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chrisjake-cp · 3 years

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History 3 Trapped Filming Diary (full English translation) - Days 1-10

Just before you start reading, a little note of explanation: the author of this diary will frequently use the character’s name when they mean the actor. I have added the names of the actors between square brackets sometimes to avoid confusion. Also between square brackets you will find some words that are implied, so I added them in the translation to make the translation a bit smoother, but they aren’t included in the Chinese text.

The book’s author will also talk in the first person POV sometimes, refering to themselves as either “I”, “we” or “this little editor 小编”. So each time you see me write “I”, it is not my own opinion I’m inserting in the text, but the author/editor’s. If I have anything else to add or explain myself, I’ll add it in a note at the end of the text.

I’ll repeat: I don’t own the book so I can’t post my scans of the pictures that came with every day. So I posted some other pictures of the scenes that were being filmed with each day. These pics belong to LINE TV or Choco Media, or I’ve taken screenshots.

Day 1-10 under the cut.

Day 1

The first day of shooting happened to coincide with ‘Li Dong’⁕ but the temperatures of that day soared to 29 degrees. The crew was going sleeveless, but the actors were all wearing sweaters or dress shirts. Tang Yi, who had on the most, was wearing a turtleneck sweater and a suit jacket on top at one point, but he didn’t sweat very much.⁕ Meanwhile A De [Stanley], wearing a shirt and a suit jacket, was [clad] the ‘thinnest’ at the scene. When he got off work and took off his sweaty shirt, the wardrobe department exclaimed: “This shirt is so wet!”

Officer Meng’s scenes for that day consisted of eating from 10 am in the morning until 6pm in the evening. He basically ate from when he got to work until he got off work. All in all he had two large bags of rice and poured 4 liters of coca cola. Junhao [Jake] will start sweating profusely and start flushing when he eats spicy food, so as soon as the director yelled ‘cut’, the crew would immediately pass him a plastic bag so he could spit out the spicy Kung Pao Chicken he was eating.

⁕ Li Dong 立冬 literally means ‘establishing the winter’, so it is some kind of winter solstice in Asian culture. In the Gregorian calendar, it falls on 7 or 8 November. According to the IG stories of some of the cast of Trapped, it was indeed 7 November 2018 when shooting started.

⁕ Chris apparently doesn’t sweat much, no matter how hot he gets. He says as much in his vlog as well. I envy him, because I’d just be sweating buckets like Stanley.

Day 2

The first meeting between Tang Yi and Wenhao is also the second time that Chengyang [Chris] and teacher Jiakui [Chen Jiakui, the actor who plays Chen Wenhao] worked together. They cooperated for the first time on a movie. At that time teacher Jiakui served as the movie’s drama teacher. When Chris had gone through make-up in the early morning, he sat alone in a corner with the script. You could easily see that he was conflicted and upset. [For the other movie] teacher Jiakui was Chris’ mentor, but here Wenhao was the target of Tang Yi’s revenge.

In the process of their scenes where they faced each other, the director hoped that Tang Yi could hate Wenhao even more, but Tang Yi’s personality is subdued and calm. So how could he fly into a raging fit and still keep his calm? In a part that was not captured on camera, teacher Jiakui aggravated some lines to make Chris more infuriated. Afterwards teacher Jiakui also said that the role of Tang Yi is not easy to perform. [Tang Yi] is a young mob boss, The hate in his eyes must therefore also carry a bit of youthfullness, which is difficult to experience for normal people in the course of their lives.

Day 3

Today was the first time that Zhaozi arrived on set, and while he was bored waiting for his scenes, Zhaozi started to act as the shop’s clerk to sell suits. Apart from suits, bowties and regular ties, he even managed to sell shoehorns. By oneself, the words just kept on flying out of his mouth which left Shaofei beside him looking dumbfounded (if you want to see Shaofei’s dumbfounded meme-like look, you have to absolutely watch the behind-the-scenes on the DVDs)⁕. [Shaofei] continued to shout “If you buy a shoehorn you get Zhaozi for free with it, please someone take Zhaozi away, Unit 3 can’t stand it anymore.”

Boss Tang was tired, and took a nap in his own shop. ‘Just a little while will do. Shaofei and A De, you two be on the lookout for me, and if the director is coming, remember to wake me.’

⁕ Excellent advice. Please do watch the behind-the-scenes after finishing this book, because a lot of what is written here is visualized in the bts. The bts are arranged per episode though, and not per filming day, but it’s still amazing to be able to see what went on.

Day 4

The set for the offices of Investigation Unit 3 is actually the office of LINE TV’s Choco Media branch. The contemporary industrial style caused the atmosphere among Unit 3 to be even more lively.

For Unit 3’s first scene together, the director used a one-shot to have everyone appear on the scene, which meant that the first time all the actors were present, they had to have a ‘chemistry’ test. But apart from the actors, chemistry also had to be there for the whole staff, as the directing crew, the camera crew and the sound crew, really everyone, also had to follow [the actors] along⁕. I still remember that by the 20th take, everyone’s lines ran very smoothly, the shot was satisfactory and everyone was where they were supposed to be. The director and the crew were holding their breath in concentration, and just when they thought they’d succeed, A Zhi [character Zhou Guanzhi, played by Kass Tsai] forgot a line in the very last sentence hahahaha. In the end, this round took 27 takes.

⁕ The author uses a metaphor/reference here. They write 乾坤大挪移 which means something like ‘The Great Shift of the Cosmos’ and is apparently a kind of martial art from a martial arts novel. It consists of 7 increasingly difficult skill levels, whereby the 7th level is almost unattainable. In other words, shooting this one-shot scene required the whole cast and crew pulling off this great cosmos shift, and thus was a big, big challenge.

Day 5

After we shot the scene where the two idiots from Unit 3 [Shaofei and Zhaozi] got into trouble and received an explosive scolding by Dapao [Shi Dapao, the name of Unit 3’s Captain]⁕, the director told Shaofei that she wanted to add a scene where he sat next to the window thinking about Sister Lizhen, continuing in the same mood [as the previous scene]...Everyone in Unit 3 felt that Shaofei was continuing to set his teeth into a meaningless old case. If there had only been some progress in the investigation...but [Shaofei] not only didn’t find any new leads, but he also got into trouble everywhere. If Sister Lizhen would still be alive, he wouldn’t be like this now...Shaofei really, really missed sister Lizhen. Rather than say that the director added this scene at the last moment, it’s more like she deliberately didn’t tell Junhao [Jake] that she would add this part.

When they were shooting, the director played the music from the music box through the megaphone and from time to time talked as well, to provoke moody feelings in Jake. In the end Jake grabbed his phone and scrolled through his mother’s Facebook, and to all our surprise Jake started bawling, so much so that even after the ‘cut’ he couldn’t stop, until the director walked over and lightly patted him on the back. To be able to cry like that in a short amount of time, even he himself hadn’t expected that.

⁕ How much fun is it that the name of the Captain of Unit 3 literally means big cannon, when he explodes in anger all the damn time? 😂 I am quite convinced that in the hospital scene where Shaofei tells Tang Yi of his fortune-telling and that only a cannon can strike him down - he uses the exact same wording ‘dapao’ - it’s actually an inside joke and he may not have meant ‘cannon’ literally.

Day 6

Today’s weather couldn’t be called very fine, and when we were shooting until 3 or 4 P.M., the daylight was almost gone, just when the filming location had large windows in every corner that reached the ground. Our funny director said “Why did the production team run out of light after 3 P.M.? Did they forget to send notice⁕ to the sun?” This caused the crew that was present to not know whether to laugh or cry. But in the end, before the sun got off work, everyone else smoothly finished their job as well.

⁕ the term “to send notice” is quite literal, but the word is indeed an entertainment industry term as well, that means to hire someone for a short amount of time or for a specific show, without there having to be a longer-term contractual agreement. So it could also be translated as “did they forget to hire the sun [to star in today’s scenes]?”

Day 7

It was a day with complicated feelings for Shaofei and little Tang Yi, as Shaofei discovered Tang Yi’s past history.

Before going to meet the adoptive father of his lover, of course Shaofei had to straighten himself out first and shave his beard to leave a good impression. In the evening, today’s final scene was shot. Before starting filming, the director hoped that [Tang Yi’s] adoptive father could guide little Tang Yi’s mood, because the intensity of this scene needed to bring out the reason why Tang Yi’s feelings for Tang Guodong ran so deep and make everyone feel the warmth that Tang Guodong brought to Tang Yi even more.

Under the constant conflict of raising [little Tang Yi] through much difficulties, a loud and clear slap came down heavily on little Tang Yi’s face. The silence at the [shooting] site caused the loud sound to be infinitely amplified, and the director and the crew were all shocked. When the ‘cut’ sounded, little Tang Yi instantly started crying, and the director rushed to the room immediately. On every crew member’s face was reluctance and shock. Meanwhile the adoptive father sat with his head down on the sofa, full of remorse.

An extra tidbit from the same scene: the crew’s love for little gadgets

There are always a few conspicuous toys in front of the director’s monitor. She explained that these were toys that members of the crew who are close to her gave her to alleviate stress. I don’t know which toy is the director’s favourite?

Day 8

For the setting of the toilets of Unit 3 we actually used the toilets in a department store. Zhaozi, who arrived at the store very early in the morning, was hit on by an older lady who was just coming into work. The lady said: “Aren’t you Zhao Youting [Mark Chao]? You definitely are Zhao Youting!!” Even though Zhaozi went on to deny it, the lady didn’t listen and believed that this handsome guy in front of her was Zhao Youting himself.

Actually, Zhaozi passed on the above story [to us], and no one actually saw this older lady. Zhaozi often tells bluff stories with a straight face, but I [this little editor] have my reservations about its credibility. But be as it may, after he was told that he looked like Zhao Youting, Zhaozi’s acting skills immediately leveled up. So okay, whether or not the story was real, we thank this lady ‘from the legends’.

Day 9

Can I call you dad after this hug?

I still remember the story of a friend coming out to his mother. He said to his mom: “I’m sorry if this thing disappoints you. I don’t dare to ask for your blessing. I just hope that you can show some understanding.” Through a chat message, his mother could only briefly reply: “If your other half is a good kid, I will give you my blessing.”

Many people in a same-sex relationship don’t dare to confess to the older generation and they don’t dare to ask for their blessings. Their only hope is not to be hated. It’s like that facing this society, and it’s the case when facing your beloved family. When Wenhao and Shaofei met each other, Wenhao gave Shaofei a hug. This hug must have carried [Wenhao’s] unspoken blessing.

No worries, dear father-in-law. I, Officer Meng, will take care of everything (pats on the back).

Wenhao and Guodong together brings its own hint of romance.⁕ The fighting was very intense that day, so much so that the police dispatched a Quick Fight Force team in concern [for the situation].

⁕ The term that the author uses is 腐味 (fuwei, the taste of fu). The first character, ‘fu’ is the same ‘fu’ that is used in terms like fujoshi 腐女子 and fudanshi 腐男子 (which are Japanese) but it’s the same pronunciation for that first character. So the author implies that there might have been something more than friendship going on between Chen Wenhao and Tang Guodong. They imply the same thing later in the book as well (day 60, where the two are called a CP).

Day 10

A Mei [Stanley] who portrays A De, said that he was the expert in getting beaten [in this drama]. I say that Stanley definitely dedicated himself to taking on that role. Many times his head bumped into the wall and the crew told him to take a break, but Stanley couldn’t stop yelling “no no, hurry up, I’m familiar with it now!”

All the way through the end Officer Meng and Vixen⁕ no.1, A De, cheered each other on before ‘Action!’ [was called].

⁕ The word for vixen is ‘fox spirit’ 狐狸精 in Chinese. I love that and I could probably write essays on this subject. In classical Chinese literature, foxes were most of the time portrayed as (mainly female) temptresses who seduced males for sex and then didn’t shy away from sucking the soul out of them, kind of like a succubus. If anyone is ever in the mood for some academic literature about foxes in late imperial China, I've got you covered https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3237790-alien-kind

So A De and Andy are constantly referred to as these foxes who want to seduce Tang Yi and snatch him away in front of Shaofei’s eyes.

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josefavomjaaga · 3 years

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For the favorite historical figure ask game: 5, 6, and 9

5. What is the most ridiculous statement on him you have ever read?

The most ridiculous statements on him I probably have not even read as I have not studied the Second Empire, when people tried to turn Eugène into some kind of hero and a shining example of chivalry and loyalty, which he clearly was not.

Krettly in his memoirs calls him »le brave et vertueux Eugène, le prince sans tache, celui qui refusa tout pour rester fidèle à son bienfaiteur« (»brave and virtuous Eugene, the flawless prince, the one who refused everything in order to remain faithful to his benefactor«). Which is, when you look a little closer at what really happened between Napoleon and Eugène during the last couple of years, just not so. And considering that meeting his mother, stepfather and friends in Munich already went against his modesty (according to Darnay), he probably would be quite embarrassed by that kind of talk.

The most painful and, while not entirely ridiculous, at least unfair statement would come from Octave Aubry who called Eugène »the most ungrateful of them all«. (»De tous les proches de l’Empéreur, avec les moins d’excuses, il est le plus ingrat.«)

6. In your opinion, what is his biggest flaw?

Lack of self-confidence, a deep-rooted insecurity and, related to that, the wish (read: need) to make himself loved by everyone. Throughout his life, Eugène always needed somebody to look up to, whose praise and approval he tried to win. As Michel Kérautret states: He always remains »le fils«, the son. He never truely came into his own, was always looking for a father figure, very ready to fight for somebody else, but never for himself.

9. What is your favourite depiction of him (e.g. in painting, sculpture etc.)?

There’s a miniature made after Gérard’s portrait that I like because it really shows a very boyish, »baby face« Eugène that I assume captures him quite well:

I'm also fond of this one, still as Colonel in the Guard:

Among the "official" portraits as viceroy I prefer the second one by Appiani as I find it less embellished - all contemporaries agree that Eugène was not truely handsome.

It also seems closer to this bust:

And finally, the one that touches me the most, the last portrait, made in Munich by Stieler, when he clearly is already worn-out by depression and his illness (this one is today in Munich's Residence Museum, by the way):

Thank you so much for asking!

#eugene de beauharnais #ask game #napoleon #napoleon's family

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dossi-io · 3 years

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An introduction to DeVita

Do you want to learn all about the AOMG artist DeVita? This article will cover everything you need to know about the third female member to join the labels roster.

The content of this article is also available in video format, embedded at the bottom of this article.

Prelude

In early April of 2020, the Korean hip-hop label AOMG ambiguously announced that a new artist was signing onto the label. This label was grounded by the Korean-American triple-threat; Jay Park, who’s also one of its executives. This is a label with a very organic feel and artist-oriented nature, which stands out compared to many other music labels.

On April 3rd, the label’s official Instagram account posted a video. It was titled, “Who’s The Next AOMG?” where fellow AOMG members talked about this upcoming recruit. They sprinkled small hints and details by sharing their thoughts on the artist without mentioning who.

Around the world, fans immediately began speculating on who this could be. The major consensus was that it had to be the solo artist Lee Hi, due to reporting like this: “AOMG responds ‘nothing is confirmed’ to reports of Lee Hi signing on with the label”

A few other names got thrown in fan speculations like Hanbin (B.I), previous member of IKON, Jvcki Wai, and MOON (문) aka Moon Sujin. This despite a few of these already being signed to other labels.

On April 6th, three days later, the account was updated with a part two. This time dropping more hints, which would exclude many names from fan speculations.

On the 7th of April, the label’s official Instagram account posted a short teaser. The video sported an 80’s retrofuturistic setting, with a woman turned from the camera, dressed in all black, rocking braids, and some glistening high-heels. As it seemed to be a female, some were now certain that it had to be Lee Hi. A small few actually guessed correctly that the one who would be joining AOMG would be Ms DeVita.

Finally on April 9th, it was official! She debuted with the music video, from which the teaser clips was taken from, EVITA!, which accompanied the release of her EP, CRÈME.

What does the name DeVita mean?

The name DeVita, draws inspiration and meaning from two things. Firstly, Eva Perón – also known as Evita – who was Argentina’s former First Lady. When Chloe was learning about Eva’s life, it inspired her to combine “Devil” and “Evita”, thus creating “DeVita”. The name signifies the duality of how both Eva Perón and DeVita could be perceived. Either being a devil, or an angel depending on the eye of the beholder. Secondly, Salvatore Di Vita, a character from Cinema Paradiso, was also a source of inspiration.

An introduction to DeVita

Chloe Cho – now known under the artist name DeVita – was born and raised in South Korea, until the age of eleven. In 2009, she moved to Chicago, where she would learn English.

In 2013, she went back to Korea and participated in the third season of the show; K-pop Star. A talent show, where the “big three” (the three largest music labels in Korea) hosts auditions to find the next big k-pop star. However she didn’t win, therefore neither got signed.

Later on, she returned to Chicago and graduated high school. After reflecting on what she wanted to do next, she decided to make music. In 2014, her pursuit to become an artist brought her to the talent show Kollaboration. On this show, she performed covers and actually ended up being a finalist. Despite her talents, she did not triumph as the winner of the show.

Not letting these losses stop her, she started releasing music on Soundcloud. The earliest release I could find, Halfway Love (Ruff), was from 2016. Her catalogue consisted of both covers and original music.

One day, Kirin, an artist and CEO of the music label 8balltown Records, was introduced to DeVita’s music. He liked what he heard and the two linked up. In May of 2018, WEKEYZ, one of 8balltown’s producer duos released a track titled Sugar. This track featured both DeVita, and the AOMG rapper Ugly Duck. This was the beginning of many collaborations to come.

On August 28th of 2018, just a few months later, AOMG released Sugar (Puff Daehee Mix).

This was a remix done by Puff Daehee, the alter ego of Kirin. Along with this track, it was accompanied by a music video starring Kirin, DeVita, and Ugly Duck. For most people, this was their first time seeing DeVita.

DeVita continued doing features on many songs by Korean artists while creating a little buzz for herself. There’s one notable feature, which could be seen as an important milestone in her career. That is her feature on the track Noise, from AOMG artist Woo Won Jae’s project, titled af.

In a tweet a few days after the release of CRÈME, she shared the significance of this moment.

“I was still making minimum wage working at a restaurant back when Noise dropped- I wrote my part during my shift on the back of this receipt paper. This was about a year and a half ago. A little bit after that I got a call from Pumpkin at 3am Chicago time. He said Jay wanted to meet in Philly in 4 hours. They put me on a plane and the rest is history.”

The phone call she mentioned in her tweet, about Jay wanting to meet, must have been made around September 2018. Jay was performing in Philadelphia at the time. The moment they met in Philadelphia was actually captured through a photo of the two. However, this picture ended up getting removed later on.

Fast forward a few months and Jay had just released his Ask About Me EP. The project focused on a western audience, so he went to the States on a promo run. During his visit, he also met up with DeVita once again, as can be seen here.

Finally, on April 9th, her being signed to AOMG was officially announced and she debuted with her EP titled CRÈME. Her joining AOMG, looked like something that happened pretty naturally. The vast majority of artists she had collaborated on tracks with happened to be AOMG members. Getting comfortable with the AOMG family, likely made the decision to join crystal clear.

Artistically

Just a quick look at her body of work thus far, a majority of it is in English. However, she has no issues singing in Korean, as proven by her feature on Code Kunst’s; Let u in. The tone in her voice has this sort of mixture of many singers, a melting pot of sorts. It reminds me of Audrey Nuna, SAAY, H.E.R, some vocal riffs from Dinah Jane, and at times, just a tiny bit of Ariana Grande.

As an artist, she’s still in the early stages of carving out her own unique sound and style. There’s incredible potential here, but her distinct identity is not completely there yet. I see before me a caterpillar that within a couple years, will transform into a butterfly, with its own identifiable pattern to spread its wings out on.

From what she’s shown so far, I would say she seems most comfortable doing R&B and soul music. However, beyond a quick description I prefer to refrain from categorizing her. Mostly because artists generally feel limited when categorized. More importantly, because we have no idea what she has in store for the future.

Debut EP: CRÈME

CRÈME is DeVita’s “crème de la crème”. She constantly modified the tracklist to present her debut project in a way that held her personal standard; essentially presenting us her best tracks. The result is CRÈME, which consists of five tracks, with a runtime of fourteen minutes altogether.

This EP showcases the fact that she is a competent songwriter, able to write some soulful, emotional ballads. It is completely in English and all the tracks are written by her, telling both life stories of her own and that of others. A majority of the production was handled by her “musical soulmate”; TE RIM, but other notable names, like Code Kunst show up as well.

Tracks:

Movies, introduces the project in a very gentle manner. In the track, DeVita paints a picture of a criminal couple, getting a rush, by committing crimes together. The lyrics feel inspired by movies like Bonnie and Clyde. My initial thoughts were that, for some ears, it could possibly be “too” calm as an opener. It doesn’t demand attention the way EVITA! does. Simply put, it’s not a bad track. I would just have put this track later on in the EP.

EVITA!, is something different compared to what I hear from others in the K-R&B lane. I love the 80’s aesthetic in both the track and music video. Sonically, the nostalgic saxophone riffs, warm lush synth pads, thumping bass line, results in a trip back to the 80s. With this recipe, topped with DeVita’s “current” contemporary soul and R&B voice makes for an interesting combination. The music video had that futuristic 80’s look with the neon colors, and I loved how the guns she played around with looked a lot like the “Needlers” from the Halo franchise. The title is once again just like DeVita’s name, an ode to the controversial Eva Perón. The instrumental was originally used by TE RIM, the producer of the track in 2017. His version has the same title as DeVita’s version and I recommend giving that one a listen as well, as it has a different feel to it. This track was definitely one of the highlights of the EP.

All About You, is a simple yet beautiful piano love ballad. Originating from her own tales of love, her vocals effortlessly capture what she felt during these moments.

