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sissy-the-siren-writes · 7 months

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Ten Years From Now

Master Reference Post Archive of Our Own

Chapter 1

If Marian Hawke had a bit for every time she’d had to sneak into her family’s estate through the cellar, she’d only have two bits, but it was weird that it had happened twice.

“Very weird,” Marian murmured to herself as the ghosts of yesteryear shivered past her, ripples in the darkness.

The small flame that was barely doing its job of lighting the way through the maze-like vault beneath the Amell’s ancestral home flickered as its wielder whipped around, summoned by her idle comment. Marian was certain that if the flame had been a normal flame, a flame born of stone striking stone, it would have sputtered and died in protest of the reckless carelessness with which it was handled. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on how one looked at it—for Marian, however, the flame was not a normal flame, and the man wielding it was not a normal man.

She squinted as the quivering flame and its summoner approached her, what she had initially thought to be a pitiful little excuse for a light now blazing with the brilliance of the sun. Whether it was because her eyes had become so adjusted to the oppressive darkness that they couldn’t handle direct confrontation with the darkness’ antithesis, or because her under-the-breath remark had pushed the flame-wielder’s anxiety past its frayed limits, his adrenaline-fueled fear spilling into the magic used to create the miniature inferno cradled in the palm of his hand, boosting its light-the-way powers to new and glorious heights with each passing thump of his heart, she couldn’t say. She suspected it was some combination of the two though.

The man, now close enough that she could smell the two weeks’ worth of salt and sweat he had accumulated over the course of their long boat ride, lifted the dancing flame slowly from her chest to her cheek. Marian’s skin buzzed with that unpleasant tingle one only experienced when they were being scrutinized, and she imagined that the man’s honey-brown eyes were narrowed in concentration, his thin lips pulled into a severe line, brow as wrinkled as her laundry. The part of him that was the clinician, the healer, had taken over, inspecting her from head to toe, searching her and the precious cargo held securely against her breast for signs of harm or distress. Of course, there was nothing wrong to be found—externally, at least—and when the flame-wielder-slash-healer discovered this, he asked, “What was that?”

Marian wasn’t about to admit that she’d briefly hallucinated an event two decades old, watched apparitions of her sister, her best friend, and her lover—him—charge into the labyrinth beneath the sprawling estate with the recklessness of youth. The last thing he needed was something else to worry about, and the last thing she needed was someone else worrying about her—well, worrying about her more than they already did. What she did need, however, was that Maker-damned fire out of her face; not answering him would only encourage his alarm and feed the blighted fire though, and so, in her most convincing voice—which wasn’t all that convincing—she said, “What was what, Anders? I didn’t hear anything. Did you?”

Anders—for that was who the man, the wielder of the flame, her lover, was—didn’t budge. “Marian.”

Marian’s lips stretched wide in a crazed grin as the flame in Anders’ hand brightened, orange-red tendrils licking at the skin lining her jaw.

Definitely anxiety powered.

“Your fire is very nice, Anders,” she cooed, “and while I'm very proud of you for making something so wonderfully radiant to light our way, I would like to retain the use of my retinas.” She shrugged. “You know…. Watch Leah grow up, stab a person or two, walk down the aisle, save a city from a rampaging hoard of Qunari…. Normal things that normal people do with their normal kids.”

“Watch Leah…what? You—oh.” The flame dimmed to the size and strength of an abnormally large firefly. “I’m sorry, I—”

“That’s another bit for the Sorry Jar,” she singsonged as she blinked, clearing the dark spots that dotted her vision.

“Another bit for the—but I wasn’t—this has nothing to do with—that’s not fair.”

“A sorry is a sorry. I don’t make the rules.”

“You do, actually.” Free of the black splotches popping in her eyes, Marian could see the affection in Anders’ gaze as he looked down at her, his words robbed of any bite they might have had.

“Do I? Always considered myself more of a rule breaker than a rule setter, but there’s a first time for everything I suppose.”

“Yes—like staying on topic.”

“We were on a topic—a topic about rules and about how I set them, apparently. You’re the one trying to derail us. At least, that’s how it looks from where I’m standing.”

“Marian, that’s not—”

“And before that, we were talking about normal things that normal people do with their normal kids, your fire in my eyes—my retinas thank you, by the way—and something about you hearing voices and me definitely not hearing them.” She tilted her head to the side. “That about covers everything we’ve discussed in this brief interlude, does it not?”

Anders sighed, his non-flame carrying hand rubbing at his tired face. For a heartbeat, Marian felt her gut roil with guilt—she was the one putting those creases of stress in his forehead, she was the one causing the crow’s feet around his eyes to deepen, she was the one responsible for the slump of his shoulders—but the feeling passed as quickly as it had come, reflexively grabbed and shoved down beneath conscious thought, buried in her unconscious mind where it would fester and boil and rot her from the inside out. “Love, please. What’s wrong?”

Marian held on to her smile. “Nothing, Anders. Nothing is wrong.”

Disbelief radiated from the mage, his mouth screwing to the left.

“Really.” Marian’s electric-blue eyes fixed him with their piercing stare. “I’m fine. Leah is fine. We’re fine. Everything is…fine.”

“If you’re certain…” His tone of voice suggested that he, at least, was not certain.

“Yes!” Marian exclaimed, a bit too aggressively. Anders lifted an eyebrow at her in suspicion and she cleared her throat. “Yes. Yes, I am,” she said, much calmer this time. “Certain. Certain that everything is fine.” It was, of course, at that exact moment that their dreaming daughter—Leah—decided to shift in Marian’s aching, overused arms. A hiss escaped from between her clenched teeth, her biceps screaming that they, at the very least, were not fine. “OK—I take it back, I’m not fine.” It was her turn to lift an eyebrow at Anders. “But unless you plan on carrying Leah, this giant, two-handed sword strapped to my back, or, better yet, both…it’s best we move forward before I fall on one or both of them.”

Anders’ mouth twitched at the corners. “If you’re carrying Leah up front and the sword is on your back…how could you fall on both of them?”

“It’s me, Anders. I’d find a way.”

The ghost of a smile slipped across Anders world-worn face, amused despite Marian’s stubbornness. “No doubt you would.”

Satisfied that Marian and Leah were at least not it any immediate physical danger, Anders turned around, his back to Marian once again, the flame returning to its former strength as he resumed his trek through the darkness. With some effort, Marian forced her burning legs after him, the bone-gnawing exhaustion born from living a life on the run for sixteen years—a life of light sleep, kidnappings, ransoms, assassins, and confrontations with Prince Piss—doing little to take the edge off of her discomfort at being the follower instead of the leader. It was only logical that Anders was the captain of this leg of the journey, however, as, despite the fact that the estate belonged to her, she hadn’t spent nearly as much time exploring its depths as Anders had, hadn’t memorized its layout, its twists and turn. She’d never had to flee into its maw to escape the templars prowling Darktown, hunting for their prey—hunting for him.

Anger spiked her blood, quickened her pulse, a new set of ghosts rising unbidden before her.

How many times had Anders emerged from the underground beaten and bloody, his robes ripped, skin bruised? How many times had Marian discovered him sitting in front of the fireplace, drenched in cooling sweat and steaming entrails, his normally expressive eyes vacant? How many times had she woken to find him slumped over a desk, his hands stained night-black with ink and bright, sticky red with poultice, mud and sewage crusting his clothes?

He’ll never have to run again. We’ll never have to run again, Marian told herself firmly, eyes trained resolutely on Anders’ too-thin shoulders, reminding herself that the ghosts were just that—ghosts. The Inquisitor finished what he—what we—started. Sister Nightingale is Divine Victoria. The Circles are gone. Mages are free! Mages. Are. Free. It’s over. It’s done. No more running. No more templars. No more late night manifesto editing sessions. All is right with the world! All is right with the world. All is… All is… All…

Despite her super-convincing self-reassurances, the angry thing that lived inside some hidden part of her, buried so far down she hadn’t even realized it existed until she had had to make what was supposed to be an impossible choice between her love and the so-called greater good, stirred. Her grip on Leah tightened, vision tunneling until all she saw was the too-lean man before her. She took a deep breath in, felt her chest expand with dank cellar air, held it until she felt like her lungs would burst, and then let it out, trying to root herself in the present.

