#could be considered sam critical at points

[literaryavenger]

Broken - part 3

Summary: You find Bucky having a panic attack and do your best to help him.

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Female Reader

Warnings: Minimal use of Y/N. Panic attack. Innocent and broken Bucky. I'd also like to say I never actually had a panic attack but did my best to write the whole process with the research I did. My poor attempts at being funny.

Word Count: 2.1K

Part 1 | Part 2

A/N: I'll say it till the end of time: English isn't my first language and this is my first fanfic. I'm thinking of starting to write fanfics because I have so many different ideas and scenarios and I have NO idea where this one is going, so maybe let me know if you'd like to read more from me? Idk. If you find mistakes please feel free to point them out so I can correct them. I'd also love some feedback and constructive criticism Enjoy!

Masterlist

As soon as you left the medbay, you immediately went to the floor where the guest rooms are, determined to check up on Bucky.

You find them all empty, so you decide to check around the tower in all the communal spaces: Living room, kitchen, training rooms, ecc.

Nothing.

At this point you're starting to wonder if he left the tower altogether. "Jarvis?" you decide to ask the AI.

"Yes, Miss Y/LN?" he answer.

"Do you happen to know where Bucky is?"

"He's locked himself in his room." Jarvis promptly answers, leaving you a little confused.

"But I checked the guest rooms, they were all empty."

"Mr Barnes has been assigned a permanent room, like every other Avenger."

"Oh." you say, a little surprised but happy about it "Could you tell me where it is?"

"It's on the 48th floor, room next to yours and in front of Mr. Wilson’s."

"Thank you, J." you say, making your way to the elevator.

"You're welcome, Miss." he says.

It made sense he would get assigned that room. It's one of the last ones left free as the team keeps growing, and it also happens to be the floor where Steve lives along with you and Sam.

You get to your floor and are thankful to see that it's empty, not wanting to confront anybody else today.

You make your way through the corridor and stop at the first bedroom on the left, Bucky's new room.

You gently knock on the door but don't get any type of answer, so you knock a little louder.

Again, nothing.

"Bucky, it's Y/N." you can't hear anything. "

I just wanted to make sure you were okay? Jarvis, are you sure he's in there?" you ask after not hearing a sound.

"Positive, miss Y/LN." you consider what to do for a few seconds.

He obviously doesn't want anyone's company. Or maybe he just doesn't want yours.

After all, you have known him less than a day, and he did left the medbay after you made eye contact and you saw him crying.

You hope he doesn't think you agree with what Tony said, even though you didn't even try to defend him after you learned about his past. But you were just shocked, whatever you expected, it definitely was not that.

Before you could decide to knock again or just leave him alone, you hear a very muffled sob coming from the other side of the door. As much as you do want to respect his privacy, you're getting a little worried.

You try opening the door but it's locked. "Jarvis, override lock on Bucky's room."

"Lock override successful." he says just as you hear the lock click.

You carefully open the door and look towards the bed, but see that it's empty.

You come in and close the door behind you, standing with your back against it and trying to adjust to the newfound darkness in the room without the light from the corridor.

You look around the room trying to locate Bucky when you hear another quiet sob coming from the furthest corner of the room.

You slowly make your way towards it and, as soon as you're close enough, you see Bucky curled up with his arms hugging his legs against his chest and his head buried in his legs.

"Bucky...?" you try to get his attention before getting any closer so as to not scare him, but you’re not sure if he can even hear you.

He's still visibly shaking like before and sobbing very quietly but uncontrollably. you get closer and kneel down right in front of him, gently putting a hand on his shoulder.

His head shoots up in surprise and the look on his face is that of pure fear as he moved back as close as he can against the wall and as far away from you as possible.

you feel bad for scaring him, and pull away a bit further from him, but still close enough so he can see who you are after the initial shock.

You can tell he recognizes you when his face and his shoulders drop some of the tension, although he makes no attempts to get closer to you.

You decide to try and get a little closer after a few moments, so you slowly get back to kneeling right in front of him while he watches your every move but doesn't try to get further away.

His eyes are wide open and his breathing is getting quicker by the second, tears still streaming down his face.

Then you realize he's having a panic attack.

You consider your options for a second. You've never had a panic attack yourself, but you know Tony gets them and, although you've happened to be there for a few of them over the years, you were never the one to calm him down. Getting him wasn't an option either, everything considered.

You could try to get Steve, he might know what to do if this has happened to Bucky before, but seeing Bucky's breathing get quicker and quicker you guess there's not enough time to get him here.

Then suddenly you remembered something helpful, thank fuck.

"Bucky, look at me." you order him quietly so as to not make him panic even more.

He meets your eyes, meaning you have his attention, but shows no signs of calming down.

"Tell me five things you can see." You simply tell him.

He's confused for a moment, but seeing the determined look on your face you guess he decides that he indeed heard correctly what you asked of him and starts looking around.

"I can see..." He starts but seems to have trouble finishing his sentence.

"It's okay, just try to take a deep breath and concentrate on the things around you." You tell him in the softest voice you can while trying not to panic yourself.

"I-I can see a lamp," he starts, looking around. "the door... a bed, a chair, and... a desk?" he finishes, a little unsure of what he's even doing.

"Good. Now, tell me four things you can touch." you tell him, still surprisingly calm.

"I can touch the carpet" he says, slowly touching the fluffy carpet under him. "The dresser, the wall..." he says, touching the dresser at his right and the wall at his left that he was basically hiding between.

"And... Um..." he looks like he has a little trouble coming up with a fourth thing, until he reaches for you, puts his right hand on your shoulder and says "And you."

You chuckle, which seems to calm him just the slightest bit and you keep going. "Alright, tell me three things you can hear."

He stays quiet for a few seconds, listening for sounds you imagine, and then says "I can hear the AC, the rain and the elevator being used."

He then looks at you waiting for the next thing, but you take a second to realize what he said and you're impressed.

You hadn't even realized it's raining and the elevator was all the way across the floor. The hearing on this man. With a small 'damn' that you’re now sure he can hear, you keep going.

"Tell me two things you can smell." you tell him.

You can see his nose scrunch a little, which you find adorable, and he says "I can smell jasmine." looking at the flower vase on his bedside table filled with jasmines, your favorite flowers that Tony tends to leave here and there just for your enjoyment.

"And… strawberries?" he says, a little confused with his answer.

You're confused too until you realize what he's probably smelling. "Oh, it's probably just my shampoo" you say with a chuckle.

He gives you a nod with a smile smile and you say "Now, last thing, tell me one thing you can taste."

He thinks about your words for a second, a look of concentration on his face, then he looks back at you and says, very quietly. "I can taste my tears."

you give him a sad smile and say "That's heartbreaking... But on the bright side, you're not panicking anymore."

He gives you a sad smile of his own, but seems to suddenly realize everything that just happened.

His face drops and he bows his head, refusing to look you in the eye, clearly very embarrassed that you saw him in the middle of a panic attack.

"Are you okay?" you ask him softly, tears still running down his face and his body still trembling a little but visibly more calm.

"I should be the one asking you that..." he answers, his voice a little hoarse from all the crying.

You can't help the smile that makes its way on your face at his concern.

"I'm fine, thanks to you. Are you okay, though?" you ask again.

"You shouldn't be here..." he says quietly.

He's still avoiding your question, so instead you ask "Why not?"

"I could hurt you..." he says in a small, sad voice that breaks your heart.

"Would you hurt me?" you ask.

He frowns and almost immediately says "of course not" still very quietly.

You give him a reassuring smile and say "Then I'm not worried." he finally looks up at you and gives you a small smile.

After a few minutes of silence, you feel the need to ask him. "Was that the first time that happened to you?"

He shakes his head and, when you don't say anything else and just look at him expectantly, he elaborates.

"I've had a few in the last three months, since... You know..." He says with a quiet voice and avoided your gaze. "It was the first time someone helped me though... Steve tried to, but they wouldn't let him..." he finishes.

You know by 'they' he means the guards at the Raft, so you don't ask any more questions about it, knowing he probably wants to forget about that place in the first place.

So instead you get up, look down at him and, extending your arm for him to take, you ask. "Why don't you get some sleep? You look exhausted."

He just nods, slowly taking your hand and getting up with absolutely no help from you. Being a big and strong dude of course he doesn't need it.

You walk to his bed and he sits down, you turn and are about to walk to the door when he stops you, his hand still in yours.

You turn back towards him and see him looking down, which makes you think that maybe you imagined him pulling on your hand?

But then you hear him, barely because of how low his voice is, asking "Can you stay?"

You aren't sure you heard right, so you ask him "You want me to stay with you?"

But he seemed to take that as you thinking he was crazy for even suggesting something like that because he very quickly drops your hand and says "You don't have to, you probably have enough of me after the panic attack, it's alright you can go." and just lays down on the bed, turning his back on you.

You stand there for a moment, thinking of what to do before you decide that not only is it clear that Bucky was desperately reaching out, not wanting to be alone, but you don't want to be alone either.

And, right now, it feels like Bucky is your only friend left in the tower. The only one you aren't pissed at, at least.

You move closer to his bed and quietly say "Bucky... I can stay, if you want me to."

He turns around to face you, a little shocked so you give him a smile to let him know you're serious.

He scoots over to make space for you and, after taking off your shoes and without either one of you saying another word, you lay down on your back.

After several minutes of silence you hear him quietly say "Thank you." which makes you turn on your side so you're facing him, only to find him already facing you.

"Anytime." you whisper back with a smile, which he returns.

You stay like that for a little while, just looking at each other, and eventually you fall asleep, his beautiful, freakishly blue eyes being the last thing you see.

Bucky watches you sleep for a bit until he also falls into a quiet sleep, with you very unaware of the fact that this is the first time in years, if not decades, that Bucky actually gets a full night of peaceful sleep.

Part 4

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x female reader #bucky barnes au #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes x y/n #bucky barnes imagine #sebastian stan #marvel fanfiction #bucky x reader #bucky x you #james bucky barnes #bucky barnes x f!reader #avengers x reader #avengers x platonic reader #avengers x platonic!reader

[wolfjackle-creates]

Bring Me Home Arc 2 Part 18

Welcome to another WIP Wednesday!

Story Summary: Tim and Danny are both neglected by parents who care more about their work than their families. They deal with this by spending too much time online and find each other playing MMORPGs. They keep up their friendship as Tim becomes Robin and Danny becomes Phantom and don't bother keeping secrets from each other.

Arc 1 AO3 Link

Arc 2: Part 1, Previous

Word Count: 1.7k

-----

From the radio station, the four traveled to the television studio for their next interview. The host had listened to their radio interview and helped summarize much of the information before asking further questions.

Tim and his teammates called into question the biases of the Drs Fenton and hoped their criticisms would bring others to think twice before taking their word as gospel.

When they were finally done, it was almost nine.

Tim shot off a quick text to Bruce for his morning check-in. He noticed Conner texting someone, too. “Who’re you talking to?” he asked.

“Sam. She says Danny’s still passed out. But her parents are talking about some sort of press release the mayor is planning on putting on at City Hall at ten.”

Cassie groaned. “Ugh, more reporters. Please say we don’t have to go.”

“We should,” said Tim. “But we can go in civvies.”

“Can we at least get breakfast first?” asked Bart. “It’s been hours since we woke up!”

“Yeah,” agreed Cassie. “I’m starving. Let’s get some food. I think I saw a diner when we flew to our second interview.”

Before Tim could consider protesting, Conner had him secure in his arms and TTK and they were in the air.

“Lead the way, Wonder Girl.”

Tim scowled to hide his smile. “Oh sure, don’t listen to your leader. Just do whatever.”

“You’d let us starve?” wailed Connor. “Then we’ll stage a mutiny!”

Cassie laughed. “Yeah, see how long you remain in charge of a hangry speedster, half-kryptonian, and demigoddess.”

Tim grinned. “Oh, but you forget I know you all very well. I can win you back to my side. Starting with Kon.”

“And how do you plan to do that?” demanded Conner.

“Easy. I’ll just bribe you with Alfred’s cookies and a great movie. If I add in a dash of ‘I need your help’ and my puppy dog eyes and you’ll be eating out of the palm of my hand.”

“That’s another square on my bingo card!” called back Cassie. “And look, we’re here!” She pointed down to a quintessential American diner with green glass windows.

The group met Bart a block away in an alley where they shed their gear.

“I’ll tell Sam what we’re up to.” Conner pulled out his phone to send the message.

“Quit wasting time! We’re on a deadline,” moaned Bart as he positioned himself behind Conner and tried to push him towards the street and breakfast.

Conner laughed and refused to budge, so Tim figured a demonstration of his power was in order.

He got in front of Conner and pouted at him. “I know I was joking about not allowing breakfast, but I’m the one who didn’t eat before the interviews. An omelet is calling my name.”

Conner groaned and ran a hand down his face. “Fuck you, Rob.” But he stalked forward out of the alley.

Tim and Bart exchanged grins.

“Seriously, Tim,” said Cassie. “This trip has been great for my bingo card.”

Tim stuck his tongue out at her and jogged to catch up with Conner.

Breakfast was simple but tasty and they devoured far too much food. Their waitress was clearly impressed with her first exposure to a speedsters appetite. Add in a super and a demigoddess and it was obscene.

All too soon, however, it was time to go to the mayor’s press conference. As they made their way there, they joined a growing crowd. Clearly many people were interested in whatever the mayor had planned.

In the crowd, he could hear comments about their interviews. It seems both had been posted online and already had thousands of views. Some people seemed to be sympathetic to them, but others were mistrustful of the “outsiders.”

“If they’re such good friends, why did it take so long for them to come here?” asked one man of his friend.

“I’ve a cousin in Central City. She says trouble always follows a superhero,” said another.

Tim exchanged a look with Conner. He’d be able to hear more conversations and could share his perceptions later.

Before long, they were entering City Hall. Already the seats were full, so they were forced to stand in the back. Jack and Maddie were sitting near the front. Jeremy and Pamela Manson sat on the opposite side of the room as them, but also were near the front of the room.

Tim exchanged looks with his teammates to make sure they saw both couples. Conner was glaring at Maddie and Jack.

“They’re complaining about our interviews,” said Conner. “Throwing around guesses that we are either possessed or have already been brainwashed by the ghosts.”

“At least we know they aren’t observant. Maybe they won’t notice us.”

Mayor Montez stepped up to the podium and everyone fell silent. “People of Amity Park, we have been faced with a threat the likes of which we’ve never before seen! And based on the events of this morning, it doesn’t seem like we’ll be able to rely on outside help to get us out of it.”

A stone sunk in Tim’s stomach and he exchanged looks with his friends.

“We only have one piece of business today: Defeating the ghosts that infest our town. And to do that, I'm calling for a vote to cede all ghost policing and security decisions”—he held up a photo of Maddie—“to Maddie Fenton.” As Tim watched, however, the mayor’s eyes glowed red and he winced. “I mean Jack,” he corrected, holding up a new picture of Jack Fenton. “The completely competent Jack Fenton.”

“He’s overshadowed,” breathed Conner.

Tim nodded and was already sending a message to Sam, Tucker, and Danny. “And who knows who else.”

Before they could say anything else, the mayor continued, “And we’ve located the ghost responsible for all the terror inflicted on our town.” He held up a picture of Phantom. “Whatever some outsiders may have tried to lie to you about this very morning.”

A gasp rang out among the crowd. Tim glanced at his friends. Conner was glaring at the mayor fiercely and Tim attempted to step in front of him, as pointless as their relative sizes made the action.

The mayor smiled viciously as a panicked crescendo rose from the crowd. Tim’s phone vibrated in his hand and he saw a response from Sam.

Sam: We saw Sam: Danny is on his way Sam: And we’re following as fast we can

Under his breath, Tim muttered, “Conner, you and Bart should go suit up. Cassie and I will stay and keep an eye on what’s going on. Stay close, but try not to be seen unless an attack happens.” Subtly, grateful for their places against the wall, he passed over the thermos he’d taken with him that morning.

Tim heard Conner’s sigh of relief as the two slipped away. He hated pretending to be a civilian in a crisis. Even more than the rest of them.

Cassie whispered, “I almost hate you for keeping me here.”

Tim just bumped their shoulders together.

The mayor, or rather the ghost inhabiting him, raised his arm and silence slowly fell. “We cannot call for outside help. Those who call themselves the Young Justice today proved that the so-called heroes of this world will defend our enemy over us. That they will spread lies to keep us subject to the whims of these ghosts.” The last word was spat. “So we must solve the problem ourselves. Jack Fenton, if the people of this town agree, you and those you train will be our defense force, will you do this?”

Jack near jumped three feet in the air in his excitement. “I’ve been training for this my entire life, Mayor Montez! I’ll be honored.”

“I believe we must institute martial law! The 9 PM curfew will remain in place. No one will be allowed on the streets alone. No loitering. The park will be closed until further notice. Same with the public pool and library and a number of other locations. Drs Fenton, will you be able to set up buildings protected by ghost shields where people can gather for safety?”

Whispering broke out among the public. Maddie stood tall next to her husband, though being continually overlooked in favor of him was clearly grating on her. “We can. Fenton Works is already protected and within two days we can have another shield up and ready. Within the week, we could have five.”

The whispered were almost loud enough to drown her out by the time she finished speaking

“Order! Order!” called Mayor Montez. “All in favor of declaring martial law, and allowing the completely competent Jack Fenton to mobilize a massive ghost hunt, please say—”

But cutting off the mayor, Danny, in his Phantom form, suddenly appeared in the air in the middle of the hall. “I might be too young to vote, but I’m casting one anyway.”

Around them, everyone gasped and people began backing away even as Danny shifted to look at them. Tim and Cassie both tensed and prepared to run.

“You people have to listen to me,” urged Danny. “I’m on your side.”

Mayor Montez took a step back as members of his security moved to stand in front of him. Jack and Maddie jumped up and glared at him.