1974 Live, is yet another ballad, but this time, with a calm guitar backing, playing a poppier R&B chord progression. DeVita’s voice is given a lot of space to be in the center of the track. As soon as I heard this track I became curious. What was the significance of this year, which would have her title the track as such? My questions were left unanswered… until the EP had marinated a while, when she tweeted: “1974 Live is about Christine Chubbuck”. In case you’re unfamiliar, Christine Chubbuck was a television news reporter, who made history in 1974. She was the first person to commit suicide live on air. According to her mother Christine’s suicide would on paper be due to an unfullfilling personal life. All throughout her life, she had experienced unreciprocated love. With this information tying back to the track, it becomes a lot less ambiguous and reveals a more cohesive narrative.

Show Me, is the final track of the EP, featuring immaculate production from the talented CODE KUNST. The sound is very moody, which fits her voice like a glove. This is my favorite performance on the entire EP, both lyrically and vocally. The lyrics present someone who’s fed up dealing with men, who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. Now she’s looking for love with someone who’s honest and “real”.

With the project being a year old now, it has already gotten her nominated for both Rookie of the Year along with EVITA being nominated for Best R&B & Soul Track in the 18th iteration of the Korean Music Awards.

A majority of listeners seemed to enjoy the project. Many seem to be in love with her voice judging by the endless amounts of praise she has received, often described as painfully addicting, soothing, smooth, and so on.

I also asked a friend who’s a huge fan of Korean music, especially the hiphop and r&b scene to share her thoughts on the project. Here’s what she said:

"This whole project is empowering, in particular the tracks Show Me and EVITA! DeVita being a new artist, managed to impress me and many more listeners through this EP. As mentioned earlier, empowering lyrics with unique melodies and beats. Especially with the track EVITA! The fact that 1974 Live and EVITA! was referring to, two historically important women, is something that I love. This is one of my favorite EP:s of 2020 and DeVita is now included in my list of favorite artists." @Haonsmom

From what I’ve seen, only a few have been vocal about not really being too fond of the project. Some were left a bit disappointed, as they were expecting more hip-hop and R&B from an AOMG artist. The lack of “danceable” tracks was also a concern to some. Despite these criticisms, one thing was always mentioned; the girl has a beautiful voice and is obviously talented.

After listening to this EP, I hear a lot of potential. Being an EP with just five tracks, it definitely avoids overstaying its welcome. It’s brief enough to allow a listen through the entire project, no matter what you’re doing. My favorite tracks would have to be Show Me and EVITA!, but I found the whole project to be enjoyable. This EP is sprinkled with lovely vocal performances and simple but captivating production. I do still stand by my opinion that Movies would have fit better later in the tracklist if you’re chasing that mainstream ear.

I think the way EVITA! kicks you in the face, demanding attention, would’ve been a better fit as the opening track. In contrast to the other tracks, the energy level is unique, making the placement feel odd as the rest of the tracks have a chill vibe. All in all, this project gave me a taste of the “crème” but left me with a curious yearning for what this chef will whip up for dessert.

Bright future ahead

The addition of more female artists to the AOMG roster was much needed. Hoody was the first and only female member for about four years. This was the case up until late 2019, where she was then joined by sogumm, who had just won AOMG’s audition program called SignHere. Now funnily enough after DeVita, Lee Hi actually did end up officially signing with AOMG on July 22, last year.

Based on what I’ve heard during Devita’s Kollaboration days, she has improved immensely. This topped with her leaving the impression of someone passionate about their craft, bodes well for what's to come. She seems to be someone who'll constantly evolve.

Following an artist, at the early stages of their career, is something that I always find exciting. With such a lovely debut, I cannot wait to see what the future has in store for DeVita.

To view the content of this article in video format simply play the video embedded below.

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Credits:

The first image in article: Original photo, pre-edit from @jinveun

Gif from the Sugar Puff Daehee MV: @moxiepoints

#devita #krnb #jay park #aomg #h1ghrmusic #8balltown #kpop #review #korea #uglyduck #chloe devita #chloe cho #kirin #evita!#crème #moon sujin #khh #korean hip hop #krap

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star-birthmark · 4 years

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Silent Saviors: 4taro x Fem Reader

Finally... FINALLY IT IS DONE! This is infernal ask that has been in my inbox for so long!!! Thank you to @stardustbrosaders for the request all those months ago lol. This was the request: “Heya! Would it be possible to write a P4! Jotaro x Female! Reader where the reader gets her stand under stress from a battle? The group almost gets defeated but the reader’s stand appears and she beats the enemy, saving everyone? For the readers stand type could it be close range like SP and CD?”

I also drew the reader’s stand for this fic. You can find a link to the stand info here.

This is a long ass fic btw. It’s literally 11 THOUSAND WORDS. I don’t know what compelled me to make the fic this long. I really don’t. But I did and here we are. I hope you like it, no matter how long it is!

Quick content warnings: General violence and angst, strangulation, murder (duh)

Without further ado: Silent Saviors: 4taro x Fem Reader (11k words)

A dark force was afoot in the town of Morioh once more, but it had just been a long day, and no progress had been made to capture that force. The team’s morale was low. The exhausted high school students stumbled home to catch a good night’s rest, thoughts of ongoing danger in their small town looming over their heads. The young manga artist Rohan Kishibe grumbled to himself about his failures, wondering how a genius like him could not decipher this mystery like he had last time. You felt a heavy air of unrest lay over the town as you awkwardly shifted in your seat on the ride to the Grand Hotel, looking over at your travel mate as he silently ran over the facts in his head. He shook his head in frustration. None of this made any sense. All the victims had been killed in the same way, so it must be a stand, one that didn’t leave behind any evidence, one potentially even more dangerous than Kira.

A dark force was afoot in the town of Morioh once more, but you didn’t know anything about the first monstrous event that had occurred. The small town’s silent saviors all agreed with one another to seal their lips and tell no one what had really happened. Not that anyone would have believed them.

But you would have. Your travel partner didn’t know anything yet, but the more time you two spent in this strange town, the crazier you felt you were becoming. You were seeing objects levitate in the air, you were seeing arms stick out from these bizarre teenagers. At this point, you’d believe anything just to make it all stop. You stumbled inside from the taxi, convinced this small town was driving you insane.

Your partner turned to you in front of your hotel room, his own room right next door, and placed his large hands on your shoulders.

“Are you alright (y/n)? If any of this investigation gets to be too much for you, just tell me and I’ll send you on the next flight back home.”

You snort tiredly. “Too much for me? Jotaro you look exhausted… You haven’t been taking breaks from the case at all… You’re always so anxious. Do you promise you’ll actually go to bed this time?”

Jotaro looked down at you and moved his hands from you, sighing heavily. “Yeah… I promise…”

You give him a shy smile before shrugging. “Besides… you need me, don’t you? Weren’t you the one that said I’m the only one that calms you down?”

Jotaro gulped and broke eye contact with you, his own silent way of admitting that you were right. You chuckled and opened the door to your hotel room, giving him one last look and goodnight before you left to go to bed. You would wake up about two hours later from the sound of your partner’s shuffling about in his room next door. You slipped on a thick crew neck over your thin tank top and shorts and open to the door connecting to the two rooms.

You peaked your head past the door to find a familiar sight before you. Pictures were tacked onto a corkscrew board, red thread connecting the dots to draw the group one step closer to solving the crimes. Files were splayed out over the desk, a map of the small Japanese town resting on the nearby bed, etched with red Xs displaying the sites where several young men and women met their demise. Amongst the mess, you found the broad shoulders of a tired Jotaro Kujo hunched over the desk, the young man still looking at the mountains of documents, eager to find the path to justice. It was hidden in those pages, he was sure of it. It had been your third night together in that hotel, and it was evident that you two would be there for much longer.

---

“Miss (L/N) it says here that you have received your degree in zoology and graduated at the top of your major.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And it says here that you recently led an academic study of marine biology that went very well back home.”

“Yes sir, and it would be an honor to join this esteemed team of scientists here at SPW.”

It was the year 1998, and you were interviewing to work at the Speedwagon Foundation. You had graduated atop your class, and had a passion for your work that few possessed, as well success that few could show for. You prayed that this interview was going well. The Foundation was the utmost important center of scientific research in the world and you didn’t want to waste an opportunity to work there. You watched the smile on your interviewer’s face as he reviewed your credentials before setting the paper down.

“Miss (L/N) I’d like to welcome you aboard our team. I believe you will contribute much to our efforts.”

Your face lit up in excitement and you rushed to shake his hand. “Thank you so much sir, I won’t let you down! If I could ask what position you’re hiring me for?”

“You see we have an opening for an assistant with the Kujo lab. Since you’re just starting off here- you’ll be assisting him in meetings and in bench work-”

“Excuse me... the Kujo lab? As in Jotaro Kujo? Isn’t he my age?” You interrupt nervously.

“Why yes miss… is there an issue?”

“Well no sir it’s just… I thought perhaps I’d be working under an esteemed professor… I didn’t think someone fresh out of grad school would already have a lab to himself… Not to sound ungrateful of course, I just didn’t realize I would be working under one of my contemporaries…”

A sigh came to the man and leaned back in his chair, thinking about how to explain the situation.

“Miss (y/n), the reason I’m placing you in Kujo’s lab is that I feel the two of you would work well together, given your similar backgrounds and parallel personalities…” You furrow your brow, unsure what the supervisor meant until you were face to face with Jotaro Kujo himself a few days later.

You still remembered the day well. You hung your coat up on a nearby hook and looked about the lab. Documents were piled over every available surface with no particular organization. A large fish tank stood in the far corner, a wild variety of fish encased within. Anatomical posters of aquatic life were all over the walls, and right by the window sat Jotaro. He hadn’t looked up when you came in. Approaching his desk, you stared down at the mass of black hair on the top of his head. Soon clearing your throat, the young doctoral student’s head shot up to look at you blankly. You opened your mouth to speak, taken aback by his unemotional expression, nervously turning to a notebook you had on hand.

“Uh… um… My name is (y/n) (l/n), your new coworker. I would like to thank you for allowing me into your lab. I had been going over your most recent papers on the social patterns of starfish on the eastern-most coast of Japan and I was just wondering if-”

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

You looked up from your notes and into the young man’s deep blue eyes, your breath catching in your throat. You struggled to form a sentence under the intense gaze, your breath shuttering out from your lips, and you looked back down at your notes.

“I’m (y/n) (l/n)... your new coworker.”

Jotaro nodded slowly, considering what you had just said. You watched as he removed his large white overcoat and leaned back in his chair, donned in a fitted black t-shirt.

“Why did they hire you?” You lean forward confused, your ear facing him.

“I’m sorry?”

“Why did they hire you?”

You look away for a moment, considering his now nervous expression, his nervous tick of chewing on his lip, his small twitches of the eye, his clenching and unclenching of his jaw. You looked down, finding his leg bouncing anxiously against the floor. A small, sweet smile came to you, and you opened your mouth to speak, alerting his attention.

“You and I apparently have parallel personalities… according to them.”

You watched as Jotaro’s lips curved into a shy smile and he got up from his seat, grabbing a notepad from a nearby drawer. He then turned to you and extended his arm out, pointing. You followed the direction of his hand and saw a separate desk facing his at the other end of the office. You turned back and quickly nodded, rushing to set your things down and then turning to face him once more.

Jotaro nodded courteously at you. “Have you read my most recent work?”

“Yes, I just told you that I did that-”

“Good. Come to the meeting with me then.”

You followed after him into a nearby boardroom, unsure of the situation about to befall you. The meeting began. Executives discussed their most recent funding prospects, deciding whether or not to continue their spending, depending on how successful the trials had been. You sat patiently in your chair, listening to the others argue frankly amongst themselves. A steady, fast tapping upon the table commanded your attention and you turned over to see Jotaro staring off into the distance, his fingers rapidly tapping on the desk, his whole form shaking with sensory overload.

“Mr. Kujo? And you?” You watched as Jotaro’s head shot up and he looked around the room. He hadn’t been listening, his mind had been too overcome with anxieties.

“I um… I uh… W-what were-”

You watched nervously as this man came undone at his seams. You cleared your throat and tapped the table next to his notepad. Getting the message, Jotaro grabbed the notepad quickly and anxiously flipped through its pages.

“Um… sorry about that. I would like to further my research- wait no this is on the wrong page. Wait no it’s not… wait-”

You looked around as the listeners began to get frustrated, looking at each other in jest of one of their top researchers. You chewed nervously on your finger, hoping Jotaro would pull himself together. It was your first day working with him, and it was already troublesome.

“I would like to further the research done in my penultimate paper. Or was it my most recent...”

“Mr. Kujo, we would have liked for you to have prepared for this meeting…”

“No no… I did. I did. Wait-”

With a quick motion, you reached over and placed a hand on Jotaro’s shoulder, calmly taking the notepad from him and then turning to the group. Jotaro looked away, still visibly shaken.

“Mr. Kujo clearly states in his most recent paper that he plans to continue his research, at a different coastal region, comparing more behaviors there to make sure that this past successful trial wasn’t any sort of spontaneous fluke. He writes in his goals of perhaps inspecting the regional colonies of starfish around S-Town… Following that, he plans to remain in contact with the genomic department and track genetic similarities between human and aquatic life that may explain the similar social patterns between the two.”

You explain to them all, having memorized the paper. Turning to the notepad, you saw what Jotaro had written in preparation for the meeting. You then turned back to the investors.

“Mr. Kujo kindly asks that you aid him in his funding so that mankind as a whole may find a better understanding of the natural world… That’s all he wanted to say. He just couldn’t find the right page. Sir.”

You reached back and placed the notepad back near Jotaro’s shaking hand. You returned your hand back to the other’s shoulder, squeezing gently to reassure the scientist that he was alright. The young man turned to you in a bit of surprise, not expecting your presence to calm him oh so much. The executives all took in your words and the head of the meeting slowly nodded.

“Well… thank you for your assistance, miss…?”

“(l/n).”

“Right well thank you… We will consider Mr. Kujo’s work for a second trial.”

“Thank you. He appreciates it.” With that, you let go of Jotaro’s shoulder.

The meeting soon adjourned, You got up to leave your seat when you felt Jotaro’s hand grab your shoulder. You turned around to see him slowly stand up from his chair.

“Thank you. I’m not a big fan of speaking to them…”

You nodded quickly. “Yes… of course…”

From that day on, the two of you were inseparable. Having experienced the horrific acts done to him and to those he loved back in his teenage years, Jotaro was convinced that you were the only one who could calm his constant nerves and anxieties. You became his most powerful tool against the outside world. You understood his work perfectly, understood his mannerisms perfectly, and respected his need for silence in the office. You knew how to say things the way he would himself, and you had no fear discussing them to other people. The two of you became much closer over the months of your working. Jotaro became much less of an enigma in your eyes. It would be a few months until Jotaro would unwillingly reveal his more “secret” projects.

The first time you saw the arrow, Jotaro did not want you to see it. But still, what happened that day would forever change your relationship with the young scientist. You had arrived early, hoping to surprise him with a hot breakfast and a smile. You turn the corner to walk into the lab, yet when you go to open the door, you find it locked. Strange. Looking inside the room, you find Jotaro hunched over his desk in focus, in the same clothes as the day before, having not yet unlocked the door. Even more strange. You knocked on the door, only for him to leave the room with another door in a hurry, ignoring your pleas. With a grumble, you dug for your keys, figuring his weird behavior was just fatigue, and that he probably slept over at work again. When you finally get into the lab, you place your things down, and that's when you see it lingering underneath his desk in a rushed hiding spot.

Encased within a thickly walled wooden box, an arrow remained, barely hidden from your gaze, as Jotaro had had no time to hide it from you. The latch was undone, another sign that Jotaro had run away from the scene.

Jerk. Didn’t he trust you enough to show you something like this? It’s just a bow and arrow! Why was he hiding it? You called out for him to return to the room and explain what the bow and arrow was for. Hearing no response, you turned back to the wooden box, reaching your hand in to inspect the bow and arrow.

It all happened so fast. In the blink of an eye.

There were no in-between movements. One moment you had pricked your finger on the razor sharp tip of the arrow, the next moment you were standing up, the box had been tightly locked, and Jotaro stood right in front of you, chest to chest, intensely staring you down. Your breath became ragged as you maintained eye contact with him. What just happened? You didn’t even hear him come in. The box was right before your very eyes, and you didn’t even see that it was locked. How did he even turn you around without you knowing?! A chill went down your spine as you hesitated to speak even a word to the man before you.

“Do you see what was in there?”

Jotaro asked you calmly. You felt a cold sweat form on your forehead. Jotaro, ever the impatient man, grabbed your jacket collar, shaking you out of your scared daze.

“I’m asking you now (y/n)! Did you see what was in there?!”

“No, I didn’t see anything! I don’t know what just happened! I swear! I saw you run away from the room and went to see what was in there and the next thing I knew you had come back and it was all so fast and I don’t understand and I-... Jotaro… you’re scaring me.”

Your body convulsed at his rough contact, your hands reaching up to push him away, but his tight grip on your jacket remained steadfast. Pure instinct had compelled you to lie to him about seeing the content of the box, but the terror and confusion you had displayed was genuine. You still didn’t understand how he was able to move that fast, or affect you with you even knowing. Just who was this man?

Jotaro stared down at you for a moment longer, before releasing you from his grip and taking a few steps back. You stumbled back, grabbing the edge of his desk to stabilize your fall. Your heart continued to race in your chest as you heaved, still struggling to make sense of what just happened.

Jotaro silently called out Star Platinum, having his stand hover right in front of you as you kept staring at him in confusion. Your expression didn’t change once he called out his stand. So you were telling the truth. You really hadn’t seen the arrow. Or at least, hadn’t touched it.

Jotaro sighed, rubbing the side of his head with a groan. He hadn’t stopped time in so long, but it seemed he was worried over nothing. “I’m sorry to frighten you, (y/n).”

You finally straightened yourself out, gulping. “Who the hell are you? Really?!”

“...I’m Jotaro Kujo. That is all.”

Another chill ran down up your spine, but you played it off. If he wanted to continue things as per usual, you’d have to do the same.

“Right… I brought breakfast. And there’s a morning meeting in half an hour so freshen up.”

You walked past him to retrieve the food you had bought for them. Looking down to pick it up, you noticed a red blood stain on your jacket. It must have been from your bleeding finger when you’d pricked it on the arrow. However, when you turned to look at the finger itself, you found that it was fully healed, not even scarred, even after such a precise and direct cut. Jotaro politely asked you for the food, claiming hunger, and you rushed to take your coat off and hide it away. You got the sense that he’d question further if he saw the fresh blood stain.

After that fateful morning, things continued on as per usual. You still had your questions, but after a few weeks had passed without another incident, you resolved that whatever that bow and arrow were must have been top secret for the Speedwagon Foundation. You figured no company could be as powerful as they were without keeping a few secrets. And this was one of them.

So you resolved to ask no questions about that one day. The same way you didn’t put up much of a fight when, in the summer of 1999, after months of you two planning to stay there together, Jotaro told you that he would be going to Morioh alone to research for his PhD, without you. You were furious, enraged how the two of you could become so close since you began working there, yet he still didn’t trust you to go with him. You argued with him the night before he was set to leave, but his resolve never crumbled. You weren’t going to Morioh, that was final.

In the three months that he was gone, Jotaro regularly sent you his findings, and you sorted them back at Speedwagon Headquarters. When he finally came back, more visibly shaken than he was before, you could only wonder what the coworker you had grown so attached to had experienced in Morioh in the summer of 1999.

Circling back to the present day, it was the winter of 2000, and there was yet again a dark force afoot in the town of Morioh. Only this time, Jotaro would not go alone.

“You have to let me come with you this time.”

“Explain why. Explain why I have to let you come with me this time. I did just fine on my own before.”

You gritted your teeth at the other’s stubbornness. “Will you please just listen to me? Jotaro when you came back from Morioh, you were even harder to deal with than before! Any sound in the office set you on edge and you screamed when someone set off fireworks near our building! And you still haven’t explained to me what happened there! Now let me come with you! I can help!”

Jotaro turned his attention away from his work, finally looking at you for the first time in that conversation. He hadn’t realized just how attached to you he’d become, how much you meant to him. You were his ticket into communicating with the world to his fullest, and after recalling several confusing conversations with Josuke, Okuyasu, and Koichi, Jotaro realized he actually needed you in order to articulate himself to the others without getting too anxious or angry.

“Alright fine. We’re leaving tomorrow at 2. You better be ready.”

But nothing could have prepared you for the horrors you were about to encounter in that small town. To your shock and disgust, you learned that aside from his research, Jotaro was investigating a murderer. And then you met Josuke and the others. That was when you first felt that you were going crazy. When you saw glimpses of third arms extend out from these teenagers, saw one of them heal a broken leg with ease, saw another erase space itself. People all over this small town were vanishing in thin air, and the incidents were happening more and more frequently. It didn’t make any sense, but no one was commenting on it, so you felt you were just imagining things. The same way you must have imagined Jotaro moving at lightspeed that morning you pricked your finger on the arrow.

Finally, we return to the current scene of Jotaro hunched over his desk, his room in the Morioh Grand Hotel littered with documents, the board nearby covered in photos and string, the bedside clock reading 2:33 am. You approached him carefully in the tense silence, knowing not to startle him whenever he was in deep thought.

“...Jotaro-”

“Dammit dammit dammit! I’m sick of it! Where the hell is he?!”

Jotaro slammed his fist down on the desk, his chest heaving in frustration. Why did this keep happening to him?! He just wanted to live a normal life, and he thought after Kira, he could. But like so many times before, Jotaro Kujo was wrong. Perhaps it was his destiny to be unfortunate. Perhaps there would always be another person stabbed by the arrow that would have it out for him and the others. Perhaps he was always destined to have a target on his back. Jotaro turned around to see you there, your form shaken from his sudden outburst. You’d never seen him that angry before. He met your gaze, unaware that you were sensing a vague presence of a being just above the man’s shoulder.

He sighed, walking over to you. “I’m sorry to scare you (y/n). I’m just getting frustrated by all this.”

You hesitated to speak for a moment, flinching when Jotaro placed his hand on your shoulder. You look up at him with a glare. “Tell what you haven’t been telling me.”

“You’ve been with me in Morioh this whole time (y/n). We both know the same things about this case I-”

You shoved Jotaro back, the surprised scientist bumping into his desk. “Don’t play dumb with me Jotaro! There’s something you’re not telling me! Do you think I’m an idiot?! Do you think I can’t handle it?! Tell me why you and a bunch of fucking kids have to be the ones taking down a killer?! Why can’t you just leave it to the police like a normal person?! Just say it! I… I can help you!”

