#if we get the second season focusing on these two books with perhaps a mid season finale at the point where lucy leaves the agency

[woman-loving]

A History of US Bear Subculture

Selection from “A Concise History of Self-Identifying Bears,” by Les Wright, published in The Bear Book: Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subculture, edited by Les Wright, 1997.

Roots In his 1991 introduction to The Bear Cult: Photography by Chris Nelson,[1] Edward Lucie-Smith attributes iconographic sources of bears to the 1950s gladiator movies starring bodybuilder Steve Reeves. Gay “physique studios” of the time reflected the predominant fashion of closely shaven faces and bodies. “Old Reliable,” a Los Angeles-based photographer of homoerotic wrestling, specialized in “natural” men, soliciting hustlers, punks, ex-cons, and other truly “rough trade” types off the streets (from the 1950s-1990s) to pose for his camera. Old Reliable’s models were street-smart scrappers, perhaps shabby, perhaps defiant, unquestionably blue-collar, or lower, class. A fat cigar in one hand and the middle finger of the other hand thrust into the camera’s face is the signature pose for Old Reliable’s models. John Rechy’s novels, especially 1963 best-seller City of the Night, serve as a record of gay male engenderment of this particular type in the urban subcultures of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Another informant, living in the Miami, Florida area during the 1970s, reports that when he first started coming out into the bar scene in his mid-twenties he encountered a cluster of “bears” that congregated in the Tool Room, a back bar area of Warehouse VIII, a “disco place.”

“[i]n the meantime, some counter-culture tabloid I read occasionally ran a cryptic personal ad for a Bears party, which would gather at a men’s bar called The Ramrod on a particular evening and time, so I bit. Not knowing the bar’s whereabouts, then learning the address and trying to find the unmarked place in the downtown darkness, I was late but not too late. A dozen of so men with beards, most of them husky, were piling out of the bar door as I was walking in. Two of them grabbed me by each arm, and one said “Great! You’re the even number!” Now I was just in the first stages of coming out, even to myself, but I let myself get swept away (with an alarmed smile on my face). I thought I was headed for my first orgy (gay or straight), but it turned out to be a real party at a home on one of the causeway islands between Miami and Miami Beach. Real men having a hell of a good time without a woman in sight. Imagine!! We watched the second half of the Dolphins game, played some cards, then sat outside under the moonlight, slowly pairing off and disappearing back indoors or off into tropical hiding places behind the patio.

I was out. I started hanging out regularly at the Ramrod, where any bearded local was greeted as “Hey, Brother Bear!” I checked out The Rack, a leather saloon, but the bear camaraderie was not present. A few Rack regulars were good-looking, beefy, bearded guys, but their bikes and image were their focus, not the bears among them. The bears continued to patronize the Ramrod and the Tool Room, or a larger bar in Fort Lauderdale called Tacky’s, but could be found in lots of neighborhood bars, too, like The Hamlet and The Everglades. Not only did we refer to ourselves as bears, but the term caught on among non-bears too.

It was too early in beardom, I guess, to have a Bears club or organization of any kind. Nobody thought of it. There were spontaneous parties arranged by word-of-mouth, picnics, beach volleyball. We even loaded three vans full of bears and invaded Key West.

You might think of Florida as an unlikely place to find bears, but bearded men were very common there in the 60s and 70s. When the disco era streamrollered fashion for straight and queer alike, it became less common. Many bears kept our beards, many left only a moustache. The Ramrod faltered and closed, 13 Buttons and The Copa flourished, as did all the big discos of the day. I became more private whit three bear affairs over five years, then finally met a cowboy in New Orleans on Mardi Gras and left Florida forever. We moved to Colorado in 1981 and had five great years together. I've been in Denver since 1986 and was later a founding member of one of the oldest bear clubs in the country, Front Range Bears.

But that’s another story.”[2]

Larry Reams has unearthed the first documented apparent uses of “bear” in the current sense. He has found among records of the Los Angeles-based Satyrs’ MC club the formation of a “bear” club mentioned in two entries from 1966.[3] Another source cites anecdotally a group of lovers of a “Papa Bear” in Dallas, Texas, as the start of the “bear community” “well before 1975.”[4] Several undocumented sources have related similar anecdotes of private circle or bar circles of self-identifying bears.

The first published description of gay “bears” appeared in a whimsical article called “Who’s Who in the Zoo: A Glossary of Gay Animals,” penned by George Mazzei in the Advocate, July 26, 1979. Larry Reams reports that he and his friend, the author,

“were standing in Griffs’, a Los Angeles leather bar, one evening discussing the types of men we were and those to whom we were attracted. We decided we were Bears and continued on to formulate what we thought constitutes a Bear. Once we had described Bears it was an easy step to look around the bar and create the rest of the article.”[5]

Because the type so strongly suggests aspects of both bear attitude and bear image, it is worth quoting in its entirety:

“Bears are usually hunky, chunky types reminiscent of railroad engineers and former football greats. They have larger chests and bellies than average, and notably muscular legs. Some Italian-American Bears, however, are leaner and smaller; it’s attitude that makes a Bear.

General Characteristics: Hair. Their tangled bears often present no discernible place to insert a comb. Laughter. Bears laugh a lot and are generally good natured. They make wonderful companions since they are prone to reach for the check, buy the next round and keep abreast of when the Trocadero is dancing this season. Their good humor can turn threatening if you attempt to cruise their trick and you will hear about if for weeks afterward. [...]”

Jack Fritscher was creating and documenting a similar impulse in San Francisco contemporaneous to this Los Angeles subculture. Those pre-AIDS years in the Castro and South-of-Market subculture are documented in the roman à clef Some Dance to Remember. Recorded in the novel is an account of Fritscher’s short-lived underground magazine called Man2Man, a direct precursor to the first incarnation of BEAR magazine. The “homomasculinity” of Fritscher’s philosophical quest was summed up in the magazine’s subtitle: “What you’re looking for is looking for you!”

First-Wave Bears of the Zeitgeist, 1986-1989

The energy that called itself “bear” appeared as one of the signs of reemerging gay communal life following the arrival of AIDS in the 1980s. After several years in a state of shock, emotional devastation, eating more, perhaps exercising less, continuing to age, and ready for a somewhat slower and more compassionate pace of gay sex and gay social life, “hibernating” clones, leathermen, and many other self-identifying types came back to gay public spheres as “bears.” AIDS led many of us to put on extra padding and to eroticize (or publicly admit to our erotic desire for) male bulk. Feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly, had articulated the mechanisms of patriarchal/capitalist subjugation through the “beauty myth.” The tyranny of the “Castro (or Christopher) Street clone” had been breached.

Since the late 1970s, in counterpoint to the “endless party” spirit of gay life, increasing numbers of gay men were burning out on the alcohol and recreational drugs. Alcoholism has been, and remains, a serious problem in the gay community. The drug experimentation of the “love generation” had turned into a nightmare before AIDS arrived. Now, for the first time, many were experiencing another sense of self, a “sober self,” a discovery of self-respect, which allowed them to bring to a halt these self-destructive behaviors. Across the country sobriety became not only fashionable, but even “politically correct.” Discussion of the uses and misuses of the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous belongs elsewhere. Relevant to bears is the rise of self-esteem among gays--whether through sexual “liberation” or adoption of cultural norms of the moment.

The self-empowerment movements of the 1970s, the nurturance and “safe space” strategies of 1970s feminism, the ever greener alternative impulses of rural gays, Radical Faeries, and nongay-identifing men-loving men (as disseminated, for example, through RFD magazine), and the fundamental strategy of Stonewall politics--coming out--prepared the way. For gay men, who had come out as gay, as sober, as HIV positive, as leathermen, it would seem “natural” to come out--yet again--as a bear. On the one hand, Stonewall-era identity politics shaped the Zeitgeist. On the other hand, for many men-loving men who did not identify with any of the images of gay men in the gay press or with (usually) urban gay men they had encountered on trips to a city, their first encounter with the idea or an embodiment of a “bear” would strike pay dirt. Many have reported immediate identification, sometimes after years or decade of not “fitting in.” Twelve-stepping and two-stepping were new venues for socializing, for being in community without an explicit exhortation to sex. It gave us another chance, a utopian moment, in which to reinvent ourselves and our community.

“Bears” have been emerging as successor to the “clone” and as transmutated variant of “leatherman,” as an integration into gay mainstream social life of “girth-and-mirthers.” In many ways, it was a humanizing response to what clones had been. Martin P. Levine, in his study “The Life and Death of Gay Clones,” focuses on the urban enclave of West Village clones (Manhattan), noting that “AIDS, gay liberation, male gender roles, and the ethics of self-fulfillment, constraint, and commitment”[7] were the sociocultural shapers, creating and destroying this gay male subculture. Bears, during the 1980s, represented a break with the competitive and objectifying tendencies which had alienated so many Stonewall-era gay men. Bears continued the tradition of masculine identification, the social identity politics of gay liberation, and basic Enlightenment values of equality, self-determination, and self-fulfillment. Bears sought to ameliorate between socially isolating cliques and creating safe social spaces, comingling social and sexual spheres, merging rough, unkempt masculine iconography with the emotional nurturing lacking in the clone subculture and the caretaking many gay men felt called to as a direct result of the AIDS epidemic.

The point of titration came in 1987. The “Bear Hugs” parties, the advent of BEAR magazine, and developments in electronic communications were the catalysts that sparked the concept of the self-aware, self-identifying bear across communities. First, computer bulletin boards and then listservres and moderated mailing lists made communications instantaneous and were collectively dubbed “cybearspace.” All three significant events took place or are tracable back to San Fransisco, independent each other but with an unexpectedly synergistic effect all together. All three represented, each in its own way, a “safe space” for bears.

Play Parties A group of friends began organizing private “play parties” in Berkeley and San Francisco in 1987, as safe and warm gatherings--social and sexual for their friends and friends of friends. Private, invitation-only “jack-off circles” became popular during the AIDS sexual freeze, but these were an alternative social and sexual space for gay men who felt “left out”--out because they did not fit, or felt like they did not fit, the gay media images of “beauty”--young, tanned, smooth-skinned, blond LA surfer boy “twinks.” Their “difference” was both physical and perceptual, and was expressed through a social and sexual inclusiveness--men in their thirties, forties, and fifties, ranging from slender to stocky to chubby (though generally on the heavier side), usually with beards and perhaps body hair, and from a range of social classes. The common mold was a warm, nurturing, affectionate attitude toward each other. The intimacy of the early days changed, however, when the gatherings grew to over 100. By 1989, a larger space and a more formalized “guest list” became necessary.

This San Francisco group was the spawning ground for several later developments. Among them were Bear Fax Enterprises, a business privately owned by Ben Bruner and Bill Martin. The International Bear Expo, which ran for three years in San Francisco (1992, 1993, and 1994), the effort of dozens of local bears, was overseen by a steering committee, many of whom later founded the Bears of San Francisco and the International Bear Rendezvous. The “International Mr. Bear” competition and title were introduced at Expo ‘92; John Caldera, the first title holder, eventually acquired ownership of the tile, and the contest has been held annually ever since.

“Bear soup” became a widely adopted idea. In many places it refers specially to hot tub parties, though often with the implication of an orgy or private sexual pairings later in the evening. Sometimes “bear soup” seems to refer merely to a crowded space full of bears. The Bear Hugs group in Great Britain is a strictly social organization.

Similar groups, such as the OzBears of Sydney, Australia, and the Bear Cave parties in Manhattan, had started up for purposes of private socializing, and formed the basis of new groups that developed into bear clubs dedicated to social activities or even community work. As organized bear clubs have arisen and sex clubs started advertising a weekly “bear night,” these play parties have all but disappeared.

BEAR Magazine At about the same time, Bart Thomas began putting together a small, photocopied underground magazine he called BEAR . The magazine was, at first, local to San Francisco. It consisted of jack-off photos and personal ads. The reader could send in appropriate photos of himself or stop by the BEAR office and pose for the magazine. In some ways, BEAR may be seen as the direct successor of Jack Fritscher’s Man2Man underground magazine of nearly a decade before. Before he could actually launch the magazine, Thomas succumbed to complications form AIDS, but not before passing the torch to his friend Richard Bulger.

Bulger’s vision of a lifestyle magazine, articulating this masculinity, with a leftist sexual political slant, and embedded anthropological underpinnings, not to wax abstractly, but to act, to embody the principles through practice and a level of discourse clear to any blue-collar man. In a few years’ time the magazine expanded in size and status, and from word-of-mouth circulation to international commercial distribution, with a full line of videotapes, photo sets, and accessories.

In this 1993 study of BEAR magazine, Joe Policarpio describes the dual aspects of image and attitude stressed by publisher Richard Bulger through his choice of models and editorial content. The general profile of a “bear” includes at least some facial hair and some body hair (”usually the more the better”), a “musky animality,” a blend of traditionally masculine aggressiveness and (feminine) desire to cuddle, muscles by Nautilus or physical labor, and a tendency to be older than the models found in most other gay male porn magazines. “The most important point is these men are presented as fitting an ideological pattern the magazine espouses. This is one of freewheeling, playful and positive attitude toward sexuality between men. He is comfortable in his body and exudes a sense of self-assurance.”[8]

Because of personal ties, BEAR magazine was from the start intimately connected with the South-of-Market bar scene. The original Lone Star Saloon was the first “bear bar,” and followed the tradition of the Ambush and the Balcony, both of which had gone out of business early in the AIDS epidemic. These “sleaze bars” all developed an international reputation. They all offered a free-spirited, anarchic, anything-goes ambience, drawing in blue-collar types who disdained the middle-class pretensions of mainstream gay culture, those who sensibility combined social rough edges with the loyalty ethic of the American lower classes, and misfits, eccentrics, and other “rugged individual” types historically drawn to frontier towns and their saloons.

“Cybearspace” Direct electronic communications over the Internet developed and proliferated during the 1980s and 1990s. Word-of-mouth knowledge of bears spread very rapidly across the Internet. The preponderance of bears on-line or in computer fields is traceable back, in part, to this. One of the most often used private or personal uses of the Internet, regardless of sexual orientation, is for communications of a sexual nature. The lines of communication are numerous and diverse: live chat lines (IRC), BBS (electronic bulletin boards), unmoderated (echoed) an moderated mailing lists, websites, CU See ME (live video transmission), and e-mail. Altogether an individual can transmit or receive text, images (such as gif or jpeg), sound, and video images (nearly) instantaneously. The Internet allows for establishing and maintaining contact anonymously, for uncensored communication, for the exchange of visual images (yourself, your friends, your favorite sexual icon), and for echoed messages (broadcasting to all subscribers of a mailing list of a global mailing to everyone in your e-mail address book). Certain mediums (such as the IRC) can guarantee anonymity (no clues as to personal identity or physical appearance). The question of subverting prejudgment on the basis of appearance becomes moot, however, when we consider the proliferation of visual mediums, such as webpages, archived gif and jpegs, or CU SeeMe, which permit blatant self-advertising based on one’s appearance without revealing one’s name or location.

Early on, circa 1985-1988, there were several bear-dedicated bulletin boards, such as the PC Bear’s Lair (sysop Les Kooyman). The bearcave chat room on the IRC has been a very popular site in cybearspace for live conversation. While the option of remaining anonymous is always available (everyone uses a “handle,” or pseudonym), cyber-communities have evolved over time. This may range from sexual encounters to personal friendships to life partners.

By far the most popular cybearspace is the Bears Mailing List, or BML. Founded by Steve Dyer and Brian Gollum in 1988, it grew from a small, friendly, safe-feeling cybergathering of several dozen bears to a heavily subscribed, largely anonymous, and often fractious, moderated exchange of over 3,000 subscribers. Since 1995 Henry Mensch and Roger Klorese have been moderating the BML and introducing changes to accommodate the dramatic shift in tenor and purpose of the list. Subscribers are drawn from all fifty states and several dozen nations worldwide. English is the lingua franca although everything, including whether to have and who should determine a common language (and how), has been brought up for discussion. Bob Donahue’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek rough guide to “bear codes,” which was accessible from the BML archives, is the source of subspecies terminology within the bear community, such a cub, otter, behr, and the like. Numerous individuals have taken the code in all seriousness and this has become a source of contention, quoted by both sides in disputes over what is a “real” bear. [...]

Although not the only cybear group to do so, the BML has staged several informal, in-person gatherings of its subscribers  During Stonewall 25 in New York City, for example, some sixty to seventy BMLers gathered at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park on the day before the parade. Consensus determined the group should form a spontaneous contingent and march in the parade. And thus on Sunday, Stonewall 25 included a sizable contingent of mostly bearded, bearish-appearing gay men from all across the country and from abroad.

Second Wave: formalizing, 1989-1994

Bear Clubs As the concept of bear circulated between gay communities across the country and “news of recent developments in the gay capital” was drawing more comers to San Francisco, localized efforts to promote and organize bears appeared everywhere. The Bear Paws of Iowa, co-founded by Dave Annis and Larry Toothman in 1989, was the first bear club. By 1992, Bear Expo organizers were aware of four such clubs. Two years later, there were forty. According to the International Directory of Bear Organizations, maintained by The Tidewater Bears (Virginia), as of January 1996, there were 137 bear clubs or explicitly bear-friendly (girth-and-mirth and leather) clubs worldwide.

Bear clubs have generally followed along the lines of their older cousins, the lather motorcycle clubs. In some places this means an informal club that schedules periodic social events. In other places, this has translated into a great deal of fundraising and gay community civic activities. As the club model has gained wider acceptance, it has drawn long-standing problems endemic throughout the gay community into its sphere.

A formal club membership structures creates automatically an insider/outsider division, even if membership is “open to all” (usually defined as “bears and their admires”). Having a club also invites quibbling over definitions of who is a “real” bear. (This is borne out by regional differences, whether emphasis has been placed on body hair, on body weight, or on “attitude,” though a beard or moustache seems to be universally required). Clubs and organizers of events, such as the OctoBearFest (Denver), Orlando Bear Bust, Bear Pride (Chicago), European Big Men’s Conference, or the International Bear Rendezvous (San Francisco) have created bear contests, which engenders the very hierarchical system the earlier bear impulse had been resisting.

Finally, the disjunctive ideals of bears as working-class masculinity and bears as an increasingly distinct subculture within mainstream gay culture bring into sharp relief the larger issues of gay community. If bears began in a spirit of inclusiveness and egalitarian-mindedness, sex positive and relatively “anti-looks-ist,” then what is to be made of the increasingly conformist, consumerist, competitiveness that has take over? As the idea of bears has spread, the opportunities to travel far and wide, to purchase ever more and ever more costly bearphernalia, to update an expand one’s computer sources are generating another, unanticipated dividing line-between bear haves and bear have-nots. to what extent does having money now calculate into the formulas of who is a “real” bear?

Expanded Print Media As BEAR magazine rapidly grew in format, production values, and circulation, reception among gay mainstream media remained very lower. The first published serious essay on bears was a piece I wrote in 1989. It appeared in its entirety in Seattle Gay News, an abbreviated version in the San Francisco Sentinel, and Drummer magazine carried the “Sociology of the Urban Bear” as the first bear cover story in 1990. (It was reprinted in Classic Bear, February 1996.)

What became known as bear types had been featured, in one way or another, in RFD (rural), in Chiron Rising (”mature”), in leather/SM-oriented, and girth-and-mirth publications. Numerous niche-crossover magazines sprang up in the early 1990s--Bulk Male, The Big Ad, Husky, Daddy, Daddybear, GRUF. Bearish models began staring back at the reader from the pages of Advocate Men, Honcho, In Touch, and other gay mainstream glossies. BEAR magazine’s direct competitor American Bear, published by Tim Martin (Louisville, KY) took advantage of a lacuna left by BEAR magazine’s retreat from Bulger’s philosophical lifestyle magazine publishing. With the establishment of the bear icon in the gay community and the world of mainstream-gay print advertising, gay bears had become a local presence everywhere (not just in San Fransisco). And with interests, at least sometimes, beyond immediate sexual gratification, this translated into new niche markets. While American Bear Features a regular column on dissonant (HIV-positive/negative) couples (Bulger adamantly refused to mention AIDS in his magazine), a how-to column on accessing the Internet, and other features, none of the bear magazines have attained Playboy-calibre intellectual content.

In the early 1990s “bear war” broke out when Bulger, then owner-publisher of BEAR, sought to gain sole ownership of the word “bear” as his company’s trademark. Needless to say, this led to a lot of bad feelings and was widely followed and criticized in cybearspace. The Advocate even mentioned it in print. At the time, the Bear Hug group’s informal newsletter the Bear Fax had been expanded into a full-fledged magazine by Bill Martin. The lingering legacy of this “war” was a schism, based on a difference in basic body types typically portrayed in each magazine, between “fat bears” and “skinny bears.” Since this time, personals ads have proven far more profitable, and the bulk of the magazine currently consisted of personals ads, photo spreads, and commercial advertising.[9] The magazine was sold to Bear-Dog Hoffman in 1994 and is currently under Joseph Bean’s editorship. It is not clear which direction the magazine will go. It is clear that BEAR is the voice of authority in matters of bear community and sensibility.

Print media as gone a long way in generating a prototypical bear icon--full-bearded, fairly to very hairy, beefy to chunky GWM baby-boomer, probably of Irish, Jewish, Italian, Scandinavian, or Armenian heritage. In reality, the question of race, presence or absence of body hair, body build, social class, or outlook on life is anything but so neatly compartmentalized. BEAR magazine introduced the serious photographic work of Chris Nelson (as Brahman Studio) and Steve Sutton (who succumbed to complications from AIDS in 1994). Lynn Ludwig has established himself as the documenter of the San Francisco bear community. And, perhaps, the most gifted photographer of bears is Los Angeles-based John Rand, whose work is included in this book.

Bear Contests The bear calendar includes many regional gatherings, as mentioned above, as well as annual bear contests as the local club level. The highlight of such events is often the bear content. As Lurch, a popular bear icon, stand-up comic, TV actor, and psychiatric nurse, has put it, “I prefer to say ‘titleholder.’ ‘Winner’ implies ‘losers,’ and none of us are losers.”[10] Successful bear contest titleholders may be expected to organize or work a number of fund-raisers, go on public speaking engagements and represent their hometown or club on the road. In other places, the local bear club may be one of the few, or even the only social outlet, and merely being a known presence in the local community is the extent of the titleholder’s “duties.”

The emergence of bear contents has tended to straddle the fence between two sides--parodying traditional gay ideals of beauty while striving to establish a new, legitimate bear ideal. The International Mr. Bear contest, a component part of the San Francisco-based International Bear Expo, evolved in its first three year from poking somewhat self-conscious fun at traditional gay values to striving in an increasingly serious manner to project an image of a self-confident bear ideal, a new icon assuming its place among the archetypes of male beauty. From the beginning there has been an emphasis on personal warmth, a compassionate nature, civic-mindedness in the gay community, and spiritual playfulness. Titleholders John Caldera (IMB ‘92) and Steve Heyl (IMB ‘93) worked hard during their “reign,” and have remained genuinely and deeply committed to the bear community. Yet, in the progression of titleholders and the proliferation of bear contests in recent years, here has been an increasing tendency toward consolidating a bear image, and away from qualities intangible or at least invisible to the camera.

#lgbtq history #bears #us history #united states #gay history #les wright #the bear book

[alloftheimagines]

billy hargrove | heaven-sent | part five

masterlist | series | part four

words: 2k+

warnings: st2 spoilers, violence, hints towards domestic abuse, drinking, smoking, swearing, arguing

disclaimer: i in no way support the actions of billy. i just find his character interesting and want to explore it more with my oc. takes place from season 2. OC is hopper’s daughter. first part taken from the ‘will the wise’ ep.

summary:  she’s an angel. he may as well be the devil. one would not exist without the other.

Frances hears her father's shouts before the cabin is even in view. Without thinking twice, she sets off in a run, twigs snapping beneath her feet as she dodges the trip wire. She clutches her camera firmly in her hands to prevent it slapping against her stomach, wind rushing past her as she speeds up.

"You're like Papa!" she hears El scream as she gets closer, and dread causes her heart to drop. She knows her father, knows he won't take well to a comment like that. She can't hear her father's reply, only El shouting a few moments later, "I hate you!"

"... I'm not too crazy about you, either!" Hopper responds.

"Shit," Frances mutters, slowing down to catch her breath. She closes her eyes and inhales, blocking the screams out for a moment before she finally enters the cabin. Neither Hopper nor El notice her despite the creak of the wooden door, too busy screaming at one another.

"Brat," Hopper says, throwing a book at El. El raises a hand to stop it, suspending it in mid-air as blood trickles from her nose. She tosses it back at him forcefully, hitting him in the stomach.

"Hey!" he exclaims in bewilderment, his eyes wide as he looks at El.

"Stop it!" Frances interrupts, finally gaining their attention as she stands between the two of them, her hands held up in caution. "What the hell is going on?"

El ignores her, marching off. Hopper trails behind her, passing Frances without acknowledgement. "Don't you dare walk away from me, kid."

The couch is shoved into his shin by an invisible force and he trips. "Hey!"

The last Frances sees of El before she slams her door shut without touching it is her eyes blazing with anger. "El!" Frances pleads, but it's too late.

"Open the damn door!" Hopper yells, banging on the wood forcefully. "You wanna go out in the world? You better grow up. Grow the hell up!"

A scream erupts from the bedroom, and without warning, the window panes shatter in their frames, shards of glass flying into the cabin. Frances is unable to duck in time and a small piece of glass scratches her cheek. She barely feels the sting, though she can feel the dampness as blood begins to ooze from the wound, and presses her hand to her face in shock. Hopper curses, kicking the wall with his heavy boot before running his hands over his face.

"What the hell happened?" Frances questions when she is able to form a coherent sentence.

"The damn kid went to see Mike today," Hopper sighed, his eyes softening when he sees that Frances is hurt. "Jesus Christ, are you alright?" He's on her in a second, pulling her hands away from the cut so that he can inspect it.

"I'm fine. It's just a scratch." She struggles out of his grip, glass crunching beneath her shoes as she heads to the kitchen and grabs a towel to stop the bleeding. "Look, I know you're just looking out for her, but you need to go easy on her. She's just a kid, and she can't see her friends. Imagine how that must feel."

"Did you miss the part where she blew out the fuckin' windows?" He pointed to the now empty frames dramatically. "What if that glass had hit your eye?"

"It didn't," Frances sighs. "I'll talk to her, okay?"

"No," he shakes his head, rubbing his stubbly chin in frustration. "Let her cool down first. She's ... dangerous."

"She's not dangerous," Frances replies. "She's afraid and alone. She doesn't understand that you're keeping her safe. Just let me try."

Hopper motions to the door dismissively. "Fine, you think you can handle her, Mary Poppins? Be my guest."

Frances treads back to El's door, knocking gently. "El, it's just me," she calls when the door doesn't budge. "I understand why you're mad and afraid. Why don't we talk about it?"

"Go away," El demands after a moment, her voice muffled.

"El, please—"

"Go. Away!"

