#stays faithful to the book in many ways but is also its own unique take on the characters and story and works very well as a movie

[jessiescock]

Ppl really need to understand what the word 'adaption' means. Like if you're translating a story from one medium to another, you're gonna have to make some changes. A movie adaption of a book that includes every single scene and sentence of dialogue from the book would probably be a very bad movie. Different forms of media all have their unique limitations and opportunities, and a good adaption will take those into account. Also many adaptions were never meant to be exact copies of the original work, but a different artist's new take on the source material it draws from. Basically what im trying to say is that staying as faithful as possible to the source material is not inherently what makes an adaptive work good, nor does changing the source material inherently make for a bad adaption jfc

#example: rodrick rules #makes significant changes to the source material but is a very good adaption #stays faithful to the book in many ways but is also its own unique take on the characters and story and works very well as a movie #ofc sometimes changes do make a story worse. siehe: eberhofer filme #wobei dampfnudelblues wieder n beispiel für ne gelungene adaption ist das captured den vibe und the gist of the book very well #like ich kann gut nachvollziehen warum die da manche sachen geändert haben #die restlichen filme einfach travesty #they're like evil mean spirited caricatures of the source material no nuance no sincerity no compassion no humanity just bad cringe humour

[rockislandadultreads]

Nonfiction Thursday - True Crime: Cults

Cultish by Amanda Montell

What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has...

Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day.

Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere.

The Doomsday Mother by John Glatt

At first, the residents of Kauai Beach Resort took little notice of their new neighbors. The glamorous blonde and her tall husband fit the image of the ritzy gated community. The couple seemed to keep to themselves―until the police knocked on their door with a search warrant. Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell had fled to Hawaii in the midst of being investigated for the disappearance of Lori’s children back in Idaho―Tylee and JJ―who hadn’t been seen alive in five months.

For years, Lori Vallow had been devoted to her children and her Mormon faith. But when her path crossed with Chad Daybell, a religious zealot who taught his followers how to prepare for the end-times, the tumultuous relationship transformed her into someone unrecognizable. As authorities searched for Lori’s children, they uncovered more suspicious deaths with links to both Lori and Chad, including the death of Lori’s third and fourth husbands, her brother, and Chad’s wife. In June 2020, the gruesome remains of JJ and Tylee were discovered on Chad’s property, and the newlyweds were arrested and charged with murder. And in a shocking development, horrifying statements revealed that the couple’s fanatical beliefs had convinced them the children had become zombies--a belief that may have led to their deaths.

Sex Cult Nun by Faith Jones

Faith Jones was raised to be part a religious army preparing for the End Times. Growing up on an isolated farm in Macau, she prayed for hours every day and read letters of prophecy written by her grandfather, the founder of the Children of God. Tens of thousands of members strong, the cult followers looked to Faith’s grandfather as their guiding light. As such, Faith was celebrated as special and then punished doubly to remind her that she was not. Over decades, the Children of God grew into an international organization that became notorious for its alarming sex practices and allegations of abuse and exploitation. But with indomitable grit, Faith survived, creating a world of her own—pilfering books and teaching herself high school curriculum. 

Finally, at age twenty-three, thirsting for knowledge and freedom, she broke away, leaving behind everything she knew to forge her own path in America. A complicated family story mixed with a hauntingly intimate coming-of-age narrative, Faith Jones’ extraordinary memoir reflects our societal norms of oppression and abuse while providing a unique lens to explore spiritual manipulation and our rights in our bodies. Honest, eye-opening, uplifting, and intensely affecting, Sex Cult Nun brings to life a hidden world that’s hypnotically alien yet unexpectedly relatable.

The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn

In the 1950s, a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially integrated, and he was a much-lauded leader in the contemporary civil rights movement. Eventually, Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to northern California. He became involved in electoral politics, and soon was a prominent Bay Area leader.

In this riveting narrative, Jeff Guinn examines Jones’s life, from his extramarital affairs, drug use, and fraudulent faith healing to the fraught decision to move almost a thousand of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. Guinn provides stunning new details of the events leading to the fatal day in November, 1978 when more than nine hundred people died—including almost three hundred infants and children—after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink.

Guinn examined thousands of pages of FBI files on the case, including material released during the course of his research. He traveled to Jones’s Indiana hometown, where he spoke to people never previously interviewed, and uncovered fresh information from Jonestown survivors. He even visited the Jonestown site with the same pilot who flew there the day that Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered on Jones’s orders. The Road to Jonestown is the definitive book about Jim Jones and the events that led to the tragedy at Jonestown.

#true crime #true crime books #cults #religion #nonfiction #nonfiction books #nonfiction reads #Nonfiction Reading #Book Recommendations #book recs #Reading Recs #reading recommendations #TBR pile #tbrpile #tbr #to read #Want To Read #Booklr #book tumblr #book blog #library blog #Library Books

[oswald-privileges]

ALL RIGHT BUT YOU ASKED FOR IT

Power of Three as a series is just. full of weaknesses, most of which come down to poor continuity and structure. I'm not gonna try and fix ALL of those, bc that'd be laborious as hell, but I will pick out things that I feel are the most egregious as case studies.

What Po3 does have, tho, is an absolutely shining strength in the concept of its three main characters. After twelve books of Blandly Heroic Protagonist Syndrome, Jayfeather is an absolute godsend. He's angry! He's rude! He's unhappy! He's not nice. I Love Him And He's My Son. Lionblaze has his invincible pride (hah) and emergent bloodlust, and Hollyleaf has her moral absolutism and certainty. These are good starting points for characters. Sadly, the lack of continuity undermines what could have been three really good character arcs.

So! I present to you:

HOW TO MAKE "WARRIORS: THE POWER OF THREE" NOT COMPLETELY SUCK ACCORDING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE; A NON-EXHAUSTIVE, NON-CONSECUTIVE LIST BY ME

ONE

- Have there be a persistant, overarching series threat. Sol is a character with amazing villain potential who does literally nothing except hang around, and do exactly 2 Bad Things completely off-screen. This Is Not Good.

- Instead, have him be present from the second book onwards- initially introduced as a friendly but enigmatic outsider who is slowly revealed across the series to be a complete black hole of a personality, a social parasite quietly rearranging whatever community he's a part of to just-so-happen to benefit him as much as humanly possible. His "preach individualism not starclan" methods are not so much values as one strategy out of many. (to those who know me- yes i have a type. no i will not apologise.)

- Maybe his ultimate goal is to dissolve and centralise the clans or something so that he can live out his life as a political puppetmaster in all the cat-luxury he likes. idk it's hard to imagine overall stakes for this rewrite BECAUSE THE ORIGINAL DOESN'T HAVE ANY

TWO

- For gods sake you don't have a series based on the premise of "the main characters develop super powers" and then only have the second power confirmed by the end of the fourth book. I understand the first book mostly focusing on Jayfeather- his powers are obvious from the start, he's got the strongest personality of the three, he gets access to most of the prophecy plot stuff because of them. But you NEED to have the other two show an interest in something concrete happening to them beyond that, and you need to at least hint towards the other two having something unique to them even if nobody clocks it yet.

- Have Jayfeather tell his siblings about the prophecy by the end of book two at the latest. The amount of time he spends noodling around not sharing it with them is inexcusable. It's not that it's out of character for him to hang onto a secret for a bit, it's just that there's no point and it slows everything down. It would be equally in character for him to go to his siblings and be like "look, i'm SPECIAL. well you as well but ALSO ME". Boy starts off as desperate for recognition, what can I say

THREE

- Have Jayfeather discover that StarClan don't withhold signs or information on purpose for the sake of "building courage and faith" or whatever nonsense. Seeing and communicating the future is metaphysically very difficult, so interpreting signs and messages is a genuine skill, or even an art. The cats of StarClan, however, really are just ghosts, much more similar to living cats than the currently living believe. This is the impotus for Jayfeather's discarding of his reverence for StarClan, which remains consistent throughout the series.

- Have Hollyleaf and Jayfeather both still change their cat careers in the first book, but put place more attention on the fact that they basically switched jobs. Have a scene where they end up yelling at each other, because can't the other see how lucky they have it? The tension breaks when they realise they've both lost something important to them- Jayfeather his chance to prove he's as capable as a sighted cat, and Hollyleaf her path to helping her clan in the way she thinks is best. They commiserate together, and reluctantly promise to do the best they can with their lots, so they don't waste the path the other wishes they'd taken. This closeness is eroded over the series as they disagree more and more on the subject of StarClan and its role in their moral choices and obligations.

FOUR

- Speaking of Hollyleaf! I nearly threw my phone across the room when the first Omen of the Stars book claimed that Hollyleaf "worked so hard to discover her power to help her clan". Where, Ms Erins??? I would have LOVED to have seen that!! Hollyleaf expresses absolutely no concern over the details of what power she has/will develop, and only has a couple of scenes even touching on her ambitions to help her clan. She has some vague ideas about becoming leader and like one scene where she gets to do some leadery things, but that never gets followed up on. What does happen is that the whole "warrior code" thing becomes more and more a part of her personality (for no clear reason) until she snaps.

- Hollyleaf going off the deep end is something I wanted so badly to get into and be moved by, because I could see where it comes from! Her moral certainty is fascinating, especially since it's based in something as abstract as the warrior code- which, when you think about it, isn't really... anything. There's no concrete set of rules that make it up, no traditional wording or cat philosophers, not even any fables. It's a handful of agreed-upon, common sense rules- don't cross boundaries, don't take prey that isn't yours, respect your ancestors, and don't murder. That's it!

- So, combining the above points, I think Hollyleaf not being one of the Three should stay, but both the audience and the characters are given good reason to believe she is. By around the third volume, make it so that Hollyleaf has found that her power is to get cats to "Do The Right Thing"- i.e. what she wants them to do. She sneaks off often to see Sol, who teachs her how to use this power. Her siblings are concerned about this new power, having already gotten a glimpse at what Sol can do, but she's confident that she can only use this power for good. Volume-specific plot happens, Sol manipulates her into causing him to win, she is shocked and horrified, and vows to stick ridgedly to what she knows is right i.e. The Warrior Code

- However, the more fervently she tries to stick to this abstract idea, the less it gives her results, the more her power seems to be failing. Believing that StarClan is taking her power away from her, she becomes caught up in a faith-guilt spiral that puts her in the position to snap at the end of the series. By that point it's clear to her siblings that Hollyleaf has no power- she was just very, very good at persuading people to do what she wanted.

FIVE

- Lionblaze is a girl now because I Said So. This Cat Is Trans And There's Nothing You Can Do About It.

- Her relationship with Heathertail stays the same- childhood sweethearts who are torn apart as they begin to understand the nature of the societal divides that exist between them.

- This can be used to contextualise the whole "half clan/outsider blood" thing as a cultural contradiction. In reality, inter- and outer- clan relationships aren't at all rare. They can't be, otherwise the whole society would be inbred out of existence in like five generations. But if at least one society of humans can spend a good 200 years pretending Sex Is Bad And Sinful Actually then cats can have persistant cat-racism in the face of all logic. Heathertail clocks this contradiction, Lionblaze doesn't.

- Her relationship-to-power arc doesn't need changing all that much either, other than starting much sooner and being more consistent. At first, she's completely overjoyed by her power, since unlike her siblings, it lines up so well with her ambition- become the finest warrior any of the clans have to offer. As the berserker rage aspect becomes more prevelent, she becomes more and more disturbed by the fact that she isn't disturbed by what she can do, and that she doesn't want the escalation of her power to stop.

- Tigerstar still does his thing, but Brambleclaw knows about it. He recognises the signs from when his father used to visit him, and tries to train Lionblaze in his own way. She ends up caught between wanting to be a good warrior, and testing the limits of her power.

SIX

- Jayfeather can stay basically the same because he's my perfect little angy boy and nothing needs to change. His arcs can be strengthened by having a more robust relationship with Yellowfang where they try to out-bitch each other, and coming to terms with his internalised ablism. Maybe he has a chat with Mothwing about faith a couple of times. Him furiously lashing out at being offered help transitions into an acceptence and understanding of his abilities more naturally. He never stops being A Grumpy Old Man.

- All fucking past-lives unexplained time travel goes in the BIN. Doesn't fucking happen. You can have that lore dump sprinkled across the books, or come from going deep into the tunnels and having a surreal meeting. Make it properly eldritch-level scary, shake Jayfeather's confidence in the idea of them being just a bunch of ghosts.

SEVEN

- Have the way Brambleclaw and Squirrelflight present very clearly as parents to the Three be explicitly, textually unusual. One of the things I liked so much about the first series was an almost total lack of emphasis on who was mated with who, and who was related or not. It felt very real to how feral cat colonies form, where raising kittens is a communal job. This gets completely dropped the moment series 2 starts and now the cats have monogamy.

- This emphasis on the family unit and fostering close relationships between parents and kittens is deliberate on the part of both Leafpool and Squirrelflight. Their aim is to cover for Leafpool so she doesn't lose her role as medicine cat- something she already gave up Crowfeather for before she was pregnant.

- In that little bit of backstory, have a robust reason for both Leafpool and Squirrelflight to leave the camp while Leafpool is pregnant and giving birth, possibly one that ties into the present day story in some minor way. I don't know how, it would just make that element of the story a lot more ground than "we left, the kits were born, then we came back and everyone was cool with it"

- When it comes to the "I am Not your mother" reveal, Jayfeather and Lionblaze are confused and hurt that they were lied to, but come to the reasonable conclusion that well, since they were raised mostly by Squirrelflight, saw Leafpool often, and are loved by both, they don't hate her. Lionblaze has something of a crisis over being half-clan, possibly initiating an attempted reunion with Heathertail. Jayfeather is more concerned with how other cats will think it makes him lesser, something he's still sensitive too.

- Hollyleaf, meanwhile, completely fucking snaps at the way her mother Violated Part Of The Code. It's a completely irrational reaction, but expected because she's been growing more and more reliant on The Code for the whole series, and less and less stable in her attempts to aid her clan and train to be its new leader.

- Squirrelflight is the one to murder Ashfur. This is easy to work out while reading- she's literally the only one of the four with a motive who isn't a perspective character. The mystery is less around finding out who did it, and more about why she did it (it's very ambiguous as to whether it was an accident or not). The main tension comes from who finds out when.

- Lionblaze is shocked, awed by how far she'd go to protect the three of them, and reassures her she did the right thing (as a way to salve her own uncertainty over her own longing for violence). Jayfeather makes it all about himself because he's Jayfeather- upset that he didn't know immediately, instead of, you know, figuring it out in a few hours because he can basically read minds. They try their best to hide it from Hollyleaf, who is already rattling around the final volume as a full-on antagonist, but are unsuccessful. This almost costs them something incredibly important- possibly Squirrelflight's life.

EIGHT

- the whole plot with the Tribe Of Rushing Water is a MASSIVE can of worms that could be removed from the series without issue. As it is:

- Characterize the Tribe as uncertain of how to fight other cats, because yes, they haven't had to do this before. DON'T characterise them as pathetic, doing whatever their leader says without thinking, and with ancestors who have Given Up

- Have some of the Tribe be really good at the violence. Worryingly good. Have others be sickened by what they're being asked to do.

- Have some of the clan cats reflect on what they've done. Hollyleaf would be all for introducing this society to jesus The Code, but even she might be horrified at being thanked by a tribe cat who can't wait to get out there and win themselves glory, only to be killed a few hours later

- The Tribe begin a new tradition of marking the walls in the mud they use as camoflage in order to commemorate their battles, and memorialise the fallen. One of the characters reflects on the fact that in a generation or two, the Tribe will feel like it's always been this way. How many of their own traditions- those that feel almost like natural law- started out the same way?

- Have Sol as the leader of the invaders, or maybe having insinuated himself into the tribe as a "mediator" and doing his charismatic cult leader thing.

NINE

- Cinderheart isn't a reincarnation of Cinderpelt. She's just named after her bc Cinderpelt saved her mother from a badger. this is because I think the reincanation thing is stupid and I can't think of a way to make it good.

TEN

- No more using tails as hand gestures like covering people's mouths. Never. None of it. It's expunged from existence.

Disclaimer: I haven't read Omen of the Stars yet, so I can't account for anything that might happen in that series that's grounded in Po3. I'm like... two thirds of the way through the first volume. I'm Not Impressed.

#Warrior Cats #warriors #The Power of Three #Jayfeather #Hollyleaf #Lionblaze #long post

[heavensmortuary]

🍁🍂🍁🍂Alright, since its mid-September, its time for my annual spooky movie reccomedation list! I include ratings, and I can include trigger warnings for any of these films upon request as well! I'm also looking for horror movies to watch myself, so feel free to comment/ask any as well!! So, here we go, in no particular order...🍁🍂🍁🍂

Fantasy/sci-fi horror:

The Thing 1982 [R]: A group of scientists find a shapeshifting alien underneath the ice in Antarctica, and they just survive as it imitates them. Trust no one. The Thing is one of my favorite movies in general. Its scary, retro, and the special effects are insane. It reminds me of classic Lovecraft, but better. Very terrifying. 10/10

Pan's Labyrinth 2006 [R]: During the Spanish Civil War, a young girl named Ofelia enters a world of twisted fantasy while above, her step-father's brutality causes trouble in the midst of a rebellion. Genuinely a beautiful movie. It's like a fairy-tale, and sometimes you forget it's a horror movie. It's simply magical, but frighteningly real. If you love classic fantasy, monsters, history, and horror, you'll love this movie. 10/10

Alien 1979 [R]: A team on a shipping vessel in soace come in contact with a parasitic alien within the clausterphobic confines of the ship. A classic, and it's still absolutely terrifying. Sharp insight on early 80's consumerism (in more than one sense), and a marvel of alien horror. Its very claustrophobic, tense, and 100% worth watching, especially if you love scifi. 10/10.

Aliens 1986 [R]: Continuing the story of Alien, space marines must investigate a distress signal from a colony, and what they find is more horrifying than they could have imagined. Full of retro action, humorous quips, scares, and plenty of bullet spray, it's a terrifying and fun watch. I enjoyed it just as much as the original, and its just awesome, while being scary at times. 10/10

Annihilation 2018 [R]: After the mysterious death of her husband, a Biologist goes into Area X to discover what horrifying cosmic entity his team found there. Not nearly as good, or accurate as the book (I CANT reccomend the Southern Reach trilogy enough), but this movie genuinely frightened me at points and the setting is simply beautiful. Its clever, creepy, and it's a strange watch. 8/10

Signs 2002 [PG-13]: After strange symbols appear in the cornfields on a family's farm, they must protect each other, and their faith, during the invasion. Love this movie, it's just spooky enough, but outside if the monsters, the people in this movie are what really matter. It's compelling, and a beautiful story. Simply excellent. Plus you'll know where the screaming guy in a closet meme comes from after seeing this one. 10/10

A Quiet Place 2018 [PG-13]: Could you survive a world where making a single sound could spell your death? Monsters decend upon the Abbot family, just as a baby is on the way. One of my favorite movies ever. Its beautiful and ABSOLUTELY horrifying. I think I forgot about eating my popcorn while watching this one. Overall, the desperate survival of the Abbots is heartwarming, but oh so stressful. If you can, PLEASE watch the sequel right after this one. 10/10

A Quiet Place 2 2021 [PG-13]: The Abbots face new challenges as they traverse a devestated landscape, and monsters wait around every dark corner for them. An EXCELLENT sequel. I caught myself actually going "NOOO AAAA" at some points, and its totally a worthy sequel to the scares in the first one. Again, great story, great characters, great cinematography, great message. 10/10.

Coraline 2009 [PG]: Coraline Jones, unhappy with moving to a new house, suddenly finds a whimsical world in a little hidden tunnel inside the house, but she learns the sinister truth behind the candy-colored world beyond the wall. Dont let the stop-motion animation confuse you; this movie is terrifying. A classic from my childhood, and its a treat to watch every Halloween. The Beldam has to be on the list of the most horrifying villains ever. 10/10

Zombies, ghosts, ghouls, and everything in between:

The Haunting 1963 [G]: Based on the novel The Haunting of Hill House, a group of people must stay in a supposedly haunted mansion. Eleanor, one of the women, suddenly believes that the house is talking directly to her. One of the many adaptations of the book, it's spooky, and it's very disturbing, while also having a nice theme. Perfect for setting the mood on a October night. 8/10

Night of The Living Dead 1990 [R]: Survivors take shelter in an abandoned farm house while the undead attack. Can they work together, or let their own prejudices get the best of them? I havent seen the original yet, but I love this movie. Very scary, and its directed by Tom Savini, so lots of good ol zombie gore. Not only that, there's a good bit of social commentary here on racism. The classic was the original zombie film. 9/10.