All is right with the world. All is right with the world. All is right with the world.

She kept consciously breathing in and breathing out, kept focusing on the man that was alive—alive, despite it all!—in front of her, kept reminding herself that the weight in her arms was his—her—their daughter, as the angry thing reached up towards what remained of her soul, gripped its fractured edges, and pushed.

“We’re nearly there,” Anders announced, his voice cutting into Marian’s increasingly frantic thoughts like a hot knife through butter. Startled, Marian gave a violent blink and looked up to see Anders observing her over his shoulder. He must have noticed her agitated mien, assumed it was his fault—as he always did—and felt responsible, as the next words out of his mouth almost robbed him of another bit for the Sorry Jar. “Sor—I mean….” He paused, considering his next words. “It’s taking so long because it’s been…awhile…since I last had to do this.”

Marian barked a short, sharp laugh, the angry thing still smoldering in her veins, causing Leah to stir in her sleep. “Yes, how dare you have been forced to play so much hide-and-seek with the templars that you memorized the location of every rusted nail and loose floorboard of my basement.”

“Is that what upset you earlier? Thinking about—”

Marian bristled. Nope—she was not having this conversation. Not now. Not ever. “I think I know where we are!” she declared, brusquely brushing past him.

“Marian, we need to—”

“Yes, I definitely know where we are.” She squinted into the shadows that lived beyond the flame’s warm halo, examining the support columns and spider-webbed casks. “Usually sent Bodahn to fetch…whatever it was we kept down here, but sometimes he wasn’t around, and Orana hated the cellar.” She continued on ahead, not caring how obvious it was that she was simply talking to fill the void and steer clear of Chantry-Go-Boom Day discussions and anything related to it—templars and the angry thing simmering inside her included. Anders remained silent behind her, the only evidence that he was following her the fact that she had not yet been plunged into darkness. “It was because of the spiders—Orana wasn’t just scared of them, she despised them. I tried to help her get over her fear-slash-hate—told her the spiders in the cellar were very small compared to what we ran into in just about every cave, forest, thaig, and other giant-spider-friendly place. Didn’t help her much, if at all. Actually…I think it made her fear-slash-hate worse. Couldn’t even get her to think of going near the vault door for weeks. Speaking of the vault door…” She whirled around, flashing a mad, triumphant grin at her mage. “There it is.”

Anders returned her grin with a somber, tired smile that wasn’t really a smile, but more of a “We’re totally talking about Chantry-Go-Boom Day and Related Matters later” grimace. “Yes—there it is.” The flame winked out of existence as he moved to the bottom of the wooden stairs that led up to the vault door.

Marian resisted the urge to shoulder him aside and rip open the vault door, bursting into the mansion with a scream so loud that the residents of the Fade could hear her, warning any unwelcome visitors that lurked within that they had less than ten seconds to flee before she did her best imitation of Fenris and sent her gauntlet-clad fist through their chest. Fortunately for any unwelcome visitors that may or may not have been lurking, she had agreed with Anders that whoever wasn’t carrying Leah should do a sweep of the estate before the Leah-carrier entered, confirming the safeness or unsafeness of the abode. It was only logical that Marian be the Leah-carrier, seeing as how, despite the strength it took to wield a stave with as much flourish as Anders did, she was stronger, and, since he had also been stripped of his Warden stamina thanks to Queen Cousland’s Cure for the Taint, Marian also beat him in that regard now. This, therefore, logically meant that Anders would go first into the unknown, but, in that moment, as they were on the precipice of their success—or doom—Marian damned logic.

“Don’t.”

Marian looked up in the direction of Anders’ voice. “Don’t what, Anders? I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific—I can’t read minds.”

“Don’t even think about doing what I know you’re thinking about doing,” he chastised, Marian smirking at the frown she could hear.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied, the tension between them thickening like the mud on the bank of Lothering’s river after a good rain. “Also…since when can you read minds?”

“I don’t need to be able to read minds to know what’s going through yours.”

“Enlighten me then. What am I thinking?”

Anders sighed heavily, and she pictured him pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. “Please, love. Please. Not now. Not when we’re so close.”

Marian opened her mouth, a witty retort ready about how at least one of them was close poised to leave her lips, thought better of it. “Fine.”

“Thank you, love.” The lock on the vault door clicked as he unlocked it. “Stay put. I’ll be back.”

“Unless you’re not.”

“Marian—”

She gestured with her elbows at the door, even though he couldn’t see her. “Go on! I won’t move a muscle. Pinkie promise.”

“Why does that not fill me with confidence?”

“Because you know me.”

“To your detriment.”

Before Marian could respond, Anders was gone, the door creaking as he slipped through and shut it behind him. She let out an exasperated huff, frustrated at the need for their clandestine return to Kirkwall, at herself, at him, at…everything.

The angry thing lifted its head, waiting to see if it would be fed.

Marian kicked distractedly at the wood-planked floor, cringing as the pointed tip of her Champion boots dug into the recently replaced boards.

So much for Varric’s restoration—already ruining it. Just like you ruin everything else you touch. How long will it take you to fuck things up this time, Marian? A day? A month? A year?

She took her bottom lip between her teeth and worried it, doubt curdling her stomach.

Was she doing the right thing? Bringing Anders back to Kirkwall—the city where he’d lost his first love, where he’d nearly lost himself, the city that hated him, where his sins—her sins—watered the very ground they stood upon in the blood of a hundred innocents, the very ground that their daughter—

Leah.

Marian glanced down at her golden-haired child, tucked safely against her breast.

How many mothers had lost their daughters that day? Their sons? What about the daughters that had lost their mothers? Sons their mothers? Marian was no stranger to loss—her father had been taken from her by illness, her brother ripped apart by an ogre, her mother mutilated by a madman—but to know that she had played a direct part in the immense death and destruction that day…

Leah’s weight became unbearable, and Marian staggered forward, her vision growing faint as her breaths came fast and quick.

You kill, Marian. That’s what you do. What’s the difference between a Mother, Sister, Brother and a mother, sister, brother? Chantry, Qun, templar, mage, prince, citizen…everyone is something to someone. And everyone is guilty of something. No one is truly innocent—not even children. Especially not children. Children are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.

Yes, I’ll admit that some children are rather…unpleasant, but—

No buts! You never felt bad about it before—about what Anders did. About what you did. Why start now? Is it because you’re back here, after all this time? With Leah? With him? Or is it because you—

“Marian!”

Anders’ voice pulled her back from the brink, like it always did. Blinking, she focused her eyes on where he stood at the top of the stairs, the warm glow of the candle on the wall behind him lighting his black-feathered shoulders. Marian felt her heart skip a beat as she stared at him—he was why she had done what she had that fateful day. Why she’d do it again in a heartbeat, too. She would never, ever let anyone take Anders from her. Or Leah.

“Marian?”

Marian plastered her trademark Marian Hawke grin across her face. Yes, she would do it all again. She would do whatever it took to keep Anders and Leah safe. The angry thing inside her agreed.