“You’re not fooling anybody, ghost kid!” declared Jack. “You are going down!” He reached back and pulled out the Fenton fishing rod, the line was horribly tangled and Jack began messing with it. “As soon as I finish untangling this thing.”

Cassie let out a disbelieving huff.

Tim shook his head. “Apparently,” he replied to her unasked question. He pulled out his phone and shot a message to Bart and Conner.

Rob: get back here now Rob: All 4 of us are needed

Before he even finished typing his last message, Bart was at his side. Just in time to see Danny mutter something and shoot an ectoblast at his parents who were thrown back with the force of it, destroying the podium and leaving a burn mark on the ground.

“Shit,” muttered Tim. “Cassie, let’s go. Impulse, try to help where you can.”

“You’ve got it.”

----

Next

And so the best of intentions go awry!

I can almost taste the end of this arc, but for all I know, that'll take another 10k to finish. So we'll see what happens. Hope you enjoyed.

I no longer do tag lists, but please check out the Subscription Post if you want to be notified of updates.

#dpxdc #now we find out the consequences of the interviews #amity parkers not trusting the JL will have zero consequences for the town #none at all #walker's plan is still going forward #and the worst is yet to come #*evil grin*

[charcubed]

Disneyland's Rogers: The Musical, propaganda that turns Steve Rogers into more myth than man, and revisionist history (possibly) to a purpose

Any of my thoughts in this post could just be me reading too far into things. I'm very aware of that, and please know that this post exists just because this sort of thing is fun for me! This is a thought exercise where we propose "What if we live in a world where the MCU is actually doing a cool and interesting thing as a longcon?" If you have anger at Marvel, that's valid and relatable, but please don't get angry at me or imply I'm an MCU stan who doesn't think critically about the mouse. Thanks!

Breaking news: I'm back on my bullshit!

A quick personal recap: I infamously hated Avengers: Endgame for a long list of reasons (and I even rewrote the movie). One of those reasons is that I've always taken issue with Steve's ending. But in the years since then, and as the MCU's phase 4 has evolved, my frustration at Steve's "ending" has turned into an ongoing and legitimate theory that the MCU could be slowly leading into a loosely adapted Secret Empire plot line. I know we've all been joking about Steve being trapped or about an imposter Steve since 2019, but uhhh, it's kind of not a joke to me anymore? It feels weirdly plausible at this point and so I enjoy discussing the potential.

You can find a full elaboration on that here, where I wrote out my "Steve was snatched by HYDRA" theory in 2021.

In that post, one of the things I mentioned at the time was Rogers: The Musical being in the Hawkeye trailer.

[The musical's] very existence is an example of how in-universe the stories of the lives of the heroes are being commodified, especially (in terms of how they’re framing it) for Steve’s. The heroes are no longer seen as people, if they ever were. They are, as Kate Bishop says to Clint in a recently released clip, more about “branding.” Sam Wilson will be redefining the shield moving forward in a Cap context, but simultaneously, the world is still enamored by Steve Rogers as a symbol in his own right. And that is ripe for manipulation as a Trojan horse to control public opinion… whether in the context of things like this by themselves (is the musical portraying Steve accurately, or is it painting an inaccurate picture of him the world accepts as fact?) or in future (is this propaganda that makes the public see Steve a certain way and continue to love him, to set up a fake or brainwashed Steve coming on the scene later?).

Now a form of the musical exists in full, at Disneyland and all over Youtube. Considering some of its baffling content – which I will break down below – this perspective seems even more strongly worth considering.

I have two main reasons for why I'm defending examining this musical so closely:

1. It is (arguably) an in-universe piece of media that has bearing on the MCU canon. It isn't like any other typical Disneyland attraction; its very existence is meta and it was in canon first. Obviously it's seen in Hawkeye, but there are also posters for it in several different phase 4 properties. It's lurking in the background indefinitely. So what can this musical tell us about what the wider public within the MCU is being told about the life story of Steve Rogers?

2. This Secret Empire graphic – which is animated in the center of the stage of a prolonged period of time – feels like a literal sign to pay attention.

Granted, this is obviously still ancillary material. 99% of the MCU audience will never see this musical, whether in person or on YouTube. But just because it isn't a vital piece doesn't mean it's automatically an entirely irrelevant piece.

They've given me an inch with that sign and I'm taking a mile.

So if you're interested, please join me on this journey :)

For the record, let me just say that I salute the creative team behind this show. It's pretty fun and the songs are catchy, the sets and costuming are cool, and the cast is overall very talented.

It's also fucking maddening. LMAO.

Why? Firstly, because of the seemingly deliberate ahistorical inaccuracies. We all know Ant-Man is wrongly shown in the Battle of New York, which originally "came from [the Hawkeye showrunner] and Marvel, as something to further aggravate Hawkeye as he watched the show, and also as a comment on how movies and articles and people always get something wrong." It seems like they expanded those meta nods, but most inaccuracies are now in service of glorifying Steve and Peggy's "love story." Yes, romance objectively makes for good theater; but again, I feel that this is worth examining considering the full context.

And secondly, Steve's ending is framed as an offer presented to him, convincing him it's the happy ending he deserves because he's tired. In my mind, these two big elements go together, and I'll walk you through the details of what happens in the musical before I tie the thought threads back around into some theorizing.

For your reference, here's a list of the main songs and story beats:

• "U-S-Opening Night" - the Starkettes (who are basically a Greek chorus) frame the show's story, and then it turns into an ensemble that loosely takes place at the Stark Expo. • "I Want You" – Steve's "I want" song about trying to enlist in the army. • "Star-Spangled Man With A Plan" – Steve performing on the USO tour obviously, and then there's a reprise with an added voiceover that (very briefly) covers the Howling Commandos' rescue + the war via comic book imagery. • "What You Missed" – Fury and the Starkettes tell Steve some pop culture things he missed while he was frozen, + they tell him about the Avengers. Then Fury goes down a list of other hero characters, including the Guardians? Doctor Strange? Wanda?? It plays loose and fast with time, because many non-2012 characters are bafflingly mentioned in this nonlinear Avengers list – including the Winter Soldier (???). • "Save the City" – this is the song seen in Hawkeye, with the civilians + the Avengers all involved, but it's slightly different here and expanded to also reference other battles. • "End of the Line" – Old Steve presents main Steve with the time stone as an opportunity for his happy ending, and they reflect on things together. (Yes, this is insane.) • "Just One Dance" – Steve and Peggy reunite and sing about their love. • And then there's basically a reprise of "Save the City," with the Starkettes and the whole cast closing the finale out.

Right out of the gate, let's address this: the main reason you're going to see some fans pissed about this musical is not only that Steve and Peggy's ~epic romance~ is made a pillar of the story... but also that Bucky's importance/involvement in Steve's life is minimized as much as possible.

And they took Bucky-related elements from canon and made them center more around Peggy instead.

• For some weird reason, Peggy is in the Stark Expo scene. When a soldier is hitting on the Starkettes ("hey sweetheart, I wanna dance!"), Steve tells the soldier to show the ladies some respect. The soldier grabs Steve and throws him down, and then Peggy swoops in to yell "Pick on someone your own size!" and punches the guy before walking away. So she's given Bucky's TFA line verbatim, and she is given the role he had of saving Steve from bullies. There is blatantly no reason they couldn't have had Bucky still serve that function and be truer to "history," because he briefly enters this scene in uniform less than a minute later to announce he's shipping out to the 107th – and then he spins off with a date on his arm. (We don't see Bucky on stage again until the full cast comes out for the finale!)

• After the Star-Spangled Man show, Peggy rushes in to talk to Steve. Steve is excited about his USO performance (???) but she urgently tells him to listen as she says that the 107th has been captured. Peggy apparently knows it's Bucky's division, and she knows Steve is going to go, so she tells him that she's already arranged transport for him. This is a subtle twist from the truth of how it went down in TFA, in which Steve recognized 107 as the number of Bucky's division, and his dogged determination inspired Peggy to relent and help his rescue mission. Here, Peggy is given a stronger role in the Cap origin story. And before Steve rushes off, Peggy sings a short untitled ballad hoping for their dance, so Steve pauses before he leaves to ask her to go on a date with her when he returns. • The most egregious Bucky-to-Peggy change of all is the song "End of the Line," in which the infamous Steve and Bucky line/promise (that broke Bucky's brainwashing...) is re-contextualized to be about ???? Peggy waiting for Steve in the past??? Old Man Steve and regular Steve sing it together. But we'll go back to that in a minute.

Again, I get it, yeah? It's for theater. Whatever. But in reality, the obvious logical truth is that Peggy is centered (to the point of taking elements from Bucky's story, and in turn Bucky is downplayed) because they needed to convince the audience that Steve going back in time to be with her makes sense. Steve's time travel ending had to be justified, so the Peggy and Steve "love story" had to be a pillar in this with everything else being given lesser weight.

And the inherent selfishness of him doing something as big as going back in time also had to be justified... which is why they do their best to convince you Steve fought so much he deserved it.

Let me elaborate on that by describing the lead-up to the "End of the Line" song.

So, right before "End of the Line" is "Save the City" – which includes Steve belting "I can do this all day!" repeatedly, of course. It's the 2012 Battle of New York as the Avengers come together to win.

As they begin to disperse, the song then transitions to a voiceover alert mentioning Sokovia being under attack by artificial intelligence (a.k.a. Age of Ultron). The Avengers group rushes back to center stage to say "Save the city! Help us win!" together for battle again.

And then things get fucking weird.

Because the next voiceover threat is "Washington DC. Attack: the Winter Soldier." This is not accurate to the order of events! The Winter Soldier events were before Age of Ultron; the public of the MCU would also know this.

And suddenly on stage Steve is now in the center while everyone else gestures to him. Instead of singing with him, they're telling him "Save the city! Help us win!"

Then, another voiceover: "Wakanda, under attack" (Infinity War) and again, Steve is centered while everyone else points to him. The ensemble says, "Save the city, help us win! Save us all from the state we're in! Got to hear you, got to hear you, got to hear you say..." as Steve is buckling to his knees under their pointing. And as the lights go down to one spotlight on him and everyone else leaves, he says "I can do this all day" one last time, but now it's subdued.

The implication is that Steve has been fighting and fighting, people leave him or he loses them, and he's tired.

And then fucking Old Man Steve arrives.

He says "On your left," because yes, they gave him Sam Wilson's line. BATSHIT.

So now there's two Steves on stage! There has been no mention of Thanos or infinity stones or anything up to this point! (I can only assume that's because in the MCU universe no one would want to be reminded of the trauma of "the Blip" – though it's pretty wild that they're allowed to know about magical time travel?)

Steve is baffled by Old Man Steve's arrival. I, too, was baffled by Old Man Steve's arrival.

As Steve questions how this is possible, Old Man Steve shows him the time stone from his pocket – and only the time stone – which Steve recognizes.

OLD MAN: "You've got to remember where you've been to know where you're going." STEVE: "Where am I going?" OLD MAN: "A date with destiny." STEVE: “Destiny. So we’re the hero till the end?” OLD MAN: “That’s the thing about endings, Steven. They can be rewritten.”

Lmao???????

Steve starts singing about how he hopes this means they "win" and calls himself a "tired hero."

STEVE: "But sometimes I wonder, who will save the savior? Can we really do this all day? So here I am, now and also then. Just a man, looking back at where he's been." OLD MAN: "The road is rough but wounds are healed by a thing called time. You can't forget what's waiting at the end of the line."

Me, watching this: the fact that he says this out of the blue makes absolutely no sense.

There's a bit more singing, including "end of the line" repetition, and then Old Man Steve pulls out the time stone to essentially show visions of... I don't fucking know. Past, present, and future?

That's pre-serum Steve, Steve with Mjolnir, and Sam Wilson as the new Cap. This is the only reference to Sam in the whole thing.

More singing, and then: Peggy's silhouette.

OLD MAN: "Can't forget who's waiting..." STEVE: "I can't forget who's waiting..." BOTH: "Don't forget who's waiting..." STEVE: "At the end of the line."

At this point I'm like, what in the hell?

Did Old Man Steve just brainwash normal Steve into thinking "end of the line" is now about Peggy? Because uhhhh, sorry, that's what it feels like!

Then Steve uses the stone to go back in time, reunites with Peggy, etc. etc. finale.

It's truly some crazy shit.

[drags hands down face]

Look... there's a lot to unpack here, and there's a lot that gets me about it. I know this is dramatized for the stage! I KNOW! But the fact that Old Man Steve shows up to convince Steve he should go back in time makes me want to gnaw on furniture.

Another person essentially uses the lure of a life with Peggy to tempt Steve into doing this, dramatized or not. That is how it's framed.

It's a hell of a way to frame it, and it makes Steve's ending stand in even starker contrast to so many other things in phase 4. Desperately trying to go backwards when you shouldn't or to bring back a lost lover is an evil temptation, and it results in a trap or negative cosmic consequences for basically all of the other characters in the MCU.

• In Shang-Chi, Wenwu is tempted by the Soul Eaters beyond the Dark Gate. They use the voice of his deceased wife to convince him to set them free. • In "What If" episode 4, Doctor Strange becomes evil in a desperate bid to save Christine and he destroys his universe. Along the way, he tries to tempt/trap the good Strange who's fighting him by using visions of Christine, but good Strange knows she isn't real. • Wanda's grief and desire to bring back Vision leads to – well, you know. • In No Way Home, Peter trying to undo things is what causes the multiverse problems.

And the fact that they frame it as Steve being tired, so basically the argument is he deserves that time travel ending (just like MCU fans who defend Endgame say in real life)... Well.

There's no way to make it hold up, especially because in "What If" they explicitly subverted that and had Captain Carter not go back in time despite how she felt she'd "earned" it.

Lastly, in this musical as Steve decides to pursue time travel as his course of action, he basically has the meaning or memory of "end of the line" rewritten for him. I refuse to not think that is some nefarious shit. Yes, it's not out of the realm of possibility that it's just some general Disney erasing Steve and Bucky nonsense.

But... this is on another level to me. I do think that it's a blatant choice that they had to be aware even general MCU fans would call bullshit on. Everyone knows it's inaccurate. "End of the line" is embedded in pop culture consciousness as being connected to Bucky. It just is! Surely that means it's not a stretch to theorize it could be deliberate meta commentary.

How, in the MCU world, would the in-universe playwrights even know the phrase "end of the line"? How the fuck would it be accidentally applied to Steve and Peggy? Not to sound like a crazy person, but who the fuck was rooting around in Steve and/or Bucky's personal business or their brains in order to obtain that knowledge and then remix it, and why? Neither of them would flippantly mention it in the public eye or interviews ever. So where did its inclusion come from?

And in the finale ensemble, this is Bucky's line when he comes out on stage and salutes + points to Steve: "Don't forget who's waiting..." And Old Man Steve completes it with "...at the end of the line."

What on God's green earth am I meant to do with THAT?

Smh.

The vibes are fucked, folks.

The MCU public wouldn't know enough to say the vibes are fucked. The MCU public wouldn't know the origin of "end of the line" as a phrase. But us? The ones who know the "true story" via the movies? We can call bullshit.

Whether the creative team behind this musical did every aspect of this consciously or not, in my opinion the fact that they had to tweak canon "history" to A) make Peggy's involvement in Steve's life more central and B) emphasize Steve as a tired hero all works as commentary on and almost a condemnation of Endgame's frustrating ending. In a way, it's also what Endgame did with the compass and 1973 moment with Peggy as well.

Steve's ending had to be convincing.

It's theater.

And so, maybe the same is true for the in-narrative perspective of this musical in the context of the MCU world. What purpose would it serve to tell the MCU public a feel-good narrative about how all Steve Rogers wanted was to no longer be a tragic man out of time and get to make a life with his best girl? To frame it as being about how he fought so hard for years and so he earned a happy ending? To minimize and nearly erase Bucky's importance in his life?

Who would want to do that sort of propaganda, and why?

The MCU civilians are given this happy explanation and maybe don't widely question it. Who cares about the details or logistics if it makes a good story, I guess. It's a stretch, but maybe they mostly applaud it. Maybe they're happy for "America's favorite son" (not unlike people who uncritically liked Endgame). In a way, it's even a rehabilitation of his image (after the Accords) like putting the shield on the Statue of Liberty. And maybe they'd even be ready and waiting to applaud if Steve ever made a dramatically selfless and de-aged return to the spotlight or a position of authority.

But mostly, the public is being conditioned to not know or to forget that anyone else like Bucky Barnes or Sam Wilson would possibly know Steve Rogers the person well enough in the modern day to call bullshit on any of this – or on his hypothetical miraculous future return.

So. Sure, it's probably nothing.

But what if it's not?

-------

UPDATE: @faeriecap added to this post with some incredible information and further behind-the-scenes context about the MCU/Marvel stuff at Disney parks! Check it out here :)

#rogers the musical #rogers: the musical #steve rogers #captain america #captain america meta #marvel meta #imposter steve #anti-endgame #peggy carter #stevebucky #mcu #marvel #stucky #anti-endgame steve #char writes things #me: is anyone else going to write about this being propaganda? no? fine I'll do it myself #I should not be posting it after midnight but I don't want to be tempted to fucking look at it again tomorrow. be gone you monster

[mvltixcc]

Girls Like Girls - Robin Buckley X Cheerleader!Reader

Summary: Robin has a crush on the new girl in town. Y/N is also a new member of the cheer squad, which means Robin sees her all the time at games and other school events. Unfortunately, Robin is put in a tough situation. She's scared to talk to her because the cheerleaders have a reputation of being mean girls and she fears that Y/N may not feel the same. Little does Robin know that Y/N does not appear as she seems. Y/N becomes best friends with Eddie, which seems unlikely at the surface due to different social circles. This leads to rumors of course and word spreads like wildfire here at Hawkins, which then makes Robin's feelings even more confusing. After hanging out with Steve and the gang, Robin starts to see a different side to Y/N. Will they end up together or will they just remain friends?