But Jotaro couldn’t tell you. You wouldn’t understand his world and the horrifying stands contained within it. He had to keep you safe. The moment you find out anything more will be the moment you die.

“No… I can’t tell you (y/n).”

“But that’s not fair I-”

“(y/n), I’m sorry, but if you ask me again, I’ll be forced to send you back home and have you fired from my lab. Try to understand me, I’m doing this for your own safety, but I can’t have you be near me if you don’t cooperate.”

You stood there in shock. Would he really do that? Didn’t he know how much working for him at the Foundation meant to you? How much care that you put in for him and his work? And he’d throw all that away just to protect some stupid secret!? Who did he think he was?!

Your whole body began to quiver in rage at the other’s behavior. Just when you thought there was something between the two of you, something more than just a young professor and his assistant, he makes it clear that you mean nothing to him, and you never have. You watched the man before you, turn away from your gaze to focus back to his work. With a huff, you reach for the door to leave, your hand touching the handle.

Then, it all went white.

Your hand touched the handle, feeling the metal scalding to the touch. Before you could flinch back and yelp at the pain, a hand circled around your neck and another crept around your waist, the grip keeping you flush against another body. You look around the room, watching the color and furniture dissolve from your view until all you could see for miles was a white void. The only thing you could feel was the man with a locked grip on your neck, blocking your airway. You kicked to set yourself free, until you felt a ghostly presence cling onto your legs to hold them together. That same feeling washed over your wrists to bind them as well. The man holding onto you within the void leaned down to bring his mouth to your ear.

“No human on Earth is unable to feel pain.”

Your whole body shuddered at the deep growl in his throat. “W-who are you?! What do you wan-”

“I’m the one talking (y/n)!”

With that, his hold on your neck tightened ever more. How could he have known your name? You all had made a point to only use names in private in case the murderer was lurking around. So that means… A pang of realization hit you. He’d been hiding in this hotel room, listening to you and Jotaro was however long. Black spots appeared before you in your line of sight, your head was feeling lighter and lighter. You were becoming weightless.

“In the split second that a human being first feels pain, that is when they are at their most isolated. At the first sign of pain, it’s every man for himself. When a man is shot, in the first moment he feels pain, he isn’t thinking of the man next to him that got shot in the brain. He’s thinking only of himself. The fight or flight response is activated, all other surroundings become useless. That selfishness, that hunger to be healed, that desire for self preservation, is what fuels Foreigner’s God, my stand!”

Your eyes shot open at the last word. “A...stand?” You choked out.

“My stand, Foreigner's God, extends that initial moment of selfishness that comes with pain. No longer are there distractions that can bring someone back to care for others. No longer are there healers that can take that pain away. Your hand is still burnt from the handle that I heated up, so…”

He turned you both around and you saw through your hazy view, a body appear in the white void. It was Jotaro, the man frantically calling out your name and rushing between his room and yours in a search for you. At one moment, the two of you even seemingly made eye contact, and you saw the absolute fear in his eyes at the realization that he might have just lost you. Your mouth quirked up in a smile, and tears began to form in your eyes.

Jotaro took a step closer, maintaining your gaze, and you felt relief in your heart that he could really see you. Until suddenly, he rushed to the night stand, fazing right through you and your assailant, not even noticing your presence in the room. You struggled to shout under the choking pressure as you saw him panic, reaching to the phone to call Josuke.

“Wait! Jotaro! I’m right here ah-”

“Didn’t I tell you (y/n)! At that critical moment of pain, it’s every man for himself! It’s just you and me in here! You’re in my world now, sweetheart. I allowed you to see Jotaro’s image, but he cannot see or hear you!”

The killer turned your head to the side, ready to snap. But he had to wait, for his stand would deactivate the moment you were killed, and then he’d be left vulnerable to a furious Jotaro in that hotel room. He needed information about his opponents’ abilities, and Jotaro was playing right into his hands by calling his friend.

“That’s it… That’s it Kujo! Call Josuke Higashikata! Call him! CALL HIM!”

You trembled under the rough grip, struggling to call out for Jotaro, hoping he wouldn’t call anyone and reveal any secrets.

And then amidst the silence, the click of Jotaro hanging up the phone filled your ears. You watched the look of reflection on his face. Somehow, maybe it was because of years of battle with monsters just like this man, but Jotaro Kujo realized that you hadn’t run away. Someone was keeping you from him. And he was now more alert than ever.

“Shit! He’s smarter than I thought! He must suspect there’s a stand attack going on.”

The murderer grumbled before dropping you to the ground. He couldn’t kill you, not without proper info on how to defeat Jotaro and the others. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t hurt you. With a sharp kick to the back, the assailant managed to knock you away, breaking bones in your spine and leaving you immobile. Recalling his stand ability, the murderer managed to escape out a window without a trace, figuring you would lose consciousness. With a gentle thud, you toppled to the ground, right next to the open window.

“(y/n)!”

Jotaro rushed to the sound, seeing you lay there, gasping for breath. He turned to the open window seeing no one around. He had disappeared. And right under his nose too. How long had the man been in the room with them?! How dumb could he have been?! Reaching up to Jotaro, you muttered that the man had broken a few bones in your back and that you couldn’t move.

“I’m sorry Jotaro. I didn’t get a good look at his face…”

“Don’t worry about that! I’ll get help right away!”

You looked up with hazy eyes as Jotaro rushed to the phone to call Josuke. After everything between the two of you, after everything he’s said to you, it was surprising to see just how much he truly cared about you. Holding the phone to his ear, Jotaro frantically told Josuke your condition and for him to get over here as soon as possible. Glancing down at your arm, Jotaro’s eyes shot open at the black ink that painted your skin just a few centimeters beneath your wrist. In all caps, as if the murderer was playing with you all, the ink wrote,

“Foreigner’s God - AS.”

- - - - -

“Honestly Mr. Joestar, where does that grandson of yours get off running me and the others ragged like this? He sees one person with the initials A.S. in a phonebook and he sends me out across down to read them with Heaven’s Door.”

Rohan Kishibe sat drinking his tea, absently working on Pink Dark Boy, waiting for Jotaro’s next move. His companion, Joseph Joestar, took a sip of his drink at Rohan’s rude accusation.

“Hush now Rohan. We all put Jotaro in charge of his operation, given his connection to our main victim. All he’s doing is using your stand to its full capabilities.”

The old man raised an eyebrow and Rohan got the hint. Mr. Joestar was the only one of the group that the snarky artist fully respected, so he would follow the seasoned stand user’s lead.

A heavy set of footsteps entered the room, followed by a more uneven pair lingering behind. The two stand users looked up to see you and Jotaro enter. You were looking better since the attack. Josuke had healed your back of the broken bones, but the bruises and intense pain of walking remained. Moving with crutches, you slowly stepped out from behind Jotaro as the two of you entered the room. Jotaro, his face darkened in a mixture of unhealthy fatigue and intense bloodlust, approached Rohan’s table and slammed down a stack of papers.

“Names, addresses, ages, and criminal histories. All here. I want you done with it within the next two days.”

Rohan grumbled, standing up. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking to me like that Jotaro. Not even a hello, not even an acknowledgment of your grandfather. He’s the only reason I’m letting you push me around like this you-”

Jotaro took one step closer to Rohan, staring the smaller man down in silence. A chill went down the artist’s spine. Shown plainly in the scientist’s eyes was a haze of dark intent, of evil desires. He wanted this person dead, and for them to suffer. Joseph flicked his gaze up at his grandson, recognizing the expression from the other’s climactic fight with DIO. A tinge of worry filled the old soul.

They needed to catch him, and catch him soon.

“Jotaro, come on. We told Josuke and the others we would give them an update soon.”

At the sound of your voice, raspy still from the attack, Jotaro’s face softened into its usual composure. He turned around to face you, and you gave him a tired smile.

“Right, let’s go. Rohan. Two days, please. I’m counting on you.”

Tipping his hat over his eyes, Jotaro held out an arm for you as you both walked to the rendez-vous point to meet with Josuke.

Rohan still felt lost in the other’s murderous expression. It had been three days since your run in with Foreigner’s God, and Heaven’s Door’s user was one of the first to arrive at the scene in order to search for clues. He remembered reading a page drawn from your unconscious body; you had blacked out soon after Jotaro made the call for help. Josuke was working on your spine, and there was a tense silence about the room. A silence soon interrupted by the crash of wood hitting the floor. Everyone looked up, seeing Jotaro standing deathly still in his spot, meanwhile Star Platinum had escaped and had thrown the table over and smashed it into the floor. The rampaging stand turned to the board and knocked it over with a fierce punch, wood scraps and documents flying everywhere.

“Hey Jotaro stop it! We need those!”

Josuke yelled, drawing out Crazy diamond to hold Star back. In his blinded rage, the stand took a mindless swing, punching Crazy Diamond in the jaw and sending both him and Josuke flying into the opposite wall.

“Josuke!”

Koichi and Okuyasu rushed to their friend. He wasn’t injured too badly, surprisingly no bones broken; nothing a bandage or two couldn’t fix. The four of them, the three teenagers and the artist all turned to Jotaro in shock, who by this point had absorbed Star Platinum into his being. Turning back to face them all, they all got a look at it.

The truly furious face of Jotaro Kujo.

The calm and collected scientist now wore the face of violence, a face he hadn’t worn since Egypt. His eyes shone bright with a horrifying lust for vengeance. Those eyes looked away from the frightened stand users, towards your unconscious body. Without a word, Jotaro left the room, and the others let out a shaky breath in the tense air. Those eyes. It had been three days and those eyes were still ever present. Rohan shook away his discomfort and waved goodbye to Mr. Joestar, understanding now.

Jotaro was not in this for justice. If Kira had hurt only you those months ago, Jotaro would have worn the same face. You were the key to Jotaro’s psyche and wellbeing. That was a fundamental truth about Jotaro Kujo. It was that day that Rohan Kishibe learned another fundamental truth.

Sometimes, the universe places an answer in your hands when you need an answer the most.

Half an hour later, it happened. It was in the middle of a secluded street, inhabited by only three people at that moment. A man. A woman. And the young artist, who had been so enraptured by his goal of locating the first name of his list that he barely had the time to react when it happened. And when it did, it only took an instant.

The man in front of him quickly drew out a pocket knife from his jacket, driving its blade into the woman’s shoulder, unaware Rohan was behind him seeing the act in its entirety. Before the woman had any time to scream in pain, the pair vanished into thin air before the artist’s very eyes, and into the man’s stand realm. Rohan held his breath, frightened at the pair’s sudden disappearance. A stand user. It must have been. Was this him? Reaching quickly into his bag, Rohan Kishibe phoned his first line of defense.

You had been sitting with Jotaro and all of the Morioh teenagers when Jotaro received his call from Rohan.

“What is it?”

“I found someone. It’s either him or another one Jotaro.”

Jotaro shot up from his chair, eyes blown out in stress. “Are you sure?! How do you know?!”

Josuke, Okuyasu, and Koichi all grew the same expression of fighting spirit on their faces and you were sure danger was ahead for you all.

Rohan tried to remain calm. “I’m not sure… Come over here with the others. We have a better chance of taking down whoever this is together. I’m by Owsen, two streets over…”

Inside Foreigner’s God’s realm, the man grabbed on tighter to the struggling woman’s neck as she gasped for air.

“Please, please don’t kill me! Please don’t k-kill me!”

But the man was hardly paying attention to her cries. He had brought a vision of Rohan into the void and was watching the artist’s movement’s while still strangling the woman as she writhed in pain.

He didn’t like what he was hearing. With a grunt, the man turned the woman around to face Rohan’s vision, his hand still tight around her neck.

She whimpered at the sudden motion, tears streaming down her face, meanwhile he stared boredly at Rohan talking on the phone with Jotaro and the others.

“Hey bitch, who is that?”

The woman just kept crying. “Please don’t kill me!”

Gritting his teeth, the man smacked her upside the head and tightened his grip around her neck. “Tell me who that is!”

Her vision hazy, the woman took a good look at the eccentrically dressed man. “I-I think th-that’s Rohan Kishibe. A famous manga artist…” She sputtered out.

The man’s eyes widened. Rohan Kishibe. He was at the scene of Kira’s death. Could he be another of them?

A fit of laughter took over him and he cackled, his jubilation mixing uncomfortably with the woman’s struggle for her life. Continuing to holler, the man dropped the woman to the ground and she remained there, coughing to catch her breath.

“Oh that’s great! I’ve heard he’s good too! You ever read any of his stuff?!”

She looked up at him confused, watching his face twist in excitement as he realized that he, a lowly stand user, was about to kill a man that helped take down the mighty Yoshikage Kira. Staring down at the ground, she shuddered at the sound of the maniac’s voice.

“Hey.”

A chill went down the woman’s spine. Suddenly, the man wasn’t laughing anymore. She turned her head to find a way to escape, seeing nothing but white everywhere. Why couldn’t anyone see what he was doing to her?! The man on the street with them, Rohan, why wasn’t he stepping in? It’s like they weren’t the real world at that moment.

“...I asked you a question.”

Tears filled her eyes again as she met his bored gaze. “W-what?”

Drawing closer to her weak form, and kneeling down on the ground, the man before her grabbed a fistful of her hair and she screamed at the sudden jerking pain.

“I’m asking if you’ve ever read any of his stuff!”

The woman felt a crushing pain in her chest, as if a mysterious force was stepping on her.

“N-no! I haven’t! But please don’t k-”

“Hmph.”

In a split second, the stand’s hands came around the woman’s neck and snapped it, and Foreigner’s God’s ability ceased. The man quickly his himself out of sight, seeing Rohan standing alone in the street.

Rohan turned around at the thud of a body hitting the ground behind him. He looked over to see the dead woman, her eyes blown out and a thick ring of bruises around her neck. Just like what you had gone through. And there it was, the same tag that had been on your body after your attack.

“Foreigner’s God. - AS. ”

Bringing his phone shakily to his ear, Rohan muttered, “It’s him Jotaro. He’s just killed someone else. Get over here now!”

Jotaro felt the same dark intent sweep over him as he heard Rohan speak those words. “Do you see him?”

“No. He hid himself somehow. He’s nearby I bet. Waiting to get me… Come soon. I’m hanging up.” With that, the artist turned his phone off, staying on guard for any attackers.

Jotaro hung up the phone call with Rohan and turned to the others to come with him. You stood up as well to head to the scene when you felt Jotaro’s hand roughly shove you down into your seat.

“No.” He ordered plainly.

“No?! You expect me to be useless again?! I’m the one he attacked first! I wanna see him go down and I wanna help do it!”

“I’m not having you go over there! You can’t get hurt again!”

You stared up at him, shocked at the concern plastered all over his face. But still, you were stubborn. That’s one of the things he loved about you.

“What about you?! What makes you sure you won’t get hurt?! Or even die Jotaro?!”

“I’d rather that than you die (y/n)! The world needs you more than it will ever need me! And I can’t watch someone I love get hurt right in front of me again!”

You stood there frozen, your legs feeling like they were about to give out at those word.

“...What?”

Jotaro felt a hand grip his shoulder, turning to see Josuke motion for him to get going. They needed to catch this guy. And fast. Giving a quick glance to your shaken form, he knew you understood why you needed to stay behind.

You did, of course, know him and his words better than anyone else on Earth.

Jotaro began running with the others towards the scene and when he was a few feet away, you heard Koichi ask your beloved lab partner if he had any idea what kind of stand they were dealing with.

Your mind flooded back to the words that man had spoken to you. A stand. That was the word he kept using. A stand. AS. Those were the initials of the man that nearly strangled you to death. Foreigner’s God. He said that was the name of his stand. A stand. Stand.

Your mind kept repeating that same word over and over again in your head as you stood there in the crowded Morioh street. All of these people. The people you had come to love. Josuke and the others. The strange lives they lived. Jotaro. The strange life he had drawn you into. They were all working to save the thousands of people that lived in this small Japanese town.

You thought back on all they had said, all that you had overheard over the course of the investigation. Things you didn’t understand now flooded your mind. They spoke about the first trip, the killer. Killer. A man named Kira. Killer Queen. Killer Queen must have been his stand. A stand. Is that why you think you’ve been going crazy? Are those third arms stands? ...Did Jotaro have one?

“Gimme… gimme… gimme… GIMME!”

Your whole form awoke from your deep train of thought at the sound of someone calling out to you. You turned around, looking at all the people that were walking nearby. No one was even looking at you. You sighed. You supposed this town really was driving you crazy. You reached for your crutches and took one step forward-

“GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME!!!”

The loud voice rang violently in your head and you fell to your knees from the shock. Covering your ears, you foolishly tried to block out the sound. Your whole body began to feel weak, your whole being heating up. It felt like your blood was boiling, your muscles were tensing, an unwanted rage consuming every cell in your form.

“What’s going on?! What’s happening to m-”

“GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

“Who are you?! What’s going on?!” You thought to yourself, panicking. What was this voice?!

“GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

“Go away…” You muttered under your breath as you knelt on the pavement.

“GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

“Go away…” Your voice subconsciously raised, drawing others’ attention.

“GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

“GO AWAY!” You let a shrill yell, grabbing violently at your hair in terror, causing a crowd of people to form around you.

And then the voice stopped, a quiet renewing in your head. You sat there, gasping for air, your throat still burning from the attack days before, and your screaming had not helped it. You looked up at everyone staring up at you in shocked worry. In a calm daze, you stood up, grabbing your crutches and began to walk away from the others.

Jotaro. Jotaro would know what it means. What that voice was.

- - - - -

Arata Sone had been Yoshikage Kira’s only friend as long as the killer had been alive. He was the only person in the world that Kira confided in. He remembered the night he met the blond murderer. One evening, the normal man came home from a very late night at work to a silent home, his wife sleeping upstairs. With a heavy sigh, Sone was about to enter his bedroom when he heard his wife let out a sudden shriek, before the sound immediately ceased into a renewed silence. Panicked, the man swung the door open to find another man about his age, standing in the middle of the room, a dismembered hand in his grasp. The hand was dripping blood onto the carpet, and Sone’s wife was nowhere to be found. Putting two and two together, the man felt a chill slither up his whole body. He remained stuck in his spot as he watched the blond man draw closer to him. Then something strange happened. Arata Sone knew that he should be afraid, knew that he should be begging for his life, knew that the proper thing to do was flee. But what he did shocked both himself and the murderer before him.

Arata Sone laughed harder than he ever had before.

Cackling loudly to an unsettling degree, he even managed to throw the calm and collected Yoshikage Kira off guard. After several minutes, the laughter died down and the man looked at the other before him with a wide smile on his face.

“Thank you.”

For the first time in a long time, Kira felt a shudder rush through his body.

“Thank you?”

“I was waiting for a good moment to kill her myself.”

In that moment, both men felt one of the great pleasures of life, a pleasure that can only come from being shunned for one’s desires for so long, and then to finally have that desire recognized by another being. The two men called out their stands and both fell into fits of laughter and joy at their shared murderous trait. A new friendship had been born.

A few years later, Arata Sone saw on the news the gruesome image of his beloved friend’s face crushed beneath an ambulance. Seeing what he could only guess were other stand users at the scene, his ever present lust for murder grew within him to a boiling point. Foreigner’s God’s user made a promise to himself. To kill those who had killed his friend.

And today was the day to make that happen. The killer watched from his hiding spot as Jotaro and the others ran to the scene to see a very shaken Rohan Kishibe, who was wondering why the killer had yet to show himself. What none of them knew, was that their attacker had grown as a stand user. He was about to apply what his dear friend Kira had once taught him, and was merely hiding to get them all in one place.

Sone waited for the group to get within his stand’s range.

You slowly made your way on your crutches towards the scene. You needed to know these answers.

“Just a little farther…” He thought as he waited for Jotaro and the others to be within his grasp.

“Just a little farther…” You muttered to yourself as you turned the corner, two streets away from Owsen. An ominous feeling crept over you, making you feel sick to your stomach.

Finally, they were all together within his stand’s range. Arata Sone waited for the right moment, a sick smile on his face.

Jotaro went to speak. “Any sign of h-”

And then the attack was sent into motion. In that split second, each of Morioh’s fighters looked down to see a small mass of white matter form around their ankle. With the snap of his fingers, the matter exploded, taking a chunk off each person’s leg with it. Jotaro, Josuke, Koichi, Okuyasu and Rohan all collapsed to the ground as the street became consumed in a white void the moment they all felt that same sting of pain.

“No human on Earth is unable to feel pain.”

They all looked up from writhing in pain as the man they had been hunting down showed himself, the twisted smile on his face more present than before.

“When a man feels he is at his most cornered, that is often when the most opportunities arise for him. My st-”

In a flash, Jotaro lunged forward, landing a punch to Sone’s face. The smile went away.

“I suppose I’ll take your hand next.” He grunted, grabbing Jotaro’s arm and slamming his whole body to the ground. The moment his hand made contact with the ground, another white mass formed around Jotaro’s finger and exploded, and Star Platinum’s user once again hollered in pain.

“Jotaro!”

The other Morioh fighters called out to their injured friend and all of them got up to attack their enemy together. The moment they took another step, white matter formed once more around their feet and exploded again. The five of them were squirming on the ground in pain once again.

“As I was saying before you so rudely interrupted me, Jotaro Kujo. My stand feeds on that first moment of selfish pain and extends it, trapping others in a blank void without distraction from their pain. It’s a terrifying ability when used properly, though I will admit, back when I attacked your little friend, I wouldn’t have been able to take you all on at once, and that’s the only reason I spared her life…”

He looked down to see Jotaro’s face overcome with rage at your mention. It was a fruitless effort, but Jotaro lunged at his enemy again, only to be knocked on his back. The moment his body touched the ground, several bubbles of the same white substance engulfed the scientist’s back and exploded, leaving bleeding indents all over the tall man’s frame and causing him to gasp at the pain.

“But you see. I have grown as a stand user. You may remember from the tag on your beloved friend’s arm the words Foreigner’s God. Well that my friends, is the name of my stand. Or no… this is something different. A new ability that I’ve learned. A swan song to my dear friend, Yoshikage Kira!”