Dawn of The Dead 1978 [R]: As the undead rise up, survivors take to a shopping mall in order to survive. I don't know how to describe this movie's vibe. It has this weird retro 70's feel, mixed with uncanny horror. It's campy at times, but it doesn't take away the scariness. Very fun in a weird way, and its an on-the-nose satire of american consumerism. 10/10

Train To Busan 2016 [R]: While the world crumbles around them, a small group of survivors must learn to protect each other on a train headed to Busan. Seriously, please watch this one. It's completely unique to any zombie film I've seen. It's scary, but you genuinely care about the characters, and its VERY intense. Love this one. 10/10

Murder and ect:

Scream 1990 [R]: A masked serial killer stalks high school students in middle class suburbia. Its a parody of the modern horror genre, clever and scary all at once. I enjoyed it as a classic and I liked the commentary on how violence with no essence effects people, especially when glorified with horror films. Definitely not for everyone, but its good never the less. 8/10

Wait Until Dark 1967 [NR (I give it a PG-13)]: A gang of criminals looking for heroin attack the home of a blind woman, and it turns into a horrifying game of back and forth between them, until it can go on no longer. Literally one of the best thriller movies ever. Genuinely scary, and genuinely clever. This was actually the first film I saw Audrey Hepburn act in. Super tense near the end, I was biting my nails the whole time. 10/10

The Village 2004 [PG-13]: A rural community is faced with a hard decision as the monsters in the woods leave bloody warnings around their small town. I watch this one every autumn. Its atmospheric, the score is breathtaking, and its a great story. Its beautiful, gently frightening, and its overall a love story. I love this one a lot, even though I know a lot of people didnt like it. Don't go in expecting a great twist at the end, and you'll enjoy it. 10/10

Jane Eyre 2011 [PG-13]: Jane Eyre becomes the governness to an estate, and find a dark secret there. Not necessarily horror, but its gothic and absolutely beautiful. Its the perfect october movie. I love it lots. Nothing hits different than a rainy october day, a cup of chai tea, and this movie playing. 10/10

TV Series:

Stranger Things 2016- [PG-13]: After a child is taken by a supernatural force, the small town community of Hawkins must search for answers and find him before its too late, but as they search, a horrifying conspiracy comes to life before them. I adore this series. Its a love letter to the 80s. Cant reccomend it enough. 10/10

The Twilight Zone 1959-1964 [PG]: A serialized series featuring many different stories ranging from scifi to horror and everything inbetween. Its genius honestly. Each story is compelling, and thought provoking. A great Halloween watch. 10/10

The Walking Dead 2010- (seasons 1 & 2) [R]: A sheriff wakes up from a coma to find himself in a terrifying world of the undead. Its a decent series, at least in the first two seasons! Its pretty scary. Its great if you like zombie movies! 7/10

Over The Garden Wall 2014 [PG]: Two brothers find themselves lost within the world of the Unknown, a place where time is blended together and reality isn't quite right. Ok, real talk here. Its my favorite series of all time. I could go on and on and on about it. If you haven't seen it, please I beg you. Theres nothing like it. Its literally the BEST autumn show to watch. Clever, funny, lightly disturbing, deep, nostalgic...its fantastic. 11/10

So, there you have it. Huge list of horror movies I've enjoyed and actually reccomend. I have seen quite a few more than this (Halloween, Dawn of the Dead 2004, Nightmare on Elm Street, ect), but I specifically picked out the ones I love the most. Enjoy! And have a great autumn.

#krakens croaks #hope yall enjoy!! #feel free to rb and add some reccomenations

[luthienne]

Hi dear, do you have any good words on emotional courage?

hi my love, you can check out this post and this post; here are a few more:

“I know a lot about pain… and I know it is bad for people, eats away the spirit, but how about courage, what is it for if not to use when needed?”

Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters 

“This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet 

“You don’t realize it, perhaps, but you are turning these delusions and illusions of the past into criminal things. Relinquish everything. Stay in bed until you feel so shock full of energy, hope, courage that you bounce out of abed. You can only aid the world–if you still believe the world needs our individual aid–by retaining your faith in life. Your body may be weak, but I know you still have wings.”

Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller

“I… want to inherit the witch in my women ancestors—the willfulness, the passion, ay, the passion where all good art comes from as women, the perseverance, the survivor skills, the courage, the strength of las mujeres bravas, peleoneras, necias, berrrinchudas. I want to be una brava, una peleonera, necia, nerrinchuda. I want to be bad if bad means I must go against society—el Papá, el Pápa, the boyfriend, lover, husband, girlfriend, comadres—and listen to my own heart, that incredible witch’s broom that will take me where I need to go.”

Sandra Cisneros, A House of My Own

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.”

Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of———. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know is a fighter and a screamer.”

Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Poems, and Prose Poems

“There is always some miracle left; and though miracles do not happen, they might happen. Who knows? Perhaps our intelligence, our instinct, our senses, in spite of their daylight clearness, are leading us astray. Perhaps the one thing needful is just that unreasoning courage which follows hope’s will-o’-the-wisp as it burns…”

Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

“But if the deepest loss, […] / can be, not just survived, but made into the matter / of hope, made into song, not into a hatchet / to cut off the offending parts, made into poems / then blessed be the end of things, the loss of whatever / secures us blindly and mutely to our lives.”

Julia Alvarez, The Other Side/El Otro Lado

“I run / stumbling, expectant. / Impatience is hopelessly / desperate. Hope / takes time.”

Marie Ponsot, Springing: New and Selected Poems

“How lightly we learn to hold hope, / as if it were an animal that could turn around / and bite your hand. And still we carry it / the way a mother would, carefully, / from one day to the next.”

Danusha Laméris, The Moons of August

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

Representative John Lewis

“Where does such a force come from? What does it mean? A voice very faint, and inside me, offers a possibility: how shall there be redemption and resurrection unless there has been a great sorrow? And isn’t struggle and rising the real work of our lives?”

Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Poems, and Prose Poems

“Don’t forget that apparent impossibility of something is the first sign of its naturalness—in a different world, obviously.

Marina Tsvetaeva, from a letter to Anatoly Steiger

“Grieve. Have / hope.”

Jorie Graham, Swarm

John Berryman, “The Heart is Strange”

“Skin had hope, that what’s skin does. / Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.”

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Two Countries”

“I am quite troubled in the depths of my soul. But that will pass,”

George Sand, in a letter to Gustave Flaubert

“Let’s dance a little before we go home to hell.”

Muriel Rukeyser, A Muriel Rukeyser Reader

Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream (tr. Beverly Bie Brahic)

“That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different.”

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Ada Limón, “Dead Stars”

“Listen, everyone has a chance. Is it spring, is it morning? Are there trees near you, and does your own soul need comforting? Quick, then — open the door and fly on your heavy feet…”

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems

“Get to the bottom of this intensity and have faith in what is most horrible, instead of fighting it off—it reveals itself for those who can trust it, in spite of its overwhelming and dire appearance, as a kind of initiation. By way of loss, by way of such vast and immeasurable experiences of loss, we are quite powerfully introduced to the whole.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Countess Alexandrine Schwerin, June 16, 1922

“…only one thing is urgently needed: to attach oneself with unconditional purpose somewhere to nature, to what is strong, striving and bright, and to move forward without guile, even if that means in the least important, daily matters. Each time we tackle something with joy, each time we open our eyes toward a yet untouched distance we transform not only this and the next moment, but we also rearrange and gradually assimilate the past inside of us.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Adelheid von der Marwitz, September 11, 1919

“Continue to believe that with your feeling and with your work you take part in what is the greatest. The more strongly you cultivate this belief inside of you, the more it will give rise to reality and world.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Elisabeth Freiin Schenk zu Schweinsberg, September 23, 1908

“…I have known with certainty that the worst things, and even despair, are only a kind of abundance and an onslaught of existence that one decision of the heart could turn into its opposite. Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Anita Forrer, February 14, 1920

“…he says, it will be all right.

“It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child ... and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”

Madeline Miller, Circe

“Right then she knows herself even less than she knows the sea. Her courage comes from not knowing herself, but going ahead nevertheless. Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.

Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories; “The Waters of the World”

“Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, from his essay On Fairy-Stories

Camille Norton, Corruption: Poems

“Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“I have the fervour of myself for a presence / and my own spirit for light; / and my spirit with its loss / knows this; though small against the black, / small against the formless rocks, / hell must break before I am lost;”

H.D. from Collected Poems; “Eurydice”

Denise Levertov, “Epilogue”

“The days go numb, the wind / sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves. // Through the empty branches the sky remains. / It is what you have. / Be earth now, and evensong. / Be the ground lying under that sky. / Be modest now, like a thing / ripened until it is real…”

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke’s Book of Hours (tr. Anita Barrows, Joanna Macy)

“I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is not ease for the heart to be had from words of reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.”

Samuel Beckett’s words of consolation to his friend, Alan Schneider

“What matters is not to allow my whole life to be dominated by what is going on inside me. That has to be kept subordinate one way or another. What I mean is: one must not let oneself be completely disabled by just one thing, however bad; don’t let it impede the great stream of life that flows through you. I have the feeling of something secret deep inside me that no one knows about.”

Etty Hillesum, from a diary entry featured in An Interrupted Life

“You have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link. / This is but half the truth. You are also as strong as your strongest link. / To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of the ocean by the frailty of its foam. / To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.”

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“Try to keep what is beautiful to you and what you can use for today and now — You must not let things you cannot help destroy you —”

Georgia O’Keeffe, from Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters

“What we love, shapely and pure, / is not to be held, / but to be believed in.”

Mary Oliver, from Evidence; “Swans”

“In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for ourselves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness. And then we turn; for it is a turning that we have prepared; and act. The time of turning may be very long. It may hardly exist.”

Muriel Rukeyser, from A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, “The Life of Poetry”

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” 

Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

“But don’t lose heart, dear ones—don’t lose heart. Don’t let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.”

James Baldwin, from Another Country

“You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves. / Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile, the world goes on.”

Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

#ask #anon #quote compilation #emotional courage #words #lit #poetry #long post #of hope to bite on like a bullet #yeah ok i have no chill #also no explanation for how my brain works and ties all of these together #compilation

[life-rewritten]

Giants of Thai BL AKA The MOST ANTICIPATED  THAI BL SHOWS FOR 2021

It's weird to think that the year 2020 has ended. This has been a journey in the past year, on the surface everywhere you looked it looked like there was no place to be happy and excited because of all the things that happened. It was suffocating at times, tiring at best, and it was just astonishing how many things could go wrong in only one year. That being said, one genre/demographic that grew even stronger this year, took some time to impress and improve on its tropes, its ideas and concepts and that's BL. Which also took some of us by surprise, for the ones who've been watching BL since the first oldies, to the new people who joined and also became in love with the genre and have stayed since then. BL has been an incredible, interesting journey, and I am so happy to say that it looks like 2021 isn't letting go of that energy. So to celebrate entering 2021, a year hopefully for a release from all the worries in 2020, a year to restart, refresh and keep getting better, here are the Giants of Thai Bl making their way in 2021. We have so many insane ones, from more mafia dramas to new unique non-university storylines, to og actors, and new powerful ones, to interesting pairings and new channels producing shows for 2021 to many many more countries joining the fight to be the top of our affections and energy. Thai BL is not going anywhere, and you know what that's perfectly fine with me.

GMMTV

I already did a whole squeal about the shows upcoming from GMMTV here: But after careful consideration here is my top 3 most anticipated: Enchante, Not Me, Bad Buddy. I know Enchante beat out ATOTS, but for me, I'm obsessed with the way the writer plans secrets and meta to unveil, and I keep repeating it's by Theory of Love director and production team. I'm so excited. I just hope they put in the same energy and effort they used in theory of love for this you have so many potential incredible actors that can take over this genre if you give them a good script and hard work. Hopefully, GMMTV intends to do so for not just their royal couple shows but also for rookie actors because Book and Force in this trailer? Looks fantastic.

Studio Wabi-sabi

When I hear about Studio Wabi-Sabi, you see two juxtaposed reactions from me, one you see anticipation and excitement from seeing my most loved actors off-screen; however, you also hear a groan from me. I'm sorry I didn't use to be this way, I used to be so ready to embrace every show directed and created by New Siwaj; in 2020, New was one of the directors I kept having headaches about because of all his shows in 2020? What exactly happened? Why did they flop so hard? Why was he so slow? I'm hoping that it's because he had too many projects to handle at the same time since fair enough LBC was filmed same time as GMMTV My gear and your gown and maybe that was too much to handle? But the reason why I like News choices usually are because they're emotional, impressive with their plot lines and have good character arcs and couples we end up falling in love with. He could be an iconic director because he has so much talent in his company, so I'm hoping he uses his lessons and grows and becomes better in 2021.  But Let's get to the shows announced so far for 2021 because they both have the potential to take over 2021. I said what I said.

Between Us

Genre:  Friends with benefits, Romance, Comedy, PTSD, Angst, 

Ahh, this is incredible. I'm so happy. Win and Team are from a great tv show already with Until We Meet Again and not going to lie, but seeing Buon as Win and Prem as Team? Perfection. Like guys I actually fell so hard for this couple despite their low screen time. Buon stole the scene each time he appeared, with his little smirks, and mischief, with flirty bad-boy energy and their relationship, was precisely what I live for passionate and full of chemistry. They're great, which is why it's so exciting to see that Between Us is getting its own show, the show based on these two love story in a parallel timeline to Until we meet again. I screamed. The book sounds interesting; we're getting some conversations about PTSD, some healing relationships, and angst and more passion.  I'm so excited about this since I first saw BuonPrem. I knew they were going to get known enough to bring their own show. And they deserve it, let's hope we get an interesting script that keeps us invested, enough opportunities for these two to have softer and profound moments whilst still holding on to their passion, and let the drama not be stale but addicting. Please New, don't let this show also be slow-paced, I'll lose it if another show is ruined by directing from you. 

Ratings: 4/5: BuonPrem, they leap off the screen, their chemistry is that great. From hearing about the plot I'm also excited to a more in-depth look into Team's insomnia and his past and psychological scars, and I'm hoping to see a deeper reason for why these two should be together.

Love Mechanics 2

Genre: Romance, Comedy, Angst, Drama, Friends with benefits, Unrequited love, 

That's the thing about Wabi-Sabi; they have amazing actors that steal our hearts away. This shows cast is no different, it's YinWar and it's a collab with Channel 3. Like What? It's everything. YinWar from Love Mechanics trended with millions of people obsessed and wanting the show to be extended and actually appropriately done. In came Channel 3 and we have this gem coming on April. No words. YinWar on screen is thrilling; War is just outstanding as Mark, his nuances, his glares, his looks of pain and longing, man I was absorbed into it. Although LM's writing is toxic and really left me feeling confused and uncomfortable with the details pushed aside, it was hard to ship VeeMark when Yin's character made terrible decisions and was awful even in the book. I'm the queen of analysing damaged flawed characters, and I don't run away from toxicity as long as there is a growth and change later on, as long as there's a good reason we needed to see that. For Vee's character, his actions were unnecessary for us to know about his character; they were just messy and upsetting. That's why I think seeing more depth for his actions and seeing Mark regress and also make mistakes like him will even out their relationship and make me feel more understanding about how these two flawed characters came to be and why they should be together.  Let's hope with funds from Channel 3, more effort and energy put into the show, it'll be great because with actors like War this show can be just as big as it was when it had errors. Maybe even better. 

Ratings 3.5/5 Love mechanics messy storyline makes me worried about this, but I think I might have a great time watching and analysing Mark's revenge after being heartbroken. The angst and drama of it all just sound interesting.

Channel 3

2020 brought a new surprise with Channel 3 deciding to invest in BLS. BLs have always been not on mainstream channels, so seeing Channel 3 in Thailand decide to make their own shows, a collab with other companies, and bring some directors and writers and actors known in the BL world already, shows they are serious. This may be because of the success of 2gether and other breakthroughs in 2019 taking over the scene. But I can see that Channel 3 did not come here to play, they are researching, looking for ways to make a great BL with the information provided on the past BLs and they want to make it big. And you know what with shows like GEN Y showing up last year, I want to believe that Channel 3 is a competition for GMMTV and others. They invest in funds and have longer minutes for their episodes, and they also pay attention to international fans by streaming on new places like Iquiyi and others. It's exciting. Channel 3 has already dipped their toes with Love Mechanics, and in 2021 they have even more shows to give us:

Teddy Bear Miracle

Genre: Romance, Comedy, Supernatural, Drama, Friends to Lovers, Fantasy,  Mystery, Lakorn

What a weird title for a show. What an odd premise. What a bizarre book. But you know what I'm so excited about this; this is meant to be a lakorn series that is BL. Like wow, it has a good cast, known faces in the Thai acting scene and a director/screenwriter who has won awards for his own script. That's even more exciting. But the best thing about this is that it's a fantasy and has supernatural themes, yep it's weird we're dealing with a magic system where teddy bears come to life, and other inanimate objects talk? But I'm so excited to see what this brings; we have a man transformed from a teddy bear with amnesia who's searching for his past and how he ended up as one and his owner who's not yet ready to let his comfort go. It's so interesting, with family history and drama and of course, a romance that will probably touch my heart. I'm excited for this zany, wacky and dramatic show. Normally, I shy away from the crazy because I don't like crack humour, and it just means a bunch of many irritating sound effects and editing choices. But I want to trust the whole team from Channel 3, from the behind the scenes the show looks great, the couple has chemistry, and I'm excited to delve into the mystery at play and see what this story is meant to become. So excited honestly.

Ratings: 4.1/5 The wacky magic system scares me not going to lie, but I have faith for some reason in Channel 3, so I think this might shock us all. I think we'll get good acting, and perhaps good directing too. The mystery might also make me want to analyse. We shall see.

Lovely Writer

Genre: Romance, Comedy, Angst, Drama, Acting/Writing Industry, Haters to Lovers,  

Did you say Kao and Up and P'Tee the director of TharnType the series? Sign me up I'm there; I've been screaming a bit since I heard about this series. From the first time, it was announced that Channel 3 was turning the book into a show, I was like this sounds unique again? And it has an interesting plot, I guess, and it's also going to have drama. I'm hopeful then. When I heard about the whole team and watched the trailer, I got into it even more. Lovely Writer sounds right up my alley, to be honest, we have this introverted writer who is determined to write a masterpiece and stop his company from making him produce BLs for the hype only for his next project to be a BL show which leads him to his new sneaky, sly, wolf in sheep's clothing roommate. Kao played his roommate from Until we meet again who won my heart as Korn and made me cry buckets. So, of course, I'm excited, Nubsib (Kao) may have some tricks up his sleeve to get next to Gene, but I think things will be more complicated than he thought, I'm ready to explore the world of the film industry and dating scandals that Gene and Sib will fall into the more they fall for each other. The angst and drama. Can't wait. Also, TharnType is one of my favourite series, and one of the reasons is because of Tee so... That's even more reason to see Gene and Sip's love story develop. Will it be as angsty, passionate and filled with plot twists? From what I hear maybe. 

Ratings: 4/5 I just think this is an excellent team for a BL backed by Channel 3 and also has an exciting plot filled with ups and downs. I'm excited to see what happens and from the behind the scenes they released in the new year I think it'll be right up my alley.

NADAO

It had to be mentioned that I'm still in shock that Nadao is investing more into BL's. I don't know why, it just feels too good to be true, after giving me show after show that's perfection and quality I'm starting to have high expectations and hope for more, despite my weary heart not wanting to trust that this is real. I'm dramatic, I know. Anyways Nadao has gifted me twice with two shows that have shocked me and made my jaw fall in awe. I'm just like wow, they really did that. Every single piece of work that comes from them is art. Every single script is exceptionally written. Every single show is acted beautifully, and every single director and producer makes me inspired by the way they create. This is when focusing on their BLs because Great Man Academy and I told sunset about you are masterpieces in their own way, they deserve to be praised and never forgotten. It's just incredible that with a company like Nadao, everything falls into place, even when we think it won't because of past experiences. Nadao has shown up and decided to create unique pieces each thoughtful. Deep and breathtaking. Why won't I be over the moon when 2021 announces that we're getting another part from them with I told sunset about you getting a sequel. You bet I haven't stopped screaming and looking at the time to hurry up, so we get to March 11. I'm serious.

ITSAY PART 2

Genre: Romance,  Angst, Drama, University, Coming of age

And that's because of what ITSAY was to us in 2020. It was something that can't be explained concisely. It was everything. To hear that we're getting the second part of the story of Oh and Teh, I feel like I am already preparing my heart and mind for another invasion, last time I was a mess because of this show, I was all over the place because of this show, and I was incredibly happy for a moment because of this show. To relive that again would be everything. It's slightly worrying that Teh and Oh finally getting together and fighting through the odds to stay together will run into more obstacles. Are you kidding me? After all, we went through to see them together?? It makes me worried, I have this real distrust for sequels of BLs, and it hasn't changed despite 2020 producing some okay follow-ups. Sequels never meet the expectation set; sequels are always reduced in quality because the focus is now on popularity and fame, sequels lose their integrity of the characters we've come to know and love and sequels hurt. They make me sometimes give up on a show that is my love, and it hurts. It's a painful realisation that I can't take away or forget the sequel events, so these characters are now ruined infinitely for me—looking at Together with me next chapter. It's scary. But Nadao hasn't failed yet, I mean it when I say their scripts are like works of art, I mean it when I say you can tell they put blood, sweat and tears to create their shows, why would ITSAY part 2 be any different? These two shows I mentioned before are coming together because the director of GMA is joining the team of ITSAY to produce whilst Boss becomes the producer. As long as he's there, I'm fine, as long as we still get hard work, energy, effort and thought put into it. I'm fine. Because it translates on screen, I'll try to lower my expectations, but I can't wait to see BilkinPP as TehOh again. I can't wait to fall in love with the show all over again. Let's hope we all end up satisfied. 

Ratings: 4.5/5 The being a sequel is what's deducting the 0.5. I can't come here and be a fool; I must guard my heart against disappointment somewhat, despite failing already to do so.