There's enough power in El's voice for Frances to know that she isn't helping matters and if she pushes her anymore, the cabin might come down in a heap of ash and rubble. She turns to her father, disappointment in her eyes. He shrugs, planting himself on the couch despite the fact that it's no longer in its usual spot. "I told you. She's impossible."

"Cut her some slack. She's been through a lot."

"Yeah, well, haven't we all?" he huffs, sadness flickering over his features. By the time he looks up again, it's gone. "Listen, I'll handle this. You're better off staying in the trailer tonight."

"You sure? I don't mind staying."

"No. You don't need to deal with this. Go home."

Frances nods, placing a hand on her father's shoulder as he puts his head in his hands. "You're doing your best. I know this isn't easy."

He places his hand over hers, rubbing her hand with the pad of his thumb. "Thanks, kid."

She flashes one last, solemn look at the door before making a move to go. Her father's voice stops her. "Hey, Fran. You okay? You look a little pale." He's turned around in his chair, his blue eyes flooding with concern. His cheeks are flushed with the remnants of his rage.

"Yeah," she lies. "Just tired, I guess."

"Look, I know I haven't been all that available recently and we haven't spent much time together. That doesn't mean you can't talk to me. I'm still your old man. I still care about you more than anything else. You know that, don't you?"

"I know that, Dad." She hesitates, worrying at her lip as he waits expectantly. "Jonathan and I broke up."

"Sweetie—"

"No, it's okay. It was a long time coming," she says quickly. "You sure you don't want me to try again with El?"

He looks at Fran and then at El's closed door.

"No. Better give her some space tonight. Go home, kid. Get some rest. Enjoy the peace."

* * *

Frances doesn't head home right away, instead following the overgrown trail to the ravine. She takes a few pictures as she goes, finding solace in the click of her camera, the repetitive action of winding back the film. Shadows loiter in her peripheral vision as the sun begins to set, and she tries to ignore them, ignore the feeling of something encroaching in on her. She's relieved when she gets to the open road, but only for a moment. For the second time this week, she has company. Billy leans against the hood of his car, his back turned towards her as he watches the sun go down. She can just make out the orange glow of a cigarette in his mouth.

Instinctively, her hands find her camera and she captures the view, the soft silhouette of the golden-tinged boy in front of the bleeding, pink sky. The sound of her shutter clicking alerts him of her presence, and she smiles guiltily at being caught. "You mind?"

He shrugs, smirking, though it doesn't quite meet his eyes. "I always knew I was your muse."

She shakes her head at his arrogance, deciding to play along as she crosses the road and meets him by his car. "Well, it's only right since you got it back for me."

He doesn't react, taking a drag of his cigarette. His eyes are focused on the view in front of him. Frances frowns as she realises that they're gleaming with moisture and red-rimmed as though he's been crying. His long, thick eyelashes are moist, too, against the fading sunlight, his lips pink and raw as though he's been chewing them. Atop his cheekbone sits a purple bruise that she knows wasn't there earlier.

"Are you alright?" she questions carefully. His shirt is buttoned up wrong, the cuffs of his denim jacket unrolled and covering half of his hands. His knuckles aren't bruised – if he was hit, it was one-sided.

"Peachy," he responds, smoke rolling from his mouth. He offers her a cigarette, looking at her for the first time and faltering. She's forgotten the cut on her own cheek, but she feels the sting of it now as if for the first time. "Are you?"

"Peachy," she repeats, a soft smile on her lips. "No, thanks," she says to the cigarette.

Billy shuffles down slightly so that there's room for Frances on the hood. She leans onto it, glad to take the weight off her feet, her eyes watering against the cold breeze.

"You come up here a lot?" he asks, words muffled by the cigarette. Up close, she can smell a slight hint of alcohol on his breath and realises that there's a bottle of whisky planted on the other side of him. He's not drunk, though, not yet.

"Best place to watch the sunset," she shrugs. "I used to think of this place as my little secret. Guess I'm gonna have to find somewhere else now."

"My company that bad?" His voice is hoarse, as though he's been shouting. Frances can't help but look at him again with concern, and he can't help but refuse to return her gaze.

"Billy, what happened?" she whispers delicately.

"Nothin' you need to concern yourself with, angel. Why? You worried?"

"Wouldn't go that far."

"Please," he grins, "it's cute."

"Shut up," she scoffs, pulling her jacket closer to her torso as the wind picks up again. The valley below is dotted with amber and gold leaves that gleam against the sunset. The dead leaves blow around them, rustling. She takes a deep breath in, her soul soothed for the first time in days. She thinks that perhaps he feels it, too, because for a while neither of them say a word, and neither of them need to. The silence is like a blanket, comforting and warm, safe.

Of course, Billy is the one to break it as he stubs out his cigarette with his boot and shoves his hands into his pockets. "So, you talk to your boyfriend yet?"

"Nope," she sighs. "He's too busy with Nancy."

"Dick," he curses, shaking his head. His tangled, blonde curls ruffle as he does.

"Yeah."

"How long were the two a' you together?"

She exhales, ignoring the lump in her throat. "Two years. Before that we were best friends."

His eyebrows arch in surprise. "Jesus."

"It's not just his fault. I can't pretend like he's a terrible person for doing this to me," she says, and this time she's the one who is unable to meet Billy's eyes. "I've been distant. I basically pushed him right into her. If you don't give a guy what he wants, he's gonna find it somewhere else, right?"

"Doesn't matter what you did, Fran." It's the first time he's called her that, and she likes the way her shortened name rolls on his tongue like honey. "Doesn't give him an excuse to chase after another girl and leave you drunk at a party."

"I wasn't that drunk."

He chuckles. "You weren't sober, either."

Her cheeks flush with colour, and she smiles. "Better he didn't see me like that, anyways. He always hated the way I was when I got drunk."

"Like I said," he rolls his eyes, "Dick." Billy takes a swig straight out of the whiskey bottle before offering it to Frances. "I for one don't give a shit. You wanna go for round two?"

"No, thanks." The sun seems to disappear behind the horizon all at once, and she shivers in the grey twilight. "And neither should you if you're driving. I gotta go."

"I can drive you," he offers, twisting the lid back on the bottle and pulling his car keys from his pockets. "That is, if you're not gonna bite my head off for offering."

"You don't have to—"

"I want to. Feel like a drive, anyway."

Frances sighs, hesitant. He's already holding the door open for her, a small, hopeful smile on his lips. She can still make out the sadness lying just beneath his expression, though, muted and dull, but there.

"Alright," she agrees finally, sliding into the passenger's seat. The leather is cold against her legs. "But only 'cos I'm freezing out here."

"Yeah, yeah," he retorts. "Keep tellin' yourself that, angel."  

part six

#billy hargrove #billy hargrove imagine #billy hargrove fanfiction #billy hargrove oneshot #billy hargrove x oc #billy hargrove angst #billy hargove x reader #billy x oc #billy hargrove fanfic #stranger things #stranger things fic #stranger things oneshot #stranger things imagines #stranger things fanfiction #billy hargrove/oc #billy hargrove fluff #fluff #angst #fanfiction #st fanfiction #fic #dacre montgomery #dacre montgomery fic #dacre montgomery imagines

[screamingatanemptyroom]

I Can’t Eat Love pt 12

Hey everyone! The story continues! Thanks to everyone who sends me messages and comments! Sorry if I’m spamming your feeds, but I try to answer all the old questions before posting the next part, so I don’t get too far behind. 

I’m really having fun, and I hope you guys are too!

Master post linked here

Quick content warning for this next part. Lenora’s mother is emotionally and physically abusive. The physical part is not described or detailed. 

______________________________

I thought I had mentally prepared for my mother’s  arrival. It had been almost two years since I had last seen her face in my past life. I couldn’t help but wonder if she would be any different in this one. So many things had already changed here and there, perhaps she had as well. 

Sitting at my desk, pretending to work but unable to even read one page, I stopped to laugh at myself. At these types of pathetic hopes. I knew better than anyone that she wouldn’t change.

I heard the sounds of a carriage outside, dropping the unread book in my hand with a loud thud. My heart rate increased, pounding in my chest as I stood up, moving towards the entrance.

I could already hear her screaming.

 “HOW DARE YOU DROP MY BAG YOU STUPID COW!”  Mother stood there, her face red with rage, screaming at one the young women who worked as a maid at our home. She was a newer higher, I had only seen her a few times around the main hall, but I felt a pang of sympathy as she shied away from my mother’s anger, mumbling apologies as she clutched the bag in question.

“I’LL TEACH YOU TO DISRESPECT ME!” the terrified words and tears of the maid fell on deaf ears, as my mother raised her hand, preparing to strike the girl. Even in her anger, a slight grin tugged on the corner of her mouth. She thrived off of moments like this, making others afraid.  

______________________________

“What happened?!” As she got in the carriage after the disastrous party, mother glared at my father and me, confused.

 “Prince Ronan… he… he broke of the engagement.” I could barely force the words out through my tears. My father sat at my side, trying to hand me a handkerchief to dry my eyes, looking overwhelmed.

“…” The carriage was deathly silent.  My mother looked at me with a tired, disdainful gaze.

“So you’ve finally done it?” Her gaze was sharp, feeling as though it was flaying me open. “I’ve told you over and over to ensure he fell in love with you, and in the end you couldn’t even keep him interested enough to tie the knot?!”

“Dear, maybe this isn’t the time or place…?” My father interrupted with a sympathetic glance towards me, but was ignored.

 “Did he leave you for another woman?” Her question was cold, sucking all the warmth out of the carriage. I shivered, trying to hold back further tears and nodded silently.

“THEN WHY DID I WASTE ALL MY TIME ON SUCH A WORTHLESS GIRL?!!” Her hand raised up in the air. I closed my eyes as it came down towards me, wishing I was someone else.

______________________________

 The lawn was silent. Mother’s hand was stopped, paused mid-swing as I reached out and grabbed it. The contact stung my palm, but I smiled gently, refusing to show any pain in front of her.  Behind me, the maid still crouched, staring up at us both with wide eyes, only releasing the bag she still held as a grim-faced Hallers reached out and took it from her.

“Welcome back, Mother. Why don’t we have some tea inside?” 

My first words to my mother since I woke up in my second life. It felt oddly surreal. Our eyes met, and despite my complex feelings she didn’t appear to realize anything was amiss. Shrugging, she dropped her hand and stepped away from the maid, a bored expression back in place.

 “No, no tea just yet.” She was looking at the family home with disgust. “I must have a bath first, I’m positively filthy from the road dust.” Without a further glance at anyone, she strolled inside, heading upstairs. Shooting a quick glance to me to confirm I had no disagreement, Hallers went into action, giving out instructions to the servants to arrange the bath and unpacking.  

With a small sigh of relief, I turned to return inside, only to pause as I felt a small tug on my sleeve.

Surprised, I looked back to see the maid I had rescued from being struck.

“Thank you, Miss!” Her eyes were filled with gratitude, making me unsure as to how to answer. I wasn’t someone who should be thanked. I was the one who brought that woman back in the first place.

I forced a smile, “Don’t worry about it. She thinks everyone is useless…” I paused, briefly looking back at the home which now contained my mother. “Especially me.”

“That’s impossible!” She stuttered slightly on her reply, obviously nervous at the conversation, “No one could think YOU are useless, after everything you’ve done! Everyone looks up to you, Miss!”

“I wouldn’t say that…” I met Hallers gaze, expecting him to chastise the girl for not returning to work but found him nodding in agreement instead. I wondered briefly if complimenting me was the way to get on his good side, and then brushed the idea aside as ridiculous. Hallers was an eternal professional. He would never give leeway in the rules for such a silly reason!

Focusing back on the young maid, I asked. “What’s your name?”

“Lia, Miss.” She curtseyed as she spoke, a well-practiced gesture. Despite her youth and inexperience, she had obviously been working hard. I made a mental note to commend her to Hallers later, along with a warning to keep her away from my mother.

It was the least I could do.

“Well Lia, I’m happy you’re fine.” I turned away and walked back inside, thinking of the confrontation that was awaiting me shortly. 

“One of us should be.”

______________________________ 

My mother took her time with the bath, only coming down after several hours had passed. I had given up waiting and was going through some of the weekly expense reports in the office, feeling tense. Every nerve was on edge. If anything, it seemed  as though Mother’s long absence from the family had worsened her self-indulgent and abusive personality. My hopes of being able to reason with her were disappearing fast. 

This was not going to go well.

A quiet knock on the door sounded, and Hallers, his face once again expressionless, let my mother in. I stood up to greet her, smiling despite my sudden nervousness, and looked over at the butler, feeling a pain in my chest at the concern in his eyes.

“We’ll need a few minutes alone. I’ll ring for tea once we’re done.”

He looked back at my mother for a moment, worry slipping through his otherwise perfect mask. “Are you sure?” He whispered. It must have cost him a lot to ask this, and  for the briefest of moments I wished more than anything I could say yes. That I could hide behind him and beg him to stay. To protect me from what I had to do next.

 But that wouldn’t help me in the end. I had to change my fate, and to do that… I needed my mother on board.

“I’m sure.” And I was. Despite how much I wanted to avoid this, I knew with absolute certainty that I didn’t want him to witness what I was about to do. “I… have to do this. “ 

His face resumed its mask, but his eyes stayed on mine.  “Good luck, Miss.”

The door closed behind him, and I was alone with my mother.

______________________________

She was beautiful, it was impossible to deny it. Coppery hair, held up in an intricate design, large dark eyes framed by full lashes, her features were delicate, hardly touched by time. She moved with a grace of a much younger woman, each motion stunning to watch.

She sat down in one of the chairs, looking me over with a critical eye. “How are things going with the Prince?” The first question she always asked when she saw me.

How many times had I dreamed of giving her a positive answer, of finally making her proud of me?

But it was never meant to be, in this life or the last.

“We barely see each other.”  

In response, She glared at me, annoyed by my answer. “PERHAPS if you put more attention to your appearance?” She glanced at my dress again. “No man would want to court a plain girl who dresses like a servant!”

I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at that. I did wear simpler designs at home, no longer comfortable in the complex lace ridden monstrosities that Angela constantly wanted me to wear, but it was still well made, elegant clothing. This design was one of our best sellers at Prosperity, in fact. 

“No, this just won’t do.” She shook her head, smiling condescendingly at me. “I’ve heard of this new shop, “Prosperity.” Apparently it’s all the rage among the nobility. I’ll take you there before your birthday and we’ll try to make you look presentable.”

I kept my face straight, sitting down behind my desk. “That’s alright, I own quite a few dresses from there already.”

How I managed to say that without laughing, I was unsure. Fortunately, Mother didn’t notice, it was unclear if she had even heard my response at all. She was already making her own plans.

“Of course, I’ll go shopping tomorrow, I need an entirely new wardrobe. I’ve had this for an entire season, and I hate to have them think I’m out of fashion. Then once we’re done at the dress shop we’ll move on to accessories…” She continued speaking, but I had already stopped listening, internally wincing as I mentally added up the amount of money she was already planning on spending within her first day of arriving.

I couldn’t let this happen.

“Mother,” I interrupted her, ignoring her annoyed stare, “As far as shopping goes, we’ll have to be careful. We still have debt to pay, and we can’t afford…”

“Of course we can afford it!” She waved a hand, dismissing my concerns. “Your father is a lord! We run the duchy!”

I shook my head. “The money from the duchy is all going back into the land for now, to help it get back on its feet. Right now we are solely getting money from my business…”

“WHAT?” She jumped to her feet, her face pale. “Are you working for money, you stupid girl? Who do you think you are, a merchant’s daughter?!” She laughed, an angry, bitter sound. “If anyone caught wind of this, if the palace heard of this… you’d be finished socially.”

“We’d be finished anyways, given the amount of debt we had.”

“None of that will matter when you are Queen!” Her voice was raising, her face turning red. “No one will dare collect from us then!”

“We can’t count on that.” My voice turned pleading. “Please be reasonable, we must live within our means…”

“WE COULD COUNT ON IT IF YOU WERE DOING YOUR JOB PROPERLY!” Leaning over my desk, her face was close to my own, I could see my face reflected in her furious gaze. “If you were prettier, smarter… better… He would love you and never look away. Don’t you DARE ruin my life because you are too boring to keep your own fiancé from straying!”

Mother sat down, catching her breath as she finished her tirade. I watched her with a tired gaze, wishing I was anywhere else. That I was anyone else.

My hand trembled as it inched towards the drawer in my desk.

“Please, Mother. For once in your life consider your family before yourself. I’m only asking for a little restraint, nothing life-changing. Can’t we just…” My voice broke. “Be a family? Work together?”

She laughed, her eyes mocking me as she answered with a smile. “You do not tell me what to do. You should never have had any involvement with the Duchy’s finances or a business in the first place. We’ll put a stop to it immediately. Your father will take over, as is proper, and you will focus all your attention on catching and keeping the prince’s attention. As for me?” She chuckled. “I am going shopping tomorrow.”

I felt a chill, as my heart froze within my chest. My gaze turned cold and my hand no longer trembled as I unlocked the drawer, slowly removing the folder from underneath the false bottom. 

The file I had Rig prepare as his second assignment. The one I hoped would never have to be used.

Thud.

I tossed the papers on the desk in front of her. I was smiling, but the expression didn’t meet my eyes, which grew colder as she reached for the papers, confused 

“What is this?”

“See for yourself.” Every word lacked emotion. I couldn’t allow myself any chance to feel pity for her, to feel regret over what had to be done.

She opened the file, reading each page, the blood quickly draining from her face. Tossing the papers to the floor, she glared at me, spitting with rage. 

“LIES!” 

I sighed. “No, Mother. That’s the truth.” I pointed at the folder. “You are having an affair with the Earl of Beral. You have been visiting him at his private house regularly during the time you pretended you were staying with family. The affair has been going on for two years now, although he is by no means the first.” I explained the contents of the papers with a dispassionate tone, as if describing the weather. “Every detail of your affairs is written down in that file. Every. Sordid. Detail. ” 

Her eyes widened. “No matter what some piece of paper says, that doesn’t make it true.”

“But it is true, Mother.”

And it was.

______________________________

“Mother!” I slammed the door to the small room we were renting, furious. “Did you steal from the dress shop I work for?!”

She sat at the table, her usually well-styled hair disheveled. I noticed she was wearing a beautiful new gown, now stained with dirt. In one hand clutched a piece of paper, the other covered her eyes as she sobbed. 

“That bastard!” She pounded the table with the fist holding the paper, crumpling it further. “THAT DIRTY, LYING BASTARD!”

I was confused, but still pushed forward, determined to hear the answer. “Mother… did you steal from the shop I work for? They fired me today, thinking that we were working together! That was the only source of income we had! What are we going to do?!”

She dropped the hand covering her eyes, glaring at me. “None of that matters, you stupid girl! I needed the money so I took it!” She sniffed disdainfully. “I’m the wife of their Duke, they owe it to me!”

I winced. We hadn’t seen father in weeks. Severely depressed after we had lost our home, he had taken to gambling in gentleman’s halls. I hid what money I could, but he somehow always found some to take with him, only to come back with nothing, smelling of alcohol and regret. I had heard rumors that he owed the wrong kind of people money now, and with him not returning day after day, I assumed the worst.

“We’re not owed anything now, Mother.” I sat down at the table as well, feeling defeated. “What’s wrong?”

“I took the time to get dressed up, and go see him! He should be GRATEFUL! How dare he turn me away, as if he’s somehow BETTER than me!” She was barely coherent in her rants, throwing the piece of paper on the table.

I looked at the letter, and felt pain at the words. “You were having an affair with the Earl of Beral?”

 “Six years we’ve known each other! But now that he has a young whore for a wife he suddenly doesn’t need me anymore!” She pounded the table again with her fist. “I thought he simply wasn’t getting my letters, that’s why he hasn’t come to get me… but this…”

I wanted to cry, but held back my tears, trying to reach out to comfort her. “Mother…”

She slapped my hand away. “STAY away from me!” She spat, standing up and pointing at me. “This is all YOUR fault! All you had to do was marry the Queen’s brat and we would have been happy!”

“Mo...”

“You killed your father, you know?” She grinned viciously “He died in a ditch, alone, without a single crown to his name and it’s all YOUR fault!”

“…” I couldn’t speak, it hurt too much to breathe.

“Well I’m not staying here a moment longer.” Mother walked to the door, pausing and looking back at me. “I’m going to find the earl, and I’m going to remind him of who I am. And all the dirt I have on him.” She laughed. “Goodbye.”

The door slammed behind her, leaving me alone, staring at the door.

______________________________

“Even if  you have this… paper.” Mother pointed at the file on the floor. “It doesn’t prove anything.”

I shrugged. “I don’t have to prove anything, Mother. All I have to do is release this information to the nobility.” 

Her mouth gaped open for a few stunned moments. “You wouldn’t!”

“I would. You would be cast out from all proper society. A social pariah.”

“But… You would ruin your own reputation at the same time!”

“It may be slightly detrimental, yes.” I spread my hands helplessly. “But after father divorces you and we’re separated legally, many will remember how little you and I see each other. They think of the Queen as raising me more than you already. In the end, I’ll survive the scandal.” I stood, keeping her gaze. “But you won’t.”

In the silence that followed I gathered the papers on the floor, stacking them neatly on the desk and sitting back down.

 “You will be given a monthly allowance. Use the money how you will. Be here for birthdays and anniversaries, otherwise I don’t care where you are or how you spend your life. I think both Father and I would be happier if you spent as little time as possible here.”

I handed her some money, which she held limply in her hand. She stared up with me, her eyes filled with a hopeless rage.

 “I will make you pay for this, you ungrateful brat! You’ll regret crossing me!”

Tapping the folder in front of me, I smiled. “Try me.”

“You’re a monster!” She whispered the words, staring down at the papers that held her dark secrets.

“Naturally.” I stood up leaning closer, whispering the last words in her ear. “One gave birth to me.”

She left silently, and I sat back in my chair in silence.

______________________________

It was done.

I should feel relieved, or angry or sad… but instead, I felt empty.

I had wished for a different ending in this life.

______________________________

I stood on the street, staring at the woman’s body on the street. Rig put a hand on my arm, worried. “I didn’t want you to see this, but Hale said she looked like you…”

“It’s my mother.” I whispered, taking in the all too familiar features, now still and silent. “How…?”

“Made to look like a robbery, but there’s some whispers that an Earl might have paid someone to keep her quiet.” He studied my face for a few moments. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No.” I turned away, shaking my head slowly. “You can’t help the dead.”

______________________________

She was still alive in this life, and even if she never loved me… I still hoped she had a different end in this one.

I stared down at the folder on my desk, replacing it in its hidden compartment. It felt unnaturally heavy in my hands.

This was what I was now.

“A monster.” I whispered, feeling the room starting the fade around me. I was having trouble catching my breath. I reaching out a hand for the bell to call Hallers, but it seemed to move further away.

“Miss?” I heard the door open, but the sound was wrong, as if I were underwater. “I saw her Ladyship exit, are you…”

“A monster.” As I fell through the darkness I felt someone grab me.

“LENORA!”

______________________________

Unsure of how much time had passed, I started to fight my way to consciousness, but paused as I heard familiar voices.

“Thank you for checking on her. The doctor says she’ll be fine, she just needs rest.”

Hallers? Who is he talking to?  I wanted to sit up but  every muscle in my body felt weak as if I had run for miles without rest.

“She works too hard!” A woman spoke out, upset. Maline? “She needs to learn to take it easy, she’s not even sixteen yet and everyone depends on her.”

“She’s tough.” Another voice answered, the accent reminded me of Rig. “She’ll take on the world and win.”

 “I know she’s tough, but I worry!”

“I worry too.”

The voice that sounded like Hallers sighed. “All we can do is support her. But if anyone hurts her…”

Rig’s voice laughed. “Oh they won’t live to regret it, will they?”

I wanted to speak out, ask them who they were talking to, but even as I prepared to open my eyes, a wave of exhaustion hit me, and I returned to the peace of unconsciousness.

#writing #i can't eat love #part 12 #tw abuse #abusive parent #fantasy #second life #second chance

[dansnaturepictures]

My 10 wildlife and photography highlights of 2020 blogs: Blog 2: Experiences with my favourite birds this year: Part 2 of 2-Close to home (Favourite birds seen at Lakeside and home and mentions of young birds, springtime species and relatively rarer birds I saw at local Lakeside)

One lunch time daily exercise walk whilst working from home in strict lockdown that stood out was when I saw three smashing Great Crested Grebes up close at my heartland as such for them Lakeside. It was actually on the day our dog Ruby passed away in mid-April. But seeing these birds proved a perfect point of escapism and cheered me up a lot that day. They were nesting by this point which is always interesting to see and I was able to get quite close to them and see their nests. Being up close I remarked how rarely you do see these birds up close and I loved focusing on their distinctive and very well coloured markings. It was amazing seeing not one but two nests I remember when I first saw them here there was only really one pair but they are doing so well at this very local location for us which I was so happy with. I took the first picture in this photoset of one that day. All of this really made me nostalgic of the early days I saw them here and what a big moment that was with us identifying them for my birdwatching early on. It was a great feeling which made me feel why I love these birds too. That day also I took some of many pictures of Lesser Black Backed Gulls at Lakeside a pair of striking and well coloured birds I enjoyed getting very close to at Lakeside at various points in 2020. The next Tuesday the lakes of Lakeside were teeming with Great Crested Grebes during a daily exercise walk I saw so many with some on each lake and got so close to a few of them again. I was so happy to see this again. This was on a generally brilliant walk that day where I also got a surprise first sighting of a Common Tern this year for me, one of a band of species I don’t normally see over Lakeside for the first time in years especially which I did this year which taught me to value my local patch a lot as when I’m constantly there I can see special things which was a big theme of the lockdown and working from home days as I mention so much in these posts.

Little Egret flying over the house in April stood out during this time and again a few times in May. On the Thursday that followed the Common Tern walk I had another daily exercise walk at Lakeside where I saw more Great Crested Grebes and had a lovely intimate moment on a sunny and hot day as a Little Egret perhaps the same as the one that I saw over the house flew right over my head which looked great against a bright blue sky and I enjoyed so much. I took the second picture in this photoset of this bird. This was another precious moment with a common member of my group of favourite birds that kept my spirits up during the lockdown. That day also I enjoyed seeing and photographing my first goslings of the spring a group of Greylag Geese and a territorial Mute Swan noisily chasing Canada and Greylag geese around which was exciting to watch. The following Friday I saw Great Crested Grebes well again here as well as an even closer view of a territorial Mute Swan chasing Greylag Geese which really stood out and I saw and photographed Canada Geese goslings there that day too here which was great. Carrying on with a more general note of a big highlight of my year that was observing nesting and territorial in breeding season birds over Lakeside and indeed at home with the young of many birds coming into the garden a lot throughout the spring during the lockdown, the circus of breeding season observations continued as I saw and photographed a Moorhen bringing material to its partner and chick on their nest to reinforce the structure. That day I did see a Great Crested Grebe closely yet again at Lakeside and from my room alongside a raptor hat trick of Buzzard, Red Kite and Sparrowhawk I got the big moment of seeing my first Swifts of 2020 out my window. This continued over Lakeside the next day on a lunch exercise walk as I saw Coot chicks and Mallard ducklings very close, the Greylag goslings again I went on to see them many times on walks as they got bigger, heard a Swift and saw Great Crested Grebes once more. This set the tone for a few nice days and into the following week in great weather seeing and hearing Swifts over Lakeside. A bird that kept my hope up of getting year ticks as we went into the first lockdown and travel was restricted and a bird you can see all over that I really enjoyed seeing at home and keeping me connected to nature this year. I would go onto see and photograph the Coot and Moorhen chicks on nests, the former swimming and the ducklings and both types of goslings multiple times on the walks.