Word Count: 1.3k

Pinterest board for inspiration

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

“You know what Buckley, if you’re gonna criticize the way I do my job why don’t you just do it yourself.” Steve said jokingly, handing Robin a vhs tape and headed back to the counter. 

“It’s not my fault you don’t know anything about movies.” She chuckled as she put the movies away. 

“Well you have fun with that, I’m gonna go man the register.” Steve said as he continued to walk away from his friend. Robin continued to put away the tapes, a few people came in here and there but it was mostly dead on this particular Friday night. Which was odd, all things considered. It was around 8 o'clock when a group of people had walked in. 

“Welcome to Family Video, let me know if you need help finding any-, oh great here we go.” Steve said as the group walked in. “What?”  Robin asked, as she was restocking the candy display. She stopped in her tracks for a moment, looking up from her spot. “Oh uh hey there.”  Robin stammered.

“Hi Robin!” Y/N said excitedly. Robin had a hard time putting words together. You usually came here at the same time every Friday to pick out a movie. Robin almost thought you weren't coming because it had gotten so late. But there you were, standing in front of her in your cheer uniform. 'Practice must have gone late." Robin thought to herself. She stood from her spot to get a better look at you. ‘God she looks so pretty.’ She thought. A few people walked in the store, causing a slight breeze to head in your direction. She caught a scent of your perfume. She closed her eyes for a moment as she took in the smell, it was sweet and gentle. It smelled of vanilla. “Are you gonna pick a movie or what Y/N?” Eddie interrupted, bringing Robin out of her thoughts.

“Yeah yeah yeah, just give me a minute you goose.” Y/N turned to her friend and said jokingly. She walked over to the movies and went section by section to find the right one. 

“Okay let's not destroy the display guys.” Steve said dreadfully as he walked over to the rest of the Hellfire club trying to clean up the mess of his hard work he had done earlier. 

“Boooo, you’re no fun Harrington.” Gareth had mocked. Steve picked up the last item, sarcastically laughing back the comment. “I’m fun, I’m Steve Harrington for god sakes.” He muttered under his breath as he walked back behind the counter. 

Robin watched you as you pondered for the right film. You had gone aisle by aisle with no luck. Then suddenly you had picked up a movie and scrunched your nose as you had inspected it. Robin felt a smile creep upon her face, she couldn't help but look down in hopes you or anyone else could see her. 

“Now why are you making that face?” Eddie questioned as you held up the movie to show him why you had said expression written upon your face. It was a copy of My Bloody Valentine.

“What about it?” Eddie continued to question. 

“Do you see what section we’re in!?” Y/N proclaimed, pointing to the sign that had said ‘romance’. 

“Oh god are you gonna make us watch a girly flick? Sam made us watch one of those last week, okay we don't need a repeat of that!” Eddie groaned. 

"I can hear you, you know!" Sam stated from across the store.

“No you goose, this movie is in the wrong section.” She laughed walking over to the counter to check out the film.

“Did you guys find everything alright?” Robin asked as she scanned your items. “Yeah we found everything okay.” Y/N said getting her money out of her wallet. “That's not true, this was in the wrong section.” Eddie stated pointing to the movie.

Robin groaned, “Damn you Harrington.” 

“What is this pick on Steve day?!?” Steve had proclaimed. 

Robin finished checking you out, she couldn't help but admire how beautiful you looked under the light. She was soon interrupted from pondering as you had said your goodbye’s, waving and flashing a small smile to Robin. She had waved back and gave the same smile in return, but that soon faded as she saw Eddie put his arm around your waist as your group walked out of the store. Robin let out a sigh and hunched over the counter, letting her head fall into her hands.

“You okay?” Steve asked his friend, giving her a small nudge. 

“Yeah I’m fine.” Robin said, picking her head up and brushing the hair out of her face. “Yeah that’s a load of bullshit and you know it.” Steve said, sitting up on the counter. “You like her don’t you?” He questioned.

“Does it really matter? She’s with Eddie, she’s not interested in girls.” Robin stated, messing with the string coming off of her sweater. Steve couldn’t help but feel sad for his friend. He couldn't imagine how hard it is for her to try and find someone during times like this. I mean this is the 80’s and a small town in Indiana for crying out loud. “Have you even asked her?” He questioned.

“Oh yeah let me just go up to the most beautiful woman ever and just say ‘wow nice weather we’re having here, oh hey by the way do you like to kiss girls?’ Do you know how stupid that sounds?!” Robin got nervous just thinking about it and when she got nervous, she rambled.

“Well don’t talk about the weather with her for starters.” Steve chuckled.

“You know what I mean dingus!” Robin said, giving her friend a slight shove. 

“Look, you won't know unless you ask, who knows maybe she likes you back? You thought that she was mean and scary because of her being a cheerleader, you were wrong about that weren’t you?” Steve stated, he tried to remain hopeful for Robin. He wanted his friend to be happy. She shrugged, Robin’s hopes in finding a girlfriend became low after everything that had happened with Vickie. She was happy that the two could remain friends, but it still stung nonetheless. 

“Next time you see her, you should ask her to hang out. It’s a start to get to know her and to know for sure right?” Steve asked, now facing her. 

“I guess, I just don’t wanna go through that kind of heartache again.” Robin said, looking down at her feet.

“Well no matter what, I’ve got your back.” Steve said, bumping into Robin. This caused her to chuckle. 

“Alright alright, let's get back to work so we can get out of here. You owe me a bite to eat after this for making me clean up your mess of your so-called organization.” Robin laughed as she went to organize the returned tapes.

“You’re never gonna let that go are you?” Steve asked. 

“Nope.” Robin yelled from the back.

Next chapter

#stranger things #robin buckley x y/n #robin buckley #robin buckley imagine #robin buckley x female reader #robin buckley stranger things #robin buckley x reader #robin buckley x fem!reader #robin buckley fic #robin buckley x cheerleader!reader #robin buckley x cheerleader #steve harrington #eddie munson #maya hawke #stranger things 4 #stranger things fanfiction #robin buckley angst x female reader #robin buckley angst #stranger things x y/n #stranger things x reader #robin buckley fluff #robin buckley x reader fluff #eddie munson fic #steve harrington fic #lesbian #wlw

[zeephyre]

CRITICAL ROLE CAMPAIGN 3 EPISODE 85 SPOILERS

IM LITERALLY ABOUT TO LOSE MY MIND YALL

Where do I even ??? start ???

I haven't been posting c3 as the episodes dropped in...a while actually, like right before they went to the feywild. i have many thoughts and many feelings about so many things that have happened since then and I'll summarise them so I can get to THIS episode.

fearne and ashton - love their shard powers, they're literally royalty and terrifying, and i want them to make-out. i can't wait to see them go full primordial again in a real combat situation.

imogen - save her. literally save her. free her, even. i love everything about the call of ruidus when it comes to imogen on a narrative standpoint, but...God I get so worried that we're gonna lose her. I don't mean she's gonna betray the hells, but...ruidus could take her and then i would simply perish.

laudna - before i really get into wtf went down this episode with her and she who must not be named, i gotta say... im worried. very very worried. however, that fireball was objectively the best shit ever.

fcg - i can't even really remember anything stand out abt fcg except what Sam pulled last night so.

chetney - still the heart of the team, still my baby girl, still my favourite. love him to bits.

orym - i think laudna is going to beat his ass one of these days and im... even more concerned about that after this episode. his nana morri powers are cool as fuck tho... does that make him a warlock now? i know he isn't multi-classing but wouldn't that be cool

ANYWAY WE'RE ON THE FUCKING MOON AND WE GOT MOON LORE AND EVERYTHING WAS SHITTY THEN FUN THEN SHITTY THEN FUN AGAIN THEN REALLY FUCKING SAD THEN IT ALL WENT TO SHIT AGAIN.

the moment imogen reached out to ruidus and matt mentioned that she could sense where other ruidusborn were i fucking knew that otohan was high tailing it in their direction, and i thought they instinctively knew that too but they probably got so distracted.

we were travelling for hours and had a huge fight that almost got them captured (not to be confused with the OTHER two fights that almost got them captured) and I was begging and screaming and crying for them to get a long rest safely hidden away AND THEN THEY SPLIT THE PARTY WITH BARELY ANY SPELL SLOTS OR HIT POINTS AFTER BEING DRAINED FROM ANOTHER BATTLE WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM

(Sidenote, the willmaster really opened up the door to the further increase in moral pondering in a certain number of hellians. i do think using the harness is disgusting and hypocritical, but i don't condemn them for it, it just...makes me wanna vomit thinking abt what ludinus did with it. not to mention the HUNGER parallels between laudna and ludinus...its just not good yall. also??? objectively funny that fcg seemed weirded out by the idea of killing the willmaster, not just with the harness but in general, considering how many people they've killed up to this point)

idk if its just the inherent terror that an evil old hot lady can inspire that makes otohan so much more terrifying to me than ludinus. like, objectively, ludinus is a worse threat and could wipe them out EASILY but jesus otohan is like the damn reaper to me. it's the trauma from the laudna, fearne, orym massacre mixed with the underlying little drop from their uthodurn romp that let us know that resurrection spells are NOT working and idk if that got fixed bc of time passing or distance from the leylines but i really did not want to test that shit out in real time

thank...god that sam riegel is a damn genius player, that banishment of fcg and fearne was the ONLY reason fcg survived. and thank GOD FOR KEYLETH BECAUSE WITHOUT THAT CLOUD SPELL BELLS HELLS WOULD BE VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY DEAD RN.

God, "otohan has us. run." is going to haunt me just as much, if not more than the almost tpk. it just...shot me straight back to bassuras and the plan to run that just...immediately fell apart.

god fcg truly could have died there. and fearne would be captured. i know the hells would be too stupid and too brave and too loyal to leave fearne with otohan in their cloud form but can you imagine a world where fcg was gone, fearne was captured and the hells had to switch from recon to rescue... itd be stressful but pretty fun.

thankfully it didn't come to that and some good came from the shit.

ruidus is so beautiful. i was worried they'd end being trapped under ruidus while they explored (not that I wasn't on board with the detours, I wish this wasn't a time sensitive mission), but matt's imagery of the fossilized elven structure and garden made me sad but also happy that we got to see it.

i cannot believe that the stupid plan to shove fearne up a water hole happened AGAIN and it ended up with us FINDING A BACK HOLE TO RUIDUS GOD I LOVE THESE CHUCKLEFUCKS WHEN IS THE NEXT EPISODE MATT YOU CANNOT DO THIS TO ME. WHERE EVEN ARE THEY??? IS IT EVEN EXANDRIA???? WHAT DO WE DO IF IT IS EXANDRIA??? WHERE DID THIS HOLE EVEN COME FROM???? DOES IT CLOSE AND REOPEN??? IS IT STAGNANT?????? IS IT FUCKING STABLE?!?!?!?!?!

God...we could go back to keyleth and the others and actually invade ruidus without encountering the ruby vanguard. (that's if they're alright because otohan did go out onto the battlefield and we don't know what fhe fuck she did when the illusion fell through)

GOD. IS IT THURSDAY YET??? WE HAVENT EVEN FOUND THE RESISTANCE????

#critical role #cr3 #bells hells #critical role campaign 3 #c3 #critical role c3 #critical role spoilers #imogen temult #ashton greymoore #cr laudna #laudna #orym of the air ashari #chetney pock o'pea #fcg critical role #cr spoilers #fearne calloway #c3 e85 #cr3 ep85

[scoobydoodean]

Do you have siblings, and what order are you in?

How do you view and feel about Sam running away multiple times, and then in 5.16 Sam running away are the only memories he's given? (and do you think angels did that purposefully?)

I am the younger of two and I understand how Sam can run away and how it would only be about getting away from their, but that Dean would feel the brunt of it all. But I can totally imagine my older sibling understanding Dean, but not necessarily Sam's pov.

I also don't think Sam's reasoning is ever fully explained, at least in 5.16, it makes him seem much more selfish and uncaring. I think he assumed Dean was better equipped to handle living with their dad alone simply because he behaved, it just happened to be that Dean and dad were linked - and I don't really know how much they talked about their relationship with their dad till they were older.

I wonder if Dean ever would've considered leaving John and living somewhere near Sam, or even running away with Sam.

I have three siblings. I'm in the middle. Two older siblings and the caboose is 7 years younger than me. So I remember what it's like to be the baby but I also know what it's like to play older sibling to a sibling several years younger than me. My younger brother and I are also very close.

If this was all prompted by my comment the other day that I wasn't looking forward to watching "Dark Side of the Moon", I don't dislike the episode because it shows Sam running off. I do have issues with the episode, but a large part of my distaste for it is that it is generally very depressing. It being depressing in of itself isn't a criticism of the episode—it's supposed to be depressing because it's about total loss of hope and belief for Dean (and then Cas as well losing hope at the end of the episode). It's doing what it's supposed to do in that sense. It's just hard to watch. Unfortunately, a lot of people take the bleakness of it and the idea that Dean is a burden and etc as truth and not manipulation meant to drive him to say "yes", and that also makes me rather sour about it.

I don't care that Sam wanted to go to college, or that he was happy at another family's thanksgiving at one point in his life. The Flagstaff memory bothers me a little because Sam's fond recollection of it, unmarred by any negative associations, clearly suggests he didn't face any consequences for running off once John found him. The fact that he never even into his adult life considered that Dean might have faced consequences does feel rather self-centered, and that's on purpose. I don't care that Sam went to school or that there were points as a kid where he wanted to run off.

I do disagree with the premise that Sam still desires some normal core Thanksgiving. I simply don't think that would be a favorite memory for Sam anymore. Just a few episodes prior to this, in "Swap Meat", Sam sat down with someone else's family for a normal, family dinner and he hated it. He found Gary's parents absolutely obnoxious. He told Gary afterward that he envied his life, only to turn to Dean and say he lied.

SAM I totally lied. That kid's life sucked ass. All that apple-pie, family crap? It's stressful. Trust me – we didn't miss a damn thing.

Or observe earlier in the episode:

DEAN You ever think that you'd want something like that? Wife, rugrats, the whole nine? SAM No, not really my thing anymore.

In fact, it's Dean who envies the normal life in "Swap Meat" and several other episodes (ex: 2.20, 4.19) whereas Sam indicates several times that a normal life is not something he wants (2.02, 2.10, 2.20, 4.08, 4.19, 5.12). In 4.08 and in 2.20, Sam in fact overtly states that he would not go back and choose a normal life now if he could go back. In 3.01, 4.19, and in 5.06, Sam also heavily emphasizes the importance of family within the hunting dynamic. I track a lot of this within the tag #sam the hunter.

I think there is a strong argument to be made that Zachariah ran them through heaven like rats in a maze in 5.16, directing them toward certain memories and not others in order to make Dean believe that Sam doesn't care for him (I have a separate post to make about this in more detail). However, I don't believe Zachariah forced in memories that aren't "greatest hits". I think he just drove them away from any happy memories Sam has with Dean and toward ones where Sam grasped independence from John, misappropriated to make Dean feel Sam doesn't care about Dean or appreciate/recognize his sacrifices (the former is not true, but the latter is in fact true in many cases).

Note though that when Joshua arrives and takes them to heaven's garden:

SAM: This is heaven’s Garden? DEAN: It’s-it’s nice… ish. I guess. JOSHUA: You see what you want to here. For some it’s God’s throne room; for others it’s Eden. You two, I believe it’s the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. You came here on a field trip.

So right there, we have a shared favorite memory, right after (presumably) any potential influence Zachariah had on what memories they were seeing was eliminated.

What primarily irritates me about this episode and many other Dabb/Loflin episodes is their perpetual need to insert the narrative that Sam wants a normal life he explicitly states he does not want over and over and over in everyone else's episodes, while they write Dean as someone who says things like "I mean, we’re supposed to be a team. It’s supposed to be you and me against the world, right?" It implies a sort of desperation vs apathy that, even when contradicted in subtler ways, I just don't find interesting... And yet they seem to harp on the same dramatic "misunderstanding" over and over and over for all eternity. And Dabb continues it after cutting ties with Loflin. In fact he continues to toy with these obnoxious dramatics to the very end of the series in a way I find unbelievably tired and obnoxious and I resent it. He's the same one-trick pony when it comes to his ideas on Dean and Cas conflicts in the later seasons.

As to your last bit there: Dean did consider running off. We see this in "Bad Boys", and in that episode, we also see that Dean doesn't end up abandoning their family because he felt Sam needed him. We hear a similar narrative in regards to John in 1.06 from the mouth of the shifter—that Dean had dreams of his own, but Dean felt that John needed him, so Dean stayed. John echoes this when he says that he was an emotional wreck and Dean took care of him (2.01). We see Dean also taking care of Mary in "Dark Side of the Moon" after she gets off the phone with John, upset. 5.16 casts Dean as someone perpetually sacrificing his own needs for his family, but unappreciated all the while. In fact, Sam doesn't recognize any of his sacrifices. Dean is nothing more than a blood offering on the altar of family. Zachariah intends this narrative and leans into it heavily in the scene where he explicitly manipulates what Sam and Dean are seeing.

MARY: Don’t you walk away from me. I never loved you. You were my burden. I was shackled to you. Look what it got me. The worst was the smell. The pain, well. What can you say about your skin bubbling off? But the smell was so… You know, for a second I thought I’d left a pot roast burning in the oven. But… it was my meat. And then, finally, I was dead. The one silver lining was that at least I was away from you.

Zachariah has Mary speak about Dean being a burden to his family and to her, but it's potentially more layered than "Dean has abandonment issues". What Mary says about being shackled to Dean—being burdened by her child—firmly recollects Dean's claim to Cas in 5.03 that he's chained to his family through responsibility, and that finally being away from Sam is a relief. This fake Mary says death was her escape from similar chains of responsibility to her loved ones. It was the only escape. Burned up and dead but finally free. There's an implication there that Dean can finally escape responsibility in a similar way, and in two episodes, Dean is going to try and escape by saying "Yes".

