#and that anger becomes so warped that it fucks with his sanity

[lollytea]

Im afraid of the person I will become if we get belos witnessing huntlow or eda and getting dejavu in the last episode

On one hand, I feel like the obvious person that Belos would sees flashes of Evelyn in would be Eda. Because she's her actual descendant and bears a striking physical resemblance to her. But also, Belos is familiar with Eda. The Owl Lady was an infamous criminal wanted by the Emperor since long before the series began. I'm sure Belos noticed the similarities a long long time ago. He likely knows there's a family link. So, if those two end up having a confrontation, Belos won't be caught off guard by all the distinct Clawthorne features. He probably won't fly into a rage upon seeing her.

Unless....remember how angry she was in AOAW when Lilith stole Luz. She's gonna be just as pissed to see Belos has stolen Raine. And he's seen that kind of Clawthorne rage before. And it makes him relive things against his will. Maybe that's what makes him go ballistic. He knew who she was this whole time but things like the eyes and hair never bothered him much. But once Eda lights up in a fucking inferno of fury, Belos isn't seeing the Owl Lady anymore. He's seeing her and he's willing to throw away everything else just to see her dead.

I really love the idea that it's the emotions and the actions and the significance that stir the image of Evelyn in Belos' mind, rather than physical resemblance.

Which is one of the many reasons why I love the idea of him seeing her in Willow. Because she is the exact opposite of Evelyn in terms of appearance. Evelyn was tall and thin with sharp facial features, a head of wild bushy hair, burning amber eyes, while Willow is short and chubby with a moon shaped face, soft green eyes and neatly braided hair. She would fly completely under Belos' radar.

But...then he sees her holding someone's hand. And that someone has his brother's face. His brother steps between him and that girl, shielding her with his body in that stupid selfish way. And then 400 years are suddenly eaten away and he's a young man again with a death grip on a dagger.

It just goes to show that Belos' has become so consumed by denial and rage that his resentment towards Evelyn has mutated into a form of obsession in itself. Not only does she never die but she never stops taking from him. Killing Caleb just wasn't enough for her, but now she needs to make sure he can never have his brother back. He catches sight of her constantly. No matter how many centuries pass, she haunts him from the bodies of endless witches, in an endless cycle of taking. She's stolen hundreds of his grimwalkers.

What Willow looks like is irrelevent. She's the latest of hundreds of witches that Belos saw Evelyn in. The fact that his grimwalker is willing to throw his own life away just to protect her tells him everything he needs to know. This time, he kill the right person.

#im not saying willow is evelyn's reincarnation #she isnt #im saying that belos is so unwilling to admit his own guilt for killing caleb that he blames everything on evelyn #and that anger becomes so warped that it fucks with his sanity #so everytime his grimwalkers betray him hes like *guy falling off his bike meme* ''fucking evelyn'' #hes tricked himself into believing that she is deliberately reincarnating over and over again just to fuck with him #and god forbid he recognize the individuality of his grimwalkers #so if they fall in love he always just sees it as caleb and evelyn all over again. it doesnt matter how different the relationship is #but i cannot stress this enough. evelyn was dead to begin with #belos has just completely fallen off the slippery slope #(headcanon. sorry this is a headcanon not an analysis.)

[sousice]

          ˙✫*ﾟ  PARK  JIMIN  ,  CIS  MALE  ,  HE/HIM  :  did  you  hear  JOVI  YUEN  is  joining  the  cast  of  exposed  after  their  gossipy  reddit  threads  about  other  celebrities  was  revealed  ?  the  twenty  four  year  old  guitarist  with  950k  followers  is  trying  to  clear  their  name  .  they've  become  known  as  the  resident  philosoph  here  in  the  mansion  ,  and  it's  clear  that's  spot  on  because  they're  quite  - escapist  &  -  heedless ,  but  also  +  sentimental &  +  tenacious .  you  know  they're  heading  to  the  confession  booth  if  you  hear  don’t  you  ( forget  about  me )  by   simple  minds  blasting  ,  most  likely  talking  about  how  they're  more  than  painted  on  leather  pants  ,  smoke  rings  drifting  in  the  air  ,  beaten  up  paperbacks  and  hair  dye  for  therapy  .

heyo  !  i’m  deni  ,  she  /  her  pronouns  &  working  plant  mom  in  the  gmt+9  timezone  .  here  is  my  messy  babe  jovi  ,  a  hotshot  wannabe  .  he  has  a  tiny  wanted  connects  tag ,  so  please  check  ‘em  out  and  we  can  vibe  whatever  i’m  srsly  down  for  any  of  that  ! so  hit  like  if  you  wanna  plot    this  is  short  and  sweet  for  sanity’s  sake  . 

𝖻𝖺𝗌𝗂𝖼𝗌.

name:  jaebeom  “ jovi ”  yuen

birthday:  january  29th

hometown:  manchester  ,  u  .  k  .

astro  sign:  aquarius  

chinese  zodiac:  rat

sexual  attraction:  pansexual  

romantic  attraction:  panromantic    

occupations:  guitarist  &  unofficial  back-up  vocals   

viral for:  skateboarding  tricks  ,  ripping  his  clothes  onstage  ,  crowdsurfing  ,  #exposed  for  sleeping  literally  anywhere  on  instalive  and  tiktok  ,  skintight  leather  pants  ,  a  new  hair  color  every  month  ,  floral  tattoos

𝖺𝖻𝗈𝗎𝗍.  