Their eyes shot open at the mention of that hardly forgotten name. “Kira?” Josuke muttered.

“Oh right… an old friend of mine. I figured when I would be taking revenge for his death, I would use some of that explosive power of his that I loved so much. You see everyone, normally I would only be able to keep one person at a time in my realm. You can only hurt some many in one instance after all!”

It was in that moment, Foreigner’s God revealed itself in its humanoid form right beside its user. Lunging forward, the stand attacked the stationary fighters, knocking them all to the ground. At the very second their bodies touched the ground, the same miniature explosions went off, extending their pain and keeping them in the dangerous realm.

“Gimme gimme gimme…”

You placed a hand against your ear trying to block out that annoying voice that was seemingly coming out of nowhere. You weren’t far from the scene, your mind still running wild, asking a thousand questions as to what a stand even was, what that voice just then was, who were the others really dealing with, what was this man capable of. You weren’t sure of what you would be able to do, but something within you drew your body closer and closer to the street where your friends were currently writhing in agony. You didn’t care about what Jotaro wasn’t telling you. You didn’t care that there were still questions that needed answered. You just wanted to help, anyway you could figure out how.

Staring down at their battered and bleeding bodies, Arata Sone let out another burst of jubilation amidst the void.

“I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this before! If you haven’t already noticed, my once empty void has now been combined with its own type of landmines. You cannot move without a new one setting off, and extending that pain further. You’re going to be stuck in here until you bleed out, with no one to hear you or see you! That is it the secret to my new ability, Arsonist’s Lullaby!”

With that cry, the stand stormed through the five of them once more, knocking them to the ground once more, causing new land mines to set off, all to the tune of its user’s laugh-filled joy. It was then that white walls of the void were beginning to fade, and the scenery of that Morioh street was starting to fade back into view.

“Hmm… it appears this ability takes up more of my energy than I thought. I suppose I can’t kill all five of you at once and remain invisible at the same time. No matter, I can’t sense any other stand users around, just the six of us. I don’t care who sees this! I’ll just kill the witnesses after I kill you!”

It was then that Arata Sone made a fatal mistake, and just like his friend Yoshikage Kira, let his hubris take over. Removing the hiding nature of his stand, but doubling the landmines, the man watched as the five powerful stand users struggled to even get close enough to him to land in a hit. New landmines keep going off, new injuries created.

They were dangerously close to bleeding out, all in plain sight of another stand user. You.

You turned the corner to see the carnage ahead of you, finding your whole group in the enemy’s grasp. You couldn’t even tell what you were seeing. The moment one of your friends moved, they would immediately flinch back in agony. Drawing your attention to the man standing over them, a familiar chill went through you. That was the same man that had attacked you days before. And seeing what he was capable of doing to the people you had grown so close to, you were now more scared than ever of him.

But you noticed something. Amidst the pleasure that this monster was reveling in, there was a distinct look of concentration plastered all over his face. You watched his expression twitch with each time an attack went off on one of your friends. He must be doing something with his mind to attack them. He was focusing. His focus. You needed to capture his focus.

Steeling yourself for what was to come, you dropped your crutches and took a deep breath in, something in you knowing the dangers you were about to face, and the rest of you stupidly seeming not to care.

With a small ounce of bravery, you shouted at the top of your lungs. “Stop it! I won’t let you hurt them!”

Sone turned around at the sudden distraction, surprised that someone was taking notice. His eyebrow raised in intrigue. That could only mean one thing. You were another one.

Jotaro recognized that voice. No… no no no. Looking up, he saw your frightened body shaking and staring straight into the enemy’s eyes without a way to defend yourself.

“No! (y/n) get out of here! You can’t be here! He’ll kill-”

The killer turned back around and punched Jotaro straight in the gut with his stand, sending him flying back into a tree.

“Jotaro!”

You shrieked. All five of them were dying right in front of you, so close to bleeding out. And now his focus was on you, and it had taken all your courage to simply call out and distract him from the others. You watched as the man drew closer, ready to kill another. The same giant smile came over his face again.

“(y/n) huh? And here I thought you were a smart person. Smart enough not to beg for me to hurt you again. But sorry, there’s no escape this time!”

“(y/n) no! Run away! Get out of here!”

You didn’t have time to register whose voice had called out to you before you saw the attacker lunge right at you. You put your arms up over your face as your body collapsed to its knees, your eyes shut in fear, and a horrified scream uncontrollably left your lungs.

“Now die!”

And then, you felt weightless.

“GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME”

As you felt a massive weight being lifted from your body, your eyes shot open to find someone new standing over you. Actually, you weren’t sure if it was someone new, or something new. This new thing, it didn’t seem real.

“GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME”

Your face lit up in shock. Attached to this new thing was the same voice that you had been hearing in your head before. You watched as its fists fired off in a flurry of punches, all hitting their marks on the man’s body. You were mesmerized by its appearance. Its body, about the same size as yours, looked as if it were made of glass. Swirling around within that glass was a pool of different colors. Different blues, purples, oranges and pinks flowed together seamlessly, all encased within the glass structure as it pummeled the enemy before you.

“GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME… A MAN!”

With one last, hard punch to the enemy’s chest, the glass figure stopped its attack and turned around to face you. You shuffled back on the ground, your chest heaving in fear from what had just happened. The figure before you, without speaking a word, drew its arm forward to point at Sone, who was now frozen in his spot before you. Then, everyone watched as small ripples began to form over the man’s whole body. All over his arms, legs, and chest, it looks as if the flesh was moving, as if someone had dropped a pebble into a lake. Then the ripples began to glow brightly, the full spectrum of colors radiating out, and tearing their way from the inside of his body outward. The enemy let out a painful shriek as the searing pain overtook him, more and more light spilling out of his body as the flesh around it became torn and melted. Finally, less than a second later, an explosion of white light burst out of the man’s body. And once that flash was gone, so was he. Foreigner’s God had been defeated. And this thing that you could tell was a part of you, it had been the thing to kill him.

Shakily, you stood up, holding on tightly to your crutches, keeping your gaze on this figure that had erupted out of you.

“...ABBA?”

Still confused, all you knew was that something in your body told you to say that name. The figure turned around to face you and gave you a shy smile before coming closer and embracing your shaking form in a hug. Surprised you could even touch it, you wrapped your arms around ABBA as well, finding to your disbelief that the glass like material felt soft and warm to the touch. You looked down its back, eyeing the pattern of jagged lines all over its body, as well as the swirling colors within. You felt your eyes well up with tears. Something about holding onto this being, one not entirely separate from you, felt so right. It felt like it had been welling up inside you for so long, and you couldn’t help but love it now that it was out.

“A stand…” You muttered. It was all so clear now. Your stand.

After a few moments, ABBA stood up and nodded towards the group of your injured friends. Holding you up, both you and your stand rushed over to Josuke. The teenager’s eyes opened with a pained groan, looking up at you and seeing ABBA at your side. His face lit up in surprise and he tried to sit up before the crushing pain forced him back down onto the ground. He muttered weakly for you to see if Rohan was alright, and you did.

Suddenly, a small white figure burst out of the artist’s body and punched Josuke in the arm. You watched, intrigued as a section of the teen’s arm unfolded like a book. The white figure leaned in, writing in Josuke’s arm the words, “I currently do not have any injuries.”

You watched in awe as the bleeding wounds all over Josuke’s body slowly began to close. Within a few minutes, Josuke was up and mobile as ever. He had several questions to ask you, but first, he had some healing to do. You watched as a pink and blue being, you assumed Josuke’s stand, flew out of his body and hovered over all of the other injured, healing them nearly immediately. They all stood up, groaning from the shadows of pain still left behind from the attacks. One by one, each of them looked up at you, each of their faces growing an expression of surprise and adoration. You felt small under their gazes, looking up at your stand standing next to you. As small as you felt, there was something about ABBA that made you feel powerful. Especially considering what it had just done to defeat the enemy.

“(y/n)... is that your stand…?”

You looked over at Koichi before quickly nodding. “Yeah… I guess it must be right?”

You tried to shrug it off with a nervous laugh, but even you were still in awe of this new ability. Finally, you turned to Jotaro, watching his face for a reaction. The gentle giant stood frozen at a loss of words, unsure of what to say. His gaze turned to ABBA, a melancholy look of admiration and love spread over his features.

“Come on Jotaro… say something. Don’t worry. I’ll understand-”

You muttered softly before Jotaro rushed forward and cut you off with a tight hug. You rested your smaller body against him, tears of relief streaming down your face, grateful that everyone was still alive. You looked up to gaze into Jotaro’s blue eyes, seeing that he had begun to tear up as well. Then something caught your eye. Looking over the tall man’s shoulder, you saw a purple skinned spirit faze out of your partner’s body and float over to ABBA, starting deeply into your stand’s face. ABBA, who had before been so calm and collected, now shrunk back a little bit with a childish giggle at the sight of the handsome stand before her. As ABBA held her face in her hands, you felt your cheeks flush bright red. Your eyes widened and you pushed Jotaro away from you, turning to your stand.

“H-hey wait a minute! ABBA, it’s not like that!”

“Gimme?”

ABBA asked innocently as she grabbed Star Platinum’s hand tightly in her own. Jotaro now felt his face heat up and turn bright red. With a heavy sigh, he watched as his stand wrapped yours in its arms, chuckling a bit at your embarrassment.

“Sorry about all this. His name’s Star Platinum, and he’s definitely more… emotional than I am.”

Your eyes widened at what that could possibly mean. Wait… did they think that you and Jotaro were…

“W-wait it’s not like that! He and I are just… “

“Gimme?”

“No! W-well I mean I care about him but I-”

“(y/n).”

You turned around to face Jotaro as he calmly took his hat off, revealing the jet black hair that you loved seeing.

“I’m so glad you’re okay (y/n).”

Your heart swelled at his words and you slowly turned around to see ABBA and Star Platinum holding each other lovingly, a warmth erupting throughout your whole body at the sight. The feeling of Jotaro grabbing your hand caught your attention and met his gaze once more.

“He’s the personification of my thoughts and well… it seems like your stand, ABBA right? It seems like she’s the personification of yours.”

The two of you watched as your stands talk to one another in their own little language, each enamored by the other’s presence. You turned back to Jotaro, seeing that his face had drawn closer.

“Yeah… I guess... you’re… right.”

As you breathed out that last word, Jotaro closed the gap between the two of you, your lips connecting in a sweet, long awaited kiss. You wrapped your arms around the fellow scientist’s, and now fellow stand user’s, neck, giggling slightly as he lifted your body off the ground to hold you tightly in his arms. When you two broke for air, Jotaro quickly kissed you again, holding you up like his life depended on it.

When he finally set you down, Jotaro Kujo placed a hand to the side of your face and wiped away your tears. With a small laugh, he turned over to your stand.

“Hey ABBA, what took you so long huh?”

“...Gimme.” ABBA shrugged a little bit and pointed at you.

You smiled, wiping your tears away. “She said she wouldn’t appear until I was either ready for it, or I really needed her.”

Jotaro rolled his eyes at your stand. “Well you really waited for the exact moment that she needed you huh-Ow!”

Jotaro grumbled a bit as Star punched him in the arm, annoyed that his user was making fun of this new pretty stand. ABBA grinned mischievously before looking around at the rest of the group, and seeing all of the other stands.

A feeling of happiness swelled within the stand’s heart. Ever since you had pricked your finger on the arrow, for so long she had been growing, becoming more and more trapped within you. It had been lonely seeing you struggle without her help. It had been upsetting to see you not yet be ready for her to show herself. But now, eyeing all the others, Heaven’s Door, Echoes, the Hand, Crazy Diamond, and especially Star Platinum, ABBA really didn’t feel alone anymore. And seeing now how the other stand users of Morioh rushed over to hug you and vocalize their shock at you having a stand, ABBA could tell that you didn’t really feel alone anymore either. With a sigh of content, your stand fazed back into your body as you followed the rest of the group away from the scene and back to the hotel to get some much needed rest.

You leaned against Jotaro’s frame as he wrapped as a strong arm around you. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat everyone! Tonio’s, my treat!” He said with a bright smile.

Josuke and Okuyasu cheered, “and (y/n) can meet Tonio’s stand!”

You turned back to the teens in shock as you all walked ahead. “Tonio has a stand?!”

Koichi gave a firm nod. “Yeah. So does Hazamada.”

“That weird kid?!”

“My girlfriend Yukako too.”

“Damn… I had no idea…”

You all shared a laugh as you left to enjoy a well deserved victory, the sun setting over the beautiful town of Morioh, another dark force defeated by the town's newest savior.

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bestworstcase · 4 years

Text

a comprehensive guide to zhan tiri’s lore or, it’s not that confusing or contradictory, i promise

first things first: if you are somebody who pays attention to creator interviews and you are interested in canonical zhan tiri lore, i want you to gather up everything you’ve ever heard chris say about zhan tiri and erase it from of your brain. i know he’s made statements regarding his interpretation of her backstory but this post was made by death of the author gang and we are interested ONLY in what is stated and shown in the text itself. meaning belongs to the viewers, and creator interpretation is irrelevant.

ready? let’s go!

who or what is zhan tiri?

zhan tiri’s first appearance in coronan history occurred thousands of years ago; in plus est en vous, rapunzel specifies two thousand, but every other mention of zhan tiri as a historical figure is “eons” or “millennia,” and the most objective source we have—the plus est flashback—is marked “thousands of years ago.”

there is no direct evidence to suggest that she existed prior to this, but i think there is enough circumstantial support for this theory to conclude that she did: namely, the existence of idols and other religious iconography associated with her name. my reasoning here is as follows:

the plus est en vous flashback shows demanitus banishing zhan tiri to the lost realm. this makes it—give or take a few years—the last point in time when zhan tiri would have been free and thus able to make any lasting cultural impact.

it follows that any relevant historical artifacts we see must predate the plus est flashback, as they represent a time when zhan tiri had a significant enough cultural impact to fuel their creation.

moreover, though sugracha and tromus are the only disciples of zhan tiri who directly appear in the series, it is implied that there are many more:

Lord Demanitus was in a constant battle with Zhan Tiri and his brethren. Over the years, Demanitus captured many of the evil spirits and held them prisoner in that chamber. (S1, Painter’s Block)

much of the coronan folklore concerning the demanitus-zhan tiri relationship is... wrong, but due to sugracha’s verifiable imprisonment in the demanitus chamber, i feel it reasonable to conclude that this tidbit is correct in that there are, or at least were, other disciples held inside the demanitus chamber. and, as with the historical artifacts associated with zhan tiri, it is logical to conclude that whatever cult produced these disciples predated the plus est flashback.

so, we’ve established the historical artifacts and iconography associated with zhan tiri came before the plus est flashback, but what exactly does that entail, and what does it tell us about zhan tiri’s true nature?

icons of zhan tiri: an overview

#1: janus point

janus point is a henge, and based on the iconography—the ram’s head symbol is plastered all over the jardinière and the henge pillars—it appears to be a site dedicated specifically to zhan tiri. the same symbol also appears on the seal in which sugracha’s spirit was trapped inside the demanitus chamber and is unique in that the muzzle appears to corkscrew.

the appearance of the henge evokes a quasi-religious flavor, and in who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, rapunzel refers to the site as a “mystical ground.” at the very least, this is a ritual site that was heavily associated with zhan tiri, and it would not be much of a stretch to conclude she was outright worshipped here.

#2: the spire idol

this artifact appears in both the keeper of the spire and race to the spire. it’s a small stone idol kept in the spire’s... gatehouse, for lack of a better term, and it depicts the basic ram-headed hulking demon zhan tiri. nothing is said about it in either episode.

#3: the tree of zhan tiri

there is zhan tiri iconography all over this tree.

the stone ram’s head over the entrance...

...the bas-relief in the first chamber...

...more ram’s heads over all the interior archways and the scroll shelves...

...and a return of the corkscrew-snouted ram’s head from janus point on the altar for this glorious oversized flytrap.

#4: the shell house

tromus’s shrine gives us yet another variation on the ram’s head symbol as well as another full-body idol and also, though i didn’t get a screenshot of it because it’s hard to see with the way tumblr resizes images, a little ram’s head symbol on the clasp of his robes.

so where did this imagery come from?

with the exception of the spire idol, there is evidence to suggest that zhan tiri herself had direct influence over the design of all this iconography.

janus point seems to have held some importance to zhan tiri herself; when she appears to varian in cassandra’s revenge, she surrounds herself with pieces of it and superimposes her own head on top of the tree.

further, the corkscrew-snouted ram’s head reoccurs at the great tree, which is unique among the sites associated with her in that we know zhan tiri actually resided there for what sounds like a significant amount of time; according to the legend adira shares, the great tree was zhan tiri’s “stronghold.”

this means that it’s plausible that either (a) zhan tiri herself shaped the symbols on display in the tree, or (b) they were modeled after her by her contemporaries. the interesting thing about this, there are four distinct variations on the ram’s head symbol inside the tree: 1) long, thick snout with elongated horns; 2) angular, no snout, short horns, 3) corkscrew-snouted, and 4) humanlike skull with ram horns.

and likewise, the iconography inside the shell house was created by someone we know to have been a contemporary of zhan tiri’s; tromus was one of the students of demanitus who turned against him to join zhan tiri instead, and it is logical to assume that he did, in fact, see zhan tiri in the flesh at some point—and his ram’s head design is yet again different.

this begs the question: if all five of these designs were modeled on zhan tiri herself, why is there such variety in the basic shape? i believe this is a strong point in favor of considering zhan tiri a shapeshifter who chose and stuck with a single general form for long periods of time but casually and frequently modified the smaller details. and in fact, we do see her do this in season three, with the most notable occurrence being. this:

so, we have concluded that:

zhan tiri’s historical iconography predates the plus est flashback, and

accurately represented her physical appearance from that time

from this, the only reasonable conclusion is that zhan tiri is a shapeshifter, who spent a considerable amount of time in the giant, ram-headed demon form depicted in all of her pre-demanitus iconography.

but she’s human in the plus est flashback!

in the series, human characters are designed with a wide diversity of shapes and sizes, but their color palettes stay within the range of realism, with natural skin tones and eye/hair colors. zhan tiri is... not like that.

she may be human-shaped, but her color palette sits drastically outside the norms the series has established for human characters; her skin is dead white, her hair is a dull lilac color, her eyes are bright purple with a circle of gold around the pupils. none of these are natural human colors.

there is precedent in the series for marked changes in appearance and coloration as a result of meddling with magical forces: when cassandra claims the moonstone, it turns her hair and eyes bright blue and gives her an unhealthy-looking pallor. rapunzel’s hair, likewise, turns gold due to the sundrop’s influence. thus, taking this in isolation, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility to conclude that zhan tiri, too, has had her appearance altered by whatever magical nonsense she’s been mucking around with.

however, if we look at this design in the context of the conclusions we’ve already drawn about her historical iconography and what that tells us about her true nature, i think a much simpler and more plausible explanation is that zhan tiri, being a shapeshifter, donned this humanlike form in order to get closer to demanitus. there could be any number of reasons for doing so—considering demanitus’s fixation on seeking the drops for the right reasons, i would imagine creating some distance from the malevolent monster form in order to gain his trust would have played a role in this decision.

five final points in favor of shapeshifting

#1: zhan tiri in the lost realm

we see in plus est en vous that the lost realm causes absurd magical mutations in people who are trapped there. varian theorizes that these mutations could become irreversible if they stay in the lost realm for long enough, but given that they are all freed shortly thereafter and the changes revert, there is no concrete evidence for or against this theory.

still, this raises an interesting question: if the lost realm mutates anyone who enters it, and if these changes become irreversible after long periods of time what would happen if a shapeshifter was trapped there for thousands of years?

when zhan tiri escapes from the lost realm, she isn’t all that different in appearance from when she entered it. she’s much smaller. her hairstyle has changed a bit. she lost the bag at some point. but that’s... really it. it’s a much less drastic alteration than we see happening with the coronans, who are shown transforming into objects and animals, with their bodies distorted, or with pieces of themselves becoming detached and floating away. and these changes also serve her manipulation of cass by making her appear small, weak, and harmless, so it isn’t out of the realm of possibility for zhan tiri to have chosen this form for herself.

i think it is reasonable to assume that zhan tiri, being a shapeshifter herself, was able to, if not outright resist whatever magic in the lost realm causes these mutations, at least “fix” them as they happened. her brief appearance in painter’s block supports the idea that she retained the ability to shapeshift while inside the lost realm, since she appears there as the ram-headed demon.

#2: her shapeshifting disciples

both tromus and sugracha are able to appear human, and sugracha states that she can take “many forms” in painter’s block. though it’s never explained where they got this power, it is reasonable to conclude that they received it from zhan tiri—she is their master, and the implication very much seems to be that it was she who gave them their creepy green spirit form of immortality.

and, if zhan tiri is handing out powers of shapeshifting to her minions, it follows that she must be capable of shapeshifting herself, too.

#3: gremlin zhan tiri’s demonic shadow

this shows up in cassandra’s revenge and plus est en vous and seems to straightforwardly suggest that zhan tiri’s true nature is closer to the ram-headed demon, with the humanlike form being more of a disguise.