#5.12 #5.16 #writer disk horse #family chains #mail #dabb disk horse

[honoka-marierose]

In 2010, Rayman was dead. After two popular minigame collections with his then-co-stars, the Rabbids, Rayman was usurped from his throne as Ubisoft’s mascot and relegated to cameo appearances in games like Academy of Champions: Soccer. Sam Fisher has suffered a similar fate recently.

Then, a miracle - Ubisoft released Rayman Origins, a gorgeous 2D platformer with excellent movement, incredible music, and enough charm to make you forget all about the limbless wonder getting kicked out of his own series. Not a Rabbid in sight.

Origins was an incredible new beginning for Rayman, but it was only the beginning. Two years later, Ubisoft Montpellier did it again with Rayman Legends. Not content to simply be an improvement on the first game, Legends was one of the best 2D platforming games of all time. It looked like things were only going to get better.

Unfortunately, despite massive critical success, Rayman faded into the background once more, with only a few minor mobile games since then. Now, his long decade of silence is finally over thanks to Ubisoft Milan who, ironically enough, have brought Rayman back in a game that stars the very creatures who originally kicked him out.

“I would say that I started thinking about the DLC as soon as I saw the work on Sparks of Hope going in the right direction,” Sparks of Hope’s creative director Davide Solani tells me. “I loved the idea of closing this fantastic journey of Sparks of Hope with Rayman, as Rabbids were originally introduced in a Rayman game. I felt it was the correct thing to do”.

Rayman in the Phantom Show marks Rayman’s first appearance in a game in some time, which gave Ubisoft Milan the opportunity to redesign the character for his reintroduction, which also marks the first time he’s been in 3D since his Super Smash Bros. Trophy model in 2014.

Solani tells me that extensive work went into designing Rayman’s new look for the game, with the idea being to aim for something “new, current, and fitting for our universe”. Specific effort went into Rayman’s facial expressions and the body and shoes, for which the team challenged themselves to “dare a little” by introducing pockets and a larger hood to give the limbless wonder more comfort and a sense of identity outside of adventuring.

Of course, one of the most important elements of Rayman’s design is his hair which, beyond the whole lack of limbs thing he’s got going on, is one of the key parts of the character’s identity. Rayman’s hair is used both to fly and to look fly, and it’s a core part of this look.

“[It’s] one of the most 'representative' parts of the character,” Solani says. “We wanted to avoid just an indistinct mass, but also not to go overboard with details. We therefore focused on creating this balance between volume and details. A fully animatable tuft that would help to underline the character's charisma and emotions.”

Rayman may have a new design this time around, but Sparks of Hope isn’t above referencing the hero’s past. The Phantom Show is stuffed with nods to Rayman’s history, including reworked versions of his combat fatigues from Hoodlum Havoc, a cutout of Globox and some plum juice from the same game, a cardboard recreation of the first level from the adventure that started it all, and even some shoutouts to the pirates from Rayman 2.

Another Easter Egg Solani points out is Rayman’s weapon in the game, which resembles the plunger gun that he used in Raving Rabbids. You’d think that Rayman would want to avoid memories of that particular encounter considering everything that happened after, but he’s rocking a brand-new one in the Phantom Show.

“I loved the idea of paying a tribute to the plunger, in a way,” Solani tells me. “With my team, we’ve imagined how a new plunger could look like years later, and how this new basic weapon could be transformed through the various costume transformations, and what special ability could result from each. It was a fun process for us.”

It’s not just Rayman himself who returns for the Phantom Show, as the DLC also sees the return of David Gasman, the voice of the limbless wonder for nearly all of the games in the series before Douglas Rand took over the role for Origins, Legends, and the mobile spin-offs.

“Like many players, for me, David Gasman is Rayman’s voice. Also, we did use David as Rabbid Mario in Sparks of Hope, and it was a tremendously fun experience working with him. The idea of having him going crazy to voice both Rayman and Rabbid Mario was too good to miss. “

One of the most interesting things about the DLC is that it’s not just a reunion between Rayman and the player, it’s a reunion between Rayman and the Rabbids as well. The limbless wonder hasn’t been on-screen with them properly since TV Party, with only a small cameo from the screaming nuisances in Rayman Adventures between then and now.

The DLC plays into this time gap, with Rayman holding a grudge against the Rabbids when he first runs into them. Solani says that this was one of the ideas that the team worked with and that they loved seeing Rayman and the Rabbids bickering, but that they start to work together across the expansion, as Rayman quickly gets over his grudges in the name of being a hero.

Rayman in the Phantom Show closes the door on Rayman’s past while being brutally honest about the hero’s long absence. It has fans wondering if the DLC opens another door for his future, one that many want Ubisoft Milan to be involved with.

“We don’t know yet what we’ll do in the future,” Solani says. “But I can assure you that working on Rayman was a true honour for all of us.”

#ubisoft #rayman #rabbids #mario + rabbids #mario + rabbids sparks of hope #rayman in the phantom show

[nalyra-dreaming]

Yeah to add to that anon, I've been coming across some stuff on different platforms as well in the last 24 hours and honestly, I'm very disappointed in some individuals. I can see where show fans were coming from to some extent only accepting what was shown. Some of them got way out of hand, but some of these comments are now coming from people that have been in the fandom. I know Sam was also subjected to this but if I'm being honest, I think it's worse for Jacob because he already had to hear, and still is hearing it, just for being casted. There are the normal comments on YouTube making comments about Claudia/Assad/Jacob's race which I think as a fandom we have come to sadly expect, but I'm very disheartened to see it with some individuals in the fandom who were criticizing the group (and rightfully so) doing it to Sam last year that are now being just as ugly and/or insensitive toward Jacob, Claudia, and/or Assad.

-I've seen someone refer to Louis as Amber Heard and Sam as Johnny Deep.

-Tumblr posts saying Louis has manipulated Lestat the entire time and only did anything wrong (Antoinette, etc) in response to Louis' manipulations.

-There are some comments on a subreddit not under the IWTV subreddit saying that the the showrunners need to realize that Sam is the only reason people are watching the show.

-Another stating they are glad Louis is going to be exposed as a liar so maybe people will lose interest in Loustat and consider replacing him with Nicki.

-Another comment saying Louis/Jacob should be killed off along with Claudia because he is the true abuser and they don't want to see Lestat yearning for him after wronging Lestat.

-Another conversation that started as a discussion with Lestat's bloody frame from the trailer that ended in criticizing Rolin's comments about keeping Jacob around longer than season 2 because they would prefer to see Lestat with other love interests that are worthy of him.

-Another attacking Assad's looks.

-Another suggesting other actors who should have been casted as IWTV characters, rating them lowly, and detailing what is wrong with their looks in a discord. Poor Assad is getting the brunt of that one.

-A tweet from someone outside of the fandom complaining about the iwtv fandom for crossing the line with Eric and saying they should be jailed so I'm assuming it was not a pleasant exchange.

It is ridiculous and I had to get off IWTV related media today because it also crossed my mind that Jacob and Assad could probably see a lot of this. I commented this and was told "well they did it to sam so now it's jacob's turn."

How… nice.

Some points of this I actually saw, so…

Tbh, the cast is aware of the backlash just look at how nervous Sam was at the SDCC panel (and that was before the main shit even started). They know. And I also think it is no coincidence that Jacob withdrew a bit or that Assad was shit scared of taking on Armand.

This story comes with baggage because for some reason people just cannot stay polite. Don’t see the human behind the screen. Separate them from the role. Ugh. It makes me want to scream.

I really wished I‘d been wrong there, honestly 😒

I expect it to get worse before it gets better and I can only recommend that everyone curates their bubble / feed accordingly.

#anonymous #asks #ask nalyra #interview with the vampire #iwtv #iwtv cast #fandom wank

[vampirepunks]

Higgs Monaghan's MBTI + Enneagram Typology (pt. 2)

(disclaimer: this is my opinion based on deep character study, eight or so years of special interest in typology, and subjective interpretation. if you wanna argue, good luck finding my PDB. friendly debate is fine.)

MBTI: ENTP (Ne-Ti-Fe-Si)

Enneagram: 7w8

Instinctual Variant: sx/sp

Tritype: 782

(part one: mbti deep dive)

(Sam analysis)

As an ENTP, Higgs is right at home in enneagram 7. However, he's an interesting flavor of ENTP 7, due to his sexual instinctual variant, 8 wing + secondary fix, and emotional center in 2. Let's start with the basics.

Enneagram 7 Overview Basic Fear: Of being deprived and trapped in pain Basic Desire: To be happy, satisfied, to find fulfillment Fixation: Planning Trap: Idealism Passion: Gluttony

Deprived and trapped in pain, huh? Considering Higgs' backstory as an abused child locked away from the outside world, forcefully told there was no life outside the four walls of his home, denied the ability to explore and discover, punished for basic curiosity, this makes perfect sense. Higgs experienced extreme repression of his natural instincts, denial of his basic emotional and psychological needs, and had no means to escape the constant abuse he suffered. Remember, the common belief is that one's MBTI type is innate, while enneagram theory hinges on the acquisition of negative traits stemming from warped self-beliefs manifested by the impact of inevitable social oppression and possibly even trauma. The enneagram dips closer to psychology and sociology than MBTI (still pseudoscience tho, Naranjo was a hack and is very worthy of criticism) and thus is a lot more logical in its foundations. Hence, I strongly believe that any MBTI type can be any enneagram, due to the breadth of human experience, it's just a matter of conflicting cognition and instincts. Don't fight me on this one, y'all, I'm working on my sociology B.A., I can go back and forth all day about this stuff. I'm gonna get banned from PDB any day now for the arguments I get into.

It's not hard to understand why "be happy and fulfilled" became the crux of Higgs' pursuits. Enneagram 7 takes this most basic human desire, "be happy," and crafts it into an obsession. Until they overcome their fix and passion, 7 will never be satisfied. (cough cough, intelligent eyes in a hunger-pang frame... ahem. sorry, sorry, something stuck in my throat there. moving on.)

Enneagram 7 treats life as one grand stage, where anything can happen if you just want it badly enough. Thus, 7 is hedonistic, rebellious, undisciplined in one way or another, driven towards wish fulfillment, egotistical, persuasive, and extremely seductive, with some variants of 7 exhibiting charlatanism and fraudulence.

Sexual 7

Instinctual variants are the result of the enneagram type's passion invading an area of the social life and self, dominating its expression. There are three realms here: sexual (not always explicitly in the adult sense, this refers to one-on-one relationships, intimacy, etc), social, and self-preservation.

So, obviously sexual 7 is the result of gluttony + the sexual instinct. sx7 traits include: talkativeness, grandiosity and exaggeration, exhibitionism of personality and style, invasive tendencies, brazen audacity, obliviousness, magical thinking, relationship difficulties, self-indulgence, hypersensitivity, anti-hierarchical escapism, and intolerance for frustration.

Put simply, sx7 has their head in the clouds. Ichazo nicknamed this subtype "suggestibility." Although I really dislike Naranjo, he made an excellent point when he said, "The sexual seven is not earthly, but heavenly. He is not interested in the things of this world. It is the gluttony of the things of a higher and more advanced world. The sexual E7 is what we could call a dreamer[...] His passion is to dream, to go towards the sweetness of the imagined instead of contacting the ordinary and not so interesting reality."

Higgs is a showman. He paints everything in metaphor, in literature, in poetry, in history, in performances and masks and shadow theater. When captured in the literal view, Higgs' life is one tragedy after another, with no rhyme or reason, no grand answer to "why me," no satisfying conclusion to make an adoring audience cry for him. In the meta, fourth-wall breaking sense, the player becomes that for him. He looks us in the eye and asks, "Isn't this what you've been waiting for this whole time?" and prances around putting on a good show as we give him the attention and recognition he craves; we observe, we react, and a few of us see him. For a few moments, we live in his tragedy, we smile at his one-liners, we laugh at his bad behavior, and in those precious moments, he isn't alone. He's still at it, winking at the camera in the DS2 trailer when he quips about porters having to pull the trigger sometimes, a sly little, "I know what you did. You're not better than me. You get it."

But let's peel back that layer. Higgs is a mask. Let's talk about Peter.

Yeah, Peter, who was destroyed time and time again by his stubborn drive to believe, no matter how many times it got him hurt, nearly killed, even. Peter, who believed his way into stepping into a new world with a new sky. Peter, who believed his way into becoming a terrorist. Peter, who believed his way into Amelie's puppet master hands. Peter, who believed until the moment the carrot was snatched away and he met the stick face-first. Peter, the child whose only crime was being curious, became a grown man with his dreams shattered entire, with no innocence left to call his own, no one to save him, and no way out. So what was there to do but construct new dreams, nightmares made ideal, to build anew an image of himself as "the bridge that brings the extinction" in service of a greater power? Dreamer turned apostle, Saint Peter having the faith that he could walk on water. Except Amelie didn't pull him out when he sank. (Sam did, but that's a completely different conversation.)

Higgs built up a world of magic, because his real life was tragic, and in the end, Amelie forced him to bury the castle.

sx7 traps themselves in false hope, breezing through the world with witty speeches, talking, talking, talking, coasting by on charm and an energetic demeanor to mask their anxiety. This is right at home in the possibility-obsessed, silver-tongued ENTP, but the sensitivities of sx7 soften the ENTP personality quite a bit, amplifying their vulnerabilities and making them all too easy to manipulate. This is a personality that needs someone to protect them, and to teach them to protect themselves, which Higgs never had. Coffin tried, but fate had other ideas, and she became another loss upon his shoulders.

Self-Preservation 7 (secondary)

Now, on PDB, almost everyone has voted Higgs as sx/so, and I get why, but I believe Higgs is very social-blind and not countertype. The last instinct in a stack is a personality's blind spot, their weak point, the thing they struggle with, try to ignore, and overcompensate for. For Higgs, that's the social instinct. The self-pres and social instincts are conflated a lot in 7, due to this type’s inherent need for outward validation; their cool exterior conceals fear of inferiority and deprivation. 7 is arguably the most extroverted of the enneagram thus their self-preservation needs are heavily dependent on the presence of other people and having a clear role within a group. They often create family units and can appear similar to the so8 via their proclivity for creating a “tribe” for themselves, a group they nurture and in turn are protected by. Thus, sp7s are characterized as defenders in spite of their obvious self-interest. sx/sp 7s are often warm, charismatic people. Combined with an 8 fix, they're quite intense. In a well-read ENTP, this is a personality that could sell ice in the Arctic, and people gravitate towards their ability to sell their dream. "Together, we'll carry packages from sea to shining sea."

Many of Higgs’ deeper issues can be explained through the aforementioned developed Fe + social-blindness + a 2 fix in his emotional center. Having grown up completely isolated from the world, there’s no way he could be anything but soc-blind. His self-sacrifice is cognitive compensation for social deficiency and expression of a moral righteousness generated by his sx7-driven idealism, not an instinctual social egotism and rejection of gluttony. More on this when we get to his 2 fix. sp7 is the closest of the 7 variants to the literal definition of gluttony. They yearn for indulgence in every way.

Now, let's talk about that 8 wing and tritype secondary fix

Enneagram 8 is known for its aggression before all else, and it has a strong pull on any personality that has it in their wing or tritype. The 7w6 is flighty, much more risk-averse, and they work to satisfy their gluttony by seducing others into feeding their cravings for them, holding back to explore all possibilities, and they seek assurance that they're making the right choices, whereas 7w8 knows what they want and they'll take it if they have to. The 8 wing adds a heavy-handed, decisive edge to the 7 personality; 7w6 pushes back when the world closes in on them, 7w8 pushes forward against the world to make sure they're never restricted to begin with. Thus, the sx7 with an 8 wing displays much more sexual aggression (licking people!) and is inclined to show dominance. They're self-protective, they don't like to share their toys, and they won't let anyone take what's theirs. See: "gonna make [Sam] regret ever fucking with me and mine." This makes the 7w8 a powerful protector, a fierce enemy... and a nervous wreck prone to covering up fear with violence, anger, and provocation. This sort of aggression is a tendency in the standard 7w8, but with an 8 fix added to the tritype, it becomes a leading trait. This is particularly interesting in an ENTP, as they aren't typically aggressive by nature; they seek conflict for entertainment's sake, without malice, looking to test people and expand their own worldview through discourse. The ENTP 7w8 with an 8 tritype fix, on the other hand, takes up stronger convictions, greater stubbornness, and an impatience for people who won't bend to their whims. They often go looking to convince people they're right, getting frustrated when they aren't heard. ("You just don't get it, do you?") Further, when 8 invades the sexual instinct, secondary to a 7 fix, you get a personality that wants to possess the hearts and minds of their closest loved ones, fears abandonment, would die to protect one of their own, and knows better than to bite the hand that feeds.

Finally, the tertiary 2 fix

Enneagram 2 is a nurturer. 2 generously gives of themselves, constantly fixating on everyone else's needs. This is a personality that would give another person the shirt off their own back if they asked. Important thing to understand: their help isn't free. They might say it is, but 2 unconsciously expects to be rewarded and praised for helping others. Overall, this fits well with Higgs' secondary instinctual alignment in sp7. 7 fears being deprived, while 2 fears that no one appreciates them, and they mask this insecurity with a show of humility and an insistence that they were merely doing the right thing. They reason that if they meet everyone else's needs, their own needs will be taken care of in reciprocity. Meanwhile, they minimize those needs, making themselves as small and convenient as possible, denying they have needs at all. With an sx/sp alignment and a secondary 8 fix, this becomes a push-pull internal conflict between "I don't need anything, really" and "Give me what I need or else." I firmly believe that part of why Higgs' betrayal of Fragile was so malicious was a subconscious urge to punish her for not being... you guessed it... what he needed.

Let's go back to the point from post no. 1 about Higgs having highly developed Fe. In his youth, every time Higgs found himself in a new social situation, he responded with skepticism and instinctual aversion to social connection. It took time and persuasion for him to warm up to the idea of group politics; he’s only convinced when he realizes he’s needed and stands to have his own needs fulfilled in turn. Most people try to place Higgs' emotional center in enneagram 4 (which, when modulated by the sx-instinct and an 8 wing, can get downright nasty due to the fixation with envy and the aggression of 8) but frankly... I think that's lazy analysis.