parents  are  normal-ish  .  a  little  goodie-goodie  ,  cookie-cutter  in  that  way  that  drives  all  the  suburban  boys  off  the  deep  end  .  pent-up  anger  snowballed  into  a  separation  around  jovi’s  middle  grade  years  ,  but  they  were  never  divorced  —  never  called  it  what  jovi  and  everyone  else  knew   it  was  .  walked  around  the  like  ghosts  in  a  house  everyone  knew  they  couldn’t   afford  .  but  whatever  .  not  like  all  that  passive  aggressive  bullshit  and  refusal  to  acknowledge  the  truth  had   any  lasting  effect  or  anything   .  .  .  and  fuck  ,  everything  in  that  upper  class  society  just  sucked   .  everyone  clawing  their  way  to  the  top  and  expectations  sucking  out  all  his  dreams  and  ugh——

thrift  store  paperbacks  .  a  guitar  slung  over  his  body  .  skate  parks  .  sharpie-covered  chucks  and  warped  tour  summers  .  jovi  ditched  the  violin  and  medschool  dreams  to  throw  himself  into  the  Vibe  and  who  would’ve  thought  he’d  get  hyped  all  over  VINE  and  insta  ?  managed  to  weasel  his  ass  into  several  hundred  thousand  followers  and  millions  of  views  all  for  an  aesthetic  .  the  board’s  always  been  his  thing  —  convenient  and  cool  —  and  when  he  started  a  band  with  some  of  his  best  mates  ?  dude  ,  his  parents  were  livid  but  he  was  on  cloud  nine  .  a  hot  excuse  to  get  the  fuck  outofthathouse  and  chase  dreams  around  the  country  .

pretty  face  ,  cool  tricks  and  wicked  fingers  on  the  stage  .   he  didn’t  want  to  admit  it  to  his  parents  ,  but  he  kept  up  with  the  school  .  online  classes  on  the  bus  ,  stage  shows  in  the  morning  .  yeah  ,  he  flunked  out  ,  but  he’ll  never  forget  the  memories  of  taking  final  exams  drugged  out  of  his  mind  .  one  day  he  blinks  awake  and  realizes  like  .  dude  .  they’ve  made  it  .  failing  at  blood  family  ,  school  ,  and  any  other  career  he’s  got  ,  this  is  the  only  life  he  knows  to  protect  .  he’s  gonna  ride this  wave  as  long  as  he  can  .  but  how  long’s  it  gonna  last  ?  music  might  not  be  his  first  love  ,  but  all  that  attention  is  .  jovi  doesn’t  know where  he’d  go  if  this  all  came  tumbling  down   ---  so  guess  he  just  has  to  keep  pushing  .

𝗉𝖾𝗋𝗌𝗈𝗇𝖺𝗅𝗂𝗍𝗒.

talented  and  idealistic   .  jovi  sticks  strongly  to  his  beliefs  and  doesn’t  intentionally  set  out   to  irritate  anyone  .  he’s  rather  distant  ,  “  dignified  ”  and  thinks  of  himself  as  intelligent  .  likes  shiny  things  and  gadgets  he  can  toy  with  ,  science  fiction  and  philosophy  books  ,  modern  artwork  that  looks  weird  as  hell  but  is  colorful  enough  to  catch  the  eye  .  trustable  with  a  lock  and  key for  a  mouth  .  clever  ,  adaptable  ,  but  more  of  a  backseat  viewer  than  a  driver  .   runs  from  emotional  expression  ,  temperamental  in  a  way  that  makes  him  destructively  impulsive  ,  and  #aloof  (  NOT  )  from  drama  .  likes  #DEEPTHOUGHTS  conversations  over  beer  and  a  smoke  ,  easy  listening  and  ‘80s  music  .  brave  as  shit  on  the  stage  and  the  board  .  shy  as  shit  everywhere  else  .  eyes  seeing  everything  and  a  mouth  that’d  run  a  mile  a  minute  if  given  the  chance  .  muses  a lot  about  the  Unknown  and  doesn’t  give  two  thoughts  of  the  actual  ramifications  of  some  of  the shit  that  comes  out  his  mouth  (  whatdya  mean  people  listen  to  him  ??? )

#exposed.intro #i'm LATE

[mutantsrisingrpg]

Congratulations BECKY! You’ve been accepted as VENUS.

Becky’s back, back again. Becky’s back, tell a friend! Now that I got that out of the way, I can make this a serious acceptance note. I can honestly say there was not a moment while reading this app that I didn’t think your Hana was it. Hana is obsessed with power and the way you hit on that through her bio had me on the edge of my seat. You created this storm of a girl that I want to know more about even if I know the danger associated with her. Both of us are beyond excited to see the “human embodiment of pikachu with anger issues” on the dash!

Welcome to Mutants Rising! Please read the checklist and submit your account within 24 hours.

Out of Character Information:

NAME/ALIAS: Becky

PRONOUNS: she / her

AGE: 24

TIMEZONE & ACTIVITY LEVEL: GMT ( but technically GMT +1 currently bc summer! ); online daily, particularly active atm because ya girl is working from home

In Character Information:

DESIRED ROLE: Venus / Hana Mercado

GENDER/PRONOUNS: Female; she/her

DETAILS & ANALYSIS:

Even in a city like Miami, Hana is hard to miss in a crowd. Bubblegum bursts, her lazy chew concealing the switchblade sharp smirk that slides across her mouth a little too late for anyone to be able to avoid the trouble that comes from it. She thinks she’s wired up wrong, like a casino gambling machine full of bullets that just keeps dishing out violence while playing its disjointed electric-warped song of congratulations, bright lights flashing wildly.

To your left, a man walking his pet leopard down the sidewalk; to the right, Hana Mercado paralysing a man with the touch of a fingertip for wolf-whistling her. She fits in well here, Florida born and raised, helping the drug lords keep their territories and the mutants keep their identities and everyone and anyone in between keep what’s left of their slowly unravelling sanity. Despite the bustling sea of tourists that ebbs and flows with the good weather, it’s easy to feel lonely. Hana isn’t great when it comes to other people. Pushing them away is a lot less difficult than making them stay.