Other Affiliates

We have our other shows. These were a pleasant surprise. With all the growth of new BLs, it's starting to get crowded and saturated, but as much as it's hard to see which shows stand out above all the noise,  some make you see it. These shows are the ones that stand out for me out of the rest in 2021. I don't know what companies they're from, all I know is the information given to me and past experiences.

KinnPorsche

Genre: Romance, Mafia, Angst, Drama, Friends to Lovers, Haters to Lovers, Bodyguard trope

AHHH. Can you hear me AHH. Okay, I'll calm down. But no really, KinnPorsche is finally preparing for filming and the cast has been set and I'm screaming. KinnPorsche was the book in 2020 that was announced as the most coveted; I remember so many fandoms wanted their actors to be chosen as the main cast. The reason? Because this is meant to be the first Mafia/Crime BL. Yes, you heard us, no more universities and engineers we're doing bodyguards and spoilt gangsters. I'm... But just knowing this, you just know that the show will also have angst, angst angstttt for days, drama, and a romance that probably involves haters to lovers, passion, and character development. We're coming in with guns blazing, with many side couples that look just as good and interesting, and many actors that look perfect for their roles. I cannot wait for KinnPorsche, especially when one of my favourite actors is going to be in it as a second lead Jeff Satur! Have you seen the posters, the character introduction, who they're casting for the rest of the show? This looks amazing, it seems well put together, and the whole team looks determined and ready to give us a great show. I'm honestly so excited, but I've also heard things about the book that I will have to wait for the show to be a judge of before saying. All I can say is quality of a show also includes the themes in the script, we're trying to evolve past the toxic plots and ideas in BL, so I'm hoping if there is any we cut it real quick and change that part. It's the producers and directors' choice to keep parts in that could be edited or removed. I haven't read the book, so I'm going to be wary about it for now, but from the whole cast, teasers, and posters I really think this show could be a favourite if appropriately handled. 

Ratings: 4?/5 The question mark is for the rumours I've heard about the book. I can't lie that I want this show to be great and become one of my all-time favourites but with angst and violent personalities and passion comes leeways to toxicity and more and that's just not cute or needed.

My Engineer Season 2

Genre: Romance, Comedy, Angst, Drama, Friends to Lovers, Haters to Lovers, Unrequited love,  University,

Okay, this is it, folks. My Engineer came in 2020 and knocked our socks off; it's the most underrated great show in 2020 (apart from why r u) in my opinion. It was brilliantly constructed with enough screen time and plot for every couple of the show. My Engineer is a great show; it didn't make it to my favourites because I had issues with the main couple, but it was my most enjoyed when it came to the side couples. Because we had KingRam, TharaFong, and MekBoss. (Sorry to BohnDuen Fans). These were some of the most exciting, heartfelt, loving couples in 2020, KingRam was just chef kiss. And to hear that we're getting a sequel based on them? Well you know what I did, I screamed. I loved both KingRam and TharaFrong they were done so well, acted so well, and they made me laugh and laugh and then squeal and blush. They were too cute. The ending of my engineer left both these couples on a cliff hanger; we had a depressing bro zone with TharaFong as Fong came to realise his feelings, we had a wait what moment with Ram telling King he wasn't drunk when the kiss happened which is essentially a 'we need to deal with this new situation' text. And it's got me so excited to see what happens next. The first part of this was excitement. The second part is sigh, sequels. I told you didn't sequels are just urgh. I couldn't stop my excitement about KingRam, and I went to read the novel, and I usually don't mind it, but I don't think if the sequel is based on their story that I'd like them in season 2. And that's ridiculous because they're finally the main couple of season 2, and TalayPerth is impressive to see on screen. Sigh. I wasn't happy when reading the book; there are specific actions and choices made that just shifts the dynamic of the first season into the opposite. And I'm not particularly excited to relive those moments. Let's just say I still have high hopes for My engineer mostly cause I don't know what's happening to the other couples; I really hope there's a change in the script, maybe more information, more reasons for the characters to act the way they do, more depth? Because I want to like this show, I want it successful, but I'm not a clown I can't pretend it will be if it's based on the books. We'll see if I'm proved wrong. I hope I am.

Ratings: 3.5- Why did I read the book why?? I should have come into it blind I would have given it a 5/5 just for KingRam. Sigh

Love Stage 

Genre: Romance, Comedy, Gender Bender, Friends to Lovers, Childhood friends,  

This was a shock. Thailand has started to remake mangas from Japan, and it's all the most loved ones. In 2021 we already have Antique Bakery being remade by GMMTV (Read my GMMTV Giants of 2021) and now we have Love Stage which is also getting a Japanese Movie remake out in 2021. It's a great manga, anime and it's going to be a fun show. I enjoyed the characters, and I liked the storyline. But what I'm the most excited about when it comes to this is Kaownah and Turbo finally, after years of waiting have a new series. YES. Kaownah plays Long in TharnType our villain, and he was incredible in that. I heard he and Turbo were meant to be in the show My Umbrella, but it was cancelled and forgotten which was disappointing. These two are so cute, they're known for their fanservice and their chemistry and friendship. And I like them a lot. I can't wait to see Love Stage. I think they'll kill it. Can't wait to hear more about it let's hope this time it sticks and comes through on our screens. 

Ratings: 4/5 It's a fun storyline, and it has an excellent acting couple. I'm excited.

If 2021 already sounded brilliant because of GMMTV 2021, 2021 sounds even more exciting with these new shows; there's so many coming out, so many breaking stereotypes, so many unique plotlines, and so many great actors showing up. It's going to be a great year. I'm just glad BLs are growing, things are changing slowly, things are starting to have meaning and improve, international fans are being listened to, LGBT voices is also being listened to, we are getting there, not yet there but closer, every single time someone makes a choice to create a great plot and story that is more than just two guys making out, a show filled with heart, messages and essential representation with the good actors that also want the shows to mean something or are willing to put their all in it, every time someone chooses to make a good BL, you're paving the way for change and for the meaning of BL to change as well, for it just to be seen as something more in media. And that's needed for so many people who want shows like this to be respected and created for voices that need to be heard and displayed. Let’s see more with excellent quality in 2021.

#thai bl #bl series #bl drama #gmmtv 2021 #between us #love mechanics #itsay #i told sunset about you #my engineer #lovely writer #wrpup #2021

[northstarfan]

Alpha Flight #42 - (Bill Mantlo and David Ross, January 1987)

So we get two terrible bits of writing this time around, one in full bloom and one just seeded.

Let’s start with the immediate bullshit, Heather’s response to Northstar after he manages to shake off Kara’s conditioning again. 

So, as I’ve noted before, most of the early indications we have of Northstar’s sexuality are varying degrees of snark and homophobia from his teammates. And that’s a whole lot of not great. But this one is really beyond the pale. Northstar was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by the person they’re debating letting onto the team, and Heather completely dismisses it as a joke. Not only that, she does so even as she acknowledges that it would have been worse for Northstar because Kara was a woman - an indication that she knows that the assault would potentially be more traumatic for him as a gay man. And she just doesn’t care.

That’s not just “quit the team” territory, that’s “quit the team and put your leader’s head through the wall on the way out”. Scenes like this are one more reason why I maintain that anyone who gives Northstar shit about his attitude toward Alpha Flight has never actually read Alpha Flight.

Then there’s the more infamous element - the cough that marks the start of the aborted storyline that was supposed to culminate in Northstar dying of AIDS. For the sake of redundancy, I’m not going to cover every panel that had Northstar sniffle, cough, and stagger his way to Alpha Flight #50, but since this is the issue where it first rears its head, I am going to give a general overview.

So this goes all the way back to Bill Mantlo taking over the title. Mantlo, who was on The Incredible Hulk at the time, was enthusiastic about taking over the book when John Byrne offered to swap titles. As Mantlo told Amazing Heroes: “I was bowled over [when Byrne called], because this was John’s creation and I’ve had nothing but admiration for the way he’s been handling it. So I said ‘My God, yes!’ And that’s how we decided to switch.” (Amazing Heroes #76, 1985). This enthusiasm also seemed to include a plan to out Northstar. As John Byrne put it in that same interview: “[Bill] is going to try and say the unsayable about Northstar in no uncertain terms; I wish him luck.” 

Outside of that particular point, however, Mantlo seemed to have little interest in the Beaubier twins and had no real direction for them outside of Aurora’s fluctuating powers. From AH #76: 

“So far the least interesting to me are Aurora and Northstar. John played them up the most, and really went heavily into their origins, but he made so many changes to them that it’s almost impossible for me to say what the norm is any more. I’m just giving them a chance to relax and recuperate while I concentrate on the others.” 

Ultimately, Mantlo’s plans to out Northstar were blocked by editorial, and he found writing Jean-Paul under the same limitations Byrne had dealt with to be quite frustrating:

“I always felt Northstar had possibilities if his background could be developed as a logical extension of his character. But I was prevented from doing that because of creative restrictions. Therefore, I had to look at the character as a viable superhero with the reality of his gayness kept largely in the dark. And as a character, his flying and running fast just didn’t make him and integral part of the team without his uniqueness - being gay.” (The Advocate #479, 1987)

 This lead to Mantlo’s decision to reveal Northstar as HIV+ and kill him off. From the same interview: 

“Northstar… could have been made to just vanish or even quit the team, but Mantlo wanted to be true to the character’s integrity. He decided, instead, that Northstar would die of AIDS. It seemed, [Mantlo] says, plausible given the fact that there had been allusions to numerous relationships during his years in the book. ‘It would give me the opportunity to deal with a frightening, sad, controversial topic in a comic book - which I had always understood Marvel was all about,’ he adds.”

Alpha Flight’s editor, Carl Potts, was not on board with this. From the same interview with The Advocate: “We had never openly declared that Northstar was gay. Now we had the only fairly popular Marvel character generally acknowledged as being gay and he was dying of AIDS. You shouldn’t equate one with the other.”

The two came to a compromise on the storyline, wherein Alpha Flight’s foe, Pestilence, would sicken Northstar by quickening the “corruption” in his body, with the disease remaining unnamed and the intent being that Northstar would never realize he had contracted HIV, even as his illness progressed.

Said Mantlo: “It was really AIDS in another guise, and there were still complaints about it being too similar.”

The storyline was ultimately resolved by Mantlo having Loki tell the Beaubier twins that their respective ailments (Jean-Paul’s wasting disease and Jeanne-Marie’s increasing mental instability) were the result of them being half-elves unsuited to life in the mortal realm. Jeanne-Marie used her powers to heal her brother, Jean-Paul got sent off to Asgard to live with the elves, and both were written out of the series for about two years worth of issues. (The twins were eventually brought back by other writers via the expedient explanation of Loki being a lying liar who lies.)

Mantlo was displeased with the compromised ending:

“It’s really a fallback position, since we were precluded from doing anything else… Quite honestly, I think it’s hypocritical and pointless, but that’s comics. You can’t do anything controversial, even if it has integrity, even if it’s honest, even if it’s an attempt to deal with a serious issue affecting thousands of people and likely to affect millions more.” (The Advocate #479, 1987)

Though there were apparently plans to revisit the twins at some point, Mantlo left Alpha Flight before this came about.

So, there’s a bit to unpack here, the biggest point being Mantlo’s reasoning behind trying to kill Northstar off. This was a writer who was plainly frustrated by the limitations being imposed on him, but, at the same time, he also sounds very much like he’d limited himself by reducing Northstar’s character to the sum of his sexuality. Aside from a brief aside in Marvel Fanfare #28, it seemed Northstar’s jam-packed past of childhood trauma, circus life, professional disgrace, and political terrorism held no interest for Mantlo as something that could be used to open the character to wider exploration, nor did even his own ideas for Northstar and Aurora’s otherworldly origins. No, if Northstar couldn’t be outed, he had to die. And if he couldn’t die, he still had to leave the book.

I’ve said before that I admire Mantlo’s integrity in not dropping the subtext related to Northstar’s sexuality, and I hold to that. As a writer, he could have saved himself a massive headache by simply making Northstar straight or immediately dropping him from the roster. So I do believe that Mantlo was in some part sincere in his desire to do something authentic and emotional with his planned storyline for Northstar; he’d stated that Jean-Paul’s sexuality was a unique quality in the comics landscape and seemed to want to make that an open part of the book by whatever means he could. There’s even a case to be made that, for better or for worse, linking Northstar to AIDS and the scrutiny that storyline brought made it that much more difficult to downplay the queer subtext surrounding the character, in turn making it easier for a later writer to make a case for making his homosexuality canon.

However, I have a real hard time scraping up much patience for a straight writer who decided that portraying a semi-closeted character was just too hard, when that very life experience would have been authentic to any number of queer readers, particularly in the middle of the AIDS crisis. I’ve even less patience with the apparent conclusion that the way to remedy that frustration was to kill Northstar instead of finding more subtle ways to advance the character, as Byrne had managed, or even just having him leave the team. The notion that it would have been out of character for Northstar to leave Alpha Flight is absolutely absurd; this is a character who only ever stayed with the team for the sake of his sister. All that would have been required for Jean-Paul to plausibly leave would have been for the writer to stop torturing Jeanne-Marie for an issue or two, or to have her take a bad enough turn that he took her off the team for her own safety and that of others.

Finally, I can’t say I have much faith that Mantlo would have been able to execute his plotline at all well, particularly given how little sympathy he seems to have had for Northstar as a character or how little interest he had in him beyond the controversy of his sexuality. Whatever Mantlo’s intent, it’s hard to believe that we’d have gotten any deathbed emotion that rang true to Northstar as a character or was particularly honest as commentary on society’s treatment of AIDS victims from the same writer who had Northstar’s teammates blow off sexual assault as delivery for a truly nasty homophobic joke and who thought a gay character possibly having had two romantic relationships in his life (I’m assuming this was in reference to Raymonde and Maurice) made him so promiscuous that it was plausible he’d have AIDS. And on top of that, regardless of other motivation, the decision to get rid of Northstar seems to have come as much from Mantlo’s frustration with his editors as any desire for meaningful character development. 

In conclusion, for whatever good I might be able to say about Mantlo, I’m not the least bit sorry that his plans were derailed. He seems to have been, at best, a writer with better intentions than capability when it came to the sensitive subject matter he’d decided to tackle, and it seems for the best that other writers were able to give Northstar the development he couldn’t.

Next Time: The Man You Were

Previous installments of the series can be found here and at AO3.

#northstar #jean paul beaubier #alpha flight #x factor #homophobia #northstar's gayest hits

[mytwilightimagines13]

Amnesia (Book Two)(Part Twelve)

The witnesses

Two things happened at once. Caius's eyes focused on Aro, and the tiny cruel smile came back. And Edward hissed, his hands balling up in fists so tight it looked like the bones in his knuckles would split through his diamond-hard skin. Carlisle glanced anxiously at Edward's face, and then his own face hardened. While Caius had blundered through useless accusations and injudicious attempts to trigger the fight, Aro must have been coming up with a more effective strategy. Aro ghosted across the snow to the far western end of the foe’s line, stopping about ten yards from Amun and Kebi. The nearby wolves bristled angrily but held their positions. “Ah, Amun, my southern neighbor!" Aro said warmly. "It has been so long since you've visited me." Amun was motionless with anxiety, Kebi a statue at his side. "Time means little; I never notice its passing," Amun said through unmoving lips. "So true," Aro agreed. "But maybe you had another reason to stay away?" Amun said nothing. "It can be terribly time-consuming to organize newcomers into a coven. I know that well! I'm grateful I have others to deal with the tedium.” Aro said and many took a quick glance at Maeryn before returning their attention back to Aro. Alec grabbed Maeryn’s hand and squeezed it lightly. Maeryn returned his gesture by stroking his hand with her thumb once. “I'm glad your new additions have fit in so well. I would have loved to have been introduced. I'm sure you were meaning to come to see me soon." Aro continued. "Of course," Amun said, his tone so emotionless that it was impossible to tell if there was any fear or sarcasm in his assent. "Oh well, we're all together now! Isn't it lovely?" Amun nodded, his face blank. "But the reason for your presence here is not as pleasant, unfortunately. Carlisle called on you to witness?" "Yes." "And what did you witness for him?" Amun spoke with the same cold lack of emotion. "I've observed the child in question. It was evident almost immediately that she was not an immortal child - " "Perhaps we should define our terminology," Aro interrupted, "now that there seem to be new classifications. By immortal child, you mean of course a human child who had been bitten and thus transformed into a vampire." "Yes, that's what I meant." "What else did you observe about the child?" "The same things that you surely saw in Edward's mind. That the child is his biologically. That she grows. That she learns." Maeryn still couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that Bella and Edward had intercourse when she was only human. Maeryn had to admit she was impressed by Edward’s ability to restrain himself. But she was also disgusted by it at the same time. She couldn’t ponder on the fact how he could bring his mate in so much danger. Not just by having intercourse, but also by impregnating her. Overall, she found it foolish. "Yes, yes," Aro said, a hint of impatience in his otherwise amiable tone. "But specifically in your few weeks here, what did you see?" Amun's brow furrowed. "That she grows... quickly." Aro smiled. "And do you believe that she should be allowed to live?" Hisses escaped multiple mouths on the foe’s side, once Aro’s words had been spoken out loud. Half the vampires in the foe’s line echoed in protest. The sound was a low sizzle of fury hanging in the air. Across the meadow, a few of the Volturi witnesses made the same noise, including Maeryn. Edward stepped back and wrapped a restraining hand around Bella’s wrist. Aro did not turn to the noise, but Amun glanced around uneasily. "I did not come to make judgments," he equivocated. Aro laughed lightly. "Just your opinion." Amun's chin lifted. "I see no danger in the child. She learns even more swiftly than she grows." Aro nodded, considering. After a moment, he turned away. "Aro?" Amun called. Aro whirled back. "Yes, friend?" "I gave my witness. I have no more business here. My mate and I would like to take our leave now." Aro smiled warmly. "Of course. I'm so glad we were able to chat for a bit. And I'm sure we'll see each other again soon." Amun's lips

were a tight line as he inclined his head once, acknowledging the barely concealed threat. He touched Kebi's arm, and then the two of them ran quickly to the southern edge of the meadow and disappeared into the trees. Maeryn was sure that they wouldn't stop running for a very long time. Smart move. Aro was gliding back along the length of our line to the east, his guards hovering tensely. He stopped when he was in front of Siobhan's massive form. "Hello, dear Siobhan. You are as lovely as ever." Siobhan inclined her head, waiting. "And you?" he asked. "Would you answer my questions the same way Amun has?" "I would," Siobhan said. "But I would perhaps add a little more. Renesmee understands the limitations. She's no danger to humans - she blends in better than we do. She poses no threat of exposure." "Can you think of none?" Aro asked soberly. Edward growled, a low ripping sound deep in his throat. Caius's cloudy crimson eyes brightened. Renata reached out protectively toward her master. And Garrett freed Kate to take a step forward, ignoring Kate's hand as she tried to caution him this time. Maeryn watched the scene closely, holding her hands out, ready to weaken Bella’s shield at any moment. Siobhan answered slowly, "I don't think I follow you." Aro drifted lightly back, casually, but toward the rest of his guard. Renata, Felix, and Demetri were closer than his shadow. "There is no broken law," Aro said in a placating voice, but everyone on both sides of the meadow could hear that a qualification was coming. Bella was becoming furious, and hurled the fury into her shield, thickening it, making sure everyone was protected. Maeryn smiled and used her gift slightly, giving Bella some resistance. Not enough to break the shield, but enough for her to lighten up Bella’s fury even further, and use more energy than originally asked for. "No broken law," Aro repeated. "However, does it follow then that there is no danger? No." He shook his head gently. "That is a separate issue." The only response was the tightening of already stretched nerves, and Maggie, at the fringes of their band of fighters, shaking her head with slow anger. Aro paced thoughtfully, looking as if he floated rather than touched the ground with his feet. Maeryn noticed every pass took him closer to the protection of his guard, and felt more relieved with every pass he took. "She is unique... utterly, impossibly unique. Such a waste it would be, to destroy something so lovely. Especially when we could learn so much .. ." He sighed, as if unwilling to go on. "But there is danger, danger that cannot simply be ignored." No one answered his assertion. It was dead silent as he continued in a monologue that sounded as if he spoke it for himself only. "How ironic it is that as the humans advance, as their faith in science grows and controls their world, the more free we are from discovery. Yet, as we become ever more uninhibited by their disbelief in the supernatural, they become strong enough in their technologies that, if they wished, they could actually pose a threat to us, even destroy some of us.” Aro said, his face looking troubled. "For thousands and thousands of years, our secrecy has been more a matter of convenience, of ease, than of actual safety. This last raw, angry century has given birth to weapons of such power that they endanger even immortals. Now our status as mere myth in truth protects us from these weak creatures we hunt. This amazing child" - he lifted his hand palm down as if to rest it on Renesmee, though he was forty yards from her now, almost within the Volturi formation again. "if we could but know her potential - know with absolute certainty that she could always remain shrouded within the obscurity that protects us. But we know nothing of what she will become! Her own parents are plagued by fears of her future. We cannot know what she will grow to be." He paused, looking first at the foe’s witnesses, and then, meaningfully, at his own. His voice gave a good imitation of sounding torn by his words. Still looking at his own