“Ready or not, here I come, Anders!”

~~~

Varric hadn’t been lying when he said he’d returned the Hawke Estate to its former glory.

Placing both hands along the top lip of the banister, Anders leaned forward to survey the spacious great room below. Even with only a handful of the manor’s candles lit, their inviting, homey glow trapped firmly inside the house’s towering walls by massive rich red curtains, Anders could tell that his—no, Marian’s—friend had spared no expense in restoring her family’s home, returning it to the exact, if not better, condition in which they had left it that fateful night sixteen years ago.

He pretended not to watch as Marian slowly picked her way towards the stairs, her face a carefully arranged mask he couldn’t read, her sharp blue eyes absorbing everything and betraying nothing. The urge to seize her face between his scarred hands and force her to look him in the eyes and tell him what had disturbed her earlier was strong, but he resisted. That wasn’t how one went about getting Marian Hawke to talk—Marian Hawke would talk when Marian Hawke was ready, and that’s all there was to that.

Marian paused at the desk directly beneath where Anders stood, her eyes narrowing in concentration as she leaned over to read the message that Varric had left her. Anders averted his gaze to give her some privacy; having discovered the letter during his preliminary inspection of the manor, it had taken naught but a glance for him to recognize the dwarf’s handwriting, and, seeing as how he was still on Varric’s shit list, had assumed the words were not for him, and immediately moved on.

No longer searching for threats, Marian preoccupied, Anders allowed himself a moment to appreciate the finer details of the restored estate. To his left, the marble-white fireplace stood quiet, freshly chopped wood stacked neatly inside its firebox, hearth swept clean of all debris. A writing table and chair sat to the left of that, though whether or not they were the exact same pair he had frequently used during his previous stay at the estate, he couldn’t tell from his vantage point. Across the octagonal-patterned stone floor lay a light-red rug, two sets of golden lines embroidering the length and width of it near its out-most edge. Even the plants were the same, their leaves faded to the exact calming yellow-tinged green shade as their predecessors.

Anders’ fingers curled into a vice grip, fingernails digging into the granite.

It was as if time had stood still at the Hawke Estate and he had returned to the night he had nearly destroyed everything he loved.

Guilt twisted his insides into painful knots.

After all he’d done…after every lie he’d told, every person he’d betrayed, every life he’d taken…. Did he deserve this? Did he deserve a partner that loved him? A daughter that adored him? Did he deserve…did he deserve…

...to live?

Anders closed his eyes, screams—always, the screams—ringing in his ears. Even now, nearly two decades later, the smoke still clogged his nose, the blood still filled his mouth, the ash still burned his skin. He remembered it all with stunning accuracy, could recall with perfect clarity every single detail—the flash of Hawke’s Key, the wet tump of Varric’s arrows burying into the chest of a frantic mage, Aveline’s shield clanging as she deflected a Templar’s rapid blows. He remembered the anger—no, the hate—roaring in Sebastian’s sky-blue eyes as he’d sworn his vengeance, the disgusted sneer in Fenris’ voice as he reminded Anders that he was helping the mages for Marian and Bethany but not for him, Isabela never failing to remind them all that she absolutely did not want to do this but was anyway with exasperated groans. He remembered the pity with which Merrill—Merrill! Who had been responsible for her Keeper’s death, who had been banished from her clan!— had regarded him, the stern reproach in the thin line of Nathaniel’s lips and draw of his brow that had been directed at him, Bethany a perfect mirror of her mentor. He remembered Donnic, the assassin Zevran Arainai, and even that wretched Templar Samson, all stepping in to fight on their behalf. He remembered them all and more—the wounds of that night had sunk into his bones, his marrow, his soul.

He would never allow himself to forget—even if there was some way to erase that night from his memory, some potion he could drink that blotted it all out, some spell he could cast that overwrote the pain, he wouldn’t use them. No, he would never allow himself the dumb comfort of ignorance, would never allow himself to live a life blissfully unaware of all the carnage he and Justice had left in their wake.

And he would never let himself be forgiven, either.

“Isabela’s stairwell carvings are gone.”

Anders’ eyes flew open, his attention snapping to his immediate right where Marian had come to stand next to him. When had she ascended to the second floor? How long had he been lost in his own thoughts?

Always wrapped up in yourself, never paying attention to the ones that matter most. Typical.

Adrift in her own memories, Marian seemed to not have noticed the alarm she had raised in him. “I wonder if Varric replaced the stairs because of the carvings, or because someone else vandalized them with something even more unsavory.”

Anders was proud that he was able to keep the panic out of his voice, his heart slowly calming from his fright. “Is that sadness I hear?”

“Yes, it is sadness.” Marian sighed. “She had some really, ah, unique…etchings.”

Anders offered her a consoling smile. “I’m sure she’d be happy to ruin your furniture once again.”

“Gleefully,” Marian agreed. She pursed her lips, thin eyebrows bunching together as she glared at him out of the corner of her eyes. “And it’s our furniture.”

Anders opened his mouth to correct her—he had no right to claim this life of luxury—only for Marian to quickly cut him off.

“Yes, it’s yours, too, Anders. I don’t care what you say. If something happens to me—”

“Nothing is going to happen to you.” Anders let go of the banister, his cramping fingers thanking him, and turned to face her. He set his jaw, brow furrowing. “I won’t allow it.”

“You won’t allow it? Ha! I’ll let the Maker know, next time I see Him.”

Anders’ mouth went dry. “Next time you see Him? I thought you said—”

“Sarcasm, Anders! Sarcasm.” Marian laughed a laugh that did not quite reach her eyes.

Anders closed his eyes, forced himself to swallow. “Please don’t joke about that.”

“About what? The part about seeing the Maker, or the part where I—”

“I don’t give a blighted rat’s ass about the Maker.” Anders opened his eyes as he clenched his fists, Marian making an exaggerated, faux-offended gasp at his blasphemy. “I do give a blighted rat’s ass about you, however, and you…you died Marian.”

Marian lifted her shoulders in a shrug, seemingly indifferent about her own demise. “I got better, didn’t I?”

“That’s not the point!” Anders shouted.

Marian shot Anders a warning glare as the eight-year-old in her arms whimpered and curled into her chest.

“That’s not the point,” he repeated in a whisper, determined not to let the topic slide—again. “You died because of me. Because I….” The words got stuck in his throat, tears welling in his eyes.

“Because you what?” Marian picked up ruthlessly. “Knocked me up? Lost control to Justice? Couldn’t stop me from knocking Justice-you out because he was burning you up from the inside out and I couldn’t bear to see you die?”

“I—”

“Is it because your actions led to the Wardens—Nathaniel and Velanna—no longer trusting you?” Marian pressed relentlessly on, her voice gradually increasing in volume. “Because you were dozing comfortably in Nathaniel’s strong, muscled arms while I held Prince Piss and his pissy posse at bay? Or is it because you couldn’t make that grand sacrifice you’ve been dying to make since the Chantry exploded and finally—”

Leah groaned again, shutting Marian up mid-tirade. Both froze as their daughter moved, mumbling something that was almost coherent as she snuggled further against her mother.

“It doesn’t matter,” Marian said, quieter this time, eyes downcast.

Anders swallowed the urge to scream. It did matter. It mattered quite a lot, in fact. To him. To Leah. To everyone else whose life Marian had touched. How could she not see that? How could she not understand that she was the thing that had held them all together all those years ago, that was still keeping him in one piece now, a stubborn, persistent sap that valiantly refused to be dissolved no matter the agent used against it?

Because you broke her.

“Marian, we need to talk about—”

“It. Doesn’t. Matter.”

“It does,” he insisted, frowning. “And we need to—”

“We need to sleep. Before we say things we’ll both regret. It’s been a long day.”

He couldn’t argue with her there. “….Fine.”

She smiled a smile that reminded him of a particularly mischievous cat. “There; that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“But we will be discussing this later.”

“Discuss wh—oh! Don’t glower at me.”

“Marian, please.”

“Alright! Alright. If it means that much to you—”

“It does.”

“—then we’ll discuss it later.”

“Thank you.”

“Please, don’t mention it,” Marian grumbled.

Truthfully, Anders didn’t believe that she would discuss it later, but he also knew that further argument was pointless. Shelving his objections for the time being, he opened his arms. “Here—give Leah to me.”

“Gladly.” With a carefulness at odds with the enthusiasm with which she spoke, Marian maneuvered their sleeping daughter into his arms, chuckling slightly as Anders let out an, “Oof!” Wincing, she stretched her arms above her head, mouth opening wide in a yawn. Despite the bulky Champion armor clinging to her toned body, their mini-fight, and the extreme exhaustion threatening to claim him, Anders felt a stirring in his loins.

“Didn’t your mother teach you its rude to stare?” Marian teased.