Everything is loud. Everything is bright. The electricity is near palpable as she splashes through the remnants of a thunderstorm, rainwater spraying over fresh white sneakers. She’s quiet when the sun sets, bleeding red across the sky, the colour of the popsicles she’d eat for dinner as a kid. It’s hard to fear the consequences of her actions when she’s as close to a young god as anyone’s ever going to get. Mutants? Deities? Same difference if you know how to play to the right narrative.

Fuck you has always been easier to spit than a genuinely spoken I love you and that’s the honest-to-fuck truth.

[ + ] driven / brave / resilient / passionate [ - ] arrogant / reckless / unpredictable / childish

BIO:

Money is power. And power is power. And electricity? The sort that decorates the country like a spiderweb, an interwoven network of wires, all humming, all singing to her, the siren’s call of greatness from above ground and beneath it? Power.

Hana is a vicious formation of blood and desire, with the scent of someone burning from the inside inhaled like a nicotine hit. Interrogation comes naturally to her; smiles that should be sweet on a face like hers turn sharp and deadly. She likes to hear them beg. To watch them shake. People spill their secrets to her whether they like it or not.

It’s been that way since she was nineteen years old, static dancing between her fingertips after getting too riled up in an argument with a neighbour’s son over stealing her family’s gas cylinder. An impromptu lightning strike had left the tarmac lining the trailer park sizzling, black and sticky like summertime ( and don’t worry, the Cheeto-dust-decorated-rude-mouthed-slacker-of-a-punk-ass-brat had survived – getting hit by lightning suddenly made him interesting, too, so if anything she’d been doing him a favour ).

A freak accident, they’d called it. Another one of those unexpected Florida storms. But she knew better than that. As had her mom, smoking a fresh pack of Camel Blues from the other side of the door’s insect screen, fresh foils in her hair, acrylic nails the colour of the algae in the neglected community pool down the street. Thinking back, maybe this all stemmed from swallowing too much of that fucking nuclear-waste-looking water when she’d dared to swim there as a kid, hot and sweaty as a storm breaks on the horizon.

But the point – the point is that, to her mom, having the human embodiment of Pikachu as a daughter was as good as winning a jackpot at one of her weekly bingo sessions. She tries to sell it. Power. The ability to pluck electricity from charged particles in the air makes her daughter useful. A living battery. Studies on mutants at University of Miami dish out hefty paychecks after the right terms and conditions have been signed ( note: if you die, that’s on you, don’t try to sue us ). Hana attempts to protest but even she can’t deny that the allure of getting rich sounds like a dream come true.

So she goes to college. Not in the usual sense, sure, but she gets to live on campus ( in a secure underground testing facility beneath the BioMed building ) and hang out with others ( mostly mutants ) her age. And it’s fine for a while until simple fitness tests and blood sampling turn more extreme. Some days are hazy, pumped full of drugs and hooked up to machines that she doesn’t know the name of, let alone the purpose, beeping their own idle hospital-like symphony. Other days are dark and quiet, plunged into sensory deprivation for the sake of whatever it is the boffins in their lab coats are trying to figure out.

She’ll get rich or die trying and, ironically, neither of those things happens.

When the anti-mutant-testing protestors storm the building, they free Hana from both the confinement and the contract. The money she was supposed to get at the end of all this vanishes, along with the pleased looking humans who pat themselves on the back for doing a good deed and disappear to go and celebrate. None of them ask her if this was what she wanted. None of them stop to think that maybe liberation was never an option for her.

Her mom’s gone too. A new trailer stands where Hana’s home once had. The monthly paychecks from the university never reached her bank account, instead wired directly to Mrs Mercado. She laughs until she cries, the air crackling overhead.

After all that, turning to a life of crime is far easier than it has any right to be. Angry and alone, she fucks a guy in a gang in the back of his drop-top and makes herself useful when it comes to getting money out of those who owe it. She runs from the cops. Has a gun pressed to her temple. Watches an illegal weed farm burn at the flick of a lighter. Nothing phases her because she doesn’t let it. Rules stop meaning anything when you realise just what having powers can get you. Making a living from getting spineless people to open up their mouths and offer the gold that is information makes her feel a little less like a failure. Interrogation has a nice ring to it, after all. And once she makes a name for herself, sought after by those who know that secrets are worth a decent stack of bills – well – who is she to turn a job down?

EXPANDED CONNECTIONS:

YVETTE. It’s more than just the sticky sweet sugar of sisterhood. Hana would fight tooth and nail for Yvette should she say the word; would go to war for her if needed. There are very few people in the world that she cares about more than herself, but her partner ( in crime, in the sport of bringing their enemies down, in a vodka-tasting kiss that she’s managed to take a little too far ) holds the throne to Hana’s adoration. If only Yvette would take another step further into chaos and embrace becoming the seductive sort of danger that people run from.

ANDREAS. He knows how to say the right things, she’ll give him that. Hana wants what is hers. And sure, she may not know what that is exactly but the whispers of power he offers are captivating. After so long of operating alone for anyone with enough money to afford her services, the concept of joining strengths is a tricky one to navigate. She keeps him waiting, keeps him on his toes, avoiding a crystal clear answer for the sake of keeping her cards close to her chest. Better to have multiple options on the table than settling for the first one that comes along.

DEREK. Oh, the joy of knowing she’s the shiny new model; a glossy picture-perfect upgrade; a brand new battery to keep Damien and his clowns energised. The temptation of coaxing out Derek’s anger to watch him slip up and fall further from grace is all too great. She’ll press a cherry red lipstick kiss to the dark shades of the sunglasses he will no doubt need down here in paradise. Her future is bright, can he say the same about his own?

DAMIEN ft. JACKSON. He sends his loyal hound. She can only assume that Jackson is missing a collar because he doesn’t like wearing it in public; his Tiffany heart-shaped dog tag would probably get too warm glinting in the Miami sunshine. Hana knows a mob boss pet when she sees one, sniffing her out amongst the cheap cocktails and plastic palms of a Tiki Bar on Ocean Drive. Who’s a good boy? It’s appealing, the carefully constructed dream Damien offers. Almost a little too good to be true given the circumstances. She knows his gang has chased others out, a fine show of strength and organisation, but how long will it last when he doesn’t even know this city?