On a sunny and boiling Lakeside lunch time exercise walk on 26th May I was thrilled to see Great Crested Grebes on each lake again. On one lake behind them I saw something I’d wanted to for many a lunch time here this year when a Kingfisher darted past. I then looked in the binoculars and saw two on a branch with one feeding the other so probably one was young. I took the third picture in this photoset of one. This was a sensational moment for me it really made me happy as I hadn’t seen a Kingfisher for months by that point not since what I talked about in my last highlights post for them I don’t think. That day I also saw the regular Greylag and Canada Geese families both with their goslings looking really big by that point. A fantastic spring walk. On a similarly hot and sunny lunch time walk that following Thursday with me knowing where they liked to sit now I saw a Kingfisher again on the same lake in the same area with my bridge camera with me that day to zoom in a bit more with pictures I took so I was thrilled to see one again. That day it was a hat trick with Great Crested Grebes seen on and a Buzzard soaring beautifully over against a blue sky a busy main lake beach lake with a few other of my key species of the lockdown era around that day too around that lake and generally on the walk. I heard a Green Woodpecker that walk too. I had a brilliant favourite bird moment at Lakeside on 3rd June when after hearing them on a few of the walks beforehand I got cracking views of a Green Woodpecker flying right beside me on a grey and pretty wet day. I gasped a bit when I first saw it as I had not actually seen one for a little while and it was so nice seeing its features and why I love it so close to me. A great example of how nature allowed me to still have so much love and excitement for the world around me whilst working from home. The next day it was nice to see a Great Crested Grebe pair building a nest, a new family of Mallard ducklings on the pond in the nature reserve, the Greylag Geese goslings not looking much like goslings at all looking very much older with adult feathers etc. and the Canada Geese goslings big too. I would soon see the Canada Geese goslings on a walk there on 19th June looking very grown up as well. Nice moments in that journey I loved having this spring with these young birds here, I also heard a Great Spotted Woodpecker making an alarm call in the woods that day, a working day I took an especially large amount of photos which was great. On 29th June I was happy to see Great Crested Grebes doing a bit of fishing at Lakeside, a day I saw alongside the grebes the only common aquatic bird I had yet to see offspring from on my journey following nesting at Lakeside at that stage a Mute Swan with an adorable little cygnet. That Thursday I saw a couple of Great Crested Grebes on nests here again which I liked throughout the summer I got great views of the Great Crested Grebes on nests, and a Kingfisher darted out right in front of me over a lake when I was having one of my best birding moments of the year another working from home Lakeside lunch time gem and a find on my patch I felt when I saw four Common Sandpipers on and by the lake my first of the year. A bird we had struggled to see until that point due to the travel restrictions a little so this was a relief and a delight and one of my best wildlife moments whilst working from home headlining that key club of birds that may be common elsewhere but are quite a turn up for books at my very local urban country park Lakeside.

On 13th July I spotted a young looking Great Crested Grebe at Lakeside it looked big so I was unsure if it was one of this year’s chicks but amazing for me to see if it was. That summer’s day it was also memorable to see Swifts gliding in the sky and the Mute Swan pair with a big fish they were trying to eat which I took a photo of. That following Wednesday I got a great view of a Buzzard at Lakeside flying over. On 29th July it was nice to see a Green Woodpecker briefly at Lakeside at lunch time, a strong day for birds by summer so normally quieter season standards as I saw Stock Doves at Lakeside, House Martin there and really well on the way and a Sparrowhawk flying from my bedroom window whilst working that morning. On 29th August a Saturday evening I was thrilled when a Sparrowhawk came into our garden and I saw and photographed it as it flew off on a neighbouring fence I was so happy to see it one of my best garden bird and wildlife moments this year.

Going back to July the next day I got the moment I had been waiting for with the principal party of my platoon of favourite birds I could see and loved doing so whilst working from home when I finally saw a Great Crested Grebe pair the main one I had witnessed nest building on Concorde lake in the south west of the site with two adorable little chicks on the back of one on the lake. The last of the common water birds I was to see chicks of here this year it really was a journey like no other in 2020 witnessing the bird breeding season here which was an amazing opportunity for me. This was a fantastic moment and I enjoyed a great bit of time that lunch time watching them in the binoculars, photographing them and in aw of them with their little famous humbug stripes for markings. Here I witnessed the fascinating behaviour to see one of the adult birds rolling over, plucking white feathers from its belly and feeding them to the chicks. They do this to help with pellets and early digestion in their life cycle whilst they learn to fish. I also heard the chicks calling which was lovely and as I was transfixed on them one went under water and came back up before getting back onto the parent’s back. What a natural moment on a hot summer’s day that uplifted me to no end I took so many photos that day too landscape and wildlife. The next day I got brilliant views of the Great Crested Grebes and chicks again on the same lake, here photos and binocular views revealed there were three of the chicks and not two as I thought before. It was brilliant to see them on one parent’s back with another parent fishing and hunting on the lake. It bought back a dragon or damselfly to feed to a chick and it was wonderful to see a little chick have a swim that day too. It was great to photograph them with my bridge camera that day which I would have done with the Peregrine chicks another of my favourite birds in Winchester if I wasn’t working at home. Great Crested Grebe very much filled the hole with others of seeing them every lunch time as the main favourite birds I saw whilst working from home and watching chicks absolutely added to that more. I enjoyed brilliant views of them that hot day a real day of young birds and intimate moments with Moorhen chick and a young Robin seen well at Lakeside too the Robin walked through my legs which was nice. That next week the Great Crested Grebe chicks some celebrity birds with lots of people coming to see them became something it was an honour to see again and again on lunch time walks, becoming a bit like the Peregrines I would usually see often with chicks every day whilst in the office on lunch and it was similar to them with the atmosphere around them too. It was great to chat to a fellow person photographing the grebe family at the lake that Tuesday.

On that day as well as seeing and taking some photos of one parent with the adorable chicks on its back when I walked to the far end of the lake I got a shock when as I looked over it as a group of Mallards and the other of the Great Crested Grebe pair whilst fishing darted out from under a fishing jetty area. I saw and photographed it splash which was amazing too a strong theme for me this year photographing birds splashing and this new camera of mine does seem to do it well with water droplets. What struck me when watching this handsome adult bird is, with the greatest respect to Mallards it was with, how much the shape and colours of the bird made it stand out against them. And I am incredibly biased as it is one of my favourite birds but for a bird you actually don’t very often see close to other species it reminded me what standout birds they are which reminded me why I first fell in love with them and I just had a brilliant moment with this one that day another highlight of my days working from home. That Wednesday I noticed from a distance the bird with chicks on its back looked very close to a fishing jetty on the other side of the lake. So I raced there to see them very closely and I was delighted to they are such beautiful birds. It was fantastic to watch them as ripples of the water were born to a gentle breeze. Being so close in binoculars and the naked eye it was great to really look at the female with chicks and look it in the eye as such. Seeing the focus in its face waiting to see where its partner would emerge from under the water, and then gently shifting herself at a greater speed to go towards the partner. More fascinating behaviour it felt brilliant to see. The next day I noticed a young chick on the water for an extended period and not on the Mum’s back which was interesting, a day I saw two Bullfinches really well at Lakeside. The next day an extremely hot one I was delighted to see the grebe family again with one swimming on its own after a food fish pass from the father which was fantastic to see and I got a close view of the father that Friday evening. That lunch time I got great views of both Buzzard and another raptor the Kestrel at Lakeside a memorable duo.

The next week I got anticipated looks at the three chicks directly on the water and not on their Mum’s back. This was fantastic to see, and it was great to see both parents bring them food that lunch time. Especially memorable that, like swans the month before I saw here with a massive fish showing the strength of Lakeside as a diverse urban site for fish its obviously popular for fishing, one of the adult Great Crested Grebes brought in a gigantic fish for the chicks! They had a go at eating it but with a Black-headed Gull another star Lakeside bird this year chasing the grebes after the fish the adult eventually swallowed it to save the meal possibly to regurgitate later. Brilliant and precious moments with these birds again presenting great unique photo opportunities too. That Thursday I saw the grebes again the chicks looking bigger and bigger, as well as Buzzard which I saw and photographed right over the path the same spot as May which I talk about below with the two and I also saw a Kestrel further down the path over the nature reserve again that day too. The next day I saw Buzzard and Great Crested Grebes and chicks again at Lakeside, I loved watching the chicks swimming along and trying to guess which one would get the fish when the adult brought one in witnessing a particularly good food pass close by. That evening after a day and week I got views of many brilliant birds generally and in numbers some true standout species beside some of my favourite birds in the garden/from home and at Lakeside I had a highlight of the year when the week after seeing my first of 2020 out the window we had a dusk Lakeside walk and saw at least two bats skimming over beach lake. Beautiful summer night vibes. Exceptional natural moments and unique to witness and take in the landscape and birds I was so familiar with in the day in darkness. That next Monday a lunch time walk I saw the Environment Agency pump increasing dissolved oxygen levels in the water for the good of fish in one of Lakeside’s lakes after they decreased in hot weather creating an interesting waterfall looking feature from a far in the landscape which was lovely, I got chatting at a safe social distance to a man about this and also about why predation meant the Great Crested Grebes have failed to rear chicks here prior to 2020 for so long. Which explained why they put a barrier up by the nest and it was heartening to feel how the pair were helped. I went on to see that gentleman quite a few times on my walks and talk now and again which was nice. As if to further celebrate the success when I saw the two adults and three chicks that walk I saw the young living up to their grebe instincts and diving for the first time a key milestone for the birds and a key part of how they’ll need to live as adults which it was amazing to witness. The diving continued as I got very close to them the next day and I noted that it was interesting that when you see an adult dive which is interesting you sort of don’t see a trace of it and trying to pick up where it will go is hard. But with the chicks the shape of them just sort of stays or lingers near the top and as they were learning they quite often pop back up. It was quite cute to see in a way. That lunch time I also got a really good Green Woodpecker view in such a strong area for them the nature reserve meadow fenced off area I saw the Stock Doves there too and a House Martin very nicely. That Thursday I enjoyed the Great Crested Grebe family and House Martins again at Lakeside and also was surprised to see a terrapin and a big fish very close to the edge of the lake at Lakeside a day of unique wildlife or animals in a wild environment for me to see staying long in the memory on a very hot day.

On 25th August I enjoyed seeing the three Great Crested Grebe chicks and parents at Lakeside on a different lake the adjoining one to the one they usually were. It was amazing to see that they were now really moving about within the country park a great stage at their development as wild birds. I saw them on this lake two days later on a glorious late summer’s evening in the sunshine on a day there was a thunderstorm in the afternoon. A couple of views of them and a Buzzard flying over there stood out the next day a generally good one. More distant views of them followed the next week as I felt so used to having them around. I had a memorable Buzzard day on 4th September seeing two soaring out of my window and then hear one call by a wooded areas at Lakeside and then see one speedily fly right over my head there at evening. A particularly memorable day especially for birds as I enjoyed seeing Stock Doves, Common Terns, Great Crested Grebe, many garden birds and more as well In a week that after the usual summer lull of seeing birds common included I was seeing so many day to day whilst working from home and photographing them I took so many photos that day with many I am proud of. The following Monday I was thrilled to get a really close view of two very grown up looking Great Crested Grebe chicks along with another cracking Stock Dove view at Lakeside. Alongside favourite birds of mine at Lakeside on 10th September a very sunny and hot day I was thrilled to see a Kestrel one of my star birds of working from home walks fly and hover right over my head in glorious sunshine allowing for great photo opportunities. Quite often whilst working from home when I’ve seen a Kestrel at Lakeside I’ve gone onto make it a raptor double and see a Buzzard one of my favourite birds too or vice versa. I heard one here that day and then over the southernmost lake I saw a Buzzard soaring against a blue sky which was very nice and in a nice setting. I then on this lake caught up with a Great Crested Grebe chick and one parent I got nicely close to them. It was good to see this young one so much bigger against the adult by this point and also to see it plucking one of the adult’s feathers was interesting. I mentioned when I first saw these chicks I observed an adult picking its own feather to feed to the chicks as is done in Great Crested Grebe development to help their digestion. So to see the chick confidently doing it was amazing and came full circle really. The next day I noticed two Great Crested Grebe chicks barely recognisable as chicks they looked so big and saw one scratching itself with its foot which was great with adults seen too, as well as Kestrel and Sparrowhawk seen that day which was nice the latter being mobbed by a Carrion Crow. I saw a Buzzard soaring over from my room quite well the next day which was great. On the Monday that followed I got a close Great Crested Grebe view at Lakeside which was nice.

The next day as I walked along the main path at Lakeside towards the lakes through the two fenced off areas I was delighted to watch a beautiful Buzzard glide against a bright blue sky for a bit one of my favourite sights in nature which I have observed here so much this year and at home and loved it. On the lake here that very hot day I was relieved and thrilled to see the three Great Crested Grebe chicks on the lake one was on the lakes. I was happy to watch them in the binoculars swimming and diving like the adults. I was relieved though as I got so used to seeing these baby birds day in day out mostly and before that day I’d started to only see two, one of the three or none at all on walks so I sort of wanted to know they were all okay and progressing naturally. I was treated that day to see them all then. It was very lovely to see not only how big they have got but how one in particular was showing a nice bit of adult colouring. I was very excited to see these birds. That Thursday I loved seeing one chick speed towards one visible parent and its siblings on the lake a good moment of viewing. The next day I got some fantastic moments viewing two adults and the three chicks, really seeing the grownup chicks dive well with their plumage really looking like they were about to go into adult colours and seeing some interesting food passes from adult to chick I loved seeing the chick swallow quite a big fish. This was all to the backdrop of some stunning blue water on the lakes reflecting the heatwave on another great sunny day for bridge camera photos of them to compliment the ones I’ve got with my DSLR of them this year I’ve used both so many times for them I just had a feeling this would be a slightly more long-distant specialist bridge camera day and so it proved to top off a strong week for me for the grebes. Photos I’ve taken of the Great Crested Grebe family at Lakeside so far this year have included the fourth-eighth in this photoset.

On a rare weekend Lakeside walk in the early stages of the autumn the day we travelled home from Norfolk in September it was nice to see the Great Crested Grebe chicks from a far on the lake with an adult looking very much older now after not seeing them for a week my longest run not seeing them so it was great to see them. On the Monday that followed I saw and photographed all three being surprised again by how big and much like the adults they were then and feeling proud of the journey I’d witnessed with them and enjoyed so much this year. It was on a generally amazing and packed just under an hour lunch time walk at Lakeside where I also got another close favourite bird view of a Green Woodpecker flying and landing, as well as see three Stock Doves quite well again, the Tufted Ducks after not doing so far a while here, manage to have the Mute Swans follow me along the footpath when out of the water, simultaneously see quite well and photograph a Kestrel flying and landing, see a Stonechat for my first ever time at Lakeside another strong bird which is perhaps common elsewhere I saw at Lakeside this year as well as see a Roe Deer in the meadow area in a very strong year I had for seeing them at Lakeside. With notably most of the sightings coming so late into walk. I saw a Stonechat in the same place at Lakeside the following Monday and Tuesday.

I was then very happy to see the Great Crested Grebe family again that Thursday with the chicks looking very big. I loved getting very close to them and it was amazing to see an adult get a fish and feed it to the chick I got great views of the fish I saw some nice big fish close to the surface earlier on in the walk it is a well-used and liked fishing sight here too. I took pictures of the family with one of the chicks and an adult with a fish in their mouths I really did value some fantastic time close up to these birds that day. A day I also loved seeing a Grey Wagtail in the Monks Brook ford at Lakeside a bird I was missing a bit at that stage I’m so used to seeing them by the River Itchen in Winchester. The next day it was very interesting with the Great Crested Grebe chicks to see a bigger but similar in that it was low to the water scanning fish a Cormorant at Lakeside. Not a bird I often or regularly see at Lakeside but had before which was another birding highlight of working from home on a work day which I enjoyed seeing. This was added to brilliantly by a Kingfisher flying across the lake and landing on a tree that I saw in a strong run for seeing them for me at that stage in the year.

The following Friday I got stunning views of a Green Woodpecker at Lakeside as it went onto a tree and hung off it. With my big lens on I was just in range to really try to take a photograph of it. And it stayed there for a good while too. So I did take some pictures and managed to creep safely closer to it. I was so happy to - what felt like finally or finally again - take a picture of a Green Woodpecker with it quite in focus. One of the pictures I took that day is the ninth in this photoset. I liked the way the sunlight brought out its amazing colours too. This has been a long time coming really as the Green Woodpecker such an agile and fidgety bird is not one I’ve taken many or many respectable pictures of over the years. I instantly felt out there that day what I was taking would probably automatically be my best efforts for the species. So this felt amazing getting a picture of one of my favourite birds as it does always but so special with this species. And thinking about it I just had to get a Green Woodpecker photograph like this at Lakeside at some point this year. I did indeed photograph it in the form of a record shot when I saw my first of the year here in January but I mean one I see of a greater standard than that in terms of photo quality. Record shot tends to be a poorer quality far away photo just to reminder seeing the species by especially if it’s a rarer one or one I haven’t photographed much. As Lakeside and being an urban site I maybe can’t say this about many species is genuinely the best place I know for Green Woodpeckers. So working from home and being here so often at lunch times I just had to be in the right place at the right time at some point and get a more decent photo and I was pleased I did. I had had a deepening pool of Green Woodpecker sightings at Lakeside the few months prior so that day really consolidated that. But most importantly it was about watching the bird and connecting with one of my favourite species that day and I so happy to watch it in the binoculars sat there for a long time after taking the shots too and really take it in. An exciting moment. I made it a favourite bird hat trick by seeing a beautiful Buzzard delicately floating in the air above the lakes that day and caught up with the Great Crested Grebe family getting wonderful views of them too as they swam towards me and I couldn’t believe once again how big and grown up they were so much like adults as my time with the chicks seemed to fly by.

The Monday that followed I had one of my best days whilst working home for seeing favourite birds at Lakeside, getting views of Green Woodpecker and Kingfisher flying which is pretty special anywhere in any context consolidating the surge of Lakeside sightings of them as 2020 went on. I also saw the Great Crested Grebe chicks that lunch time, unusually for October seeing all three together they were more independent so separated a lot by that point when swimming around. I was also thrilled to see a Jay for the first time at Lakeside whilst working from home on my lunch time walks it is a bird I see a fair bit over Lakeside. I saw so many here this autumn a time they are about a lot collecting acorns in the bumper crop of them this year. This added well to a strong theme of seeing lots of crow species well over those few weeks I enjoyed great views of the Jay flying along the fence on the northern path. I also saw Roe Deers in the nature reserve area at Lakeside that day hiding under trees from rain possibly making me remark what a wonderful year from before lockdown onwards I have had for seeing these mammals at Lakeside and how excited I am having them so close to our home. This was a generally brilliant day of wildlife watching tagged on to a fantastic weekend where we went to Bushy Park on the Saturday and saw the Wilson’s Phalarope and Grey Phalarope and more at Pennington the Sunday with the aforementioned Green Woodpecker and Great Crested Grebes particularly photo experience of the Friday. That day I also loved seeing loads of Collared Doves and Starlings at home with a comic view of four of the former squeezing onto a street light and one on the frame of the goal/basketball area on the green out the front. This became one of my best weeks or best few days for garden birds and birds seen around the garden all year with Blue Tit, Robin, Jackdaw, Magpie and Pied Wagtail joining usual suspects Starling, Goldfinch, House Sparrow, Woodpigeon and Collared Dove to add a great bit of variety with some special views of all especially a Blue Tit I saw looking through the window at me and flying off so close which was fantastic. Going into autumn I saw so many Collared Doves around so many of them would come into the garden compared to usual and it was great to see them all come onto the tray particularly and on the fence and roof visible from my room real nice gatherings of them.

I made it another favourite bird hat trick at Lakeside that Thursday 15th October with Great Crested Grebe, Jay as I had heard the day before seen again pretty well flying and Buzzard seen at Lakeside I mention the Buzzard experience more below in this blog in a Buzzard section I’ve got going. The Great Crested Grebe I got a cracking view of underneath the bridge I crossed which I had done before I took a picture I was really proud of featuring this bird that day. I also got nicely close and intimate views of all three chicks that day which was lovely. I saw the Roe Deers again that Friday getting one of my best ever views of one in a the northern most fenced off nature reserve area in the long grass and one of my best ever photos of one as they yet again this year frequented an area of Lakeside over a few days something I noticed a lot this year, one of the deers which I took a photo of was in perfect sunlight that very sunny day and week. It was part of an amazing few weeks seeing four deer species so well at various places and a fantastic natural moment again at Lakeside on a lunch time of mine. The first one I saw which bounded off into the grass with its mate with nice antlers was less than 10 metres away from me I believe which was amazing. The following Monday I saw the three Great Crested Grebe chicks flying at me over a lake. They all flew, the first time I had ever seen the chicks do that and I rarely see any grebe species flying anyway there are typical water birds in every sense, as there was some sort of noise and motion that was coming from the lake it was quite spectacular seeing them fly towards me an interesting moment. I enjoyed seeing three Jackdaws on our roof at the start of my lunch time walk that day. That Wednesday at the spot I saw my first of the year at in January west of the bowl a Green Woodpecker sighting at Lakeside brightened up a wet lunch time walk, as did a fairly unusual for us Magpie in the garden that day which I saw come in a lot this year. I liked seeing a Stock Dove over Lakeside again the next day a really sunny one as well as with enjoying other garden birds that day and appreciate just how many Goldfinches I was seeing in the garden at that stage in the year my favourite garden birds they just started to pile into the garden to feed like the Starlings do those weeks. I enjoyed seeing Green Woodpecker and Jay at Lakeside on Monday 26th October a dog walk for me taking Missy as my Mum was ill that day fantastic views of both especially the Green Woodpecker on a tree seen through my binoculars when I lead dog walks it can be a great chance to focus more on seeing birds with less scope to have a camera and be photographing wildlife in particular.

I saw a Green Woodpecker well the other side of Lakeside where I don’t normally see them that Wednesday by the woods to the west of the site, seeing it fly and then cling onto a tree a second chance in one month to get a photo of one which I was over the moon with. I also loved watching a variety of garden birds including Blue Tit, Goldfinch, Starling, Pied Wagtail, Jackdaw just to name a few in and around the garden that day whilst working just enjoying the simple but pure joy of watching birds feeding in the garden and a variety of species at that something to really raise the spirits. The next day after not seeing them for a few I saw the Great Crested Grebe chicks at Lakeside barely recognisable as young birds by that stage they had really grown up and they really have been raised so brilliantly this year and it’s been one of the best bits of my year to follow these one of my favourite birds and first ever birds I got excited about as a kid so locally to me. That day I also achieved my next little goal of Lakeside whilst working from home walks seeing my first winter thrush of the season at Lakeside a Fieldfare and not the commoner Redwing I tend to see here in winter. It was a great view of it at the top of a bare tree north of the steam railway station an area that would become so rich for birdwatching for me within Lakeside this autumn and it was one of my wildlife moments of the year as it was another of the birds that yes are quite common elsewhere but I don’t often see at my very local Lakeside which I did yet another moment of realising what is around nearby, I had only seen one Fieldfare at Lakeside before that point. I saw Green Woodpecker at Lakeside again that Friday to the east of the site where I am more used to seeing them, and I remarked at how the Green Woodpeckers were the main bird here for me those autumnal weeks really with how many I saw.

I saw some Red Kites fly over our house in late April the first the same day as two Buzzards during a run of seeing them at home a lot which I talk about below with a fantastic Red Kite view so that stood out. The Red Kites continued to regularly fly over the house and one Sunday in early May I got a cracking view of two flying over and photographed one.

It was nice in March to see a couple of Buzzards flying over the house one morning and then again a week later at nearby Lakeside on a sunny day during the lockdown we’d seen them at both before but it’s not a bad bird to have around regularly in a town for sure. The following weeks I saw them a few times again from my bedroom window as they became regular birds around the neighbourhood for me which I was so pleased and thrilled with. I saw four species of birds of prey from my bedroom window whilst working from home which I loved. I got a brilliant Buzzard fix at Lakeside on 21st May on a lunch time walk as two were parading right over the path a little way in front of me. In the right place at the right time with my big lens on my camera ready I caught up with them and enjoyed glorious views of two flying right over my head against a bright blue sky on a scorching day with Swifts around as well. I took the tenth picture in this photoset of a Buzzard soaring that day. That morning I’d seen one from my window being mobbed by Jackdaws. A beautifully connected moment with nature. On a hot mid-June Lakeside walk I got a similar great moment with a Kestrel flying and hovering right over my head and House Martins seen flying nearby too. On 6th July on quite a nice, hot and sunny for a bit walk it was great to see a Buzzard flying in the rough and wild field to the west of Lakeside Country Park and landed, a place I often see them, on a day I saw Great Crested Grebe too. Buzzard and Great Crested Grebe flew the flag for my favourite birds at home and in daily exercise walks during the first lockdown. I enjoyed seeing yet another Buzzard over the northern path in Lakeside and against a bright blue sky on 29th September I saw so many there this year. I did take a Kestrel hovering picture I was proud of on a sunny day at Lakeisde in the late summer/early autumn.

On 15th October as I mentioned earlier at Lakeside after the first Great Crested Grebe as I walked over the bridge I was delighted to hear another of my favourite birds the Buzzard calling their distinctive high-pitched call. It sounded distant but I looked up and there briefly over my head was a Buzzard flying so I believe two in the air that day. I got a sensational view of this bird flying really nicely and I got a picture I was so proud to take of it. A fantastic few moments watching this bird before it flew on. It’s always an amazing day when you see a Buzzard and especially so locally at Lakeside this is a regular pair that are around here and at home, but to see it against a bright blue sky and get a photograph is one of the best things in nature for me and has been for ages it really gets me going and gets excitement running through me. It was a brilliant moment especially coming so soon after the Great Crested Grebe with the Jay to follow on a stunning autumnal day for sunshine with such nice light. I liked the picture I took of it, I took the notable Buzzard pictures here in May my best for two years I always seem to photograph Buzzards well in years ending in even numbers, being the year it’s been this year with circumstances allowing my volume of pictures to explode those weren’t the only Buzzard pictures I’ve taken but I feel like this one has probably bettered those for quality and particularly of note some at Martin Down that same month so I’ve been spoiled with Buzzard picture opportunities this year which makes me feel very fortunate. These two specific birds which I saw before and in the early days of strict lockdown raising my spirits once more that day. I walked on that day and reflected on how my Lakeside walks that week had become more tranquil. I think that’s because perhaps as autumn comes and maybe people are not out on social distancing exercise walks as much with the time of year changing and Lakeside just seemed quieter despite really nice weather. But I think just generally getting into nature really does help you focus and sharpen the mind and the sense of peace. And as I walked to behind the steam railway station I was thoroughly enjoying my walk and I reflected probably for the first time - I may have said it on here and otherwise without really thinking about it - not only for the amazing wildlife I see here locally I am so lucky to have Lakeside Country Park a fantastic and valuable green and open space right near to me only a short walk away from home and I can just take some time out each lunch or most lunch times as I do for within Winchester when in the office and get lost in a walk and in nature. In my bonus eleventh highlights post this year about my November and December I also wrote about favourite birds of mine close to home and other notable Lakeside birds.

