his face acting as a solace to Patton.

“I think so, he made himself bleed in an attempt to stop himself from talking which triggered a sensory overload, like the ones Virgil had but I barely had to do anything to calm him down It looked like he had dealt with them before,” Patton explained struggling to prevent the audible tremble in his voice. He knew the moment he approached the apathetic looking boy sat reading, isolated from the rest of the children that starting a conversation wouldn’t be easy but once he eventually opened up upon the mention of his book all of the previous awkwardness was worth it to witness Logan’s eyes light up but that light died as quickly as it appeared, when Logan silenced himself Patton’s heart cried out for the boy. He dug his nails into his cheeks so ferociously Patton feared he may draw blood but once he clamped his hands over his ears and his breathing rapidly accelerated he knew immediately he was going into sensory overload. Patton was no stranger to the condition through Virgil’s own experiences though nowadays they were infrequent but however still happened on rare occasions so he was familiar with the steps to helping someone going through it though his assistance rarely required, he simply added extra weight in the books on Logan’s lap and Patton’s cardigan around his shoulders acting as grounding methods but Logan recovered primarily on his own puzzling Patton as for Virgil it often took up to half an hour to settle him after an overload however for Logan he returned to his cool composed state in a matter of minutes, mask washing over his face once again almost appearing embarrassed by the episode as if handling attacks like these alone were common.

Patton’s breath hitched and this time it did not go unnoticed by Emile who immediately swung into action enveloping him in a warm embrace knowing Patton responded much better to physical touch and reassurance to verbal, stroking his back with one hand, gently caressing his curls with the other until his breathing returned to normal but he made no move to push away remaining firmly engulfed in Emile’s arms.

“I just want to protect him Emile, he deserves a family,” He murmured into Emile’s chest, his eyes stung with tears but he refused to allow them to fall so to not alarm Dee. Patton had a weakness for children in difficult situations and circumstances and had an overwhelming urge to protect the people in his life and now it was Logan’s turn for someone to care for him no matter how rocky the path was.

“I know you do and you will,” Emile replied resting his chin atop Patton’s head “but please don’t forget to take care of yourself, after Virgil and Dee…I never want to see you that way again,”. Emile hands which had settled on Patton’s shoulders gripped him tightly as if he feared he may disappear like he almost did back then.

“You don’t need to worry about little old me,” Patton said plastering a smile across his face in attempt to comfort Emile, raising his hands to rest on Emile cheek brushing his thumb across the patch of freckles dusted on his cheekbones. He didn’t need anyone else worrying about him, it was his duty as a father to care for his family which included Emile.

“I’ll always worry about you little brother,” Emile reminded Patton. Patton and Emile considered each other family neither of them had any siblings of their own so now called themselves brothers.

“We are the same age kiddo,” Patton said though they certainly didn’t look it. Patton had consistently had a baby face never quite growing out of it while Emile flourished into adulthood much sooner.

“And yet you still call me kiddo,” Emile quipped.

“I call everyone kiddo, okay compromise I’ll let you call me your little brother if you let me call you kiddo. Deal?” He proposed stretching out a hand towards Emile.

“Fine deal,” Emile sighed taking Patton’s hand begrudgingly “Little brother,” A mischievous smirk playing on his lips. Patton rolled his eyes knowing he would soon regret that decision. “So, will you be telling Roman and Virgil they may be receiving a new brother?”. Patton initially wanted to keep his intentions to adopt again secret especially from his children until he was absolutely certain on whichever child he chose being the correct fit for his family which now didn’t seem so distant any more.

“Not yet, I’m sure if I told them Roman would instantly try and talk me out of it,” Patton said glancing to the collection of pictures frames decorating the once empty mantel place specifically to the smallest hidden partially behind the others of the first night with Virgil and Dee, nobody was looking at the camera Roman and Virgil who hadn’t ceased in their bickering since they arrived home and once Patton believed they had finally reached a compromise he brought out the camera hoping capture their first night together as a family but however he wasn’t quick enough before Virgil caught him immediately turning away from the camera concealing his face with his hoodie sleeve, Roman arms folded across his chest pouting and Dee attached to his half-brother’s leg refusing to part from him. It wasn’t the first family portrait he’d expected but it was perfect though Roman still hadn’t forgiven him for showing the picture to his Roman’s friend Elliott Sanders on his first ever sleepover. Roman had been an only child for so long and then he all of a sudden had two younger brothers which he took time adjusting to and it required him witnessing one of Virgil’s more severe panic attacks for him to at long last recognise him as his little brother but yet telling Roman he may perhaps be receiving a another brother he would surely oppose.

“Well don’t keep them in the dark for to long,” Emile said stepping over toys towards the window “And speak of the devil,”. Emile pointed towards the school bus steadily approaching the bus stop located outside the Hart house where Roman and Virgil would soon be getting off.

“Hey Dee, Virge and Ro are home,” Patton spoke softly shaking the sleeping toddler awake, well aware if he allowed him to sleep any longer he wouldn’t sleep tonight but he shot up instantly at the mention of his brother’s names making beeline for the door to greet them.

A short while later Patton’s eldest Roman aged twelve and his middle child Virgil aged ten arrived home squabbling as usual.

“You just have to seize your moment my chemically imbalanced romance,” Roman proclaimed dramatically as he often did, practically vibrating with energy his ADHD medication presumably having worn off. Gesturing wildly with his arms resulting in Virgil having to duck out of the danger zone to avoid getting struck in the face by a flailing arm, grimacing at the nickname.

Roman was the first to be adopted by Patton soon after he got back onto his feet with a well-paying job and his own home,adopting a child was simply the final piece of the puzzle of his dreams. Roman had been a rambunctious six year old given up by his biological mother at birth and had been floating within the foster system ever since. They had an instant connection with their shared love of all things Disney and silly puns that no one other than this six year old child seemed to appreciate but his seemingly never-ending supply of energy and inability to sit still regularly got him into a lot of trouble however to Patton he was perfect and simply a child who required an outlet for his creative energy, which he found in theatre kick-starting his passion for performing. Roman now apart of a local children’s theatre, had starred in numerous plays from well-known musicals to Shakespeare remakes and had obtained a small fan-following as a result and of course Patton attended every performance. With only a few short months until Roman blossomed into an angsty teenager, Patton had noticed some recent changes in him particularly in his appearance. His former auburn waves were now slick with styling gel and his clothing choices progressing from costumes - he assured Patton he was much to old for now - to whatever the latest trends were, most recently an all white ensemble beneath his red bomber jacket embellished with gold stitching and crown he’d asked Patton to add for him not completely abandoning his princely persona. Though Patton always thought Roman looked stylish his son didn’t seen to think the same of him, often embarrassed by his attempts to be ‘fashionable’ and had taken the challenge upon himself to dress Patton whenever they were to be seen in public together which Patton didn’t mind finding he quite liked Roman’s style suggestions but would always find a way to put his own Patton twist on it.

“What like you? I don’t think so sir-sing-a-lot,” Virgil quipped in his usual fashion, sinking further into his oversized back hoodie, cramming his gloved hands concealing his own burn scars into his pockets, music blaring out of his headphones which hung loosely around his neck playing some obscure band Virgil idolized immediately making his way to the kitchen shoulders hunched, his clenched jaw and closed off attitude was evidence that his anxiety levels were clearly on a high.

Virgil and Declan, Patton had been adopted from the same Orphanage as the two were half-brothers from the same abusive household and refused to be separated. Virgil, seven years old had been taking care of his eight month old brother Dee virtually since he was born but because of their complex situation they were relocated every few months, never remaining in one home for two long before both were sent away once again. Their first meeting didn’t go as effortlessly as Roman’s had, originally Patton had intended to adopt one child. A plan which had been thrown out of the window the minute he met Virgil who had been involuntarily forced into meeting Patton and undoubtedly irritated by the whole situation and once the two were left alone together Virgil made his frustrations known shouting and swearing before fleeing, saying that Patton was shocked would be an understatement and nearly walked out there and then but had a change of heart upon learning about Virgil’s troublesome past and his tenderness towards his younger brother. Virgil and his brother deserved a family and Patton would be the one to give one to them. So Patton came back the following day requesting a session with both brothers which went about as well as anticipated but once Patton put his mind to a task he wouldn’t be discouraged so easily, it took time and patience but they were worth it. Dee adapted to the new environment without any trouble presumably due to his young age and minimal memories of his past family but Virgil who had a severe mistrust of adults and to Patton’s knowledge at the time received the brute of his parents abuse took much longer to adjust but as time passed he gradually opened up but this wasn’t the beginning of Virgil’s problems, as a result of his trauma he had developed several mental disorders affecting his daily life he only had officially diagnosed and treated - a few different anxiety disorders, depression, OCD, insomnia and PTSD - a few months ago after suggesting he go to see a therapist for his worsening anxiety and panic attacks and though progress is slow there has been a steady improvement and he is now much more open especially with his feelings. Virgil had retained his sarcastic attitude and stubbornness and had a rather unique sense of humour which Roman often became the victim of but beneath his tough outer exterior exemplified by his dark aesthetic and choice in clothing distressed jeans, band t-shirts and his patchwork hoodie all in his two favourite colour black and purple is a thoughtful and kind-hearted individual who managed to find his voice finally in music and poetry.