Higgs’ initial reluctance to accept his DOOMS for what it was and subsequent secretiveness about killing to maintain it for his own survival screams 2. Higgs doesn’t self-victimize or wish to be special. Rather, he conceals his own needs and justifies his actions through a belief that he’s undertaking a selfless path. (“I’m an altruist now, I live to help other people[…] Community’s what it’s all about.”) He needs the world to need him and deteriorates when his role is threatened. In his time leading the West, people loved him and relied on him, but that wasn’t enough for him. Because he’s soc-blind and sx-dom, he only feels truly seen, fulfilled, and appreciated when he has attention and approval through a one-on-one relationship, such as with Coffin, Fragile, Amelie, etc., and he obsessively pursues the same recognition from Sam. (It’s worth acknowledging this is also indicative of disordered attachment, anxious-avoidant type.) When he fails, he falls back on the self-pres instinct, so… pizza, anyone?

Amelie initially lured him with the deceptive promise of enough power to create the better, freer, fairer world he was striving for. In his mind: save the world = save himself. Can’t save the world? Can’t save himself, time to take the whole thing down with him and call it mercy. That’s an unhealthy 2 heart center, believing he can only meet his own needs by rescuing everyone else, projecting his own turmoil onto others. He convinces himself he’s doing the right thing, giving the world what it needs. While his thirst for wide-scale justice is genuine, he exhibits an intense craving for attention, intimacy, and recognition, becoming suddenly naive and vulnerable when someone offers what he lacks. Conversely, he’s antagonistic, aloof, aggressive, and ego-defensive when his needs are denied or threatened.

Conclusion

Higgs' most basic of needs were denied from a young age, and as an ENTP, he's inherently driven to hedonism, has a need for an intellectual playmate/trustworthy equal, and craves a balance between novelty and safety, so he’s gluttonous towards intimate relationships and a sense of security. His sx7 alignment means he dreams big and loud, constructing kingdoms in his mind and a personal narrative where he's the hero in shining armor, free to explore the world as he wishes and save it while he's at it. His sp7 secondary means he thirsts for his own means of survival and the assurance of it, going out of his way to endear himself to others and become indispensable to guarantee that survival. His 8 fix means he's assertive, strong-willed, aggressively self-protective, and highly possessive of anything he views as "belonging" to him. His 2 fix means he needs others to need him, needs to feel important in his loved ones' lives, needs to have his efforts rewarded, needs a larger role to fulfill, and most of all, needs to know that he's allowed to need things. As an sx7, he's comfortable with wanting things, but that 2 fix means needs are unacceptable for him to express.

Becoming Higgs—embodying a self-righteous, pharaoh-inspired persona—was the only way he could cope with the injustice and deprivation he suffered. (Coffin: “There was such a fear in him, but beneath that a terrible anger[…] That poor boy…”)

Mature-but-unhealthy ENTP 782 at its finest. Feet on the ground, head in the clouds. In conclusion, I want to fuck him so bad it makes me look stupid. What a man.

#literally obsessed with the fact that he has the exact mirror of my personality type #intj: ni-te-fi-se. entp: ne-ti-fe-si. alter egos. he's 7w8 i'm 8w7. he's soc-blind and i'm soc-dom. so on so forth #i could fix him and he could make me worse <3 #to sum up: this is a horse girl movie and i imagine myself to be The Special Girl who's the only one that can ride (😏😏😏) the wild stallion #i'm delulu about it actually. very fun. highly recommend. but watch out it'll hurt your sanity forever and people will def look at u funny #:))))))) #✨✨self-awareness✨✨ #mbti #enneagram #personality typology #character study #entp #higgs monaghan #death stranding #logan.txt

[kayetra-spade-queen]

Danny Phantom

There's not much change in name, but I intend to use what the fandom come up for his middle name (at least I think that's what the fandom agreed on? I might be wrong).

Daniel James Fenton.

Daniel, his actual full first name.

James, is what I remembered the name the fandom agreed upon, or at least some of it.

Fenton, his family name. There's nothing for me to explain about.

Also, a friend pointed out that I have a habit of giving things dramatic names (I'd say the influence of Genshin is strong af-). I do have a habit of making something to be more extreme than it was when it was originally made, so please don't mind it.

Relationships:

Maddie and Jack:

They're still the goofy and quirky parents Danny and Jazz had, but was smarter compared to the original. Knew Danny turned into ghost and the portal incident, more like they were also witnesses of that said incident. The sound of his scream of agony and pain manage to pull out nightmares for the both of them on several nights. However, that doesn't waver their love for their son. Sure, he may become half of the being they're hunting down for the sake of studies or something, but that doesn't erase the fact that this ghost child is their child, their little baby who unfortunately fell into the abyss of their own mistakes and neglect. They assists Team Phantom many times when it comes to the supply and whatever knowledge they have currently and are still expanding beyond their current understanding for the sake of learning to find a solution that wouldn't harm either side of the plane.

Jazz:

Nothing much different compared to the canon, except she was also a witness to the incident. Her overprotectiveness tenfold, much to Danny's dismay, and it took a lot of time for them to find a common ground and for her to tone down. There's nothing much different in this version compared to the original.

Sam, Tucker:

Danny's friends since elementary. Their relationship is pretty much the same as they are in canon, but what's different is that Danny and Sam doesn't harbor feelings for one another (I apologize for those who ship Amethyst Ocean), and therefore they aren't in any other relationship other than best friends.

Valerie:

Danny's relationship with Valerie is very contradictive compared to their relationship in canon. First and foremost; Valerie listens to people more than just act out and shutting her ears out, yes she sometimes act out first questions later, but she had made pretty good judgements and know that nothing good happens when jumping to conclusions too quickly and taking everything at face value without knowing the full story. She and Danny became friends during freshman year of middle school, and although Valerie still somewhat in the 'popular' clique in their school, she'd prefer to spend time with the Team Phantom any time. She could be considered the hub of all gossips at school with how much information she gets from the most loud and chatty clique of the whole school.

Dani/Elly, Dan/Ozzy:

Dani: The first ever semi-success clone of Danny made by Vlad. Nothing really is different in their relationship, until Dani was in the most critical condition that had something to do with her unstable ectoplasm, which required her to have to be revert to a some sort of fetus and undergo a process similar to normal human pregnancy, but instead of putting the halfa fetus into Danny, it was put inside of a bottle first before a birthing pod when the halfa child became more mature and resembles a newborn. In turn, she'll be reborn back as purely Danny's child (think about Ben who asexually reproduced, but went through a completely different process) without any of her past memories in place. The art and technology of doing this process remains undisclosed. Her new identity became Eleanor Maria Fenton with the nickname "Elly", and she became the ghost princess by right of birth after her "rebirth".

Dan: Their relationship remains the same until Danny decided to properly take care of Dan (before the de-aging). Think of it like a Nahida-Scaramouche/Wanderer relationship. Although it was a painfully grueling process, Danny was patient and really think about Dan and his freedom and his disoriented characteristics at heart and tried to the best of his abilities to help Dan out through it all. However, it turns out the ectoplasm from Vlad's half in Dan was found out to have a corruption, making Dan going through an excruciating pain and suffering. In order to cleanse the corruption entirely, Dan have to go through the same process as Dani, reverting him back to that of a fetus, born now as a halfa, and restart everything from scratch. His new identity became Kalos Marcus Fenton with the nickname "Ozzy", becoming the ghost prince by right of birth after his "rebirth". He and Elly had became twins in this current life.

Cujo:

The ghost dog that Danny found outside the building of Axion Labs (no, he didn't went in and wreck the place, because I'm twisting some things in Shades of Gray because Valerie is part of Team Phantom from the start). The dog looked lost, confused, as if it doesn't know what to do, so Danny decided to take the dog in and brought him home. After a while, he realized the tag on the dog's collar, and figured that this dog at some point was a staff at Axion Labs or maybe someone related to someone who works at the lab, and decided to check what's the deal with the dog and the lab. Danny later found out that the ghost dog, along with other dogs before (he didn't know if the other staff dogs are also dead, but he'll have to check it up later) are used to be guards dogs decades ago, but they were let down when technology became more efficient. The dog canals, food bowls, and other stuff are being put in an abandoned storage space that was completely sealed off. But a single toy stood out to him, a squeaky toy. Since this is the only toy in the whole room, Danny assumed this might've belonged to the ghost dog he found, so he decided to go back home and hoping this is the item that the dog was looking for to the point of waiting outside the walls of the lab for, which thankfully it was. However, instead of going back to the Ghost Zone, the dog decided to stay, and Danny became his owner after asking Maddie and Jack (to which both agreed). Cujo became his name.

Vlad:

Good god, where do I even begin... Ok, I guess I should start that their relationship is a lot worse than in canon. Yes, he still had that hatred towards Jack, but he also hated Maddie as the miniature portal was also her creation as it is to Jack's. By extent, he hated both of their kids too (unreasonable? Yes, but anything goes for me-), but particularly Danny due to his status as a halfa and the many connection he had between the living plane and the Ghost Zone. Dani's creation wasn't because he wanted a perfect son, it was an attempt to use the clones as an army to attack Danny. Dan's creation was literally a succeeded version of Vlad's plan. Vlad figured that the only way to really hurt Maddie and Jack, was to hurt their beloved youngest, the more pain the better he said. Vlad was so deep into his hatred towards the Fentons, morality was completely out the window and down the drain for him. Every attempt was another way for him to destroy the Fentons of what they did to him, he wasn't willing to talk whatsoever, even an attempt would've been futile instead. Due to me completely erasing Phantom Planet from existence, Vlad was still roaming free under the facade of a good natured mayor while scheming to get rid of the Fentons by any means necessary. His ectoplasm became corrupted due to many times it was used to experiment dangerous creations and many mysterious methods. However, Vlad could withstand it due to his overflowing amount of sheer hatred, while Dan couldn't handle the corruption due to having Danny's DNA.

Manny:

A fellow member of the Nicktoons Team. Manny (alongside Jenny) joined much later. They started out as acquaintances then friends, then after a while, they both started a relationship. Manny's life became even more interesting by the time the twins came to the picture, and Manny wouldn't want it any other way. He's a great babysitter (any maybe even parent, someday).

Jimmy, Timmy:

Danny considered both of them as his troublesome younger brothers, particularly Timmy. It all happened because the Turners asked the Fentons if it's ok for them to leave Timmy under the Fentons for a while, and that's how Danny's babysitting career started (do not ask for details. If you know what the Turners are like, that should speak volumes enough). Danny met Jimmy a little later afterwards after seeing a lonely kid on the bench of the courtyard of Timmy's school, so he decided to approach him, and that's how they get to know each other. Danny was a bit protective towards Jimmy due to how many times he's been bullied and being treated as an outcast because of his high IQ, so Jimmy found a safe haven in Danny. Although Danny said he's more of their babysitter than anything, Danny turned out to be that of a parental figure of the team; slightly strict but responsible and gave out reasonable rules so no one gets into unwanted troubles even outside missions. Both Jimmy and Timmy viewed Danny is that of the 3rd parental figure who kept them grounded and the voice of reason and motivation for them. Although he is still capable of grounding them, like confiscating Timmy's video games and locking Jimmy's lab while taking the key with him. Jenny said it was a given considering many times those two caused trouble.

SpongeBob:

Danny's best buddy in the team. SB had always been the motivational one of the whole team and kept everyone in spirits. Literally the closet person he had in the team way before Manny and Jenny. Supports Danny through thick and thin, and was the first person Danny ever confided with whenever he had problems and vice versa.

Jenny:

Was the only person (robot?) Danny recognized in Center Shades, and the only one Danny talked with for a while until he got to know the other members (particularly Randy and Jake). Danny was Jenny's backup fixer whenever Jimmy is not available and/or wasn't with them altogether, hence the only person Jenny trust in the other team with her mechanisms.

Info Dumps:

I will be dumping a hella load of info in this column, so be warned if you don't want to read everything. I'm not really willing to make a separate blog about this topic itself, so consider it like a Danny speciality that you can't find anywhere except asking Danny himself;

The term 'ghosts' is an umbrella term used for all types of spirits that originates from all the realms of the Infinite Realms (commonly known as the Ghost Zone). Just because they're called ghosts, doesn't necessarily mean they are whatever that's left of a human spirit.

Ghosts aren't inherently bad natured; they're more driven by their obsessions more than anything, and doesn't really meant to cause harm, but their obsessions could clouded their better judgement, making them getting mischaracterized as 'bad natured' and 'pure evil'. They're not bad, they just need something to feed off of their obsessions to find a few specks of peace.

The Ghost Zone is actually named as Infinite Realms, but another name was also proposed when the realm was first discovered; Gap of The Sun. The reason for this naming is that it was once believed that this realm had been created from a sun that once exploded, and instead of turning into a black hole, it turned into a neverending realm filled with doors leading to many other realms. However, the naming and this theory was eventually dropped due to lack of evidence to support the claim of the exploded sun that created this primal realm.

The nature of ectoplasm is currently unknown, but it is theorized to be remnants of a spirit's will and their former drive when they were still alive. But due to the lack of evidence, there is no concrete info that the ectoplasm were remnants of the ghosts leftover living will. It was only left that ectoplasm are just what give these ghosts their shape after their soul no longer resides using a human vessel in the living plane.

There's a phenomenon between the ghosts called a "Death Day", where the ghost will have to relive the memories of their death, the feeling of pain they felt all over again. They would go completely paralyzed and won't be able to move at all as they relive the memories and pain of their death with nowhere to go as they couldn't move. The aftereffects when the day of their Death Day had passed are; extreme numbness, lacking color vision in their sights (everything is in black and white for them), complete blockage of their powers, and whatever that's left in their mood swings of their Death Day. The only way to minimize the pain during Death Day was when the spirit's living loved ones visit their graves or commemorate the death anniversary. Even then, that won't erase the pain entirely, as it won't affect anything in the aftereffects (although this is unclear for those who are born as a halfa).

Danny's ghost king title:

Ok, so I did said that Danny became ghost king in this version, right? Well, in version, Danny became ghost king a little later after the defeat of Pariah Dark. Technically, he was already crowned shortly after, but due to the fact he's biologically and chronologically too young to rule yet, it was decided that Danny have to wait until he was 20 to finally take on the big roles of being the king of ghosts. Until then, he was made to do smaller tasks that seemed a bit big to him at first, but once he became king, the weight was even more immense than what he had initially thought it would.

The Ghost Law:

A law that is absolutely mandatory to follow by all ghosts of every realm and every kind. Here are some examples;

Ghosts are absolutely forbidden to harm those who still resides the living plane by any means.

In terms of handling one's obsessions, it is absolutely advised to ask the Ghost King for any solution that wouldn't involved the living beings.

Killing a living soul or the environment of the living realm will be heavily punished.

In terms of living amongst the alive in the living plane, a barrier must be made around the property to prevent ghost hunters or unwanted guests from lingering the property.

When a soul from the living plane had lost its human vessel and could no longer resides amongst the alive (basically: someone died), it is an absolute must to inform the ghost king in order to conduct the 'White Farewell' ceremony for the now-departed spirit.

Personality:

Not much different, except he radiates mom energy all over. Well, no wonder. Along with Ben, Danny has plenty experience when it comes to hyperactive and/or rowdy kids, and had a huge sense of parental responsibility towards everyone. Both Danny and Ben would be fussing over those who would dive head first into trouble without a clear plan and getting injured in the process, or when someone did something incredibly stupid it ended as a huge problem (they're in the Overview department for a reason).

Danny is more... Elegant compared to the original. There's always an aura of grace coming from him, and sometimes his voice comes off a sort of a mystical vibes, even if he didn't intend to it. Although despite being king, his overall personality didn't change; humble, friendly, and approachable.

Battle attire:

Something like a royal outfit, but nothing extravagant. Ok, maybe adding a bit of claws on his gloves could be a bit extra, but you can't blame me, blame Ningguang-

The hair tho, I have been thinking like a Zhongli-style ponytail in battle form. But in normal form, like human form will varies depending on what Danny wanted. Majority of his hair would already be white even in his human form.

The design I came up with.

(Base: TheCherryMonsterLu (DeviantArt));

Weapons:

Polearm

Fenton Thermos

Flashdisk

Abilities:

Ghost powers

Ice powers (from his Ice Core)

Ectoplasm generating

Mind reading

Dream-jumping

Other Info:

Obtained the title or nickname as "Siren Voice", due to his mystical and beautiful voice. Think of it as those myths where sailors would disappear when they heard the voice of a mermaid/siren. This'll be hella useful for Danny in so many ways.

Ftm transgender, though he liked being called 'mom' by the twins.

Although he is a Fenton, he does not have the Fenton luck when it comes to driving (neither does Jazz). But he was usually being driven to by his ghostly staff/guards than driving himself. He still have a driver's license though.

Still can't get close to Blood Blossoms, otherwise he'll experience pain as horrible as the time of his 'death'.

Danny's body is sturdy but also hella flexible. He used to do gymnastics when he was younger, but his flexibility was greatly enhanced when he became a halfa.

Danny's eyes changed after the incident, not just when he's a ghost; originally icy blue, now blue on top half, and ecto green on bottom half. His eyes is still fully green when he went ghost.

The 2nd tallest in both at Nicktoons and the other team. Sorta thriving and suffering at the same time (the whole 'shorter people live longer' joke became a bit too literal than it was intended to due to Jake's longevity).

Danny would, quite literally, became a dictionary when someone would ask about ghosts, its nature and laws, etc.

Danny and June are actually pretty close friends due to their shared dreams to be an astronaut (even with their current circumstances).

Danny used to love eating sweets and desserts, but as Sam and Valerie monitored him and limit his consumption of sweet food ever since he had the twins.