witnesses, he spoke again. "Only the known is safe. Only the known is tolerable. The unknown is... a vulnerability." Caius's smile widened viciously. "You're reaching, Aro," Carlisle said in a bleak voice. "Peace, friend." Aro smiled, his face as kind, his voice as gentle, as ever. "Let us not be hasty. Let us look at this from every side." "May I offer a side to be considered?" Garrett petitioned in a level tone, taking another step forward. "Nomad," Aro said, nodding in permission. Garrett's chin lifted. His eyes focused on the huddled mass at the end of the meadow, and he spoke directly to the Volturi witnesses. Maeryn raised an eyebrow, wondering what this nomad could possibly say to still put an end to this tension. A tension of a starting battle, waiting around the corner to blossom like a deadly flower. "I came here at Carlisle's request, as the others, to witness," he said. "That is certainly no longer necessary, with regard to the child. We all see what she is. I stayed to witness something else. You." He jabbed his finger toward the wary vampires. "Two of you I know - Makenna, Charles - and I can see that many of you others are also wanderers, roamers like myself. Answering to none. Think carefully on what I tell you now. 'These ancient ones did not come here for justice as they told you. We suspected as much, and now it has been proved. They came, misled, but with a valid excuse for their action. Witness now as they seek flimsy excuses to continue their true mission. Witness them struggle to find a justification for their true purpose - to destroy this family here." He gestured toward Carlisle and Tanya. "The Volturi come to erase what they perceive as the competition. Perhaps, like me, you look at this clan's golden eyes and marvel. They are difficult to understand, it's true. But the ancient ones look and see something besides their strange choice. They see power. I have witnessed the bonds within this family - I say family and not coven. These strange golden-eyed ones deny their very natures. But in return have they found something worth even more, perhaps, than mere gratification of desire? I've made a little study of them in my time here, and it seems to me that intrinsic to this intense family binding - that which makes them possible at all - is the peaceful character of this life of sacrifice. There is no aggression here like we all saw in the large southern clans that grew and diminished so quickly in their wild feuds. There is no thought for domination. And Aro knows this better than I do." Maeryn watched Aro's face as Garrett's words condemned him, waiting tensely for some response, a sign to end this nomad. Who does he think he is? Questioning her Master like that?! But Aro's face was only politely amused, as if waiting for a tantrum-throwing child to realize that no one was paying attention to his histrionics. "Carlisle assured us all, when he told us what was coming, that he did not call us here to fight. These witnesses" - Garrett pointed to Siobhan and Liam - "agreed to give evidence, to slow the Volturi advance with their presence so that Carlisle would get the chance to present his case. But some of us wondered" - his eyes flashed to Eleazars face - "if Carlisle having truth on his side would be enough to stop the so-called justice. Are the Volturi here to protect the safety of our secrecy, or to protect their own power? Did they come to destroy an illegal creation, or a way of life? Could they be satisfied when the danger turned out to be no more than a misunderstanding? Or would they push the issue without the excuse of justice? We have the answer to all these questions. We heard it in Aro's lying words - we have one with a gift of knowing such things for certain - and we see it now in Caius's eager smile. Their guard is just a mindless weapon, a tool in their masters' quest for domination.” Maeryn frowned at his words, but quickly shook them off. This Garrett is a liar, nothing more, nothing less. "So now there are more questions, questions that you must answer. Who rules you,

nomads? Do you answer to someone's will besides your own? Are you free to choose your path, or will the Volturi decide how you will live? I came to witness. I stay to fight. The Volturi care nothing for the death of the child. They seek the death of our free will." He turned, then, to face the ancients. "So come, I say! Let's hear no more lying rationalizations. Be honest in your intents as we will be honest in ours. We will defend our freedom. You will or will not attack it. Choose now, and let these witnesses see the true issue debated here." Once more he looked to the Volturi witnesses, his eyes probing each face. The power of his words was evident in their expressions. "You might consider joining us. If you think the Volturi will let you live to tell this tale, you are mistaken. We may all be destroyed" - he shrugged - "but then again, maybe not. Perhaps we are on more equal footing than they know. Perhaps the Volturi have finally met their match. I promise you this, though - if we fall, so do you." He ended his heated speech by stepping back to Kate's side and then sliding forward in a half-crouch, prepared for the onslaught.

#alec volturi #volturi #volturi imagine #vampire #twilight imagine #twilight

[empyreal-insights]

Border Jumping: In It, Not Of It

{Border Jumping, part 1}  .  Esthero, one of my favorite singer/songwriters, posted a song on IG, “Great Version of Me”:  

They say I’ve got “spark”  They say I’ve got “magic” They say I’ve got all the things that I need, and if I want it, I have it

They say I’ve got heart And a light that surrounds it, but I’m lost in the dark Did you happen to notice? 

I need something good to happen to me ‘Cause I can’t stop drowning When will I feel like all the things they see?  When will I be this “great” version of me? 

I’ve tried so hard, tried to live it and own it Kept staring ahead, pretended how great things have been going

But I’ll let you in on my intimate moments:  I feel alone Mostly, I feel forgotten I need something good to happen to me ‘Cause I can’t stop drowning When will I feel like all the things they see? When will I be this “great” version of me?

‘Cause I can’t go back And I’m scared to move When will I feel like all the things they see in me? When will I live so gracefully?  When will I have what’s coming to me? 

I need something great to happen I wanna meet this great version of me. 

Wanna meet her so bad Great version of me

I spent a lot of time fighting against myself because of this feeling. Here’s some of what I learned when I was dancing between breaking down and breaking through.  

Find Your (Higher) Power I’ve tried so hard, tried to live it and own it Kept staring ahead, pretended how great things have been going But I’ll let you in on my intimate moments: I feel alone Mostly, I feel forgotten

I know folks have issues with God. But if you’re resonating with this message, understand that you’ll require a relationship with Source / a Higher Power / Creative Force (1). 

If you can’t wrap your head around having faith in the concept of a God-Force, the next best thing is to master some form of energetic literacy through mindfulness, tai chi, meditation, martial arts, pranic healing, reiki, or a similar methodology. 

Do not intellectualize this. You can start with a book or two, but eventually you need to choose something, then find someone that can teach you how to do it. You must learn to see Energy as barometer, master key, and mother tongue.

Why? Because your lessons, blessings, and karmic resolution are meant to play out between you and Source, with a thin veil between you and some of the "typical” human experiences (2). Energetic literacy gives you the language to stay in communion with Source, and this relationship will sustain you when people will not or cannot. 

Go With Your Flow  When will I feel like all the things they see in me?  When will I live so gracefully?  When will I have what’s coming to me?

You can’t move like everyone else. You’re on a whole other timetable - one that more closely mirrors the spiritual world. I realize that in some western spiritualities this can translate to a commitment to austerity or asceticism, which I clearly reject.  

While in this process, it helps to be able to soothe and comfort yourself on demand, in the healthiest ways you can manage. There’s enough to figure out without adding deprivation to the list. 

Also, don’t feel like you have to be happy all the time. Create space to cry, wail, grieve, and lament. The song that inspired this is a perfect example. I write. You might make art. Just make sure the pain passes through. Don’t dwell in it - that’s how you start to feel stuck.  

Chironically wounded shadow workers - those of us that long to fit in and experience the belonging others take for granted - often never asked to be set apart, but we keep finding ourselves in that position (3). Acceptance eases some of the loneliness and gives us the patience to wait our turn.      

The good news: you are exquisitely protected. Respect that. Don’t chase people who leave; don’t force yourself into incompatible spaces; don’t beg to be understood. 

This is why your relationship with Source is nonnegotiable - you need to know exactly who and what is working in your life, where They're guiding you, what to avoid, and how to call upon and respect that Power when necessary. Acting in accordance with this understanding will help your life move more effortlessly.  

Be Grateful  I need something good to happen to me ‘Cause I can’t stop drowning When will I feel like all the things they see? When will I be this “great” version of me?

You know how the spiritual folks talk about being thankful for every little thing? Do that. 

When you're hollowed out from that weeping and wailing? Take a breath (or a nap), then give thanks.

To live long enough to get all the good things waiting for you - ‘cause some of us blossom well after 35 (4) - you must learn to cling to gratitude as if you’re dangling off a cliff and help is at least 30 seconds away. 

The good things are happening, will continue to happen. You may not have everything you want, but do you have most of what you need? Thank what sustains you: food (say grace), pets, friends, plants...whatever you have. You must learn to see the joy along the way because our despair can be fatal.  

Again, it’s natural to feel anger, frustration, jealousy, and whatever else. Observe it, resolve it, and keep it moving. Be as human as you need to be in any given moment, but always, always, always return to gratitude. 

Welcome Your Awakening They say I’ve got “spark”  They say I’ve got “magic”  They say I’ve got all the things that I need, and if I want it, I have it

They say I’ve got heart And a light that surrounds it, but I’m lost in the dark Did you happen to notice?

Yes, I noticed. You’re not crazy or arrogant for realizing that you’re different. Your energy's legit, that's why people react to it so definitively. 

Accept that reactivity is often the limit of human capacity. They’ll be fascinated, dazzled, but fall short of being able to hold you, love you, or define you. 

But soon - after some dark days and some unbelievably beautiful ones - it won’t hurt so much. You’ll know where to receive comfort, love, and understanding. You’ll discover your work, your people, your place, and that great version of you. 

...

(1) Source is becoming a preferred term when sharing these thoughts because (a) the name Osun, one of my primary deities, derives from a Yoruba word meaning, “the source,” (b) I have a deep relationship with water, which is considered a/the source of life - perhaps the most important after air itself, and ( c ) it feels less loaded and/or culturally specific than “God.” Your parents - most especially your mother - can be considered your Source. Food, clothing, shelter... sources of survival. That, in my opinion, is the kind of emotional connection and relationship that allows us to interact and commune with the Divine in the most intimate, healing, healthy, and hopeful ways. 

(2) Certain aspects of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy have an intricate way of explaining why some are meant to perpetuate the needs and desires of daily / cyclical human life, while others are meant to work and live more closely with Source. I use these as examples because certain texts and concepts within these traditions have been translated and interpreted for a western audience over the last 40-50 years, and may be more immediately accessible than other ideologies. If you go for the ancient texts first, just know you’ll need to filter through what I call the “human shit” (sexism, politics of the era) to get to the underlying truths that can help you deepen your spiritual practices. (sidebar: I think this is what those “caste” systems were SUPPOSED to be about - interpreting the flow of human life and integrating our unique, personal destinies into an overarching social construct, not oppression and domination. But, humans love a hierarchy.)

(3) In contrast to the “fuck the world” cynics, loners, or folks with outsized egos willful enough to claim places they didn’t earn. And, hell, that energy has its place. They seem to have it easier, right? But we’re all prone to thinking the grass is greener where we don’t have to water it. 

(4) Why do you think elder-ship is revered in so many pre-colonial / indigenous cultures? Youth has its advantages, but most of us have to grow into ourselves, and that takes time. Even when you’re blessed with precocious emotional intelligence, there are some things you only learn through living. Allow yourself the grace to move through life at your divine pace.

#blogging #life #lessons #destiny #music #spirituality #personal power #healing #self awareness #bliss creation

[theredherb]

The Red Herb’s Top 10 Games of 2020

Hey, fuck 2020. You might notice that many of the “Best Of” lists you read this year and last can’t help but mention how terrible 2020 was. That’s because every day was like hitting a new, splinter riddled branch on our 365 day plummet off a shit-coated tree. The year brought with it a viral pandemic that served as a pressure cooker for the societal and systemic issues boiling beneath the surface of our every day life. And we’re not out of it. 

At least one positive holds true of 2020: the games were pretty darn good. One has to wonder, though, if 2020 was the last year of what can be called “normalcy” for the video game industry. Now that the remainder of titles brewed in pre-Covid times are out in the wild, what will the future of gaming look like as studios shift to work-from-home and distribution models migrate to digital as the primary bread winner? What will games look like going forward?

I have no fucking clue. We’ll get there when we get there. But looking back, I’m glad to have had such solid distractions from the stress and strife. If 2020 is any indicator for the industry going forward, then my takeaway is that games will continue to grow in prominence because of their ability to help us cope and, more importantly, stay connected.

Anyway, here’s video games:

10. MARVEL’S AVENGERS

Oh, Marvel’s Avengers. I know you expected to be on more prestigious Top 10 lists than mine. Truthfully, I debated whether or not you should be here. But I had to search my soul (stone) on this one. Really assemble my feelings. Tony Stark my thoughts (?). Here’s the short of it: Marvel’s Avengers has a great story campaign with a surprising amount of emotional weight thanks largely to Kamala Khan’s quest to reassemble the heroes of her youth. Once the final cutscene ends, though, players were expected to take their play box of Marvel heroes, jump online, and duke it out against hordes of villains for the privilege of precious loot and level gains. It would be impossible to get bored because Crystal Dynamics was going to continually Bifrost in new quests, cosmetics, and heroes -- for free!

Except, after fans blasted through the campaign (took me a solid weekend), they found a multiplayer mode filled with repetitive fights against non-descript A.I.M Bots, a handful of dull, un-Marvelous environments (the PNW?! In a video game?! Wowwee!), and a grind for gear that became useless minutes after it was equipped. Oh, and bugs. Tons of bugs. It must be hard for A.I.M. to take earth’s mightiest heroes seriously when they’re falling through the fucking earth every other mission.

So why the Kevin Accolade™? Of all the mistakes and underbaked ideas, Crystal Dynamics got the most important thing right: they made me feel like I was a part of the Avengers. Cutting through the sky as Iron Man; dive bombing, fists-first as the Hulk; firing gadgets at cronies as Black Widow; cracking a row of skulls with Cap’s shield… Avengers is a brawler on super soldier serum.

The combat is crunchy and addictive, and surprisingly deep once you unlock your character’s full suite of skills and buffs. The gear matters little. But choosing a loadout that works for you -- like ensuring enemy takedowns grant you a health orb every time or turning area clearing attacks to focused beams of hurt -- does matter. When it comes to games with disastrous launches, Avengers is the most deserving of a triumphant comeback story because, if you clear the wreckage, I think there’s a solid game here. If I was able to spend hours playing it in its roughshod state, I can see myself digging in for the long-term once it’s polished up and given a healthy dose of content. You know...if Square Enix doesn’t outright abandon it.

9. STREETS OF RAGE 4

Here’s a fact about me: I love beat ‘em ups. From Final Fight to X-Men to The Simpsons, I prioritized my quarters for the beat ‘em up machines (and House of the Dead simply because House of the Dead fuckin’ owns). Unfortunately, Streets of Rage wasn’t in arcades, and I didn’t own a Genesis growing up, so I didn’t get around to the series until Sega re-released as part of a collection. Though my history with the 29 year old brawler is shorter than some, the basics stand out out right away: it’s an awesome side-scrolling brawler filled with zany character designs and high octane boss fights.

SoR4 nails that simple spirit while adding an electric soundtrack, buttery smooth animations, and an art style that looks like a comic book in motion. You can button-mash your way through the game or master your timing to combo stun the shit out of bad guys. Same screen co-op is a requisite for the beat ‘em up genre but I have to call it out nonetheless given that it's next to obsolete these days. The story campaign is, of course, finite but a stream of unlockables and a Boss Rush Mode pad out the package nicely.

I really don’t have to go on and on. I’m on board with any game that captures the arcadey high of classic beat ‘em ups, and Streets of Rage 4 does it with flare.

8. RESIDENT EVIL 3 REMAKE

Resident Evil 2’s remake was my game of the year in 2019. It’s a pitch perfect revision that captures the pulse-pounding fear of the original while beautifully updating its graphics and gameplay for modern audiences. The most striking aspect of RE2’s remake is how it expands and reconfigures the classic game’s environments and set pieces. Capcom managed to recontextualize, and even improve on, the original’s design while staying faithful to its tone and atmosphere.

Resident Evil 3’s remake is less successful in modifying and improving on its source material. If the game feels like it was handled by a different team than RE2R, your gamer hands have good eyes (roll with it). It was developed by a separate internal team (three different teams, in fact), but that’s actually one of many choices mirroring its 1999 forebear. Just like the original, RE3R is a tighter (i.e. shorter) experience that launched less than a year after its predecessor. And just like the original, the game skirts away from survival horror in favor of action horror.

Unlike last year’s remake, however, RE3R paints in broad strokes with the original material much in the same way that 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake shared a vague resemblance with Romero’s ‘79 classic. Capcom at least nails down what matters: you play as Jill Valentine, beaten and discredited after the Arklay Mountains incident, during her last escape from the zombie besieged Raccoon City. Her exit is complicated by Nemesis, a humanoid missile that relentlessly pursues her from minute two of the game. Her only chance of making it out alive is by teaming up with a gaggle of Umbrella dispatched mercenaries, including an overly handsome fellow named Carlos Oliveras that you control for a spell. But fans struggled to get over what Capcom didn’t remake. Several enemies, boss fights, and a “divergent path” mechanic that had you choose how best to escape the Nemesis in a pinch were omitted from the remake. Even an entire section set in a clock tower was cut. But, let’s be honest, the biggest omission is a secret ending where Barry Burton saves the day using only his beard. For real, YouTube that shit.

If you look at what the remake does instead of what it doesn’t, you’ll find a lightning paced action game highlighted by tense, one-on-one fights against the constantly mutating Nemesis. The tyrant’s grotesque transformations evoke the mind-rending, gut turning creature designs found in John Carpenter's The Thing. It’s sad that Nemesis doesn’t pursue you through the levels as diligently as he did in the original, or as Mr. X had in last year’s remake, but these “arena fights” end up being harrowing and fun, culminating in a memorable final encounter. The remake also treats us to the best incarnation of Jill to date. She’s a cynical badass, exasperated at how Umbrella upended her life, and can take a plunge off of a building yet still muster enough energy to call Nemesis a bitch. RE3R also shines thanks to its snappy combat, including a contextual dodge that feels rewarding to pull off, less bullet-sponge enemies than RE2, and an assortment of weapons to get you through Jill’s Very Bad Night(s). It makes for a necessary, though shorter, companion to last year’s stellar remake.

7. HADES

I’m experiencing a new type of shame including a title that I haven’t beaten on my Top 10 list, but I can assure you that I’ve dumped hours into its addictive death loop. It’s probably because of my resistance to looking up any tips, but given the skill-check nature of the difficult boss fights, I’m almost afraid the top shelf advice will amount to “die less, idiot.”

My failings aside, Hades is brilliant. It’s the perfect merger of gameplay and storytelling. You play as Zagreus, son of Hades, and your entire goal is to escape your father’s underworld domain. You pick from a selection of weapons, like a huge broadsword or spear, and attempt your “run,” seeing how far you can make it before an undead denizen cuts you down. It’s familiar roguelike territory, but where Supergiant separates their game from the pack is in the unique feeling of constant progression, even as you fail. With each run, not only is Zagreus earning a currency (gems or keys) that unlock new skills that make the next go a little easier, you’re also consistently treated to new lore. The fallen gods and heroes that line your father’s hall greet you after each death and provide a new insight into their world. The writing is bouncy and hilarious, the voice acting ethereal and alluring, and the character designs could make a lake thirsty.

Supergiant’s stylistic leanings are at their peak here. They’ve managed the impossible feat of making failure feel like advancement. Sure, it totally fucks up other roguelikes for me, but that’s okay. None of those games have Meg.

6. DEMON’S SOULS

Whereas Capcom takes liberties with their remakes, Bluepoint took the Gus Van Sant approach and made a 1:1 recreation of the 2009 title that launched the “Soulslike” genre. The dividing difference is a 2020 facelift brought to us by way of the PlayStation 5’s next-gen horsepower. There’s been online arguments (surprise) regarding the loss of Fromsoftware’s visual aesthetic in translating the PS3 original in order to achieve a newfound photorealism. It’s true, some beasties lose their surreal weirdness -- a consequence of revisiting designs without the worry of graphical or time constraints -- but the game’s world is still engrossing, morbid, and bleakly gorgeous.

That’s not to say all Bluepoint did was overhaul the graphics and shove this remake out the door. No, their improvements are nuanced, under-the-hood changes that gently push the genre into the next-generation. For one, the loading times are incredible. You could hop between all five archstones in under a minute if you wanted. And this game is a best DualSense controller showcase outside of Astro’s Playroom. You can feel a demonstrable difference between hitting your sword against a wall compared to connecting it with an attacking creature. Likewise, the controller rumbles menacingly as to let you know enemies are stomping across a catwalk above you. “Better rumbles” was not on my wish list of next-gen features, but the tactile feedback goes great lengths to make you feel like you’re there.

Granted, sticking so closely to the original means its pratfalls are also carried over to the next-gen. The trek between bonfire checkpoints is an eternity compared to the game’s successors, and Fromsoftware hadn’t quite mastered the sword ballet of boss fights prevalent in Dark Souls. Instead, a handful of bosses feel more like set pieces where you’re searching for the “trick” to end it versus having to learn attack patterns and counters. Still, it’s easy to see the design blueprint that bore a whole new genre. From having to memorize enemy placements to hunting down the world’s arcane secrets in the hopes of finding a new item that pushes the odds in your favor. Bluepoint’s quality of life improvements only make it kinder (not easier) to plunge into the game, obsess over its idiosyncrasies, and begin to master every inch of it. That is until you roll into New Game+ and the game shoves a Moonlight Greatsword up your ass.

5. YAKUZA: LIKE A DRAGON

Here’s a fact about me I’m sure you don’t know: I love beat ‘em ups. Streets of Rage 4 had an easy time making it on this list because it can be classified as both a “beat ‘em up” and “good.” Here’s another fact about me: I’m not the biggest fan of JRPGs. I’m told this is not because of any personal preferences I harbor, but rather due to a distinct lack of culture. I’ve made peace with that. At least my uncultured ways are distinctive.