Anders tried to shrug as nonchalantly as Marian had while carrying Leah, failed. “Probably.” He grit his teeth as his upper back screamed in protest from the attempted shrug. “How did you manage both Leah and your two-hander?”

With a wink that weakened his already shaky knees, Marian turned sharply on her heel. “Put Leah to bed and I’ll show you what else I can manage.”

Anders shook his head, a breathy, incredulous laugh escaping him. He followed after Marian, turning left towards Leandra’s old room while Marian continued on straight to the master bedroom. “What was that about needing to sleep?”

#marian hawke #hawke #f!hawke #anders #anders x hawke #anders x f!hawke #handers #f!handers #dragon age 2 #dragon age #fanfiction #sissy writes

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thecorteztwins · 4 years

Note

🔥 villains. 🔥 the hellfire club 🔥the difference between naive and unintelligent characters

Welp, this all got STUPIDLY LONG and I’m really sorry. Under a cut because HUUUUUGE.

🔥 villains.There’s just been a robbery! All the jewels in the museum’s vault have been stolen! The culprits are….Sabretooth and Magneto!Yeah, that doesn’t sound right, does it? Thievery isn’t really something either of them do, they’re not bank robber or cat burglar types at all. And Magneto’s not a fan of Sabes to my memory, it’s unlikely he’d work with him unless it was essential to his ACTUAL goals…which this isn’t. But hey, they’re both bad guys, so they must do ALL the bad things! No matter what it is, it’s in-character if it’s evil or unlawful, right?This is the logic that I see running both often in fandom, and also sometimes with canon writers. There’s a mentality that if someone is villainous or bad in ONE way, then they must be villainous or bad in ALL ways. I think there’s always been this misunderstanding, as people do tend to think in black and white a lot, but I think it’s also increased with the rise of purity culture in Tumblr, where people/characters/works are All Good or All Bad, and if the bad guys aren’t depicted as 1000% heinously evil then it’s APOLOGISM. An example in RP would be that more than once I’d had people expect Fabian to be a racist. I can see why, given that he expresses sexism, classism, a bit of ableism, and disgust with physical mutations. But not only does he never express racism, he never expresses racism DESPITE AMPLE OPPORTUNITY. Think about it—his main antagonists are Magneto (Jewish) and Quicksilver (Jewish and Romani), he once personally fights Bishop (Black and Indigenous Australian) one on one, he’s on one team with Shinobi (half white, half Japanese), and his allies/underlings in the second-gen Acolytes included people who are African American, Moroccan (and Muslim-coded), and Inuit. And he never, ever, EVER even THOUGHT anything related to race (or religions that are usually implicitly tied to race) about ANY of them. Given how blatant his other prejudices are, I think he would very much let the reader KNOW if he were racist, anti-Semitic, etc. An example in canon…look, I’m sorry to bring up this dead horse again, but it is the best example that I presently have—Sebastian Shaw making the “women’s work” comment. As with Fabian, I get why it makes sense on the surface. He’s a powerful man, the proverbial rich old white guy, and he’s part of an organization where women walk around in lingerie as a general rule. It seems like it makes sense, it does, I grant that. But then if you actually look at his history…for 40 years of canon, he’s been allies and enemies with many powerful women, and never made a remark about their gender, never relegated lesser or menial tasks to them, never treated any of them differently as partners or foes, he actually never even flirts with any of them, be they opponents or partners in crime (except that ONE issue when Emma is in Storm’s body and he kisses her…yeah that was a weird issue, why does a telepath need a gun to switch bodies?) Which is pretty unusual for a male Claremont villain. And he actually reacts with “I…see.” the one time a comrade makes a genuinely sexist remark. He doesn’t agree with him, he’s more like “wow ok I can’t believe he said that but I guess I’ll let it go since I want to recruit him” So, it’s actually VERY odd for him to suddenly say something like that, once you know the character. Especially since, like Fabian, he had TONS of opportunity in the past and he’s also not a character that most writers want to seem sympathetic or likeable. So it’s unlikely the writers were just trying to make him look good by playing down some secret sexist tendencies all this time or something. It’s more likely he just doesn’t have them BUT IS STILL A HORRIBLE PERSON! He just doesn’t need to be horrible in every way! Most people, even the MOST terrible, aren’t horrible in EVERY WAY POSSIBLE.That’s also why I try to avoid having Fabian being too homophobic (beyond “I can convert lesbians”) or transphobic, despite the fact that I *could* justify it (since those things are very intertwined with sexism)—because he’s awful enough. Giving him additional bigotries just seems stupidly redundant and cheap. Especially since I think people actually hate a bigoted character more than they hate a murderer; like I feel like if Duggan ever graduates to Shaw making a racist or homophobic remark, I might have to close his blog, but it’s fine to have blogs for fictional serial killers. By the same token, a villain having good traits doesn’t somehow eliminate their bad ones, especially if the good and bad traits are unrelated to each other. A mass murderer supervillain is not “actually a good guy deep down” because he loves his family; it’s actually VERY common for even genocidal dictators to care for their own. Hell, not to go all Godwin, but Hitler was an animal-lover and had a beloved dog. You can certainly point to good traits to show that a villain isn’t ALL bad (which as I just said, I support) but not being “all bad” isn’t the same as “actually a good person and just misunderstood!” Like, Shaw being an egalitarian in a lot of regards or was good to Madelyne Pryor or loved his father, doesn’t change he’s a heartless, morally bankrupt monster who abused his son and sold out an entire oppressed species (his own, no less) for his own financial gain. Mystique is an incredibly complex character, far more so than Shaw, but her love for Destiny and Rogue and many of her other good points don’t change that she hunted down other mutants for the government, abused her human son for not being a mutant, has committed rape by deception numerous times (though I think that’s due to the writers not realizing that’s a thing), constantly tries to manipulate her daughter’s life and choices, and I’m pretty sure I recall an issue where she framed a guy for domestic abuse just for funsies?Basically, villains are people. They have individual different traits and beliefs and motives, and those things will drive them towards individual different types of villainy. One villain probably won’t do the same kind of villainy that another does. Likewise, someone being a shitty person in one way, or many ways, doesn’t mean they will be in ALL ways. Pointing this out isn’t the same thing as denying their flaws or defending them, but some people do do this and that’s wrong too. Nuance needs to be allowed for. Pointing out Shaw isn’t awful in every way doesn’t mean I think he’s a misunderstood woobie whose crimes should all be forgiven. Pointing out Mystique has done awful shit doesn’t mean I think she’s pure evil and all her complex points should be ignored. It just means I don’t think characters should be strawmanned by fans OR writers as paragons or demons, especially when it contradicts what canon has actually established (with the caveat that canon is dumb sometimes too, and also some characters canonically ARE one extreme or the other, but I’m talking about ones who AREN’T)🔥 the hellfire clubI’ll give two on this! One is “unpopular” just in the sense it’s not something I’ve ever heard anyone express, but I’ve never heard an opinion in opposition to it either. The other is “unpopular” in that it does directly contradict a popularly held opinion.The first is that I think it’s stupid that Grant Morrisson made The Hellfire Club into a strip club, and it’s stupid that writers since depicted it this way. The Hellfire Club is shown in the 80s and 90s as being, first and foremost, an elite social club for the wealthiest and most powerful people in society. It’s basically a big posh country club, and most of its members are just regular people. Super duper rich people, but still normal people, lots of old money and new money and big business owners and politicians and probably royalty/nobility. Most of what they’re doing is big fancy, stuffy galas and balls, that kind of thing. But under the surface, it’s hinted that there is indeed a much more sexual underside to it. The female staff wear very fetishy maid costumes, the female Inner Circles literally have dominatrix lingerie as their getups, and while we actually never see what goes on beyond the closed doors in the 80s, nor was anything directly stated, the hints are definitely there that it’s as libertine in the private rooms as they are prim and proper in the ballrooms. We don’t know WHAT exactly is happening, only that it’s dark and decadent and surely sexual in some kind of “abnormal” (read: kink shaming) way.And then it turns out it’s just a strip club where the dancers wear corsets? Really? REALLY? I’m sorry, you expect me to belief that these oh-so-forbidden and secretive sexual delights that are available only to the richest and most powerful people in the world are…a TITTY BAR WITH NO ACTUAL TITTIES EVEN OUT???? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! It’s so fucking juvenile! It feels like something a 13 year old made up while trying to come up with the mos edgy, shocking, “sexy” thing he could. It just…doesn’t work. It doesn’t work firstly because it completely took away the whole “upper class veneer” that is as much an essential part of the HFC as the sex. In fact, I think more so. Writers, artists, and fans all like to focus on ZOMG THE SEXY COSTUMES but thematically speaking, I think the fact it’s an elite organization exclusive to the super-wealthy is much more important; that should be what they’re really about as villains, but writers end up focusing way too much on the shock value of the kink, and that’s how you wind up with stuff like this. The second reason it doesn’t work is that…it isn’t even shocking. When what they were doing was kept hidden, the reader could imagine no limit of decadence and depravity. When it’s revealed, and revealed as something that’s frankly super and common and TAME (seriously, strip clubs aren’t edgy these days) that you can get anywhere else, you’re left wondering why exactly anyone gives a shit about being in the HFC if this is all it really is? We should NEVER get to see what the HFC patrons truly do in private, and we should definitely never get shown that it’s just watching a woman pole dance with Victorian underwear on. That doesn’t make the HFC look sexual, it makes them look like PRUDES!Honestly, I do actually love the sexy sinful decadent aspect, but it’s overtaken the “extremely rich and powerful people trying to rule the world from behind the scenes through political and economic manipulation” aspect (which is far more interesting and villainous) that I kind of wish sometimes they had been created without the kink or colonial cosplay aspects, and instead had just worn some 80s powersuits.Now, here’s the “unpopular as in contradicts the popular” opinion. I see the Hellfire Club described a lot, in canon and fandom, as an organization of powerful MEN, as a bunch of MEN who just want to control others, as a BOY’S club…but aside from Sebastian Shaw, all the most prominent and effective members of the Club have been women? I mean, think about it. The names most synonymous with “Hellfire Club” in fandom are Emma Frost, Selene, Jean Grey as Dark Phoenix, and Sebastian Shaw. Shaw’s the ONLY dude that really gets any focus from writers OR fans; the women are almost always utilized more by writers and remembered more by fans. Heck, in the London Branch of the Hellfire Club, NONE of the male members of the Inner Circle even got NAMES, while ALL the women did. Now, of course, individual women in an organization being successful in said organization and beloved by fans/writers, doesn’t mean the organization itself can’t also be sexist. And like most people, the disparity between the costumes of both the Inner Circle and the mere staff does lead me to believe that it was probably founded and run only by men originally, and I bet women probably weren’t even allowed in for a long time (especially given that it was established in the 1700s) But that’s my HEADCANON. That’s what I EXTRAPOLATE. But what’s actually on the page IN THE PRESENT is women that are on equal footing with men, or superior to them. They’re not just simply ALLOWED in the Inner Circle, they’ve been dominating it from the first appearance with Emma ruling it alongside Shaw over Leland and Pierce, and then Selene coming in to challenge Shaw and Emma (with Shaw being terrified of her) in a way that none of the other members (all male—Leland, Pierce, Von Roehm) could. Gender is never brought up by anyone, even the most despicable male HFC members like Donald Pierce. So while I believe it was founded by sexist men, the Inner Circle seems pretty egalitarian now.But of course, there’s the costumes. I absolutely think it’s a sexist setup that the men get to wear (super ugly) period cosplay while the women are in fetish lingerie. It seems to be the standard uniform, and the fact that they haven’t CHANGED it shows that there’s definitely still some sexism.Except…it doesn’t seem to be a rule in-universe that the women HAVE to wear them? We actually see female members of the HFC, such as Selene, wearing clothing other than that while hanging out there; there’s actually a scene wear Selene is wearing pants and a sleeveless turtleneck with gloves. Maddy also wears a lot of black leather when she’s a member, but it doesn’t look like the Hellfire Club ladies getup, it looks like all the other stuff she was wearing in the 90s. And when Selene, Emma, etc., AREN’T in the Hellfire Club…they often still dress exactly like that, or in a similiar manner. I think it’s pretty clear that no one is MAKING them wear the uniforms, they just LIKE them, they’re probably “encouraged but optional” or something like that. And Emma even has that WHOLE DAMN SPEECH about how this is her armor, how it empowers her, etc. That said, while I don’t think any other CHARACTERS are making these women dress like that, I do think the writers/artists are. If a real woman made the speech that Emma did, I’d be like “ok sure, you go girl, do what feels empowering for you”. But Emma ISN’T a real woman. Every word in her mouth in that panel is being put there by Chris Claremont, a horny man with a dominatrix fetish who is trying to justify it by selling it as feminist. That is what it is. But just because that’s the case on a meta level…on an in-universe level, no one makes these women dress like this, and that’s very evident, and while the way they’re treated by writers/artists is definitely affected by them being women, the way other characters, including the Hellfire Club men, treats them, isn’t. At least not til shitty recent stuff. (I’ve seen some people think SHAW made the women dress like that….yeah, sure, like he could make SELENE do anything? He’s completely afraid of her but somehow can make her wear something she doesn’t want? Emma and Selene dress like that no matter where they are and whether they’re presently HFC members or not, but somehow he’s making them do that? HOW DOES ANYONE GIVE THIS GUY THAT MUCH CREDIT?)Basically, I think people are TRYING to be feminist, but it often ends up feeling like SEXISM to me? Because it’s totally ignoring and erasing the power and agency that these women exert in this organization, and often even claiming that it’s actually the men who have all the control, when aside from Shaw it’s usually the ladies running the show. It just seems disrespectful to me. It’s like, as much as people are claiming to hate a lack of agency for female characters, they seem more comfortable with that idea than a situation where women actually HAD it. Maybe it’s because they’re villains, maybe it’s because the costumes really are distracting and unequal no matter how the writers try to justify it (again, I wish they’d just gone with business suits), but there seems to be an overall fandom determination to insist on women like Emma Frost and Selene as victims or simply accomplices to a greater (male) villain, rather than embracing them as the Top Tier Bad Bitches they were/are, and, again, that seems more sexist to me than not. But I worry people will think I’m sexist if I say that. But you know me, you know I LOVE agency for female characters, and how I rail against it when see them ACTUALLY lacking it in comics, so you know it’s not that. I think it’s just a part of the rise in purity culture that even “progressive” people would rather see a woman forced or coerced to be a victim than choose of her own volition to be a villain and be GOOD at it :/🔥the difference between naive and unintelligent charactersWell, firstly, obviously there IS a difference. Naivete is just a lack of experience or learned knowledge, neither of which has anything to do with intelligence. A naive character may make mistakes in a new situation based on their lack of knowledge about it, and that may LOOK stupid to those who have this knowledge, but it’s not the same thing. I think we can agree that, say, Tony Stark isn’t stupid, but if he had to navigate in the wilderness, he might do things that experienced hikers and campers and outdoors people know are SUPER BAD IDEAS. Because this isn’t something he knows about or has experience with.So, I think considering characters who are new to this world (as is common in comics—lots of people from other dimensions, planets, and times) as stupid because they don’t know a lot of things we take as a given, is erroneous. I think it’s pretty common for fandom to look at, say, Longshot or Thor, and deem them as basically being idiots because they’re not familiar with their new environments…when in fact, we’d all be acting the same if we wound up in Asgard or Mojoworld. Not that there’s not other reasons they can’t be idiots, but not knowing what a toaster is isn’t one of them.The big difference is that naivete is a temporary state, and I think both writers and fans forget that. The character’s naivete will gradually decrease as they learn more and more. So if you’re writing an Avengers fic where Thor has been on Earth for five years so far, he probably knows what a toaster is, can order normally at a restaurant, isn’t confused by normal sights like cars or traffic lights or computers, etc., but could still be confused if he went to a Midgardian country with very different cultural norms than the ones he’s learned in the United States. Likewise, I can keep Malcolm perpetually baffled by new worlds in RP since time is kinda wobbly here and can be static or move forward or back as we like, but if I were writing him in a linear story, he would have to learn along the way about the technology and norms of other worlds as he experiences them; if he didn’t learn, THEN he would be unintelligent, not just naive. If he touches a hot stove once because he didn’t know what it was, and it burns him, that’s naive. If he touches it twice to test if it does the same thing again, that’s curious and maybe even smart, despite looking stupid to others. If he keeps doing it every day by accident, then THAT’S an idiot. Also, even a naive character may still be able to deduce