EXTRA:

Inspo [ x ]   Pinterest board [ x ]

ANYTHING ELSE: ily both

#Accepted #accepted: venus

[neuxue]

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 23

I like this Rand. Can we keep him? Just for a little bit. 

Chapter 23: A Warp in the Air

Oh hell yes it’s Cadsuane; do you know what this means? Do you?

It means Outsider POV. Of…*waves hands in general direction of Rand last chapter and makes squeaking noises* that.

Oh no, Daigian’s dead. That’s too bad; I liked her. As did Cadsuane, but we both have Other Concerns at this particular moment. Sorry Daigian.

“then went for you as soon as we were assured that al’Thor was alive and our enemies had been dealt with.”

Well by that specific assessment everything’s fine.

Sort of.

I mean ‘dealt with’ is rather subject to…timescale and breadth of application of the term ‘enemy’ but. Sure.

How could he have gotten himself into this much trouble, again!

Yeah, sorry Cadsuane, but you’re going to have to drop the ‘again’ there. This is a very new level of trouble. Which, given what the last several books have done to him, is saying something. But we’re no longer talking ‘tortured and furious and struggling to maintain a firm grip on sanity’ or ‘imprisoned and half a step away from losing his mind’. Throwing Asha’man at the Shaido or breaking a member of a ruling council isn’t going to solve this one. This is ‘fated saviour of the world on an already precarious balance of salvation/destruction has just crossed his own last moral threshold while accessing the ultimate power of the incarnation of evil and chaos’. Not sure we have a playbook for this scenario.

“Was the tea involved?” Cadsuane asked Merise quietly.

I know what this is referring to but leaving that aside, this is one of the best out-of-context lines in the series.

It’s possible I’m biased.

The fool boy was lucky to still be alive!

Approximately half of his mind would agree with that.

What a Light-cursed mess, Cadsuane thought

Not…quite. The Light has very, very little to do with the current situation. That’s the worrying part.

Min sat on the bed, rubbing her neck, eyes red, short hair dishevelled, face pale.

Someone get Min a giant mug of hot chocolate and also a therapist.

(“I would cut off my arm before I hurt you.” Oh, Min).

If anyone can get through this intact, it’s Min Farshaw. But still. How do you avoid the automatic, involuntary, instinctive sense of fear when you next look at the person who held you down and nearly killed you. One of Min’s great strengths is that, in situations where she should be absolutely out of her depth and terrified of everyone, she decides ‘fuck that, I like it here and I’m staying put’. She is one of the very, very few people in the entire world who isn’t afraid of Rand at this point. How do you maintain that, after something like this? It’s not a question of whether she can still love him so much as whether she can override the overwhelmingly instinctive response. Well enough to not have it tell even through the bond. Can she continue to be completely and genuinely unafraid of him, after that?

“The danger has been dealt with,” he said softly. Something in his voice made her hesitate. She had been expecting anger, or perhaps satisfaction, from him. Fatigue at the very least. Instead, his voice sounded cool.

Oh.

Oh no help.

Okay. So this is going to be a Problem for me. Right then.

Finally, he turned, looking at her. She took an involuntary step backward, though she couldn’t say why.

Ahhhh this is delicious. This is the woman who walked straight up to him, asked for tea, and not only flat-out ignored his every attempt to intimidate her, but actually intimidated and unsettled him. And now, at a single glance, she recoils. That’s…telling.

I wonder if it’s out of fear, or if it’s more to do with what this means. She was the one who said “he has a rage in him fit to burn the world and he holds it by a hair,” who recognised what he was doing to himself and vowed that he would relearn laughter and tears. And now she sees, in that single look, what she most feared. It’s perhaps not a fear of him so much as a fear for everyone and everything else. For the entire fate of the world, because in meeting his eyes she sees the worst possible scenario actually playing out.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if this is a step back not out of fear, but out of the realisation that she has failed.

There was a strange serenity about him now, but it had a dark edge.

Well hello there that’s a sentence crafted specifically to destroy me.

The whole…deadly calm and serene yet at the same time frighteningly unpredictable and volatile beneath the stillness, unfettered and unrestrained and at peace with utter violence is quite a look.

This is what happens when Rand finally stops trying to hold on to some piece of himself, stops fighting his path, accepts himself and his role and his power…except it’s the wrong acceptance. It’s surrender to the wrong side.

It’s a beautiful twist of the knife because the sentiment for the last several books has been one of wanting Rand to accept his role in truth, and to stop fighting himself. He’s been tearing himself apart, pushing himself harder while at the same time trying to hold himself back, pulling his mind apart with denial of who he was; he’s been at war with himself for so long now, and the promise inherent in that is a moment of catharsis and release, in which he embraces and accepts rather than pushing away or pulling back, and in doing so achieves a greater power.

And that’s exactly what we get… but it’s all wrong.  

And this could so easily have collapsed into melodrama. The reason it doesn’t, I think, is because it is such an absolutely note-perfect culmination of the progression and trajectory Rand has been on for more or less the entire series. This has always been the shadow waiting in the wings, even if its shape was amorphous at first. All those broken promises to himself, those early lines crossed, the way he progressively clung more and more tightly to the lines he managed not to cross. There was always going to be a point when that last threshold was crossed, and where everything that’s been hanging suspended and precariously balanced on top of it finally crashed. The moment where everything snaps. You can see, more and more clearly as the books progress, the shape of that outcome. You know the Shadow wants this as well, know he is being played into a role where he will serve the Shadow even as he fights for the Light. You know his sanity is questionable at best, and that he’s teetering on the edge of irredeemability in his own perception.