But my disinterest in JRPGs is notable here because it illustrates how very good Like A Dragon is. Transitioning the Yakuza series from a reactive brawler (entrenched in an open-world SIM) to a full-blown turned-based RPG was risky -- especially 8 entries into the mainline series -- but it pays off explosively for Like A Dragon. Not only does the goofiness, melodrama, and kinetic energy translate to an RPG -- it’s improved by it. Beyond a new protagonist -- the instantly likable and infinitely affable Ichiban Kasuga -- we’re finally treated to an ensemble cast that travels with you, interacts with you, and grows with you. Their independent stories weave into Ichi’s wonderfully and end up mattering just as much as his.

The combat doesn’t lose any of its punch now that you’re taking turns. In fact, it feels wilder than ever and still demands situational awareness as your enemies shift around the environment, forcing you to quickly pick which move will do the most damage and turn the fight in your favor. RGG purposefully made Ichi obsessed with Dragon Quest (yes, specifically Dragon Quest) as an excuse to go ham and morph enemies into outlandish fiends that would populate Ichi’s favorite series. It’s a fun meta that never loses its charm.

This is the best first step into a new genre I’ve ever seen an established franchise make and I hope like hell they keep with it for future outings -- and that Ichi returns to keep playing hero. There’s plenty of callbacks and treats for longtime fans, but RGG did a masterful job rolling out the virtual carpet for a whole new generation of Yakuza fanatics.

4. GHOST OF TSUSHIMA

Sucker Punch’s dive into 13th century Japan doesn’t redefine the open-world genre. But like Horizon: Zero Dawn before it, Ghost of Tsushima takes familiar components of the genre and uses them exceptionally well, creating an airtight experience that can’t help but stand out. I can tell Sucker Punch mused on games like Assassin’s Creed and Breath of the Wild, tried to figure out what makes those games tick, and then brought their own spin to those concepts. You can feel it in their obsession to make traversal through the environment as unobtrusive as possible, letting the wind literally guide you to your destinations instead of forcing the player to glue their eyes to a mini-map. You can feel it in how seamless it is to scale a rooftop before silently dropping on a patrol, blade first. You can feel it in the smoothness behind the combat as your sword clashes against the enemy’s. Every discrete part is fine-tuned yet perfectly complements the whole. The game is silk in your hands. 

The mainline story can be humdrum, though. It mirrors the beats of a superhero origin story, which isn’t surprising when you account for the three Infamous titles and satellite spinoffs under Sucker Punch’s belt. But Jin Sakai’s personal journey outshines the cookie-cutter plot. His gradual turn from the strict samurai code to a morally ambiguous vigilante lifestyle (to becoming, eventually, a myth) is a fascinating exploration in shifting worldviews. This is bolstered by the well-written side-missions dotting your quest, some of which play out in chains. It’s these diversions about melancholy warriors and villagers adjusting to life under invasion that end up being the essential storytelling within the game. Whatever you do, don’t skip a single one.

Before GoT can overstay its welcome with collectible hunting and stat-tree building, the ride is over. If you find exhaustive open-world titles, well, exhausting, Sucker Punch coded enough of a campaign to sticking the landing and not more. But if you were looking for more, the game’s co-op Legends mode is the surprise encore of the year. It strikes its own tone, with vibrant, trippy designs, and a progression system that embarrasses other AAA titles in the space (I mean Avengers. I’m talking about Avengers).

3. THE LAST OF US PART II

The Last of Us is widely regarded as a masterpiece. It’s a melancholic trek through a realistic post-apocalypse, driven by the budding bond between a world-weary survivor and a would-be teenage savior. The fungal zombies and violent shootouts with scavengers were scary and exciting, but ultimately just window-dressing compared to the level of complicated, and honest, human emotion on display throughout the tale. While a segment of detractors helpfully pointed out that The Last of Us’ story isn’t unique when compared to years of post-apocalyptic books, comics, and movies, that argument seems to forget that a narrative more concerned with the human protagonists’ connections to one another instead of saving the world or feeding into a hero complex is pretty unique for games -- especially a high profile, AAA budgeted game.

Still, fans made heroes out of Joel and Ellie because of their own connection to their journey. And that connection is almost instantly challenged in the opening hours of The Last of Us Part II to heartbreaking effect. But I’m here to tell you that any other sequel would have been dishonest to the legacy of the original game. To be given a hero’s quest as a continuation, an imagined sequel where Joel and Ellie do battle against the viral infection that’s swept the earth, would have been a despicable cash-in. It would have been a mistake to follow-up the original’s careful examination of human nature just to placate an audience that seems to have missed the point Naughty Dog made. The Last of Us Part II hurts. But it has to or else it wouldn’t have been worth making. It’s a slow-burn meditation on the harmful ripples revenge creates, how suffering begets suffering, and how, if we don’t break the cycles of violence we commit to, suffering will come for us.

To drive this point, we’re given two distinct perspectives during the meaty (and somewhat overlong) campaign, split between Ellie Williams, the wronged party seeking revenge, and Abby Anderson, an ex-Firefly whose actions set the sequel into motion. The greatest trick Naughty Dog pulls off isn’t forcing us to play as a character we hate, it’s giving us reasons to emphasize with them. It was gradual, and despite some heavy-handed moments meant to squeeze sympathy out of the player (how many times do I have to see that fuckin’ aquarium?!), I eventually came to love Abby’s side of the story. The obvious irony being that she unwittingly walks the same path Joel did in the original.

My love for the narrative shouldn’t distract from how well designed the world is. Being a King County local, the vision of a ruined Seattle strikes an uncomfortable note -- it was eerie seeing recognizable buildings overgrown with vegetation but otherwise devoid of life. Maybe the heart-wrenching story also distracts from the fact this game is, by definition, survival horror. Exploring toppled buildings in the dark, hearing the animalistic chittering of the infected, defending yourself with limited resources… It manages to be a scarier entry into the genre in 2020 than even RE3R. There’s a particular fight in a fungus covered hospital basement that easily goes down as my Boss Fight of the Year. Human enemies make for clench-worthy encounters, too, with incredibly adept AI that forces you to keep moving around the environment and set traps to avoid getting overwhelmed.

Admittedly, the subject matter -- or more to the point, the grim tone -- was tough to stomach during an actual pandemic which has happily treated us to the worst of human nature. Still, The Last of Us Part II is absolutely worth playing for its balance of mature themes and expertly crafted world, and the way it juxtaposes beauty and awfulness in the same breath.

2. SPIDER-MAN: MILES MORALES

The most impressive thing about Miles Morales is that, despite being a truncated midquel rather than a full-blown sequel, it’s a better game than 2018’s Spider-Man. It’s not because of the instantaneous loading times or the fancy ray-tracing techniques used on the PS5 version of the game. Rather, it’s how it takes the joyride of the original game and hones it into a laser focused experience filled to the brim exclusively with highs. Like Batman: Arkham Asylum going into Arkham City, Miles starts the game off with his mentor’s best abilities and tools. From there, he discovers his own powers, his bioelectric venom strike, which ends up feeling like the missing ingredient from the first game’s combat.

Your open-world playground -- a locale in the Marvel universe called “New York City” -- is exactly the same size as the previous installment, which helps avoid making the game feel “lesser.” But Insomniac wisely consolidated the random crimes Peter faced into a phone app that Miles can check and choose which activity to help out with. Choices like this really trim the fat from the main game and help alleviate “the open-world problem” where the story’s pacing suffers because players are spending hours on end collecting feathers. This is great because Miles’ story is also great. The narrative kicks Peter out pretty early on, focusing on how Miles assumes the role of city protector, primarily focused on his new home in Harlem. Insomniac avoids retreading the same path paved by Into the Spider-Verse by telling a relatable tale where Miles defines his identity as Spider-Man. With a strong cast led by Nadji Jeter as Miles, the game lands an impactful story that weaves its own new additions to Miles’ mythos (light spoiler: I loved their take on The Prowler).

Miles Morales was pure virtualized joy from start to finish. A requirement of the platinum trophy is to replay the entirety of the game on New Game+. I didn’t hesitate to restart my adventure the minute the credits were over. Everything I loved about 2018’s Spider-Man is here: the swinging, the fighting, the gadgets, the bevy of costumes. But it gave me a new element I adore and can’t see Insomniac’s franchise proceeding without: being Miles Morales.

1. FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE

I love subversive media, I do. And Square Enix’s “remake” of one the most beloved video games ever made subverts expectations by openly acknowledging that, yes, the original story you love exists and is consistently referenced in this game. But this is not that story. This is something..else. Because the truth is, SE could never have recreated FFVII and delivered a title that matched the Sacred Game fans created in their heads. That impossible standard is like an imagined deity, given power by feeding on raw nostalgia reinforced by years of word-of-mouth and appearances on Top 100 lists. I’m not saying FFVII is a bad game or that fans give it too much credit. Not at all. There’s a reason it’s so influential -- it’s good! But memory works in a funny way over time. We have a tendency to codify our perception of a thing over the reality of it. The connection we make to certain media, especially when introduced at a young age as FFVII had been to a whole generation of fans so long ago, creates a legend in our heads. Unfortunately, it’s a legend no developer could achieve when tasked with remaking it.

So Square...didn’t. Final Fantasy VII Remake has the same characters, setting, and plot beats as the first third of the original game but it’s not the same game, nor is it a remake of it in the traditional sense. It’s something new. And I fucking love that about it.

Everything is reconfigured, including the combat. After years of trying to merge RPG mechanics with more approachable (and marketable) real-time action (see FFXV and the Kingdom Hearts games for examples), Square Enix finally landed on the perfect balance. You fully control Cloud on the battlefield, from swinging your impossibly huge buster sword to dodging attacks. The ATB gauge (no one knows what the acronym stands for -- that information has been lost to time) gradually fills up, letting unleash powerful moves. But best of all, you fight in a party, and you can switch who to control on the fly.

That may not sound revolutionary, let alone for a Final Fantasy, but each character has a completely unique feel and suite of moves. At times, it feels like playing a Devil May Cry game where you can switch between Dante, Vergil, and Nero on the fly (that’s a free idea, Capcom. Hire me, you cowards). You can soften up an enemy with Cloud’s buster to increase their stagger meter, switch to Barret for a quick gatling barrage, and finally switch to Tifa to crush them with her Omnistrike. You can accomplish this in real-time or slow down the action to plan this out. It’s a great mix of tactics and action that prevents the game from feeling like a mindless hack n’ slash.

What really, really works here is the character work. Each lead walks in tropes first, but the longer you spend with the members of your party, the more their motivations and fears are laid out. You end up having touching interactions with just about the whole main cast. There’s a small segment, after Cloud saves Aerith from invading Shinra guards, that the two make an escape via rooftop.They make light conversation -- small talk really -- but it’s exchanges like this that feel genuine, perfectly framing their characters (stoic versus heartfelt), and grounding an otherwise larger-than-life adventure.

Many bemoaned the fact that FFVIIR only revisits a small portion of the original game, but I think it was a brilliant choice -- to massively expand on areas we only got to see a little of in the original. I honestly didn’t want to leave Midgar. It’s a world rife with conflict and corporate oppression, sure, but Midgar is beautifully realized, from the slums below the plates, populated with normal people trying to make the best of life, to the crime controlled Wall Market, adorned with gaudy lights and echoing honky tonk tunes. It very well may be years before FFVII’s remake saga comes to a close, but if each entry is paved with as much love and consideration and, yes, storytelling subversion as this introductory chapter… It’ll be worth the wait.

#gaming

[beneaththetangles]

Shoujo and the Bride of Christ (I)

I was fourteen years old, Shinji Ikari´s age, when A Bridge to Terabithia made its movie debut. Like his fated stay in Misato’s house, only in time have I come to realize the influence it has had on me. Leslie Burke, the imaginative and courageous adventurer played by AnnaSophia Robb, did not only unveil a new world (or many) for Josh Hutcherson´s character, but for me, too. Who would have known? The wonders they discovered, the things they built together, their common battle against evil and injustice, their shared experiences, and the way they got to know each other and count on each other made a deep impression on me. And I thought she was interesting, pretty, even beautiful. I´m sure many of you have a story like that. A classmate, a friend, a character, a book.

With my Hachiman antics and my teenage fears, I had been too defensive and self-conscious up to that point to think seriously about romance (even if, as with him, I felt its attraction). But it was from there, if ‘´m not wrong, that the thought of a man-woman alliance—deep, trustworthy,opened to God and to the adventure of life—began to seem like an attractive possibility. An ethic to fit that ideal was one of sincerity, friendship, selflessness, chivalry, self-sacrifice, prayer, loyalty, courage and honoring promises (that of the Code of Kushieda, romantic version). Much has happened since, but the essentials remain unchanged. I wouldn’t forget, or settle for less. Ever since, I have loved stories of hard-earned romance, of mutual discovery, of the fight for the good of the other and complementary communion, and even new life.

Anime, with its gift for depicting deeply personal worlds with colorful symbols, has some great stories of this kind. You have Toradora, Haruhi, OreGairu, Sakamichi no Apollon, Your Lie in April, Clannad, Ore Monogatari, EVA itself, or movies like Ghibli´s Whisper of the Heart. Many are told from the point of view of the guy, but some of the best are not: This is how I discovered shōjo or shoujo. Its best stories brought me a different, yet recognizable world, because discovering human love is, after all, a very human experience. It is also a powerful mystery, which according to the Bible, was expressly established by God himself. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” To which St. Paul comments: “This mystery is profound, but I am speaking about Christ and the Church.”

Wait, what?

Last year, during the Spanish quarantine, I had the idea of explaining the Eucharist and its role in my life using examples from shōnen anime. By symmetry, I was wondering if there was some other aspect I could explain with shoujo anime. It turns out that there is. After all, before discovering Terabithia, I had discovered Christ and the Church (according to the Catholic conception), and, as crazy as it sounds, I thought St. Paul’s comment, with its echo at the end of the Book of Revelation, did fit. I read Dante’s The Divine Comedy (this year is his seventh centenary) at 16, and that connection only grew. It still does. Ready for the ride?

Sawako Kuronuma´s Human-shaped Gate

“But… you know that’s just biology, right? Chemical fireworks, so that the species can perpetuate.” I take issue with the word “just” here. God is the author of nature, which is thus full of depth, beauty, and meaning and providentially disposed towards our growth as creatures. There is chemistry, and there is more. While it is important to take everything into account and be careful when discerning our course of action, the faith in Christ is an incarnated faith. Our bodies, our natures, our stories are full of meaning, and we may come to discover it (and not just invent it), little by little. There is a deep wisdom in the created world, at every level, from the atoms to the stars.

In the Book of Genesis we are told that, when God created man and woman, Adam named the animals and witnessed a Creation in harmony. But not until meeting Eve did he discover a creature made of something deeply and intimately his, something he had been lacking without knowing it. She was just like him, and at the same time she was so different. For her, with her, he would go beyond what he knew, and they would be as one from there on. And their complementarity was to be the source of something new, of something great. Even more amazingly, she felt the same way. That was (and is) God’s design, which reflects His own powerful, generous love, “the fiercest blaze of all.” Something like that could only have been God´s idea, really.

Kimi ni Todoke (From Me to You) tells a story that, despite its contemporary setting, feels very Edenic. We have commented on it here a couple of times. I’m not even the first to point the Biblical analogy. Sawako (which means “lively child”) Kuronuma, nicknamed “Sadako” because of her resemblance of the phantom girl of The Ring, is isolated. She has a gentle, bright interior world she cannot share. Her lack of social skills and her terrifying aura get in her way, no matter how hard she tries to get along. She is misinterpreted time and time again. But a certain guy named Kazehaya, cheerful, popular, and sporting, is not fooled by appearances. He calls her by her true name. He supports her, little by little. He guides her. And, starting from there, her world begins to transform.

The seasons change, their bond is tested, nature surrounds them and echoes what is in their hearts, and she gradually discovers many things she couldn’t even conceive of before. Friendships, joys, sorrows, a place in the world, and Kazehaya, too. There is a chance, now, that her feelings may come across. And Kazehaya is the first step, the destiny, and the gate.

So, what is the Church of Christ? First and foremost, it is a loving bond with Jesus Christ, a real, human and divine person with a physical body, and to His Father, of Whom He speaks which such passion, and the Holy Spirit. Someone who lives, who longs for us to know Him, to open new worlds to us, without whom we will always be incomplete. He is the light, we are vitrals: He will make us shine with our true shape, our true, unique colors. Sawako always shone, but never so much.

Like her, like the characters of the Bible and the Gospel, each of us is called, one at a time, visibly or invisibly, by his or her real name, not the one of the world of appearances, and it is the name of a child of God, and full of life. When we follow Christ, He makes us courageous. He makes us grow. He fights to get us to go forward. He makes us able to truly love, to bond with others. Jesus of Nazareth is the Word of God, the key, the truer, deeper, loving meaning of all that has been created, of every human being. And each one of us, personally but also in communion with others, is his Church, when chosen by Him, when united to Him, when walking to finally reach Him and letting Him finally reach each of us, through all History and Creation. And in being with Him, there is life, everlasting life.

But, even if it is still in us, we do not live in Eden. There was a fall. The world changed. And so…

Futaba Yoshioka and Her Seven Demons

In a moment of cowardice, Futaba loudly denied her newly found love for her classmate Kou Mabuchi. Unexpectedly, he heard her. So it begins.

Ao Haru Ride (Blue Spring Ride) is similar to Kimi to Todoke in some aspects (and has an episode-by-episode analysis by Twwk here), but there is a key difference. Futaba’s misfortune was not brought about by her appearance, but due to her being inauthentic and cowardly out of fear of being alone, or rejected. Kou Mabuchi, returned after a few years of unexplained absence, knows Futaba from the old days. Superficial friendships, cowardly stances, artificial laughs, boyish behaviors planned so she won’t stand out, a deep solitude, a kind of slow self-destruction—he sees through it all. He knows that she has lost herself, that she is longing for something different. So he attacks with words, with acts that point beyond. It hurts, a lot. But something about him says that he is doing it in the name of something truer, that he could guide her there, and that he is no stranger to pain and sorrow…

…which, in my view, doesn’t excuse the disconcerting, nosy, and sometimes cruel behavior Kou often displays towards her (I don´t like this one as much as Kimi ni Todoke). But, to the allegory. After the book of Genesis there is the book of Exodus, the flight. Like Futaba, we are all lying, distorted, trapped from the inside, often unknowingly. As Sarah in the Book of Tobit, as Israel in Egypt or Babylon, as Mary Magdalene in the Gospel, we are oppressed by evils, personal, social or even the supernatural, that often control or manipulate us, that enslave us. The natural development of the deeply ingrained evil is suffering and self-destruction when its inner truth arises. And Christ is the one who knows us and will fight to free us, to open a path, and the Man of Sorrows, who not only bears unbearable suffering but knows our personal suffering, the suffering of each one of us.

In a moment of cowardice, Peter loudly denied knowing Christ, who he had confessed to be the Son of God, who had chosen Him, whom he loved. And like Kou with Futaba, He heard Peter, too. But Peter repented, and Christ had a path for him, a path with others. Futaba, motivated by Kou’s words and deeds, abandons the world of lies and starting anew with a group of misfits, people who cannot advance, who perceive themselves or are perceived by others as failures or phonies. It becomes quite literal when they get lost in the forest during a competition. The Church is, likewise, a scattered group who flee from Christ´s cross, as He had prophesied, but is then brought together again. Founded upon Christ´s love, following His words of eternal life, we are still sinners, ambitious, clumsy, cowards. The old Israel thought that, by perfectly observing the Law, it could fulfill the alliance and bring God´s favor upon itself, but kept betraying Him, even if they sometimes managed to hide it behind a facade.

But Christ made clear that He came not for the healthy, but for the sick, the evil, the cowards, those traitors. Peter, the Apostles, and the disciples were chosen not because they had somehow merited it, but because they trusted Him and followed Him, even if stumbling along the way. He would made them able to triumph. Love is radical, and as we are transformed by it, love increasingly needs us to fight whatever denies it within us. It is by no means an easy battle, and Ao Haru Ride knows that. Christ is prophesied champion against the Serpent of Eden, Satan, the Adversary, the fallen angel who tempts us, and against the evil whose maximum he represents. He begins His mission by confronting him in the desert, and fights evil, forgiving sins and expelling demons, one after another, and finally prevailing over them by perfect obedience and love, onn the Cross and in the resurrection.

And His fight goes on. He wants us to have part in His death and His resurrection, from baptism to a death in Christ and beyond. He is the Savior, and the Church is his Noah’s Ark, His people of Israel escaping Egypt through the Red Sea, His plan of salvation for everyone who accepts His personal call and jumps inside to escape self-destruction and death together. He is the lover who needs the loved one to trust Him, and to fight, and will be there to help. Against the entire world, against death, against everything. The plan of salvation won’t work without that kind of love.

When they join the group, Kou lets Futaba do most of the teamwork. He… has his reasons. During His mission, Christ gave Peter and the rest of his disciples the power to expel demons, to forgive sins, to baptize, to teach, and sent them. Not because He, the Almighty, needed them, but to help them, to help human beings through the cooperation of human beings who became closer to God this way. He still does that now. He also gave them the treasures of His love, which they keep. His Sacraments, His miracles, His Gospel and His teachings, all signs and acts of His love, are preserved in the Church, a house build in rock against which the gates of Hell shall never prevail. He will be with us every day, until the end of the world, if there is the slightest bit of hope that we may accept His hand, acting, saving. Heaven and Earth will pass away, but His words will never pass away.