#4: we see her shapeshift in plus est en vous.

she briefly loses her grip on the humanlike nature of the gremlin form when rapunzel blasts her with the sundrop, as i noted above. and later—once she has the drops in hand and the gremlin form has no further use to her—she sheds it altogether to return to yet another variation on the ram-headed demon, albeit one that looks more... monkey than ram:

#5: and finally, zhan tiri herself says so

in race to the spire:

I believe Cassandra promised us a proper introduction, but she failed to deliver, didn’t she? Frankly, I’m surprised you hadn’t guessed who I am—seeing as how we’ve already met, in a way. You see, over the centuries, I’ve taken the form of whatever suits my needs: a warlock, a demon... even a blizzard.

she also portrays herself as the ram-headed demon in the vision she gives to cassandra in once a handmaiden:

now... zhan tiri is a liar, and if these were statements given in isolation of any supporting evidence, i would be skeptical. however, when all the evidence in the text points toward zhan tiri being a shapeshifting entity as the most logical explanation for everything we see of her throughout the series, i’m inclined to take her corroborating statements as a factual confirmation.

in conclusion: zhan tiri is, and has always been, a shapeshifter. if she has a “true” form, the evidence points toward it being the large, ram-headed, tentacled demon, while the humanlike shape(s) we see in season three are forms she assumed to ingratiate herself to demanitus and, later, cassandra.

what’s the timeline with her and lord demanitus?

time in this series is fuzzy. this applies not only to zhan tiri and demanitus, but to every historical event discussed by the characters and the timespans covered by each season, where the only time markers are the lantern festivals that celebrate rapunzel’s nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first birthdays and a few throwaway lines about the passage of months. thus, there is no way to say with absolute certainly when any specific event in zhan tiri’s backstory occurred chronologically. we have to do our best to arrange the events we know about in an order that is logical.

this is complicated by the fact that we know demanitus fudged some of the details to make himself look better to rapunzel and eugene: he obscured the fact that he and zhan tiri were working partners for an unknown length of time. this verifiable lie of omission casts a patina of doubt over everything else he says regarding their shared past, but it also accounts for discrepancies between what we see and what we’re told.

as always in unreliable narrator situations, what we see has far more weight than what we’re told. with this in mind, there are three tiers of trustworthiness in the information we are given about zhan tiri’s past: most trustworthy are the flashbacks and things we see with our own eyes; in the middle are the accounts of zhan tiri’s contemporaries—demanitus and the disciples; and at the bottom are the folk legends recounted by xavier and adira.

so what do we see?

#1: zhan tiri and demanitus searched for the drops together

just how this arrangement came to be is unclear, but i think we can glean some interesting information from the plus est flashback.

DEMANITUS: Zhan Tiri! This is your last warning! Give up this foolish quest for power.

ZHAN TIRI: This quest for the sundrop and moonstone was both of ours.

DEMANITUS: It was, until you made it about something darker. You made it all about gaining power for yourself! You turned your back on what was right!

ZHAN TIRI: And you turned your back on me. As long as I live, I will never stop until I have that power!

DEMANITUS: I know.

[He activates the portal to the Lost Realm.]

ZHAN TIRI: This is far from over! I will have that power, and when I do, I will destroy your beloved Corona! I promise you!

[The portal closes.]

DEMANITUS: I had no choice, Vigor. I had to send her to the Lost Realm.

this suggests a couple things.

first, the working relationship between demanitus and zhan tiri broke down because her selfish desire for power clashed with his idealism. demanitus didn’t want the power of the combined sundrop and moonstone for himself; he wanted to reunite them in the service of a cause he believed to be right. zhan tiri, by contrast, was interested solely in acquiring that power for herself—but given how demanitus reacted when he learned this, it seems obvious that he didn’t know that about zhan tiri until later in their relationship.

in other words, there was some level of deceit on her part involved with their partnership from the very beginning. she hid her true motives from him; she may also have hidden her true nature from him. i think there is support both for and against the latter point: in the present day, demanitus describes zhan tiri as “a warlock”—a word zhan tiri uses as an example of her duplicitous shapeshifting—but he also describes her as being “from another realm”—suggesting he knew her to be something otherworldly or inhuman.

i tend to fall on the side of demanitus knowing her basic nature while they were contemporaries, but believing she shared his more noble motivations at first, but i think a strong argument could be made in favor of him believing her to be human from the start and only discovering her true nature later.

second, demanitus appears to have cared for zhan tiri far more than she cared for him. in the flashback, she’s angry at his betrayal, but her focus is on her desire for the power of the sundrop and moonstone. by contrast, demanitus gives her plenty of warning and chances to turn away from her dark path, pleads with her to “give up” her selfish motivations, and expresses clear regret after her refusal forces him to banish her to the lost realm.

this, again, supports the interpretation that zhan tiri manipulated or used demanitus to further her own goals, just as she would later do with cassandra, rather than this being a true partnership that broke down as a result of differing goals. she doesn’t care about him any more than she cared about cass.

#2: zhan tiri’s behavior in season three

season three firmly establishes zhan tiri as a skilled manipulator who does not care about anyone or anything besides herself and her pursuit of her own power. i won’t get into the weeds with this—if you want to read a breakdown of (some) of zhan tiri’s manipulation of cass in season three, i wrote a post about once a handmaiden here—because for our purposes, we just need to understand that the basic character of zhan tiri as we see her in the present should inform our interpretation of her behavior in the past.

in other words, i think it is safe to assume that zhan tiri applied similar techniques and principles of manipulation to demanitus as we see her do to cassandra in the present; to wit, she would have sought to make him emotionally dependent on her by exploiting whatever vulnerabilities she could find and presenting herself to him as a trustworthy friend and kindred spirit.

#3: she is not close to her disciples

once she is freed, zhan tiri never so much as mentions tromus or sugracha again. moreover, it is unclear how much personal information they actually know about her: in painter’s block, sugracha refers to zhan tiri as “he,” which could indicate one of several things:

zhan tiri is female, but her disciples don’t know her well enough for assumptions they made about her gender based on the appearance of the ram-headed demon form to have been corrected, or

zhan tiri doesn’t subscribe to human conceptualizations of gender, and both “she” and “he” are acceptable pronouns because the gendered connotations of both are equally irrelevant.

i, personally, prefer the second explanation, but the first is tenuously supported by how little zhan tiri cares for her disciples.

what do her contemporaries say?

lord demanitus’s telling of his conflict with zhan tiri is as follows:

Millennia ago, a mysterious event in the heavens divided an ancient power in two. The sundrop and moonstone fell to the earth. Three of my pupils and I researched the legend of the sundrop and moonstone, two elements that longed to reunite. We searched, but alas could not find them.

Unfortunately, we were not the only ones looking. My pupils betrayed me, and summoned my old nemesis, Zhan Tiri: a warlock from another realm, bent on destruction. It took all of my powers to banish the evil from our world.

I knew the research I had written about the sundrop and moonstone was valuable. Dangerous, in evil hands. So I tore the scroll and hid the pieces...

this exposition also shows us the identities of the three pupils who turned against demanitus and joined zhan tiri instead: sugracha, tromus, and gothel.

their identities are all confirmed outside of this sequence: sugracha and tromus appear as loyal servants of zhan tiri, and in a tale of two sisters, rapunzel and cassandra discover gothel’s research on the sundrop flower, including a piece that is an obvious attempt to recreate the demanitus scroll, indicating that gothel was indeed his student at one time:

though it appears that gothel abandoned zhan tiri as well once she found the sundrop flower, as she hoarded its power for herself rather than seeking to use it to free her former master from the lost realm.

now... because demanitus leaves out the part of this story that would involve admitting he worked with zhan tiri before she became his “nemesis,” we can’t say with any certainty when this business with his traitorous pupils freeing her happened—or, indeed, if it actually happened that way at all. it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that the three disciples could have been pupils of both demanitus and zhan tiri, who stuck with zhan tiri after demanitus betrayed her and banished her to the lost realm.

my personal belief is that demanitus gathered his pupils to help him continue the search for the sundrop and moonstone after the flashback in plus est, only for them to be lured away by zhan tiri (perhaps via communication in dreams or visions, as cassandra’s revenge establishes that she’s capable of entering people’s dreams whilst trapped in the lost realm) and free her by reactivating the portal—thus shifting demanitus’s focus from “find the sundrop and moonstone” to “put the demon back in her prison and clean up this mess.”

however, this is all very up for personal interpretation, because demanitus’s version of events is verifiably deceptive and thus cannot be taken as hard fact.

and what do the folk legends say?

#1: the blizzard

Eons ago, an evil warlock, Zhan Tiri, had a deep hatred for Corona, and cast a spell which caused a blizzard to sweep across the land. The storm destroyed everything in its path. All would have been lost, had it not been for the ancient engineer and inventor, Lord Demanitus.

Using both magic and science, Demanitus built a massive subterranean machine deep in the Coronan mountains. This mighty device had the ability to change the direction of the wind, and it pushed the flurries out to the sea. The day was saved. Zhan Tiri had indeed been defeated. But some say the curse of the storm lives on, and is simply waiting to strike again...

we know that the basic event described here really happened, because the demanitus device does exist in the location indicated by the legend and works just as described. the details may have been glossed over or elaborated on over the centuries, but we know it is accurate in the essentials.

until recently, i put the events described in this legend immediately before the plus est flashback, to account for the snow on the ground during the flashback, but over the course of writing this post i have actually changed my own mind, and i now think that zhan tiri’s blizzard occurred when the disciples freed her from the lost realm for the first time. why? well, the imagery used to illustrate xavier’s telling of the blizzard legend is directly echoed by the imagery used to illustrate zhan tiri’s release in demanitus’s account in lost and found:

queen for a day.

and lost and found.

the color palettes here are identical, and in both, zhan tiri is depicted as the ram-headed demon, in almost the same pose, rising out of the mountains—which fits with both the location of the demanitus device and the possibility that she created (or became) the blizzard immediately after being released from the portal in the coronan mountains. moreover, her hatred of corona is based on her hatred of demanitus and her vengeful desire to destroy everything he loves, which would logically be stronger after he successfully imprisoned her once.

#2: the great tree

Millennia ago, this tree was once a sentient being, a force for good. But it was corrupted by the evil sorcerer [Zhan Tiri] to destroy any who approached it. It was Zhan Tiri’s stronghold. Inside it, he was invincible. But Lord Demanitus put a stop to the tree’s magic using an enchanted spear.

as with xavier’s blizzard legend, the fact of the spear’s existence and the behavior of the great tree itself once the spear is removed proves the basic accuracy of this legend.

the difficulty hear lies with pinpointing when all this occurred. unlike the blizzard, there are no contextual clues to suggest where this conflict at the great tree may lie in the general timeline, so any conclusions we draw must be based on speculation. the only thing we know for sure is that zhan tiri’s residence in the great tree ended during demanitus’s lifetime, which puts a hard stop in it at about two thousand years ago.

my theory is that zhan tiri corrupted and resided in the great tree long before demanitus’s time. adira calls it her stronghold, and as discussed in the first section, the great tree has the greatest variety and frequency of zhan tiri iconography of any location in the series. one of the symbols inside the great tree is even found thousands of miles away at janus point—the corkscrew-snouted ram’s head—which draws a possible line of influence from the tree to janus point. taken together, all of this suggests a long period of time during which the great tree was zhan tiri’s tree.

and as for when it entered into the conflict between demanitus and zhan tiri, i believe there are two possibilities:

demanitus knew of zhan tiri’s use of the great tree as a fortress, and she allowed him inside while they were collaborating in their search for the drops. she likely hid the violent nature of its defenses from him for a while; then she either let her guard down and allowed him to glimpse more of the truth, or the tree as attacked and he inadvertently witnessed a brutal massacre. either way, this is what clued him in to her ulterior motives, and he crafted the spear to destroy the tree’s magic—and it is this betrayal that zhan tiri references in the plus est flashback when she says “you turned your back on me.”

zhan tiri had been using the great tree as a home for many years without the aggressive kill-anyone-who-enters security measures, allowing it to function as a library or house of research. this may have been how she and demanitus encountered each other in the first place, and would go a long way to explaining why demanitus trusted her initially. it wasn’t until demanitus turned against her and imprisoned her in the lost realm, and her subsequent release by his pupils, that she became enraged and turned the great tree into an indiscriminate killing machine and demanitus forged his magical spear to stop her.

i think both options are equally plausible, and since there isn’t any direct evidence one way or another, this is another case for personal interpretation and preference to really come into play.

so, to sum up...

at some point around two thousand years ago, lord demanitus encountered zhan tiri, and she persuaded him to trust her and work with her to find the mythical sundrop and moonstone. she was most likely just using him the whole time, while he grew to care for her but became so uncomfortable with her violent methods and selfish motivations that he felt he had no choice to imprison her in the lost realm.

his pupils—whom he either once shared with zhan tiri, or gathered after the breakdown of his relationship with zhan tiri—turned against him, and either took her side in the conflict, or successfully freed her from the lost realm. i think the latter explanation(s) fit better with the information we are given.

the blizzard discussed in queen for a day most likely happened after the plus est flashback and her subsequent release by the disciples.

the conflict at the great tree most likely occurred either right before or at some point after the plus est flashback and her subsequent release, but it is plausible to assume that by this point she had been residing in the great tree for a considerable amount of time prior to working with demanitus.

demanitus defeated zhan tiri and her disciples, imprisoned her in the lost realm, imprisoned most if not all of her disciples in the demanitus chamber, destroyed the portal to the lost realm so she couldn’t easily be brought back, and transferred his soul into the immortal body of a monkey so he could spend the next two thousand years as a... watchman of sorts, over the drops, probably with the hope that he could step in to prevent zhan tiri’s release if necessary.

#rta #tts #zhan tiri #demanitus #w h e w

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xhxhxhx · 4 years

Text

I Know, I Know, I Know

In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut quotes David Irving for the death toll from the firebombing of Dresden: 135,000 dead. Irving happens to be a Holocaust denier. And that number happens to be a lie.

Towards the end of the book, Vonnegut quotes Irving by name:

One of the books that Lily had brought Rumfoord was The Destruction of Dresden, by an Englishman named David Irving. It was an American edition, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1964. What Rumfoord wanted from it were portions of the forewords by his friends Ira C. Eaker, Lieutenant General, U.S.A.F., retired, and British Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, K.C.B., K.B.E., M.C., D.F.C., A.F.C.

I find it difficult to understand Englishmen or Americans who weep about enemy civilians who were killed but who have not shed a tear for our gallant crews lost in combat with a cruel enemy, wrote his friend General Eaker in part. I think if would have been well for Mr. Irving to have remembered, when he was drawing the frightful picture of the civilians killed at Dresden, that V-1’s and V-2’s were at the very time falling on England, killing civilian men, women, and children indiscriminately, as they were designed and launched to do. It might be well to remember Buchenwald and Coventry, too.

Eaker’s foreword ended this way:

I deeply regret that British and U.S. bombers killed 135,000 people in the attack on Dresden, but I remember who started the last war and I regret even more the loss of more than 5,000,000 Allied lives in the necessary effort to completely defeat and utterly destroy nazism.

So it goes.

The figure is significant. It is more than Hiroshima, where 70,000 to 80,000 died in the initial bombing. “Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance,” Vonnegut writes early in Slaughterhouse-Five. “I didn’t know that either.” Not until he read Irving. presumably.

That figure was significant to the press coverage, like the New York Times review of March 31, 1969:

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an indescribable writer whose seven previous books are like nothing else on earth, was accorded the dubious pleasure of witnessing a 20th-century apocalypse. During World War II, at the age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath the city of Dresden, "the Florence of the Elbe." He was there on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military significance.

Or the Sunday review of April 6, 1969:

Kurt Vonnegut speaks with the voice of the “silent generation,” and his quiet words explain the quiescence of his contemporaries. This is especially true of his sixth novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in which he looks back -- or tries to look back -- at his wartime experience. In the first chapter he tells us how for over 20 years he has been trying to re-create a single event, the bombing of Dresden by American and British pilots. Vonnegut had an unusual perspective on that event. Safe, as a prisoner of war in a deep cellar under the stockyards, he emerged to find 135,000 German civilians smoldering around him. Dresden had been an open city. We closed it. We.

They led with the figure. It was important. This was the above the headline in the Sunday review: “Like Lot’s wife, he looked back -- at the destruction of Dresden and 135,000 dead.”

As Richard Evans discovered in the 1990s, Irving more or less fabricated that figure. As he recounted in Lying About Hitler (2001):

How many people did Irving think had been killed in the raids, and on what evidence did he base his estimates? The first source he used was information supplied to him by Hans Voigt, who had been a local official in Dresden at the time of the raids. Four days after the attack, missing persons search bureau was set up in the Saxon Ministry of the Interior. Voigt, at the time an assistant school master. was put in charge of establishing a dead persons department for the bureau to collect the records and personal effects of those people already dead, and of those still buried in the ruins. Irving said that it was this department which was “responsible for the identification of the victims and for arriving at some final estimate of the death-roll.”

Voigt’s office had four different filing systems for different data. The first were garment cards, onto which samples of garments taken from unidentified bodies were pasted, together with date, location, and so on. Voigt told Irving that up to the time of the capitulation “we had almost twelve thousand of these cards completed.” The second list was of miscellaneous personal belongings of the unidentified. The third was an alphabetical list of bodies identified by personal papers. The fourth was a list of wedding rings recovered from bodies. With these four indices the dead persons department was “able to clear up the identity of some 40,000 of the dead.” Thus Irving arrived at an “absolute minimum” death toll of 40,000. This in turn tallied with the figure of 39,773 given by Georg Feydt, the first person to write a reasonably considered account of the attack in 1953.

However, Irving did not accept 40,000 as the actual figure because Voigt had told Irving that he himself “estimated that the final number would have been 135,000.” In 1963 Irving was reported to have explained: “The Germans simply struck off the first digit to make the figure more acceptable to the Russians, who contended that Bomber Command was not a powerful weapon.”” In other words, he apparently thought that the Russians wanted to reassure the citizens of the Eastern bloc that Western bombing was not very dangerous. There was no evidence for this supposition. Voigt wrote to Irving as early as September 1962, blaming the amendment on “Dresden officials” (especially the then mayor Walter Weidauer), who “reduced the figure out of fear of the ‘Big Four,’ so as not to speak ill of them.” This did not seem to me to be particularly strong motive. The Russians were not involved in the bombing of Dresden. At the height of the Cold War, they would have had every incentive for inflating the figure, so as to put the Western Allies in a bad light. Yet Irving repeated the claim in 1995.

There was no corroborative evidence of any kind about the missing digit. Moreover Voigt was apparently not a popular man with the communist authorities in Dresden. Weidauer decried him as a “virulent fascist” who had been rightfully thrown out of East Germany. This was typical of the language the Communists used for people who proved a nuisance to them. Still, Voigt, then living in West Germany, may have had a political motive in accusing the Soviet and East German authorities of falsifying the statistics. Weidauer added that the death register was still extant in the Dresden Town Hall with a highest card number of 31,102 for an unidentified body. In addition there were the so-called street books. The numbers in the street books, which were compiled according to the streets and houses where the dead were found, exactly matched those on the registration cards. Irving could only sustain the figure of 135,000, therefore, by relying on a postwar speculation which he must have known was shaky and was discounted by most other writers on the raid, with good reason. This did not say much for his claim that he based his work on careful research into contemporary documentation.

In later editions, Irving further falsified his numbers, and claimed higher death tolls, but the 135,000 always depended on that invention. He put a "1″ in front of “35,000″ and claimed that as the figure.

The probable death toll was lower than that 35,000, maybe 25,000 to 30,000. That came out in the judgment at Irving’s libel trial, David Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, [2000] EWHC QB 115:

13.124 When asked what was the supporting evidence for these inflated claims, Irving relied on the estimates for the number of casualties made by Mehnert and Fetscher and on the recollection of Frau Grosse, which I have mentioned. He also testified that his claims had been based on estimates as high as 250,000 which he had received from a great many individuals. Irving neither identified the individuals nor disclosed the letters. He prayed in aid also the fact that there were in Dresden at the time an unquantified number of refugees fleeing before the advancing Russian army. Finally he relied on the estimate of Hans Voigt, summarised in paragraph 11.52 above, that 135,000 had been killed. But, as stated in paragraph 13.126 below, none of this material casts significant doubt on the accumulation of evidence that the true death toll was within the bracket of 25-30,000.

[...]

13.126 It appears to me that the evidence which I have summarised in paragraph 13.124 affords a very slender basis for the claims which Irving has made for the numbers killed in the raids. The evidence of Mehnert, Fetscher and Frau Grosse was secondhand and unverified. In the absence of any indication on what they were based, I do not consider the Irving should have given any credence to estimates in letters from unidentified individuals. His speculation about the number of refugees does little to cast doubt on the reliability of the figures quoted in the official reports. Voigt's evidence was uncorroborated and unlikely to be correct in the light of the number of deaths recorded on the official cards. In my view, Irving should not have quoted numbers based on this evidence. ... In my judgment the estimates of 100,000 and more deaths which Irving continued to put about in the 1990s lacked any evidential basis and were such as no responsible historian would have made.

For Irving, Dresden was a useful tool. If there were 135,000 or 250,000 dead at Dresden, it helped even the scales with the Allies. It was the mirror image of his Holocaust denial: German crimes were overstated and Allied crimes were understated.

Irving wanted his readers to see the bombing of Germany as the moral equivalent of the Holocaust. Evans again:

Irving wrote to Kimber in 1963 declaring his view that the crime of World War II had not been genocide but "innocentocide," the killing of civilians, and that therefore the Eastern and Western powers were just as guilty in his eyes as the Germans and the Japanese. For him Dresden was a crime. Nowhere in the earlier editions was there an explicit effort to draw the parallel. Instead, Irving allowed others to draw this obvious conclusion and then somewhat disingenuously congratulated them on their independence of mind. Thus he wrote to Sydney Silverman MP, who had reviewed the book in Tribune: "I am not someone who holds political views similar to your own, but I really must congratulate you— in spite of this—for having stuck your neck out so firmly and unmistakably by drawing a parallel between the Nazis' atrocities and what happened in Dresden; this is something I myself did not claim in my book.”

Three decades later, Irving was making the parallel explicit. In a speech delivered in Toronto on 8 November 1992, he estimated the numbers who died in Auschwitz (“most of them from epidemics,” he said) as 100,000. “Around one hundred thousand dead in that brutal slave labour camp.” Around 25,000 of these had been killed by shooting or hanging, according to German radio reports from Auschwitz received and decrypted by the British, he added. He continued:

Twenty-five thousand killed, if we take this grossly inflated figure to be on the safe side: That is a crime; there is no doubt. Killing twenty-five thousand in four years—1941, 1942, 1943, and 1944—that is a crime; there is no doubt. Let me show you a picture of twenty-five thousand people being killed in twenty-five minutes. Here it is, in my book, a vivid picture of twenty-five thousand people being killed in twenty-five minutes by the British (in February 1945) in Pforzheim, a little town where they make jewellery and watches in Baden, Germany. Twenty-five thousand people were being burned alive. ... That is what it looks like when twenty-five thousand civilians are being burned alive in twenty-five minutes. One person in four, in twenty-five minutes. One person in four in that town. As I said when I was speaking in Kitchener yesterday, it is as though somebody came to Kitchener, a town of about a hundred thousand people, and killed one person in four in twenty-five minutes. That too is a crime. Twenty-five minutes! In Auschwitz it was a crime committed over four years. You don't get it spelled out to you like that. Except by us, their opponents. When you put things into perspective like that, of course, it diminishes their Holocaust—that word with a capital letter.