“Hiya kiddos, how was school?” Patton asked as he did everyday when the boys arrived home from school though not failing to recognise Virgil’s heightened anxiety, positive Emile who was also Virgil’s therapist acknowledged his anxious energy too from their shared look of concern.

“It was splendid, in art today we finally got to make a start to our final paintings and of course I chose acrylic paint that was just a given,” Roman gushed rambling on and on about his day without pausing to take a single breath, enthusiastically motioning with his hands as he spoke. Excessive talking, one of Roman more prevalent symptoms. He’d made great improvement with his volume control and impulsiveness but he was excitable and passionate by nature and talking gave him an outlet to share his ideas though occasionally went a little overboard.

“Roman, remember to breath,” Patton spoke softly placing a gentle hand on Roman’s shoulder and the excited tension deflated as he released a breath he seemingly hadn’t realise he was holding but immediately averted his gaze to the floor shrinking in on himself, ashamed of his outburst.

“Sorry dad,” He mumbled fidgeting with the zipper on his jacket. A nervous habit of his.

“It’s alright Ro, I know your working on it. How about you tell me all about your painting at dinner tonight?” Patton proposed resulting in a complete turnabout a beaming smile stretching across his lips practically bursting at the seams with elation.

“Really, thanks padre,” Roman exclaimed a little too loudly as he bounded upstairs to where his room was, the skip returning to his step and Patton only smiled as he watched him go. Roman was Hispanic by descendant but living in an orphanage for the six years of his life, he had been brought up around English speakers and never had the opportunity to learn his native tongue but entering school had implanted the desire to learn the language and he threw himself into memorising as many words as he could. Patton had to admit he teared up a little at hearing Roman call him father in Spanish for the first time and it stuck.  

“Virgil what about you?” Patton called out to an empty living room. Virgil, Dee and Emile all having disappeared relocating to the kitchen. Virgil sat cross-legged in his usual position on the kitchen counter for some reason having an aversion to chairs though Patton never questioned it and allowed him to perch on the counter if he joined them at the table for mealtimes, which he did begrudgingly. Dee settled himself in Virgil’s lap, plucking contentedly at the threads on his jeans while Virgil rested his chin on Dee’s head running his fingers through his curls breathing deeply matching each breath with the piano ballad now streaming through his headphones. While Emile sat at the dining room table with yet another cup of coffee flicking through some loose files peering at Virgil every so often his expression laced with concern. “Hey Virgil, how are you doing?”.

“Fine,” Virgil muttered into Dee’s hair. A common response whenever asked about his feelings in an effort to divert attention away from himself but from two years of learning to identify Virgil’s avoidance habits had given Patton the ability to navigate Virgil’s ever changing moods and mannerisms. Patton knew he was not ‘fine’ far from it.

“Virgil you know you can tell me anything right? Maybe talking about it might help,” Patton suggested gradually moving closer towards Virgil but making no move to touch him without his permission but decreasing the proximity between them allowing him to make the next move. Emile’s advice repeating in his head as he frequently resorted to physical reassurances which often only panicked Virgil further unless he actively seeks it out himself so he restrained himself from pulling his dark strange son into his chest to console him, waiting patiently for Virgil’s response.

“Um…well…I…I postponed my presentation again,” Virgil stuttered disappearing further into his hoodie as if to hide away allowing his inky black bangs to fall over his grey eyes. This ominous presentation had been looming over Virgil’s head for weeks causing nothing but stress and anxiety for him but the presentation was compulsory and despite the support and resources offered by the school it did little to quell his panic. “I…I was going to do it b-but the moment I stood up and everyone eyes were on me…I…I,” Virgil gripped his own hair curling further in on himself his breathing growing more rapid and erratic as he stuttered the words out as he recounted the event, his increased distress had not surpassed Dee’s notice. The youngest manoeuvred himself now facing Virgil placing his mitten-clad hands against Virgil’s chest as he had presumably seen Patton do before in order to regulate his breathing, his large eyes staring up at his brother with a combination of concern and confusion but it warranted a weak laugh from Virgil as he inhaled a shaky breath exhaling once before repeating the action until his breathing slowed enough for him to continue. During the time Emile had appeared next to Patton placing a comforting hand on his shoulder now much closer to Virgil allowing him to step in if need be, Patton simply watched the two brothers interacting able to read each other feelings without words a lump forming in his throat. It never got easier witnessing Virgil’s panic attacks, powerless to prevent them and only able to guide him through each one as they occurred but was increasingly grateful for Emile’s presence unsure of his ability to restrain himself from attempting to console Virgil himself. “I ran…I didn’t know what else to do…I just had to get out, I ran to the restroom…I tried to do that counting thing but nothing worked but then Princey showed up out of nowhere and helped me out of it,”. Virgil glanced over to where Patton and Emile were standing but peered over Patton’s shoulder at something behind them, Patton turned and was surprised to see Roman standing completely silent in the archway having replaced his red bomber jacket for his favourite red sash draped across his torso his sketch pad and an assortment of art supplies held to his chest.

“Of course Vir…eh J.D-lightful, it is my sworn duty as a Prince to rescue damsels in distress,” Roman proclaimed striking one of his many signature poses but Patton didn’t fail to miss his initial bashfulness and in that moment his heart swelled with pride. Roman and Virgil were polar opposites and determined to forever despise each other but yet slowly but surely they were learning to tolerate each other accepting their faults and figuring out that they aren’t so different after all.

“Whatever you say Princey but thanks,” Virgil said a small yet sincere smile creeping onto his face unfurling himself wrapping his arms gently around Dee now happily babbling away. “Thank you too Dee,”.

“Do you feel better Virgil?” Patton asked his heart warming at the sight of Virgil’s rare smile.

“Yeah I do, thanks dad,” He said hoping down from his perch lowering Dee to the floor and shuffled apprehensively towards Patton but he knew exactly what Virgil was asking for, he opened his arms allowing Virgil to close the space then wrapping his arms around Virgil’s narrow frame not too tight to feel as if he were suffocating him but enough for him to feel secure. Though Virgil made no move to hug him back Patton sensed his tension dissipating as he revelled in Patton’s touch and warmth before returning to perching on the kitchen counter.

“I’m proud of you Virgil. You were able to recognise you were panicking and calm yourself down,” Emile praised placing a gentle hand on Virgil shoulder. “And perhaps he could talk about this presentation in our next session and have a system set in place for if something like this occurs again. What do you think?”.

“Uh yeah sounds good, thanks Uncle Emile,” Virgil said his face flushing from the praise a stark contrast to his pale complexion winding the cord attached to his headphones around his hands.

“Patton duty calls, I have emergency meeting soon. So I will make myself scarce and Virgil I will see you next week for our session,” Emile said Virgil only nodded in response still self-conscious in regards to his weekly therapy sessions. As Emile was leaving he wrapped Patton in a quick hug before ruffling Dee’s hair who hummed gleefully in response and he left, the grumbling of his car could be heard outside as it exited his driveway.

Patton gathered Dee into his arms, his youngest immediately making a grab for his glasses resulting in Patton having to dodge his fast approaching hands reminding him that his glasses were not a toy receiving a dissatisfied whine. Virgil remained on his perch scrolling through his phone presumably on Tumblr the tween’s favourite social media sight though he didn’t give any indication of what he was he was smiling at on his phone but Patton didn’t pry trusting his son completely and Roman had assembled his art supplies at the dining room table fixated on the potential masterpiece he was working on in his sketchbook. Patton had an idea.

“It has certainly been a day. And the only suitable way to complete this day would be with a movie night,” Patton announced promptly gaining the attention of his children. Movie nights were cherished occasions within the Hart household as Patton held the belief that a night spent watching movies with your family could solve any problem and if not it certainly made everything a little easier. The entire family gathering on the couch beneath a pile of soft and fluffy blankets, various movie snacks - typically home-made cookies - and a heart-warming feel-good movie playing on the TV Patton couldn’t think of anything superior. Occurring typically twice weekly in a normal week but often unscheduled movie nights were arranged for a variety of reasons; if Virgil had a bad day, if Roman was stuck in a creative slump or if Patton was simply feeling worn down. A movie night was always the perfect solution.