#lakeside #lakeside country park #eastleigh #birds #birdwatching #hampshire #photography #summer #spring #autumn #uk #england #world #beautiful #fantastic #precious #lockdown #green space #breathing #happy #great crested grebe #nature #planet #green woodpecker #jay #great spotted wodpecker #kingfisher #little egret #red kite #buzzard

[firejugglinghobo]

Gift for @shydragonrider for the @inkheartexchange! A mid-length drabble of some key events leading Firefox to where we find him in Inkspell, and tying in with Inkheart. (Put under read more so as not to clog up everybody’s dash!)

“What the hell is taking Basta so long?” Firefox grumbled, glaring out into the forest as if his frustration could speed things along.  He and Capricorn seemed to have been waiting for hours, and the evening sun was quickly slipping behind the trees.  If Basta didn’t turn up soon, they would be left waiting all night.  Firefox knew he was much too superstitious to venture into these woods after dark.

“He’ll be here,” Capricorn said coolly.  He was always much more confident in the knife-wielder than Firefox had ever been.

“I don’t know why you put so much faith in him,” he scoffed.  There was no love lost between the two of them, and he didn’t make any effort to hide it.

“Basta never disappoints.”  There was a familiar bloodthirsty gleam in Capricorn’s eye.  “If he says there’s something worth seeing out here, we’re sure to have some fun tonight.”

Yes, even Firefox had to admit, Basta seldom let his master down in that arena.  Even if Capricorn’s second-in-command would have prefered Basta himself as the evening’s entertainment… He was just pondering whether Capricorn would take favorably to the suggestion if he didn’t arrive soon when the man himself burst through the underbrush, pushing a sorry looking figure ahead of him.

“There!” Basta declared triumphantly, snagging Dustfinger by the collar.  “Didn’t I always tell you he was spying for the Black Prince?”  He shook the fire-dancer roughly, making him cough and grip at his shirt collar feelby.

Capricorn looked down at him with distaste, as if he were a dead beetle stuck to the sole of his shoe.  “What’s all this, Basta?  Have you lured us all here just to tell us what we’ve heard too many times already?”

Firefox smirked.  Basta had accused Dustfinger of every crime under the sun, in an attempt to convince his master to kill him or send him away for good.  They all knew he wasn’t trustworthy, but he had his uses, and Capricorn was wise enough not to allow his little rivalry with Basta get in the way.

Basta paled slightly at Capricorn’s condescension.  “Well, I’ve got proof now, haven’t I?  This little twerp-” Dustfinger cringed as Basta punctuated the insult with a knee to his ribs. “-followed you all the way from the fortress.  And I’ve just caught him red-handed sneaking closer for a good listen to what you were saying.”

“Oh, come now, Basta.”  Firefox scowled at firmly at him.  “Don’t tell me you’ve had us sitting out here in the middle of nowhere just so you could spy on our favorite pet fire-eater spying on us!”

Basta opened his mouth for a retort but never get the chance to speak.

Another voice was suddenly speaking, a commanding, alluring voice, drowning out all other sounds or thoughts.  Firefox clapped his hands over his ears to block it out, but it kept speaking, as if coming from inside his own mind.  He wanted to follow the voice; he didn’t know where, but he wanted more than anything to allow it to carry him away…

The other three clearly heard it, too.  Capricorn reached for his sword and Basta swore loudly.  The forest seemed to fade away around them, replaced instead with a cozy fire-lit room, lined with shelves of books.  There was a woman - no a child - and a man whose voice spoke their names, calling to them like White Women coming to take them away.

When the man looked up at them, the voice stopped just as suddenly as it had begun.  Firefox blinked hard to clear his vision, which was still swimming dizzily with desire.  The room was gone, with all its books and strange lights.  He was back in the forest once more.  And he was alone.

Or at least, he thought so.  Behind him, the underbrush rustled ominously, but when he turned with his hand on his sword, nothing but a cat ran past.

“Capricorn?”  His voice came as barely a whisper.  The light was fading fast now, and despite his best efforts, he felt as anxious as Basta to get out of the forest, but not before looking for his master.

There was no sign of him anywhere, or Basta and Dustfinger either.  No tracks that might give away their direction, no voices or sounds in the dark.  Just three imprints in the grass where they had stood just a moment ago.  They had all three vanished, as if snatched into thin air.

That man whose voice had so tempted him...he had to have been a wizard.  The others must not have been able to resist his call, and they had gone to him, wherever he was.  Firefox shivered at the thought.  He had been so close to going, too, kidnapped by words and a more powerful magic than he had ever witnessed.

Wherever they’d gone, they didn’t seem to be coming back in a hurry, but Firefox was feeling more uncomfortable in the forest by the minute.  With one last sweep of the clearing, he turned and began the grave trek back to Capricorn’s fortress.

Fortunately, Capricorn’s men were all quite used to their master disappearing without any explanation.  It didn’t take much coaxing from Firefox to make them believe he’d been called away unexpectedly on business.  As far as the day-to-day business of the fire-raisers, the following days were much like any others.  Firefox filled in for his master when it came to settling petty disputes among his men and giving orders for protection fees to be gathered from the surrounding villages.

Nobody seemed to miss Basta or Dustfinger.  As time went by, fewer jokes were made at their expense, and the gaps in entertainment that the loss of their quarrel left were soon filled by stories of one of Cockerell’s lovers.

Apprehension didn’t begin to grow until about a month after the disappearance, and even then Firefox acted quickly to quell the rumors of magic and murder that began to circle among the men.  He promoted those who were most loyal to him, and by some stroke of luck, many of Capricorn’s favorites eventually disappeared on their own - Fulvio, Cockerell, Mortola.  They left just as suddenly as if they too had been plucked away by the magic voice.  It saved Firefox a good deal of the trouble it would have taken to get rid of them himself.

Years stretched, until Capricorn was barely more than a legend, and the boys Firefox had recruited in the beginning were seasoned and loyal followers.  Even the Shadow seemed to have forgotten that it had ever had any other master.

Yes, things were going well.  Firefox had almost pushed the strange voice from his memory by the time it all happened a second time.

It had been an entirely unremarkable day.  Several of the men had blackmailed a local farmer into handing over a pig and had spent the day butchering it and laughing loudly at crude and bloodthirsty stories.  In the gathering dusk, the smells of the roast wafted temptingly through the battlements, and the Piper’s voice sounded through the courtyard, singing songs of feasting and triumph.

Firefox took it all in with a smile: his loyal men, the fortress under his command.  With him in charge, the last nine years had been more profitable and enjoyable than any he had spent under Capricorn.  It was good to be the one in charge.

A clamor of voices pulled Firefox from his idyllic pondering.  He scowled in their direction, expecting some petty dispute over seating at the table, but his mood turned grave at the sight of the Shadow rising unbidden from the ground beyond the fortress walls.  It never appeared unless called, and Firefox himself was the only one with that authority.

The Shadow let out a low, sorrowful moan and swayed slightly as it hunched over the fire-raisers, sending them scattering in all directions to avoid being peppered with the ash that flaked away from its towering form.  Something was wrong.  Firefox had never known the Shadow to posses any weakness, let alone show it.

He was moving toward it, ready to speak the words that sent it slinking back to wherever it hid while its master did not require it, when a familiar shiver snaked down his spine.  Just like that day so many years ago when the fate of the fire-raisers had been surprisingly changed, a voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.  This time Firefox didn’t even bother to press his hands over his ears.  He knew it wouldn’t do a thing, and this time he was eager to know what the voice was saying.

It was a different voice this time, a young child’s voice, perhaps a little girl.  How strange that such a young voice could be so enticing.  But it didn’t seem to be calling to him this time.  It had only one victim in mind.

The Shadow was gazing about for the source of the voice, as well, the look in its fiery eyes more panicked than that of any of Firefox’s men.  At its feet, the world appeared to warp and bend.  Firefox focused hard on the scene that seemed to be unfolding there.

There were no books, no room, no comfortable-looking chairs.  Only what seemed like a raised platform and - was that Capricorn!?  Damn.  Not dead after all this time, after all.  And in a cage not far off, that couldn’t be Basta!  If it was, he certainly had found his place where he belonged at long last.

Just as Firefox moved to get a better view, and some of his men began shouting that they too had caught sight of some familiar faces, the vision, along with the Shadow, vanished without a trace.  Confusion erupted everywhere, some men running toward the site of the apparition, hoping to catch sight of what was going on, and some away from it, fearful of a witch’s curse.

It took what seemed like hours for the men to calm down enough that any of Firefox’s words of reassurance would reach them.  They all had questions.  Was Capricorn still alive after all?  Had they all betrayed him by following Firefox?  Was he coming back to extract his revenge on them all?  Or was Firefox himself behind all that had happened?  Had he kidnapped Capricorn all those years ago?

The short answer to all of their wild accusations and frantic questions was, of course, “No.”  But they wanted more of an answer than that, and Firefox didn’t have it.  He’d always been much less of a believer in the supernatural than his predecessor, but this was something he simply could not explain.  Instead, he chose to look to the future.

What came next?  What would become of them all now that their greatest strength, the Shadow, was seemingly gone.  Without it, what set them apart from any of the other gangs of fire-raisers and bandits?

These were the questions Firefox was ready to answer.  For a long time, he had felt that he was thinking too small, and that greater things awaited him if he only had an opportunity to reach for them.  Now, the opportunity had presented itself to make a change, and he would be damned if he didn’t seize it.

So, when the voices finally settled and all questions had been asked, he raised a hand for silence, and unfolded his plan for their future.

“You are all right.  Things cannot be the same without the Shadow.  But it is high time we were finished with all of this magic and mayhem.  Something much more powerful is stirring in the south - conquest and the might of men.  We’ll need no more of spells and charms when we have a new benefactor: the Adderhead.”

#shydragonrider #inkheartexchange #inkheart #firefox #basta #capricorn #dustfinger

[rwby-redux]

Preface

RWBY is the breakthrough anime web series created by the late Monty Oum of Rooster Teeth. Originally teased on November 5th, 2012, and officially debuted July 18th, 2013, the series follows the journeys of four young women enrolled in an academy that trains monster-slaying warriors known as Huntsmen. Set in the fictional world of Remnant, the story initially focuses on the surface-level plot of fighting against humanity’s ancient adversary, the ever-present Creatures of Grimm; over time, it becomes apparent that things aren’t what they seem, as the cast slowly begins to connect a string of heists committed by a criminal syndicate with the violent acts of a terrorist cell. The series is aired weekly on Rooster Teeth’s website, with its main arcs spanning 12 – 16 episodes per volume. In the years following the show’s initial release, RWBY has spawned numerous merchandise and related media, including two spin-off shows, multiple side-stories published as mangas, two standalone books, three mobile games, a behind-the-scenes artbook, and OSTs for every volume to date.

As of Volume 7 there are 98 episodes in total with a collective runtime of 18:52:00, or approximately 1,132 minutes, with more episodes and side content underway.

At best, they’re visually interesting; at worst, they’re disappointing.

Let me take a second to backtrack before the lynch mob starts to sharpen its pitchforks. The series deserves much of the praise that it’s gotten. RWBY was the first American-produced anime to be released in Japan (and if you’re a fan of anime, you know how insane those words sound). The 3D models and animation from Volume 4 onward are breathtakingly stunning, and even before the show made the leap from Poser to Maya, the fight sequences managed to be equally creative and entertaining. The show was nominated for and received multiple Streamy Awards, and was awarded Best Animated Series by the International Academy of Web Television. The Volume 1 soundtrack reached number one on iTunes, beating out the soundtrack for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Such is RWBY’s (and Rooster Teeth’s) reputation that it managed to attract the attention of, and later bring on, industry veterans and vocal legends such as Jen Taylor, Josh Grelle, and Aaron Dismuke.

That’s to say nothing of the fandom this franchise has amassed, of kids, teenagers, and young adults alike. RWBY has generated dozens of forums dedicated to fanfiction, fanart, and roleplaying. Thousands of people the world over have bonded over this show, fans from all walks of life. They’re passionate about this series. The fact that I’m writing this post is a testimony of that. If I didn’t care about RWBY, I wouldn’t be sitting on my couch at 3 AM, hunched over my laptop in my pajamas.

If RWBY is so good (or occasionally threatens to become good), you might be wondering, why, then, does this blog exist?

Well, because…when you stop and look at it critically, it actually kind of sucks.

Despite initially being written by a three-man team, the series is full of inconsistencies and an underdeveloped cast. The characters, especially from Volumes 1 — 3, are full of one-dimensional stereotypes whose contributions to the story amount to a three-word summary: “The School Bully,” “The Wacky Professors,” “The Racist Cop,” “The Cutthroat Bitch,” “The Anime Waifu,” “The Audience Surrogate,” “Discount Elle Woods,” and so on. Fundamental elements of the story, like Aura, Semblance, and Dust, are either poorly-explained or not explained at all, and the limitations of those core concepts can change at a moment’s notice to suit the needs of the plot. The primary antagonist of the first three volumes is universally hated by the fandom for having no discernible motivations beyond being “ambitious and power-hungry,” and having a personality that consists exclusively of irritating smug. The show-writers, despite repeatedly promising queer representation, have failed to make even one of their ten central protagonists queer. This isn’t touching upon the fact that the first openly-gay character on the show was an antagonist, or that the next two were side-characters who were relevant to the plot for all of seven episodes, before vanishing from the story entirely. The two leads that are currently being hyped as our first queer main-cast members have only been repeatedly teased, with said characters never once uttering the words, “I’m bi,” “I date women,” “I’m not straight”—nothing but narrative subtext and playful winks from the VAs whenever a fan asks if they’re queer. Subplots end up having no pay-off or get entirely forgotten mid-volume. The story is so protagonist-biased that the heroes are frequently able to get away with being hypocritical, or committing criminal acts because “it was the right thing to do,” with their POV framed as an infallible “fuck you, got mine” verbal gut-punch to the audience (while other characters in the show, who often make the exact same calls as the heroes, are ridiculed by the show and the fandom). Whenever the story isn’t spray-painting stolen cars and selling them to their original owners, it manages to clumsily handle allegories for real-world issues such as systemic racism, mental illness, abuse dynamics/victim survivorship, and gray morality. The worldbuilding is absent from the main show and has to be supplemented through RWBY’s spin-off series World of Remnant. The story’s setting feels flat and lifeless at times because the “cultures” of this world are never established.

The list goes on and on.

So if this show has so many flaws, why are we still having this conversation?

Because I’m captivated by the untapped potential of this world. When you brush away all of the detritus, you can see the wealth of raw material buried beneath. This is a world where the gods have forsaken their creations, with one having even deliberately created the monsters that hunt humanity. The two characters who are central to the history of this world are tragic figures, one cursed with immortality as a punishment for demanding that the gods revise the first draft, and do away with needless death; and the other, cursed to ceaselessly reincarnate into the minds and bodies of like-minded souls, waging a war of attrition against a person warped beyond recognition by the capricious spite of the gods. This is a world of forgotten magic, of shifting allegiances, of characters embarking on personal journeys and unearthing deadly secrets. It’s a story of people from all walks of life learning to cooperate and work together, forging friendships and alliances in order to face the challenges that lie ahead.

It could easily have the bones of an epic fantasy series as long as it remembers to drink its milk.

RWBY’s issues aren’t insurmountable. Most of them are the byproduct of the series’ blind adherence to “rule of cool,” the motto that practically codified the beginning of the show. From Volume 4 onward, the series took a radical shift in tone that tried to be “more mature,” and only succeeded in making the earlier episodes absurd in hindsight. Why, in Volume 6, are the characters concerned about civilian endangerment, when in Volume 2 they happily pursued a giant mech in a highway car-chase scene that would’ve caused untold collateral damage and civilian death? This change in storytelling created a thematic disparity that reoccurs time and time again, retroactively emphasizing just how inconsistent the worldbuilding and storytelling are.

It tried to be Avatar: The Last Airbender, and what we’re left with instead is Game of Thrones Season 8.

Now, I’m not using this blog as a platform to damn Monty Oum (or claim to be a better creator than him). But it’s important to address the flaws in his story, and to acknowledge that his passing doesn’t make RWBY somehow sacrosanct or immune to constructive criticism. RWBY has flaws, ranging from nitpicky to potentially capable of causing real-world harm (in the case of the aforementioned queerbaiting and racism analogies). I’m a firm believer that art doesn’t exist in a vacuum; art is informed by our beliefs just as much as art informs our beliefs. We can still respect and admire the potential RWBY has to offer, while being mindful of where it needs to improve.

That’s where this blog comes in.

At the end of the day, the RWBY Redux exists as a thought experiment. I’m writing it chiefly to entertain worldbuilding ideas and headcanons I’ve spent years musing on. I’m not asking readers to agree with any of my numerous stances, nor am I going to shy away from other fans’ criticism as I hammer this project out. With a little TLC, perhaps I’ll manage to create something that manages to be more complex than its source material. And if you choose to follow along with my endeavors, hopefully you’ll find this project equal parts engaging and entertaining.

Wish me luck.

#preface #deconstruction #writing

[sol1056]

set it up and pay it off

This was going to be part of another post which I ended up breaking into two. Finally had a chance to get to this tonight. 

I’m watching tDP and istg I’m trying my hardest not to compare it ... but every mistake [other shows] made, tDP is doing a right (and an amazing right). But in terms of writing?? The fact that they solve small issues without dragging it to the next season making the audience tired and not interested?? Amazing!!

Hello, payoffs! Not only does tDP do setups and payoffs right, it knows how to gracefully remind us, and then delivers those payoffs that’ll have the most bang for the screentime.  

For those unfamiliar with the term, if the classic chekov’s gun is the setup, the moment the gun is used (in whatever way) is the payoff. Payoffs are delightful things, and very little compares when it comes to satisfying readers (regardless of the nature of the payoff). Humans like getting the answers to questions.

Behind the cut: types of setups and payoffs, four things to remember, choosing payoffs and their role in the narrative, the dangers of doing them cheaply, and how to destroy a payoff’s weight. 

Spoilers for the first episode only; everything else is vague or uses non-tDP examples to illustrate.  

a bit about setups and payoffs 

When the story asks a question or raises a possibility, that’s the setup (aka the gun on the mantle), and the payoff is the answer. This is not the same as a character asking a question; setups and payoffs are designed for the audience. 

Frex, talking about bad weather is effectively asking, ‘what if the weather got really bad?’ Now when the tornado strikes, the audience was primed for the possibility. A setup can be to show a character’s skill, so the audience isn’t surprised when the character devises an ingenious solution in the finale. Odd descriptions and curious hints will spike the tension and raise the question, ‘what if this house is haunted?’ long before a ghost even appears on the page. 

Most stories have an overall question, like ‘can A win the Kentucky Derby’ or ‘can B find true love’ --- this is often what we call the throughline. But stories are also full of ongoing questions for the characters, and also about them (or their world, their backstory, their perspectives). Some get answered right away, some explained later, and some, well, never. 

Nearly every conversation between Viren and Harrow raises about twenty questions and answers perhaps five. The characters know (or think they know) the answers to a lot of these questions; their dialogue works on the level of exchanging information, and also to provoke or establish possibilities in the viewer’s mind. When we later see Ruunan’s skills or Amaya’s rank or some other detail that resolves the setup, it’s an aha! moment.  

four things to remember

1. Setups should make sense at that point in the story. If a character is busy trying to master unfamiliar machinery, it’s probably not the most appropriate time to mention the character is a croquet champion. If the character is in a room with no windows in the building’s interior, it’s going to be awkward if you decide it’s time for them to worry about the strange weather. 

2. A setup needs to make sense in hindsight. If the ghost died by drowning, and your tension-raising questions are all prompted by lightbulbs breaking and the smell of an open fire... that’s not going to make much sense, thematically. 

3. A setup must be intriguing. Say a story raises questions about a character’s animosity or honesty. If the reveal is, well, he always looks like that, or she’s always nervous, the reader’s going to apply that retroactively and decide that question had no point. (That’s a fast track to losing an audience’s trust, by the way.) If your setups are boring, the audience will find the payoff boring. 

4. Don’t delay all your payoffs until the end. You don’t want to answer everything too fast, or you’re losing a great source of tension. But you can’t put off answering for too long, or the audience will get frustrated and quit. (Or they’ll hold on just long enough to get the one answer they really want, and quit then.) 

answer this, not that

As tDP’s three protagonists move through the season, they know nothing of the larger intrigue going on, and they have no clue what lies ahead. Resolving any of those other questions might answer some world-detail for us, but they’re not an immediate concern for the protagonists. That makes those setups less valuable for an emotional payoff, because they don’t hold as much story-weight, comparatively.

What tDP did so well was that it never lost sight of the protagonists’ own questions. The writers then identified what they could answer without giving everything away --- and of those questions, they chose to answer the ones with the greatest urgency and emotional weight. 

To understand why you’d answer those in the middle of the story, it helps to understand what payoffs do, in the narrative. 

the role of payoffs in the narrative 

I’ve talked before about the promise of the premise, and the payoff of the setup is a parallel to that concept. When the story sets up a question (a premise), that payoff is where it delivers on the promise. It’s not always good news. Payoffs are consequences; sometimes it’s more powerful to have everything go wrong. 

Here’s an example of a mid-story payoff that doesn’t have emotional weight, vs several that do. In LotR, the fellowship is forced to go through the Mines of Moria. This is a double setup: one, can Gandalf remember his way through the labyrinthine halls, and two, can they get through without alerting whatever now lives in the mines. The tension hangs on those setups, and the story delivers four payoffs for it. 

Gandalf halts the party while he tries to remember which branch in the path is correct. When he does, it’s a payoff, and it does double duty: yes, he remembers enough to guide the fellowship (what a relief) and now they can proceed (as opposed to spending the rest of the book wandering around in the dark). We readers get a breather from the oppressive tension, and the story is pushed forward.

For at least a chapter or so, Gimli’s been insistent they should go through Moria. A marvelous place, distant kin sure to show them dwarven hospitality, etc. Seeing Moria is a question that only appears once they reach the mountains, and Gimli’s interest in it is mostly from a need to impress: his constant talk becomes another setup.

The second payoff comes Gimli forces a detour to investigate a tomb. We get a short passage where Gimli reads the eye-witness account of the mine’s last occupants. It’s an emotional payoff... but only for Gimli. It’s certainly not much of a payoff from the perspective of a reader who’s focused on the urgency driving them through the mines. Had the mines been a planned part of the route from the beginning, with the entire company desperate for the safe shelter, the mine’s disaster might’ve carried greater emotional weight.  

When Pippin knocks a helmet down a well, it’s a third payoff, addressing the setup created by Gandalf's strict warning about stealth. The tension rises but it’s alleviated in another way: the setup has been fulfilled. Now to find out the consequences: a fight scene, a chase, and the situation turns dire.

Gandalf’s fight with the Balrog is the fourth payoff, pushing the setup to its limit (whether they can all get through safely), but also resolving a setup planted much earlier in the story. That is, that Gandalf is what will make the journey possible, and keep them safe (and together). 

That setup (of Gandalf’s necessity) is fulfilled when the story yanks him out of the picture, and it comes with substantial emotional weight. We’ve had seventeen chapters showing how much Frodo admires, even adores, Gandalf. Not only is the result of that setup potentially threatening the fellowship’s success, it’s also emotionally devastating for Frodo and the other hobbits. 

In sum, payoffs do three things in the narrative: they remind readers of the stakes by delivering smaller consequences along the way, they deliver emotional beats (including the catharsis of laughter if the payoff is the punchline to a humorous setup), and they regulate the story’s tension and pacing.  

disingenuous setups make for cheap payoffs

If you look at some of the turning points in tDP, there are payoffs previous to the final episode. Think of every place the story is begging a question, and you end up with a whole lot of chekov’s guns; tDP practically has three mantles’ worth. 

If the elves swear an oath to fulfill their duty, what happens if they fail? If the boys can’t protect their prize, what will happen to them, to Rayla, to the humans and elves? If the boys trust Rayla with their prize, will she betray them? If the elves assassinate King Harrow, will the other human countries march to war? And what’s the deal with that mirror, anyway? 

What makes tDP especially satisfactory is how it plays with closure before any payoff. This can be a little tricky; it requires a narrative voice that’s gained the audience’s trust. In short, you take any given question, let the characters acknowledge the consequences of failure, and then let them accept this as the price of making their choice. Skip this step, and any reversal will feel cheap. 

Take the pivotal moment in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. From the moment Edmund meets the White Witch, he’s set on a path to betray his siblings. With Narnia’s prophecy hanging on the need for all four children to sit on the thrones at Cair Paravel, the story has setup Edmund’s actions to have significant payoff. If the White Witch kills him, the prophecy won’t be fulfilled. 

When the Witch delivers her ultimatum, and Aslan decides to offer himself as substitute sacrifice, Susan and Lucy end up bearing witness. Aslan explains his choice (but not all of his intentions), and the moment is heavy with emotional weight as the girls realize the consequences of their brother’s actions. The story doesn’t shirk from their grief, either; it’s a long passage of their distress as they do their best to undo --- or at least ease --- the worst of the Witch’s damage. 

The contrast of that seeming abject loss with Aslan’s return --- and his explanation of the loophole that only he knew about --- could’ve been a cheap trick. What makes it such a pivotal moment is that neither of the point-of-view characters (Susan and Lucy) have any idea of what lies ahead, nor does the story ever slyly wink in the reader’s direction. 

In tDP, there’s an ongoing looming consequence of Rayla’s choices, and she goes through the stages of handling that with all the gravity of what she believes to be true. The story never contradicts her beliefs; in fact, it reinforces them repeatedly, closing each additional option until only one terrible consequence remains. 

We can hope that some loophole might exist, but the story never winks in our direction: it does nothing to reinforce that hope, instead pushing the setup inexorably towards its logical payoff. Like tLtWatW, nothing breaks the looming anguish of the setup’s apparent consequences, just as Aslan’s resigned wish for the girls to look away closes the door on hope that he'll at least fight his fate.

embrace the weight of a payoff

There’s an excellent video that deconstructs the use of bathos in Marvel movies (good to watch if this paragraph confuses you). Bathos is an abrupt turn from the serious to the trivial, which parallels a cheap payoff in that it tips its hand. It tells viewers: hey, we’re not taking this seriously, so no reason you should, either. 

This is where tDP --- like Trollhunters --- really shines, because it never raises the veil to show the writers behind the curtain. Too often, stories (especially in current media) back away from committing to the payoff; it’s almost like we’ve got a generation of TV/film writers afraid to show any depth of emotion. The tension gets above a 2, and the writers retreat to a joke.