Irvings almost incantatory repetition of the figures "twenty-five thousand" and "twenty-five minutes," mentioned in this passage respectively four times and five times, compared with his figure of twenty-five thousand for Auschwitz mentioned only twice, left no room for doubt about which crime he considered the greater.

That was what Dresden meant to Vonnegut, too:

I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on. All I could say was, “I know, I know. I know.”

Vonnegut never amended Slaughterhouse-Five. So it goes.

#effortpost

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scotianostra · 3 years

Photo

On December 22nd 1715 James Francis Stewart, landed in Peterhead from France.

If you read through this you might wonder, with this amount of support, how the '15 uprising failed. It's a pity the rest of Scotland didn't have the enthusiasm as this small corner of North East Scotland.

Unfortunately it was all too late as the uprising had fizzled out after Mar’s inability to press forward after Sherrifmuir, so we shall take a look at where James Stuart came ashore, the loyal town of Peterhead. Much of this is taken directly from testimony taken around the time of the Uprising.

The people of Peterhead were in the main loyal to the Sturts, and were involved in the Jacobite uprisings from beginning to end. The town proudly remembers the numbers involved and the names of some…..

In total the number of Peterhead folk called to arms in defence of the town were 138 men and 10 women – yes Peterhead women prepared to take up arms to fight for the King – Janet Dickie, Margaret Greig, Geills Scott, Margaret Dun, Elspat Mitchell, Janet Cruickshank, Mrs Walker, Elisa Bruce and Widow Bodie and Widow Brown. They were ordered to arm themselves with “ane sufficient gun charged with powder and bullets, and four spare shots besides, and ane sufficient sword” and to meet at the Cross on the appointed day, where they marched and took part in military drills. 7 Spanish cannons, salvaged from the St Michael in 1588 were taken from their position on the Battery at Keith Inch, pulled across the sand bank at the Quinzie (Queenie), and mounted on the Tolbooth Green, looking down Broad Street for the defence of the interior of the town.

On 9th September 1715 the Earl of Mar, appointed Commander-in-Chief by the exiled ‘Pretender’ King James, issued a Proclamation at Braemar signalling the start of the 1715 uprising:

“Now is the time for all good men to show their zeal for His Majesty’s service, whose cause is so deeply concerned, and the relief of our native country from oppression, and a foreign yoke too heavy for us and our posterity to bear; and to endeavour the restoring, not only of our rightful and native king, but also our country to its ancient, free and independent constitution under him whose ancestors have reigned over us for so many generations.”

On 25th October the exiled King James wrote to his supporters in Scotland: “We have not been able to look upon the present condition of our kingdoms, or to consider their future prospect without all the horror and indignation which ought to fill the breast of every Scotsman. We have beheld a foreign family, aliens to our country, distant in blood, and strangers even to our language, ascend to the throne.

“We are come to take our part in all the dangers and difficulties to which any of our subjects from the greatest down to the meanest may be exposed on this important occasion, to relieve our subjects of Scotland from the hardships they groan under and to restore the kingdom to its ancient, free and independent state.

“But we hope for better things. We hope to see our just rights and those of the church and people of Scotland, once more settled in a free and independent Scots Parliament on their ancient foundation.”

On 31st October (Hallowe’en), the Magistrates and Town Council of Peterhead met at the Tolbooth (near the present Tolbooth Wynd), under the direction of the Secretary to the Earl of Erroll (from Slains Castle), George Leith, who was also Major General of Horses under the command of the Earl Marischal, with an order from the Earl of Mar, Chief Commander of King James’s forces in Scotland, which he read – ordering twelve of their number “to be ready mounted on horseback with sword and sufficient firelock, tomorrow precisely at six of the clock, to be witnesses to the said Mr Leith, his requiring the Lord Saltoun (of Fraserburgh) to give all due obedience to the foresaid orders.”

On 1st November (All Saints’ Day), 16 mounted “fenceable men” rode to Fraserburgh to proclaim the King. They were George Leith (Secretary to the Earl of Erroll), Bailie Cruickshank, Bailie Arbuthnot, Thomas Forbes, James Whyte, James Park, John Thomson, George Cruickshank, Alex. Smith (merchant), Robert Smith, John Logan, John Taylor, William Jollie, Alex. Forbes, James Blair & William Ramsay. The band of armed Jacobites rode off north towards Fraserburgh to “require” the Lord Saltoun to obey the orders from the Earl of Mar in support of King James.

About half a mile short of Fraserburgh the Peterhead band met Lord Saltoun and “obliged him to stop until the General’s orders were read to him. ”It was demanded of him “what Party he inclined to join with” and that he “appear at His Majesty’s Royal Standard”. Lord Saltoun answered that “he regarded neither Mr Leith nor his orders more than a footman” and further said that “at a whistle, he could raise a hundred men and cause them to fight all there present.”

Bailie Cruickshank answered that he believed they wouldn’t see them at Fraserburgh, where they immediately went and “proclaimed the King with all the solemnity we could, which we found did oblige the most of the inhabitants of that town.”

A party from the group went in search of arms, which they found in the chamber of the Clerk’s house. They broke open the door of the chamber with “ane big hammer” and found 24 new firelocks, proof marked, and all with A.R. (Anna Regina) on them, all charged with balls and gunpowder. The arms were taken back to Peterhead and handed to George Leith for the General’s use.

Later, a party of Jacobites, led by Irvine of Crimond, captured Lord Saltoun and forced him to go south to join the Jacobite army at Perth. Fraserburgh was then occupied by a Jacobite garrison, which compelled the inhabitants to contribute towards the payment of the soldiers.

On 13th November both the Earl Marischal and James Keith fought at the Battle of Sheriffmuir near Stirling. The Earl Marischal was 22 years old, and his brother 19 at the time of the Battle. James suffered a musket ball wound in his shoulder and spent the night in agony at Castle Drummond.

James Francis Edward Stuart (King James VIII) landed at Peterhead late on the night of 22nd December 1715, suffering from seasickness and fevers after having travelled 7 days (5 or 6 days according to other sources) by sea from Dunkirk in a well-armed vessel laden with a cargo of brandy. He arrived with six other gentlemen, including James Francis Fitzjames Stuart, grandson of King James VII, and Lieutenant Allan Cameron (a son of Lochiel), whom he sent immediately to Perth with the news of their arrival.

James Stuart was 27 years old, and this was the first time he had set foot in Britain since his father was driven into exile in 1688 (when James was six months old). He had lived at the Scots Court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris under the protection of the French King Louis XIV.

At first the small boat crept along the shore and attempted to enter the River Ugie, presumably to get as near as possible to Inverugie Castle, but “the night was wet and late the tide”, so they instead landed at the old pier of Port Henry Haven. The unexpected visitors were graciously received at the harbour by the Earl Marischal’s representative – the Baron Bailie Thomas Arbuthnot.

According to contemporary accounts they were “all habited like sea-officers, and passed for friends of the Pretender, going to Perth for his Service”. The vessel was despatched back to France with the news of James’s safe arrival.

They stayed the night at what is now Park Lane, near the Longate – at the house of the Baron Bailie’s brother-in-law, Captain James Park, merchant and ship owner. Here James wrote a short letter, dated “Peterhead, December 22nd, 1715” to say “I am, at last, thank God, in my own ancient kingdom as the bearer will tell you with all the particulars of my passage. I am weary and won’t delay a moment the bearer.”

A local song which commemorated the landing of the King at Peterhead was sung for many years after this event.

“King James is land’t at Peterhead, an honour great to us indeed.The night was wet and late the tide, he couldna unto Ugie ride.He slept a night in our good town, upon a good saft bed o’ down.In the morning when he raise, the Marischal’s bailie brushed his claithes. He’s come to set auld Scotland free from cursed Hanover tyranny.”

On the morning of 23rd December King James left by horseback, past Buchanhaven and then west by the old turnpike that skirted the south bank of the Ugie, to Inverugie Castle to visit the widowed Lady Mary Keith, mother of the Earl Marischal.

He passed the next night at Newburgh before carrying on to Aberdeen, accompanied only by a handful of horsemen, in ill health and in disguise. A contemporary account reports “’Tis said the Pretender is very much indisposed since his arrival, which is imputed to the great fatigue he has suffered at sea, and otherwise of late.”

The Earl Marischal and James Keith met King James for the first time at Fetteresso on 27th December, making their way to Dundee on 6th January, James Stuart entering the town with the Earl of Mar riding at his right hand and the Marischal at his left.

On 7th January 1716, they briefly set up court at Scone and arrived at Perth on 8th January.

On 30th January, the King, along with the two Keith brothers, the Earl of Mar and other main supporters, made for Montrose, where the King sailed back to France on 4th February 1716 on the ‘Maria Teresa of St Malo’. James Stuart had been only 43 days on Scottish soil. The Earl of Mar accompanied him back to France and served as his Secretary of State until 1722.

The first picture is a contemporary (if fanciful) illustration which appeared in a news sheet at the time. Clearly drawn by someone who had never visited Peterhead, it shows James Francis Stuart’s arrival the second at Proclamation Pend in the town of Peterhead celebrates arguably one of the most most historic event in the towns history

#Scotland #scottish #peterhead #jacobites #'15 Uprising #history

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lady-plantagenet · 3 years

Note

♦▼ for clarence and ☼☯ for anthony woodville!

Asked via the Headcanon Meme: https://lady-plantagenet.tumblr.com/post/634584063141920769/headcanon-meme. Thank you darling! X (at least I sprinkled a bit of history in all this).

George Duke of Clarence

♦ - quirks/hobbies headcanon

- One Hobby/Quirk headcanon -

According to household accounts and information about his education, George knew how to play the harp and the lute. I headcanon him as continuing with those hobbies well into his adulthood. I don’t know if it’s maybe the fact that George had far less presence in the battlefield than his brothers - only Barnet and Tewksbury he actually fought in and his troops are never on the main battle charts which indicates they were not the most important, he was given the largest retinue to lead to France but as we know, there was rather more talking than bloodshed there ahasjd. Or if it’s maybe the fact that his actions and phrases denote an unusually emotional man... but I always saw him as rather sensitive and that also reflecting in his hobbies. I also headcanon him as being rather particular with his clothing (exposed to great finery since the age of 12), and so relished spending hours badgering his tailor over the smallest details regarding colours, designs, patterns etc. At some points even Isabel gets a headache ahashj.

He also had great taste for elaborate architecture (historically, there were many designs he had in mind and renovations for Tutbury and Warwick castle, to make them less fortressy and more palatial but died before they could be completed), so I think that links. As for the harp and lute, I headcanon him as having great proefficiency in them but not interested in showing that off and so just playing when in his own homes and heard by very few people there. Not because he was modest or something (quite the contrary) but because he did not like to do anything competitively because he did not like being seen as bested by others, or worse being seen to fail because well.. pride and self-importance. He never participated in jousting for example, because he knew he could not handle the shame if he were beaten by the likes of Richard Woodville or Anthony or the score of prominent jousters. Also as a typical aristocrat, he never saw the point of having to ‘prove’ his gifts, nor work at them enough to be truly talented.

▼ - childhood headcanon

I’ve had this discussion at some point with a mutual about when George left Ireland, I think the conclusion was that he may have very well stayed there quite a bit, at least maybe until Richard III was born in Fotheringhay in 1452, or even later (for his own protection or as an enduring symbol of his father’s importance there and piece between Earls Ormond and Desmond, as his baptism was all about uniting those two godfathers). I have to look deeper into this but the truth is next to nothing is known of George’s life pre-1460.

I see his sister Margaret being with him until 1452 or so (I think Ashdowne-Hill put the possibility that Margaret accompanied their mother to Ireland), and treating him as her baby as four + year olds have been known to do, creating the link. But while she returned to England (most likely), he would stay there for a one more year or so, with the occasional visits from the godfathers for goodwill. And goodness, both James Butler 5th earl Ormond & Wiltshire and Thomas FitzGerald 7th Earl Desmond had something of a similar spirit to their godson: always up for a gallantry whether that be rebellion (a contemporary saying something similar regarding gallantry about pre-1469 George - I think it was Crowland), reputed handsomeness (with some vanity):

“Gregory records, at the First Battle of St Albans in 1455, Wiltshire "fought mainly with the heels, for he was frightened of losing his beauty" ahahaha idk why gives me some Clarence vibes

or personalities that attracted support, eager patrons. With the facts of an absent real father this headcanon, just sort of clicks whether it has any bearing in reality (yet I recall an Irish castle where he spent his early years in being mentioned, but forgot the name). I also headcanon him as having spent a part of his infant years with James FitzGerald around, though, he may have been a couple years older (birthdate not given). As they were god brothers and both from Yorkist families, of course this is the same James that gets executed under Edward’s name in 1467 (godfather Ormond gets executed after the battle of Towton). In addition to him, many other companions that were relatives and nephews of his godfathers I suppose would have been selected as the 5/6 year olds’ companions. I headcanon George as charming them all, leading to him being remembered fondly by the Irish because though records of his going there in his adult life contradict each other, he seemed to have left an impression somehow. Of course, all this attention and preening has contributed to his deluded self-image as a very very important man. I also headcanon him as picking up quite a bit of the native tongue, but like most young children, what is quickly learned is quickly forgotten.

Anthony Earl Rivers

☼ - appearance headcanon

When it comes to my story, I’m tempted to make him the ‘golden-haired’ knight that he tends to get depicted in fiction because thematically it drives home the whole George/Anthony foil thing we spoke about and intend to hint at.

But for me, this will always be my mental image of Anthony. With a very kind yet clever looking face, like in here. I also always headcanoned him as heavily resembling his sister, perhaps, because of their strong sibling bond (this depiction capture that too with the heart-shaped face, small thin nose, round eyes and cheekbones (come to think of it also the mouth) .

Like in his contemporary depiction [Him presenting the Dictes and Saying of the Philosophers] I see him as having a warm brown eyes and light brown hair, but with a twinge of auburn (whereas Elizabeth Woodville is more full on red-gold). Because of his keeping with a hair-shirt underneath, I tend to see him as rather thin and tall (nearer to Edward and Margaret’s height than Richard or George’s).

࿊ - likes/dislikes headcanon

- Likes - (aside from what we know: philosophy, poetry, literature, religion, tournaments)

As a result of: That bit in one of his works where he (with great wit and subtlety) calls Plato out for his misogyny, him being a reader of Christine de Pizan (the only man at that time who I can recall), his strong relationship with his mother, sister and friendship with Margaret of Burgundy... I’ve headcanoned him as having a deeper appreciation and ‘like’ (more like respect) for womenhood than most of the others. And with an interest in the discourse that must have been going on post-De Pizan and Joan of Arc.

I also have this weird headcanon of him getting an insane fascination with Wales, the people, the Celtic remnants in its folklore - that is, once he establishes there with his nephew. And tried to absorb as much of it as possible. Particularly because he strikes me as one who though a great appreciator of beauty, is more attached to the natural, less ornate rather than the florid and goldeness of the london courts. As he was a well-traveled man this isn’t so far-fetched I suppose. I also headcanon him as a massive fan of Arthuriana (he did after all have all the features of chivalry) and would see himself as a Merlin to Prince Edward’s Arthur.

- Dislikes - (aside from war apparently)

I always saw him as taking a profound dislike to Edward’s debauchery later in his reign, especially, when it pertained infidelity to his sister. As somewhat of a stoic (not to say emotionless or robotic), he obviously did not say anything about it, but the disillusionment welled up in him, and he would find any excuse to not have to deal with it. By the time it came to leave for his guardianship, he was grateful for not having to see it. Of course, there remains mutual respect between him and Edward, during his pilgrimage I headcanon him as praying for Edward’s soul and for him to be guided back.

I always headcanoned him as never quite clicking with his wife. For some unknown reason e.g. perhaps she was a bit ignorant, dull or cold? We know very little about that marriage and it was quite brief nonetheless. There were no children and we never hear of them ever being in the same place, or references to mourning etc. Of course, since marriage is a sacrament and a way to connect with god, he feels a bit regretful about it, only in later life to realise, that some men are like Gawain, better suited to bachelorhood. But while respectful of women, few attain to his marianistic expectations (partly stemming from the image his sister projects). Overall, a dislike for this sort of inner-conflict.

#🍷❤️#to everyone: this meme is still open ☺️☺️#and here you have it somehow I ended up writing you a novel #can you tell how much I feel the need to write something #masters apps and schoolwork begone #george of clarence #anthony woodville #I profusely apologise #I’ll add the read more function tommorow #and grammar check

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mabelleflanerie · 3 years

Text

The Birth of Fauvism

A Study of Matisse’s The Young Sailor II

As I walked through the Metropolitan’s exhibition gallery of Greek and Roman art, through the great hallway showcasing pieces from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and into the Modern and Contemporary Art galleries, I realized that within the span of three short minutes I had experienced the fastest chronological and geographical exploration of art history. Hidden towards the far back of the museum is a group of rooms showcasing a collection named “Reimagining Modernism”. It houses the paintings of everyone from Picasso to Grünewald. The smallest of the rooms, 904, is quite unlike the rest. It doesn't have a bright vibrant wall on which the paintings have been mounted. While the other rooms have walls painted in a rich burgundy or deep royal blue, 904 is a pale grey room. Upon further inspection of its contents, I began to understand the reason for the choice of wall colour: Filled with extremely vibrant artwork by Matisse, Vlaminck, Picasso, and Derain (to name a few), it would have been an eyesore to make the walls equally as colourful. It would have even taken away from the paintings themselves. The largest, most multi-coloured, and therefore loudest of all the pieces is Matisse’s 1906 painting The Young Sailor II. At first glance, I responded in shock and to be honest, slight fear. Why would Matisse choose a bright pink background for his model who is already dressed in a jarring blue and green get-up? Well, upon further research I have discovered that these colour choices are what made Matisse stand out from his fellow modern artists.

The Young Sailor II is a fauvist portrait of a young fisherman named Germain Augustin Barthélémy Montargè from a small Catalan village called Collioure (Rewald, 89). Germain is seated on a wooden chair and his facial expressions are painted in a very cartoon-like manner (Fig. 1). Although much sharper than Matisse’s first version, there is still a lot of ambiguity that is heavily present. The only sense of differentiation between the body parts or pieces of clothing is through colour choice. The painting itself is a striking palette of green, blue, pink, and orange. The face of the model does have a few details however: The eyebrows are extremely exaggerated and I even sense a playful expression being presented. Sabine Rewald, curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum states that Germain’s “theatrical looks and his colourful costume, set against the pink, candy-coloured ground, combine to make this work one of Matisse’s most decorative portraits in the Fauve manner” (Rewald, 90). The model is dressed in some sort of a bright blue jacket, green pants with a checkered printed cuff, pink shoes, and a blue-green cap. Being that Matisse has not included any details of the garments, I find myself staring at the cuffs of the pants wondering if he intended them to be boots or checkered socks instead. This sort of confusion seems to be a common reaction to Matisse’s artwork: Julia Brucker, contributor at The Art Story, states that although Matisse’s artwork “was important in endorsing the value of decoration in modern art” the manner in which he paints with his colours is frequently disorienting to viewers (Brucker). This fauvist portrait does exactly that and I suppose it is what forced me to keep staring at it until I was completely hypnotised and enraptured by it.

Matisse - Young Sailor II

“Fauve” was a word that kept appearing on the information plaques of 904’s paintings so I sought to discover the meaning behind this strange word. Synonymous to “grand félin féroce” or in English “wild cat”, “Fauvism” describes a movement in modern art where the artists focused on personal expression through eccentric colour use (Wolf). The artists, or “Fauves” as they were known, included Henri Matisse himself, Albert Marquet, and Georges Henri Rouault. They were inspired by the artwork of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Cezanne and they concentrated on the use of vibrant colours: “Matisse emerged as the leader of the group, whose members shared the use of intense colour as a vehicle for describing light and space, and who redefined pure colour and form as means of communicating the artist's emotional state. In these regards, Fauvism proved to be an important precursor to Cubism and Expressionism as well as a touchstone for future modes of abstraction” (Wolf). Justin Wolf, from The Art History Contributors specifies three key ideas important to Fauvism: Firstly, the Fauves saw the significance of colour and the atmosphere it created. Colour was in fact autonomous to the painting itself. Secondly, the Fauves drew attention to the flatness of the canvas in order to create a sense of unification in the artwork. Lastly, the Fauves focused on depicting human expression and inner emotions. Being that Matisse excelled in these three modes of painting, he was considered to be the forerunner and pioneer of Fauvism: “Synthesizing all these ideas, Matisse turned away from using subtle hues of mixed paints and began working with bright colour, directly from the tube, as a means of conveying emotion. He had been working outdoors since the mid-1890s, and his travels to Corsica and the south of France in 1898 increased his interest in capturing the effect of strong natural light” (Wolf). Looking at the painting, I see exactly what Wolf is describing. There is very little shading or colour gradient in the piece. The jacket is a flat blue with a small number of purple stripes and the pants are a solid green just as the background is a solid pink. The brush strokes are visibly large but other than that there is no sense of texture being created.