Christ has pleaded in prayer for Simon Peter, that messy, loud self-confessed sinner, that his faith should not fail, so when he has repented, he will strengthen his brothers, feed Christ’s sheep. Peter, who reacted with undue violence (Futaba may need to confront old friends in the name of justice, but it is her own cowardice what she is mainly fighting against) and then denied Christ, will be able to disavow the Sanhedrin and Caiphas, preside over the martyr Church, and die on a cross for Christ and others, to go where he doesn’t want to go right now, and teach others to do the same. All because Christ loves him, and he loves Christ, and that love is fighting and growing. And the messy, loud, cowardly Futaba will also be able to face her demons, and face challenges, darkness and suffering beyond everything she had imagined, to tell the truth, to save others.

Do not be fooled by my criticisms: Futaba is a wonderful, relatable, inspiring character. She keeps the fight. Kou is very lucky. In this fallen world, every relationship, every bond, every friendship, every marriage, demands us to keep the fight. Human love, being made by God, reflects a ray of His own light, a ray that makes us hope and moves us to action. Likewise, the Church of Christ fights on this Earth, fulfilling the command of Christ to Peter and the Apostles, and those who came after them, teaching the Gospel and giving the Eucharist, bringing Christ´s love to our hearts. We, the group of misfits and sinners, keep assisting each other on the way, doing better or doing worse, knowing that He also works outside her visible frontiers, fighting to reach all human hearts. This is the Militant Church, which Christ will never abandon, in perpetual combat against her own evil, my own evil, and against the powers that enslave us, that enslave me, armed with the most powerful force there is—Christ´s love, Christ´s truth, Christ´s own hope. That is her source, her life and her destiny. And so she fights. And so I fight.

But what’s on the other side of the forest? What has it to do with the Divine Comedy? What is Tohru Honda doing at the top? Those are all questions for the next time. So, for now, take care, and Happy Easter!

=====

Kimi ni Todoke and Ao Haru Ride can be streamed in Crunchyroll.

#Anime #Christianity #Kimi ni Todoke #Ao Haru Ride #Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You #Blue Spring Ride #Shoujo #Articles #Author: Gaheret

[littlemisssquiggles]

RWBY Musing #84: Geography Lesson. What if…Salem will be the Geographer Character in Oscar’s Little Prince story?

Someone asked “What if the Fox is Ozpin?”

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Squiggles Answers:

I was torn between making this response post into a musing or a Pinehead headcanon. In the end, I went with both.

To answer the anon-ninja who sent me this question, well from my perspective, Oz feels more like Oscar’s Pilot.

@miki-13​ first introduced me to the concept and this eventually led to me falling in love with the prospect of both Oscar and Oz sharing the pilot role in their respective stories.

In the Little Prince story, the Pilot also doubles as the Narrator and is the character through which we learn of the Prince’s travels based on his time with the Prince lost out in the deserts. Much like Ozpin is to Oscar currently, the Pilot holds significance to the Prince since he was the last companion that the Prince meets in his journey far from home. He is the last person to befriend the Prince before he was “killed” by the snake. I use that term loosely since the reader was left unclear of the Prince’s fate.

I mean, if the showrunners wanted, I guess I can see Oz playing a double role in Oscar’s Little Prince story---both as his Pilot and his Fox. The Fox Character is the last companion that the Prince meets before finding the Pilot. The Fox holds meaning since it is through his encounter with this character that the Prince learns the meaning of his rose to him. The Fox aids the Prince in validating his love for his rose and what’s also interesting to note is that the Prince meets the Fox following a moment of doubt and hopelessness for the Prince.

From reading some spark notes on the Little Prince, I’ve come to see that of all the characters the Prince meets in his travels, the following hold the most importance in his development:

The Geographer (or the Scholar/Author), the Rose Garden, the Fox, the Pilot and lastly the Snake. I’ve talked about the meaning behind the Fox and the Pilot in the Prince’s story before but not so much the Geographer.

At the start of his travels, the Prince first visited six asteroids (325 to 330) one by one. The Geographer Character is who the Prince meets on the very last asteroid before arriving on Earth. It is this character who points out the ephemerality of the Prince’s Rose to him. When the Prince told the Geographer of his Rose, the Geographer perceived the rose as unimportant given the flower’s short life span. 

Since the Prince’s love for his rose hinged on her reliance on him to care of her, the Geographer highlighting the pressures of time and the inevitability of death caused the Prince to value his rose more than he did before. 

Because since the Rose will ultimately die one day, it gave the prince a bigger drive to love her while he still could. So you can say that the Geographer sparked the Prince’s dedication to his rose through indicating her fragile morality which made her more significant in his eyes.

But while his time with the Geographer made the Prince value in his Rose, this feeling would ultimately be snuffed out by the time the Prince arrived on Earth and found the Rose Garden. 

When the Prince discovered the Rose Garden, it made him lose the importance he once harboured for his rose since finding himself standing amongst many roses who all looked exactly like his rose made the Prince’s Rose feel common to him---less special---especially since the Prince’s rose told him that she was unique. This thought deeply hurt the Prince and it upset him to the point of tears.

It was after being in the Garden where the Prince then met the Fox. It is the Fox that renews the importance of the Rose to the Prince through its teachings of taming the heart and being responsible for what you tamed. Moreover the Fox’s lesson about love and responsibility helps reaffirms the love and devotion the Prince held for his Rose so he would never forget the meaning of his rose ever again like how he did in the Garden.

So that by the time the Prince does return to the Garden, he no longer saw his rose as like the others. To him, she was unique. His one true rose.

In the case of Oscar and his Little Prince story, it’d be interesting to see who will be the Geographer for his story. Most of all, I wonder how the Rose Garden will be incorporated into Oscar’s travels. Ironically enough Rosegarden is the name of Oscar’s pairing with Ruby but simultaneously it was also the location in the Little Prince story that caused the Prince to reconsider his feelings about his rose.

Do you know what would be interesting?  What if…the Rose Garden will be a location somewhere in Solitas that Oscar would have to pass through on his way back to Mantle? Moreover, what if…the character to represent Oscar’s Geographer will be Salem?

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Here in the Garden

Hear me out on this one. 

What if…at some point in his journey, Oscar and Oz end temporarily taking shelter in a small area in Solitas inspired by the Rose Garden. For the sake of my theory, I’m going to refer to this place as the Rosengarten---another farming settlement much like Brunswick Farms back in V6. 

Let’s say…the Rosengarten is owned by family who all share the surname of “Rose”. So basically, Oscar finds himself staying with other Roses who make him think of his Rose (Ruby).

Perhaps…on the Rosengarten Settlement, Oscar even meets one Rose relative who is almost the spitting image of Ruby.  Or rather, her very appearance and presence makes Oscar think a lot about Ruby during his stay with the Roses; much to Ozpin’s keen observation as the girl sparks conflicting feelings within Oscar that Oz takes notice of. Though Oz attempts to question Oscar on the meaning of those feelings, he is barely able to get a clear answer from the young little prince as Oscar is just as confused by his own emotions as Oz.

Since it was indicated back in V6 that Salem is fully aware of Oz being reincarnated, what if…she sends an entire swarm of Seer Grimm to track down Oscar and Ozpin.

Ultimately the Seers find the Man with Two Souls on Rosengarten. Since V7CH11 highlighted Salem being able to project a replica of herself from her Seers, let’s say…Salem uses on of her Seers to speak to Oscar and Oz.

In the Little Prince story, the Prince’s love for his rose corresponded with how much he cared for her back on his home planet. In a similar fashion, one can almost imply that Oscar’s love for Ruby is hinged on his profound belief in her. 

Time and time again, the series has highlighted how much Ruby inspires Oscar because very often the two are on the same page of wanting to achieve the same goal---stopping Salem and protecting humanity. Ruby’s devotion to doing what she can to help save the world is what inspired Oscar to do the same; both of his own fruition and in support of Ruby.

It is for this reason why I think Salem would be perfect as Oscar’s Geographer. Much like the character from the book who considered the Prince’s Rose to be unimportant given the flower’s ephemerality, I can picture Salem mocking Oscar the same way---reminding both Oscar and Oz that their little “spark of hope” that they’ve placed so much faith in is just as fragile and breakable as any other human that Salem has slain.

I can even picture Salem using Summer Rose---Ruby’s own mother as an example of just how fickle the Silver Eyed Warriors are in spite of their godly power. 

As mentioned by Watts way back in V4, Salem and her forces have dealt with the Silver Eyes before and could partially be held responsible for why so many of them remain to be nothing but legends. 

This point was further proved by Maria Calavera who unfortunately managed to survive death at the expense of her silver eyes when Salem’s forces were sent to hunt her down in her time.

Much like what she did with Ruby in V7CH11, I can picture Salem using the image of both Summer Rose and Ruby Rose to emotionally break both Oscar and Oz.

I can see Salem boasting about Summer’s death---going into full depth on how she succeeded in killing the former Silver Eyed huntress and pupil of Oz in excruciating detail---even going as far as to talk about her screams and how much she cried out for her loved ones during her final moments.

I can picture this being painfully uncomfortable for both Oscar and Oz. 

I can even picture Oscar being floored with many emotions, both his own as well as Oz. Since Summer was Oz's student, I can only imagine that Salem describing how she had succeeded in killing her would be very tough for Oz to take especially since Qrow remarked in V7CH4 that not even Oz knew what really happened to Summer after she left for her final mission.

Then again; Salem just telling Oscar and Oz how she killed Summer Rose doesn’t sound as impactful as I would expect from a potential moment like that.

Instead I like the idea of one of the Seers ensnaring Oscar in its tentacles, forcing him to see the past---see Salem's memories of killing Summer Rose in all its horrific bloody detail. All the while Oscar is just frozen in place while the Seer proceeds to choke the life out of him and snap his neck.

If it wasn't for Ozpin intervening--- taking control from Oscar long enough to jam the end of the Long Memory straight through the Seer, Oscar would be dead. But naturally, just killing the Seer doesn't stop Salem. All it does is make her mock the two souls more, her laughter cryptically echoing from the remains of the dead Seer as her essence faded away. 

To further mess with Oscar, let's say...the young prince returns to Rosengarten to check in on the Rose Family following the attack only to discover a horrifying sight. 

Let’s say…all the while Oscar was engaged with Salem, the remaining Seers had managed to kill the whole settlement before simultaneously combusting after their Alpha had been destroyed by Oz.

All that was left was a bloody heap of corpses waiting in the grass for Oscar to find. 

A garden of dead roses.

No one had survived. Not even the Rose who reminded Oscar of his Rose. It was her body that Oscar found first. And as the young prince gazed upon the deceased girl---her lifeless grey eyes staring into his in a permanent portrait of pain, Oscar suddenly finds his mind bombarded with the haunting image of a bloody Ruby Rose, lying dead in his arms because Salem had killed her. 

This was the fate Ruby would succumb to should she dare to challenge Salem. This was how her story would end and this was the message Salem wished to imprint in Oscar’s head.

It’s exactly like her monologue in the V3 Finale read:

“...A smaller, more honest soul, It's true that a simple spark can ignite hope. Breathe fire into the hearts of the weary. The ability to derive strength from hope is undoubtedly mankind's greatest attribute. Which is why...I will focus all of my power to snuff it out.

 How does it feel? Knowing that all of your time and effort has been for nothing. That your guardians have failed you. That everything you've built will be torn down before your very eyes.

Your faith in mankind was not misplaced. When banded together, unified by a common enemy, they are a noticeable threat. But divide them, place doubt into their minds, and any semblance of power they once had will wash away. Of course, they won't realize it at first. Like you, they'll cling to their fleeting hope. Their aspirations. But this is merely the first move. 

So you send your guardians...your huntsmen and huntresses,  And when they fail and you turn to your smaller soul,  Know that you send her to the same, pitiful demise.

This is the beginning of the end Ozpin, And I can't wait to watch you burn....'

It is in the Rose Garden where the little Prince lost the value he once had for his Rose. And I can definitely picture something similar happening for Oscar where Salem “killing the Rose Garden” and using their deaths as well as Summer’s to indicate her intentions for Ruby and what lies for her in the end should she dare to oppose Salem like her mother once did.

It is made clear from his brief encounter with Salem in the garden that death is the only thing that awaits Ruby at the end of her battle with Salem. Since Oscar’s growing feelings for Ruby were born from his belief in her, I can see Oscar becoming more frightened for Ruby’s life and the thought of her dying just like her mother, the Roses and any other Silver Eye she had slain in the past.

It was the Geographer Character that caused the Prince to value his rose when he realized how short his time with her will be but it was the Rose Garden that killed that feeling when the Prince realized that his Rose was no different than any other Rose in the garden.

Oscar has always believed in Ruby. But if Salem shows him that his Rose is no different than any other Rose or Silver Eyed Warrior who died trying to stop her, then how was Oscar supposed to believe in her anymore? 

Much like his fairy tale counterpart, I can imagine Oscar losing hoping---losing faith in Ruby’s unquantifiable spark and indomitable spirit because of her fragile mortality that Salem made sure to exploit before his eyes---striking him where it really would hurt. The heart. After all; the hearts of man are easily swayed.

However…it is only with the heart that one can see rightly since what is essential is invisible to the eye.

A quote that was made by the Fox.  It is here where I can picture Oz possibly coming in as Oscar’s Fox.

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A Mother’s Wish

The more I think about it, the more I’m starting to lean towards the idea considering that at the moment Oz is Oscar’s only companion and making him the person through with Oscar learns the Fox’s lesson just adds an extra layer of importance to building his and Oz’s relationship.

One thing I'm expecting for V8 is the season hopefully expanding on Oz and Oscar's bond; providing more opportunities to show Oz as a voice of guidance to Oscar. That being said, I also have a hunch that V8 might just be the final season that Oscar; and essentially we as the audience, spend with Ozpin.

I get the feeling that V8 will show a greater push for Oscar and Oz growing closer together; finally growing to understand each other and coexist in harmony as they should. 

So that by the time Oz is ready to “change” or “return to the heavens”, it will be Oscar left to be the one to carry on Oz’s story and legacy as part of his own.

At the end of V8, I believe Oscar will become the Pilot of Oz’s story which will be synonymous with him taking up the mantle of the Wizard of Light as his successor. 

While I’m not sure if we’ll get to see Oz actually reconcile with the team, I do like the idea of him and Oscar at least making peace. 

I can even see Oscar being the one to tell the group of his time spent with Oz just as how the Pilot was the one who told the reader of the Little Prince’s story and journey far from home. 

Oz might disappear but his memories of the past and his time spent with Oscar, especially on their journey together will become a part of Oscar and will remain with him for as long as he lived. 

With Oscar on his own, V8 will hopefully focus on him and Oz learning to coexist. And with Oz becoming a guide to Oscar, this is where him being his Fox plays off nicely. If Salem is to be Oscar’s Geographer as I interpreted then it would make sense that Oz is Oscar’s Fox.

The lesson that the Prince learnt from his time with the Fox helped reaffirm what he gained from his time with the Geographer. It was the Fox that made the Prince see the importance of his rose to him which helped him to confirm the love and dedication he felt for her.

This is a lesson that I can definitely picture Oz passing down to Oscar and helping him with. As we know, Oz had made more mistakes than any man, woman or child on Remnant and he’s been forced to learn from those many past experiences. 

Oz is also the only direct person outside of Qrow who personally knew Summer Rose.

Consider this theory for a second. What if...in the past, Summer Rose had proposed that she and Oz fight Salem together. This was after Raven had already left and Team STQR had disbanded. 

With her original team gone and the birth of her daughter Ruby, imagine if...Summer got a bigger motivation to try and stop Salem from Ruby. Desiring to not have her daughters growing up in a world where a great evil like Salem still existed especially when she possibly had a power than can stop her.

What if…Summer proposed one last stand against Salem and the first person she attempted to get to stand with her is Ozpin. However Oz refused to confront Salem again even with Summer, remembering what he had learned from Jinn that he was powerless to stop Salem.

OR...

What if... Oz is the one Summer told that she was going to fight Salem on her own and she made him promise to keep her secret for it. 

Imagine if...at some point during their journey together, Ozpin shows Oscar his memories of Summer Rose? 

Despite disclosing to Ruby that Oz didn't know what became of Summer after she left, Qrow also hinted that Oz had more secrets that probably tied into Summer. 

Going back to my example theory about the Rosengarten...let’s say Oscar loses hope in being able to stop Salem, being traumatized by the thoughts of losing Ruby to Salem or something along those lines. 

This causes Oz to come forward and try to help renew Oscar’s hope by showing the young prince his own memories of a time he personally spent with someone close to Ruby---her mother.

What Oz reveals to Oscar isn’t just any memory. It was a secret. A secret that contained a lie and wish from a mother who knew fully well that she was never going to return.

A Summer Rose secret that Oz never told a soul because its secrecy was a solemn promise he made to Summer.

What if...Summer met with Oz one last time before her mission. She didn't tell Oz what she had planned to do but somehow in his heart of hearts, Oz knew what Summer was going to do. He even tried to stop her. Warned her not to go through with it. 

But Summer was stubborn. Her mind was already made up. She made a choice and she was going to go through with that choice whether Oz liked it or not. 

I can even picture Summer extending a hand to Oz, asking him to fight with her. Perhaps this way, the two working together might stand a chance against Salem somehow. 

But when Oz refused to fight Salem again even with Summer, instead of becoming furious with him, Summer understood. 

Instead Summer made Oz promise that he would never tell a soul of what she was about to do. She told him to lie to keep her secret---a feat she was fully aware he could do.

What if...Oz agreeing to have Ruby attend Beacon Academy wasn’t a mere coincidence. Imagine if...Summer had also made Oz promise to watch over Ruby (especially since she shared her mother’s eyes) and Oz has been secretly observing Ruby’s development as she grew up. 

Or perhaps…Summer made Oz promise to tell Ruby the truth of her sacrifice and why she chose to make that sacrifice when the right moment comes.

I know these are only ideas but it’d be interesting if there was some truth to them since they can shed some light on Oz’s relationship with Summer. 

And Oz’s past with Summer could ultimately lend to Oscar’s future with Ruby. 

Let’s say…seeing the living memory of Summer Rose and how much she reminded him of Ruby is what helps Oscar rekindle his hope. More than that, learning of Summer’s sacrifice sparks Oscar’s desire to protect Ruby and do what he can to help her stop Salem. Or something along those lines.

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Love and Responsibility

In the Little Prince, the Prince cared for his rose. His love for her was based on the time he dedicated to catering to her needs and looking out for her. The prince became responsible for his rose since she had tamed his heart from the time they shared together just as he had tamed her heart.

According to the Fox’s lesson to the Prince, you are responsible for what you tame since love blooms from the time spent building that connection.

I've always viewed Oscar as a pillar of support for Ruby and vice-versa. Ruby has always been someone who looked out for Oscar's well-being. She protected him. Inspired him. Made him feel secure and gave him the strength to keeping pushing through. 

At the end of his journey, I can picture Oscar taking up a bigger supportive role to Ruby. 

I feel like he's going to be more protective of her but not in a smothering kind of way. What I love about Oscar’s characterization is his understanding of Ruby as a person. While he’s acknowledged her strength and he supports her positive influence over others, Oscar has also taken note of Ruby’s more vulnerable side which she rarely shows since often at times, Ruby appears to act rather nonchalant about her own qualms and insecurities.

The plot has shown Oscar coming to Ruby's aid; reciprocating the same protective nature toward her whenever he finds in a vulnerable position. Like I said, Oscar knows that Ruby is strong but he also understands her fragility.  

Salem once coldly remarked that she will do everything in her power to snuff out Ruby’s spark of hope which is all the more reason for me to believe that Oscar will do everything in his power to keep Ruby’s spark alive and burning bright.

By the time his journey with Oz ends, Oscar will become a different person than he was when we first met him. Not only is he shaping up to become much wiser, braver and stronger but I can additionally see him becoming more responsible for safeguarding Ruby’s life.

If Ruby is indeed destined to play an important role in Salem's eventual defeat, then I can definitely see Oscar being one of the people to stand by her side; using his might and magic to protect her out of his love and devotion to her.

Whatever is that Ruby will need to do to stop Salem, you can bet your bottom dollar that Oscar will be right there by her side; willing to give everything he has to see to it that she succeeds.

 If Ruby is Oscar’s one true rose then Oscar is Ruby’s little prince who is responsible for her. Caring for her always with his love.

This makes me curious if Oscar’s signature move will be his magical barrier that he can bubble around himself and others as a shield of protection. Definitely cannot wait to see the day he uses it to protect Ruby. You know he's gonna do it eventually. 

The little prince protects his rose. Always. For as long as they both shall live.

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So in conclusion…

Okay, I think I've talked enough on this subject. Somewhere during this long response post, I pray that I actually answered your question anon-chan XD Enjoy! 