There’s plenty of humor in tDP; it’s filled to the brim with witty lines even funnier in context. What keeps it from being bathos (too much) is that it’s rarely an intentional quip on the part of the characters. Rayla is deadly serious when she tells the boys, “I’m not falling for that flashing frog trick, again!” If the writers expected me to laugh, the narrative doesn’t allow even a beat as indication. The story treats its characters --- and every payoff --- with a sincere gravity. 

I think the crucial ingredient comes in how the narrative understands itself: as an intimate portrayal of a character in this situation, vs that of an actor onstage before an audience. You may’ve heard that over-quoted bit about ‘dance like no one is watching’ --- the same is true for stories: they must unroll as if there’s no audience other than the characters in that scene, in that moment. 

This goes back to a setup that revolves around characterization such as honesty or duplicity. If a character cries in private, the reader’s assumption is that this character’s grief isn’t meant to be seen as feigned. With no audience (as far as the character knows), there’s no reason for pretense. If the payoff later is a reveal the character was faking all along, the story did worse than laughing at its own characters: it lied to the audience. 

It set up a premise which the audience trusted as valid, only to deliver a payoff that hinged on the audience's gullibility. If bathos trivializes an emotional payoff, a story’s duplicity mocks the audience’s engagement. 

A story can lie to its characters, can mislead them into thinking they have options when they have none, can maneuver them into thinking they have no options beyond one... but a story should never, ever, lie to the audience. If there’s a setup, its payoff must be honest. 

To paraphrase Gaiman, a story doesn’t have to be real to be true --- and the place we most often glimpse a story��s truth in how it handles its payoffs.  

#the dragon prince #writing #story structure #setups and payoffs #sol thinks about stuff

[animesavior]

"What the hell am I doing? I’ll tell you. I'm here, and in the moment I've lived for."

-          Joe, Megalo Box (ep. 13)

The Toonami Trending Rundown for March 23-24, 2019. Megalobox ends its run with a bang as Joe and Yuri have their highly anticipated rematch at the Megalonia finals. Meanwhile, the League of Villains begin their surprise assault at the UA’s hidden campsite, Asuna learns about the Soul Translator and the Underworld as Kirito recovers from his injuries, and Meruem wishes to spend his last moments with Komugi, among other great moments.

On Twitter, Boruto and every show from Sword Art Online to Shippuden on the schedule would successfully trend in the US. #MyHeroAcademia and #SwordArtOnlineAlicization would also trend alongside these shows, but not outright.

Several character trends were also spotted from JoJo’s, Black Clover, and Hunter x Hunter, with Josuke and Rohan (As Josuke somehow cheats his way into winning a dice game), Asta (as Ladros gets back up and proceeds to pummel everyone, forcing Asta to unlock a hidden power), and Meruem (as he spends his last moments with Komugi before both succumbing to the radiation).

On Tumblr, #Toonami would trend alongside #BNHA and #Hunter x Hunter. The full list including statistics and tweet counts from the twitter app and Amr Rahmy’s Fan Screening analytics app can be seen below.

This week's feature was an inspirational speech promo titled "Stay True To Yourself". You can check it out below.

Following the success of My Hero Academia: The Two Heroes in theaters, Studio Bones and Toho Animation have announced that a second film of the hit franchise is in the works, scheduled to premiere sometime in Winter 2020. Funimation has yet to reveal plans for a theatrical release this side of the Pacific at this time.

Netflix has announced that they will be putting up the original Evangelion series up on their streaming service on June 21. Unfortunately, it has been revealed that Netflix will be doing a completely new re-dub with a new cast as Amanda Win-Lee, the show’s original ADR Director and voice of Rei, has revealed that she and the original crew will not be invited back by Netflix to reprise their roles.

Toonami creators Jason DeMarco and Gill Austin recently talked with our friend and media partner Joshua Mathieu (@jmb70056) from Toonami Squad, including how Toonami will remain competitive in this golden age of streaming, its new partnership with Crunchyroll, and the 30th anniversary of DBZ, among other things. Check it out by clicking here.

Sports anime has historically been a tough sell for the Western anime fandom. During the mid-2000’s, Toonami saw IGPX and the Prince of Tennis stumbling and Slam Dunk and Eyeshield 21 ended up pretty much DOA. While the sports genre of anime has seen a resurgence this decade thanks to the likes of Free, Yuri on Ice, and Haikyu, due to the previously mentioned shows’ focusing more on the slice of life aspects rather than the action, it perhaps came as no surprise that Toonami wasn’t really interested, and thus a sports anime joining the better cartoon show in the modern era remained elusive. That was, until Megalo Box came.

A show created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ashita no Joe, this futuristic reinvisioning of the classic manga and anime in Megalo Box was a notable hit and fan favorite among Crunchyroll viewers during the spring 2018 season with its acclaimed music, animation, and story among other things. The series would become one of the most requested anime to eventually air on Toonami, especially when Viz announced that they had licensed and were producing a dub at Anime Expo, and I think it’s safe to say the requests were heard loud and clear by Toonami and Viz. During New York Comic Con, Viz had announced that Megalo Box would make its debut on the better cartoon show on December 8, and the rest is history.

13 weeks of Joe’s quest to reach the top, and Megalo Box’s run is in the books. During the show’s run, the show successfully trended on Twitter in the US every single Saturday it had aired during its 13 week run, and included a character trend in Mikio during week 9. The show also showed up in the top 30 Amr Rahmy’s Fan Screening app during all 13 weeks.

Whether we will see more of Joe’s story in the future is hard to say, but overall Megalo Box overall was an enjoyable ride and it was great to see Toonami commemorate the golden anniversary of this historic franchise. Thanks for the memories.

Due to the glitch that preempted SAO last week, and with the next acquisition apparently not ready to go just yet, SAO will premiere both Episodes 7 and 8 from 12:30 to 1:30am ET. In addition, we’ll also see the conclusion of Hunter x Hunter’s Chimera Ant arc, while Boruto begins the School Trip arc, and Naruto begins The Taming of Nine-Tails and Fateful Encounters arc, among other moments. Until then, see you again next week as always.

Legend: The shows listed are ordered based on their appearance on the schedule. Show trends are listed in bold. The number next to the listed trend represents the highest it trended on the list (not counting the promoted trend), judging only by the images placed in the rundown. For the Twitter tweet counts, the listed number of tweets are also sorely based on the highest number shown based on the images on the rundown.

United States Trends:

Toonami/#Toonami [#5]

#Boruto [#15]

#MyHeroAcademia [Trended alongside #Toonami and #MegaloBox]

#SwordArtOnline [#9]

#SwordArtOnlineAlicization [Trended alongside #SwordArtOnline]

#MegaloBox [#6]

#JoJosBizarreAdventure [#6]

Josuke (From JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) [#19]

Rohan (From JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) [#14]

#BlackClover [#5]

Asta (From Black Clover) [#17]

#HunterXHunter [#2]

Meruem (From Hunter x Hunter) [Trended alongside #HunterXHunter]

#Shippuden [#9]

Tweet Counts:

#Toonami [6,115 tweets]

#DragonBallSuper [3,202 tweets]

#Boruto [3,823 tweets]

#SwordArtOnline [2,325 tweets]

#MegaloBox [2,212 tweets]

#JoJosBizarreAdventure [3,908 tweets]

Josuke (From JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) [2,720 tweets]

Rohan (From JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) [3,792 tweets]

#BlackClover [1,438 tweets]

Asta (From Black Clover) [5,159 tweets]

#HunterXHunter [2,885 tweets]

Fan Screening Counts:

#DragonBallSuper [#7 with 2803 tweets]

#Boruto [#5 with 4910 tweets]

#MyHeroAcademia [#7 with 2851 tweets]

#SwordArtOnline [#10 with 1836 tweets]

#MegaloBox [#11 with 2386 tweets]

#JoJosBizarreAdventure [#7 with 2931 tweets]

#BlackClover [#21 with 1134 tweets]

#HunterXHunter [#9 with 3018 tweets]

Tumblr Trends:

#Toonami

#BNHA

#Hunter X Hunter

Notes and Other Statistics:

#swordartonlinealicization: @WhoTrendedIT reported that @FUNimation started the trend in the US.

#MegaloBox: @WhoTrendedIT reported that @KaijiTang started the trend in the US.

#BlackClover: @WhoTrendedIT reported that @shonenjump started the trend in the US.

#AttackOnTitan: @WhoTrendedIT reported that @GoodSmile_US started the trend in the US.

Special thanks to @blanco-journey,  @coreymbarnes , @sdurso5 and others I forgot to mention for spotting some of the trends on this list.

Goodnight. Only Toonami on [adult swim] on Cartoon Network.

#Toonami #Adult Swim #Cartoon Network #Toonami Trending Rundown #Megalo Box #Dragon Ball Super #Dragon Ball Z #DBZ #Naruto #Boruto #Naruto Shippuden #My Hero Academia #Boku no Hero Academia #Sword Art Online #SAO #JoJo's Bizarre Adventure #Rohan #Josuke #Black Clover #Asta #Hunter x Hunter #Meruem

[multi-fandom-imagines-party]

Western Stars: An Adric/Nyssa Western AU one-shot

(gifs not mine, credit to the original posters)

Western Stars: An Adric/Nyssa one-shot

(Requested by @4thdoctorjellybabies)

The heat from the sun suffused everything, causing sweat to break out all over the young man. He could feel beads of moisture dripping down his back underneath his shirt, vest, and coat as he took out his handkerchief to mop his brow. He readjusted his hat, not wanting the sun to burn and damage his pale complexion. The stagecoach kicked up puffs of dust as it rattled away over the dirt road, leaving him standing in the middle of Traken. The town had the largest bank for miles around, and he was to be the new manager.

He looked up at the wooden building, seeing the brightly-painted sign denoting it as the bank. He hoped his future would be as bright and cheerful as the sign, but he doubted it. After his failure, this supposed promotion was actually his exile.

Walking up the steps of the building, he toppled to the ground as someone stumbled into him mid-step.

“Oh my goodness, I am terribly sorry!” A gloved hand reached down into his vision. “Here let me help you up,” a feminine voice said.

He looked up, taking the proffered hand. The hand was attached to a woman, older than himself, but beautiful. Her curls hair was doing its best to escape the ribbons that tied it back, leaving ringlets to bounce on the side of her face. Her red blouse and vest accented her figure quite nicely - although he really shouldn’t be looking at that. His eyes widened as he realized she was wearing.... trousers!

He shook his head, trying to clear away the thoughts. “My apologies, miss. My mind was elsewhere. Thank you, miss...?”

“Oh! My name is Nyssa, Nyssa Sutton. And you are?”

“Adric Waterhouse, at your service,” he said.

“Well, Mr. Waterhouse, any business you have at the bank will have to wait. The old manager died, and no replacement has come yet,” she said as she shook her head.

“I was sent here by my superiors; I am to be the new manager of the bank.”

Her eyes brightened. “Finally! It will be good to have someone new in town. The doctor has the keys. I can take you to meet him.” She stepped down, then looked at him, waiting. It would be rude to refuse her offer of help.

Adric tried to think of something, just so he could keep talking to her. Her voice was melodic and soothing. “Have you been in town long, Miss Sutton?”

She shook her head. “I don’t live in town. I own Sutton Ranch, about nine miles east of here. I raise cattle and horses.”

Well, the trousers made more sense, although she could at least wear a skirt in town. “Why does the doctor have the keys? I would think the sheriff would hold onto them.”

“Our doctor and sheriff are the same person. This is a quiet little town, and the doctor is a good man, the best around. He simply prefers to be known as a doctor, rather than by his sheriff title.”

She stopped in front of a two-story wooden building. “This is the doctor. I have to leave, I have business to finish here in town before I go back to the ranch. It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Waterhouse.” She smiled at him, a bright, sunny smile, which faded into a sheepish expression. “I do apologize for stumbling into you, though.”

Adric smiled at her. “The pleasure was mine, Miss Sutton, and you have nothing to apologize for.”

Adric’s earlier hopes of a bright, sunny future as the bank manager were proven to be false, much to his dismay. There was barely any work for him to do since, with the exception of Miss Sutton and the doctor/sheriff, the majority of the townsfolk distrusted banks and those who worked at them. The doctor, older than Adric but still young, soon became his only friend in town, the other man being remarkably amiable. Adric was sure the doctor was the only reason the townsfolk hadn’t run him out of town; even though he was a banker, he was the doctor’s friend, and apparently that counted for more than the other.

His days were filled with a whole heap of nothing to do. Granted, he was still getting paid, but for how long? He was sure he’d be fired after his earlier mistakes, but now it seemed he was to be blamed for the failure of this branch, then fired. With a reputation like that, it would be difficult to get a job.

On the bright side, Miss Sutton, or Nyssa as she soon insisted he call her, visited him every time she came into town. She, like himself and the doctor, prized reading and education, and brought books for him to read in his moments of nothing. Mostly they were on animal husbandry, farming, and other things useful for more agricultural pursuits, but it was still fascinating to him.

When she came to visit, they would often talk. She told him about how her father had passed away, leaving Nyssa to run their ranch. She told him what it was like for her, growing up without a mother in the middle of nowhere. She told him about the struggles of being an unmarried woman and running the ranch. He, in turn, told her about his childhood in Alzarius, how his own parents had died in a fire leaving him and his brother to grow up by themselves. He told her how his brother died during a fight between his gang and a rival one. He told her about how, eventually, he moved to Logopolis, with the dream of becoming a mathematician or a lawyer. Their time together caused him to develop a fondness for her.

One day, yet another boring one where no one came to the bank, Nyssa stormed in the front door. Adric fumbled his feet off his desk, the book he’d been reading flopping down. Nyssa’s hair was in disarray. When she looked at him, he could see tear stains on her cheeks.

“Nyssa, what is wrong? What has happened?” He’d never seen her like this before; while she would rant about her difficulties running her ranch, she’d never cried.

She burst into tears, throwing herself at him. Surprised, he caught her in his arms as she sobbed into his shoulder. He remembered his mother used to pat him on the back when he was a child; perhaps it would be as soothing to Nyssa as it was to him? Awkwardly, he gently patted her on the back. To his dismay, it only increased her tears.

The doctor came rushing in, looking around wildly. “Adric, have you seen- oh, you found her! Excellent. I was worried about her.”

“What is wrong, Doctor? She has not said anything since she came in.” Adric was becoming more worried by the second.

The doctor sighed. “A man, claiming to be her father’s brother, came to the ranch. He brought with him a will of her father’s that left everything to him, instead of Miss Sutton. It is a later date than the one we have.” The doctor shook his head, his mouth a grim line. “I believe it is a fake, but I do not have the power to declare it as such. I sent a telegraph for a judge, but I do not know how soon he will arrive.”

“What happens if the will is declared genuine?”

“It isn’t real!” Nyssa shouted, her eyes full of anger. “My father was an only child; he had no siblings at all, much less a brother! He would have told me. He... he would have told me...” She trailed off, tears filling her eyes once again.

“I will stall him for as long as I can.” the doctor said as he patted her shoulder. “In the meantime, I think that you,” he said gesturing to Nyssa, “should either have someone stay with you at the ranch, or stay here in town with someone. I do not trust this so-called uncle of yours.”

Nyssa shook her head. “I’m unable leave the ranch, not at this time of the year. It’s foaling season.”

The doctor looked at him, a glimmer in his eye. “Adric, will you stay with Nyssa? I can deputize you, giving you authority to deal with anything that might come up. Just... be careful. As I said, I do not trust him.”

Adric nodded. If the man was a criminal, there was no telling what he was capable of. If he hurt Nyssa... Adric had already lost his brother, he wasn’t going to lose anyone else. “You two are the only ones who come to the bank; I doubt I will be missed here.” He looked at her. “Would you consent to my- ?”

Nyssa’s eyes shined brightly, a light blush staining her cheeks. “Would you? I hate to impose, or seem improper, but I would feel safer with you.” Adric was struck by how the light from the windows sparkled in her eyes, and his breath caught in his chest. He cleared his throat, nodded, and smiled at her, not trusting his voice at the moment. From the corner of his eye, he saw the doctor watching them with a pleased look on his face. Whatever did the man have to be pleased about?

The winds were blustering by the time Adric and Nyssa left town. The sky grew darker as the clouds changed from fluffy white, to dense, heavy grey. They could both smell the coming storm. They only hoped they would get to the ranch before the skies opened up. Being caught in a storm would be dangerous, especially if it was a thunder storm. The wagon rattled and bounced along the dirt roads as Nyssa hurried the horses along. Adric focused on holding on to the side of the seat, trying to keep from bumping Nyssa with his legs.

As time passed, the clouds grew darker and more numerous. Neither Adric nor Nyssa could see the sky itself, only the clouds. They saw a flash of lightening in the distance. The boom of thunder pealed around them. The first few raindrops fell.

“We need to get to the ranch!”

Nyssa shook her head. “We are only halfway there; we won’t make it.” She stopped the wagon, as more rain fell down on them. Another clap of thunder sounded, and Nyssa urged the horses down a track on the left side of the road.

“Where are we going?”

“Farmer who left a few years ago, his barn is still standing. It’s closer than the ranch, and we need shelter.”

The wind picked up speed, whipping their wet hair into their faces. The wagon bumped and thumped along the track, which was barely wide enough. Adric held on, afraid he’d fall off if he didn’t. Soon the barn came into view. While the paint was peeling all over, the roof and walls appeared to be secure. Adric jumped down to open the doors as Nyssa led the horses in. He wrestled the doors back into place, and laid his damp coat over the side of the wagon to dry.

Movement in the shadows caught his eye. “Nyssa, behind you!” A man wrapped his hand around her neck, his other arm restraining her. As Adric froze, not wanting to do anything that would cause Nyssa to be harmed, a heavy object thudded into the back of his head. The world darkened as he fell to the ground.

Pain caused Adric to regain consciousness. Trying to move his hand informed him that he was tied up rather securely, around his wrists, arms and torso, and legs. He could move his head though, and he saw the man from earlier sitting with several others; someone else stood apart from them, talking to them. They were a tall gentleman, with slicked back dark brown hair and a beard. Adric didn’t like the way he looked; his eyes were dead, and he had a cruel twist to his sneer. Looking to his left, he saw Nyssa, also tied up. She was so still, he was afraid that they killed her. He was relieved when a small moan came from her let him know she was still alive.

“Ah, it appears my niece is awake.” The villain walked over and knelt by Nyssa. His voice was cultured and oily, the voice of a villain. Adric closed his eyes almost all the way, only enough for him to see through, and worked to keep his breathing even. He didn’t want the man to notice he was awake. “You have such poor luck, my dear. You and your friend stumbled right into our grasp.” He reached out, gently patting Nyssa’s curls, then sharply grabbed her chin, forcing her to look at him. “I will make this quite simple. Desist in contesting your father’s will, or both you and your friend will die. Your own will shall be found, making the ranch over to me. Since no one will challenge it, I shall receive what I want anyway. You have until the storm stops to think it over.” He let go of her and walked away, settling near a small fire his goons had built.

Adric’s mind was racing. Even if Nyssa agreed to the new will, they both knew this man was dangerous. He would likely kill them anyway, to make sure no one knew his secret. Adric had to get himself and Nyssa free, and to the doctor. Perhaps... He twisted and wriggled his hands, just the way his brother had taught him. He worked slowly, carefully, making sure their captors couldn’t see him. The ropes loosened slightly. Not enough for him to free himself, but it was working. His wrists were being rubbed raw, but he couldn’t let a little pain stop him. Nyssa’s life was at stake. He couldn’t lose someone else, not like his brother. He couldn’t lose her.

Finally, the ropes loosened enough for Adric to slip his hands out. There was a hole in the wall closest to them, just large enough for Nyssa and him to escape. If he could find something sharp, he could cut their ropes. A boom of thunder startled the horses, and their captors had to quiet them. One was more frightened than the others, and refused to calm down.

“Quiet, you ugly nag!” One of the goons threw a bottle; instead of hitting the horse, it hit the wooden post above Adric, showering him in glass fragments.

“That’s enough, you fool!” The leader shouted angrily and cuffed him over the head.

A sharp pain alerted Adric to a piece of glass by his hands. Feeling it, he was overjoyed to find it was a large shard, sharp and sturdy enough to cut through the ropes.

Slowly, hoping and praying he wouldn’t be seen, he inched towards Nyssa. When he was close enough, he touched her hand. “Nyssa,” he whispered, “I have a piece of glass. There is a hole in the wall, above our heads. I will cut the ropes on you, then myself. You head through the hole first, I will follow.” Nyssa wiggled her fingers against his; Adric hoped that meant she understood. He sawed through the ropes. They fell apart as he did. Finished with Nyssa, he passed the shard to her, and she worked on him. The last ropes on his feet came apart, when they heard noises outside.

“This is the sheriff! You are surrounded. Come out with your hands above your head!”

The goons stood up, shouting in confusion. There wasn’t any time. She had to be safe.

“Run Nyssa!” Adric pushed her towards the hole, and she stumbled towards it. She wriggled her way through as he followed her.

“No!” A hand caught his boot, pulling him back in. The imposter glared down at him, fury etched on his face and blazing in his eyes. “You ruined everything!” His hand reached into his coat pocket. He drew out a small revolver, the metal glinting as a flash of lightening illuminated the barn. Adric froze as he watched the revolver point at him. A clap of thunder sounded. Pain blossomed in his chest. His shirt and vest felt warm.

The doors burst open. The doctor rushed in, a rifle in his hand pointing at the the villain. Several men, from the ranch and town, followed him, their own rifles pointing at the criminals. “Lay down your weapons,” the doctor said in a commanding voice, “or face the consequences. We caught you red-handed.”

The imposter tossed down his revolver, holding his hands above his head. The doctor came forward and shackled him. “Tie them up with the ropes.” The doctor swayed back and forth as he stood over Adric- or was that his vision getting worse? The doctor knelt, and Adric shook his head as two of him appeared. “Get my bag from the wagon; Adric’s hurt!” the doctor yelled

Nyssa cried out his name as she ran towards him, tears in her eyes. “There’s so much blood. Adric, Adric, listen to me, do not die. You simply can not die, I need you,” she said as stroked his hair and face; Adric was struck by how her hands were callused and work-worn, yet equally soft and gentle. He tried to focus on what she was saying, but his vision grew dark. The last thing he heard was Nyssa screaming his name as his eyes fell shut.

Adric shaded his eyes as he watched the foals playing in the pasture. The tree above him rustled as a breeze blew through. A shout caused him to turn, and Nyssa rode up with a basket. She smiled as he helped her down from her horse.

“I thought you might be hungry, so I brought lunch for us both.” Her smile was radiant, and Adric couldn’t get enough of it. “I also brought a letter for you; it’s from the bank.”

He ripped open the letter, a grin of delight breaking out over his face as he read the words he’d hoped for. “They accept my resignation!” he whooped as he picked up Nyssa and spun her around in his arms. They both laughed as they tumbled to the ground, dizzy from excitement and spinning.

“Who knew a banker would have such a fine head for horses and cattle?” she teased, though her tone lacked any bite.

Now that he was free from that miserable bank, there was only one thing to do. Nyssa had insisted on looking after him as he healed from the bullet wound. They’d become even closer as time passed. Adric had never felt this way about anyone before. Last night, he’d looked through the few things he had from his parents.

Sitting next to Nyssa, he held her hands in one of his, the other reaching into his pocket. He looked deep into her eyes. “Nyssa, you are a wonderful friend to me. You are kind, thoughtful, intelligent, beautiful, and so much more. I am unable to properly describe all the happiness and joy and good I feel because of you. This ring belonged to my mother; my father gave it to her. Nyssa, will you marry me?”

Tears filled her eyes. She said nothing. Adric began to fear he’d made a mistake, when she wrapped her arms around his neck. “Yes! Yes, I will be happy to marry you!” She kissed him firmly. He leaned back.

“Nyssa, your reputation-” He was cut off with another kiss. As petals drifted down around them and the foals played, Adric thought that maybe kissing wasn’t such a bad thing to do with no one else around. As Nyssa leaned back, he tangled one hand in her hair, the other wrapped around her waist, and pulled her in for another kiss.

#request #requests #one-shot #doctor who #classic who #classic doctor who #adric #nyssa #adric doctor who #nyssa doctor who #fanfic #fanfiction #doctor who fanfic #doctor who fanfiction #classic who fanfic #classic who fanfiction #classic doctor who fanfic #classic doctor who fanfiction #fifth doctor #the fifth doctor #4thdoctorjellybabies request #this got away from me

[cupidsbower]

It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation

Supernatural 13x11 “Breakdown,” and 13x12 “Various and Sundry Villains.”

I can tell I’m up to eps that are after the mid-season finale now, because the Destiel game is picking up.

Breakdown

This is another ep setting up the Wayward Sisters ‘verse, focusing on Donna, Doug, and the widening circle of crimes that mix the human and supernatural.

The Butterfly Killer seems at first to be a human serial killer in a human crime case, until we get the big reveal of the human Butterfly Killer actually servicing supernatural clients, using the all too human medium of the internet. This is the beginning of an overt theme that questions where supernatural hunts end and human cases begin, which goes on to be explored in later eps. The show has been fairly careful to tread the line on this until now, but like so many aspects this season it, this case explores dualities and messes up all the lines between them. We see this same theme with Jack being both human and angel, Mordor and ParadiseEarth, the two Kaias and so on.

The Butterfly Killer’s music also plays with this as there are three love songs linked to torture and suspense. We get Look In My Eyes by The Chantels with the first torture scene, Too Good to Be True by Lon Rogers & The Soul Benders when Wendy cries for help, and Big Flame (Is Gonna Break Me Heart In Two) by Doris Wilson as the false lead of the radio in an empty room.

Are these upbeat happy moments, as the killer and clients think, or are they horrifying, as the victim and real audience think? Perspective, baby, it’s all about perspective, and also that pesky morality.

We get another installment of false/corrupt fathers this ep too -- Agent Clegg is not Dean’s father, despite calling him “son.” He’s not even that much older than Dean, so this is clearly a power play, with Clegg using it to claim a more senior role in the patriarchy.

AGENT CLEGG: Excuse me! Hey! What are you doing? DEAN: Oh, I um… AGENT CLEGG: I asked you a question, son. DEAN: First off, I’m not your son. Second- DOUG: Whoa, whoa, easy. Agent Clegg, this is Agent Savage, FBI. (x)

As always, John is still present in the text, when Dean follows his advice rather than Clegg’s. The use of John’s old-school VB radio works, where Clegg’s misdirection does not. This is interesting, as Dean has mostly been criticised via these kinds of parallels in recent seasons, but this time, John comes off well. He taught Dean and Sam some valuable skills, right alongside the toxic masculinity and other issues he brought to their family.

But just in case we’re being lulled into thinking toxic masculinty maybe isn’t that bad after all, we get the sexist truckers chiming that they’ll make Alice “family”. Ugh.