However insignificant of a fact this may seem to us, to Matisse, it was very intentional: “Rather than using modelling or shading to lend volume and structure to his pictures, Matisse used contrasting areas of pure, unmodulated colour. These ideas continued to be important to him throughout his career” (Brucker). The reason Matisse did this is because he felt it permitted him to better communicate the model’s emotion and the emotion that is depicted in the painting is one that is quite peculiar. The young man seems to be posing in a “look how fabulous I am” manner with a particularly wily look on his face. What I began to wonder while I was sat on the wooden bench in 904 staring in beguilement at this piece is how much say Matisse had in the posture or expression of the model. According to Brucker, it’s highly possible that Matisse was in fact using the model as a medium in which he could portray his own feelings by “reducing them to ciphers in his monumental designs” (Brucker). This theory seems to be proven by Matisse himself - “Matisse, by way of Cezanne and impressionism, attempted to realize his emotion in front of the object. (Matisse frankly stated in an interview of 1912: ‘I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion that it produces upon me’)” (Bock-Weiss, Matisse, 58). So now, this painting gives us much more than just a depiction of a sailor in Collioure. It gives us insight on Matisse’s life during the summer of 1906. Matisse painted The Young Sailor II while on one of his travels to the Catalan region near the Spanish border. This small village of Collioure was a frequent vacation spot of his and is in fact the birthplace of Fauvism (Brucker). Germain, the model, was one of many fisherman from this small seaside village.

Collioure, France (by journalistontherun.com)

But what exactly made Germain stand out from the eight hundred and ninety-nine other fishermen that lived in this village? According to Rewald, the Montargè family were unlike other Catalans: “Since Germain was six-feet tall and of athletic build – which is unusual for Catalans – it is not surprising that he might have caught Matisse’s eye during one of the painter’s early morning strolls along the pier in Collioure’s harbour… Another characteristic that made Germain stand out in a crowd was his Slavic features. These are shared by the Montargè family … and are still referred to, by the people in Collioure, as ‘cet air primitif’ (‘that primitive look’)” (Rewald, 89). Prior to this painting, during the summer of 1905, Matisse produced many other works of art portraying Collioure: The Open Window, View of Collioure, and Landscape at Collioure are among Matisse’s most well-known fauvist paintings. He worked alongside Derain and together they developed and refined the fauvist style (Wolf). After four months in Collioure, Derain and Matisse set off for Paris to present their work at the Salon d'Automne.

Matisse - Vue de Collioure

While Collioure proved to be the birthplace of the fauvist technique, the Salon d’Automne of 1905 is where the movement got its name: Louis Vauxcelles, an art critic who was inspecting the pieces at the exhibition used the phrase “Donatello parmi les fauves” in reaction to what he saw (Wolf). Translating to “Donatello among the wild beasts”, the word “Fauve” endured despite being disparaging. However slighting the reviews were, their portraits were bought by the likes of Leo and Gertrude Stein and Fauvism proved to be important to how colour was seen and used in the domain of modern art: “The Fauves liberated colour from any requirements other than those posed by the painting itself. "When I put a green," Matisse would say, "it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky." Art exerted its own reality. Colour was a tool of the painter's artistic intention and expression, uncircumscribed by imitation” (“Explore This Work - Henri Matisse, Open Window, Collioure”). What colour did was add meaning and context to the painting in a new and different way. Instead of asking why Matisse painted a sailor boy looking into the distance, we can now contemplate as to why the sailor boy’s ear is orange while his right hand is pink and what Matisse is trying to communicate by doing this. Before Matisse and Derain, artists were compelled to paint a blue sky, a tan face, and a red flower. Now, the artist was free to paint a red sky, a blue face, and a tan flower. Fauvism, for the first time diminished the authority the object had over how it was painted and it consequently gave way to the more successful abstract movements such as Cubism and Expressionism.

Along with painters such as his rivals Picasso and Mondrian, Matisse re-invented the way in which art was produced. By the use of simplification and color as the sole subject of painting, Matisse had a considerable influence on art and future abstract artists, proving him to be a major figure during the twentieth century. Be it Cubism, Pointillism, or Fauvism, the art of painting went through some drastic experimentation during the early 20th century and Matisse was surely an important part of it.

Bibliography:

Bock-Weiss, Catherine, and Henri Matisse. Henri Matisse: Modernist Against the Grain. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. p.58 Brucker, Julia. “Henri Matisse Artist Overview and Analysis.” The Art Story - Modern Art Insight, The Art Story Contributors, www.theartstory.org/artist-matisse-henri.htm. “Explore This Work - Henri Matisse, Open Window, Collioure.” National Gallery of Art, www.nga.gov/Collection/highlights/highlight106384.html. Kleiner, Fred S. Gardner's Art through the Ages: The Western Perspective. Vol. 2, Cengage Learning, 2009. P.688 Matisse, Henri. “The Young Sailor II” .Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998. Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Matisse, Henri. “The Young Sailor I” . Private Collection, 1906. Rewald, Sabine. Twentieth-Century Modern Masters: the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection: , Metropolitan Museum of Art. Abrams, 1989. p.89-90 Schapiro, Meyer. Nature of Abstract Art . American Marxist Association, 1937. Wolf, Justin. “Fauvism Movement Overview and Analysis” The Art Story - Modern Art Insight, The Art Story Contributors, www.theartstory.org/movement-fauvism.htm.

#MATISSE #MODERN ART #ABSTRACT ART #ART #FAUVISM #ART HISTORY #metropolitan museum of art #MET #CUBISM #POINTILISM #MONDRIAN #PICASSO #france #PAINTING #ARTIST #ESSAY #WRITER #BLOG

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How All in the Family Changed the TV Landscape

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All in the Family is roundly considered a touchstone for television achievement now, but when it debuted 50 years ago, even the network carrying it hoped it would fizzle quickly and unnoticed. CBS put an army of operators at phone lines expecting a barrage of complaints from offended middle Americans demanding its cancellation. Those calls didn’t come. What came was a deluge of support from people hoping this mid-season replacement was a permanent addition to the network’s lineup. The premiere episode contained a considerable list of “television firsts.” One of these rarities continues to remain scarce on network TV: creator Norman Lear trusted the intelligence of the viewing audience. To celebrate All in the Family’s 50th anniversary, we look back at its journey from conception to broadcast, and how it continues to influence and inform entertainment and society today.

Actor Carroll O’Connor, who was a large part of the creative process of the series, consistently maintains he took the now-iconic role of Archie Bunker because All in the Family was a satire, not a sitcom. It was funny, but it wasn’t a lampoon. It was grounded in the most serious of realities, more than the generation gap which it openly showcased, but in the schism between progressive and conservative thinking. The divide goes beyond party, and is not delineated by age, wealth, or even class. The Bunkers were working class. The middle-aged bigot chomping on the cigar was played by an outspoken liberal who took the art of acting very seriously. The audience cared deeply, and laughed loudly, because they were never pandered to. They were as respected as the authenticity of the series characters’ parodies.

Even the laughs were genuine. All in the Family was the first major American series to be videotaped in front of a live audience. There was never a canned laugh added, even in the last season when reactions were captured by an audience viewing pre-taped episodes. Up to this time, sitcoms were taped without audiences in single-camera format and the laugh track was added later. Mary Tyler Moore shot live on film, but videotape helped give All in the Family the look of early live television, like the original live broadcasts of The Honeymooners. Lear wanted to shoot the series in black and white, the same as the British series, Till Death Us Do Part, it was based on. He settled for keeping the soundstage neutral, implying the sepia tones of an old family photograph album. The Astoria, Queens, row house living room was supposed to look comfortable but worn, old-fashioned and retrograde, mirroring Archie’s attitudes: A displaced white hourly wage earner left behind by the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.

“I think they invented good weather around 1940.”

American sitcoms began shortly after World War II, and primarily focused on the upper-middle class white families of Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. I Love Lucy’s Ricky Ricardo, played by Cuban-American Desi Arnaz, ran a successful nightclub. The Honeymooners was a standout because Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden was a bus driver from Bensonhurst (the actual address on that show, 328 Chauncey Street, is in the Bedford–Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn). American TV had little use for the working class until the 1970s. They’d only paid frightened lip service to the fights for civil rights and the women’s liberation movements, and when the postwar economy had to be divided to meet with more equalized opportunities there was no one to break it down in easy terms. The charitable and likable Flying Nun didn’t have the answer hidden under her cornette. It wasn’t even on the docket in Nancy, a 1970 sitcom about a first daughter. The first working family on TV competing in the new job market was the Bunkers, and they had something to say about the new competition.

Social commentary wasn’t new on television. Shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek routinely explored contemporary issues, including racism, corporate greed, and the military action in Vietnam, through the lens of fantasy and science fiction. The war and other unrest were coming into the people’s living rooms every night on the evening news. The times they were a-changing, but television answered to sponsors who feared offending consumers.

Ah, but British TV, that’s where the action was. Lear read about a show called Till Death Us Do Part, a BBC1 television sitcom that aired from 1965 to 1975. Created by Johnny Speight, the show set its sights on a working-class East End family, spoofing the relationship between reactionary white head of the house Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell), his wife Else (Dandy Nichols), daughter Rita (Una Stubbs), and her husband Mike Rawlins (Anthony Booth), a socialist from Liverpool. Lear recognized the relationship he had with his own father between the lines.

CBS wanted to buy the rights to the British show as a star vehicle for Gleason, Lear beat out CBS for the rights and personalized it. One of the reasons All in the Family works so well is because Lear wasn’t just putting a representative American family on the screen, he was putting his own family up there.

“If It’s Too Hot in The Kitchen, Stay Away from The Cook.”

Archie Bunker dubbed his son-in-law, Michael Stivic, played by Rob Reiner, a “Meathead, dead from the neck up.” This was the same dubious endearment Lear’s father Herman called him. The same man who routinely commanded Lear’s mother to “stifle herself.” Lear’s mother accused her husband, a “rascal” who was sent to jail for selling fake bonds of being “the laziest white man I ever saw,” according to his memoir Even This I Get to Experience All three lines made it into all three of the pilots taped for All In the Family. When Lear’s father got out of prison after a three-year stretch, the young budding writer sat through constant, heated, family discussions. “I used to sit at the kitchen table and I would score their arguments,” Lear remembers in his memoir. “I would give her points for this, him points for that, as a way of coping with it.”

All in the Family, season 1, episode 1, provides an almost greatest hits package of these terse and tense exchanges, which also taught Lear not to back away from the fray. He served as a radio operator and gunner in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, earning an Air Medal with four Oak Leaf Clusters after flying 52 combat missions, and being among the crew members featured in the books Crew Umbriag and 772nd Bomb Squadron: The Men, The Memories. Lear partnered with Ed Simmons to write sketches for Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin’s first five appearances on the Colgate Comedy Hour in 1950. They remained as the head writers for three years. They also wrote for The Ford Star Revue, The George Gobel Show, and the comedy team Rowan and Martin, who would later headline Laugh-In.

Lear went solo to write opening monologues for The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show, and produce NBC’s sitcom The Martha Raye Show, before creating his first series in 1959, the western The Deputy, which starred Henry Fonda. To get Frank Sinatra to read Lear’s screenplay for the 1963 film Come Blow Your Horn, Lear went on a protracted aerial assault. Over the course of weeks, he had the script delivered while planes with banners flew over Sinatra’s home, or accompanied by a toy brass band or a gaggle of hens. Lear even assembled a “reading den” in Ol’ Blue Eyes’ driveway, complete with smoking jacket, an ashtray and a pipe, an easy chair, ottoman, lamp, and the Jackie Gleason Music to Read By album playing on a portable phonograph. After weeks of missed opportunities, Lear remembers Sinatra finally read the script and “bawled the shit out of me for not getting it to him sooner.”

The creative perseverance Lear showed just to get the right person for the right part is indicative of the lengths Lear would go for creative excellence. He would continue to fight for artistic integrity, transforming prime time comedy with shows like Good Times, One Day at a Time, and the first late-night soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. He brought legendary blue comedian Redd Foxx into homes with Sanford and Son, also based on a British sitcom, Steptoe and Son, which starred Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell, best known for playing Paul McCartney’s grand-dad in A Hard Day’s Night. But before he could do these, and the successful and progressive All in the Family spinoffs The Jeffersons and Maude, he had to face battles, big and small, over the reluctantly changing face of television.

“Patience is a Virgin”

After Lear beat CBS to the rights to adapt Till Death Us Do Part he offered the show to ABC. When it was being developed for the television studio, the family in the original pilot were named the Justices, and the series was titled “Justice for All,” according to a 1991 “All in the Family 20th Anniversary Special.” They considered future Happy Days dad Tom Bosley, and acclaimed character actor Jack Warden for the lead part, before offering the role to Mickey Rooney. According to Even This I Get to Experience, Lear’s pitch to the veteran actor got to the words “You play a bigot” before Rooney stopped him. “Norm, they’re going to kill you, shoot you dead in the streets,” the Hollywood icon warned, asking if Lear might have a series about a blind detective with a big dog somewhere in the works.

Taped in New York on Sept. 3, 1968, the first pilot starred O’Connor and Jean Stapleton as Archie and Edith Justice. Stapleton, a stage-trained character actor who first worked as a stock player in 1941, was a consistent supporting player for playwright Horton Foote. Stapleton originated the role of Mrs. Strakosh in the 1964 Broadway production of Funny Girl, which starred Barbra Streisand. Lear considered her after seeing her performance in Damn Yankees. She’d made guest appearances on TV series like Dr. Kildare and The Defenders.

O’Connor was born in Manhattan but grew up in Queens, the same borough as the Bunker household with the external living room window which wasn’t visible from the interior. O’Connor acted steadily in theaters in Dublin, Ireland, and New York until director Burgess Meredith, assisted by The Addams Family’s John Astin, cast him in the Broadway adaptation of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. O’Connor had roles in major motion pictures, including Lonely Are the Brave (1962), Cleopatra (1963), Point Blank (1967), The Devil’s Brigade (1968), Death of a Gunfighter (1969), Marlowe (1969), and Kelly’s Heroes (1970). O’Connor appeared on television series like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Fugitive, The Wild Wild West, The Outer Limits, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, That Girl, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He’d guest starred as a villain in a season 1 episode of Mission Impossible, and was up for the parts the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island and Dr. Smith on Lost in Space.

The first pilot also starred Kelly Jean Peters as Gloria and Tim McIntire as her husband Richard. ABC liked it enough to fund a second pilot, “Those Were the Days,” which shot in Los Angeles on Feb. 10, 1969. Richard was played by Chip Oliver, and Gloria Justice was played by Candice Azzara, who would go on to play Rodney Dangerfield’s wife in Easy Money, and make numerous, memorable guest appearances on Barney Miller. D’Urville Martin played Lionel Jefferson in both pilots. ABC cancelled it after one episode, worried about a show with a foul-mouthed, bigoted character as the lead.

CBS, which was trying to veer away from rural shows like Mayberry R.F.D., The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and Green Acres, bought the rights to the urban comedy and renamed it All in the Family. When Gleason’s contract to CBS ran out, Lear was allowed to keep O’Connor on as the main character.

Sally Struthers was one of the young actors featured in Five Easy Pieces, the 1970 counterculture classic starring Jack Nicholson. She’d also recently finished shooting a memorable part in the 1972 Steve McQueen hit The Getaway. Struthers had just been fired from The Tim Conway Comedy Hour because executives thought she made the show look cheap, which was her job. The premise of the show was it was so low-budget it could only afford one musician, who had to hum the theme song because they couldn’t afford an instrument, and one dancer, as opposed to a line of dancers like they had on The Jackie Gleason Show. Lear noticed her as a dancer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a counterculture variety show which Rob Reiner wrote for with Steve Martin as a writing partner. Reiner’s then-fiancée, the director Penny Marshall, was also up for the role of Gloria, but in an interview for The Television Academy, Reiner recalls that, while Marshall could pass as Stapleton’s daughter, Struthers was obviously the one who looked like Archie’s “little girl.”

Reiner, the son of comedy legend Carl Reiner, was discovered in a guest acting role on the Andy Griffith vehicle series Headmaster, a show he wrote for, but had also played bit roles in Batman, The Andy Griffith Show, Room 222, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., The Beverly Hillbillies and The Odd Couple. Reportedly, Richard Dreyfuss campaigned for the role of Michael, and Harrison Ford turned it down. Mike Evans was cast as Lionel Jefferson, the Bunkers’ young Black next-door neighbor who sugar-coated nonviolent protests with subtle and subversive twists on “giving people what they want.”

“We’re just sweeping dirty dishes under the rug.”

The very first episode tackled multiple issues right away. It discussed atheism, with Michael and Gloria explaining they have found no evidence of god. The family dissects affirmative action, with Archie asserting everyone has an equal chance to advance if they “hustle for it like I done.” He says he didn’t have millions of people marching for him to get his job, like Black Americans. “His uncle got it for him,” Edith explains, with an off-the-cuff delivery exemplifying why Stapleton is one of the all-time great comic character actors. The family argues socialism, anti-Semitism, sausage links and sausage patties. The generation gap widens as Archie wonders why men’s hair is now down to there, while Gloria’s skirt got so high “all the mystery disappears” when she sits down.

All in the Family would continue to deal with taboo topics like the gay rights movement, divorce, breast cancer, and rape. Future episodes would question why presidential campaign funds are unequal, how tax breaks for corporations kill the middle class, and weigh the personal price of serving in an unpopular war as opposed to dodging the draft. When Archie goes to a female doctor for emergency surgery a few seasons in, All in the Family points out she is most certainly paid less than a male doctor. When skyjackings were a persistent domestic threat in the 1970s, Archie suggested airlines should “arm the passengers.” It is very prescient of the NRA’s suggestion of arming teachers to combat school shootings.

But the first showdown between Lear and the network was fought for the sexual revolution. The first episode’s action begins when Edith and Archie come home early from church and interrupt Michael and Gloria as they’re about to take advantage of having the house to themselves. Gloria’s got her legs wrapped around Michael as he is walking them toward the stairs, and the bed. “At 11:10 on a Sunday,” Archie wants to know as he makes himself known. According to Lear’s memoir, CBS President William Paley objected, saying the line suggested sex. “And the network wants that out even though they’re married–I mean, it was plain silly,” he writes. “My script could have lived without the line, but somehow I understood that if I give on that moment, I’m going to give on silly things forever. So, I had to have that showdown.”

The standoff continued until 25 minutes before air time. CBS broadcast the episode, but put a disclaimer before the opening credits rolled, which Reiner later described as saying “Nothing you’re about to see has anything that we want to have anything to do with. As far as we’re concerned, if you don’t watch the next half hour, it’s okay with us.” Lear knew, with what he was doing, this was going to be the first of many battles, because this was the first show of its kind. Television families didn’t even flush toilets, much less bring unmentionables to the table. “The biggest problem a family might face would have been that the roast was ruined when the boss was coming over to dinner,” Lear writes. “There were no women or their problems in American life on television. There were no health issues. There were no abortions. There were no economic problems. The worst thing that could happen was the roast would be ruined. I realized that was a giant statement — that we weren’t making any statements.”

“What I say ain’t got nothing to do with what I think.”

Politicians and pundits worried about how the series might affect racial relations. The country had experienced inner city riots, battle lines were drawn over school desegregation, busing children to schools was met with violent resistance. Did All In the Family undermine bigotry or reinforce racism? Were people laughing at Archie or with him? Was it okay to like Archie more than Mike?

Lear believed humor would be cathartic, eroding bigotry. Bigots found a relief valve. Lear always insisted Archie was a satirically exaggerated parody to make racism and sexism look foolish. Liberals protested the character came across as a “loveable bigot,” because satire only works if the audience is in on the joke. Bigoted viewers didn’t see the show as satire. They identified with Archie and saw nothing wrong with ethnic slurs. Mike and Gloria come off like preachy, bleeding-heart liberal, hippie leeches. Lionel handled Archie better than Michael did.

O’Connor humanized Archie as an old-fashioned guy trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world. Bunker gave bigotry a human face and, because he hated everyone, he was written off as an “equal-opportunity bigot.” Not quite a defensible title. Archie was the most liked character on the show, and the most disliked. Most people saw him as a likable loser, so identifiable he was able to change attitudes. In a 1972 interview, O’Connor explained white fans would “tell me, ‘Archie was my father; Archie was my uncle.’ It is always was, was, was. It’s not now. I have an impression that most white people are, in some halting way, trying to reach out, or they’re thinking about it.” It sometimes worked against O’Connor the activist, however. When he backed New York Mayor John Lindsay’s 1972 anti-war nomination for the Democratic presidential nomination, Archie Bunker’s shadow distanced progressives.

Archie was relatable beyond his bigotry. He spoke to the anxieties of working- and middle-class families. Archie was a dock worker in the Corona section of Queens, who had to drive a cab as a second job, with little hope of upward mobility. He didn’t get political correctness. The character’s ideological quips were transformed into the bestselling paperback mock manifesto The Wit and Wisdom of Archie Bunker. White conservative viewers bought “Archie for President” buttons.

“If you call me Cute one more time, I swear I’ll open a vein.”

As cannot be overstated, All in the Family set many precedents, both socially and artistically. The Bunker family is an icon on many levels, Archie and Edith’s chairs are at the Smithsonian. But Archie Bunker is also the Mother Courage of TV. The antithesis of the bland sitcom characters of the time, he also wasn’t the character we hated to love, or loved to hate. Archie was the first character we weren’t supposed to like, but couldn’t help it. This phenomenon continues. The next TV character to take on the iconic mantle was probably Louis De Palma on Taxi. Audiences should have wanted to take a lug wrench to his head, but Danny De Vito brought such a diverse range of rage and vulnerability to that part it was named TV Guide’s most beloved character for years.

We shouldn’t like Walter White, especially when he doffs that pretentious Heisenberg hat, on Breaking Bad. And let’s face it, Slipping Jimmy on Better Call Saul isn’t really the kind of guy you want to leave alone in your living room while you grab a drink. Families across the United States and abroad sat down to an Italian-style family dinner with Tony Soprano and The Sopranos every Sunday night. But on Monday mornings, most of us would have ducked him, especially if we owed him money. Even the advanced model of the Terminator guy was scared of Tony.

The best example of this is South Park’s Eric Cartman. While we don’t know who his father is on the series, he’s got Bunker DNA all over him. He’s even gotten into squabbles with Sally Struthers and Rob Reiner. This wasn’t lost on Lear, who contacted creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to say he loved the show in 2003. Lear wound up writing for South Park’s seventh season. “They invited me to a party and we’re partying,” Lear told USA Today at the time. “There’s no way to overstate the kick of being welcomed by this group.”

“I hate entertainment. Entertainment is a thing of the past, now we got television.”