So then it’s just a matter of waiting for that moment, of watching everything spiral closer and closer. It becomes about the anticipation, the sense of inevitability as you approach the one thing that will push everything over that tipping point. That’s the piece that has to be just right, and it is, largely because of what came before. That series of steps, some large but some very small and virtually inconsequentional at the time, that created this overarching pattern and path and arc, which can then be brought to a single satisfying crash because it’s basically a massive game of Jenga.

Oh okay more casual balefire.

I’m here for this.

Poor Narishma has to be thinking on a daily basis ‘this is not what I signed up for’.

“It is a dangerous tool, but still just a tool. Like any other.”

Like everything and everyone, yourself included. That’s all it is now; that’s all he lets himself see. The rest can no longer matter.

“It is forbidden,” Cadsuane said. “I have decided that it is not,” al’Thor said calmly.

And that’s it. It’s that simple. Because again, the rest doesn’t matter anymore. It can’t. This is a tool, so he will use it, and that’s the end of it. This from the one who was so desperate not to break the world, and to leave something behind besides destruction. Now calmly declaring that balefire is a tool that can and must be used.

I don’t even know that he’s wrong on that particular count, necessarily. Moiraine came to a similar conclusion regarding balefire, and it is the only apparent way to kill Forsaken. It’s the reason Mat and Aviendha are alive. It’s a question of ends, and of means, and of the ability to stop before it goes too far. It’s not so much a question of whether balefire should be used or forbidden as it is about the possibility of moderation with something so incredibly powerful and destructive. Is moderation possible? Or will it always end in escalation and destruction?

“You’re a child playing with—”

“I have seen balefire destroy cities,” al’Thor said, eyes growing haunted. “I have seen thousands burned from the Pattern by its purifying flames. If you call me a child, Cadsuane, then what are those of you who are thousands of years my juniors?”

Wow.

I know, that’s been my reaction to approximately everything since approximately halfway through last chapter but in my defence…*gestures at book*

So a few things here. One is that he seems to accept the part of himself that was Lews Therin much more fully than he has before…and yet again, it’s in the wrong way. It’s exactly what needs to happen – but not like this. I love how that’s being played with, how he’s doing everything that as a reader you’d shout at him to do (or that I capslock regularly at him to do) and yet it’s set up so that he’s doing it in exactly the worst way possible. It’s playing all of this as such a double-edged sword, where he could fall to one side or the other and yet the choices and the decisions and even some of the outcomes look so incredibly similar even as they are polar opposites.

Rand needs to accept his past, and stop fighting himself. That’s what he’s done. And yet it’s for the wrong reasons, in the wrong mindset, accepting the wrong aspects and letting go of the very things he needs most to hold on to, while accepting the things he needs more to let go.

The other thing that stands out here is ‘eyes growing haunted’. He is steel, he is cuendillar, he can no longer allow himself to feel or care, he uses balefire on two women in quick succession and shows no thought or emotion whatsoever, and his entire demeanor here is serene, calm, cold. And yet his eyes grow haunted, as he thinks of this. It’s as if there is still a part of him – perhaps the Lews Therin part, now, the part that can feel the things he pushes so firmly away from himself – that can still register horror at what is happening.

There has to be that part of him, because if not then there’s no way for him to…well, ‘recover’ is not exactly the right word here but it’ll do. There has to be something left of Rand, and there is, but he’s closed it off from himself now, and accepted…well, I suppose in a sense what he’s chosen to accept is what he once would have rejected as Lews Therin. I can’t help but remember his “You killed yourself, Kinslayer, after you murdered your wife and your children and the Light alone knows how many others. I won’t kill where I don’t have to! Do you hear me, Kinslayer?” It’s as if he has allowed those two sides of him to almost switch places. It’s not really that simple, but there’s a sense of something like that.

Also just… ‘those of you who are thousands of years my juniors’. I mean he’s not exactly wrong? But also he didn’t really live for those thousands of years in between…

Again, it’s more a sharp demonstration of how willing he now is to claim that life as his own – at the cost, this time, of most of what made him Rand al’Thor. He still hasn’t figured out a way to have both, and that, I think, is the key. But that brings it all back to the question of how. As Rand, he can’t accept what Lews Therin did because it hurts too much and because he so desperately doesn’t want to be doomed to the same fate, or damned by the same acts. As the person he has now decided to become, he can’t ‘remember a shepherd named Rand al’Thor’ because if he does that, then he can feel, and then it hurts too much. And he has crossed all the lines that the shepherd named Rand al’Thor was defined by, so he can’t…let himself be that anymore.

And I have a feeling we’ve veered sharply into ‘it makes more sense in my head I swear’ territory. Which is almost meta, if you think about it.

“Do you recognise that, Cadsuane?” al’Thor said, nodding toward something metallic sitting on the bed

Oh this can only end terribly.

“You promised they would be protected and hidden.”

Well, you promised that you wouldn’t use your friends, or play the political games, or destroy nations, or destroy the Aiel, or hurt Min. How did those promises work out for you?

“I was unaware that you were visiting the Wise Ones,” al’Thor said. He gave a small nod of respect to Sorilea and Amys, which they hesitantly returned.

Oh man, I love that small gesture. It manages to actually make everything even more unsettling. Because it’s not like Rand has completely flipped and become evil in the laughing megalomaniac sense. (Well okay actually I suppose you could make a case for that but just work with me here). It’s more that he has simply relinquished all boundaries or restraints. Which is its own special kind of terrifying and destructive. But it means he can keep these sorts of things, like respect for the Wise Ones and sense of duty or purpose in facing and defeating the Shadow, and in showing these, it sets off just how wrong everything else about him is. Because a nod of respect to the Wise Ones really doesn’t…do anything to help. Just as fighting for the Light while in the state he’s currently in doesn’t really do anything to help the world. It’s a completely hollow gesture, and his victory now would be a hollow victory.