More interestingly, Sam and Donna are both depressed about the missing family members at the start of the ep, a niece in one case, and because of the obvious paralell, this ep pretty much confirms for me that Sam’s role towards Jack is more uncle (or perhaps older brother) than father.

SAM: You see? Told you. This is stupid. DEAN: It’ll work. Dad used it all the time. SAM: This isn’t even our kind of case. And you know, with the real Feds here, we should back down. DEAN: You’re joking, right? SAM: We’re still fugitives. DEAN: They think we’re dead. SAM: Do you really wanna get on the FBI’s radar again? DEAN: Okay, so what do you wanna do? Hmm? You wanna call up Donna and say “Hey, sorry about your niece. These kinds of things happen. Later.” And head back to the bunker so you can mope some more? SAM: I’m not moping. DEAN: You got up at 10:00 am this morning. 10:00 am. You, Mr. Rise and Freakin’ Shine. And then you turned down pancakes. SAM: I wasn’t hungry. DEAN: They’re pancakes. Look, I know you’re in a dark place right now, okay? I mean, we lost Jack. Mom is… I think about ‘em too. All the time. But you can’t let it eat you up. Now look, when I was-when I was broken up, you were there for me. Well, I’m here for you now. And I’m telling you, the only way out of this is through. Now when everything goes to hell, what do we do? We put our heads down and we do the work. We’ll find Jack. We’ll save Mom, we will. But right now, Donna needs our help. Okay?

DEAN: I mean, we save people, Sam. SAM: Yeah, we also get people killed, Dean. Kaia, for instance. She helped us and she died for it. DEAN: Hey, look, I know you’re in some sort of a- SAM: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, don’t - don’t… You keep saying I’m in a dark place, but I’m not, Dean. Everything I’m saying is the truth. It’s our lives. And I tried to pretend it didn’t have to be. I tried to pretend we could have Mom back and Cas and - and help Jack. But we can’t. This ends one way for us, Dean. It ends bloody. It ends bad.

Isn’t it interesting the way that Dean and Sam are emotionally flip-flopping? Dean was depressed when Castiel was gone. Sam is depressed without Mary or Jack. That toxic co-dependency is shattered all the way through now, with only inertia keeping it in place. They go through the motions of this speech, which is becoming more threadbare with each iteration. When are they allowed to just stop, feel their feelings, and grieve? When are they allowed to be Hunters and people? When do they get to let the negative aspects of John’s legacy go, and just keep the good bits?

The text actually talks about this via metaphor. Sam’s heart goes for $500,000, turning it into a commodity. No room for feelings there, right? It’s just a lump of meat, not the seat of emotions. But the text makes it pretty clear that this is a horific way to value people -- for the value of their physical labour alone, with no place for the qualities that make them human.

CLEGG/THE BUTTERFLY: Add a zero. Actually, add two. See, those freaks that you and your brother chase, those are just the ones that can’t pass. Either because they’re too mean or they’re too stupid, or both. But most monsters… hell, they could be your next-door neighbor. They work a regular job, mow the lawns on a Saturday. And they need to eat, which is where I come in. SAM: So you sell them people. CLEGG/THE BUTTERFLY: I sell them people other people won’t miss. And because I do that, I save lives. If my customers didn’t have me… then all those hungry, hungry hippos would be out there huntin’ and killin’. And you couldn’t stop ‘em. No one could. You should be thanking me. SAM: Huh. Yeah. Alright. Go to Hell. CLEGG/THE BUTTERFLY: I’ll see you there. Now I know you’ve been stalling because you think Dean’s gonna show up, but… Sorry, kid. It’s showtime. Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you something truly special. A new auction. Introducing… Mr. Sam Winchester!

We also get the latest iteration of “people have heard of the Winchesters” here, but yet again they aren’t taken seriously enough. I wonder where that’s going? I’m starting to think the season will end with the invasion from Mordor, because the show is doing a lot of set up to expand the awareness of monsters and Hunting. Obviously this is at least in part due to Wayward Sisters, but it seems to be foreshadowing the Apocalypse redux as well. Is the supernatural going to go public? Will the FBI get involved? The show has been reminding us of the fact Dean and Sam faked their deaths to get away from the FBI. I hope we do get more on this. I think it would be interesting to see the FBI actually figuring out what the Winchesters are, after all this lead up of everyone else getting it so wrong.

Finally, Donna shines in this ep. Her great interrogation is fantastically done, and she kicks ass in the field. I really can’t wait to see what she brings to Wayward Sisters.

Doug is such a sweetheart, and now he knows about the supernatural, in the most horrific way possible. I really, really hope we get a bunch more of him working through his issues in WS.

DONNA: Doug. I’m sorry I lied to you… but I can’t give this up. DOUG: I know. Donna, you kill monsters. You’re a damn hero. But that’s… it’s not me. I’m sorry. I love you. I’m sorry. DONNA: Doug, wait! SAM: Let him go. Donna, when you choose this life, anyone who gets too close, eventually they get hurt. Or worse. So let him go. He’ll be safer that way.

That endless refrain from Sam, but you know, that is no way to live.

Various and Sundry Villains

Wowser, what a Destiel-heavy episode! Yockey really knows how to work it.

I want to start by talking about the books that Sam and Dean are consulting. Because I’m a giant nerd. I always find the book titles in Supernatural interesting, and these are particuarly so, because as far as I can tell they are mostly made up.

“Principia Phantasmagoria” doesn’t seem to be a real book, but rather a mash-up of several other very well known books.

The most likely progenitor is the Principia Discordia - or - How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her. The introduction to this tome claims, “If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe. Most disorganized of all religions, Discordianism alone understands that organization is the work of the Devil. Holy Chaos is the Natural Condition of Reality, contrary to popular belief” (x).

I really hope this is the text Yockey is slyly referring to, but he could just be putting together words that create a strong impression of what the book would be about.

Principia is Latin for a fundamental principle, and two foundational texts use it in their titles. Descarte wrote a Principia, which was one of the inspirations for Newton’s 1687, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which explains, “the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science” (x).

Phantasmagoria is a display of dream-like images or seances, “a form of horror theatre” (x).

Put them together, and the Principia Phatasmagoria would be the seminal text on dream-walking. I wonder who wrote it in the Supernatural ‘verse?

"Archive of Unnatural Occurrences" also doesn’t exist, but in Googling that title, I found a) a Supernatural fanfiction about two sisters; and b) a this absolutely fascinating treatise on Archives: “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” by Derrida and Prenowitz (which pretty much tells you all you need to know, right there). They argue that creating an archive is like the Word of God, because it’s both a Commencement and a Commandment -- it doesn’t just begin to categorise a collection of material or ideas, it also changes the way a society thinks about those materials or ideas because of the way they are categorised (x).

The Book of Day and Night is real - huzzah! It’s an Egyptian text designed to help the dead king find their way in the afterlife, and is usually part of the decoration tombs. Here’s a description: “Other funerary compositions include the “Book of Day” and the “Book of Night,” which depict Nut, the sky-goddess, spread out across the heavens, as well as the “Book of the Heavenly Cow,” in which Nut is transformed into a cow on whom Re ascends to the firmament. Astronomical figures decorate the ceilings of several burial chambers” (x).

So what I take from this is that a) there are going to be a lot of “Nut” jokes coming up, b) that a lot more people are going to come back from the dead this season, and c) if Sam and Dean create a map of the paths between worlds, an Archive of them if you will, they will have the power of Gods.

Heady stuff!

Of course we don’t start off on such a high note.

SAM: I’m just saying, Dean, Jack was our way over there, obviously, so with him gone… DEAN: Okay, well, Jack’s been gone before. We found him once. We can find him again. SAM: No, no, he didn’t run away. He is literally in an alternate reality. DEAN: Okay, so we’ll just come up with a plan B, okay? You said it yourself. We just keep our heads down and we’ll do the work. SAM: You said that. DEAN: And I was right. Yeah. So you read, do your Sam thing, I’m gonna go for a beer run. SAM: Yeah. DEAN: We should probably loop Cas in at some point. SAM: We’ll fill him in when he calls. He checks in every day. DEAN: Yeah, with a bunch of questions and no leads. [We see Castiel sitting in a dark prison cell in hell, illuminated by a single unseen overhead light] SAM: I’m sure he is doing the best he can. Just go get beer or… [waves Dean away] (x)

Dean wants to go on a beer run, and thinks immediately of Cas. A nice callback to his muffed love declaration at the end of the Amara arc. We also get another go around of the “we just do what we do” mantra that Dean keeps spouting this season. Sam seems to think it’s wearing a bit thin.

And then we cut to Lucifer and Cas, and get a dick joke about the size of Lucifer’s “power”. Hahaha. Yeah, I can see where this is going already.

Next up is the latest incarnation of the theme of “people have heard of the Winchesters” and in this case, have heard of the car too. We find out later it’s via Rowena who told Jamie and Jennie about them, and I would love to know what she actually said. Jamie and Jennie are awful cocky given the givens, so methinks Rowena downplayed how dangerous the Winchesters can be.

So Jamie and Jennie blithely hexbag Dean into love, so that he’ll steal the Grimoire for them. Luckily we’ve already had that impotence joke, so the foreshadowing says this will come to naught.

And then we get this...

SAM: Hey, uh… I think you might be right. I think maybe it’s time we go ahead and call Cas, because, I mean, if…if… [Dean continues to whistle while doing a little spin as he enters the library. He drops the 6-pack and his keys on the table] SAM: You all right? DEAN: Am I all right? I’m in love. SAM: You...Oh, are you? DEAN: I mean, I am, like, full-on twitterpated here. Seriously, I can’t wait for you to meet her, either. She - I mean, she’s… She’s sweet and she’s beautiful and she’s just kinda sorta perfect. Anyway, I’m thinking of asking her to move in with me here…if that’s cool ‘cause this is big time. [Dean opens a drawer and removes the Black Grimoire and unwraps it] DEAN: Ahh. SAM: Uh, Dean, w-what are you doing with the Black Grimoire? DEAN: It’s a gift. For Jamie. SAM: For…Jamie? DEAN: My soul mate. [winking]

All the mentions of Castiel that lead up to Dean’s announcement are wrapped around this scene like a... condom? Sorry, I can’t think of a better wrapping metaphor. There was the reminder of Dean’s muffed love confession on the last beer run, and then this mention of Cas by Sam which Dean ignores, and instead Dean announces he’s in love, and calls her his soul mate -- he might as well have added they have a profound bond. Like, if Dean and Cas were a het will-they-won’t-they pairing, it could not be any clearer that the only person Dean could legitimately be declaring as his Love here is Castiel. It’s not even subtext, it’s main text at this point, given the way Castiel has been used to frame this moment... but it’s main text that refuses to state it overtly so that homophobes can continue to live in comfortable in denial.

Okay, I have to rant a bit here and let off steam about this. I’m here for the Destiel. I love this love story. But come on. COME ON. It’s cowardly storytelling to write this kind of queering of the text -- to actually dangle plot threads off it, it’s that central -- and refuse to admit it. I know a lot of the Supernatural creatives now pretty much do say that’s what happening -- the whole “eye fucking” stuff in the scripts, for instance -- but it’s mostly framed as “jokes” that aren’t actually jokes, and I’m tired of this. Get it together, show. This is old.

ANYWAY, Dean is in lurrrrve, but OH NOES, it’s some random girl who has obviously hexed him. It’s not even a question in Sam’s mind or our minds. The wrong name came out of his mouth, and he’s too damn happy about it, so we all know Something Is Very Wrong With Dean.

Sam comes to the rescue of course, and we get the slapstick moment of Dean and Sam fighting each other as the witches get away, with Sam’s limbs all over the shop, and Dean making goofy faces. I love irony like this -- it’s not a happy moment in the plot, but it’s a funny moment thanks to the performances. As I mentioned in my last meta, this is why the Winchesters aren’t taken seriously when monsters gossip about them. Moments just like this.

Rowena!!!!!!

I love her so much. She can resurrect as many times as she likes and I’ll be happy.

Intriguing that they have her and Sam bonding over their fear of Lucifer. They’ve really done a fabulous job of making Rowena a complex and interesting villain. I think she’s pretty much my all-time fave out of the rogues gallery.

DEAN: Yeah, the Devil’s gone. ROWENA: Oh, don’t be stupid. He’s never gone! SAM: Okay, listen, I know what Lucifer is cap– ROWENA: Oh, can we not? It’s like reminiscing about an abusive relationship. Why do that? DEAN: Let’s get back to the book. What kind of hurt can these chicks do with it? ROWENA: Oh, I’m sure they have big plans. SAM: Sounds like you know ‘em. ROWENA: Just remember being a young, overly ambitious, wee witch. And I have to give them some credit. Outfoxed you, didn’t they? [chuckling to Dean] Tell me, did they get to fifth base? DEAN: There’s no such thing as fifth base. ROWENA: Oh, you poor, sheltered boy.

Fifth base, in case you were wondering is anal sex (x). There’s a few different ways to read Dean’s response to Rowena’s question. He could be dissembling because he’s deep deep deep in the closet, but to me he comes off as genuinely puzzled. Given that, my reading is that Dean has never had anal sex with another dude. Sure it’s possible he’s done so without having heard this phrase before, and even if he’s never done that particular act, it still leaves a lot of room for sexy things he could have done with dudes. However, the case I make is that Dean picks up slang like other people learn languages, and if he hasn’t heard this expression before, his exposure to gay culture has to be pretty limited. He might have tried a few things, but not so much that he’s learned the lingo. In short: he’s inexperienced at best, and quite possibly still hymenated in this respect.

That noise you hear? Is a thousand fan theories crumbling to dust. Fare ye well, amigos, it’s been a blast.

But! (Butt. hahaha)

On the plus side, we can now revisit the whole issue of Dean’s first time with a dude, and I have to thank canon for giving us that golden opportunity.

We get another dick joke when Sam tells us, “Dean has a tape of Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” with an 8-minute drum solo.” You’ve probably noticed that I tend to look at the lyrics of songs used or mentioned on the show, but in this case it’s instrumental so my meta instincts are thwarted.

Except for the title of the track. Moby. Dick. The great white Dick that got away. Hahaha. Ironic, as it’s the ep that Castiel finally gets free. And now I will forever assume that Jimmy Novak was well endowed. ;)

There are only two more things I want to mention in this ep. The first is the fatherhood theme. It’s mainly present in the conversation between Castiel and Lucifer.

LUCIFER: There’s no “if” here in this equation, okay? Let me - let me just - let me just tell you something about my dick brother, about every version of my dick brother, okay? When he decides to do something, he does it. Doesn’t matter what the cost or who has to die. It’s gonna happen, ‘cause that’s just the way he rolls. CASTIEL: If you’re right, how much time do we have? LUCIFER: How much time? Oh. I guess that depends on how much time he spends torturing Mary Winchester. He liked her, right? Oh, Cas, you should have seen it. I mean, the things he did to her. In all my time in hell, I’ve never seen anything that horrible. Just…Oh! CASTIEL: Stop. I don’t want to hear any more of your lies. LUCIFER: Oh, this from the angel who almost has me beat in that department, and that’s saying a lot, pal. CASTIEL: Well, you always say a lot. LUCIFER: Okay, let’s face it, Cassandra, the truths I say hurts ‘cause the’re hard to swallow, so people call them lies. Go figure. CASTIEL: You want truth? How ‘bout I tell you a few truths about your son? LUCIFER: Did you just have an angel stroke? CASTIEL: Did you know that he loves movies? Fantasy movies, movies with heroes who crush villains. LUCIFER: [scoffs] Well, that’s - that’s - that’s nurture. That’s not nature. CASTIEL: And he’s thoughtful. He’s emotional. Remarkably intuitive. You - you know, he, uh, he resurrected me just out of instinct. Isn’t that a beautiful gesture? LUCIFER: [pacing angrily in his cell] Yeah, that’s, uh, that’s beautiful. CASTIEL: Jack would rather kill you than hug you. Seems relevant. Did you know he doesn’t - he doesn’t even really look like you? And he reminds me so much of his mother. LUCIFER: [whispers] Wow.

This particular mention of dicks doesn’t please me, given the subtext here that all the dicks are pointed at Dean. I don’t want Dean to become an angel condom for Michael. But I may be getting it at some point anyway. :(

That aside, I adore how effectively Cas needles Lucifer here. Cas really has learned from the best, and he’s such an asshole. It’s interesting, though, that Lucifer brings up nature vs nurture. I wonder which he considers the cause of his Fall?

Finally, the episode ends with Dean chiding Sam for being in a dark place -- role reversal from the start of the season when Sam was chiding Dean the same way.

DEAN: Look, what happened to Rowena was messed up, okay? But you just let the deadliest witch in the world walk away with a page from this book. SAM: Yeah, and if Rowena breaks bad, I will hunt her down myself and put a bullet in her. I will Dean. But if she’s right, and if she does see Lucifer again, then… I hope she makes him suffer. DEAN: You gotta get out of this dark place. You know, whatever’s going on in your head… SAM: Dean. DEAN: What? SAM: [inhales deeply] You know what? Honestly? DEAN: Yeah, how ‘bout honestly. SAM: I know what Rowena is dealing with. And she’s not the only one who… [inhales deeply] feels helpless. DEAN: What do you mean? SAM: I mean, I had a plan, you know. I, uh… Help Jack, bring Mom back. It wasn’t much, but it was something. It - it kept me from spinning off the rails. And now… Jack is gone, Mom is still in hell, basically, and I-I-I- just… DEAN: We’ll figure it out. SAM: [defeated and angry] Dean, we don’t have a plan. We don’t know what to do. So - so how? DEAN: [confidently] I don’t know. But we will, you and me. [takes a drink of beer] SAM: Yeah. Night. [exits kitchen]

Sam articulates exactly why he’s going off the rails -- because Jack and Mom are missing. And that’s freaking huge. Because if Dean was off balance because Cas was missing, and Sam is off balance because Jack and Mom are missing, that means they are not each other’s sole emotional supports any more.

In other words, the toxic codependency really is on it’s very last legs, the old scripts aren’t working any more, and it’s time to start writing some new ones.

I’ve already seen the next two eps, and if Various and Sundry Villains was a strong Destiel episode, it has nothing on Good Intentions. That is a game changer.

Previously:

I never opened myself this way (13x01 and 13x02)

You say you’ve only got one life to live (13x03, 13x04, 13x05)  

Let me tell you people that I found a new way (13x06, 13x07, 13x08)

Alive and burning brighter (13x09, 13x10)              

#supernatural #meta #spn meta #season 13 #dean winchester #castiel #destiel #sam winchester #lucifer #rowena

[centaurianthropology]

The Magnus Archives ‘A Guest for Mr Spider’ (S03E01) Analysis

After hyperventilating for a while, because IT’S HEEEERE, I got down to listening to the first episode of season 3, and … well, it wasn’t what I had expected, but it was an absolutely fascinating contextualization of a character we’ve known for a while, and also sets the scene for what we might expect going forward in season 3.  Come on in to hear what I thought about …

 The statement of Jonathan Sims, former Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, regarding a childhood encounter with a book once possessed by Jurgen Leitner.

Hooooo … this is going to be a pretty long post, because we have A LOT to get through.  This episode was exposition-rich without feeling like an info dump, which is a credit to Jonny Sims’ writing.  We got really surprising amounts of information about Sims as a character and about what brought him to the Institute.  But we also got some discussion of recent events as well, from a Sims who seems perhaps a week out from the events of the finale.  

First, we got confirmation for something I had suspected throughout season 2: a lot of Sims’ paranoia was induced by the Not-Them.  But then again, while Sims insists that it was all the Not-Them, I think it was more complicated than that.  I have a feeling that, given the very specific reactions that Sims was having compared to Tim or Martin, it was likely a combination of the Not-Them, the Beholding pricking at him and warning him that there was danger nearby, and his own natural paranoia being hugely exaggerated.  Because Sims has always been a little paranoid.  

He is, however, a lot more self-aware in this episode than he has been in quite some time.  He knows that, for the majority of the last season, he really wasn’t playing with a full deck.  I doubt he’s as recovered from the events of season 2 as he thinks.  While he does sound saner, he still frays and starts sounding a lot more broken again when he discusses the fact that his former colleagues now likely think him a psychopathic killer.  A lot is hitting Sims all at once at this point: the loss of his job, being on the run despite the lack of wide-scale manhunt (my guess is that the investigation into Leitner’s death is going to be a very secret thing, likely undertaken by Daisy alone), and having lost people he might not have even recognized as friends before he did indeed lose them.  Sasha is dead, and Martin and Tim both suspect him of murder.  As dismissive as he was of his assistants, I think he’s feeling their loss a lot more keenly than he thought he would.

But most of that remains subtext or only hinted at, because Sims might think he’s no longer the Archivist, but something is still driving him.  Something has made him find a new tape recorder, new tapes, and to start recording again in the exact same manner he did at the Institute.  One could say it was habit, but I think that the Beholding is still claiming him.  He is still the Archivist, and as such the compulsion to behold and to record is overwhelming to him.  The only way he can start to make sense of everything that happened to him and because of him in season 2 is to finally recount the story that started him down this path, that committed him to the study of the paranormal, and that even seems rooted in some of the stupider decisions he’s made in this podcast’s run.

One thing I noticed, even early on, was that Sims was ready to dismiss almost any statement—no matter how compelling—as insubstantiated nonsense.  And yet whenever Jurgen Leitner’s library came up, he took that statement, even flimsy and without any proof, as 100% fact.  Sims was a believer in Leitner’s library and its horrors, if nothing else at the beginning of this series.  And in this statement, we learn why.  Sims himself had an encounter with one of those books, and it changed him in a fundamental way, setting him on the path to become the Archivist.  For Sims, Leitner was the definition of all that was horrific, supernatural, and evil.  Sims readily admits that he was functioning in a very (understandably) self-centered manner at the beginning of his tenure as the Archivist.  He had experienced the horror of a Leitner book, and so that was real. His fear and his suffering were real, but everyone else was likely lying or hallucinating or drugged.  Sims is a deeply self-centered individual, not because he’s a narcissist, but because he has defined himself as something independent of … well, just about everything and everyone else for basically all of his life.

In addition to being a nicely creepy story, we finally get a lot more insight into what formed Jonathan Sims into the man he is today, and even in his childhood he seemed to be defined by two characteristics that seem to have spilled over into his adulthood: isolation, and a belief in his own intelligence that very frequently veers into arrogance.  We also know that Sims was “a child of the 90s”, so is likely in his early to mid-thirties (I think of children of the nineties as those who remember that period as their childhood, so were likely … five or six in 1990?  Making him 32 or 33ish?).  We also know he looks considerably older than his actual age, even to the point of already having graying hair.  We know that both of his parents are dead.  His father died when he was two of an accidental fall, and his mother died a few years later due to complications of a routine surgery.  As such, the only caretaker Sims really knew was a grandmother grieving her dead son, and who resented having to care for a rather difficult grandchild.  Sims’ sense of isolation clearly started early, as while he doesn’t seem to have any outright hostility toward his grandmother, there is a definite distance in the way he discusses her.  She tried her best, but they were clearly never particularly close, and Sims in turn never really developed any deep bonds in his childhood.  The entire statement is devoid of mentions of friends or profound connections.  Even the person who eventually saved him from the book wasn’t a friend, but instead a bully who used to torment Sims, and whose name Sims can’t remember.

This all fits so well with everything we’ve already learned about Sims.  Sims really doesn’t get the idea of family.  think Martin’s story didn’t resonate with him nearly so much as it might with others partially because of the Not-Them’s paranoia, but also partially because the idea of completely upending his life and lying about something fundamental like who and what he was for someone he loved was something that Sims didn’t quite comprehend.  Sims has always functioned for himself first and foremost.  Putting others before his own self-interest is something he is clearly working to be better at.  Indeed, he does have moments of great selflessness, like when he tried to protect his assistants by sending them home in ‘The Librarian’.  But while Martin is naturally caring, and puts others before himself even to a fault, such actions are not natural to Sims.  

Instead of friends, Sims has always preferred books.  But even in that, Sims was difficult to please.  He apparently disliked reading anything that seemed familiar, meaning he would only ever read any given author once, and any given subject once.  His grandmother took to buying every second-hand book she could find that was 50p or less, and just presenting him with piles of books to sort through and choose ones he actually found interesting.  

And second-hand books, of course, lead us straight to the library of Jurgen Leitner.

The description of ‘A Guest for Mr Spider’ is somehow even more chilling than most of the other Leitner books, because it’s a picture book.  The implication there seems to be that it specifically targets children. The strange, horrid, twitchy illustrations depict a series of flies in various costumes coming to visit Mr Spider, only to vanish as more and more of Mr Spider’s home is covered in brown ink and Mr Spider becomes more bloated.  The final consumption of Mr Horse and his son sets clear the context that the book wants children.  It will take older people, and indeed it does end up taking the 19-year-old bully who snatched the book from Sims before he could finish it, but this was a book meant to be found and read by a child.  A child who, like Sims, recognized the book instantly as something wrong and horrific, and yet who was powerless to stop reading.  Who would be drawn through the streets to a house that wouldn’t be found later.  A house full of darkness and webs, and long spider legs.  It puts one in mind of Raymond Fielding.  I wonder if, when reading the statements regarding the house on Hill Top Road, Sims saw reflected in those experiences that house from his own childhood.  Did he read Ronald Sinclair’s statement about Fielding, about the children bound in webs in his basement, and think of himself and that nameless bully?  Or did he ever think to tie those spiders together with Mr Spider?

I wonder if he might not have done.  Rather than focusing on the house and the spiders, Sims seems to have focused all his fear and his anger at Jurgen Leitner.  He would dismiss the statements about spiders readily enough at the beginning, but never a statement about Leitner.  In Sims’ mind, the supernatural was rare, with the majority of the statements he read—even those on tape—made up of hoaxes.  But Leitner was evil personified, and had tapped into some primal power that he wielded to harm 8-year-old Jonathan Sims and reshape his entire perception of how the world worked.

It shines a whole different light on how profound actually meeting Leitner must have been for Sims. Leitner wasn’t some great villain or all-powerful master of the things in his books.  He was a stupid, arrogant man who thought he could control and define things without control or definition.  He was, as Sims says in this episode, a spoiled child.  He looked at the nightmares in this world and thought he had the ability to confront them and contain them purely because he was interested and had a big enough ego to think he could.  He decided to create a way to hold the supernatural to his own whims, much as Robert Smirke had done with his architecture.  But whatever power Smirke wielded that made him so lastingly effective, Leitner lacked.  He contained the books only for a brief time, and then they all found their way back into the wild, potentially more readily available than they had been before. Even his and Gertrude’s scheme to destroy the Institute could well have been similarly short-sighted, and just another effort to exert control from a man who was ultimately just as powerless as anyone else.

This man, who Sims had so feared and hated, is remarkably similar to Sims.  They both believe that if they confront the horrors of this world, they will somehow have the ability to resist and defeat them.  They are both isolated, both believe themselves more intelligent than they actually are, and are both supremely arrogant.  Leitner isn’t a monster.  He’s a cautionary tale.