Given everyone his protection seal, so ghosts couldn't really harm them, and it'll be much easier dealing with the ghosts like that because they're under the 'territory' of the ghost king himself.

At some point, Danny will start an orphanage for lost young souls who met their fate far too early. Randy might also do the same, but just with living children, and there will also be rescue shelters and such.

Danny's signature flower is Star Lit Orchid.

#danny phantom #danny fenton #kayetraspadequeen #Shades of Prisms

[velvet4510]

Omg, when you really think about Smeagol’s relationship with Deagol … it’s insane how similar and yet how critically different it is from Frodo’s relationship with Sam.

Smeagol refers to Deagol as “my love.” That in itself is just … wow. A good many pairs of close platonic friends in LOTR refer to each other affectionately like “my lad,” “my dear,” etc. But never “my love.” So … it seems to me that maybe these two actually were a couple at the time. They’re said to be cousins, but we don’t know exactly how distant their relation was. Plus romances between cousins were quite common back in the day, long before the realization that “first-cousin romance” was incest. And I wouldn’t put it past someone like Smeagol to be in an incestuous relationship. He always was a little…disturbed.

But … the implications of that, good grief. Deagol was the Sam to Smeagol’s Frodo. They were close. They loved each other. Then the Ring came along. It tore them apart. Then the Ring came to Frodo and Sam. They loved each other. And the Ring did not tear them apart; on the contrary, the journey caused by the Ring’s threat only brought them closer together.

Smeagol was willing to kill the love of his life to get that Ring literally 10 seconds after first seeing it. He didn’t care for Deagol enough to avoid harming him if it meant possessing the Ring. In that case, you can’t even call it love, can you?

But Frodo? He possessed that Ring for 17 years and then carried it around his neck for 6 months, and he never once even considered hurting Sam in any way. (That movie scene where he points his sword at Sam was a scriptwriters’ invention; it is nowhere to be found in Tolkien’s text.) Even when Sam took the Ring, Frodo’s rageful “give it to me” brainwashed mindset lasted for only 2 seconds before he came back to himself, apologized, and went back to doting on Sam, insisting that he eat something before they continue on. Deeper into Mordor, Frodo held onto himself enough to warn Sam not to try to take the Ring again because he knew he was on the verge of losing himself and didn’t want to hurt Sam. Unlike Smeagol, Frodo harbored a love which the Ring could not overpower or corrupt. That’s real love.

And I think a part of Smeagol was able to recognize this. This was why he hated Sam. Every time he looked at Sam, and saw him with Frodo, he thought of Deagol. In the poignant scene on the steps of Cirith Ungol, Smeagol saw something in Frodo and Sam (as they slept cuddled together) that he realized he never had. He saw what he and Deagol could’ve been, but never could be because he himself doomed their chance. And he was so moved that Frodo and Sam had found what he couldn’t that he very nearly repented and changed his mind about taking them to Shelob … Then Sam woke up and yelled at him. And it was as though Deagol was yelling at him from the grave, reminding him of how wretched and horrible he was, and refusing to offer forgiveness or compassion. And that was what killed what was left of Smeagol.

The fate of Middle-earth was ultimately determined by the fact that Frodo had a greater capacity for love than Smeagol did.

#lotr #frodo x sam #samfro #smeagol #gollum #jrr tolkien #deagol #smeagol and deagol #smeagol x deagol #the one ring #lotr parallels #lotr books

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Sam Harris

Published: April/May 2024

This article was adapted from a transcript of the November 7, 2023, episode of the author’s podcast, Making Sense.

We have witnessed extreme moral confusion since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking over 200 hostages. Some of it has been just frank anti-Semitism, but much is actual confusion. Most people in the West still don’t understand the problem of jihadism. We often speak about “terrorism” and “violent extremism” generically. And we are told that any link between these evils and the doctrine of Islam is spurious and nothing more than an expression of “Islamophobia.” Incidentally, the term Islamophobia was invented in the 1970s by Iranian theocrats to do just this: prevent any criticism of Islam and to cast secularism itself as a form of bigotry. Islam is a system of ideas, subscribed to by people of every race and ethnicity. It’s just like Christianity in that regard. Unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam are both aggressively missionary faiths, and they win converts from everywhere. People criticize the doctrines of Christianity all the time and worry about their political and social influences—but no one confuses this for bigotry against Christians as people, much less racism. There’s no such thing as “Christophobia.” As someone once said (it was not Christopher Hitchens, but it sure sounds like him): “Islamophobia is a term created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

In any case, fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews don’t tend to be confused about the problem of jihadism because they understand the power of religious beliefs, however secular people generally are. We imagine that people everywhere, at bottom, want the same things: They want to live safe and prosperous lives. They want clean drinking water and good schools for their kids. And we imagine that if whole groups of people start behaving in extraordinarily destructive ways—practicing suicidal terrorism against noncombatants, for instance—they must have been pushed into extremis by others. What could turn ordinary human beings into suicide bombers, and what could get vast numbers of their neighbors to celebrate them as martyrs, other than their entire society being oppressed and humiliated to the point of madness by some malign power? So, in the case of Israel, many people imagine that the ghoulish history Palestinian terrorism simply indicates how profound the injustice has been on the Israeli side.

Now, there are many things to be said in criticism of Israel, particularly its expansion of settlements on contested land. But Israel’s behavior is not what explains the suicidal and genocidal inclinations of a group like Hamas. The Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad do.

These are religious beliefs, sincerely held. They are beliefs about the moral structure of the universe. And they explain how normal people—even good ones—can commit horrific acts of violence against innocent civilians on purpose, not as collateral damage, and still consider themselves good. When you believe that life in this world has no value, apart from deciding who goes to Hell and who goes to Paradise, it becomes possible to feel perfectly at ease killing noncombatants, or even using your own women and children as human shields, because you know that any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise for eternity.

If you don’t understand that jihadists sincerely believe these things, you don’t understand the problem Israel faces. The problem isn’t merely Palestinian nationalism, resource competition, or any other normal terrestrial grievance. In fact, the problem isn’t even hatred, though there is enough of that to go around. The problem is religious certainty.

It really is possible to be critical of Israel, and to be committed to the political rights of the Palestinian people, without being confused about the reality of Islamic religious fanaticism—or the threat that it poses not just to Israel but to open societies everywhere. My friend Christopher Hitchens was extremely critical of Israel and openly supportive of Palestinian statehood. But he wasn’t even slightly confused about the problem of jihad.

There have been nearly 50,000 acts of Islamic terrorism in the past forty years—and the French group that maintains a database of these attacks considers that an undercount.1 Ninety percent of them have occurred in Muslim countries. Most have nothing to do with Israel or the Jews. There have been eighty-two attacks in France and over 2,000 in Pakistan during this period. Want France to be more like Pakistan? You just need more jihadists. You just need more people susceptible to becoming jihadists, which is a transformation that can happen very quickly—just as quickly as new beliefs can take root in a person’s mind. You just need a wider Muslim community that doesn’t condemn jihadism but tacitly admits the theology that inspires it will be true and perfect until the end of the world. You just need millions of people who will protest Israel for defending itself, or call for the deaths of cartoonists for depicting the prophet Muhammad, and yet not make a peep about the jihadist atrocities that occur daily, all over the world, in the name of their religion.

In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed to protect Muslims from having to grapple with these facts. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, Paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations.

When one asks what the motivations of jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society, if only they were given the chance. Secular liberals imagine that jihadists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring groups such as Hamas and al-Qaeda, or even the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove he was doing anything for religious reasons.

Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if a white supremacist goes on a killing spree in a Black church and says he did this because he hates Black people and thinks the White race is under attack, this motive is accepted at face value without the slightest hesitation. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate Islam every time. The game is rigged.

Do not mistake what I’m saying now for anti-Muslim bigotry. I’m talking about the consequences of ideas, not the ethnic origins of people. Not a word I’ve said, or will ever say on this topic, has anything to do with race. And the truth is, I’m not remotely xenophobic. I’m a xenophile. The Middle East has produced some of my favorite parts of culture—some of my favorite foods, music, and architecture. Despite my better judgment, I absolutely love the sound of the Muslim call to prayer. Everything I’m saying about the problem of jihadism is about the problem of jihadism—the triumphal belief by some percentage of the world’s Muslims that they must conquer the world for the one true faith through force and that Paradise awaits anyone who would sacrifice his or her life to that end.

Of course, many religions produce a fair amount of needless suffering. Consider the pedophile-priest scandal in the Catholic Church, which is something I’ve written and spoken about before, I hope with sufficient outrage. One can certainly argue, as I have, that Catholic teaching is partly to blame for these crimes against children. By making contraception and abortion taboo, the Church ensured there would be many out-of-wedlock births among its faithful; by stigmatizing unwed mothers, it further guaranteed that many children would be abandoned to Church-run orphanages, where they could be preyed upon by sexually unhealthy men. I don’t think any of this was consciously planned; it’s just a grotesque consequence of some very bad ideas. And yet the truth is that there is no direct link between Christian scripture and child rape. However, imagine if there were. Just imagine if the New Testament contained multiple passages promising Heaven to any priest who raped a child. And then imagine that in the aftermath of an endless series of child rapes within the Church, more or less every journalist, politician, and academic denied that they had anything whatsoever to do with the “true” teachings of Catholicism. That is the uncanny situation we find ourselves in with respect to Islam.

The problem that we must grapple with—and by “we” I mean Muslims and non-Muslims alike—is that the doctrines that directly support jihadist violence are very easy to find in the Qur’an, in the hadith, and in the biography of Muhammad. For Muslims, Muhammad is the greatest person who has ever lived. Unfortunately, he did not behave like Jesus or Buddha—at all. It sort of matters that he tortured people and cut their heads off and took sex slaves, because his example is meant to inspire his followers for all time.

There are many, many verses in the Qur’an that urge Muslims to wage jihad—jihad as holy war against apostates and unbelievers—and the most violent of these are thought to supersede any that seem more benign. But the truth is, there isn’t much that is benign in the Qur’an; there is certainly no Jesus as we find him in Matthew urging people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. All the decapitation we see being practiced by jihadists isn’t an accident; it’s in the Qur’an and in the larger record of the life of the Prophet.

Worse, in my view, is the moral logic one gets from the doctrine of martyrdom and Paradise. If you take martyrdom and Paradise seriously, it becomes impossible to make moral errors. If you blow yourself up in a crowd, your fellow Muslims will go straight to Paradise. You’ve actually done them a favor. Unbelievers will go to Hell, where they belong. However many lives you destroy, it’s all good.

Again, most of this horror has nothing to do with Israel or the West. In 2014, six jihadis affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban attacked a school in Peshawar. These jihadis came from outside of Pakistan; there was a Chechen, two Afghans, and three Arabs. They murdered 145 people, 132 of whom were children. They burned a teacher alive in front of her students and then killed all the children they could get their hands on. They didn’t take any hostages. They had no list of demands. They intended to die to achieve martyrdom. And they did die, so they got at least half of what they wanted. It is very difficult for secular people to understand how this behavior could be possible. They assume only madmen would do this sort of thing.

But that’s the horror of it—you don’t have to be mad to be a jihadist. You don’t even have to be a bad person. You just have to be a true believer. You just have to know, for sure, that you and all the good people will get everything you want after you die and that the Creator of the Universe wants nothing more than for you to kill unbelievers. Here is what a supporter of the Pakistani Taliban said when interviewed about the school massacre:

Human life only has value among you worldly materialist thinkers. For us, this human life is only a tiny, meaningless fragment of our existence. Our real destination is the Hereafter. We don’t just believe it exists, we know it does. Death is not the end of life. It is the beginning of existence in a world much more beautiful than this. As you know, the [Urdu] word for death is “intiqaal.” It means “transfer,” not “end.” Paradise is for those of pure hearts. All children have pure hearts. They have not sinned yet … They have not yet been corrupted by [their kafir parents]. We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise, where they will be loved more than you can imagine. They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them. The last words they heard were the slogan of Takbeer [“Allah u Akbar”]. Allah Almighty says Himself in Surhah Al-Imran [3:169–170] that they are not dead. You will never understand this. If your faith is pure, you will not mourn them, but celebrate their birth into Paradise.

My point is that we have to take declarations of this kind at face value, because they are honest confessions of a worldview—and it is a worldview that is totally antithetical to everything that civilized people value in the twenty-first century. This problem is much bigger than the ongoing crisis between Israel and the Palestinians.

Taking Anti-Semitism Seriously

I’ve always had a paradoxical position on Israel. I’ve said that I don’t think it should exist as a Jewish state—because, in my view, organizing a state around a religion is irrational and divisive. This follows directly from my views about organized religion in general. So, obviously, I don’t think there should be Muslim states either—or Christian ones, for that matter. However, there are over twenty countries in which Islam is the official state religion and over fifty in which Muslims are the majority—and there is exactly one Jewish state. Given the history of genocidal anti-Semitism, which persists even now, mostly in the Muslim world, given that the Jews have been run out of every other country in the Middle East and North Africa where they lived for centuries, if any people deserve a state of their own, organized on any premise they want, it’s the Jews.

In 1939, the S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews seeking to escape the Holocaust, was denied entry into Cuba, the United States, and Canada and then forced to return to Europe, where many of those Jews ended up in the ovens of Auschwitz. In my view, that’s all the justification for Israel one needs. Never again should Jews have to beg to stand on some dry patch of earth, only to be denied one, and then systematically murdered.

I’ve never taken modern anti-Semitism very seriously. I think I’ve done exactly one episode of my podcast on the topic. I’ve studied it. I understand its roots in Christian theology—despite the fact that Jesus, his apostles, and the Virgin Mary were all Jews. I’m a student of the Holocaust. And I’m well aware of the anti-Semitism that existed in Europe and the United States at the time. Read David Wyman’s book The Abandonment of the Jews to understand how widespread anti-Semitism was in America, even as Jews were being killed by the millions in Europe. And, of course, I’m all too aware of the anti-Semitism that is endemic to Islam—and of the way it has been compressed into a diamond of intolerance and hatred throughout the Muslim world by the modern influence of Nazism. There’s some very depressing history there for anyone who wants to read it.

And I’ve been aware that year after year in the United States, no group has been targeted with more hate, and hate crime, than Jews. This is something that many Americans aren’t aware of. As I said, the American Left would have you believe that “Islamophobia” is a major concern. Vice President Kamala Harris is now heading a commission on “Islamophobia” in America, as though that’s the problem we’ve been seeing recently—just a massive outpouring of hatred for Muslims in America by non-Muslims. Has that ever happened?

Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Jews were targeted far more than Muslims. And that has been true every year since. According to FBI statistics, though Jews are just over 2 percent of the population, they receive over half the hate in America and five times the level that Muslims do (and I think it’s safe to say that much of this hate comes from Muslims themselves). Jewish schools and synagogues have always incurred greater security costs than non-Jewish institutions, and for good reason, because the threat to them is greatest.

While this status quo has been despicable, I have always believed that it was tolerable. And I say this as someone who has received death threats for two decades, and many of these threats are often explicitly anti-Semitic. Even given all this, I have felt that anti-Semitism, as a real threat to Jews, certainly in the West, was behind us. I can’t say that now. In the past few weeks, with Jews being openly reviled and threatened all over the world, in the immediate aftermath of the most shocking atrocities committed against them since the Holocaust, I’ve begun to think that anything is possible.

Incidentally, if you ever wondered how you might have behaved had you been a German on the morning after Kristallnacht—if you’ve ever wondered whether you would have just gone about your business or done something to resist the slide of your society into absolute depravity—more or less everyone on Earth is now getting the chance to see just that. There was a mob chanting “Gas the Jews” in front of the Sydney Opera House. We have Jewish students in Ivy League universities cowering behind locked doors in fear for their physical safety. All university administrators, Diversity Equity and Inclusion geniuses, and Hollywood celebrities who rushed to sign open letters in support of the Palestinian cause—without taking a moment to understand what actually happened on October 7, or understanding it and not caring—you are all now part of history.

The outpouring of anti-Semitism that we have witnessed since October 7 really seems to mark a new moment, both in the United States and globally. And for the first time, I now worry that my daughters will live in a world where their Jewishness will matter to people who do not wish them well, and they will be forced to make certain life choices on that basis, choices that I never had to make. Apart from being a public figure and having to deal with disordered people of every description, I have never been concerned about anti-Semitism for even five minutes in my life. I now feel that I have been quite naive. That’s putting it charitably. I’ve been utterly ignorant of what has been going on beneath the surface.

Of course, the boundary between anti-Semitism and generic moral stupidity is a little hard to discern—and I’m not sure that it is always important to find it. I’m not sure it matters why a person can’t distinguish between collateral damage in a necessary war and conscious acts of genocidal sadism that are celebrated as a religious sacrament by a death cult. Our streets have been filled with people literally tripping over themselves in their eagerness to demonstrate that they cannot distinguish between those who intentionally kill babies and those who inadvertently kill them, having taken great pains to avoid killing them, while defending themselves against the very people who have just intentionally tortured and killed innocent men, women, and, yes … babies; and who are committed to doing this again at any opportunity, and who are using their own innocent noncombatants as human shields; who are killing parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents; who burned people alive at a music festival devoted to “peace,” decapitated others, and dragged their dismembered bodies through the streets, all to shouts of “God is great.”

If you are recognizing the humanity of actual barbarians, while demonizing the people who actually worry about war crimes and who drop leaflets and call cell phones for days in an effort to get noncombatants to leave specific buildings before they are bombed, because those buildings sit on top of tunnels filled with genocidal lunatics who, again, have just sedulously tortured and murdered families as a religious sacrament; if you have landed, proudly and sanctimoniously, on the wrong side of this asymmetry—this vast gulf between savagery and civilization—while marching through the quad of an Ivy League institution wearing yoga pants, I’m not sure it matters that your moral confusion is due to the fact that you just happen to hate Jews. Whether you’re an anti-Semite or just an apologist for atrocity is probably immaterial. The crucial point is that you are dangerously confused about the moral norms and political sympathies that make life in this world worth living.