Television can educate as much as it wants to entertain, and All in the Family taught the viewing audience a whole new vocabulary. The casual epithets thrown on the show were unheard of in broadcast programming, no matter how commonplace they might have been in the homes of the people watching. When Sammy Davis Jr. comes to Bunker house in the first season, every ethnic and racial slur ever thrown is exchanged. In another first season episode, and both the unaired pilots, Archie breaks down the curse word “Goddamn.” But a large segment of the more socially conservative, and religious, audience thought All in the Family said whatever they wanted just because they could get away with it.

All in the Family debuted to low viewership, but rose to be ranked number one in the Nielsen ratings for five years. The show undermined the perception of the homogeneous middle-class demographic allowing shows like M*A*S*H to comment on contemporary events.

All in the Family represented the changing American neighborhood. The show opened the door for the working poor to join situation comedies as much as when the Bunkers welcomed Lionel, Louise (Isabel Sanford), and George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) when they moved into Archie’s neighborhood. Lear reportedly was challenged by the Black Panther Party to expand the range of black characters on his shows. He took the challenge seriously and added subversive humor. Sanford and Son was set in a junkyard in Watts. Foxx’s Fred Sanford rebelled against the middle-class aspirations of his son, Lamont (Demond Wilson). Good Times was set in the projects of Chicago, and took on issues like street gangs, evictions and poor public schools.

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Married With Children, The Simpsons, and King of the Hill continued to explore the comic possibilities of working class drama. Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show was a successful, upwardly mobile television producer. Working-class women were represented on sitcoms like Alice, but didn’t have a central voice until 1988 when Roseanne debuted on ABC, and Roseanne Barr ushered in her brand of proletarian feminism. All in the Family’s legacy includes Black-ish, as creator Kenya Barris continues to mine serious and controversial subject matter for cathartic and educational laughter. Tim Allen covets the conservative crown, and is currently the Last Man Standing in for Archie. But as reality gets more exaggerated than any satire can capture, All in the Family remains and retains its most authentic achievement.

The post How All in the Family Changed the TV Landscape appeared first on Den of Geek.

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blessedarethebinarybreakers · 4 years

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Normally I don't like to ask stuff but I feel distressed. My mom is arguing about a preaching that she heard where it says that the antichrist will be gay. She quotes the book of Daniel, particularly Daniel 11:37. Her argument is that Daniel is a prophecy book therefore it must be true. It just really hurts that she'd say this to me and keeps making remarks about my faith. That I'm not a good enough Christian for not believing like her. Is what Daniel say true or is the interpretation wrong?

Hey there. I’m sorry to hear you’re distressed, and especially that your mom keeps making remarks about your faith. It is not right for any of us to judge another person’s faith like that!

This is gonna get long, so for a tl;dr, after studying Daniel 11 and its surrounding context I can say pretty confidently that your mom is indeed wrong about how to interpret 11:37. If you want to explore just why with me, read on!

______________

So to start with, I disagree with your mom that everything in the Book of Daniel, or in any “prophecy book” of the Bible, must necessarily be “true” – or “come true” as if it were fortune telling. Biblical prophecy is not fortune telling or future telling. As I say in this post, biblical prophets were actually much more concerned about the present, about how the past had shaped that present, and about how the present could be used to shape the future! This is just a fact of how ancient Israelites viewed prophecy, regardless of how one interprets scripture (whether more fundamentalist / literal as I imagine your mom probably is, or more historical/contextual, etc.).

Christians who get really into all the biblical visions of “the end times” and the rapture and stuff don’t want to hear this, because they want it to be somehow directly relevant to them and their futures (and that’s understandable), so the following paragraph is just some information for you rather than anything that’s likely to convince your mom:

Most biblical scholars say that most of the biblical prophecies aren’t about “The End Times” the way we conceive of it. The Book of Daniel’s prophecies do include some talk of the actual end of the world, but – like the Book of Revelation in the New Testament – the majority of his prophecies actually refer to kingdoms and intrigue going on in Daniel’s own time (or not so long before or after his own time).

I have not studied Daniel’s prophecies, like, at all besides reading through them, so I can say more about how the Book of Revelation is less about “the end of the world” and more about “the end of the Roman Empire;” but Daniel follows a similar trajectory of being more about the fall of the empires that have oppressed his people than about the end of the whole world. If you have a Bible that offers footnotes about the historical context going on in any given passage of scripture, it will tell you all about that – that Daniel’s prophecies discuss the sequence of Babylonian, Median, and Persian rulers that oppress his people and criticize those oppressive kings.

Thus when you go to look at Daniel 11 (and 10), you see that Daniel isn’t talking about “The Antichrist” in this passage – indeed, that title “Antichrist” is not used at all in this Book, or in any book of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) at all! – but rather he is talking about a Persian king who is going to arise and oppress his people. The New Interpreter’s Study Bible suggests in its footnotes for 11:37 that the specific king Daniel’s talking about is Antiochus, who “grew exceedingly arrogant: He abandoned his ancestral gods and imposed the worship of Zeus Olympus” – hence 11:37′s statement that he “shall pay no respect to the God’s of his ancestors.”

Now that we’ve reached the verse itself in our discussion, let’s have a closer look at Daniel 11:37. The New King James Version reads,

“He shall regard neither the God of his fathers nor the desire of women, nor regard any god; for he shall exalt himself above them all.”

The part of this verse that is used by some to claim that “the antichrist” (if you interpret this passage as even being about the antichrist, despite the context pointing to it actually being about a Persian king) is gay is, of course, “nor the desire of women.”

But along with that seeming like a very random tangent for the prophet to mention in a verse that otherwise is about this king abandoning all gods, the issue with biblical Hebrew is that sometimes getting a precise meaning out of it is hard. Thus “nor the desire of women” is not the only translation into English that one can make from the Hebrew. I’ll list some other translations that have been made (and you can see tons more here):

KJV: “nor the desire of women”

NASB: “or for the desire of women”

NIV: “or for the one desired by women”

ESV and NRSV: “or to the one beloved by women”

New Living Translation: “or for the god loved by women”

CEB: “and the god preferred by women”

Now, there are many conservative Christians who believe that the King James Bible is never wrong, and therefore they’ll insist that the translation to “nor the desire of women” is the one “correct” translation. But even if that is the case, what exactly does “the desire of women” mean in English? Does it mean:

that this guy doesn’t desire / isn’t attracted to women, as your mom believes?

could it also mean that he doesn’t care if women desire him? aka he might still desire them, and doesn’t give a damn about whether they like him back

or does it mean that he doesn’t care what women desire/want – i.e., that he won’t listen to them about what they want, perhaps in regards to what gods he respects, since that’s what the rest of the verse is about?

Moving to look at those translations that translate it “the god loved/preferred/beloved by women,” some suggest that this meaning: just as the guy has no regard for “the god of his ancestors,” likewise he has no regard for the god[s] of his wives/concubines. There are examples in the Hebrew Bible of women having different gods from their husbands – Jacob’s wife Rachel takes her household gods with her into his house; Solomon’s many foreign wives convince him to worship their gods with them. So if the Hebrew here, hemdath nashiym, is translated something about “the god loved by the women,” that’s what it could be about – this guy won’t be swayed to worship any god, whether his own family’s gods or his wives’ gods.

That above reasoning makes much more sense within the context of the verse than it being like “So this guy won’t care about his ancestors’ god, oh also by the way he’s gay or whatever, and back to the god thing, he’s gonna exalt himself over all gods.” It would be such a random tangent!

_______

So that’s all the language and history stuff. Now let’s get hypothetical:

so…what if your mom is right? So what if the verse is saying “this guy isn’t attracted women”? (and for the purpose of this hypothetical, let’s say the verse is about the antichrist though as I discussed above I do not believe that it is.)

First off, just because he doesn’t desire women doesn’t necessarily mean he does desire men. He could be asexual and/or aromantic. That wouldn’t be much better, of course, because we’d be moving from homophobia into aphobia. Asexual and aromantic folks get vilified enough with the stigma that “oh you can’t ~~love~~?? you monster!” So I definitely do not like the supposition that the antichrist is ace/aro; that’s just as icky as him being gay.

But again, we’re in hypothetical land: so let’s say the antichrist is gay, or is aroace. ……..So what??

Gay people, aroace people, aren’t all perfect and good people. We can be badguys too, ya know? If the antichrist were cishet, it wouldn’t mean that All Cishet People Are Therefore Like The Antichrist – so if the antichrist were gay, why would it therefore mean that all gay people are like the antichrist?

He’s just one person. A big bad person – but his sexuality isn’t necessarily a part of that. He’s not evil because of whatever his sexuality is or isn’t.

I will close by offering some counterbalances to a supposedly gay (or aroace, or otherwise LGBTQA+) antichrist: there are also LGBTQA+ heroes in the Bible.

Daniel himself may well be one of them!!

To start with, Daniel is most likely a eunuch: after all, he has a position in the Babylonian court, and as David Bayliss notes, “it was customary for Mesopotamian kings in the first millennium BC to surround themselves with eunuchs as servants.” The Bible itself attests to this fact, in places like Isaiah 39:7 that talks about youths being taken from Judah to serve Babylon’s king as eunuchs. Along with those two facts, Bayliss continues with more evidence that Daniel was a eunuch:

Third, the fact that Daniel and the other captured Israelite youths were entrusted to the “chief eunuch” suggests that they were to become young eunuchs themselves.

Fourth, boys to be made into eunuchs were usually selected for their beauty, which is mentioned at the top of the list of selecting criteria in Dan 1:4.

Fifth, there is no mention of Daniel or his companions ever marrying (or having children).

Sixth, Daniel showed no interest in returning to Jerusalem after Cyrus the Great came to the throne (who allowed exiles to return to their homelands), which may have to do with his physical humiliation and the Deut 23:1 ban.“

Now, why’s it matter if Daniel’s a eunuch?? What’s that got to do with being LGBTQA?? Many queer scholars, myself included, have argued that biblical eunuchs share many similarities to gay people, or trans people, etc. I talk about the connection between biblical eunuchs and contemporary trans people in the section of this webpage titled “ ‘Better than sons or daughters’: Isaiah 56″.

(For other resources on eunuchs’ link to LGBT folks, see here, here, here, here.)

On top of that, some scholars have suggested a romantic/sexual relationship between David and the head eunuch under which he served, Ashpenaz. According to Daniel 1:9, Daniel enjoyed “the favor and tender love” of Ashpenaz. This could be a totally platonic thing, or it could be physical; the Hebrew is ambiguous.

You might not be able to stop your mom from making her awful comments, but maybe being able to respond in your head to her “the antichrist is gay!” with “no, Daniel was gay” will help you a little.

Please keep safe, and do what you can to keep your mom’s crap from getting to you (I know that’s much harder said than done). You are beloved by the God who made you, friend. And scripture is much queerer than hateful Christians want to admit.

#the antichrist #antichrist #apocalyptic literature #daniel #the book of daniel #homophobia #essays #thelandofladymarvel #reading and studying the bible #prophets

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sciencespies · 4 years

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When Catherine of Aragon Led England's Armies to Victory Over Scotland

https://sciencespies.com/history/when-catherine-of-aragon-led-englands-armies-to-victory-over-scotland/

When Catherine of Aragon Led England's Armies to Victory Over Scotland

She was, in the words of historian John Edwards, Henry VIII’s “greatest queen.” But though Catherine of Aragon’s marriage to the Tudor king lasted 24 years—collectively, his five other marriages spanned just 14 years—she has long been overshadowed by her successors.

The daughter of Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, Catherine came to England as the bride of Henry’s older brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales. But Arthur died shortly after the pair’s wedding, leaving his 16-year-old widow in a precarious position. Though Spain and England initially sought to maintain their alliance by marrying Catherine to another member of the Tudor family (both Henry and his father, Henry VII, were suggested as potential suitors), negotiations soured as diplomatic relations shifted. Ultimately, Catherine spent seven years mired in uncertainty over her future.

The princess’ fortunes shifted when Henry VII died in 1509, leaving the throne to his sole surviving son, who promptly married his alluring young sister-in-law. The couple’s loving relationship, however, eventually deteriorated due to a lack of a male heir and the king’s infatuation with Anne Boleyn.

Catherine is often portrayed as a dowdy, overly pious, stubborn old woman who refused to yield her position for the good of the kingdom. The truth, however, is more nuanced—a fact increasingly reflected in cultural depictions of the queen, including Starz’s “The Spanish Princess” and West End hit Six: The Musical, which features a fictionalized version of Catherine chiding her husband for forgetting that “I’ve never lost control / No matter how many times I knew you lied.”

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Far from being the troublesome, unappealing wife of popular imagination, Catherine was actually a charismatic, intelligent and much-loved queen. Three years into the royal couple’s marriage, Henry was still so besotted with his consort that he invited a Spanish visitor to look at her “just to see how bella and beautiful she was.”

In 1513, the queen, then 27 years old, was entrusted with command of the kingdom while her 22-year-old husband waged war against France’s Francis I. Henry left behind a small group of advisors, but as newly discovered documents demonstrate, Catherine didn’t simply defer to these elderly men’s counsel. Instead, she assumed an active role in the governing—and protection—of England.

“When she is left as regent, she is in her element,” says Julia Fox, author of Sister Queens: The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile. “… She has the power to summon troops, to appoint sheriffs, to sign warrants and to get money from the treasurer of the chamber.”

As Henry and his troops besieged the French town of Thérouanne, Catherine and her council readied for a clash closer to home. Just over a month into the queen’s regency, France’s ally, Scotland’s James IV, had declared war on England, bringing a period of peace between the neighboring nations to an end.

The fact that James was married to Henry’s older sister, Margaret, did little to dissuade either him or Catherine from entering the fray. According to 17th-century chronicler William Drummond, the pregnant Scottish queen pleaded with her husband to desist, noting that he was poised to fight “a mighty people, now turned insolent by their riches at home and power abroad.” But James, buoyed by the possibility of conquest (and of dealing a blow to his egotistical brother-in-law), refused.

Catherine, for her part, appeared to “relish the opportunity” to exercise her full authority, says Giles Tremlett, author of Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen. In an August 13 letter, the queen wrote, “My heart is very good to it.” Wryly referencing women’s traditional role in warfare, the queen added, “I am horribly busy with making standards, banners and badges.”

Michael Sittow portrait of Catherine, c. 1502 (left), and portrait of Henry VIII around the time of his first wedding

(Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Though Catherine did, in fact, order the royal wardrobe to furnish two banners bearing the arms of England and Spain, as well as “standards of the lion crowned imperial,” such tasks made up just a small portion of her preparations. Working with councilors, she mobilized forces across England, communicating with local authorities to determine how many men and horses their parishes could provide. When the mayor and sheriffs of Gloucester failed to respond in a timely fashion, she gave them a deadline of 15 days and emphasized that “writing and news from the Borders show that the King of Scots means war.”

In addition to recruiting soldiers, the queen dispatched money (£10,000, to be exact), artillery, gunners, a fleet of eight ships and supplies ranging from grain to pipes of beer and armor. She had Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey—a combat-hardened, 70-year-old veteran of the 1485 Battle of Bosworth—and his army of around 26,000 mount a first line of defense near the border with Scotland and asked Sir Thomas Lovell to lead a secondary force in England’s Midlands.

What Catherine did next was unprecedented, particularly for a kingdom where warfare was considered an exclusively male domain. As records recently found at the United Kingdom’s National Archives testify, this daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella—two famously bellicose rulers who’d spent Catherine’s childhood driving the Muslim Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula—left the safety of London and headed north toward the English-Scottish border with 1,500 sets of armor, as well as a golden “headpiece with crown” that Tremlett likens to “an armored sun hat,” in tow.

“The new details involve the queen more deeply as a director of events rather than a passive figurehead managed by those of Henry’s counselors left in England,” Sean Cunningham, the archivist who discovered the papers, told the Times’ Mark Bridges in May. “… [They] let us know that Catherine was heading for Warwick [Castle] and the Tower [of London] had pretty much been emptied of armor.”

Catherine and her troops were ready to face the Scots if James IV managed to defeat both Surrey’s and Lovell’s forces. One contemporary, Peter Martyr, reported that the queen, “in imitation of her mother Isabella,” regaled her reserve army with a speech compelling them to “defend their territory” and “remember that English courage excelled that of all other nations.”

This incident is widely referenced—including in an upcoming episode of “The Spanish Princess,” which will feature a highly exaggerated version of Catherine, clad in armor fashioned to accommodate her visible pregnancy, riding directly into battle—but many historians now consider Martyr’s account apocryphal. (Ambassadors’ correspondence indicates that the queen delivered a premature son who died shortly after birth in October 1513, but the pregnancy’s veracity remains a point of contention; in Sister Queens, Fox argues, “[I]it seems unlikely that she would have risked a much-wanted child by accompanying the army from London.”)

Tremlett deems the speech “almost certainly invented” but points out that this “doesn’t mean it [didn’t] reflect the spirit of the moment.” Fox, meanwhile, says Catherine probably made “a speech, … but whether it was quite as rousing or as wonderful, I don’t know.”

Memorial to the dead at the site of the Battle of Flodden

(The Land via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0)

As it turned out, neither Lovell nor the queen ended up seeing action. On September 9, Surrey’s troops and James’ army of more than 30,000 engaged in battle. The English wielded the bill, a simple hooked weapon derived from an agricultural tool, while the Scots opted for the longer, steel-tipped pike. An afternoon of “great slaughter, sweating and travail” ensued, and by its end, some 10,000 Scots—including 12 earls, 14 lords, an archbishop, a bishop, 2 abbots and James himself—lay dead. Comparatively, the smaller English army only lost around 1,500 men.

The Scottish king’s brutal fate was, in a way, evocative of the broader blow inflicted on his country in the wake of the defeat: As historian Leanda de Lisle explains, “James’ left hand was almost severed, his throat gashed, and an arrow was shot through his lower jaw.” (Additional ignominies, including one at Catherine’s own hand, awaited the king’s corpse.) With the Stuart monarch’s passing, his infant son, James V, became the leader of a grieving, much-reduced nation.

According to Fox, the Battle of Flodden (which draws its name from nearby Flodden Edge) left Scotland “in a powerless situation.” She adds, “Not only have you just defeated them in a spectacular way, but [the kingdom is] in disarray. Scotland is practically at [England’s] mercy.”

Prior to Cunningham’s find, historians had only known that Catherine was in Buckingham, around 60 miles north of London, when she received word of Surrey’s victory. But the new evidence suggests that the queen intended to travel further north, if not directly into battle like Joan of Arc, then at least into the vicinity of combat.

“Many a queen would have quite simply hotfooted it to the Tower of London, pulled up the drawbridge and sat there fairly safely,” says Fox. “… But she doesn’t do that. She’s no milk sop. She’s not taking refuge. She really is out on the road.”

Three days after the battle, Catherine penned a letter to her husband, who had successfully captured Thérouanne and was now besieging Tournai. She began by emphasizing Flodden’s significance, writing, “[T]o my thinking this battle hath been to your grace, and all your realm, the greatest honour that could be, and more than should you win all the crown of France.” As one might expect of such a deeply religious individual, the queen proceeded to thank God for the victory—and subtly remind Henry to do the same.

Catherine’s missive then took a rather unexpected turn. She’d sent her husband a piece of the Scottish king’s bloodied surcoat (“for your banners”) but lamented that she’d originally hoped to send a much more macabre trophy: the embalmed body of James himself. Unfortunately, the queen reported, she soon realized that “our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it.”

This “gleeful and somewhat bloodthirsty” sentiment may seem out of character for a woman renowned for her piety, but as Tremlett points out, “Plenty of pious people were also violent, [and] plenty of people were violently pious.” Few exemplify this seemingly contradictory mindset as well as Catherine’s own parents, who waged a relentless, violent campaign against all non-Christians in their kingdom.

Catherine and Henry later in life

(Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Ferdinand and Isabella’s reconquest of Spain culminated in the January 2, 1492, fall of Granada, which marked the end of 780 years of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula. Then an impressionable 6-year-old, Catherine witnessed the Moors’ surrender, as well as her mother’s leading role in the military crusade.

“This [stays] with her,” says Fox. “This idea of a woman involved in battles is there. And when she actually comes to the divorce question, she sees it as a battle. She sees fighting for her own marriage as just as important as fighting for the Catholic faith.”

Though Catherine was careful to praise her husband’s success in France, she and other contemporary observers knew that Henry’s triumphs paled in comparison to Flodden.

As Antonia Fraser writes in The Wives of Henry VIII, “[T]he Scottish threat was removed for a generation by the slaughter of its leaders. … Compared to this, the Battle of the Spurs won over the French, although part of an expensive campaign, was a purely temporary check, forgotten the next year when the King turned his foreign policy on its head.”

Catherine wasn’t the first English queen to assume the reins of power in the absence of a male monarch. Sixty years prior, another foreign-born princess, Margaret of Anjou, took charge of the kingdom amid the Wars of the Roses, fighting for her son’s inheritance and making major decisions on behalf of her disastrously incompetent husband, Henry VI. More recently, Henry VIII’s grandmother Margaret Beaufort—an “uncrowned queen,” in the words of historian Nicola Tallis—had acted as regent in the brief period before the young king came of age. (Years after Catherine’s death, her beloved daughter, Mary I, followed in her mother’s footsteps by rallying troops to her cause and seizing the throne from those who had sought to thwart her.)

Combined with the example set by Isabella and other relatives, says Tremlett, “Catherine had some very strong role models for women who could rule, for women who could fight.”

Whereas Margaret of Anjou’s seizure of power made her deeply unpopular, Catherine’s regency cemented her already sterling reputation. In the mid-1520s, when Henry first raised the question of divorcing his wife, he found that public opinion was firmly on the queen’s side. She viewed the survival of her marriage as inextricable from the survival of the Catholic Church, according to Fox, and refused to back down despite immense pressure.

Catherine’s legacy, adds the historian, “is that of a wronged woman … who did not accept defeat, who fought for what she believed to be right until the breath left her body.”

Henry, for his part, never forgot the tenacity his wife had demonstrated in the days leading up to Flodden. As he later reflected with no small amount of trepidation, she was perfectly capable of carrying “on a war … as fiercely as Queen Isabella, her mother, had done in Spain.

#History

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