And now Sims lacks that driving fear of Leitner.  He lacks a job, and he’s realizing that everything he set out to do in season 1 and even his desire from childhood to protect people from the darkness has roundly and repeatedly failed.  He wanted to organize the archive and failed.  He wanted to disprove the majority of the supernatural statements that weren’t directly related to his own trauma, and he failed.  He wanted to keep his assistants as far from harm as possible, and he failed.  And now he’s on the run.  He’s out in the wild without direction or any real idea of what he needs to do.  

So he falls back on compulsion.  He records his own statement, lacking anyone else’s.  He hides and he looks at the shattered remains of his life.  Something is going to happen, I’m certain, to roust him from this hiding space, and to plunge him into the wider world of the supernatural.  Having him out of the Institute may well be exactly the boost to his skill and his understanding that Elias thinks it will be.  He will see the powers of his world in a much more direct fashion.  He may well be able to get statements from faction members who would never set foot inside the Institute.  And he will likely be in terrible danger from all of them. We still don’t know what it means to be the Archivist, but we know that whatever it is, members of other factions want the Archivist.  They want to use him, or tell him things, or get information from him, or kill him. But Sims’ position makes him marked, not only by the Beholding, but every supernatural entity out there.  And this season, I think we’ll learn a lot more about what that really means.

This was quite the episode for big reveals regarding the backstory of Jonathan Sims, and what makes him the man he is today.  So much of it jives perfectly with the man we’ve gotten to know.  He’s protective of others, but in an abstract way that speaks more to a belief that this is the way he ought to be than a sense of genuine connection with others.  And yet he believes enough in this abstract sense of right and wrong that he is willing to put himself in danger to protect innocents.  It was why he tried to deck Michael when he realized a woman had been snatched right under his nose.  Looking back, that experience must have been even more traumatic for him than it had seemed at the time, given how closely it resembled what happened when he was a child. There was someone else walking through a door, never to be seen again, while Jonathan Sims stood by helpless to stop it.  So many of the previous statements have new resonance now that we know how closely Sims’ own experience mirrored them.

His early isolation, as well as seeing someone snatched up by Mr Spider, goes a long way to explaining why he wouldn’t reach out to Martin or Tim throughout season 2, even when he knew he should.  It explains why he’s been so hesitant to foster anything but the most professional relationships with them, despite Martin’s best efforts.  He’s never learned how to connect with anyone on a deep and meaningful level, and he’s only now realizing how detrimental that can be.

More than that, there is a guilt in Sims, unacknowledged and perhaps unconscious, that this bully he can barely even remember died and thereby saved him.  Imagine the guilt that rears up when Leitner revealed that Gertrude had three assistants, and they all died.  Imagine his guilt when he realizes that Sasha is dead and he never even noticed because of the Not-Them.  Imagine his guilt when he realizes that Tim and Martin are unable to quit, and are therefore meant to die for him as well.  These people he could almost call his friends, and some great and unknown power will kill them just because that’s what the assistants of an Archivist do.  There may well be some unconscious belief that if he just pushes them away, if he keeps them as far from him as possible, and if he stays away from the Institute, he can save them.  I doubt that’s the way it works.  I think that something will draw Sims and Martin and Tim back together, but I think that Sims is always going to be operating with that low-level terror that more people, people he cares about this time, people with names and faces he will remember, are going to end up dying because of him again.  Sims has massive amounts of survivor’s guilt, I think, and he doesn’t even realize it.

Conclusions

Starting the season out with a deep-dive character study wasn’t what I expected, but I really liked it. We now have a good idea of what’s going on with Sims right now, and have a better understanding of his head-space. He’s staying with Georgie, the hostess of the ‘What the Ghost’ podcast, and someone Melanie once mentioned actually spoke pretty well of Sims.  It’s still not clear if Sims and Georgie were once romantically involved, but he’s now staying in her guest room and cat-sitting for her.  Their conversations are awkward, like two people who haven’t interacted in years and are suddenly together and realizing how little they have in common.  

I’m interested what they’ll do with Georgie.  I’m honestly hoping she’s not another outsider character, as we already have that in Basira Hussain.  It would be more interesting if she was already an insider, perhaps a member of the Open Eye or working with Trevor the Vampire Slayer or something.  She’s said she’ll believe anything.  What if that’s because she’s already seen so much and has way more contacts in that world than Sims?  What if she’s not just a random character, but the gate through which he’ll be thrown head-first into the wider world of the supernatural in TMA?  That would be a fun twist.

I’m also hoping that, now that we’ve established Sims, we get to see what’s happening at the Institute. What is Elias doing to clean up after season 2?  Was that Daisy on the teaser trailer?  Is she hunting Sims?  If she is, does she intend to deal with him the same way she deals with other supernatural threats?  Is Martin the Interim Head Archivist?  Is Tim still there?  What is their relationship like now?  There are so many questions.  We’ve gotten a surprising number of answers about Sims, so I’m hopeful we’ll start to get a few about our other favorite characters as well starting next week.

#The Magnus Archives #analysis #A Guest for Mr Spider #TMA season 3 #it's goooooood!!!! #seriously #go listen to it before you read this analysis #because this is spoiler-filled flailing at its finest #go and listen #then come back #it's a meta party! #and it doesn't st

[lokgifsandmusings]

Definitive Ranking of Book 1 Episodes, #11/12

11. 1x05 “The Spirit of Competition”

So much probending. So much love quadrilateral.

Need I say more?

I’m back in a totally timely fashion (*coughs*) with the next definitive ranking of Book 1.

Now, I started out this list by explaining my frustration with “Endgame,” and how the biggest issues of the first season are that aside from setting up something ~cool~, there was really no follow-through from the perspective of the plot, or Korra’s development. Bryke seemed wholly unaware of what they were trying to say, and ended up with a season that stood for nothing.

With that in mind, it would seem logical that episodes such as “Turning the Tide” or “Skeletons in the Closet,” where the main plotline quite obviously began to lose its way, would be right at the bottom the list next to “Endgame.” But “Spirit of Competition” is just a special mid-season clunker. The Equalist plotline doesn’t even exist here, and it’s also probably solely responsible for every single complaint about probending since we get THREE matches, none of which are particularly meaningful.

Oh hey, Bolin feels good about himself, so he does well!

The focus is, instead, on the love quadrilateral. Sure, one of the points of this polygon is more or less missing the whole episode, but Asami’s viewpoint being dismissed as a mild inconvenience is kind of the theme of the season.

Look, I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I found Makorra wholly uncompelling from the start. In “The Revelation” I guess I saw some potential because they actually like, interacted and their differing backgrounds came up? Sort of? But the biggest reason why their scripting left me drier than a desert was that it never seemed much deeper than “you’re hot and I want on you,” largely because of episodes like this where their interactions focused on ~~feelings~~ without Bryke realizing they never established them.

And it’s not like I think giving Korra a romantic subplot was necessarily a bad idea. Girl grew up completely isolated, and there’s actually a lot to be explored as to how that might manifest with her navigating the social space for the first time, particularly with  people her own age. I just don’t really see why this is how they went about scripting it. I mean, this episode was coming hot on the heels of “The Voice in the Night,” which not only moved the plot pretty significantly, but it put Korra’s bravado and insecurities front and center. Her interaction with Amon made the stakes feel more personal, especially the way he was so clearly toying with her, and how he promised that her time would come eventually. She finally allowed herself the space to feel scared.

So why not follow it up with...a team huddle of sexual tension? 23 solid minutes of Korra trying to figure out what to do about the boy she liked? You could pretend this was her compartmentalizing and purposely not dealing with things, except that’s not really in evidence at all. Like, I don’t even think Amon is referenced. It’s okay; it’s not like he JUST HAD HER CHAINED UP.

Instead, what’s *really* important is the probending. Clearly. Now, Griffin has tried to defend probending to me a number of times. And I grudgingly understand it as a framing device for Korra’s airbending progress in Episode 2 (as heavy-handed as that was), as well as showing her learning to work with others. You can argue that’s exactly what this episode did, but really, I just don’t see the *entire* episode devoted to it as being justified.

Not to mention, this was more just showing us that pissing people off doesn’t make for the group dynamics, which...yeah? We didn’t need Korra and Mako not communicating in a probending match to understand that Korra and Mako were having trouble communicating.

Oh Jonny...

It was all very basic cause-and-effect, and combined it just seemed as though Bryke had time they wanted to burn. Except then “Endgame” was rushed and sloppy, so that’s a hard case to make. Still, recapping:

They play well in their first match

Korra asks out Mako and it’s awkward, so she goes on a date with Bolin

Mako yells at Korra for going on a date with Bolin

Mako and Korra play poorly in their second match, but Bolin wins it for them

Korra kisses Mako and Bolin sees

Everyone plays horribly for the third match, but then Korra wins it for them

I think every time we found ourselves back in the stadium, I let out a groan. But what’s even the takeaway from this? Why does Korra magically pull her head out of it? Did she have a mid-match epiphany about the value of platonic friendship that we weren’t privy to?

Mako and Bolin agree to not let girls get in between them, which is a nice brotherly moment, though I would have liked Bolin to point out that Mako should kind of shit or get off the pot here. And still the whole thing is undercut by the fact that feelings weren’t really developed between any points of this quadrilateral.

Perhaps ironically, Asami and Mako had the most depth to them of any pairing at that point, with their bonding over shared trauma.

Man, she really fed his ego...

I can’t track this for Korra’s development at all. She took the world’s worst advice from the world’s most problematic relationship coach in the form of Pema. But there’s actually something wildly endearing about how she asked Ikki and Jinora for advice in the first place, since it highlights just how much of a fish-out-of-water she is here. Of course the 11 and 8-year-olds would know this stuff! I also happen to love how blunt Pema is and could gush about the sordid Pelinzin dynamics for some time. Slay the “other woman” trope, girl! I honestly think her POV would be super compelling around the time this all went down, and one day I’ll get to writing it. One day...

What was I saying? Right, Korra’s romantic development in this episode. I just don’t even know. The way she asks him out is cringe-worthy, but supposed to be. Then she goes on a date with Bolin because she was sad about being rejected and for some reason didn’t say “sounds good, let’s go as friends.” Then when Mako calls her out for toying with Bolin (kinda? They did just get noodles), she has the nerve to say it’s so clearly his jealousy. Then they play a shitty match and Mako tells Korra he does like her, so she kisses him (honestly, reasonable). Then she’s in such a pissy mood about Mako probably yelling at her for that, that her next match she literally waterbends at the ref? But then is the person who wins the whole thing? And somewhere in that time realized she should be super thankful that Asami secured them a tournament spot in the first place?

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock

Look, navigating the world of teenage hormones is tricky, and I guess there’s something realistically dramatic and infantile about it all. But this is a scripted show, and I honestly have no idea why Bryke would think this is the compelling way to write a romance. If the idea was to force Mako into admitting he liked her, and using Bolin as that wedge, then why was Asami also necessary as a love triangle device? Couldn’t just one love triangle had sufficed? I’m also struggling to see the point of the repeated conversations between Mako and Korra, or how probending became the visual metaphor to hammer home how they’re not getting along. WE GET IT. I PROMISE.

Truly, I think the main issue is that this nonsense was all condensed into one episode. In isolation, each individual beat is fine, especially as a learning moment for Korra. I actually really liked the Borra date, not in a shipping way, but as what it was: Korra had a very good time with someone she only had a platonic attraction to, and Bolin put romantic weight onto it (for perfectly valid reasons). Then he found out in a harsh way that Korra wasn’t interested, but she apologized to him and he moved on more or less instantaneously. Their dynamic is still based on affection, and I like that the show recognized that sort of romantic incompatibility and unrequited feelings (it happens) without giving Bolin a whiff of entitlement about the whole thing.

two episodes later

I know I said I was struggling to see Korra’s growth in Season 1, which is still a complaint that’s there. But I can at least say that Korra learning to consider others was something that happened. Not as in like, “that uppity girl needs to learn empathy!” or any bullshit like that. But in the sense of, she was raised in an isolated compound and had attention on her 24/7. Everything she did was about her growth and development as the Avatar. Then she ran to the city, and quickly learned that hey, you can’t just beat people up even if it’s “justice” in your mind. You can’t just agree to dates with people you don’t want to date and not expect some hurt feelings. And you can’t just be antagonistic to your crush’s girlfriend, because she’s like...a human. I mean, you can, but Korra is a rather nice person, and didn’t want to do that after 1x07.

In some ways it’s a touch on the uncomfortable side of things, because we’re talking about a specifically brown female protagonist learning to more or less restrain herself? But it really is just about her navigating the overwhelming social space for the first time, and there’s something to be said about that as well. Aang was a fish-out-of-water in the sense that he was missed the events of the world for 100 years. Korra was a fish-out-of-water because she hadn’t gotten to experience the world at all. It’s kind of just a different way of giving us that, to a different level of success.

Like all the classics

However, I do feel like her isolation wasn’t deeply explored? Like we watched her mature and we saw her viewpoints evolve, but no one ever really talked about it, in the same way Mako and Bolin being orphans was rarely discussed too. It’s ~there~, but I do think given some of the less wonderful implications, a bit more explication would have helped.

Also, we didn’t see Korra like, having to learn greetings and slang or anything. You know, things you’d expect if this is the kind of story you’re digging into. Instead, we got Korra learning how to navigate specifically romances. Then there was her more general worldview and how she saw her fit as the Avatar, which as I said, was something heavily unresolved in Season 1 (and that’s fine). But it makes the hammering of romance all the more just...why.

I know some people watch shows for ships, but I’m not one of them (which is why I love this piece by Gretchen), and I also happen to think that [relation]ships are the most compelling when they’re not relegated to this sort of separate sphere. Book 1 was written kind of like, “oh now we’re doing the shipping episode!”

But instead of Mako and Korra yelling about the concept of dating each other, maybe we could have had them interacting so we’d have an understanding of why they wanted that. And if they were only meant to be attracted and wow, it didn’t work out ‘cause we’re incompatible (you know...what actually happened), then why focus on it like this and build it up all season as some kind of ~~true love~~?

I guess what it took me 2000 fucking words to arrive at is that “Spirit of Competition” was telling-and-not-showing storytelling for the romance itself (which sadly is "in" these days), and given that it was the only focus of the episode, it’s just not very good—not as an artform, not as a way of getting audience engagement, and not as anything that served the larger Book 1 picture.

Honestly, what follows makes me wistful for this

But at least it didn’t collapse under itself like the damn dying star that was “Endgame.”

Before I get out of here I’d like to nitpick for a second about the probending. IF YOU ATTACK THE REF, YOU SHOULD BE OUT OF THE TOURNAMENT! God, what the fuck. She didn’t even get a red card for that...just a yellow. Really violated the suspension of disbelief. Also, the random Tahno rivalry that they realized they had to build up for the next episode was so badly done. “Here’s this jerk! Hate him now!” I guess it kind of works to make Amon’s point, but the fact that we only get him in 1x05 and it’s resolved by 1x06 is very odd.

I suppose “Spirit of Competition” has merits in terms of ironic enjoyment, and there is some downright fun silliness (“you’re a bad idea!” and my favorite, “you look great, champ!”). But in that department, I’ll take “The Sting” any day.

Next time, I’ll rip into what is probably a perfectly fine episode, other than it just didn’t do it for me.

#12 1x12 “Endgame”

1x05 photo recap found here

Book 2 ranking/essays found here

Book 4 ranking/essays found here

#book 1 ranking #lok meta #korra #The Spirit Of Competition #korra 1x05

[rickhorrow]

10 To Watch : Mayor’s Edition

RICK HORROW’S TOP 10 SPORTS/BIZ/TECH/PHILANTHROPY ISSUES FOR THE WEEK OF JANUARY 20 : MAYOR’S EDITION

with Jacob Aere 

Brands spent $4.48 billion on TV advertising during 2019 regular season NFL broadcasts, according to iSpot.tv data shared by Broadcasting & Cable. The figure is up nearly 14% on 2018, as the number of ad airings during NFL broadcasts climbed more than 7% to more than 32,000. According to the data, the ads scored 157.8 billion impressions, an uptick of 11% from the previous year. Verizon, also an NFL sponsor, was the top-spending company, shelling out an estimated $150.6 million to advertise during NFL games. Insurance firms Geico, Progressive, and State Farm also spent more than $100 million on ad spots. Most money came from the automotive industry, as Toyota, Hyundai, and others reportedly spent $605.2 million on commercials, while electronics and communication firms spent an estimated $351 million. The study comes ahead of Super Bowl LIV, which has seen brands pay FOX as much as $5.6 million for a single 30-second ad slot during the game. We assume that State Farm is disappointed to see spokesman Aaron Rodgers’ Packers fall to the 49ers and miss out on a “Super State Farm Bowl” against fellow pitchman Patrick Mahomes.

Lots of familiar ESPN faces, U.S. females populate the Australian Open. The Australian Open gets underway on Monday, replete with many very familiar faces reporting from Melbourne against the backdrop of bushfires that have commanded headlines, donations, and on-the-ground aid personnel from across the world. In the broadcast booths at Rod Laver Arena and around the vast tennis complex, James Blake has joined ESPN’s tennis team, with the company announcing a bevy of new contracts for its veterans as well. Longtime ESPN tennis stalwarts with new contracts include Darren Cahill (2007, the year he joined ESPN); Chris Evert (2011); Mary Joe Fernandez, marking 20 years (2000); Brad Gilbert (2004); John McEnroe (2009); Patrick McEnroe, celebrating 25 years (1995); Chris McKendry (1996); and Pam Shriver, marking her 30th year with the network (1990). Additionally, there are 22 American women in this year’s Australian Open main draw, the most at a Slam other than the U.S. Open since the 1999 Australian Open. The first round pitted the oldest, 39 year old Venus Williams, against the youngest, 15 year old Coco Gauff (the winner).

NHL All-Star Game takes the ice and the streets in St. Louis. The NHL has lined up its roster of activations for the 2020 NHL Fan Fair, the official fan festival of the2020 Honda NHL All-Star Weekend, running January 23-26 in St. Louis. Partners gearing up for the event include Enterprise, Honda, New Amsterdam Vodka, Truly, Discover, Dunkin’, Bud Light, GEICO, Great Clips, MassMutual, and SAP. Highlights of the four-day, family-friendly festival include autograph sessions featuring former and current NHL All-Stars; a Hockey Hall of Fame exhibit featuring the St. Louis Blues; NHL memorabilia and trophy displays, including the Stanley Cup; and the sixth annual NHL Mascot Showdown featuring all 29 NHL Mascots. Additionally, the NHL and Green Day will build on their multiyear partnership with the band’s headlining performance at the 2020 Honda NHL All-Star Game on January 25. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees will perform outside Enterprise Center shortly before they take the stage inside during the second intermission presented by Ticketmaster. The performance – as always, aimed at expanding hockey’s demographic reach – will be televised as part of the live All-Star Game broadcast on NBC and throughout Canada.

The WNBA and its players' union have come to terms on a new eight-year collective bargaining agreement that includes higher salaries, improved family benefits, and better travel accommodations. This represents a turning point for women's basketball and could ultimately lead to a substantial shift in how female athletes — across all sports — are compensated. The average WNBA cash compensation will reach nearly $130,000, and top players will be able to earn upwards of $500,000. Players will also receive a full salary while on maternity leave, and an annual child care stipend of $5,000. WNBA teams, which provide housing, will now guarantee two-bedroom apartments for players with children. And while players will still have to fly commercial, they'll finally get their own individual hotel rooms. "We believe it's a groundbreaking and historic deal. I'm proud of the players; they bargained hard, they unified, they brought attention to so many important topics," said WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert. The implications of this agreement reach beyond basketball into the larger workplace, at a time when women are demanding increased pay and benefits, on their merit and as a challenge to historically unequal pay.

Looking beyond the Super Bowl, sports books nationwide are preparing for XFL bets. While sports fans have been focused on picking NFL playoff teams to bet on, or marshaling their cash for the Super Bowl, yet another opportunity to wager on football is right around the corner: the XFL. Several states have already authorized bets on the second incarnation of the upstart football league, which begins its season in February, shortly after the NFL season concludes with the Super Bowl. Others are considering doing so, and bookmakers say they have requested that regulators add the league to lists of approved betting events. On the sports betting front, helped by a surge in sports betting, Atlantic City's casinos won $3.29 billion from gamblers in 2019, an increase of over 15% from 2018 — and a huge boon for a city that's still recovering from a mid-decade meltdown that saw five casinos close.

The Super Bowl is two weeks away, but Pepsi is already making Miami Ground Zero. Pepsi has announced that Harry Styles will headline the Pepsi Zero Sugar Super Bowl party on January 31 at Meridian Island in Miami. Planet Pepsi Zero Sugar “will see an out-of-this world build out, transporting fans to a transcendent audio-visual experience unlike anything else at Super Bowl LIV,” according to the announcement. Pepsi also promises a free Pepsi Zero Sugar to everyone in the U.S. if either the San Francisco 49ers or the Kansas City Chiefs’ final score ends in zero. The company said that if such a score results, it will refund the price of the drink, up to $2.50, to anyone in the U.S. who purchases it from February 2-4. It said that in 25% of previous Super Bowl games, at least one team finished with a score ending in zero. Pepsi will also award the Pepsi NFL Rookie of the Year winner for the 17th straight year. This year’s winner will receive a custom matte black Pepsi Zero Sugar trophy as the highest fan-voted honor for NFL Rookies.

Nike begins the 2020s where it began the 2010s: as the number one sportswear brand on the planet. Nike’s Q4 earnings in 2019 grew to $10.2 billion; its income for the last completed financial year was $39.1 billion. All the same, the Portland-based giant faces significant change. It begins 2020 under only its fourth chief executive. John Donahoe, former eBay chief executive, joined Nike in January. Donahoe arrives after an awkward end to Mark Parker’s 13-year tenure. The high-profile Oregon Project closed amid reports that Parker had known uncomfortable details about the activities of banned distance-running coach Alberto Salazar. Strategically, Nike has other decisions to make that will be pertinent to the wider industry. Nike acquired consumer data analytics firm Zodiac in March 2018 and then bought Celect, a “predictive analytics and demand sensing” specialist, in August 2019. That same month it launched Adventure Club, a three-tier trainer subscription service for children. A full-scale version, perhaps based on the Nike+ membership and training scheme, could be a useful source of recurring revenue. Running a $143 billion corporation brings its rewards. Donahoe collects $45 million in cash and stock on arrival, then stands to earn up to $18.5 million a year.

The NBA tipped off league-wide activities honoring the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. NBA teams playing January 16–20 are wearing custom Nike MLK Day warmup shirts designed in collaboration with the NBPA, MLK Foundation, and Martin Luther King III. The Dri-FIT T-shirt features words from MLK’s timeless speech on August 28, 1963: “We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”  The NBA has long been a leader in race relations and community outreach activities centered on diversity, and its annual MLK Day celebrations – which lead into the league’s month-long celebration of Black History Month every February – serve as a tentpole moment for this activism each year. 

The Fritz Pollard Alliance released a pointed statement decrying the last two NFL hiring seasons. The Athletic reports that the alliance, which was founded in 2003 to promote diversity hiring, “called on the league to...take tangible steps to develop plans to increase the hiring of people of color in leadership positions.” Of five NFL openings this offseason, only one was filled by a minority — Ron Rivera at Washington. In the last two hiring seasons, only one African-American was hired to fill the 13 openings (Brian Flores in Miami), with five African-Americans fired. Four of 32 NFL teams have a minority coach: Washington, Miami, Pittsburgh (Mike Tomlin), and the Chargers (Anthony Lynn). 70% of the NFL’s players are men of color compared with 12.5% of head coaches. The alliance points out that in 100 years the NFL has gone from Pollard as the first African-American coach in 1921 to four coaches of color in 2020; the league has only one African-American GM and no African-American team presidents. This despite the presence of the Rooney Rule, enacted in 2002, which requires that teams interview at least one minority candidate.

Barstool Sports is close to selling to little-known casino company Penn National. According to Recode, the Chernin Group, which currently owns Barstool, is in advanced talks to sell a majority stake in the company to Penn National Gaming, a publicly traded, regional gambling company that operates 41 properties in 19 states. Barstool was last valued at more than $100 million, but a potential purchase price could be much higher, and might create the biggest media-gambling tie-up in the U.S. since the Supreme Court legalized sports betting in 2018. The deal would tie Barstool, a well-known company with a passionate audience, to a casino company you may have never heard of and use Barstool’s brand to transition into online sports betting. This potential move looks like a positive for Barstool, which can't find a home with sports leagues due to its brash approach to sports and pop culture coverage, and Penn National, which needs to compete in the move to online sports betting.

#10 #10towatch

[hush-falls-the-evening]

When I was young

Characters: Jonathan Crane, Edward Nygma (scriddler - established relationship)

Rating: G Words: 2196

Synopsis: Part 1 of 3 of Wish I knew you. Edward receives an unexpected invitation, and gets carried away with a plan. Jon doubts there’s anything good in it. Fortunately, Edward is very convincing.

misc info: slice of life, just a little hurt and comfort, domestic fluff, old men bickering and loving each others. There’s going to be a other parts but I really loved how this one stands by itself.

“Great news, Jonathan!”

The door was burst open as Edward waltzed into the room. Jon had been reading his latest test results, trying to pinpoint the best counterpart to a particularly unpleasant side effect his latest experiments seemed to produce on some patients. An empty vial rolled down his desk, and almost hit the ground, before being caught mid-flight by a very undisturbed Jon, who had not deigned to show an ounce of interest in his partner’s boastful entrance.

“It’s too warm and you’ve decided to switch back to your spandex?”

“Don’t be absurd.” He then paused, muttering. “The spandex is the right outfit for the right occasion. No no-” he moved toward the desk, which was pretty messy, by all means,  about to sit on top of whatever was there.

Jon finally spared him a threatening glare, making Edward do a great show of closing the open books, and pile away the stray sheets into their unused binders, and one silly folder with a few spooky marks scribbled on it, and THEN sat on top of the now cleared spot. “-It so happens that I have received a particularly unexpected invitation in one of my private inboxes this morning. I though you might find some humor in it.”

The Riddler waved a printed piece of paper in front of him. Jon did not look at it, but stared up at the other man’s face, leaning back into his chair. His long fingers braided themselves meticulously under his chin.

“Is it relevant to my interests for you to disturb my work?”

“Of course it is: I am an interest of yours,” he added cockily, then winked. The stoical man remained unimpressed, but did not object. Edward then waved the message again, calling for his attention.

Reluctantly, the former-yet-still-informally-practicing psychiatrist took the sheet and pushed his reading glasses with as much skepticism as he could muster in a single gesture. Edward rolled his eyes, motioning at him to just get on with it.

‘The Greenwoods Institute is cordially inviting you to the 30th anniversary Reunion of the class of 19XX-’

Jon’s eyebrows furrowed gravely as he read the entire mail, than looked up at the expectant expression on his partner’s face, than back to go over the entire mail a second time.

“Did you stole someone’s identity and somehow managed to get invited to a graduates’ reunion?” he flipped the page to inspect the other side, which was blank. Silly Jon.

“Oh oh no, that would have been too simple. You and I both know my personal feelings regarding Academia.” He sneered slightly at the thought. “Nonetheless, I required some kind of reference to get where I needed to be when I first strolled into Gotham. So I made some arrangements prior to that.”