Roman and Virgil expressions of elation were enough for Patton’s heart to summer-salute within his chest and they all immediately swung into action cleaning the chaotic living before they all settled down at the dining table -including Virgil - to a family-favourite of Patton’s extra special secret recipe for Spaghetti Bolognese, so extra special even the exceptionally picky eater Dee would tuck into with no complaints. Following their dinner Patton began the preparations for movie night preparing the traditional snacks while Roman and Virgil disputed over the movie choice and Dee snuggled up in the considerable number of blankets struggling to stay conscious but once the movie began - they ultimately chose a Frozen a favourite of all three Hart siblings - and barely half-way through the film when Anna began her journey to find her sister Elsa all three were fast asleep. Roman’s increasingly lanky limbs sprawled across Patton’s lap emitting occasional soft snores every so often, Virgil curled in on himself his hoodie drawn tight around his slight frame his music still flowing through his headphones allowing him to sleep easy and Dee nestled into his older brother chest Virgil’s arms gently drawing him in closer. Patton smiled immensely thankful that fate had granted him these three wonderful, beautiful, talented children there weren’t enough words in the English language to describe the warmth he felt within his heart and his one last wish was to add one more beautiful soul to complete the puzzle that is his dream and that missing piece was Logan.

But while Patton drifted off to sleep with a smile upon his face surrounded by the overwhelming love and affection of his children. Logan did not. He returned to his room beaten and broken, collapsing into his bed with an empty stomach, begging for an escape from the hell he was living.

Tag list:

@i-do-not-dislike-fudge @poems-art-darkness-n-more @alex-cain

If you would like to be added please do not hesitate to ask.

#sander sides au #sanders sides #logan sanders #patton sanders #roman sanders #virgil sanders #deciet sanders #Emile Picani #sympathetic deceit #Adoption AU #Logic sanders #Morality sanders #creativity sanders #anxiety sanders #tw child abuse #tw anxiety

[rolandfaunte]

The Story of Sewing Kit

I guess it kind of starts in the fall of 2016. Up until this point I had had some issues with anxiety/depression, and huge issues with sleep, but nothing that I would have considered to be an emergency. All of the sudden it seemed like accomplishments were becoming less frequent. Before this, when I was happy, each thought that came about in regards to an obligation was accompanied by a bit of energy that could be used to do it. That energy stopped showing up and the list of things that needed to be done began to grow as the likelihood of those tasks being completed began to shrink. I think of it like a car. Before these issues, when the car was required to drive a certain distance, gas would simply appear in the tank. Now, those same distances were required, but the gas no longer appeared. In this metaphor, the gas is provided by the subconscious, or just “the sub” as I like to call it. When you’re hungry, the sub gives you a bit of gas to go to the kitchen or order something. When you’re hungry but depressed, that gas never arrives. What then? Can you create you own? I’ve come to think of consciously-generated fuel as will power, and I didn’t really seem to have any at that time. The truth of the matter is that the sub was getting sick and, as a result, I started slowly dissolving into a pathetic mess. After sleep and motivation were gone, the disease began to target my self-worth. By the disease, I mean the bipolar disorder that at the time I was unaware of but would soon be diagnosed. The pattern of life I was developing mostly consisted of doing nothing or crying. At this point my life sill wasn’t necessarily all that bad, because I would only spend a few hours per day in a truly horrible place and would otherwise just be numb and fragile. This would be changing soon but the issue was still manageable enough that I didn’t do anything about it. In this time period, a typical day would begin with a skipped class and inactivity until around 5 o’clock, when I would retreat to my room and cry for a while about nothing and then just be numb again. My sense of self-worth was very low but I was yet to have any suicidal thoughts or full disconnections from reality. It was bad of course, but nothing compared to what was to come. In the context of the future that I’m now aware of, it’s hard to see this time period as so terrible, though it was certainly worse than anything that had preceded it. In the fall of 2016 I was introduced to Dr. K. We tried a few standard ssris and I took them religiously, thinking that they could bring back an older version of myself but they didn’t work very well. We tried a few different combinations but my decline was accelerating at an alarming rate. Each day of this time period would be the best day I would have for months to come. The episodes of tearfulness and misery became the standard mode of my life. I kept these things mostly private from those I knew well because I found them to be embarrassing and extremely confusing. After a while of this, in the springtime, a new type of episode began to emerge. It was one of infinite bliss and unstable happiness. My self-worth inflated to an amazing degree and I was filled with what felt like an infinite love and sense of connection to all things. I would create things at an alarming pace that all turned out to be of terrible quality but at the time seemed to me to be far more important than anything else in the history of the world. These were my first true experiences with hypomania. These episodes would break ferociously. I remember walking to campus in a state of absolute ecstasy, being extremely impressed with myself and all of the amazing things I would come to accomplish. My genius was absolute and my understanding of the world was absolutely messianic. The introduction of mania made for an incredibly ridiculous life, in which I was either overflowing with energy and ecstasy or begging a god I didn’t believe in to bring about some accident that would kill me. Neither version of the brain could remember the other, and I never seemed to spend any time in between them. I told my doctor of these things and he asked me to more elaborately journal during these moments, which I proceeded to do. When I next went to visit him he said he thought I might have a bipolar disorder and wanted to try a different tact medically. One med, Latuda, was very successful but left me with an unacceptable side-effect called akathisia. When I went to see him after a few weeks we had a lengthy conversation about my sense of the future and my hope for recovery and he regretfully informed me that I was ill to a point at which out-patient treatment wouldn’t be enough and it was time for me to be admitted. On the day I was admitted, I remember laying in some sort of examination room when a nurse entered and asked how I was feeling. Through tears I informed her, “I’m never going to be happy ever again.” I meant that. I was sure of it in ways I’ve never been sure of anything else. At some point before the Latuda I had begun to lose my relationship with reality but it was now gone entirely. I had no sense of what was real and was entirely possessed by the darkest thoughts imaginable, or perhaps even worse than that depending on who is being asked. For those who haven’t been depressed, these types of thoughts remain beyond imagination. When entering the ward I was presented with a line on which I needed to sign my name and write the date. I paused at the part of the paper that required the date and looked up to the nurse in confusion. Her and I were both visibly surprised by the fact that, not only did I not know what month it was, I also didn’t know whether it was 2015 or 2016. I can’t explain how or why, but I simply did not know. It was like looking at a bill at a restaurant and your brain just refusing the put in the effort to calculate a tip, except mine couldn’t even put in the effort to tell me what year it was. In that hospital I felt as though I was joining the ranks of those to whom I was truly similar. The broken and unproductive elements of society who were unable to do anything other than consume resources and spread misery and chaos. I looked at the outlets that fed energy to the medical machines, the nurses and the attendants, the food we ate, and the light that let us see it and saw them all as a waste. Why wouldn’t they just let us destroy ourselves? Why did they insist on keeping us in places where suicide was impossible when it was obviously the best thing for anyone who ended up here? I’ve never in my life spent so much time staring at a clock. The issues with sleep had made a vengeful reemergence and the time spent in the hospital truly felt like an eternity. I remember looking out of the window at a woman walking to work and thinking “I will literally never do that. I will never have a job. I will never contribute. I will never be useful enough to have to be anywhere ever.” When I was discharged, things improved in the sense that I no longer had to live my entire life on one hallway but my life was, to me at least, objectively and inarguably worse than death. I remember saying to myself that I would trade literally anyone’s life for my own. I would become anyone else and do whatever they had to do as long as it wasn’t this. I spent most of my time daydreaming about eternal nothingness. If I were to, today, right now as I write this, compile a list of reasons to not kill myself, it would be long to a point where I would get bored with the task. At that time the list consisted of two things: my family, and the girl I loved. One of the things I’ve come to realize about the disease is that it is a logical genius, and was able to provide me with an unending collection of reasons why those two elements did not belong there. Its mission was to empty the list. As for my family, one of its favorite arguments was that, over time, I would come to bring them far more harm than they could currently imagine. I would suck the goodness from their lives as they tried to care for me, exhaust them emotionally, consume their resources, and burden them infinitely. I would spoil our family’s good name and make them hate me. In a net, long term evaluation of their pain, it would be best for them to deal with my death for a few years and recover rather than have me drain them of life until I finally submitted at a later date, which I was convinced I would. As for my girlfriend, the argument was a bit different. The disease didn’t need me to necessarily excuse my suicide to her but rather find a way to remove her from my life. It told me that she only stayed with me out of a moral obligation, that she resented me secretly for how unimpressive and obviously useless I was. It told me that if I truly cared about her, I would end things between us and allow her to be free of that entanglement which, according to the disease, was something she wanted but could not bring herself to execute. These were two on the list of endless arguments in favor of me emptying the list of reasons not to do what the disease wanted me to. Both elements of the list stood stead-fast, but the disease is a beast against which arguments cannot be won while it still exists, the arguments are perpetual. The memories of that summer are quiet because I wasn’t quite there when they were made. I spent nearly the entirety of every day inside my own head, consumed by some mixture of panic, pain, dread, anger, or sadness, among others. I would wake up in the morning and simply think to myself “I can’t believe I have to do this for another day. I can’t. I can’t fucking do this anymore.” I remember thinking about how I wouldn’t wish it upon my very worst enemy. This was a punishment far worse than death, and yet somehow I had ended up inside of it without ever having committed any obvious crime. I remember sitting by the river with my best friend. This was my favorite place, next to my favorite person, and I felt nothing. It was gone and so was I. That summer moved forward into the fall when I was introduced to a physical miracle by the name of Seroquel. It brought me the most consistent sleep I had had in years, but the dosage was high to a point where my life was extremely muted and I was very dull. Next to depression, this was a miracle. When the dose of Seroquel was lowered and my mind was clearing up I began the process of trying to move these experiences out of my memories and into words and music. Unfortunately, I had never done any sort of recording before so I truly had no idea what I was doing. I was starting from scratch, with no outside help other than google. I learned how to use the different pieces of equipment very slowly, and still had only ever played piano and guitar. I listened to drums more closely to try and figure out how best to use them, as with bass, and finally started using other instruments to supplement the songs. Altogether, the process was absolutely grueling and nearly drove me out of my mind. I can’t even count how many times I worked from the early afternoon until the waking hours only to delete everything I had done. If I had to put a number on how much time was actually put into that album, including the learning process, I would start at 500 hours. Over the months I began to think of Sewing Kit as a potential weapon against future depression, thinking that when the next episode hit and the disease asked “what value do you bring?” I would have something to gesture towards and be able to confidently say “I made something that was worth making.” And that’s that. That’s Sewing Kit.