It’s the emptiness, the void. And he doesn’t – can’t – understand that, or why it’s a problem, because all he’s been able to feel for so long now is pain, so all the steps towards this were out of necessity and self-preservation, and now this is the ultimate shield. But it’s a shield that leaves nothing behind it but empty space, at which point…what are you protecting?

The room fell silent. Narishma had been asking quietly after Min’s health, but he fell silent when al’Thor stopped speaking.

Ah, silence. Such a powerful tool. And such a perfect one here, seeing this new Rand from an outside perspective. It mirrors the ‘silence’ from Rand’s thoughts when he killed Semirhage and Elza, and in the entire sequence that followed. There, we still got narrative, but it also had this sense of emptiness, of silence in that we got nothing at all of Rand’s actual thoughts or feelings. Just the sequence of events.

Now he’s silent and it’s so unlike him to those who are watching. He can be quiet, and he can be tired, and he can be angry, but this is…something else entirely.

Also can I just take a moment to appreciate Narishma here? Cadsuane – and likely everyone else in the room – is absolutely focused on Rand, and on what he has become and what has happened to him. But Narishma (maybe because he’s put up with Rand’s shit before and figures this isn’t so different) goes to Min and tries to help. He sees that she’s hurt and he doesn’t leave her alone and ignored in the middle of this horror show.

Rand obviously felt that Cadsuane was responsible for the male a’dam being stolen, but that was preposterous. She had prepared the best ward she knew, but who knew what knowledge the Forsaken had for getting past wards?

She did everything she could possibly think of, she did the best she could with what she knew and what she could reasonably expect, but in the end she failed. So is that her fault?

“You are exiled from my sight, Cadsuane,” he said softly. “If I see your face again after tonight, I will kill you.”

So calmly making death threats, when days before he was adamant, in speaking to the same person, that she was not allowed to use torture, and that Semirhage was not to be killed. So calmly making death threats, when once he would not even have considered it.

What comes to mind here is the moment when he had to sentence Mangin to death, because he had stated the law and the penalty and had to follow it through, though he hated it and wanted there to be a way out. He’s threatened death before, but each time it was more conditional on a specific crime or offence, and even then it wasn’t easy for him. This, though, is calm and straightforward and he delivers it immediately. He doesn’t wait for her protest or refusal, doesn’t first exile her and only then escalate to ‘on pain of death’. It’s just simple and straightforward and seemingly without hesitation or struggle.

Cadsuane felt an immediate stab of panic

And that’s saying something. Cadsuane doesn’t panic. But that’s the point – this is so, so far from the situation even hours previously. This is not a small step that makes things a little more difficult. This isn’t just a little bit further along a dark path. This is the last that could be done. This is the Dragon Reborn without restraint, who has chosen not to feel and has decided that he is already damned, so there is no longer anything holding him back. No longer anything of himself to hold on to.

He turned, and again that gaze of his made her trail off. There was a danger to it, a shadowy cast to his eyes that struck her with more fear than she’d thought her aging heart could summon. As she watched, the air around him seemed to warp, and she could almost think that the room had grown darker.

Yikes.

A ta’veren turned dark, and it’s as if the Pattern itself is wounded by it. Twisted, strained, wrong. And there’s the other side of it, of course, which is that this step Rand has taken has the ability to warp the very air, the Pattern, everything around him. He stands at the centre of it all, and he is the Light’s champion, and if he remains like this he will doom them all.

“But you don’t kill women. Everyone knows it. You can hardly put the Maidens into danger for fear of them getting hurt!”

“I have been forced to revise that particular inclination,” al’Thor said. “As of tonight.”

I HAVE BEEN FORCED TO REVISE THAT PARTICULAR INCLINATION.

WOW.

It’s just so…empty. Emptiness, again, set against what was probably the worst few moments of his life. Emptiness and dispassion where there was – should be – pain and terror and anger and love and determination. Instead there’s just this clinical precision, because that’s all that’s left. He had to revise that inclination. It was an absolute torment to him for several books, and it was so incredibly important to him, to hold to this one last thing he had set for himself, and now that he’s crossed that line it’s just…an inclination. Something he’s had to set aside.

This is just done SO WELL. This stark and immediate shift that takes place as he crosses his moral event horizon. It’s been step by inevitable, agonising, necessary step for so long, approaching that last threshold. A sense of something pulling, pulling, pulling to a breaking point, and then it just…snaps. Done. That’s it. And it’s no longer a gradual, painful journey but an immediate shift, a switch being thrown. The last restraint, the last limit, the last thing holding him back, gone. And the effect of that is so beautifully shown.

“Cadsuane,” he said softly, “do you believe that I could kill you? Right here, right now without using a sword or the Power? Do you believe that if I simply willed it, the Pattern would bend around me and stop your heart? By…coincidence?”

Shit. Wow. Okay. That’s…this is exactly what I wanted and it’s so beautifully, spectacularly terrifying.

(I’m torn, because on the one hand I have such a weakness for this exact character type, but on the other hand no, Rand, you are not supposed to be this character type).

Something you hear authors say sometimes is that death shouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing that can happen to a character. Or that ‘oh no this character might die’ shouldn’t necessarily be the only thing the reader fears, or even the thing the reader fears the most. I bring this up because this, what Rand is doing right now and what has happened to him to bring him to this point, is a really great example of how to give the reader something more to fear, and then to follow up on that, without killing a character. As the reader, you’re told pretty much from the very beginning that men who use the Power are doomed to madness. You’re given Lews Therin as the first example of how very, very wrong this can go. That’s the starting point, and then we get Rand. It creates a sense of fear or apprehension, because you have this inevitable threat of madness and horror hanging over him from the start. Other components get added onto this, when he starts making promises to himself and crossing lines and trying to become harder, and when we’re given more of the salvation/destruction duality.