that certain things are bad ideas, dangerous, etc. For instance, let’s say my character is a normal everyday girl sucked into a fantasy realm. She doesn’t understand the language, and the people around her don’t look like anything humanoid, but when all of them go quiet and still when a larger, more decorated one enters, and they all give it a lot of space, she can probably deduce that this is someone of great importance, and she probably should do what the others are doing and not risk pissing it off. She may know nothing about these beings or their customs, but she still can use her powers of observation and common sense. It may end up being a TOTALLY wrong move—for instance, maybe newcomers are meant to come introduce themselves to the leader by touching them–but it was a good, sensible guess. Whereas if she’d just walked up to the being and given it a good swift kick, that’d be unintelligent to an almost unbelievable point, and no amount of “she’s just naive!” could excuse it.Oh yeah, and optimism doesn’t automatically equate to naivete either. To be honest, I think that extreme cynicism is just as naive in its own way as thinking everything is sunshine and daisies, and I’d like to see this explored more in fiction rather than the perpetual “happy positive people are dumb and naive and just don’t know better, whereas the grumpy cynics are always smarter and more experienced” that media is so fond of.TL;DR Not only is naivete not unintelligence, it also should be a temporary state. It’s definitely cute to watch a naive character stumble around their new experiences, but in gaining those experiences, they’re going to become less naive, and make few mistakes. Naive characters should also still be capable of acting in ways that are sensible, even if they end up being wrong for the new situation. And being positive doesn’t automatically equate naivete either, nor does negativity equate to the reverse (and can be naive in itself)

#unpopular opinion #salt #meta #badmusesdoitwell

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apostateangela · 5 years

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Resigned!

I’ve resigned.

Yep, it’s official.

And I feel WEIRD.

And by weird I mean otherworldly, strange, not of this place.

I feel a bit off.

Oh, who am I kidding, I feel a whole lot of offness.

I have been a Mormon all my life and now I’m not.

The resignation was easier than I thought it would be.

You might be asking yourself, what is she talking about?

Don’t you just stop going to church and believing in it all?

The short answer is that while it is fairly easy to just stop going, stop participating in the organization itself, you haven’t actually left the church.

You are STILL officially a member, you are just considered inactive.

This means you are on an list that labels you as ‘inactive’. The list’s purpose is as a reference for local members and leadership to use to try and get you to come back into active status.

And oh boy do they try!!!

Visits and emails and text messages galore; harassment glazed in a smile and godly intentions.

They enlist a righteous army, including your family, in this task.

They work hard to bring you back.

And all of it invades your privacy and communicates that you are not capable of handling your own spiritual salvation.

Actually leaving the church, getting your records removed, takes nothing short of legal action.

It’s not as bad as Scientology but the parallels are definitely there.

Leaving the Mormon church has been historically an erroneous and painful process, taking such a long time that most don’t want to even attempt it.

I never thought I would do it. I thought I would be content to just step away,

I was wrong, again.

I finally decided I wanted to resign my membership, about mid March. (When I said there was a lot going on in my last post, this was one of the things I was talking about.)

But before I get to the specifics that brought me to this decision I want to share with everyone the magic I discovered while researching the best way to leave the church.

First google hit is QuitMormon.

https://quitmormon.com/

From their website:

What is QuitMormon?

Resigning from the Mormon church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints) can be a tedious and painful process. If you've decided that you no longer want to be a member of the church, resigning on your own can result in unwanted contact from church leaders and multiple requests before your resignation is finally processed. Our free service lets you avoid this process and provides privacy.

Here’s the story:

Once upon a time a young man went through the invasive horror that is leaving the Mormon church at the age of fifteen when his parents filled out their resignation petition. The experience left such a mark on this man that when he grew up and became an attorney in 2009 he decided he would help Mormons wishing to formally leave the church by filing their paperwork free of charge and streamlining the process – hoping to make their experience easier than his had been and using the law to protect their privacy and prevent harassment.

HE IS SUCCESSFUL!

HE IS A NON-DENOMINATIONAL SAINT!

A SAINT OF THE WORLD.

Start to finish my resignation took one month and four days--with zero contact from anyone in the church.

It almost seemed too easy; which contributes to some of the weirdness I’ve been feeling since.

Historically, resignations took up to two years, filled with invasive actions, to complete.

Quit Mormon makes the decision to resign--have your name removed from the records of church membership--about your feelings and not the fear of harassment and/or disappointment.

The events and thought processes that led me to considering resignation may not seem at first relevant--I have been an adamant apostate braggart just by having this blog--but my reasons hold some potential for empathy.

My list of reasons not to resign included: concern for the feelings of others, a metaphorical chain around my leg, and revenge. Maybe you care about some of these too.

When you grow up in a culture that builds community through religion you make a lot of friends. These people may even be okay human beings. But they have been programmed the same way you have been, and you will probably lose them after you leave the church as they scramble for mental and spiritual purchase on how to keep you from being lost for eternity.

The deeper side of this ties into my last post, my family.

My parents are temple workers, temple mormons. My siblings are both in the church, even though one is a drug addict. My youngest brother is in church leadership and very devout.

My niece and nephews, his children, fully ingrained into church doctrine and behaviors.

Because their lives and thoughts and hearts are so wrapped around eternal families, and as I am an immediate member of that family, it will devastate them. I held back, so as to not be the cause of that devastation.

The second reason, my metaphorical chain, was that of the difficulty in acting against God as well as the severing of my security line. I’ve kept it all on the backburner to be a desperate back door rescue possibility if I fuck my life up so much that I can’t recover on my own. The church takes care of its members, especially the inactive ones because they think the kindness will make you want to go back.

I’ve continued to have a foot in that door because I didn’t believe I could make it on my own.

I didn’t think I could survive without that God and His servants.

I had never done it before.

And there was plenty of evidence, words people had written and said that proved I could not.

Finally, revenge.

Yep, the most un-christlike reason yet.

By resigning from the church my ordinances would be dissolved.

My eternal sealing to my ex-husband was still intact and tied him to me as I mentioned before.

What I’ve failed to mention is that he married a friend of mine from the small Utah town we lived and raised our kids in, three days after our divorce was final.

A woman who I’d even worked with in a children’s church organization.

A woman who had issues with her own husband while I had issues with mine.

We had tried to help each other in our similar misery.

(side note: I used to think I was the stupidest woman in the world, but I was wrong, it’s her).

Anyway, he can’t be sealed to her in the temple unless I either die or give him written permission.

I was never going to do that.

Not because I want to be tied to him after death, but because of a petty attempt at having something I could take from him as he took so much from me.

It was an opportunity for revenge.

A culmination of events made none of these reasons matter.

First, this blog itself has helped me clarify and solidify how I feel about the church, my past, and my escape from both.

Second, I have been delving into other cult type stories of survivors; from scientology to other more violent organizations and can see the amplified benefits of being out.

Another reason is that my parents and children that are still in the church have been very harsh and indifferent to my new self and my feelings. They have said careless, hurtful things that communicate their lack of concern or any meager possibility of acceptance.

I came to a place where I was asking myself, “Why am I worried about hurting them when they have zero concern about my feelings or getting to know the real me?”

The truth is that I did not leave the church to hurt them--not even a little bit.

I did it so that still being under the oppressive shadow of the church would stop hurting me.

More than anything I want to be seen for myself, and accepted for that person--instead of hiding behind a bunch of rules and dogma.

The final push came from being in a situation where a woman a decade and a half older than I am made me tea and told me a story of how she had been a part of and left The Way cult.