[amazingsutherland]

The Art of Redirecting Negative Thoughts

Buddha described the human mind as being full of monkeys, turning from branch to branch, screeching and babbling nonstop. That's why the mind is often referred to as your "ape mind." With so much going on in your life, it's reasonable how you can get shed in your ideas. This is particularly real when one monkey, worry, is especially loud with warnings of potential risks, both actual and visualized. The more you try to disregard it, the louder it appears to become. Fear offers a specific purpose-- to shield. This is such a primitive impulse that it can conveniently control your thoughts and, when left unchecked, causes unfavorable thought loopholes that play over and also over like an old record player that gets captured on repeat. Some instances of negative thoughts loops are:

I am not good enough.

I am afraid to fail.

I never have enough money.  

Without intervention, duplicated adverse idea loops gradually become strengthened as well as at some point a circuit is created in the brain, forming a behavior. This self-defeating cycle can bring about differing degrees of:

Depression

Anxiety

Anger

Guilt

In any one of these states, it's hard to envision the possibility of not really feeling in this way, or worse, you may assume it's a regular state of being, which assuredly is not true. The bright side is, there is something you can do concerning it. The human brain is an incredible creation and understanding what it's qualified of brings hope that modification is feasible. Research in neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to create as well as reorganize synaptic connections in response to learning or experiences, reveals that this ability expands right into late adulthood. That indicates it's time to start training (focus on training) that ape mind of yours to be favorable. As new habits are created, you are essentially re-wiring the brain and also producing brand-new circuits. Keep in mind at all times as well as power it considered the adverse thought loopholes to develop? That same power and also dedication requires to be used to rerouting unfavorable thoughts patterns toward ideas that are a lot more life-expanding rather than life-limiting. Today is an excellent day to obtain started.

Take Positive Action

Those that garden know that you need to keep on top of pulling weeds, or else, they proliferate promptly and also can crowd out the greenery you wish to grow. In this instance, you want positive ideas to be like weeds as well as group out the unfavorable ideas. To get going, ask on your own, "What are some things I directly enjoy doing? Who makes me rejoice when I'm around them?" Then, make it an indicate make plans that integrate that positivity right into your life. Here are some various other actions you can take that influence positive behaviors:

Gratitude journaling: The process of creating down what you are happy for every day can have a favorable influence on your life and your overview on the future. Hang around each night writing down 3-5 points for which you are happy. It can be as simple as, "I am happy for my heart that beats."

Seek stillness: Make an initiative to seek serenity in whatever type charms to you. The more you access stillness, the extra you can touch into your internal tranquility, truth, as well as stamina. It exists, just awaiting you to see. Try looking for tranquility with meditation, hiking in nature, paying attention to calming music, and exercising breathing exercises.

Surround yourself with favorable vibes: Seek out scenarios as well as people that are positive by checking out inspiring books, attending talks by individuals you appreciate, and also paying attention to favorable songs. (Music musician Michael Franti always causes the excellent feelings.)

Perform Seva: The word "Seva" in Sanskrit suggests "generous service." This sort of solution uplifts the cumulative via togetherness as well as empathy. Concentrate on just how you can be of solution by aiding people, pets, or the earth. Attempt choosing up trash, volunteering at organizations that fascinate you, or something as basic as acquiring coffee for a person else.

Use innovation for your benefit: If you are a technology individual, there are applications available that support boosting positivity, like Happify. Try it out and see the distinction it can make in your life.

Get to the Root

Keep in mind there was a reason that you got captured up in the negative idea loop( s) in the initial location. You can't overlook this fact. Obtaining to the source can take a while and also you may select to work with a professional. However, now, you have the power to alter HOW you respond to make sure that your capacity to get rid of challenges as well as settle issues ends up being reliable. Instead of wallowing around in the muck, decide and make a decision to make far better choices that result in an empowered life where you are the writer of your very own story.

Maintain a Sense of Humor

Humor is the best type of medication, so don't neglect to have a funny bone regarding on your own. You are doing the very best you can obviously, but your ape mind can get so carried away that if you catch yourself shed in a crazy idea loop, it can almost be amusing. This clip from the Bob Newhart Program reveals some wit around adverse self-talk. Although lots of concerns are too difficult to be taken this casually, it's always handy to maintain a feeling of lightness when considering your ape mind. And if all else falls short, take Bob's recommendations and also try informing yourself to just "quit it."

Redirecting Exercise

Replacing your negative idea loops with positive ones requires time and also energy. While the change will more than likely not happen overnight, it is possible with devotion and commitment to alter. Right here is a workout to assist the procedure: Observe Your Thought Patterns You can't repair what you don't recognize, which is why a good area to start is to passively observe your thought patterns. It is very important to not evaluate, however instead, visualize you are a reporter bearing in mind on your very own habits. At various moments throughout the day, ask on your own the following inquiries and also compose your answers down in a journal:

Where are you?

What are you doing?

Who are you with?

What are you thinking?

Was there something that triggered any unfavorable thoughts?

Initially, you may want to set an alarm as a pointer to sign in with on your own. Notice the themes that keep popping up. This exercise will certainly help bring awareness around negative thought loopholes or stories you are stuck on, even if it's just a general suggestion of what that may be. Once you have this recognition, you can start selecting to see things in a different way. Understand the Lesson The greatest lessons you discover sometimes comes with wonderful rivalry. List out your negative thought patterns that you either confirmed or discovered in the previous exercise. Following to each pattern, compose down what you gained from it. : Negative thought: I am not good enough. Lesson I learned: I found out exactly how to be a more caring person. This is where you begin to utilize your ideas instead that allowing your ideas to utilize you. You may begin to feel a change in viewpoint-- an opening in the heart as well as mind to the possibilities of what this suggests for you. Replace with Positive Statements Finally, draw up positive declarations starting with "I am ..." For instance: Negative thought: I am not good enough. Lesson I learned: I learned how to be an extra compassionate person. Positive Statement: I am utilizing my presents and also talents to aid others see the great in themselves. Choose a time in the early morning and also night to check out or state aloud your positive statements. You can put this in your calendar or set an alarm system as a reminder if you need some aid keeping self-control. If you discover it difficult to believe the declarations in the beginning, that's fine. Remember, you remain in training mode. By doing this exercise, you are proactively working with re-wiring the brain and creating a brand-new behavior. At some point what your heart desires and what your mind believes will align. Training your mind is like functioning a brand-new muscle. With normal engagement, there are durable effects. Pity for yourself while you do this job. Although you will never ever do away with your old patterns completely, it will be more challenging to slide back right into them as you create a much more positive expectation on life. It will resemble placing on clothing you have outgrown as well as no more require. At the time, they offered a function, today you have larger as well as far better options to pursue. As composed in the Structure for Inner Peace's A Course in Miracles, If you were to recall upon your life as well as reduce it to moment-by-moment frames, it would certainly come to be apparent every decision made was an option between a "complaint and a wonder." You've paid lots of tribute to your complaints, it's time to consider the miracles rather as well as see what life you can unfold for yourself. If you are really feeling called to grow your technique as well as aid others gain the rewards of a healthy, favorable way of living, obtaining licensed to show with Chopra Center Certifications may be the next step for you. Learn More.