We’re given these things to fear that aren’t simply ‘Rand might die’. When he’s locked in the box in Lord of Chaos, most readers probably aren’t afraid that maybe the Chosen One and ultimate protagonist is going to bite it in book six. There are series in which that could happen, but that’s not what WoT has set itself up to be – and it’s a large part of the reason ‘Character X Might Die’ isn’t always an effective way of setting the stakes; it’s a harder threat to make feel genuine in most stories. So instead, we’re afraid of what it might do to him. Of how it might push him further towards this thing we see hanging over him, and that we dread. As the reader, the fear is for his sanity and his ability to remain himself and still do what needs to be done.

And so, here, we get the actual fulfilment of that fear. It’s the opposite of and yet akin to the feeling of triumph and payoff at the moment of triumph when everything comes together. This is just the darker side of that, when the exact thing you’ve feared for the character the entire time happens. This is what we’ve been led to fear, for Rand. We’re not afraid of him dying so much as we’re afraid of him becoming this. Of him going too far, coming down on the wrong side of that delicate balance, and becoming the champion of the Light only in name. We see the strain he’s under and we’ve been shown what the possible consequences could be for him because of who he is and what he can do (and what he must do), and that’s where the suspense and the excitement and the fear comes in. And so when it happens, there’s a kind of satisfaction in that.

Also I have a type. That’s definitely part of it.

She nodded slowly, hating herself, strangely weak.

She did everything she could. She held nothing back when it came to pursuing the course she thought had the best chance of success, and she used everything and everyone at her disposal. She even correctly identified the problem – part of it, at least. And despite everything, she failed.

This plays into and expands upon – or maybe delivers on? – what makes Cadsuane such an interesting character for me, especially with what has happened in these chapters, when you see her efforts actually end in this. She has successes along the way, but I don’t know that I ever expected her to truly succeed in her goal of teaching Rand laughter and tears. I don’t know that any character could, really, especially not if they set it as an objective. That’s part of the problem, really. It’s not something anyone can just fix. But she identified it as a problem – not incorrectly, I think – and she did what she could.

And she’s interesting to me in particular because she gets a rather unique combination of:

She’s an absolutely good-aligned character

She’s incredibly competent

She’s harsh in her methods and believes the ends justify the means

She fails

You get some of those together on occasion - evil characters who have the competence and the mindset, and who ultimately fail as a narrative point being made. Or characters sometimes who are hypercompetent and ruthless, for whom the ends justify the means, and who then succeed. And that can lead to an interesting set of questions, but I actually think the more interesting ones come from someone like Cadsuane, who fails. Because it’s the same set of questions – is she justified? Is she right? Should she have acted differently or could she have known to act differently? – but rather than being softened slightly by the ultimate outcome of success, they’re thrown into harsher relief by the fact that what Cadsuane did didn’t work. So where does that leave her? Would she be judged differently if she had succeeded? Should she be judged differently if she had succeeded?

I suspect this plays a role in Cadsuane’s rather, er, controversial nature as a character. It’s not surprising, really – those are some rather complicated questions and I suspect the answers to them vary greatly from person to person, depending on where we each draw our own lines.

They’re interesting questions to think about, though. And I like Cadsuane as a character largely because she causes these questions to be raised in a slightly different light than they usually are.

Someone had taken that child and replaced him with this man, a man more dangerous than any she had ever met.

And how terrifying must that be? To see that and not know what to do, to know only that what she did before didn’t work, and now to see that expression and hear his threats and see that darkness and warp in the air and feel, for probably the first time in at least a century or so, utterly and completely out of your depth? And to know that the fate of the world still rests on him, and this is what he has become. Someone now completely out of reach, where before there was still something of him there, something visibly human even if most chose not to see it.

That was everything I wanted from our first outside look at Rand.

I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to the rest of this.

Next (TGS ch 24) Previous (TGS ch 22)

#help me #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

[oscopelabs]

Lights, Camera, Mania: Showbiz Satire’s Descents Into Madness by Charles Bramesco

In his seminal tell-all Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger claimed to reveal the festering truth beneath the dream factory of the American film industry. His was a bemused but cynical perspective on the business of show, reveling in the sordid juiciness of early Tinseltown controversies that usually concluded with tragedy, if not death. Representatives of the film idols referred to in the book lined up to denounce the tales of drug-fueled orgies and suicide cover-ups as conjecture and falsehood, and indeed, the modern reader would do well to take Anger’s gossip with a metric ton of salt.

But rather than a factual history, Anger’s book has more value as a portrait of a certain mentality specific to this professional milieu. Even if Clara Bow didn’t bang the entire USC football team, this progenitor of the celeb exposé spoke to true conditions of the culture surrounding the movie colony, suggesting that decadence and luxury made—and continue to make—it too easy to go mad with power. Readers flocked to Anger’s toxic oil spill of a book for the same reason airport bookstores regularly sell out of the latest A-lister’s confessional: it’s devilishly pleasurable to watch fame and fortune make someone act crazy.

The best Hollywood send-ups have adopted this jaded outlook, turning an eye inward to find a carnivorous business that masticates talent and spits it out once the flavor’s gone. The recent, toothless likes of Argo, La La Land, and The Artist have courted the label of satire with a line about expanded universes here or a jab at blowhard producers there, but these little rib-nudges have been affectionate counterpoints in otherwise adulatory valentines to the magic of the movies. The good stuff cuts to the dark heart of an industry that gives creative types—and who could possibly be more mentally infirm than a writer—too much money and influence for their own good.

The history of showbiz spoofery is the history of insanity: the finest entries have used the assorted pressures of filmmaking to push their characters to their wit’s end as an absurd representation of the corrosive forces of Hollywood. Starting from Anger’s sensationalist tracking of Frances Farmer’s long, sad descent into madness, all roads have led to the sanatorium.