What is more, you don’t even care about what you think you care about, because you have failed to see that Hamas, and jihadists generally, are the principal cause of all the misery and dysfunction we see—not just in Gaza but throughout the Muslim world. Gaza is only an “open air prison” because its democratically elected government is a jihadist organization that is eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews. A rational government in Gaza that cared about the fate of its citizens could have made something beautiful—or at least not awful—out of that strip of land on the Mediterranean. But Hamas has spent billions of dollars on terrorism. The suffering of Gaza is due to the fact that it has been run by a death cult, against which Israel has had to defend itself continuously. The line you keep hearing from defenders of Israel—that “if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide”—happens to be true.

But now we have college students at our best universities tearing down posters of hostages held by Hamas—some of whom are Americans, and some of whom are children—imagining that they are supporting the Palestinian cause. It boggles the mind. We have LGBTQ activists supporting Hamas—when they wouldn’t survive a day in Gaza because Hamas throws anyone suspected of being gay off of rooftops. They’re directly supported by Iran, where gay people are regularly hanged.

We’ve got feminist organizations such as CodePink going all in for Hamas and accusing the Israelis of genocide. Do they understand how Hamas treats women? Did CodePink support the women of Iran who were thrown in prison and even killed for daring to show their hair in public? Do they realize that women are treated like property throughout the Muslim world and that this is not an accident? Under Islam, the central message about women is that they are second-class citizens and the property of the men in their lives. Rather than support the rights of women and girls to not live as slaves, Western liberals support the right of theocrats to treat their wives and daughters however they want as long as these theocrats are Muslim.

If anything good comes from this outpouring of hate and moral confusion, it will be the end of identitarian politics of the Left. A friend of mine was just at an art opening, where they were passing hors d’oeuvres, and someone she knew came up to her and asked if she had any food in her teeth. And my friend said, “No, your teeth are perfectly white and beautiful.” Unfortunately, the woman herself was Black and considered the association of the terms white and beautiful a microaggression. She got greatly offended and stormed off. What, did she want brown teeth? I know nothing about this person apart from this anecdote, but I guarantee you that this prodigy of social justice is completely confused about Israel and Hamas and jihadism. This is the sort of person for whom words are violence but massacring women and children with knives, or burning them alive, is a completely defensible response to “oppression.” Most elite circles in the West—academia, Hollywood, the media, nonprofits—have been poisoned, to one degree or another, by this social justice psychosis where imaginary harms are seized upon as though they were existential concerns, and pure evil is easily shrugged off or even celebrated as a moral victory.

What Jihadists Want

The bright line, ethically, between Israel and her enemies can be seen on the question of human shields. There are people who use them, and there are people who are deterred by them, however imperfectly. Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Let me say that again: Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Again, imagine the Jews of Israel doing that, and imagine how little it would matter to Hamas if they did. Hamas is telling people to stay in Gaza and has even physically prevented them from leaving so that they will be killed by Israeli bombs. They are using their own people as human shields—in addition to more than 200 hostages they took for this purpose. No one cares less about Palestinian women and children than Hamas does. However horrible the images coming out of Gaza, it is Hamas who should be blamed for the loss of life there. You’re calling for a ceasefire now? There was a ceasefire on October 6. Hamas broke it by deliberately murdering more than 1,400 innocent people.

Of course, Israel should hold itself to the highest ethical standards for waging war. For two reasons: One, because it should. It is right for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to do whatever it can to minimize the loss of innocent life. And, two, they should hold themselves to the highest ethical standards because the rest of the world will hold them to impossible ones.

Look at these protests we’re seeing all over the world, which began before Israel had dropped a single bomb. Now that there have been several thousand Palestinian casualties, cities across the globe are seething with rage. But Assad has killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow Muslims in Syria. The Saudis have killed well over 100,000 Muslims in Yemen. Where are the protests? No one cares, least of all Muslims. They only care when non-Muslims produce these casualties—and they especially care when Jews do it. Israel is routinely condemned by the United Nations, and the U.N. could not pass a condemnation of Hamas for the atrocities it committed on October 7.

As I said, I don’t know whether a ground invasion is the right approach. But there is no question that Israel had to act; they have to destroy Hamas, and, whatever they do, noncombatants will get killed in the process. Again, this is Hamas’s fault.

But the problem is much bigger than Hamas. Civilized people everywhere—both non-Muslim and Muslim—have no choice but to combat jihadism. This has been glaringly obvious since September 11, 2001, but it should be much more obvious now. For Israel, October 7 was much worse than 9/11 was for America. There’s almost no comparison. The revealed threat to Israel really is existential. However, in the long term, I think the threat of jihadism is existential for the West too.

This demands a much longer conversation about what to do about jihadism. I happen to think that most of our response to it should be covert. I don’t know why the Israelis, the Americans, the British, or anyone else has to take credit for anything. However long it takes, members of Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, al-Shebab, Boko Haram, Pakistani Taliban, and every other jihadist organization on Earth should be made to understand, every day of their lives, that the martyrdom they seek will be granted to them. Jihadism must be destroyed in every way it can be destroyed—logistically, economically, informationally, but also in the most material sense, which means killing a lot of jihadists. We can argue with their sympathizers. And we can hope to de-radicalize them. But we also have to kill committed jihadists. These are not normal antagonists with rational demands. These are not people who want what we want. This is not politics, and it will never be politics. It is a very long war.

Back in 2016, I released an episode of my podcast titled “What Do Jihadists Really Want?,” based on an issue of the magazine Dabiq, put out by the Islamic State. You can listen to that for more detail.2 You can also read the book I wrote with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, to understand more of my thinking on this topic. Jihadist ideology has nothing to do with Israel, American foreign policy, colonialism, or any other rational grievance, and there is no concession that any civilized society can make to appease it.

We’ve forgotten about jihadism in recent years. But it hasn’t gone away. Whatever one thinks about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was surely perceived as a victory by jihadists everywhere—and the implications of that have yet to be felt. In the West, we tend to remain blissfully unaware of Islamic terrorism (which is just another name for jihadism) unless it happens in the United States or Europe. We don’t tend to notice jihadist atrocities committed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or India, much less in the dozen or so countries in Africa that suffer them more or less continuously. And we are totally unaware of foiled plots, of which there have been many.

As I said, we also tend to think in terms of “terrorism” or “violent extremism,” and while I use those words myself, we have to focus on jihadism, because that is the underlying ideological commitment.

Now, jihadists themselves are not a unified front. There is a very deep schism between Sunni and Shia—despite the fact that some groups will collaborate across it, as we see with Hamas and the Iranian regime. And there are internecine divisions even among jihadists of the same faith. The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban don’t even get along at this point. And that’s a very good thing. Hopefully, we have an army of smart people with the necessary language skills, sowing hatred and confusion among jihadist groups twenty-four hours a day. But jihadists are all united in their hatred of liberal Western values, in their certainty of Paradise, and in their willingness to turn this world into an abattoir for the glory of God.

We cannot tolerate jihadists. We cannot let them immigrate into our open societies. And by we, I mean not just non-Muslims; I mean all Muslims who want to live sane lives in the twenty-first century. In the case of Israel and Palestine, the Palestinians have to rid themselves of their jihadists. And if that’s not possible, a stable peace with the Palestinians is not possible.

But this problem is so much bigger than Israel, or even global anti-Semitism. Spend some time reading about how the Islamic State treats Shiites. Look at the history of terrorism in Pakistan or India. If you want a totally painless way to do this, watch Hotel Mumbai—it’s a great film that depicts the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 by the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba. If you’ve forgotten, around a dozen jihadists killed over 160 people in Mumbai, many at the Taj Hotel, and the film shows this with brutal realism. And while they killed some Jews too, at a Jewish center, this attack had nothing to do with Israel, America, race, so-called “settler colonialism,” or any of the other factors that Leftist fellow travelers have been fixated on since October 7. Really, this is the least boring piece of homework you will ever be given. Go watch Hotel Mumbai, and once the killing starts, ask yourself how anyone, East or West, Muslim or non-Muslim, can live with these people.

There is an intuition out there that to solve the problems in the Middle East, we must understand them in all their depth and complexity. And for this, the most important thing to grapple with is the so-called “historical context.” But for the purpose of really understanding this conflict and why it is so intractable, historical context is a distraction—every moment spent talking about something other than jihadism is a moment when the oxygen of moral sanity is leaving the room.

There’s no sorting this out by reference to history, because any group can arbitrarily decide where to set the dial on its time machine. In any case, the Jews in Israel are “indigenous people.” The British were colonialists. Colonialists have some place to go back to. Where could the Jews go back to? There has been a continuous presence of Jews in what is now Israel for thousands of years. Most of the recent immigrants—Jews from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and other Muslim-majority countries—were driven from their homes by their Muslim neighbors after 1948, in collective punishment for the founding of Israel. Is anyone talking about their right of return? There are displaced people everywhere on Earth, but only the Palestinians have been turned into a global fetish for their right of return.

Incidentally, if a history of land theft and oppression were sufficient to produce genocidal terrorism, where are the Native American suicide bombers? Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? Do you realize how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the Chinese? Where are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers? (I think there has been one.) The truth is ideas matter. It absolutely matters what people believe. Certainty about Paradise, and about martyrdom as a way of getting there, is one of the most potent memetic poisons the human mind has ever produced. Whatever historical, political, or economic context you want to apply to Israel and Palestine, jihadism is real; its intentions toward the Jews, infidels, and apostates are genocidal; and this is a global problem, because jihadism enjoys an appalling level of support throughout the Muslim world despite the fact that it is responsible for far more death and destruction among Muslims than Israel’s acts of self-defense have ever been.

Now, obviously, there are whole populations throughout the Muslim world that are effectively hostages to the religious fanatics who control them—and certainly a large percentage of the Palestinians fit that description, as does much of Iran. But it is very easy to underestimate how much sympathy there is for the jihadist project among Muslims who are not themselves actively waging jihad. And this is a terrible thing to contemplate. When 100,000 people show up in the center of London in support of Hamas, we have a problem. Of course, it’s an open question how many of those people really support jihad. But imagining that very few of them do is pure delusion. We have to win a war of ideas with these people. Because if the future is going to be remotely tolerable, the vast majority of Muslims have to disavow jihadism and unite with non-Muslims in fighting it. When hundreds of thousands of people show up in London to condemn Hamas, the Islamic State, or any specific instance of jihadist savagery, without both-sides-ing anything, then we will know that we’ve made a modicum of progress. When Muslims by the millions pour into the streets in protest, not over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad but over the murder of cartoonists by their own religious fanatics, we will know that an open-ended future of pluralistic tolerance might be possible.

Yes, there are many other problems in the world at the moment. There’s the war in Ukraine and the looming possibility of conflict between the United States and China. Some of these problems appear much bigger than jihadism, but they all admit of some rational basis for negotiation and compromise. However bad things get with the Russians or the Chinese, they are not chanting “We love death more than the Americans and the Europeans love life.” Only jihadism has the power to turn our future into a zombie movie. Jihadists are the enemy with whom there is no rational or pragmatic compromise to make—ever.

As I’ve said many times before, the Muslim world needs to win a war of ideas with itself, and perhaps several civil wars. It has to de-radicalize itself. It has to transform the doctrine of jihad into something far more benign than it is, and it has to stop supporting its religious fanatics when they come into conflict with non-Muslims. This is what’s so toxic: Muslims supporting other Muslims no matter how sociopathic and insane their behavior. And if the Muslim world and the political Left can’t stand against jihadism, it is only a matter of time before their moral blindness fully empowers rightwing authoritarianism in the West. If secular liberals won’t create secure borders, Christian fascists will.

There may be two sides to the past, but there really aren’t two sides to the present. There are two sides to the story of how the Palestinians and Jews came to fight over land in the Middle East. Understanding all that is important—and I think it is important to understand the cynical game the Arab world has played with the plight of the Palestinians for the past fifty years. If there is a stable political settlement to ever be reached between Israel and the Palestinians, it will entail a full untangling of the facts from all the propaganda that obscures them, while keeping the problem of jihadism in view. It will also entail that the religious lunatics on the Jewish side get sidelined. As I said, the building of settlements has been a continuous provocation. But even on the point of religious fanaticism, there really aren’t two sides worth talking about now. Whatever terrible things Israeli settlers occasionally do—and these are crimes for which they should be prosecuted—generally speaking, the world does not have a problem with Jewish religious fanatics targeting Muslims in their mosques and schools. You literally can’t open a Jewish school in Paris because no one will insure it. Yes, there are lunatics on both sides, but the consequences of their lunacy are not equivalent—not even remotely equivalent. We haven’t spent the past twenty years taking our shoes off at the airport because there are so many fanatical Jews eager to blow themselves up on airplanes.

There is a bright line between good and a very specific form of evil that we must keep in view. It is the evil of bad ideas—ideas so bad they can make even ordinary human beings impossible to live with.

There’s a piece of audio from October 7 that many people have commented on. It’s a recording of a cell phone call that a member of Hamas made to his family, while he was in the process of massacring innocent men, women, and children. The man is ecstatic, telling his father and mother, and I think brother, that he has just killed ten Jews with his own hands. He had just murdered a husband and wife and was now calling his family from the dead woman’s phone.

Here’s a partial transcript of what he said:

“Hi, Dad. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” And his dad says, “May God protect you.” “Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands! Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed, Dad. Open the phone, Dad. I’m calling you on WhatsApp. Open the phone, go. Dad, I killed ten. Ten with my own hands. Their blood is on their hands. [I believe that is a reference to the Quran.] Put Mom on.” And the father says, “Oh my son. God bless you!” “I swear ten with my own hands. Mother, I killed ten with my own hands!” And his father says, “May God bring you home safely.” “Dad, go back to WhatsApp now. Dad, I want to do a live broadcast.” And the mother now says, “I wish I was with you.” “Mom, your son is a hero!” And then, apparently talking to his comrades he yells, “Kill, kill, kill, kill them.” And then his brother gets on the line, asking where he is. And he tells his brother the name of the town and then he says “I killed ten! Ten with my own hands! I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone!” And the brother says, “You killed ten?” “Yes, I killed ten. I swear!” Then he says, “I am the first to enter on the protection and help of Allah! [Surely that’s another scriptural reference.] Hold your head up, Father. Hold your head up! See on WhatsApp those that I killed. Open my WhatsApp.” And his brother says, “Come back. Come back.” And he says, “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion. What’s with you? How would I return? Open WhatsApp. See the dead. Open it.” And the mother sounds like she is trying to figure out how to open WhatsApp … “Open WhatsApp on your phone and see the dead, how I killed them with my own hands.” And she says, “Well, promise to come back.”

I would submit to you that this piece of audio is more than just the worst WhatsApp commercial ever conceived. It is a window into a culture. This is not the type of call that would have been placed from Vietnam by an American who just participated in the My Lai massacre. Nor is it the parental reaction one would expect from an American family had their beloved son just called them from a killing field. As terrible as Vietnam was, can you imagine a call back to Nebraska: “Mom, I killed ten with my own hands! I killed a woman and her husband, and I’m calling from the dead woman’s phone. Mom, your son is a hero!” Do you see what a total aberration that would have been, even in extremis?

This call wasn’t a total aberration. This wasn’t Ted Bundy calling his mom. This was an ordinary member of Hamas, a group that might still win an election today, especially in the West Bank, calling an ordinary Palestinian family, and the mere existence of that call, to say nothing of its contents, reveals something about the wider culture among the Palestinians.

It’s important to point out that not only members of Hamas but also ordinary Gazans appear to have taken part in the torture and murder of innocent Israelis and the taking of hostages. How many did this? And how many ordinary Gazans were dancing in the streets and spitting on the captured women and girls who were paraded before them after having been raped and tortured? What percentage of Palestinians in Gaza, or the West Bank, many of whom are said to hate Hamas for their corruption and incompetence and brutality, nevertheless support what they did on October 7 with a clear conscience, based on what they believe about Jews and the ethics of jihad? I don’t know, but I’m sure that the answers to these questions would be quite alarming. We’re talking about a culture that teaches Jew hatred and the love of martyrdom in its elementary schools, many of which are funded by the United Nations.

Of course, all this horror is compounded by the irony that the Jews who were killed on October 7 were, for the most part, committed liberals and peace activists. Hamas killed the sorts of people who volunteer to drive sick Palestinians into Israel for medical treatments. They murdered the most idealistic people in Israel. They raped, tortured, and killed young people at a trance-dance music festival devoted to peace, half of whom were probably on MDMA feeling nothing but love for all humanity when the jihadists arrived. In terms of a cultural and moral distance, it’s like the Vikings showed up at Burning Man and butchered everyone in sight.

Just think about what happened at the Supernova music festival: At least 260 people were murdered in the most sadistically gruesome ways possible. Decapitated, burned alive, blown up with grenades … and from the jihadist side this wasn’t an error. It’s not that if they could have known what was in the hearts of those beautiful young people, they would have thought, “Oh my God, we’re killing the wrong people. These people aren’t our enemies. These people are filled with love and compassion and want nothing more than to live in peace with us.” No, the true horror is that, given what jihadists believe, those were precisely the sorts of people any good Muslim should kill and send to Hell where they can be tortured in fire for eternity. From the jihadist point of view, there is no mistake here. And there is no basis for remorse. Please absorb this fact: for the jihadist, all this sadism—the torture and murder of helpless, terrified people—is an act of worship. This is the sacrament. This isn’t some nauseating departure from the path to God. This isn’t stalled spiritual progress, much less sin. This is what you do for the glory of God. This is what Muhammad himself did.