[thetravellingvagrant]

Day 17- Salzburg: In Which I Meet A One Eyed Monster

I decided to get myself out into Salzburg to explore early, today. Partially because I had already grown intensely tired of my new dorm-mates despite none of them having done anything particularly egregious, but also because, given how much I was paying to stay in this city, it seemed like it would just be a waste not to. I had planned a full-on touriststravaganza for my first day here, with nary a ring-road or random bog in sight. My plan then, based almost entirely on word-of-mouth recommendations was as follows; I would take a walk through Mirabelle gardens, situated not too far from my hostel and supposedly quite pleasant on my way to the Natural History (and Science) museum of Salzburg, which I had been told was a particularly excellent example of natural history (and also science) museums. After spending a few hours there, I would climb up to the Hohensalzburg castle, which had been leering down at me from the mountainout centre of the old-town since I had arrived, daring me to come and see it, if I was hard enough. Once I had had my fill of the thrill of being slightly elevated I would meander back down and have a stroll along the street on which Mozart was born and had now become a tat-hive of the highest order before finally, getting myself a lovely meal and heading back to my shitty little hostel which cost the earth.

I arrived at Mirabelle gardens not long after my plan was finalised. To be honest, I didn't spend very long there at all. Perhaps it was more spectacular during the summer, but I found the entire experience, as I did the gardens themselves, flat and uninspiring.

4/10

That didn't stop other tourists from taking a constant and steady stream of photographs, though. Of what, I am not sure; there didn't appear to be really anything of aesthetic interest within a hundred foot radius of the place, but snap away they did.

Disappointed with the gardens, though secretly a bit pleased to have freed up a little more time to spend on my other, more interesting activities, I walked briskly to the Natural History (and also Science as well) museum, paid nearly £10 to get in and, grumbling at how expensive literally everything is here, made my way inside.

The very first room of the museum  contained an approximately life-sized model of a giant squid (AKAthe best animal and I will hear literally no disagreement from any one of you motherfuckers) hanging from the roof in full attack mode

14/10

so I pretty instantly forgot how much I had just paid and began having an uncharacteristically good time. This...I think humans call it...enjoyment...continued as I progressed further into the museum, also.  Fans of terrible taxidermy (and I know there's at least one of you reading this...), I soon realised, would be disappointed with today's blog entry, as this museum was just genuinely very good and very slick. Nearly every exhibit looked like the thing it was supposed to, with no mangled up faces, or eyes popping out or bursting at the seams or anything. There were a...few odd exceptions, sure

I’m naming no names, incredibly buff marmot...

but for the most part, I really couldn't fault the museum. It was entertaining, well laid out and just generally expertly put together. It even had an aquarium (featuring an octopus and everything) and a reptile zoo. It was grand.

Fans of the blog with an extremely long memory, though, may remember on my very first trip, I visited a science museum named...NEMO or something, in Amsterdam, which, although very good on its lower floors, steadily detached itself more and more from reality as one proceeded upwards. Unfortunately for the Salzburg museum of Natural History (and also science, that's there too), though very fortunately for me, it had followed in NEMO's footsteps.

Interesting, well labelled and well thought out exhibits and animal displays petered out after around the third of five floors and gave way to...I'm not really sure what. They stopped signposting things in English after that. It appeared that what I had thought was an exhibit on Africa, though, had slowly transformed into some truly and utterly bizarre musings on mythical creatures- or at least I hoped so as it would go at least some way to explain the following:

Oh...hey, guy...

Then things really fell apart. I walked through rooms full of spooky masks

Ah!

past randomly placed posters full of cryptids

AH!

and...Garfield?

AHHHH!

The fever dream of the 4th floor, however, would pale in comparison to the full on tramadol overdose of the 5th. After meandering through a fairly good bit on the deep sea, the fifth floor straight up shat itself and delivered one of the weirdest and least coherent exhibits on the human body I have ever seen in my life. Pictures, more than words would do the experience justice,

Pictured: My nightmares

though a few highlights included an interactive display on how shit is formed, a pulse reading machine which declared one man who I witnessed use it as legally dead and a room full of stuff on sex and reproduction which boasted a picture of several women in their vests and pants with a button next to each. My best guess and rudimentary understanding of German told me that you press the button next to the woman you find the most attractive. When you did, it would display the stats for each woman and rank them by popularity amongst museum-goers. For anyone that's interested, the busty one was the winner.

Also of note were a series of little keyholes that one could peer through, each one of these tiny windows a porthole to the various stages of doing some sex. The first hole had a little barbie doll applying perfume to herself, the next hole had the same doll, now nude and with nipples amusingly etched onto her in pen, getting banged by a Ken doll. The next was just a picture of some random birds, which seemed...out of place and the final hole had a big collage of...like, leather and handcuffs and various other accoutrements of kink. It was deeply odd and rather jarring, sitting amongst a hitherto fairly child-friendly exhibit on reproduction.

Confused, though fairly sure I had now seen everything (including a wall of taxidermied dogs, positioned like, right next to the sex room) I left the nature part of the museum and checked out the sciency bit. It was shit and I spent very little time there. Overall though, the museum was still very good and probably benefited from all the weird junk in it. I definitely wouldn't forget my visit at the very least...

I had spent too long in the natural history (and hey, guys, don't forget about science!) museum and by the time I left, it was bordering on getting dark. It hardly seemed like it would be worthwhile climbing the big hill to the castle if I left it much longer, so I decided to do that next, postponing food, much to the chagrin of my angry tummy.

The walk up the hill was tiring, though enjoyable and peppered with fairly decent photo-opportunities.

I mean, it’s ait.

and after not-too-long, I arrived at the castle, sweaty, though triumphant. I walked through the main gate and...oh, you needed a ticket. And tickets were 10 euros. And it was only open for another half an hour. Right. Good. Okay, that was worth it. I turned around and headed back down. At least I had had a nice walk...

Yeah. Great.

After a quick stroll through the obsidian-dense crowds populating the street on which Mozart was born and where the  sheer quality and quantity of Mozart themed tat you can find is simulatenously both tremendously impressive and utterly depressing

Fuck you.

I headed to a local eatery for food. The diner was fairly low-end; very much your average sort of shitty UK takeaway level of quality, though somehow I still managed to spend over 10 euros on a very basic burger, too-salty fries and a small bottle of water. Oh, Austria!

I returned, very tired and (after those fucking fries) very thirsty, to my dorm. Upon entering, I realised that I was to share the room with some new guests. Three screeching, giggling Australian girls, who were every bit as immediately irritating as they sound. One of them was sitting on my bed.

“Oh, am I on your bed?” she tittered

I was so tired and the transgression so bizarrely rude that all I could muster in response was a gruff “Yes.”

I think she expected me to be better natured about it, but I doubt she would have been so light-hearted about the whole thing if she had returned to discover me sitting on her property, so she could fuck off. She moved from my bed, clearly making a mental note to never speak to me again and I retook my now pre-warmed throne.

I didn't hang around in the room for too long, darting back outside to the hostel's courtyard to quickly make some phone calls before finally returning to the room and to my bed, proper.

The lights were off as I cracked the door open for the second time. The Australian girls had gone to bed , already. It was 8:30pm.

“okay...” I sighed, not willing to  take my laptop downstairs, as the only communal space in which I could use it was current;y being used for the nightly broadcast of The Sound Of Music. Yes. Nightly. It looked like I was working in the dark for the rest of the evening.

More irritating, still, was the fact that one of these girls, the one sleeping above me and indeed the bet-sitter extraordinaire had decided to make use of the tiny little nightstand which sat next to my bunk to house her phone for the night. It was very clearly designed to be part of the lower bunk's set-up, but okay, I can just about understand not wanting to sleep with your phone next to you on an upper bunk, I guess. She had, however, neglected to switch it to mute, meaning that with every text, notification or update she got (and she got a stunning amount of these throughout the night and early morning) the phone would vibrate noisily right next to my fucking head, distracting me when I was awake and waking me up when I was asleep. Because there was a physical aspect to the vibration also, earplugs couldn't even block it out fully. It was a lot of fun.

Mercifully though, at around 2am, all her apps had updated, the notifications ceased and people stopped texting her, having received literally no response for the previous six hours and I could finally drift off to sleep, angry and exhausted.