 More Squiggles’ RWBY Content

~LittleMissSquiggles (2020)

#squiggles answers: rwby #oscar pine #ruby rose #professor ozpin #oscar and ruby #rwby rosegarden #oscar and ozpin #summer rose #ozpin and summer #rwby theories #rwby volume 8 theories #rwby volume 7 spoilers #rwby salem #rwby musings #pinehead headcanons #squiggles pinehead headcanons

[tawakkull]

Love and Mercy in Islam: Love of God.Part3

Never should one let others into these groans of the remotest places, which indeed are the launching pads to reach God, and thereby help those ignorant ones make fun of them. If this spectacular love is for the Omniscient One, then it should be kept in the most private sphere, not letting it fly away from its nest.

Telling of their trivial love, these conventional lovers wander here and there, proclaiming their love to all, acting like mad men, making their love obvious to all. Lovers of God, on the other hand, are sincere and quiet.

Leaning their heads on God’s threshold, they express themselves merely to Him. From time to time they faint, but they never reveal their secrets. They are at His service with their hands and feet, their eyes and ears, their tongues and lips and they wander in the places of His Sublime Attributes. Immersed in His Light of Being they melt and disappear as a mortal in His love. As they feel and sense God, they burn and exclaim, “More!” Much do they feel at the peaks of their hearts and still they cry, “More!” They are never satisfied with love though they love and are loved. “More!” they keep repeating. And as they continue asking for more, the Glorious Beloved uncovers veils for them, presenting to their wisdom things never seen before, and also whispering to their spirits many a secret. After a certain point what they feel, what they love, what they think of becomes Him. In everything they see they find graceful manifestations of His Beauty. Leaving their strength entirely, at a certain time they connect their will power to His, melt in His demands, and evaluate this high rank with how much they love and are loved, and again with how much they know and are known. With obedience to Him and faithfulness, they express their love. They lock the door of their hearts with bolt after bolt in such a secure manner that no stranger can ever enter that pure house. With all their beings they are witnesses of God, and their praise and appreciation of God is far beyond their comprehension.

Their belief, on the other hand, in God’s response to such loyalty is adamant. Their place in God’s Presence is in direct proportion with His in their hearts, which is why they endeavor to stand upright before Him.

Never do they act like a creditor when they love Him deeply; on the contrary, they are as embarrassed as a debtor. As Rabi'a al-‘Adawiya put it,

“I swear on Your Holy Being that I have not worshiped You demanding Your Paradise. Rather, I loved You and connected my slavery to my love."

As such, they walk with gushing love toward His Realm, keeping His blessings and kindness in mind. With their hearts, they constantly endeavor to stay close to Him, and with their reason and intellect, they observe phenomena in the mirrors of the Divine Names. They hear voices of love in everything, are mesmerized by the fragrance of each and every flower, and consider every scene that is beautiful as a reflection of His Beauty. For Him, all they hear, feel, or think of is nothing other than love, as a result of which they watch the whole existence as an exhibition of love and, again, listen to it as a harmony of love.

Once love has put up its sumptuous tents in the valleys of the heart, all opposite events seem to be the same, such as peaceunrest, blessing-calamity, hotsweet, comfort-discomfort, griefpleasure, all giving the same sound and looking the same way.

Indeed, for loving hearts, suffering is no different than pleasure. To them, suffering is the very cure, so they drink pain and agony as they drink from the rivers of Heaven. No matter how merciless the time and events get, they stay still with a profound feeling of loyalty. With their eyes fixed on the door to be opened, they lie in wait to welcome some manifestations and kindness in different dimensions. They crown His love by respecting and also obeying Him. Their hearts beat with submission and they shake due to the fear of disobeying the Beloved. So as not to fall, ironically, they take shelter again in the Unique Source of reliance and aid. This kind of quest for an agreement with and consent of God makes them in time very dearly sought by everybody both on Earth and in the heavens. The only thing in their consideration is nothing but God. For them, expecting something in return is a kind of deception, yet they regard it as discourteous not to accept the blessings they have not asked for. They give these blessings high esteem but, cautiously, each of them moans; "I take refuge in You from their temptations.”

An ardent longing is the highest rank for a lover, and to get lost in the lover’s desires and wishes is the most unreachable attainment. Love is founded upon elementary principles, such as repentance, alertness, and patience, whereas once introduced, selfpossession, familiarity, love, longing, and other principles are required in order to merit this position. The first lesson on the path of love is purification, to be deprived of personal desires, to relate all your thoughts and communication to Him, to be busy with things that hint of Him, to wait expectantly in case He manifests, and also to stay determinedly where you are for a lifetime in case He turns to you one day. In this path, love is to be madly in love; ardor is the gushing passion, enthusiasm and desire; when ardor becomes the true nature of humans then this is yearning; consent is meeting every act of the Lover with pleasure; selfpossession is being cautious against becoming intoxicated with the blessings of hearing or feeling His Presence, or being under His direct guidance.

The more people develop in themselves one of the above features, the more changes there are that can be witnessed in their behavior. Sometimes they seek quiet bays where they can confide in Him. Sometimes under the influence of a variety of considerations, they talk to Him and state their grievance concerning separation. They are filled with joy expecting union and relax with tears of bliss. At times, they do not see what is going on around them, for they experience unity in multiplicity, and sometimes they get lost in the awe of peace and cannot even hear their own voices.

Love grows and develops in the bosom of wisdom. Wisdom is nourished by knowledge of the divine. Those who are not wise cannot love at all. And those whose perception is weak cannot reach wisdom, either. Occasionally, God himself implants love in hearts and activates the inner mechanism, an extra blessing which most people long for. Nevertheless, relying on some marvelous wonders and waiting impotently is one thing; an active waiting in endless contractions is totally different. The faithful servants at the Gate of the All-Just One put their expectations on action, take up a dynamic stance and, therefore, they generate with that seemingly still position enough energy to suffice the entire universe, materializing awesome activities.

These people are loyal lovers incarnating certain characteristics. They meet every act of the Beloved with pleasure and display faithfulness all the time, as if repeating Nesimi;[ A famous Sufi poet from Baghdad, Nesimi is considered to be one of the first masters of divan literature. He has two divans (book of poems) in Turkish and Persian. ]

A desperate lover, I won’t, O the Beloved, abandon You,

I won’t do so even if You rend my heart with a dagger.

Despite the fact that they always seriously long for His Company, never ever do they whine. They remove all expectations that are not of Him from their minds, and think only of His Presence. Their conversations become those of the Beloved, and thus, their voices gain an angelic profundity.

For them, love is everything. They can survive without bodies; but without souls, they cannot. They believe that there is no room in their hearts for others, only for the love of the Beloved.

As such, even if they are the poorest and weakest of the world, they hold a status envied by kings as well. They are big in their smallness, mighty in their impotence, wealthy enough in their neediness to command the entire universe. Though they look like a puny candle, they are like an energy source rich enough to light up suns. Even if everyone were to run toward the loyal lovers, it is still clear to where and to Whom the lovers are running. With the wealth of their essential characters they transcend the entire universe. But when they turn toward Him, they become a spark, even less—they become nothing by forgetting all that pertains to their existence.

A life without Him counts little for them. A life without Him is not a life at all. Leading a life without loving is a wasted life, and the delights and pleasures not related to Him are nothing but a placebo. They ceaselessly talk about love and longing and regard those who are not familiar with these as being somehow different.

#allah #god #islam #muslim #quran #revert #convert #convert islam #revert islam #reverthelp #revert help #revert help team #help #islamhelp #converthelp #prayer #salah #muslimah #reminder #pray #dua #hijab #religion #mohammad #new muslim #new revert #new convert #how to convert to islam #convert to islam #welcome to islam

[mxenigmatic]

2020’s Self Care Books for Trying Times

With Covid-19 a global pandemic that is still lingering in the air, and keeping our connections at a social distance, added how here at NYPL our librarians miss the frequent interactions with our patrons, I was contemplating on ways to keep our reading connected, our souls warm, and our health having its self care. Before google, I’d rely on the plethora of information our branches hold on any challenge in life I’d be facing. Now with a myriad of problems we can tackle, and resources we can all use to improve our lives, I wanted to tackle grounding and elevating ourselves to cope with our surroundings, than advice I can provide on financial, relationship, life goals, etc.

In this blog “2020’s Self Care Books 4 Trying Times” I’ve comprised my 20 favorite titles for the year 2020 on wellness, people’s journeys, and how health experts can help guide us to a calm and vibrant place for our wellbeing. From parenting tips, to self acceptance, coping with a mental health disorder, or even self care rituals, the need for healthy habits is a topic we all can relate and rely on to keep us striving through this winter, and being united through our current unstable climate. We should never be ashamed of our experiences, asking for help, and addressing challenges in our lives to be at peace with our pasts, content with our present, and hopeful about our futures.

What is Self-care, according to very well mind, describes a conscious act one takes in order to promote their own physical, mental, and emotional health. There are many forms self-care may take. It could be ensuring you get enough sleep every night or stepping outside for a few minutes for some fresh air.

What is mindfulness? Mindfulness refers to being in the moment. This means feeling what our bodies feel, letting ourselves think without judging our thoughts, and being aware of our environment. It is about paying attention on purpose to both what is happening inside and outside of you.

ADULT

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

Topics: Professional Development, Success, Psych Evaluation

One of the most inspiring and impactful books ever written, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has captivated readers for nearly three decades. It has transformed the lives of presidents and CEOs, educators and parents—millions of people of all ages and occupations. Now, this 30th anniversary edition of the timeless classic commemorates the wisdom of the 7 habits with modern additions from Sean Covey. The 7 habits have become famous and are integrated into everyday thinking by millions and millions of people. Why? Because they work!With Sean Covey's added takeaways on how the habits can be used in our modern age, the wisdom of the 7 habits will be refreshed for a new generation of leaders.

Stay Positive: Encouraging Quotes and Messages to Fuel Your Life With Positive Energy by Jon Gordon

Topics: Self Help, Affirmations, Optimism

Stay Positive is more than a phrase. It's an approach to life that says when you get knocked down, you'll get back up and find a way forward one faithful step and optimistic day at a time. Start your day with a message from the book, or pick it up anytime you need a mental boost. You can start from the beginning, or open the book to any page and find a message that speaks to you. The book is a go-to resource for anyone wanting to inject a healthy dose of positivity into their life

$9 Therapy: Semi-Capitalist Solutions to Your Emotional Problems by Megan Reid and Nick Greene

Topics: Life Skills/Hacks, Self Care Rituals, Budgeting

A collection of the authors' favorite life hacks and mini-upgrades, such as craft cocktails on the cheap or tips for a perfectly planned staycation. Sometimes it takes as little as nine dollars to turn your life around. How to find simple pleasures in a pricey, wellness-obsessed world.

You Were Born For This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance by Chani Nicholas

Topics: Astrology, Self Acceptance

A revolutionary empowerment book that uses astrology as a tool for self-discovery, success, and self-care from the beloved astrologer Chani Nicholas, a media darling with a loyal following of one million monthly readers.

TEEN

Teaching Mindfulness to Empower Adolescents by Matthew Brensilver

Topics: Mindfulness, Educational Guides, Learning Disabilities, Reflections

Effectively sharing mindfulness with teenagers depends on distinct skill sets . . . done well, it is incredibly joyous." Matthew Brensilver, JoAnna Hardy and Oren Jay Sofer provide a powerful guide to help teachers master the essential competencies needed to successfully share mindfulness practices with teens and adolescents. Incorporating anecdotes from actual teaching, they blend the latest scientific research with innovative, original techniques for making the practices accessible and interesting to this age group. This text is an indispensable handbook for mindfulness instruction in its own right, and a robust companion volume for teachers using The Mindful Schools Curriculum for Adolescents

The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color by Virgie Tovar

Topics: Self Esteem, Plus Size Positivity, Hygiene

Every day we see body ideals depicted in movies, magazines, and social media. And, all too often, these outdated standards make us feel like we need to change how we look and who we are. The truth is that many teens feel self-conscious about their bodies and being a teen girl of color is hard in unique ways. So, how can you start feeling good about yourself when you're surrounded by these unrealistic, and problematic images of what bodies are "supposed" to look like? This book is an unapologetic guide to help you embrace radical body positivity. You'll identify and challenge mainstream beliefs about beauty and bodies; celebrate what makes you unique and powerful; and build real, lasting body empowerment. You'll also learn how to spot diet culture and smash your noisy inner critic so you can start loving your body. It's time to create your own definition of beautiful and recognize that your body is amazing. It's time for a self-love revolution!

Out!: How To Be Your Authentic Self by Miles McKenna

Topics: Coming Out, Self Acceptance, Family Dynamics

Activist Miles McKenna came out on his YouTube channel in 2017, documenting his transition to help other teens navigate their identities and take charge of their own coming out stories. From that wisdom comes Out!, the ultimate YA guide to the queer lifestyle. Find validation, inspiration, and support for your questions big and small--whether you're exploring your identity or seeking to understand the experience of an awesome queer person in your life."

Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir by Tyler Feder

Topics: Grief Counseling, Coping with terminal illness, Bereavement. Family Estrangement

Tyler Feder shares her story of her mother's first oncology appointment to facing reality as a motherless daughter in this frank and refreshingly funny graphic memoir.

Superpowered: Transform Anxiety Into Courage, Confidence, and Resilience by Renee Jain and Dr. Shefali Tsabary

Topics: Health, Fitness, Selt Esteem.

The perfect tool for children facing new social and emotional challenges in an increasingly disconnected world! This how-to book from two psychology experts—packed with fun graphics and quizzes—will help kids transform stress, worry, and anxiety

Teen Guide to Mental Health by Don Nardo

Topics: Teens, Mental Health, Body Image, Puberty

Todays teens face and are expected to deal with a wide array of personal, social, and other issues involving home-life, school, dating, body image, sexual orientation, major life transitions, and in some cases physical and mental problems, including eating disorders and depression. This volume examines how many teens have learned to cope with and survive these often stressful trials and tribulations of modern youth.

KIDS

Turtle Boy by Evan Wolkenstein

Topics: Social Life, Friends, Relationships, School Stress

Seventh grade is not going well for Will Levine. Kids at school bully him because of his funny-looking chin. His science teacher finds out about the turtles he spent his summer collecting from the marsh behind school an orders him to release them back into the wild. And for his Bar Mitzvah community service project, he has to go to the hospital to visit RJ, an older boy struggling with an incurable disease. Unfortunately, Will hates hospitals. At first, the boys don't get along, but then RJ shares his bucket list with Will. Among the things he wants to do: ride a roller coaster, go to a concert and a school dance, swim in the ocean. To Will, happiness is hanging out in his room, alone, preferably with his turtles. But as RJ's disease worsens, Will realizes he needs to tackle the bucket list on his new friend's behalf before it's too late. It seems like an impossible mission, way outside Will's comfort zone. But as he completes each task with RJ's guidance, Will learns that life is too short to live in a shell.

How To Make A Better World: For Every Kid Who Wants To Make A Difference by Keilly Swift

Topics: Activism, Human Rights, Organizing

If you are a kid with big dreams and a passion for what is right, you're a world-changer in the making. There's a lot that can be changed by just one person, if you know what to do. Start by making yourself into the awesome person you want to be by learning all about self-care and kindness. Using those skills, work your way up to creating activist campaigns to tackle climate change or social injustice. This fun and inspiring guide to making the world a better place and becoming a good citizen is packed with ideas and tips for kids who want to know how to make a difference. From ideas as small as creating a neighborhood lending library to important ideas such as public speaking and how to talk about politics, How to Make a Better World is a practical guide to activism for awesome kids.

All About Anxiety by Carrie Lewis

Anxiety. It's an emotion that rears its head almost every day, from the normal worries and concerns that most of us experience, to outright fear when something scary happens, to the anxiety disorders, that many kids live with daily. But what causes anxiety? And what can we do about it? All About Anxiety tackles these questions from every possible angle. Readers will learn what's going on in their brain and central nervous system when they feel anxious. They'll learn about the evolutionary reasons for fear and anxiety and that anxiety isn't always a bad thing--except for when it is! Most importantly, kids will discover new strategies to manage their anxiety so they can live and thrive with anxiety

Dictionary for a better world: poems, quotes, and anecdotes from A to Z by Irene Latham

Topics: Inspiration, Self Help, Advice

Organized as a dictionary, entries in this book for middle-grade readers present words related to creating a better, more inclusive world. Each word is explored via a poem, a quote from an inspiring person, and a short personal anecdote from one of the co-authors, a prompt for how to translate the word into action, and an illustration".

I feel... meh by DJ Corchin

(E-book)Topics: Health, Fitness, Management

This series helps kids recognize, express, and deal with the roller coaster of emotions they feel every day. It has been celebrated by therapists, psychologists, teachers, and parents as wonderful tools to help children develop self-awareness for their feelings and those of their friends. Sometimes I feel meh and I don't want to play. I don't want to read and I have nothing to say. Sometimes you just feel...meh. You don't really feel like doing anything or talking to anyone. You're not even sure how you're feeling inside. Is that bad? With fun, witty illustrations and simple, straightforward text, I Feel...Meh tackles apathy—recognizing it as a valid emotion, while also offering practical steps to get you out of your emotional slump. It's the perfect way for kids—and adults—who are feeling gray to find some joy again!

Violet Shrink by Christine Baldacchino

Topics: Phobias, Relationships, Social Skills

Violet Shrink doesn't like parties. Or bashes, or gatherings. Lots of people and lots of noise make Violet's tummy ache and her hands sweat. She would much rather spend time on her own, watching the birds in her backyard, reading comics, or listening to music through her purple headphones. The problem is that the whole Shrink family loves parties with loud music and games and dancing. At cousin Char's birthday party, Violet hides under a table and imagines she is a shark gliding effortlessly through the water, looking for food. And at Auntie Marlene and Uncle Leli's anniversary bash, Violet sits alone at the top of the stairs, imagining she is a slithering snake way up in the branches. When Violet learns that the Shrink family reunion is fast approaching, she musters up the courage to have a talk with her dad. In this thoughtful story about understanding and acceptance, Violet's natural introversion and feelings of social anxiety are normalized when she and her father reach a solution together. Christine Baldacchino's warm text demonstrates the role imagination often plays for children dealing with anxiety, and the power of a child expressing their feelings to a parent who is there to listen. Carmen Mok's charming illustrations perfectly capture Violet's emotions and the vibrancy of her imagination. A valuable contribution to books addressing mental health."-- Provided by publisher.

Check out this link to a presentation by NYPL’s Children’s Librarians, Sarah West and Justine Toussaint on Mindfulness/Social-Emotional Self-Esteem Picture Book Spotlight. Featuring popular book titles in our database of the past few years promoting kids well beings!

Pre-2020 Books

Aphorism by Franz Kafka

Topics: Life Quotes, Recovery, Future Planning

For the first time, a single volume that collects all of the aphorisms penned by this universally acclaimed twentieth-century literary figure. Kafka twice wrote aphorisms in his lifetime. The first effort was a series of 109, known as the Zurau Aphorisms, which were written between September 1917 and April 1918, and originally published posthumously by his friend, Max Brod, in 1931. These aphorisms reflect on metaphysical and theological issues--as well as the occasional dog. The second sequence of aphorisms, numbering 41, appears in Kafka's 1920 diary dating from January 6 to February 29. It is in these aphorisms, whose subject is "He," where Kafka distills the unexpected nature of experience as one shaped by exigency and possibility."

This Book Loves You by PewDiePie

Topics: Life Skills, Inspiration, Food 4 Thought

A popular blogger shares humorous pieces of advice and positivity, including "Never forget you are beautiful compared to a fish" and "Every day is a new fresh start to stay in bed."

The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach To Living A Good Life by Mark Manson

Topic: Self Help, Happiness, Motivation

In this generation-defining self-help guide, a superstar blogger shows us that the key to being happier is to stop trying to be 'positive' all the time and instead become better at handling adversity. For decades we've been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. But those days are over. 'Fuck positivity, ' Mark Manson says. 'Let's be honest; sometimes things are fucked up and we have to live with it.' For the past few years, Manson--via his wildly popular blog--has been working on correcting our delusional expectations for ourselves and for the world. He now brings his hard-fought wisdom to this groundbreaking book. Manson makes the argument--backed both by academic research and well-timed poop jokes--that improving our lives hinges not on our ability to turn lemons into lemonade, but on learning to better stomach lemons. Human beings are flawed and limited--as he writes, 'Not everybody can be extraordinary, there are winners and losers in society, and some of it is not fair or your fault.' Manson advises us to get to know our limitations and accept them. This, he says, is the real source of empowerment. Once we embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties--once we stop running from and avoiding, and start confronting painful truths--we can begin to find the courage and confidence we desperately seek. 'In life, we have a limited amount of fucks to give. So you must choose your fucks wisely.' Manson brings a much-needed grab-you-by-the-shoulders moment of real-talk, filled with entertaining stories and profane, ruthless humor. This manifesto is a refreshing slap in the face for all of us so we can start to lead more contented, grounded lives."

Zen Pencils: Cartoon Quotes From Inspirational Folks by Gavin Aung Than

Topics: Writing Development, Expression, Quotes

Gavin Aung Than, an Australian graphic designer turned cartoonist, started the weekly Zen Pencils blog in February 2012. He describes his motivation for launching Zen Pencils: I was working in the boring corporate graphic design industry for eight years before finally quitting at the end of 2011 to pursue my passion for illustration and cartooning. At my old job, when my boss wasn't looking, I would waste time reading Wikipedia pages, main biographies about people whose lives were a lot more interesting than mine. Their stories and quotes eventually inspired me to leave my job to focus on what I really wanted to do. The idea of taking these inspiring quotes, combining them with my love of drawing, and sharing them with others led to the creation of Zen Pencils.