There is no substitute for understanding what our enemies actually want and believe. I’m pretty sure that many of you reading this aren’t even comfortable with my use of the term enemy, because you don’t want to believe that you have any. I understand that. But you have to understand that the people who butchered over 1,400 innocent men, women, and children in Israel on October 7 were practicing their religion sincerely. They were being every bit as spiritual, from their point of view, as the trance dancers at the Supernova festival were being from theirs. They were equally devoted to their highest values. Equally uplifted. Ecstatic. Amazed at their good fortune. They wouldn’t want to trade places with anyone. Let this image land in your brain: They were shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) all day long as they murdered women and children. And these people are now being celebrated the world over by those who understand exactly what they did. Yes, many of those college kids at Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell are just idiots who have a lot to learn about the world. But in the Muslim community, and that includes the crowds in London, Sydney, and Brooklyn, Hamas is being celebrated by people who understand exactly what motivates them.

Again, watch Hotel Mumbai or read a book about the Islamic State so you can see jihadism in another context—where literally not one of the variables that people imagine are important here is present. There are no settlers, blockades, daily humiliations at check points, or differing interpretations of history—and yet we have the same grotesque distortion of the spiritual impulse, the same otherworldliness framed by murder, the same absolute evil that doesn’t require the presence of evil people, just confused ones—just true believers.

Of course, we can do our best to turn the temperature down now. And we can trust that the news cycle will get captured by another story. We can direct our attention again to Russia, China, climate change, or AI alignment, and I will do that in my work, but the problem of jihadism and the much wider problem of sympathy for it isn’t going away. And civilized people—non-Muslim and Muslim alike—have to deal with it. As I said in a previous episode of my podcast on this topic: We all live in Israel now. It’s just that most of us haven’t realized it yet.

#Sam Harris #hamas #hamas supporters #israel #islam #pro hamas #islamic terrorism #hamas terrorism #eretz yisrael #palestine #pro palestine #free palastine #free gaza #gaza strip #religion of violence #jihad #islamic jihad #jihadism #october 7 #hamas massacre #moral confusion #religion #religion is a mental illness

[cantsayidont]

Hateration holleration, teevee edition, with important new critical evaluation features:

APPLES NEVER FALL (2024): Engrossing, often funny seven-part mystery-drama, based on a novel by Liane Moriarty, about the dysfunctional family of retired tennis pros Stan and Joy Delaney (Sam Neill and Annette Bening), whose four adult kids — rich dipshit Troy (Jake Lacy), hot mess Amy (Alison Brie), perpetually resentful Brooke (Essie Randles), and neurotic underachiever Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) — begin to unravel after Joy mysteriously disappears. Did Stan kill her? Does Joy's disappearance have something to do with their former houseguest Savannah (Georgia Flood), a troubled young woman who had persuaded Joy and Stan to take her in under what may have been false pretenses? Everyone knows something more than they're telling, as the situation brings old resentments bubbling to the surface. Perhaps a smidgen too arch for its own good, and the shifting flashback structure sometimes makes it hard to keep track of the sequence of events, but consistently interesting and refreshingly nuanced, with well-drawn characters and excellent performances. (Neill, Bening, and Flood are particularly good.) Only the finale falls short: Certain key character motivations remain murky, and the final scenes are a bit flat, perhaps an inevitable consequence of a story that flits between tones and genres in a way that leaves it without a natural endpoint. Also, the South Florida setting isn't always convincing; big portions of the series were actually shot in Australia. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Yes! (More than one, even.) VERDICT: Flawed but worthwhile.

THE BROTHERS SUN (2024): One-season action-comedy-drama series about an infamous triad underboss from Taipei, Charles Sun (Justin Chien), who's sent to America to protect his mother (Michelle Yeoh) and younger brother Bruce (Sam Song Li) after a cunningly staged attack by an unknown enemy puts his father (Johnny Kou) in the hospital. Mama Sun scarcely needs protection, but the same isn't true of Bruce, a dorky pre-med student who really wants to do improv, and who's totally out of place in his family's world of ultraviolence and organized crime. Meanwhile, Charles' childhood friend Alexis (Highdee Kuan), who's still sweet on him, is now an ambitious assistant DA who sees taking down the triads as a defining career move. Starts off disarmingly light (though always quite violent), but gets significantly darker as it goes on, which really isn't to its credit — after the cheerful amorality of the early episodes, the increasingly maudlin themes of conflicted family loyalty feel heavy-handed, culminating in a credibility-straining climax with about as much subtlety as a cement mixer. It could also have used more Michelle Yeoh and less Sam Li, whose character is such a feckless dweeb that he sometimes grates. Chien actually makes Charles a more credible character than Bruce, impressive considering the level of pulpy plot contrivance involved. A planned second season was canceled, but except for a post-credits tag in the finale, the story feels reasonably complete. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Not so as you'd notice. VERDICT: Starts well, veers too far into turgid melodrama.

PALM ROYALE (2024): Fingernails-on-chalkboard would-be social satire, set in 1969 and featuring Kristen Wiig (with a singularly unconvincing Georgia accent) as conniving but vapid former beauty queen Maxine Simmons, who for some unaccountable reason is determined to wheedle her way into the Palm Beach upper crust, by hook or by crook, while secretly squatting in the mansion of society matron Norma Dellacorte (Carol Burnett), who almost no one realizes is actually in a coma. The glib voiceover narration recalls the early seasons of DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, but with no bite and no apparent point — there's no reason to care about the premise, the plot, or any of the characters, who are neither sympathetic enough to be likable nor bitchy enough to be fun. Wiig is just awful, straining to prove she can do the kind of role that in recent years has usually gone to Margot Robbie; she can't, and she's obviously at least 10 years too old for her character. The period production design is suitably glossy, but an interesting supporting cast (including Laura Dern, Allison Janney, and Leslie Bibb) is completely defeated by the dreadful scripts, and Ricky Martin (built like a marble statue with acting to match) eventually arrives to stink up the proceedings as Norma's loyal houseboy. I only barely made it through the third episode, and the idea of enduring seven more is too painful to contemplate. If you're in the mood for genteel Southern bitchiness, you'd get more out of a highlight reel of Rue McLanahan scenes from THE GOLDEN GIRLS, which would actually be funny. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Not in the first three episodes. VERDICT: Alternately dull and agonizing.

#teevee #hateration holleration #apples never fall #liane moriarty #annette bening #sam neill #alison brie #jake lacy #essie randles #conor merrigan turner #georgia flood #the brothers sun #justin chien #michelle yeoh #sam song li #johnny kou #highdee kuan #alex hewkin #palm royale #kristen wiig #carol burnett #laura dern #allison janney #leslie bibb #ricky martin

[dani-halfa]

On Sam Manson’s case

Sam Manson is a weird case of a character because she is a main character in Danny Phantom and yet she doesn’t have exactly what i would call a ¨proper character arc¨.

On the surface, Sam Manson is defined by her sarcasm, intelligence,  brash attitude, individualism and morality. She is someone who often likes going against what it expected in society. She criticizes society issues and has desire to change things for the better. She rarely shows any fear of speaking up, regardless of who the person is. For instance, she stood up for Danny in ¨Parental Bonding¨ when Paulina was making fun of him. She is protective of her friends and often acts as the voice of reason in the group. 

Sam seems to be into supernatural things, she knew about the Fright Knight, also known as the ¨Spirit of Halloween¨ in ¨Fright Knight¨. This may come from being a goth or helping Danny with ghost hunting. This is an interesting aspect of his character that doesn’t get much exploration, which it is a pity because it has potential. So, with all these things that she has you would think the writers would came up with some interesting ideas for her character correct? Well, that comes the issue with Sam: They didn’t. Or well, they did, except its mostly defined by one thing. Her relationship and crush on Danny.

Like, there is nothing wrong with having the girl in the team falling in love with main protagonist. That’s completely fine!. The problem with Sam is that most of her episodes seem to be defined by the crush she has on Danny and she doesn’t have much episodes exploring her personality outside of that.

It doesn’t help that in Season 3 she is reduced to be Danny’s girlfriend as a good chunk of the episodes are about ship teasing the relationship between the two instead of exploring their characters.

Her goal in changing society is important in like two episodes and it leads to mixed results. (Mystery Meat and One of a Kind). There isn’t a bigger arc of her coming up with some project to help Amity Park or her school. The fact that her family is rich could have shaken up some plot threads. For example: Her standing up against something her parents are doing because she finds out that it is inmoral.

One episode that explores her character well its ¨Beauty Marked¨. Because of her individualism and no fear of speaking up, she inspires Dora to stand up against her abusive brother. This episode... has a few issues that have been discussed by other people in the past but i think at least it does a good job a showing Sam’s attributes having a positive impact on someone.

And yes, unironically, ¨Girls' Night Out¨ a Season 3 episode explores her relationship with Jazz and she learning to get along with her, which is weird that they did this at this point in the series and not before considering Jazz is an important character in the series and a part of the team.

The problem with ¨Beauty Marked¨ is that it doesn’t evolve Sam in a way that has an impact in the bigger narrative nor has much consequences for her later on. The same applies to ¨Girls' Night Out¨ since it is on Season 3, that has almost zero cohesive narrative.

"Parental Bonding" is sweet episode because it shows that Sam is into ¨girl things¨ but maybe avoids doing these things because she is afraid of being seen as ¨shallow¨. It could been interesting to see her trying to remain ¨unique¨ while learning to be into ¨girly things¨. Maybe Jazz could have helped her with that or even Valerie.

In contrast to Tucker, he has at least three episodes about him.  "What You Want", "Doctor's Disorders" and "King Tuck". While they don’t have much consquences of his character, they explore him quite well. "What You Want" and "King Tuck" explore his inferioty complext and desire to be admired by other people. How power can get over his head and makes not think things through. "Doctor's Disorders" is a good episode that has Tucker facing his fears of hospitals to save Danny from Spectra. As you can see, Tucker is allowed to some development outside his sidekick role. And this doesn’t count B plots from a few episodes.

To be honest, both Sam and Tucker feel like characters that the writers didn’t put much thought into them when it came to their character arcs. They are just there, sometimes helping Danny with his ghosts adventures.

The closest that Sam gets to character evolution is her learning to be less possessive of Danny and that she can’t force him to like her. ("Fanning the Flames"). There were moments that Sam expressed getting jealous of Danny paying more attention to Paulina than her. What bothers me is that her not confessing her feelings to Danny wasn’t properly adressed neither? Did she expected to be rejected by him? Was she afraid that it would ruin their friendship? This was never brought to explain why it was the case.

Eventually Danny returns these feelings to Sam.  (Frightmare- Claw of the Wild). By the end of the series they become an official couple and start dating (Phantom Planet).

Like i previously mention earlier, her character arc is mainly defined by her relationship with Danny and there doesn’t seem to be much outside that aspect. All of this is rather disappointing since Sam is a character that can be explored in multiple ways. 

A few ideas that come to my mind to fix this are: Explore her relationship with her parents, her coming with ideas to change society or Casper school, getting into witchcraft or showing an interest in the supernatural, making her go capturing ghosts on her own, meeting someone she cared about in their ghost form; to name some examples.

In all, Sam Manson is a character that is fun and had some potential to an interesting character but she wasn’t given the proper execution she needed to have a good arc.

#Danny Phantom #sam manson #danny fenton #DP characters #dp analysis #danny phantom season 3 #Beauty Marked #fanning the flames #Tucker Foley

[utilitycaster]

Some of the resentment I've seen of FCG's coin feels like it stems from viewing FCG as less a character than a vehicle for Sam to do bits. They view the coin as Sam doing a bit that isn't landing and is taking up time and space that could go to the actual characters in the group that have stories instead of what they view as a bunch of disconnected jokes. I saw this with FCG going into the Grand Ring, too. People on Twitter saying that that was Sam trying to get the group killed for a laugh.

Truly I have to believe there is either one server or just like...a bunch of very stupid people who all follow each other and parrot each other's takes because the reaction to the Grand Disk especially is absolutely batshit fucking nuts:

If you give a heroic adventurer a weird noise, they are probably going to investigate it. If they investigate it, they are probably going to check it out. If FCG hadn't run in, someone else would have.

This show has been on for literally 8 years now and there has never been a main campaign TPK. Truly the Otohan fight is the only one where I take serious issue with the balance and signaling, and even then, so what, half the party died, they fixed it. Why is this fight different from all other fights?

On top of that this happened before we knew resurrection was broken, too, so like, the reaction during the episode truly makes no sense; the audience knowledge was that this party has THREE people who have revivify and two with Raise Dead and only one true glass cannon. They are arguably better positioned to take on threats than like, Bells Hells the regular party.

If a character dies the cast member will play another character and just based on the track record of past replacement characters the chances are high that they will be just as good if not better. If you don't want to watch a show in which permanent character death is an option then go do that.

I have, recently, actively tried to push back on the "bro do you even play TTRPGs" attitude people sometimes have regarding really stupid criticism, and to be fair this is narrative criticism too but like...unless a TPK is explicitly the goal or baked into the setting as a possibility (eg: Calamity; Neverafter; games designed for it like the Tomb of Horrors module or Call of Cthulhu or something) the GM absolutely does not want a TPK. Do you know how much fucking PAPERWORK is wasted in a TPK. If they had a TPK Matt would have had to look at an entire encounter and backstory regarding, say, Oltgar and Drixlitch, that he had lovingly designed, and go "well, guess that's fucked."

So anyway if you saw FCG go through the gates and your thought was not "ooh, combat" but rather "this will be a TPK" idk work on your breathing exercises or something because that's a wild leap.

Anyway the funniest thing in all of this is that the most recent episode made it clear that it's not just a bit. Also though it's like. Which "actual" characters? Chetney has been pretty decently served as a character, all things considered; the entire solstice plot revolves around Imogen so it's time for Laura to get a well-deserved break so Imogen can actually process and develop as a person rather than just be under constant nonstop stress; I love Fearne but this arc is just not really about her whole deal; and both FRIDA and Deanna have gotten plenty to do. Honestly while balance between characters is not really a thing in the sense that some people make D&D characters with tons of hooks and things to do and paths to take and some do not, and also the overall narrative of the party is important to consider*, the character balance of this particular arc has been the best of the whole campaign.

*most people get this intuitively UNLESS they are particularly stupid, or have either shipping or My Blorbo Is The Protagonist brainrot, to the point that you can diagnose these conditions when someone's previously decent understanding of story falls off a cliff

#answered #Anonymous #yes there is a passover joke in here #the more people insult the coin the more i will force them to look at religious references bc it's funny #cr tag

[punkxcalibur]

personal mphfpc recap since i finally finished reading all the books

spoilers for the entire mphfpc series ahead. this will mostly be me talking about the book's imperfections, because when i love a piece of media, i also love criticizing it to its core

so, i first read the books 1-4 in 2020 and i was SO obsessed!!?? i wasn't really into social media and fandom culture back then, so i didn't really have anyone to talk to about mphfpc and i remember being very sad about that. i also remember trying to make fanart of the characters, but i REALLY sucked at art back then and to this day i find old mphfpc drawings and cringe at them. maybe it's time to redraw some of those...

anyways, i read the fifth book when it first came out in germany and i kind of hated it lol. i was really rushing through it, because i couldn't wait for the fugh reunion. so i kind of missed out on the whole plot because i only cared about fiona and hugh.

basically, i recently finished rereading the books, because nostalgia or whatever and i'm kind of obsessed again. so...i'm just dumping some thoughts on the whole series here because on tumblr i can actually find ppl with mutual interests.

first of all there's literally SO MANY inconsistencies and plotholes?? what the actual fuck ransom riggs. idk how much of this is prevalent in the og books, because i mainly read the german translations, but sometimes riggs just forgets who hugh is i guess?? he mixes up his and horace's peculiarities once and at some point he is referred to as howard. who the fuck is howard. these are literally the most easiest mistakes to fix. does he not have an editor?

i'm not even gonna talk about the movie. i have a whole seperate post for it

it sometimes bothers me how only certain characters seem to serve a purpose. in every novel emma, enoch, millard and bronwyn are clearly the focus (besides jacob) despite the fact that the other characters are equally interesting and likeable. hugh, horace, claire, olive and obviously fiona are just NOT THERE for like the entirety of AMOD. are you kidding me

the entire second trilogy...is kind of a cashgrab. of course i'm happy we got more books and i liked them, but it's kind of obvious that the author simply had some pictures left and saw an opportunity to make some more profit out of them. that's not bad, but these books weren't necessary for the overall storyline.

the thing with the prophecy in DODA...the entire book was dedicated to finding the other lighteaters, but they don't really do anything in the end?? i kinda get why noor has to be the *main character*, but why introduce julius and sebbie when everything could have played out the same way without them?

julius and horace...is it really that hard to age julius down? it would've made that a lot less creepy. there is literally no reason for julius to so much older than horace. not sure if this could be considered queerbaiting, since i don't know a lot about that topic. would be grateful if anyone elaborated more on that.

hugh and fiona are still my favorite thing about these books THEY ARE PERFECT IN EVERY WAY AND DESERVED SO MANY MORE SCENES UGH. i don't need another jemma kiss i need FUGH. there is just so much potential and plus, we never really get to learn about their backstories?? like we know that they're from the 1840s, so how did they get into a loop a century later?

how was fiona able to *whisper* to hugh in DODA, she literally had her tongue cut out, hello?

so many characters with lots of potential either die or just disappear. lilly, sam, althea, peter-and-joel...ring any bells??

why is horatio kinda

ok i'm sorry

the photos are so funny sometimes, because at times there will be a photo of, say, emma and in the next book there will be another picture of her and she just looks like a different person. because,obviously, that's a photo of a different person. but apparently, ransom thinks we're too dumb to notice that.

i would just love it if there'd be storylines that focused on each character individually, because again, WASTED POTENTIAL

ricky deserved to have a comeback, i feel like this is general fandom consensus

introducing v, just to kill her off? idk man

despite all of these criticisms i just made, i fucking cherish these books

since pjo gets a new awesome reboot i think we deserve one too

i also wish the fandom was bigger but maybe it's a good thing that it's kind of niche. i don't know.

uhh i guess that was my not-so-little rant and yeah...enjoy this post i guess

#mphfpc #miss peregrine's home for peculiar children #miss peregrine book #mphfpc meta #thoughts #long post