#travelling #vagrant #travel #europe #salzburg #natur haus #natural history museum #science too #hohensalzburg #mozart #tat #duck #rubbish

[judedoyle]

It’s sort of a corny project, assembling songs by women and non-binary people at the end of every year. It’s a very dopey, dated, 1990s, Women Who Rock! version of feminism. I mean, I think there was a reason for that iteration of feminism — year-end lists are still dominated by men, and my favorite albums fall through the cracks just about every year for that very reason — but it begs the question of why you’d do it now, when it has been established fact for many decades that you do not have to be a man to make music.

The reason I do it is that it keeps me honest. This year’s list, for example, is all women; I don’t know of any albums by non-binary people that came out this year, though I’m sure there were some. But even within that narrower subset, I am blown away by how many kinds of songs by women there are — how wildly different women are in their voices and priorities and visions, how the word “woman” sums up so much but, somehow, doesn’t tell you anything at all. Making the list, I can start to feel like I’m assembling my own little pantheon, selecting a hall full of different archetypes or visions of what womanhood can be, so that listeners can wander through and pick the vision that best suits their needs or their own self-identification.

That task seemed particularly important this year. Trumpism insists so much on homogeneity — on the second-class status of all women, sure, but also, on the supremacy of whiteness, on heteronormativity, the importance of only admitting one specific Ivanka-esque type of woman to even exist as a person worthy of consideration. I wanted to select as many different versions of womanhood as I could, to show something about what “being a woman” could potentially mean.

Nor is this really a “best songs” list this year, if it ever was. I never agree with other writers’ year-end lists, and I can never put everything I love onto one cohesive mixtape; this started as twenty-four songs, and it could be thirty, or fifty, and still feel incomplete. There are songs I loved that are missing. What this is, I think, is a list of the songs that felt most like 2017; that reflected the mood and the predominant anxieties of the moment. They tend to fall into themes: Songs about fascism, about men, about grief, about God and magic. Putting them together is not just about lifting different women’s voices up, but about writing a kind of collective diary of one very strange year.

“2016,” Nadine Shah, Honeymoon Destination

Nadine Shah gets neglected, on the list of musicians I like, because she’s not showy. She just plugs away, making quietly excellent, sort-of-PJ-Harvey-ish songs for voice and guitar. This song starts out in that quiet, excellent mode, in an assortment of mundane details: She’s thirty, she’s depressed, she’s getting addicted to true crime TV, all her friends are on weird diets. Then history comes staggering into the frame — what is there left to inspire us with a fascist in the White House? — and suddenly, you’re aware that you’re hearing the voice of a biracial British Muslim woman living through Brexit and Trump, and that it is incredibly crucial. She pulls this trick a lot on Holiday Destination, angrily raking the state of the world through her songs, and though it’s sometimes incredibly on the nose, well, it deserves to be. This is that kind of year.

“Aryan Nation,” EMA, Exile In The Outer Ring

If Nadine Shah’s anger is elegant and British, EMA’s is scuzzy and loutish and American. I got to hear this album before its release, which makes me particularly fond of it, but I like to think I can still be objective. What stuns me about it is that it manages to pull off “populism,” as a stance, without ever overriding or ignoring identity. The narrator here is pulling away from the whiteness and ugliness of the United States under Trump — she’s “a refugee from the Aryan nation,” as she puts it — but she’s still located firmly among the 99%. “Tell me stories of famous men / I can’t see myself in them” is a demand that rings throughout the whole album, which mixes intimate songs about emotional abuse and misogynistic dude friends with big songs about downward mobility and class struggle, “identity” politics with politics-politics. In this song, the men standing outside the casino, the face of the elite, register as nearly demonic figures; they might be demons, I think, since “in their eyes are things that you and I will never know.” But their evil expands and takes on new facets, depending on who you are. There’s a double indictment: EMA’s Everyman can’t see herself in the nation’s “famous men” because they’re famous, but also because they’re male. Either way, she’s ready to burn it down.

“No Man Is Big Enough For My Arms,” Ibeyi, Ash

Oh, man. I love this song. I would probably love it for the title alone, to be honest. But I cannot escape the feeling that, were Leftist Asshole Twitter to get ahold of its existence, they would hate it more than seventeen Hamiltons combined. It’s an incredibly simple piece of music: Just the Diaz sisters singing the title phrase over clips of Michelle Obama’s speeches, and specifically her 2016 campaign speech about Trump’s history of assault and what our nation owes its girls. If the election had gone another way, or if the tone were valedictory, it absolutely wouldn’t work; it would probably represent the same corny, self-satisfied #centrism that I’m sure some podcast is accusing it of as we speak. But this isn’t a victory lap. As the mournfulness of the singing should make clear, it’s a funeral dirge: For a historic moment that passed into a historically racist backlash, for the vision of a better world that never came to pass, for a promise to our daughters that wasn’t kept. As much as Democrats loved the idea of “when they go low, we go high,” or Michelle Obama herself, that wasn’t the vision of women and girls that carried the day. We’ve all been brought low now.

“When the World Was At War We Kept Dancing,” Lana Del Rey, Lust for Life

If you told me, back in 2014, that I would be relying on Lana Del Rey for insights into the national psyche, I would have either laughed you out of the room or thrown myself out of a window to defeat your grim prophecy. Yet here we are, with a song by Lana Del Rey about American politics and the rise of fascism, and I kind of like it. Granted, her proposed solutions — they are, in order, “youth,” “truth,” and “dancing” — are all (intentionally?) vapid and Lana Del Rey-like. But the core question — is it the end of an era? Is it the end of America? — is one that’s haunted me all year. Welcome to 2017: Things are so bizarre and depressing that Lana Del Rey sounds normal.

“Let’s Generalize About Men,” Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Here’s the thing, guys: I fucking loved Al Franken.

I loved him early on. I had every crappy Al Franken book of “political humor” in high school. I listened to his radio show on Air America, even as Air America collapsed into a smoldering pile of debt and garbage. I was so thrilled to share a room with him at Netroots Nation that I texted my parents, and they texted back that they were proud of me, like it had taken some feat of exceptional skill and intelligence to be in the same room as the keynote speaker at an event. I teared up watching him talk about sexual assault in the military, how we were failing those women. And I know women who worked on his first Senate campaign. They loved Al Franken. I loved Al Franken. Al Franken could have been President, on the back of all the women who loved him.

Al Franken can roast in the pits of Hell.

The creators of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” almost certainly did not intend for this song to air the same week as the Weinstein allegations and the Shitty Media Men list. They had no control over how its lyrics — right now we’re angry and sad! It’s our right to get righteously mad at every member of the opposite sex! — would land in an environment where seemingly every famous man was publicly accused of sexual atrocity. Nevertheless, in a few short weeks, this song has become my chief emotional release valve for dealing with an endless wave of sexual trauma, and the one thing that can reliably make me laugh. This is probably the one song I’ve listened to most in 2017, and it’s not even from a “real” pop album.

I don’t know why this makes me laugh as hard as it does. I think it’s the deranged cheerfulness of the music, and how triumphant they all sound. They’re just listing lazy ’90s sitcom tropes about gender, but Gabrielle Ruiz puts so much mustard on the phrase “all men only want to have sex,” my God. And, in an age, when #notallmen routinely swing by to remind you of all the stuff they’re not doing, you have to admire the magnificent troll job of lyrics like “there are no exceptions / all three billion men are like this!”

Of course, you’re not meant to agree with them; there’s a whole trip through straight ladies’ condescending homophobia, just in case you missed the point. But when they finally get to the verse about all the other stuff that all men do —  all three point six billion men, and also, Al Franken — well. It is a song that is of its moment. That kicker would no doubt be less brutal, in a pre-Weinstein universe. But it’s funnier when you believe it could be true.

“Boyfriend,” Marika Hackman, I’m Not Your Man

The concept of this song — Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” from the girl’s point of view — is so simple, I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before. And maybe it has! But  it’s hard to believe it’s been done better, because this is, moment-for-moment, my favorite song of the year. It’s really just four jaunty minutes of Marika Hackman telling some poor schmuck about how excellently she fucked his girlfriend last night: “It’s fine ‘cause I am just a girl / it doesn’t count,” she sings, and it’s one of the most coolly vicious moments in any song this year. In another year, it might not even strike you as all that political. But in a year especially full of male sexual aggression and cluelessness, of Robert in “Cat Person” and the vanguard of the Left scoffing about “pats on the backside,” frogs using cuckolding metaphors and seemingly every single Hillary-hating talking head getting exposed for rubbing his penis on coworkers, “Boyfriend” feels like the snarl of rage that’s been bubbling under every conversation. I mean: Among other things, she is literally cucking this dude. It could be pretty gross. But I’ll allow it.