As she described to me her experiences, as well as her separation from her family for a period of time as she left christianity completely, it struck a chord in me.

The parallels were undeniable.

I heard my own voice inside my head and heart say with perfect clarity and resonance,

“This is what you want Angela!

You must leave the church officially.

It’s time!”

And as it is rare that my own voice speaks louder than the other voices of my past,

I knew I had better listen and act.

That night I discovered QuitMormon and filled out my resignation paperwork.

As I did so a calmness settled into my heart. All the anxiety and worry over my family as well as my future dissipated. I felt peace.

It is now final.

I have resigned.

I am no longer Mormon!

I have done it.

And in doing so, I am resigned.

I’m resigned to living in a world without easy supernatural answers.

A world where morality is up to humankind and not godkind.

A world where natural consequences rule more than metaphysical reasoning;

maybe everything doesn’t happen for a deeper long term reason

but rather because sometimes people are just shitty or that is just how the path goes.

A world where death contains a depth of devastation because no one knows if that is just the end or if there is actually something after.

A world without rose coloring or neatly tied packaging.

A messy, chaotic world filled with pleasure, joy, pain, and sorrow.

I am resigned to feeling it all as honestly as possible.

I am resigned to be myself, no matter the cost.

In fact,

in spite of the cost,

because I am worth it.

-Angela

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

The second season of The Handmaid’s Tale was, in almost every way, a marked improvement on the first. It was bolder in its storytelling, more incisive with its character arcs, and knitted together with stronger thematic underpinnings.

Without Margaret Atwood’s book to fall back on, for the most part, the series pulled back just a bit (literally, in the case of the camera, which dropped more often into wide shots) to examine the ways totalitarian societies hollow from the inside out, taking and taking and taking, until they become the only way of life you know. It was as timely as season one, but in a very different way, less triumphal and certain of the power wielded by large groups of people raising their voices as one.

It was also so, so, so much harder to watch, in a way that maybe sort of broke the show.

This is the paradox of series like The Handmaid’s Tale. Sometimes, making your show better can simultaneously make it worse, can expose the flaws in the template that were always there that viewers were better able to overlook when there were more obvious and glaring flaws to point to.

Make no mistake: The second season of The Handmaid’s Tale will be very high up on my year-end “best of TV” list, and I feel it made only very minor mistakes. (Mistakes that, sadly, include the very last scene of the season, leaving a bad taste in the mouth.)

But I’m more worried than ever — and I was already pretty worried — that the series has no long-term plan beyond rubbing viewers’ noses in misery. And worse, even if it does have a plan to alleviate the sorrow, embarking on such a plan might be antithetical to the spirit of the show, breaking it even more.

Well, unless you’re Fred Waterford. Hulu

The first two seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale form a loose diptych, mirroring and subverting each other in fascinating ways. They’re about survival in the midst of dystopia, about the idea that those who are oppressed continue to find ways to live and hope, even when doing so seems pointless. My guess — more of my hope, really — is that by the end of the show’s run, we will realize this was a “first chapter,” of sorts, as the show pivots to a new chapter about how unsustainable the theocratic hellscape of Gilead is.

But the first season kept stepping back to remind viewers, “Hey, this is a TV show.” Pop songs would turn up on the soundtrack with weird regularity. Handmaids would stride toward the camera in formation, in ways that seemed designed to underline their force as a potential army against their oppressors. It was laced through with hope and triumphalism, with a sense that the series was always about five seconds away from having star Elisabeth Moss flex her bicep in a Rosie the Riveter pose.

This stuff was easy to point to as a problem with the series. After all, the world the Handmaids live in is one that offers little hope or triumph for them. They’re held as rape slaves by a theocratic patriarchy, and even if they theoretically outnumber their oppressors, they’re systemically kept down by a government that believes them to be little more than chattel.

But the more season two wore on, the more it stripped away the hope and the triumphalism, the more I realized that these flaws were part of why the show was able to break out in its first season. It’s similar to the way that Mad Men’s first season was riddled with lots of ridiculous reminders of how different the ’60s were, which critics could point to as flaws, but viewers could welcome as punctures in the show’s immersive nature.

It’s really easy to get lost in Handmaid’s Tale, which is sumptuously designed and filmed at every level. It all but invites you into its space, through those frequent, eerie close-ups, shot with wide-angle lenses to blur out the backgrounds. Hearing pop music deployed as a clumsy metaphor for not losing hope is a great way to break the spell, to lure the viewer back to reality, where things are not this bad. Not yet.

And in season one, early in the Donald Trump administration, it was easy for progressives watching The Handmaid’s Tale to believe that hope and triumphalism could exist side by side with worry and sadness. In season two, that was harder to believe, as it became clear that the actions of Trump, even if he is booted from office before 2025, even if he’s booted from office tomorrow, won’t take years or even decades to overturn, but likely generations. The few times hope punctured the Handmaid’s Tale bubble — one time featuring Oprah Winfrey herself — felt more like dispatches from another universe than ever before.

And The Handmaid’s Tale kept accidentally releasing episodes that directly seemed to comment on what the administration had done just that week, including an episode about Gilead’s squabbles with Canada (in the wake of Trump’s lambasting of Canadian leader Justin Trudeau) and then another in which June’s daughter, Hannah, is ripped from her arms, which aired almost directly in the midst of the family separation crisis at the US’s southern border.

None of this is the show’s fault, of course, nor is the frequently clumsy marketing surrounding products meant to tie into it. But they all increase the noise around the show, which can make it harder to see the series for whatever it still is. (This, again, is reminiscent of what happened to Mad Men.)

And what the show has become is, in essence, a horror series. All of the hope in season one has been ground out of the show. Its shift from close-ups to wide shots in many episodes underlines the ways all of these characters are at once trapped by Gilead and a part of it, unable to escape their own complicity.

The show weaponizes what we know to be true about television — there will always be a status quo for the characters to return to, most regular characters have “plot armor” that keeps them safe — and it uses it to remind us, over and over again, that if you had to live through these truths, unable to change or evolve, it would be an unending horror.

And in that sense, perhaps, it has become a kind of progressive Walking Dead. That show crystallized conservative fears about America under Obama by depicting small communities of stalwart traditionalists being beset by hordes of outsiders.

But where The Walking Dead could always fall back on metaphor — I might be a progressive, but I love zombie movies and can enjoy them purely on the level of genre — The Handmaid’s Tale can’t. It keeps trying to make Gilead a metaphor for reality in a way that would crystallize progressives’ fears about Trump while allowing just enough remove to keep watching. But reality keeps refusing to be made metaphorical.

June goes on the run. Hulu

The final moments of season two of The Handmaid’s Tale don’t seem to radically shift the series’ status quo. Indeed, they seem to underline just how hard it will be for the series to run indefinitely with that status quo in place. Sooner, rather than later, and maybe even right now, that status quo will become untenable.

But the more I thought about those final moments, the more I came to realize that they really do change the show’s status quo considerably, should the series follow through on it. Up until those final moments, the resistance to Gilead within the series was mostly whispered about and in the extreme background of the story. At the end of season two, it steps out into the light, in a way that suggests this is where the story will pivot going forward. June will find a way to take up arms against Gilead, will become a revolutionary, a resistance fighter, maybe even a “terrorist.”

But this, too, might be against the spirit of the show.

To be clear, I’m not precious about the Atwood novel. I think it is a remarkable feat of literature, but an ongoing series adaptation of it is inevitably going to have to widen the scope of what is, ultimately, a very claustrophobic book. It’s going to have to world-build and add character arcs and introduce its own new characters who can stand alongside those from the novel. (The lattermost of these is something the series still struggles with.) And even in the book, it’s clear that Gilead eventually falls, though it happens way off-page.