“So you technically graduated a school you’ve never been to?”

“I successfully graduated a school, with the highest recommendations. An establishment with a good reputation and a very flawed database. And security. And staff,” he huffed in contempt at the offending memory. “The fact that the old Director had to keep his lips tightly shut about the whereabouts of my admission, least he exposed himself to the very damaging nature of the shocking revelations encompassed in my excruciatingly detailed folder of personal data-” he paused in his elaborate tirade, offering a particularly proud smirk with a flourish. “-is only a bonus.”

Jonathan stared soberly at the genius seated on his desk, before a wry grin slowly crawled onto his thin lips. He looked at the mail for a third time, now with the intended irony Edward had boasted about when he first came into the room.

“Oh come now, Jonathan. I didn’t stroll here beckoning your ‘oh so precious attention’ just to get your silent snark!”

“It is pretty irritating to know a preschooler managed to download himself a high school certificate and terrorize the presiding authority.”

“Jealous, perhaps? Oh, and I wasn’t that young. or else that makes you a living artifact!”

“I’d like to point out that time has no bearings on fear.”

“Well I think you might want to check in on your lovely cracking joints first. Also, the 1600s called, and they want their shoes back in the shortest delay.”

The doctor actually chuckled darkly at his indignation. “You must had been the original inspiration for the old ‘someone could hack onto your computer’ ads.” He was clearly enjoying their banters here, which pleased Edward quite a bit.

“Well…” Edward tried to remain as factual about it as possible. “Of course, historically there has been much, MUCH more significant cases back in the days, and anyone could easily read about this really but-” he trailed off, looking away with an irrepressible smile.

“I presume you’ve done similarly with a hypothetical college degree of some kind?”

“Oh. No. Well-… That’s another story, which I am pretty sure I told you before,” He stated accusingly.

The wiry man observed him quietly. There was something warmer in his stare, Edward would look into it if he had the time to seize the moment, before it flickered away. He seemed… nostalgic, almost.

“So,” Jon drawled, deliberate spider he was. “Any hypothesis as to why they’ve invited you now and not at the reunions previous to this one?”

“I though of that, evidently. It is most likely the Director had enough conscience to go over the list and skip my name before sending the invitations. More so, his current records seem to indicate he’s been hospitalized a few times so, it is very possible he was not aware that someone would mishandle the guest list while he was away.”

“Possible,” Jonathan commented, his thumb and index were brushing his jaw reflectively.

“….. What are you thinking about?” Edward asked with cautious curiosity.

The older man exhaled calmly, and seemed to change the direction of his thoughts entirely. “You know in old folklore, it was particularly rude to not invite the resident spirits to join the town events. Nobody expects them to show up, but to-”

“Jon, I know you’re not just referring to Sleeping Beauty, but please tell me this is not just because we ended up watching the spinoff movie two weeks ago, since we could not agree to watch anything better.”

“………….. Nobody,” he repeated slowly, persistent. “Expects them to show up. But to leave them -out- of an event?” his hands went back to fold together over his middle. His eyes were staggering. “That is, a whole other level of insult, my darling,” he eerily cooed. Obviously pleased with the trail of thoughts he was entertaining.

Edward took note of his own fevered heartbeats, and inhale sharply. “So! Does that mean I can count on you to join me?”

That knocked out Jonathan’s spell in an instant. “What?”

Edward felt almost sorry. (but not really) The man looked almost owlish with his glasses. “Wait! What was I thinking. I should do this the proper way.”

The redhead hopped off the desk, and collected himself for greater effect, and-….. smiled.

It was a really sweet smile, yet Jonathan had not moved an inch, and instead stared at his partner blankly.

How could a grown, seasoned villain like Edward, proud, exuberant, self-confident, unbeatable in his domain, seeker of all mysteries, -including Jon-…… looked almost flustered, as his breath hung onto an embarrassed smile.

He managed to catch up some of his usual bravado and asked with great eloquence. “Jonathan Crane-”

“Edward-”

“-will you, do me the pleasure to accompany me to the belated prom I’ve never had?”

It showed he was very proud about this grand setting. That for sure. It wasn’t as if they’ve never went out together. They did. Rather often to Jonathan’s tastes, but they did.

But the older man remained frozen in a deadly stance for much longer than his occasional surprises would sometimes occasioned. And what seemed like an achingly sweet plan in Edward’s mind crumbled slightly at the lack of reaction from his second-favorite rogue.

“Jonathan?”

It took him, much longer than Edward’s nerves should had been able to wait for. But Jon breathed again, blood flowing back up the brilliant doctor’s face. Frowning considerably as a hollow, disbelieving laugh escaped him.

It really wasn’t a pretty laugh, either. And it irked Edward spectacularly.

“Jon, I was legitimately looking forward to asking you this,” he pointed impatiently.

“Don’t, ah. Don’t take this the wrong way, Edward. I just didn’t think I’d be asked to ‘prom’ a second time around. I’m not, particularly fond of my reminiscing memories of the prime event.”

“……… Oh.”

“Ever eloquent, as always.”

Edward had somehow moved and dragged a chair next to him. Jonathan watched warily as he looked at his partner, who was quietly assessing if it was alright for him to reach out. After a moment, Jon gave a tired nod, and focused on the familiar hand pressed on his forearm.

He seemed rather irritated- or embarrassed- at his momentary lapse. Almost treating the silence as a necessary evil: eager to move onto another topic and unsure how much of himself he was -or had- revealed in the last minutes .

For now, he looked at nothing in particular, and found some comfort in that.

“Will you at least let me plead my case?” Edward asked after a while, his thumb tracing the soft flesh of his forearm.

“The more adamant you are about something, the more incline I am to argue and disagree,” he warned, but not dismissing his idea just yet.

“I know, I know. As it is not… always uncalled-for. I know you don’t talk, nor want to talk about… your youth in general. And in light of this, I’ll make you a better offer.” His enticing grin was back once more, his voice smoothing in a conspiratorial way. “You come with me, as my roguish partner-” Jon turned a deadly glare, calling him out on his blatant sugar-coating. “- and we, as the true outstanding individuals we are, and were always meant to me, outshine anyone who ever had the ineptitude to think otherwise.”

Jon scrutinized him in great detail, hypothesizing on every possible flaws. “….. Are you ready to waste your time on this, solely because you accidentally clicked the wrong shipping options for your latest order, and you find yourself with too much time on your hands?”

“AH. Of course not! I don’t make the same mistake twice!”

Jon gave him a look, toward which Edward huffed in a dismissive way.

He was dead right, and he’d be damned if he showed Jon how it had sent a cold shiver of shame down the Riddler’s spine.

“You do know these people are mostly just middle-aged citizens with mundane jobs, ordinary preoccupations and fears? This would be no better than a placebo-experience to patch-up whichever trauma and missed opportunity we’ve been through.”

“And these citizens, several states and stones away, are painfully unaware of what dark spirits they have been denied to meet thus far~”

Jon would had argued further, but his lips snapped shut. The glare was now accusing, but subtly tinted with…. approval. Edward looked at him expectantly, delighted, victorious.

“Of course. I should had known you’d appeal to my interests.”

“What can I say? Sometimes your interests coincide with mine.”

“Sometimes.”

There it was again. That look. That oh so personal warmth Jon had so rarely allowed himself to show to the world, or even to Edward up until much later after their initial rivalry. ‘Initial’ Rivalry. It was still there, as both man were drawn to win the upper hand of a situation through wits and well-timed theatrics. Edward was simply… more implicitly showy about the extent of his power and knowledge.

That intelligent gaze, the one Edward had discovered and treasured after years of knowing the man, had never failed to fascinate him more than even he liked to admit.

He suppressed a much-too-honest grin, and lowered his eyes to where his hand was resting on top of Jon’s sinewy forearm.

The tips of Jonathan’s long fingers brushed softly through his hair, where silvery strands as begun to show amid the vibrant ginger. They stroke the outer-shell of his ear delicately.

“And what if this whole ridiculous affair was only a way for Batman or our fellow rogues to lure us out of Gotham for a few days?” he asked softly.

“… Possible,” he admitted just as softly. “It occurred to me as well. I’ve already prepared a few safety measures in cases of impromptu escapes in the past. Additional protections and a thorough scan of my network would be mandatory to get a better understanding of the current status quo as well. Not that I am not perfectly aware of everything already…” he trailed off.

Jonathan removed his glasses and laid them casually on the desk before him. His fingers combing deeper into Edward’s hair as he leaned toward him. The arm under Edward’s palm moved, their hands joining somewhere along the way.

“I’ll help you secure the details, then,” Jonathan finally offered. The sober words were only an excuse to retain some of his resilient reserve. They could have fooled Edward, if the context wasn’t speaking a much tender language.

Their eyes met, and Edward found no logical reason not to cross the distance between them.

#scriddler #Jonathan Crane #edward nygma #scarecrow #riddler #established relationship #unfortunate amount of fluff #old men being silly basically #Wish I knew you - fic

[marcjampole]

Trump is almost the same person as Teddy Roosevelt in personality and character, except Trump speaks loudly & carries no stick at all

Since the election pundits have from time to time compared Donald Trump to various former presidents, most frequently Andrew Jackson because both were racist populists with tempers who liked talking tough and using the military. But I’ve also seen writers find similarities in Trump’s temperament to both Adamses, in incompetence to Buchanan and in dishonesty and political strategy to Nixon. Trump himself has spoken of his accomplishments as worthy of a Lincoln, which to people who live in the real world is akin to claiming an average Little League baseball player is as good as Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays (or Giancarlo Stanton and Mike Trout for younger readers).

In a continuation of this trend, Vice President Mike Pence recently compared his boss to Theodore Roosevelt — a comparison that may have surprised many Americans because TR is depicted as a hero and one of our greatest presidents in most history books while the public already realizes how unprepared and incompetent Trump is for the job he has now held for about eight months.

But as Stephen Kinzler’s depiction of TR in his entertaining and illuminating The True Flag reminds us, Trump and Teddy share so many personality, character and class traits that you might think they’re the same person. The True Flag discusses the debate surrounding the Spanish-American War and its bloody aftermath in which American soldiers tortured, raped and slaughtered their way to victory against rebels in the Philippines, the first time the United States used its military might to make acquisitions beyond the borders of the contiguous 48 states. The book focuses on the imperialist arguments made at the end of the 19th century by TR, Henry Cabot Lodge and the yellow journalist William Heart, who with Joseph Pulitzer pretty much invented fake news. They and many others were in favor of projecting American military might, holding possessions in which the inhabitants could not have free elections and extending U.S. control to peoples considered racially and culturally inferior. On the other side, the peaceniks believed fervently that the U.S. should not pursue military adventurism and that it was unconstitutional suppress the voting rights of people in other lands; they included such luminaries as Mark Twain, former President Grover Cleveland, Jane Adams, Andrew Carnegie and the distinguished Senator Carl Schurz.

Nowhere in The True Flag does Kinzler mention Donald Trump, but the picture he paints of TR is so similar to the Donald we have seen for the past 30 years that you could swear it was Trump being described.

Let’s start with their backgrounds. Both TR and Trump were born in the lap of luxury with a silver spoon in their mouth, on third base and thinking they hit a triple. Filthy rich.  The Roosevelt family had what’s called old money. Very old money. The original Roosevelt arrived in the New World from Holland sometime in the years just before 1650 and bought a lot of land in mid-town Manhattan, the original source of the family wealth. Trump family money also originally came from real estate—developing and managing properties.

Inherited money gave TR and Trump immediate access to the public through the news media and to political circles that would not be available to most people. Both used that access to expatiate about controversial topics, going to war and projecting America’s might in TR’s case and, for Trump, spreading the bold-faced, racially-tinged lie that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

But access doesn’t necessarily translate to respect. For the most part, the ruling elite, including the Republican Party, disliked both and found both to be a royal inconvenience, and with good reason: The Rough Rider was and Trumpty-Dumpty is a self-centered and loud-mouthed buffoon who often spoke/speaks without thinking and acted/acts impetuously. The center of TR’s world was TR, who thought himself the best man for every job and burned to wield the power of the presidency. Sound familiar? Many in the Republican Party at the turn of the 20th century feared that the irresponsible Roosevelt would gain the power that he so blatantly sought. Same for Republicans during the 2016 primary and election season.

But while despised by the political, civic and intellectual elite, TR and Trump were/are highly popular with large segments of the American public, thanks to the news media. In TR’s day, the media meant newspapers, of which there were many, many more across the country than today. Interestingly enough, Teddy’s rise in the public esteem was fueled to a great extent by one media giant, William Randolph Hearst, who owned and ran a media empire of newspapers based on sensationalizing the news and saber-rattling for wars of conquest. Hearst grew to dislike Teddy, especially after Hearst also became infected by political ambition.

Here’s where the similarities get really sick: Both Theodore Roosevelt and Donald Trump built their reputations on fabrications. TR was the warrior, the hero, the Rough Rider who led a band of volunteers up San Juan Hill against the Spanish Army in Cuba. In fact, the hero spent a total of two afternoons in battle. His one casualty was an escaping unarmed prisoner surrounded by TR’s men who he shot in the back several times. Kind of sounds like big game hunting.

Most of us now know that when Donald Trump agreed to be the business mogul featured in the original “Apprentice” he was a failed real estate developer and casino operator in multiple bankruptcies and a mess of financial trouble. It was the mass media—the television show and the entertainment and celebrity media that covered it—that established his reputation as a business master of the universe, thus giving Trump the platform to pursue his sometimes successful and sometimes disastrous branding business.

Two frauds that the media turned into celebrities.

The last similarity: both were accidental presidents. The Republican Party made Teddy McKinley’s VEEP to remove him from power and the public eye. The plan backfired when McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt assumed the presidency. Let’s not dwell too long on the long string of freak occurrences that enabled Trump to win the electoral college despite losing the popular vote by about three million, including the wave of voter suppression laws, the interference by the Russians, the weakness of the other Republican candidates and former FBI Director James Comey’s ridiculously stupid twin decision to release information about the Clinton probe but not about the Russia-Trump connection.

A consideration of the differences between the two men is sobering, because it reminds us that the problem with Donald Trump is his not his emotional frailties but his political positions and the reasons he holds them.

Roosevelt believed in science and in weighing the evidence, which among other things, informed him of the need to protect the environment from the degradations of human beings. He backed down from his imperialism once he became president and had more information and experience (and perhaps the power after which he lusted). TR was well-read. His beliefs in domestic matters tended towards the progressive, which in those days meant minimizing the power of large corporations and setting the rules to create fairness for workers and consumers.

By contrast, Trump is poorly read and educated and holds a basket of deplorable beliefs about immigration, crime and the economy that are rooted in the myths of the 1950’s, and by myths I mean beliefs that were wrong then and not held now. On global warming and environmental regulations, he has ignored basic science and the advice of virtually every reputable expert in favor of his own irrational beliefs. He looks past the crime statistics which shows an enormous long-term decline and instead believes in the harsh image of crime in the cities depicted in the tabloid newspapers that he read in the 1960’s and 1970’s, before the days of cable news.

Which brings us to the issue of racism. TR made and Trumpty-Dumpty makes a large number of racist statements. Racism was inherent to the Rough Rider’s imperialism and lurking behind many Trump’s beliefs and actions. But TR’s racism reflects the mainstream thinking of his era. Like Woodrow Wilson and much of the Progressive movement, TR believed in the inherent superiority of white people of European descent. Racism tars his reputation, but most every other white American was racist at the time. I doubt that TR would be an overt racist today, since all his views, even his foreign expansionism, were mainstream. By contrast, Trump’s racism puts him out of the mainstream. Virtually every Trump statement or action to be condemned by other Republicans has involved denigration of or harm to African-Americans, Muslims, Mexicans or other non-white minorities. He flirts with racist groups that hold views that are so far out of the mainstream as to be an anathema to virtually everyone else.

Finally, despite his heavy-handed narcissism, Roosevelt ended up being one of our better presidents, rated by some among the top ten. In contrast, by ending DACA and U.S. support of the Paris agreement, disrupting relations with long-term strategic allies, cracking down on immigrants, trying to kill the individual health insurance markets created by the Affordable Care Act, threatening the civil rights of the transgendered and rolling back environmental, business and educational regulations, Trump has already done enough damage to America and the world to rate as the second worst person ever to win the electoral college or succeed a dying or resigning president. All he has to do to slide below Harry Truman to the very bottom of the list is convince the American military to drop a nuclear bomb on some enemy.

The lesson, again, in comparing these two highly narcissistic individuals is that it’s not the state of Trump’s emotions that should be of concern, but his politics. It’s his harmful, racist and misogynist stands and beliefs that are most dangerous to the future of the United States.

#trump #donaldtrump presidency

[claryaastark]

Would I love me?

062418

Isn’t it strange? To look at someone and see yourself. Not the virtual but the real image of you. Isn’t it strange? To see your thoughts on someone, to feel your emotions on someone, to see the things you admire on someone, to have a taste of your favorite food on someone. To have a sip of your favorite coffee on someone. To fight the ideas that you believe on someone. Isn’t it strange? To have a glimpse of your soul on someone, someone who isn’t you, and someone who is different from you.

Well, perhaps yes, perhaps no.

It was a very long and tiring day. I was on my way home, thinking about how bad I am on fixing the right format of my final thesis output. I really suck at revising. But instead of thinking about acads, I divert my attention into the bustling city. All I hear were the loud blasting sound of the vehicles, the gossip of two high school students on the right part of the bus. The gentle utterance of the woman in front who wears a red polo shirt with a coca-cola logo on the left side. And judging her looks, I think she is some sort of a saleswoman, maybe a manager? Or simply an employee as she talks to someone over the phone. Meanwhile, on the back part of my mind, it feels weird but I can also hear the clicking of coins as the bus’ conductor collected our fare. I hate being this meticulous and observer sometimes.

I almost throw myself in front as the driver stepped on the break. A hint, either someone will come down or someone will ride. And the latter thinking was right, a man on his mid-20s I guess? I looked away and focused myself on the street lights which are unsurprisingly blurred because of my myopia. Without looking, I felt that the man sat beside me, and for no apparent reason he pushed himself beside me. Wtf?

“You’re occupying too much seat and with the right comprehension, I regret to tell you that this seat is for two passenger, and YOU ARE OCCUPYING TOO MUCH.”

He repeated his first statement with diction and sarcasm.

“I’m sorry,” that’s all I said, I want to argue because of his reckless and improper behavior but I’m too tired to fight with an arrogant stranger.

But he rolled his eyes instead. And for the second time, I ignored his disrespectful behavior. It was a one hour ride to reach the street of our home. So I busied myself on scrolling the gallery of my phone.

“Are you okay?” He said out of nowhere.

“Huh? Me?” I said while pointing myself awkwardly.

“No, I am actually talking to myself” he said sarcastically and he rolled his eyes. For a man, this one is really arrogant.

“Uhh, I’m doing good I guess, and why do you asked?” I said awkwardly.

It was weird, after he freaked out because of the seat, he is now asking my current state like we were close or something? What’s with this man?

“Nothing, is it bad to ask? You should be thankful that I asked if you’re okay. You seem stressed and by looking at you, I can already tell that no one really cares for you, and everybody is ignoring you. Like you don’t belong anywhere”

And he laughed. He fucking laughed. First he mocked me, and now he is insulting me? Which I found very offensive. I’m dealing with too much stress right now, and I can’t even breathe properly because of so many reasons, and now, a stranger is insulting me like he knows what I’ve been dealing with? I felt a sudden pang on my chest. I am offended.

“Fuck-off” I said bravely, despite the fact that I nearly cried.

He was shocked, I can tell.

“Ooh. I’m sorry, I was just joking, and... I thought that it was the most unique way of telling sorry. I’m sorry for freaking out”

And that’s where we started. I do not know as well, what power of Gods and Goddesses had put us together. He was an arrogant man, disrespectful and talks a lot of offensive things, so am I. But I loved him anyway, and I admit, that I learned a lot of things from him. We were mainly pragmatic. He is no sweet, gentle and showy. But he was pure, sincere and mature.

But just like anyone else, he left. He came for no apparent reason, and he left for no apparent reason as well. Maybe, just maybe, on a scientific basis, what happened to us is repel. He is he and I am me, we are the same and attraction is really not working with us. I guess?

It was a normal Sunday afternoon. I was bored, and the only thing that gives me comfort during tedious times on this very dull life is : coffee. I made my way on the nearest coffee shop downtown.

The aroma of sweet vanilla and bitter cocoa welcomed me. The dream catcher that was hanging on the door had clicked, a signal that someone is making their way in or out. I look for my favorite spot, where I can peacefully sit and be drowned by the deafening silence. I ordered my favorite matcha coffee, and a piece of custard cake. I pulled the Young Adult novel series that I was reading since last week, I am on the third book of the series. It was Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Wings and Ruin, and damn, I just love the character of the God-like Rhysand. Most of the time, I wished that I was like the protagonist or the fictional characters on books, and movies. Might at least get a happy ending despite of struggles. But the fuck, no matter how good you are on escaping reality through arts and fictions, at the end of the day, you will sleep and wake up on the bitter slap of reality.

I put my earphones on, browsed my phone and look for my favorite app, the spotify. I am no great person, but I can brag that I got a very good taste when it comes to music. I can enumerate a lot of artists, genres, bands, albums, and the likes all day if someone would let me to. Though I’m bad at singing, at least, I got a big contribution through appreciation. I got them all! I played Movements’ Feel Something, one on the lists of my Album of the Year. Then here we go, my kind of escaping shits in life. What a very peaceful moment for me.

I was sitting alone and peacefully for almost one hour, in fact, I was halfway on finishing my cake and coffee until I noticed a man who’s staring at me. I faked a cough and tilted my body on the other side, to at least stop him from staring at me. But ugh! I can see on my peripheral vision the he’s still looking at me.

“What are you staring at?” I put my book on the table, loud enough for him to hear.

I didn’t get a verbal response, instead, he pouted his lips, a sign that he was pointing on something. Then I waved my book upward.

“On the book?” I asked with irritation, he is damn lazy. Can’t he speak?

“Yup, I love Feyre since day 1, and I didn’t trust Tamlin since then, that psychopath-sex-addict-obsessed-and-pseudo-lordshit.” He said coldly.

Ohh. So he read Maas’ ACOTAR?! My irritation suddenly turned into amusement. I removed my earphones and smiled at him. I patted the seat next to me, inviting him so we can talk more about this series. I mean, it is odd, to find someone who reads the same goddamn book that you are reading. Reading is a cool interest after all.

He sat hesitantly. I pushed the lock button to see what time is it. It’s 4:35 in the afternoon.

“Woaaah, man?”

I was taken aback when he spoke.

“You listen to Movements?”

Then I forgot that the album is still playing on my spotify app. And I guess, he saw it on my lock screen. But wait...

“Yup, and you too?” I said with amusement on my voice.

“Yeah, damn same man! Patrick is a wholesome piece of shit!”

And we laughed. Those laughter turned into weeks, months and years. A stranger that I met unexpectedly, is now a person that I used to know. Again, someone left my life.

We had the same interest in almost everything, we attended a lot of book signing, book launch. We bought a lot of albums from our favorite bands. We attended concert, gigs. We watched countless movies, we drank a lot of coffees. We travelled places to taste various delicacies and kind of foods. We jogged at sunrise, and walk at sunset. We were happy. Or... should I say, we were almost happy?

It is weird but he was totally just like me. We share the same interests, we fight the same ideologies, we have the same belief in almost everything. But again, he came to me, without me, asking for it, and now he didn’t even give me a chance to ask again, to ask why he left. I loved him, and I guess, things won’t really work on the way that we want them to be. So is us. And it’s sad.

It’s almost the end.

The end of the semester. And after all the hardships, sleepless nights, frustrations, failures, we are finally wearing the black toga! It’s the graduation season.

“Congrats, B!”

It was Kat, one of my thesis group mates. I returned her congratulations with a nod and smile. I’m too lazy to speak, it still overwhelms me that I survived and finished College with a Latin honor. Not to brag though.

I’m so excited to share this to him. I smiled, my heart is beating fast as I make my way to our favorite spot : under the mango tree.

It was a peaceful and underrated spot. Underrated to the point that we’re the only people who knew this place. I guess not all accidents are bad, because I found this place accidentally, so is he.

I smiled as I saw him playing the guitar again. He seems too preoccupied that he didn’t notice my arrival. I pouted my lips then a silly idea entered my mind. I tiptoed carefully then I cover his eyes from behind. He stopped his fingers from moving along with the guitar strings, and I felt him smile.

“Uhm, since I don’t want to mess with your tricks, let me pretend that I didn’t know it was you. So, who’s this?”

He joked.

I kissed his cheeks from behind and whispered.

“Your future wife saw her name on the final list of graduates and guess what, a Cum Laude!”

“Wow! Congrats, B! I’m proud of you. You finally made it!”

He hugged me tight.

I opened my eyes with the bittersweet memory. It’s been a year since I graduated College, and it is the first time that I visited this place again. Still peaceful, the only different thing is that, the people who used to own this place, are now the people who used to know each other.

For the third time, someone left me again. He is one of the kindest persons that I know. He brings out the kindness in me. A responsible man, very family and school oriented. He’s the one who makes me realize the essence of being responsible. He taught me to appreciate little things, and the most important thing that he planted me is, I realized that I am not bad. That we’re like each other.

He used to sing me a lot of songs, he motivates me to always do better not just for myself but for my family. I was happy. We were happy. But I guess, happiness is not enough to bind people together. There are things that are more important than being in love.

And that’s my biggest realization.

The stories that I’ve told you is just a piece of a whole. I didn’t tell you the hardships, the pains, the sleepless nights that I experienced when they left. It was hard, to be left behind. With or without explanations, it was hard.

I started asking myself what’s wrong with me. I started doubting myself, I hated myself. And I started feeling afraid of taking risks. I began to wonder, do these wrong people deserve my time, invested feelings, and love?

I met a stranger on a bus, and I took a piece of him. I was an arrogant, sarcastic and disrespectful being sometimes, so is he. We were the same. I saw my bad sides in him. And I fell in love with those evil. I learned to accept that there is good in every wicked.

I met a stranger on a coffee shop. I took a piece of him. I saw myself in him. The things that I admire, my interests, my ideologies and all the stuff that makes me happy. He will always be my real life reflection.

I met a stranger under the mango tree. I took a piece of him. I saw my good sides in him. I was kind, compassionate and I realized that I really care for those people around me. He made me love my soft spots.

I always see myself in them. They are like a reflection of my different sides. It was bitter, that they made me doubt myself. They made me feel insecure for leaving me behind. They made me hate myself. But after all, it was all about me. Piece by piece, I assemble myself into whole.

Funny because, I just fell in love with myself. That they are just the representation of who I truly am, that they are me. I was the stranger in the bus. I was the stranger in the coffee shop. I was the stranger under the mango tree. Every piece of them is equal to the remnants of myself that I was trying to build.

If I were them, would I love me? And I got the answer, yes, because I just did. I fell in love with myself.

© to owner of the photos.

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#self love #short story #fiction #self worth #writings #literature