“Green Light,” Lorde, Melodrama

Sometimes you do need a fun, blockbuster pop song. Despite Lorde’s much-vaunted writing skills, several lyrics in this are just plain goofy: “We order different drinks at the same bars,” for example, is what everybody does at bars, including people who are on a date with each other. Later, she snarls that her ex is a “damn liar” for claiming to love the beach, a line which summons up a long history of passionate and incredibly specific anti-beach sentiments, and raises the serious possibility that she’s singing about Anakin Skywalker. But if you can get past the mental image of Lorde swinging through the club with Darth Vader, each of them taking sips from a single shared gin and tonic, there is a sense of propulsive longing to this song, a sense of being so excited you’re almost sad, like the twinge you feel on Christmas morning when you realize there’s nothing left to wait for. That sense of pre-emptive nostalgia defines many of the great moments on Melodrama; Lorde is both vibrating with joy over how new and full of potential her world seems to be, and sad that it won’t always feel like this. That feeling defines a lot of youth, too. Many songs aim for that epic sweep; Jack Antonoff has a retirement fund because of it, “Tonight, Tonight” and “1979” were the ones people played when I was young enough to actually feel it, but this year, that big, hopefully hopeless, Gatsby-invoking chorus was the closest to the real thing.

“Say You Do,” Tei Shi, Crawl Space

This is another record that got under-rated as the result of being simple, pretty and specific in its ambitions when the context demanded Big Statements. There’s nothing wrong with big statements, and this list is full of them. But this is four perfect minutes, no wasted space, no false steps, and it makes me happy every time I listen to it. Granted, it’s aiming for that same cheesy ‘90s mom-jams vibe that a lot of people aim for these days; viewed through a certain lens, this is basically a HAIM song. But HAIM actually released an album this year, and none of the songs were as good as this one. The whole album is like this; intentionally lovely, boundary-pushing without being self-indulgent, excellently crafted. It’s skated just under the radar, maybe precisely because of those qualities. But crises pass, and craft keeps standing.

“Frontline,” Kelela, Take Me Apart

Even simple, blockbuster pop songs are not always as simple as they seem. It was only when putting this list together that I realized all the songs I’d classified as “just fun” were about the same thing. They’re all about women contesting men’s narratives. You don’t know me like you say you do, Tei Shi insists; you’ll always deny that we’re going in circles, Kelela says here; even Lorde, God bless her, is incredibly clear on the fact that her ex does not like the beach, despite recent statements to the contrary. (Is systemic corruption at play? Is Lorde’s ex in the pocket of the powerful beach lobby? Only time will tell!) I don’t think I got the appeal of ‘90s R&B nostalgia before now; here, especially in the pre-chorus, it’s simultaneously sexy and meticulous, propulsive but airbrushed at the same time. But within that is Kelela herself, who has been gradually moving to the forefront of her own songs for years now, becoming a persona rather than just another instrument: Coming up with the Sun around me… now I’m up and I won’t be taken down, she sings. The fact that the defiance is intimate makes it no less political. I believe her.

“Deadly Valentine,” Charlotte Gainsbourg, Rest

It’s hard to come up with an elevator pitch for this one. It’s the Stranger Things soundtrack, but also a French disco, but also Charlotte Gainsbourg singing about her sister’s suicide. Any one of those elements could undermine the other, but somehow, they don’t. This year has been full of albums about grief — reasonable, given that it feels like most of us are grieving something — but the opulence of Gainsbourg’s, the way it calls on the musical history of the family to dramatize the loss of one of its members, stands out. I get so caught up in the catchiness of this one, so blinded by all the disco lights, that I can almost miss Gainsbourg mourning in the background (“I’m my own shadow / you are my little hurricane”). Which, I think, is the point.

“Los Ageless,” Saint Vincent, MASSEDUCTION

Annie Clark is a very cool musician. One of the last great cool musicians, maybe. Cool has been on the way out, though, in this century; what you find sexy and mysterious, I might just see as repressed and withholding. Clark does not like it when her audience gets too close. She doesn’t do “raw.” The emotion in her songs gets refracted through intellect, through reference, through character, through irony; often, and especially on her last album, she seems to be playing a parody of herself, as if she can only be a pop star by putting scare quotes around her own personality. This is often very appealing; it’s why people point to her as an heir to David Bowie or David Byrne (or, presumably, other celebrity Davids). It can also be frustrating, when you want to make a direct connection and she doesn’t let you. I don’t know why MASSEDUCTION is different; maybe the breakups Clark has been through have worn down her defenses, maybe working with living schmaltz factory Jack Antonoff has thawed the ice a bit. But this chorus is huge: Big, melodramatic, honest, painful. It’s not something I knew she could do.  

“Jukai,” Jhene Aiko, Trip

I TOLD YOU PEOPLE ABOUT JHENE AIKO AND YOU WOULDN’T LISTEN.

Sorry! I was super into Jhene Aiko in 2014, the first year I made this list. I talked about her all the time and people looked at me like I was an idiot. Back then, she just sort of floated around, appearing on dudes’ songs. It took a while for her own aesthetic to take shape. She had vague, New-Agey ideas about spirituality; she talked a lot about weed; she made regrettable puns. (How regrettable? Her first album is called Souled Out, featuring a song called “Lyin’ King,” so, you tell me.) Even when her aesthetic finally did take hold, her label kept making incredibly cash-grabby statements about how there’d never been a Frank Ocean for the female demographic. So that was how people saw her, I think — just a stoner riding a trendy vibe. Someone you could write off.

If I told you, in 2014, that Jhene Aiko would be turning in a 22-song conceptual exploration of her brother’s death and her own substance abuse, and that it would begin with a song about Aiko entering the “Sea of Trees,” which is a common place for Japanese people to commit suicide, and that you would be hearing Jhene Aiko seriously sing lines like “I envy the dead,” and that critics would love it, I do not think you would have believed me. But here we are, with the harrowing, serious Jhene Aiko statement about death and grief that the world didn’t know it needed. Women shouldn’t have to bring themselves to their knees to be taken seriously. So the best thing to know, about Jhene Aiko, is that this was always there.

“Wildwood,” Tori Amos, Native Invader

The Tori Amos “return to form,” if you ask me, occurred way back in 2011, with Night of Hunters. But, at least since the 2014 critical re-evaluation that accompanied Unrepentant Geraldines, it’s widely agreed that she’s all the way back on her game. So if I tell you that Native Invader is great, that several songs are as good as anything she’s ever done, that’s not surprising. If I tell you that she’s still doing concept albums, but that it’s started working— this album is, in no particular order, about climate change, the Dakota access pipeline, her mother falling severely ill, and the Native American ancestors on her mother’s side of the family; in typical Tori Amos fashion, the endangered bodies of the planet and her mother and her ancestors get all tangled up together, until, by the final song, they seem like the same being — maybe that doesn’t surprise you, either. But this might: I finally get what she’s doing with the ‘70s soft-rock thing.

In plenty of Amos’ late-00s work, maybe all the way back to “Crazy” on Scarlet’s Walk, she’s tried to signify “sexiness” with what sounds like smooth tunes for dudes with heavy mustaches and ladies with feathered hair. Given that Amos gained her initial fan base by running on wild, primal intensity (this is either a song or a scene from The Exorcist; I’m honestly still not sure) her fixation on suddenly sounding mellow was bizarre and frustrating. “Crazy” worked fine, but “Sleeps With Butterflies” almost derailed her whole fucking career.

Yet here we are, with another sexy-’70s Tori Amos song. It’s mellow; it’s smooth. There are bongos on it. And yet, I know what it’s doing now. This is an album about aging and death; the death of wild nature, the all-too-possible death of her mother, the impending adulthood of her now-17-year-old daughter, and the fact that Amos, within the foreseeable future, will become part of her family’s oldest living generation. The point of the ’70s sounds, I think, isn’t that Amos believes they’re current; it’s that they are part of Amos’ youth, echoes of the songs she fell in love with as a teenager. These songs are to Tori Amos as Tori Amos records are to me — something precious from a world that has ended, a little bit of being young that she gets to carry around. “Wildwood” summons up a wild, healing, erotic relationship with Nature (don’t @ me) but also sounds as if it’s mourning that communion, and the woods, which may not be there for her own grandchildren; it sounds, like the Lorde song, as if it is about both happiness and the inevitable end of happiness, nostalgic for something that is happening right now.

“Om Rama,” Alice Coltrane, World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane

When you talk about Tori Amos, you’re always talking about God. Her worldview is deeply pagan, not in the New-Age sense, but in an earned way; when she sings to the woods as a living creature, asking it to heal her, you know she’s serious.

That was my second-favorite album of 2017. This is my favorite. I don’t know how I found it; I think it just got introduced into my Spotify feed through some algorithm. And I’m not even sure if it qualifies; sure, it was released this year, but all the actual music was recorded decades ago. It wasn’t even intended for mass release. This is Alice Coltrane’s attempt at writing devotional music for her ashram; it was meant to be heard by the ashram, and no-one else.