What strikes me as a “problem,” however, is the idea that June herself might be instrumental to the collapse of Gilead. It’s not against the novel, which ends June’s story on one of literature’s most famous cliffhangers, since there, the future of Offred (we don’t know her pre-Gilead name in the book) is so unknown to us. For all we know, she started making homemade Molotov cocktails and burning down whole cities.

But Offred/June is a character defined by her normalcy and by how horrifying her “normal life” has become, by the idea that in some other life, she might have lived a “Tale” of long, rainy Sundays and seeing her daughter off to college and finally a hard-earned retirement.

Making that woman into a revolutionary hero feels like a difficult leap. And every time I’ve talked to someone who works on the series’ writing staff, they’ve referred to June as a “hero,” not in the sense of her being the protagonist (and, thus, “our hero”) but often in the sense of her building toward some great destiny.

That said, it’s basically what the TV show has to do to survive at this point. (Though add me to the chorus of TV critics calling for the show to set a hard and fast end date in season four or five.) As much as I find the twisted dynamics within the show’s central settings intriguing (especially when they involve the remarkable Yvonne Strahovski slowly awakening to the oppression she submitted to live under), making the series stumble through them for many more seasons would exhaust it and tarnish its legacy.

Sending June into the midst of the resistance could work as a way to find new stories to tell within this world, and could also find a way to re-inject a sense of the hope that season two abolished back into the storytelling.

But that would, in the end, cut against what made season two so remarkable and so hard to watch. Those wide shots took The Handmaid’s Tale away from just one woman’s story and turned it into a country’s story, into a tale of what happens when you become complicit in monstrosity by accidents of history. I’d say that story is timely, but it always is. The show’s trick will be seeing if it can find a way to make a story of burning that system to the ground just as vital. Stories of struggle, of unending doom are easy to tell on television. Stories of release are much, much harder.

The Handmaid’s Tale is available on Hulu.

Original Source -> The Handmaid’s Tale season 2 was masterful. But it may have broken the show.

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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Finland Has a Sports Screw Loose

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Finland Has a Sports Screw Loose

10 interesting facts about Finland

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HYRYNSALMI, Finland — There’s some thing extraordinary happening in Finland. Over the beyond few decades, because it has all but disappeared from the global sports activities level, this humble Nordic nation has the type of lost its sports thoughts.

More than 2,000 humans ventured to the far flung backwaters of central Finland recently for the twentieth annual Swamp Soccer World Championships. If you and your partner want to compete in the Wife Carrying World Championships, you have to come to Finland. The Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships? Finland. The World Berry Picking Championship and the Air Guitar World Championships? Finland and Finland.

“We have some weird interests Finland ,” stated Paivi Kemppainen, 26, a body of workers member on the swamp soccer Sports Loose opposition and grasp of the understatement.

Just have a look at swamp football in Hyrynsalmi, an area wherein Jetta can obtain a small level of celebrity over time. Jetta is a stuffed badger ensconced in a hen cage. She acts as a mascot of kids for a crew of 12 pals who make the seven-hour force each year from Vihti, close to Helsinki, for the competition. They offered the doll seven years ago from a junk shop at a dual carriageway rest prevent, and her reputation around the swamp has grown ever since. A couple of years ago, she changed into interviewed with the aid of a neighborhood newspaper.

Continue reading the principal story On Saturday morning, the guys stood around shivering in threadbare thrift-save fits, which they said have been their group’s legitimate heat-up duds. A bottle of vodka changed into being handed round (their preferred way, reputedly, of warming up). It turned into approximately 10 o’clock. Soon it might be time for their first recreation of the day. They set Jetta apart and stripped of their outerwear, revealing skimpy blue wrestling singlets.

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Left, Petra Koskela drinking wine at the Ukkohalla inn, wherein many gamers within the Swamp Soccer Championships stayed; proper, a player’s shoe is held on with tape to hold it from sticking in the muck. Credit Janne Körkkö for The New York Times Before they trodden into the mud, they have been requested a query: Why?

“You can say you’re world champions of swamp soccer,” said Matti Paulavaara, 34, one of the crew members, after a contemplative pause. “How many can say that?”

The genesis of swamp football changed into in 1998, when creative metropolis officers in Hyrynsalmi cooked up a competition-like occasion that might employ the region’s great swamplands. Thirteen groups confirmed up for the first tournament. Since then, the aggressive discipline has grown to about 2 hundred groups.

The latest fits — six-on-six, with 10-minute halves — were performed on 20 fields of varying squishiness, spread out over 50 acres of swamp. Finnish rock echoed thru the woods.

People striding on the seemingly firm ground would disappear unexpectedly into the smooth earth, as though descending a stairway. Some tottered on their palms and knees, like infants. Others stood nonetheless, till they have been waist-deep in the muck. The rankings were normally low. Many of the players were inebriated.

It’s tough to imagine an uglier model of the Beautiful Game.

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Even the best movements are extra hard in swamp soccer. Credit Janne Körkkö for The New York Times “You play, you lose, you win — no one cares,” said Sami Korhonen, 25, of Kajaani, who became gambling within the match for the 9th time. “The entire sport is so difficult, you’re definitely worn out while you’re completed.”

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This streak of strenuous irreverence began sweeping through the quiet Finnish geographical region inside the mid-Nineteen Nineties and has most effective grown considering the fact that.

In 1995, a Finn named Henri Pellonpaa killed a world-record 21 bugs in 5 minutes at the Mosquito Killing World Championships in Pelkosenniemi.

The World Sauna Championships were heavily contested in Heinola from 1999 to 2010 until a competitor died from 1/3-diploma burns.

More currently, hundreds of Finns, maximum of them teenage girls, have taken up competitive hobby horsing, in which competition trot and hurdle barriers while riding the timber toys.

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Finland was as soon as ambitious in traditional sports activities, however, has currently taken a hard pivot closer to hosting weird competitions. Clockwise from top left: hobby-horsing championships in April; the 2009 Sauna World Championships; Wife Carrying World Championship this month; the 2014 Air Guitar World Championships. Credit Clockwise from pinnacle left: Rex Features, through Associated Press; Heikki Saukkomaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Timo Hartikainen/Lehtikuva, thru Associated Press; Vesa Ranta/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images How did this appear? How did Finland grow to be such fertile ground for wacky sports?

There’s no easy solution, however, Finns offer diverse deep-seated elements, such as an enthusiastically outdoorsy populace (that goes barely stir-crazy all through the place’s oppressively dark winter months), the sizeable public gets admission to recreational areas, and a persevering with rest of the historically reserved countrywide man or woman. (Also, alcohol.)

Finland is the maximum thinly populated united states within the European Union. It boasts endless forests and almost 200,000 lakes, and its citizens revel in “Everyman rights,” which guarantees public get admission to maximum out of doors lands and our bodies of water for recreational purposes. The European Commission continually ranks Finns as a few of the maximum bodily energetic people at the continent.

“We’re like a forest people,” stated Lassi Hurskainen, 30, a former professional goalkeeper from Joensuu, who visited the swamp soccer tournament whilst website hosting a section for a Finnish sports activities television display. “So we provide you with video games that relate to nature.”

Straddling the Arctic Circle, Finland endures long, punishingly darkish winters. Summer consequently marks a duration of country wide catharsis. It enables that u. S . Has a predicted 500,000 summer time cottages, and due to the fact many Finns receive up to 6 weeks of vacation time per yr, the act of unhurriedly passing time outdoors feels almost like a country wide birthright.

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A lake on the Ukkohalla motel. Finland boasts endless forests, extra than two hundred,000 lakes and 24 hours of daylight at some stage in some summer time months. Credit Janne Körkkö for The New York Times The mosquito-killing contest, as an example, changed into invented by way of a Finnish businessman named Kai Kullervo Salmijarvi as a summertime diversion for his children.

“I think we pass a bit loopy inside the summer,” said Hanna Vehmas, a sports activities sociologist at the University of Jyvaskyla. “Mix that with alcohol, and perhaps we need to compete a little bit.”

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