The main thoroughfare is the derelict drag of Sunset Blvd. Billy Wilder was the first to conjure a human manifestation of filmmaking’s maggoty underbelly with Norma Desmond, a crumbling grand dame cannily played by crumbling grand dame Gloria Swanson. Swanson applied the exaggerated techniques of silent film acting to the talkie form in order to create an affected style marked by its own period, a symbol of decay in an industry obsessed with the new and young. She constructed an insular fantasy life in her isolated castle lair as a coping mechanism for her fall from prominence, and for his blackest joke, Wilder allowed her delusions to become reality in the film’s concluding punch line. Norma’s deteriorating psyche imbues the film around her with a bit of her mania, too; a funeral for a chimp Charlestons along the line between the silly and the somber. Even as he verged on the outlandish, he struck a chord; Louis B. Mayer famously bellowed to Wilder at an L.A. screening, “You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!”

But this strain of satire truly hit the fever-pitch sweet spot with S.O.B. in 1981, trading the showbiz-specific indignity of aging past relevance for that of creative compromise. Director Blake Edwards plays a cruel and pernicious god to his Job-like plaything of Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan), a producer driven to desperation by his first flop and willing to do anything in order to salvage it. He’s put through the wringer several times over, bungling four suicide attempts in increasingly pathetic fashion before arriving at the epiphany that sex was the missing ingredient from his character study of a closed-off woman retreating into the recesses of her own mind. (All we see of the fictitious Night Wind is a disturbing, surreal dream sequence set to “Polly Wolly Doodle” twice over, first as an unsettling juvenile fantasy and then as a doubly unsettling eroticized juvenile fantasy.)

The film industry, at least as it’s shown here, doesn’t function like other professional sectors. Nobody really knows what’s going to connect with an audience and what won’t, and to those working on the inside, it often feels like no rhyme or reason governs the separation of hits and misses. Edwards makes Felix into the casualty of a sense-defying work culture, where no bad idea or underhanded maneuver is off limits so long as it yields success at the end of the day. Felix grows deranged as a result of his constant humiliation, and resolves to play as dirty as the weaselly studio executives who cheat him out of the rights to his picture once it starts to look like a success. By the moment he’s killed due to his own harebrained plan, he’s been reduced to a nattering nutjob, martyred by a system seemingly resistant to logic.

Robert Altman would torment another power-producer to the point of breaking a decade later with The Player, but the next film to actively integrate the mentality of lunacy into its overall atmosphere would be the gleefully unhinged Death to Smoochy. (It’s no coincidence that all the films mentioned so far drew powerfully polarized reactions at the time of their release; a draught this bitter has never gone down easy.) Shifting to the other side of the camera, director Danny DeVito mined laughs by transposing the cutthroat nature of big-leagues entertainment to the bush leagues of kids’ shows. He juxtaposed the core nastiness of back-room wheeling and dealing with the outward-facing nicety of Barney and his ilk, and in doing so, delivered an uncommonly misanthropic take on how the sausage of entertainment gets made.

Moreover, the film presented a physical manifestation of hyperactive id in Robin Williams’ corrupt, ruthless kiddie showman Rainbow Randolph. Starting at a coked-out 10 and only turning the dial higher from there, Williams rendered his role as a manifestation of pure, white-hot hate, screaming every line at the top of his lungs. As he goes about his dogged mission to dethrone his replacement Smoochy (Ed Norton as the chipper Sheldon Mopes), DeVito suggests that Randolph’s frenzied dysfunction simply reflects the fucked-upped-ness of his climate. The ostensibly incorruptible Sheldon is offered the seductions of money, pleasure, and influence, and while he’s able to remain true to his principles in the face of it all, Randolph’s the foil illustrating what happens to those without the required moral fortitude. He has a near-complete psychotic break at feature length, his mind irreparably warped by the deleterious forces of televised playtime.

Tropic Thunder took a more specific set of reference points for its deflation of Hollywood ego and pretension, ultimately driving its subjects to the brink of sanity as well. Namely, the myth of Francis Ford Coppola and the notoriously calamitous production of Apocalypse Now (dutifully chronicled in the making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness) provided the guideline for this send-up of war films and the people who play make-believe in them. Coppola reportedly went a touch native while mounting his titanically ambitious epic in the jungles of Vietnam, and likewise, the prima donna actors dropped into the wild start to lose it when they realize the danger they’re in is bona fide.

Writer/director/star Ben Stiller gets in some good potshots at scuzzy corporate types (Tom Cruise’s craven studio head Les Grossman comes off looking the worst of all), but mainly lampoons the actors taking their craft seriously enough to lose sight of themselves. Both Stiller’s macho action hero and Robert Downey Jr.’s award-festooned boob slip into their assigned roles, extending Method acting to the point of fractured identity. Rather than taking aim on the machinery that generates movies, Stiller trains his crosshairs on the process of acting itself, mocking those artistes so wrapped up in “becoming” their role that they can’t tell where it begins and they end. Stiller accelerates their mental strain by dumping the cast in enemy territory, but they don’t end up anywhere that Jared Leto hasn’t gone of his own volition.

Just about all entertainment that goes behind the scenes of entertainment agrees that the job’s not a part-time gig, that creating art on this kind of scale demands a lot from the people involved. The gentler critiques have stopped the symptoms at workaholism, but these more incisive films expand that list to include a wide array of psychological hazards. Los Angeles runs on hysteria, on the single-minded willingness to do anything and everything to make the show go on. The innumerable “troubled-but-brilliant” biopics have made the suggestion that inner anguish is the noble sacrifice that true talents make for shouldering the burden of genius; in an art form as prone to disaster, complication, and overall FUBARification as cinema, it’s just the cost of doing business.

#hollywood #insanity #mania #sunset boulevard #sunset blvd #norma desmond #the player #robert altman #death to smoochy #danny devito #robin williams #tropic thunder #tom cruise #ben stiller #robert downey jr #musings #oscilloscope laboratories #film writing #essay #kenneth anger #hollywood babylon