Yet I am hard-pressed to think of anything else like it: A female composer, from the 20th century, wrestling to communicate her own experience of God. There’s so much going on in here; traditional chanting, gospel music, ’90s synths that sound like the Twin Peaks soundtrack, what we used to call “soundscapes.” You float from one texture to another, one worldview to another, linked only by Coltrane’s own sense of the divine. It’s incredibly intimate; maybe too intimate, since you’re very aware that the state of Alice Coltrane’s soul was not intended for people outside her own religious community to pass comment on. But it’s also incredibly beautiful, a synthesis that somehow goes beyond what “God” sounds like in Western music (choirs, mostly) or Eastern appropriation, and becomes its own, new sublime.

“Tabula Rasa,” Bjork, Utopia

Here is an unexpected thing about having a baby: Bjork makes me cry now. I’d always listened to her, given that she belonged to that sacred constellation of ‘90s “alternative” ladies that makes up about 80% of my personal value system. But I tended to view her with respect, rather than love; she struck me as a cerebral artist, technically brilliant but not too intimate. Then I found myself breastfeeding at 3 AM, listening to “All is Full of Love” and crying, or singing “Hyperballad” to the baby in the bath, and I realized the emotion had always been in there. I just hadn’t felt it yet.

Utopia adds a few entries to the list of “improbable words Bjork has trilled on a record,” including “Kafkaesque” and “patriarchy.” But she’s serious about the patriarchy thing. This record is, like the title says, her utopia — her matriarchal island, where nature can still hold sway, where mothers are never defeated in their ability to protect their daughters, where, after all the dirt and awfulness of the year, we might be able to get clean. She’s less singing than she is invoking it into being.

Some of the details on this song are small, petty, specific: A bad divorce, a father who led two lives. But the whole thing centers, as stories of matriarchy always do, around a mother and her daughter. When Bjork finally starts witching out, singing her preferred solution into being — “Tabula rasa for my children / not repeating the fuck-ups of the fathers” — it’s hard to imagine a better hope to take into the new year.

[rwaggs81]

It’s 8:00 pm here.  I just woke from a nap.  I really needed it. As you may have noticed, my mood on these posts is mostly positive.  Part of me wants to keep it that way.  The other part of me realizes that if I don’t keep this real, there’s no real point in doing it in the first place.  Today was when the homesickness bit me really hard for the first time on this trip.  I know 3 days in seems early, but knowing myself, I expected as much.  I am prone to homesickness.  I am very reliant on routine.  I am rooted.  Part of why I planned this thing the way I did was because of my understanding of my nature. This morning, I parted with my room of the first two nights.  The place was uncommonly quiet and calm for Ho Chi Minh.  Just what I needed, in a way.  The room, however, was quite isolating and a tad depressing, if I stopped to think about it.  I checked this morning if they still had the room available tonight, just in case, but they didn’t...which ultimately is probably a good thing for two reasons. 1.  I need some good sleep to get past the initial jet lag, and I wasn’t getting it there.  I’d sleep really deep for about 4 or 5 hours, and that’s it. 2.  I need to not get frozen in place. Each day here so far, I’ve started with a pretty positive energy.  This morning was no exception.  At 9 am, when I left with my bike all packed up with bags, the air was still somewhat cool, I was in good spirits, and I had the knowledge that I needed to find a new place to stay tonight.  Part of me wants to stay in one of the hostels in the backpacker district, but I think that the back of my mind knows that I’m not feeling that social just yet.  I also wonder if there’s part of me who feels like an imposter in that setting due to my age.  I suspect I’ll find out soon.   The first place I went this morning was the backpacker section of District 1 to look around.  I ended up sitting at a table on the street with an older German fellow named Axel.  He was nice enough, and it was nice to just interact with someone, but uniform to the other days here, the place started wearing me down over the next hour.  The street vendors who constantly approach with the sames wares and the same robotic sales tactics were in full effect....(points to my sunglasses, then to a similar pair on his mobile display)... Him:  “I have same, but real, not fake” Me:  “That’s okay, I only need the one pair.”  This back and forth goes on about 6 times, before he just stands there and stares at me for about 30 seconds, pulls the same routine with the German guy, and finally leaves.  In the course of an hour, this process repeated itself at least 10 times.  Sometimes glasses.  Sometimes a wallet.  Sometimes this unique flint and tinder style lighter, and sometimes fabric wares.  I point to my bike bags to show them that I literally have no room to add to my belongings.  No dice.  Eventually, I just have to go into broken record mode. Them:  “Hello, look...” Me.  “Khong, Cam On!”  over and over until they give up and leave. I think that the charm of the backpacker district is lost on me.  By day, it’s as I described, and by night, it’s something that I may have enjoyed when I was 19 and heading up to dance clubs in Canada.  It drains my energy.   Axel explained to me that he has a “girlfriend” during his visit.  You can see these couples walking around the district.  Older men with younger Vietnamese girls, in a kind of consensual partnership.  Axel gives a pretty good breakdown of how this works.  He approached this girl at a bar and started talking to her.  She gloms on to him, comes to his room, basically acts as an escort.  He buys her nice things, and presumably pays her something when it’s time for him to leave.  He told me that he went briefly to the place where she lives.  8 people living in a small apartment.  Motorscooters stored inside at night.  Everyone sleeping on the floor and still each paying $100 per month in rent.  Each engaged in various hustles to get by (if you don’t have a hustle here, you are FUCKED.) Axel, frankly, seems like a normal guy.  Am I not normal in that I could never, EVER envision myself pursuing an arrangement like this?  I’m uncomfortable even thinking about it.  This place stokes my empathetic nature, but there’s no way to personally assist literally millions of people.  It’s just a way of life to them. When Axel takes his leave, I decide it is time to figure out my room situation.  Turns out that I’m as indecisive about this as I am about where to travel next.  I kinda just ride around aimlessly for awhile.  Then I stop to look at booking sites on my phone.  I finally settle on something a little more expensive than I’d done the previous two nights, realizing that my emotional state is likely being hindered by a lack of sleep and wishing to isolate myself better for a night.  A “western” feeling hotel, which costs relatively less here than back home... I find one.  It says District 1.  I book it, and start navigating to the address.  I didn’t realize how expansive the area that qualifies as District 1 was.  A couple miles of riding, and I’m in what must be the “Japantown” I’ve read about.  This may seem weird, but I’m already in a state of adjusting to one culture, and I’m not super thrilled with being  in that culture’s version of another culture...but whatever.  I navigate to the place, and it even has the address written fully on the gate..but is CLEARLY not the place, or even a hotel.  I log back into Hotels.com.  I’m going to try to cancel the booking and go back towards the area I’m more familiar with.  I must call.  I have very limited actually call minutes.  I get a girl on the phone, explain the situation and am put on hold for 5 minutes.  Ugh.  I can’t do this, so I hang up the phone and just ride around the area for a while, and finally find the place.  Every reference to the place online is the wrong address.  I can’t possibly be the only one who’s run into this issue. Anyway, its big, and western.  They view my sweaty appearance with pretty thinly veiled annoyance, and are probably not thrilled with my bike.  Elderly white tourists pack the downstairs restaurant bar.  I’m a little disgusted with myself for even being there, but I don’t care.  I need sleep and quiet.  I go upstairs to my beautiful room with beautiful view and even more beautiful double headed shower (first things first), and shut the world out.  One call to the on site laundry service, and one quick trip downstairs for a shot of Makers Mark and a surprisingly excellent cheeseburger and downright heavenly mango smoothie (these people do not mess around when it comes to juice and such), and I’m back in my room at 3 pm and ready for a nap. GREAT nap.  Insane dreams.  I feel better.  I feel like I will sleep again tonight well.  I feel resolved that I’m going to head to Cambodia tomorrow or the next day.  I’m going to book myself at a popular hostel there, throw myself in socially and stop taking myself so seriously.  The hostel in question actually runs a pub crawl nightly...which seems a little juvenile, but the price they charge for it goes straight to educating local kids.  They pay their local help a lot more than prevailing wage.  Maybe that will make me feel better about things.  I may head to the coast south of Phnom Penh after that.  I will be a typical white tourist in Siem Reap and see the incredible temples.  I think that I will then head to Bangkok for a bit, and then take the Central Thailand train route to Chiang Mai, with some interesting stops on the way.  First, I’m going to go out here in friggin Japantown and get myself a beer.  These plans are all subject to change. Asia, even when it resembles home, is weird.  It’s actually weirder when it tries to cater to western tastes.  It feels weird in the bones.  It takes adjustment.  That is all. PS.  I’m fine, and safe, and healthy.  I’m just being real, and I feel better for it.  Love you all.