By: @Mx.Enigma

She/They/Queen

#new blog #booksarelife #self care #library #nyc #nonbinary #nypl #life hacks

[humanp30ple]

👽 Star Stuff 👽

Basic

Name: Stella-Marie Monroe

Nickname: Tell, Stella Belle, Star Stuff

Age: 17

Gender/Pronouns/presentation: agender, they/them, feminine

Nationality: American

Ethnicity: Afro-Arab and Irish

Race: Multiracial

Orientation: Bisexual

Known Languages: English

Occupation: High school student, dreams of being either an astronomer or a physicist.

Physical Description: 

They're a shapely individual who stands at 5’4 and weighs 123.5 lbs. They appear to be physically mature for their age with wide, full hips, a busty chest, and rounded, sloping shoulders connected by a slim, well-defined midriff. Their bottom is full and round and most of their weight seems to be situated around their thighs. They have tawny brown with a coppery undertone and that’s covered from head to toe in freckles, chestnut-colored eyes, and warm black, waist-length, corkscrew curls pulled into a high side ponytail with mall bangs. They have deep-set, almond-shaped eyes with full, rounded eyebrows with a low arch.

They have a heart-shaped face, their chin is pointed and their forehead is the widest part of their face. They have a strong jawline that tapers off into a defined chin and high cheekbones. Their nose is relatively small with a flat, round shape. They have a heavy upper lip pronounced cupid's bow. They have a gap between their two front teeth that they aren’t really proud of but refuse to get fixed despite how insecure it makes them. Their ears are smaller than average ears and are slightly pointed with unattached earlobes. They frequently wear makeup; their favorite look is draped blush with either an orange or pink tinted lip gloss.

They have large rectangular palms with fingers equal in length to the palm. Their nails are often painted in bright neon colors. They are right-handed.

They have a medium-sized birthmark located just under the left side of their collar bone that kinda resembles the milky way galaxy if you look at it hard enough.

Their most iconic outfit is a fuzzy, neon pink, over-sized, off the shoulder, leopard print sweater with a bright green alien on it worn over a fluorescent green leotard tucked into baggy, high waisted, acid-washed mom jeans that are rolled up at the ankles to reveal the fishnet stockings underneath worn with white high top Nikes. They are most often seen wearing a wide variety of brightly colored scrunchies. Their favorite and perhaps most iconic scrunchie is a hot pink one with neon green aliens on it.

Likes/Dislikes:

Likes:

Space and space-related things

Science fiction

The 80s and things with a retro aesthetic

Makeup

Animal print

Cursed images

Roller skating

Crunchy foods

Dislikes:

Inauthenticity

Bad science

Being lied to

People who act in bad faith

Being wrong about something and not knowing it

People who spread misinformation

Smooth, pasty food

Being considered ordinary

Favorite colors:

Pinks, greens, and purples, specifically in bright, fluorescent, neon shades; deep blues

Favorite Food(s):

Cheez Balls 

Favorite Drink(s):

Coca-Cola

Favorite Song/Theme Song:

Space Age Love Song by A Flock of Seagulls

Movies/TV Shows/Performances: 

Cosmos (the Carl Sagan one)

Star Wars Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back

Hidden Figures

Book(s):

The Dune series by Frank Herbert

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Favorite Subjects in school:

Physics

Planetary science

Favorite animal(s):

Opossum

Favorite place(s): 

The movies

The local roller rink and arcade

The local planetarium

Personality:

Charming, independent, energetic, and compassionate, Stella-Marie Monroe truly is a free spirit.

One of their most endearing qualities is their strong humanitarian impulse and extreme generosity with their time in helping other people. They feel their best when they’re serving others in some capacity. They love people and want to dedicate their life to helping people, whether that be through educating them or advocating for them.

They’re quite talkative and enjoy both small talk and deep, meaningful conversations, which are just two sides of the same coin for them, and are adept at steering conversations towards their desired subjects in ways that feel completely natural and unforced. 

People close to them have said that one of the best things about them is that they are direct and to the point. They say what needs to be said, especially when no one else is willing to say it and can generally be relied upon to be the person who won’t hesitate to call out something or someone they don’t think is right. Though they can be quite contentious at times they can also be trusted to be the one who preaches compassion and sensitivity and is concerned with ensuring the well being of others. They’re generally a good judge of character and possess the ability to peek behind the mask that others wear and identify dishonesty and disingenuous motives.

Many people have described their thought process as being unique, eccentric, and perhaps a little unconventional; with ideas coming rapid and often completely out of the blue. Reading fiction, especially science fiction helps give them food for thought regarding radically new ways of looking at things and heavily influences the way they view the world around them. They aren’t content to just accept things as they are and would much rather think about what they could be. 

They can become a bit impatient with those who are conservative in their thinking and unimaginative and those who are afraid perhaps to think about and try new things and ideas. Nevertheless, they won’t push anyone outside of their comfort zone if they truly don’t think they’re ready to leave it just yet. 

As they observe, forming new connections and ideas, they won’t hold their tongues – they’re excited about their findings and share them with anyone who’ll listen. This infectious enthusiasm has the dual benefit of giving them a chance to make more social connections, and of giving them a new source of information and experience, as they fit their new friends’ opinions into their existing ideas.

Ideas are at the core of their being. They generally prefer to work with the big picture yet still display a healthy appreciation for all the little details. When describing an event, will tell people what it meant instead of what happened and would much rather focus on the “Why?” than the "Who?", "What?", and "When?" When it comes to new ideas, they aren’t interested in brooding – they want to go out and experience things, and don’t hesitate to step out of their comfort zones to do so. Knowledge is important to them and they chase as much of it as possible. They’re always on the search for new information and enjoy passing on the knowledge they've gained. 

They firmly believe that there are no irrelevant actions, that every shift in sentiment, every move, and every idea is part of something bigger. To satisfy their curiosity, they try to notice all of these things and to never miss a moment.

Although they’re very open to exploring new ideas, they require some form of scientific proof before anything can be believed and have been known to call out bad science whenever they come across it. Even then, they enjoy entertaining hypotheticals and indulging in the seemingly impossible. They possess a strong imagination and a unique sensitivity to their surroundings. They often receive intuitive hunches and are apt to have vivid dreams. They have a deep appreciation of beautiful things and find beauty in almost everything. 

Many have noticed the intensity with which they carry out their activities and pursue their interests. Once they’ve set their mind on a goal, their dedication, determination, and commitment to it are extraordinary. Any attempt to deter them or make them change their course has a 90% guaranteed chance of failing miserably. Whatever they’ve set their sights on, they refuse to give up or let go of it. Some find their enthusiasm to be magnetic, others find it just plain scary.

Keeping things going is their strength, especially once someone else starts them. Their stamina and persistence are simultaneously their greatest strengths and one of their greatest weaknesses; they can get caught in a rut and refuse to seize new opportunities. There are times when they can come across as dogmatic and unyielding. They follow their own convictions regardless of what others think of them and won’t quit until the thing they’re pursuing has reached its logical conclusion.

What they have in regards to pure enthusiasm they lack in terms of concentration. It’s hard for them to maintain interest as tasks drift towards routine, administrative matters, and away from broader concepts.

They also have a habit of overthinking things and have a tendency to doubt their own conclusions. They’ve never been one take things at face value – they look for underlying motives in even the simplest things. It’s not uncommon for them to lose a bit of sleep asking themselves why someone did what they did, what it might mean, and what to do about it.

They are often described as being independent to a fault. They loathe being micromanaged and restrained by heavy-handed rules – they want to be seen as highly independent masters of their own fates, even possessors of an altruistic wisdom that goes beyond draconian law. The problem is: they live in a world of checks and balances, a pill they are not happy to swallow.

Ironically, despite readily advocating for the needs of others, their greatest weakness is that they struggle with advocating for themselves. They often have a difficult time saying no and will sometimes stay in bad situations thinking that they can somehow change the other person and then all will be well. Subconsciously they love to play the martyr or the savior who fixes people and as a result, people will often try to take advantage of them and their willingness to help. They’re a sucker for a sob story, much to their own detriment.

They’re a sentimental and romantic person. At times, they expect too much from others and then feel hurt if the other person doesn't come through for them. They have a strong tendency to place their loved ones on a pedestal, thus setting up the eventual disillusionment that comes when they discover that the object of their admiration has faults, too.

Their worst quality, however, is their refusal to cope with challenging emotions. Negative feelings make them uncomfortable. They have a difficult time dealing with their own or other people's problems and emotional pain. They often try to "cheer up" or offer advice to those who are hurting, but in actuality, they’re trying to avoid or ignore the emotions involved. This refusal to engage with their emotions in a way that’s productive causes their feelings to manifest in ways that cause problems for them, particularly when under stress, criticism or conflict, They frequently experience emotional bursts that are counterproductive at best and debilitating at worse.

#ocs #long post #80s #aliens #aliencore #spacecore #starcore #retro aesthetic #nblw character #nb character

[fuwafuwamedb]

Dodging Death Pt 9 (Hakuno, Caster Gilgamesh)

Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 , 6, 7, 8

___

I had to bathe you…

I had to bathe you…

The phrase alone had her mind running haywire. She couldn’t breathe, especially after realizing that she was in his arms and she was having him help her eat. This guy was still just as cuddly as before. He still made small sounds here and there, nuzzling against her neck.

Gods, but she could almost picture the man actually bathing her like a cat.

He was already holding her so close. She could already feel his breath on her neck and shoulders. The nightgown, a gag gift from Rani, was slipping off her shoulders since she had thin lace holding the golden fabric up.

This is too much!

Far too much.

She wasn’t betrothed, she was bewildered.

Telling him anything was impossible at the moment though.

The fact that he was upright and holding her as a man was enough to have her stilled. The fact that the man, whom had just recently been the fluffiest golden feline that she’d ever seen, was telling her that her kiss, which she could faintly remember, was the cause of his being human again was enough to make her head spin.

True love’s kiss.

She looked up at him after another spoonful of the soup, seeing the king pull back enough to meet her gaze.

“You’ve barely eaten.”

Yeah, but Rin couldn’t cook. This soup was lukewarm at best and the ingredients left a bit to be desired. More than that, she wanted to understand what exactly she was in for.

“W-what are you going to do now?”

The soft chuckle did nothing for her.

“What?”

His finger wiped at her cheek, pulling back with some soup residue on it. He pressed that finger to his lips, lapping it off as those red eyes remained focused on hers.

“…I’m too young to marry.”

The man raised a brow.

It was true. She was in her early twenties. That meant she was still in the phase of making bad decisions and roaming around afterwards with her head held high and a handful of sleepless nights to think back on all those poor choices. She was still in that stage of life where she could stay up all night and go out to parties with Cu Chulainn without a second thought.

Responsibility was paying for things and that was already enough of a headache.

Marriage, and to someone like the great king here, was not on the table.

“In my kingdom, you would already be round with your second child,” Gilgamesh told her simply. “I did inform you that I would work slowly though. I will get you comfortable with-“

“I’m too plain.”

The man paused.

“…You’re a king, aren’t you?” Hakuno stared up at him, remembering bits of his speech from before.

“I am. Again, I am King Gilgamesh from Uruk.” He seemed to enjoy introducing himself.

“Shouldn’t you be finding some doe-y eyed, soft-spoken lady who is princess of some far off kingdom? Someone who is so pretty it literally hurts your eyes to look at her?”

That was how fairytales worked.

The king- or rather- the prince because princesses always married princes, would wander out and find the fairest lady of them all. They would safe the woman from danger and the woman would fall blindly and madly in love. She’d shit out some kids and the kids would do the same thing while the princess and the prince would grow old together in some musty castle.

Then again, this was an Uruk king…

Did they have castles in Uruk?

I should have really paid more attention to my books.

She’d gotten distracted by the Ishtar insults. That and the king’s insults to Humbaba.

Speaking of that…

This guy had more wives than all of Fuyuki. What did he need another wife for? Again, her becoming betrothed to him was becoming more and more farfetched.

“Do you think so poorly of yourself then?”

The man tilted her chin up, running his thumb over her lips once more.

She was still transfixed by that gaze.

“I’m not naïve,” she told him, meeting that gaze seriously. “I’m nothing like a goddess or a model. I am passable.”

“Passable.”

“I’m sure you had wives that were also passable. They were nice enough looking, but you wouldn’t seek them out for anything. That’s how I am.”

“That is nonsense.”

“And you have how many wives?” Hakuno shook her head, dispelling his bewitchment of her and standing up. She held the fabric of her nightgown tighter around herself. “I’m not a wife. I’m hardly even human with how much I work. You’ve seen me. Dawn ‘til dusk, always typing at my computer or working or studying. Even when I watch TV, I’m still studying during commercial breaks.”

He reached out, but she took a step further away.

True love or not, that didn’t mean anything.

His hand caught her own.

“Hakuno, sit and speak with me.”

“I can’t.”

She needed to be dressed. She needed to figure out what had happened while she’d been passed out. She’d already slept with this king and that was something that was going to earn her a one way ticket to the doctor’s office for a checkup and a good two minute test.

However, to her surprise, he released her hand and stood up. The bowl that she’d abandoned was pulled into hand before he was walking passed her.

“You’re being stubborn. I will assume that you’re not shamefully hiding from someone that you willingly slept with and shared magic with. You’re better than that. Fate would not chose someone weak at heart to stand at my side.”

“You’d be surprised.”

He threw a look her way.

Those eyes said nothing less than shut up.

“You saved my life.” He kept his voice level, but the tone was clear enough, authoritative enough. “You went out of your way for a creature in this world that you knew nothing about. I could have bitten you and you could have become injured. You could have died yourself. Instead, you put your faith in something and you cared for me. You showed your love to me, holding me to your chest while you slumbered and bringing me into your baths and to your meals to join you.”

She hadn’t known he was human.

“You think that I want some naïve chit that will wilt at the mere sound of my voice, but I have had many of those given to me. I’ve accepted many of those for the sake of treaties and peace. I’ve seen them into the homes of soldiers and nobles as well. They enjoy the comforts of Uruk, pledging their loyalty to Uruk and enjoying the benefits of their decisions.”

They…

That wasn’t something in the history books.

Hakuno found the man moving forward, setting the bowl down nearby. His hands went to her shoulders, wrapping around her to pull her in close to his heat once again.

The very nearness of him was like laying near a fire. And perhaps there was no better description for someone like this man, with ember colored eyes that burned you to the core.

“You, Hakuno,” Gilgamesh told her. “You’re defiant. You are interesting. Plain, of course, but there is something unique to the way you look to another. You show wit when the time calls for it. You show softness at times when I would appreciate it most.”

He slid the straps of her nightgown from her shoulders, holding it up with his hands alone.

“I intend to court you.”

That voice of his didn’t make it a goal or a desire. He said it like the courting was already done, like she would be stripping her body of all its coverings right here and now for his gaze to partake in.

“I intend to make you see what I have come to find in you. When you do ask me to take you again, because I will prove myself to you, you will find that you feel quite like those goddesses and models that you think yourself on uneven level with.”

The nightgown slipped.

His gaze remained on her face.

“Is this your necklace?”

“It is,” he told her.

She reached behind her neck, letting the thing fall to the floor with her nightgown.

“Are you inviting me to touch you or declining my courtship?”

“How expensive was that?”

He shrugged, “Perhaps the price of one of those car collections in the small showings on the television.”

She dove down immediately.

“YOU HAD ME DROP SOMETHING THAT EXPENSIVE?!”

“You chose to drop it, Hakuno!”

She picked it up, checking it and stammering away at an apology. The thing was heavy gold. Thick, heavy gold with jeweled accents here and there; she could almost hear the sounds of appraisers weeping at the sight of her treatment.

And then touching it with her hands.

Gods!

She wrapped it in her nightgown, glaring at him.

“You should have told me!”

He could have not put it on her!

Oh no, but Rin and Cu Chulainn had seen her in it. She must have looked like some bought off rich housewife to them.

She’d be stuck hanging out with Shinji in her classes.

This was it, the end of it all.

The man’s arms wrapped around her, earning another squeak as he touched her sides.

“STOP!”

“What’s wrong?”

“I need to put this in a safe or something!”

“Hmm?”

A certain softness pressed against her neck, a set of short hairs brushing against her skin. With that touch, she could feel chills run through her veins. Another press. Another.

She wasn’t even sure what had happened, but the feel of his lips made her whole body feel lighter. The light fluttering of what felt like wings were in her stomach as a warmth spread in her chest. Over and over, she could feel that rubbing and those fleeting presses of softness. The mewl that left her lips came a moment before she found them both on the floor.

“This… is too expensive,” she breathed, exposing more of her neck as she spoke.

There was a prickling to her eyes. She wanted to just lean in and get more but she wasn’t sure how to do this.

She wasn’t sure if she was even strong enough or wise enough to know how to ask.

“You need more of them,” he murmured. “I want to hear your wrists and your ankles jingle when you walk, Hakuno. That is something more I can give you.”

“I don’t need it.”

“And that makes me want to all the more,” he insisted, his voice becoming more upbeat by the minute. “You will become a great magician by my hand.”

“…I thought you were courting me?”

A soft chuckle came, she could feel him nip at her lightly.

Why did she have to be this affected by him?

“I am, but you can be both. You show great promise by being able to speak Sumerian fluently already. You don’t seem to realize how often you speak it, but your lilt to the tongue suits you.”

She needed ice cream.

The whole bucket. She was going to devour the whole thing and then take the coldest shower known to mankind. She’d freeze away what this warmth was doing to her brain. She wasn’t being foolish enough to turn slightly, looking up at him.

And he wasn’t brushing a hand through her hair, leading her back to lay against the floor.

And she definitely wasn’t pulling him in by the robes he had on, her eyes falling to those lips.

I’m not a romantic.

I don’t even read that kind of cheesy garbage.

“You look like you want me to touch you,” he murmured, brushing his cheek to hers in order to murmur into her ear. “Say that you want me and I will do what your body is asking. Do not tell me that I’m alone in feeling this heat between us.”

He’s too good.

Hakuno found herself holding him there, pressed against her chest. His body was pinning her down. His mouth was doing more of those soft kisses just under her ear. She was sure she was going to have some face burn or something from all of his rubbing.

Her chest would feel good with that…

“Gilgamesh,” she found herself almost moaning.

“You are the most breathtaking woman I have ever seen,” the man dared to tell her.

“Just do it,” she replied.

She held his shoulders as he carried her back to her room. She found herself stretched out across her bed and her hips lifted, that mouth of his with the small start to facial hair rubbing against the space between her legs.

Time failed to mean anything.

She could only perceive time in how many times the man seemed to get her to cry his name with that mouth of his. Words had been sweet, but the way he could devour her was far, far more dangerous to her senses.

He found her mouth when she cried out for him to come to her.

His fingers wreaked havoc then.

She could feel him clean her up later, tenderly moving his mouth along her body as she thought uselessly about holding onto the sheets.

First, she needed to have any energy at all.

He brought a cloth to clean her up with. Wiping her off and murmuring. So much murmuring. His voice was a permanent echo in her head as she lay underneath him.

“You can have this when you please,” he promised.

This was far too good, too perfect for asking to have whenever she wanted. They would never leave this bedroom. They’d never survive more than a week. The two of them would simply stop existing after that.

Even as it were, Hakuno wasn’t sure if she was going to live through this.

Was it all that bad?

She really didn’t need anyone else. She looked after herself well enough and she had her friends in times of need. 

A soft sound met her ears. 

It sounded like a light pounding noise.

Her neighbors must have forgotten their key. 

A louder sound cam now. 

Hakuno opened her eyes, staring up at the ceiling as she felt Gilgamesh stir next to her. He was moving to sit up, frowning as he stared towards her bedroom door. 

In the second few seconds, chaos. 

What sounded like splintering came from outside her room. The sound of glass, most likely from her living room, came next. 

“The door!”

She shifted, aching too much to move much as Gilgamesh leaped out of bed.

“Cover the door! Don’t open-”

The axe that wooshed by Gil’s face was enough to make her blood run cold. She could see him slam the door shut immediately, grabbing the dresser nearby and sliding it into place.

Her phone... 

Looking around, Hakuno all but crawled to where it was.

Hakuno dialed without a second thought. She could hear the operator, rattling out her address as reasonably as she could as she heard the sounds of someone moving through the house. Repeatedly, she shook her head at Gilgamesh.

They needed to stay.

Sirens could be heard. 

Lights flashed outside their room.

Hakuno could hear the sounds of several feet clambering along the outside of the house, moving around before she heard someone bang on the door to her room.

“Police!”

“We’re in here,” Hakuno called. “We’re okay!”

Well-

Gilgamesh opened one of the drawers of the dresser he’d moved, tossing her a shirt and pants. The task of dressing was impossible without him coming over to help her, telling the police they’d be a moment.

Her eyes were on him, but he was moving fast. He didn’t take any time for granted, nor did he bother with trying to allow her to move. 

That, of all things, was clearly pointless. 

There were a series of police outside her bedroom as the dresser was pushed aside and Gilgamesh carried her into the hall. 

She could see sparks coming from the light fixtures, books and items torn and chopped and shattered all over the place. 

In a matter of a few minutes, with them hiding in her room; her entire world had been sliced down to nothing. She had been reduced to an owner of very, very few things. 

Her arms tightened on Gilgamesh.

“We need to leave.”

She couldn’t agree more. 

#drabble #drabbles