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fandomwriterstuff · 3 years

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“We’re a well-oiled team of military-grade kindergarteners,” his best friend, and the only other human on the ship who would understand what kindergarten was, continued chastising him and his companions. “The level of education and training among the three of you eclipses that of the entire rest of the members of this operation,” Annabeth continued, pointing her finger individually at himself, his pilot Jason, and his Chief Science Officer Nico. “You know, I’m not that surprised with you, Percy, but you are our XO so you should really be more responsible,” he winced at that, still feeling a bit of imposter syndrome at being the Commander of the USS Olympus. “Jason, shouldn’t you be piloting a ship or something?” At that, he saluted her and did an about face before scampering off to get into more trouble. “And you, you’re definitely way too responsible to have gotten mixed up with this Seaweed Brain and Sparky, so what’s in this tomfoolery for you?”

Nico, the only Neptunian on the ship, shifted his large black wings self consciously under the scrutiny of their Chief of Operations. Percy, as the Commander of the vessel, felt obligated to protect his usually stoic and well-behaved… acquaintance? Di Angelo was reserved, almost standoffish, and resented anyone who tried to stick up for him for some reason, but that didn’t stop Percy’s stupid seaweed brain from doing so. Hence the acquaintance. Percy was 99% sure Di Angelo didn’t consider him a friend. But he was nice to Percy and a great officer, so Percy considered him his friend.

“It was my fault, Annie,” he used her childhood nickname carefully, not knowing whether it would soften her up or piss her off more. He was hoping for softening. “It was just another one of Jason and my dumb ideas that we thought we would need a scientist to help with, and we didn’t want to piss off Leo by involving him in it. You know how he is about his engineer and warp cores and whatnot,” Percy held his hands up placatingly. “Leave Di Angelo out of this, he has sciencey things to do, isn’t that right?” Percy side-eyed his companion who (not surprisingly) rolled his eyes.

“I try not to get involved with human pranks or even Jovian mischief, but Officer Grace and First Officer Jackson were about to be meddling with my linguistics team. It isn’t my duty to tell my superiors what to do, so I sought out the next best option, supervising and ensuring no lasting damage was done to the physical or emotional state of the linguistics team. Now,” Here Percy held in a smirk as Di Angelo shrugged. “If they caused interference with the machinery of the ship, that wouldn’t be my expertise, so I allowed it to happen and-” Percy held back a laugh as the other male started speaking even faster to get everything out as Annabeth turned redder and redder. “I’m very sorry about that, truly, but I had no control over the situation.”

“No control over the situation? You three broke our LIT machine and now we have to go back to Earth as soon as we pass close enough to fix it. Soon enough nobody on this ship will understand each other,” the woman across from them crossed her arms and Percy shrunk back a bit.

“I want to make a joke about a machine being called “LIT,” but I feel like it isn’t the right time,” he muttered. “I know the Linguistic Inhibition Technology is important, but most of us have a working understanding of at least one other language, so it shouldn’t be a huge issue, right?”

“You know it works by connecting to the implant technology in our brains, so as it shuts down one by one, members of this ship from spaces stations and planets far and wide will have no clue why they suddenly can’t understand their XO, or their Chief Officer, or their best friend. So you better explain this. And you have to tell them that we’re going straight back to Earth to fix it because no nearby planets have the same brain implant tech as us. Damn Terrans and their brand name technology copyrights,” Annabeth grumbled and finally turned around to walk off.

“Hey, you’re Terran, too!” Percy shouted after her, but she just flipped him the bird.

“She can do that?” Di Angelo asked, side-eyeing Percy.

“Yeah, she’s been my best friend since we were twelve. As long as she doesn’t undermine my authority in front of everyone else, I don’t really care. I’ve done way worse to her,” Percy laughed at the other man’s frown. “Nothing bad, just pranks and things of that sort. Maybe when we get back to Earth we can show you where we’re from. You never set foot off of the training grounds while you were in school.”

“I would… like that,” Di Angelo paused and gave Percy a soft smile.

“Great,” Percy patted the younger male on the shoulder and made his way to the Command Center.

Percy sat himself down in the rotating chair and pressed on the comms device.

“Gooooood evening crew of the USS Olympus, this is your Commanding Officer, Percy Jackson, speaking,” he smiled at the engineering crew that was scuttling by, only for one of them to pause and look at him like he was speaking a different language… Whoops.

“There was a malfunction with the Linguistic Inhibition Technology and we will be returning to Earth henceforth to repair it before the damage becomes problematic. You may experience glitches with your implant technology and may revert to only understanding your first language and those you have studied extensively. If somebody looks like they’re not understanding what I’m saying right now, please escort them to the linguistics team in Science Bay 3. Carry on. Jackson, out.” He clicked again and the mic turned off.

He sighed, this would be one of his bigger mistakes. They were supposed to be exploring, but they couldn’t do that if nobody could speak to one another. One trip home couldn’t hurt him, and he was sure Annabeth would be happy to see her father.

It wasn’t until later after the Chief Officer meeting when someone finally asked Percy about Earth. For many of the non-humans on the ship, Earth was a place to get education and training to go out in the star fleet, and they never set foot outside the campus grounds, just like Di Angelo. But people had stopped asking him questions because Earth was basically “Space Australia,” as Annabeth had explained to him. The adaptability of humans and their need to pack bond astounded many and horrified many others. So, he stopped talking about home.

It was a new member of their ship, Novax (a Vulcan who was a part of Leo’s engineering team), who asked him about it first.

“I hear Earth is 75% made of pure salt water, and is filled with animals of all kinds. Do you have a favorite water animal?” he asked Percy excitedly.

“Definitely dolphins, though they aren’t underwater creatures. Like humans they need oxygen to breathe, and come up for air very often. My favorite actual underwater species would have to be a hippocampus from Neptune. I’ve always wanted to go and see one, but my human anatomy prevents me from going on-planet,” Percy explained and sipped on his hot tea.

“There are a million creatures in the ocean and you pick one that doesn’t breathe underwater?” Clarisse grunted. His Chief Tactical Officer was a brutish Martian, but very specialized in weapons. “And your second favorite isn’t even Terran.”

“What else do you know about the ‘ocean’?” Novax breathed, leaning forward.

“Eh, not much,” Percy shrugged.

“I’m not sure I heard that correctly, maybe my LIT unit isn’t functioning well,” another member of engineering asked, Nyssa. “Your planet is 75% water and you don’t even know what is inside it?”

“I could tell you about the people who spend their life learning about what survives in the deep depths,” Percy looked up, knowing he had all of the non-Terrans hooked on every word. Even Di Angelo had paused in his note taking and was staring wide-eyed at Percy. “But I don’t know if you’d want to know.”

“No we do!” Nyssa exclaimed. “There are people who dedicate their lives to a place that’s literally not navigable by humans, the main inhabitants of the planet?”

“Well as you said, most of the planet is water. Which means that coastal communities are filled with fisherman, whalers, swimmers, and more. I could tell you about some of those. I could also tell you about the scientists that spend years of their lives building bots that can’t even come close to withstanding the pressure at the deepest depths without imploding, or I could tell you about those that do come close,” he shrugged.

“What happened to those?”

“The video feed cut out after only seeing multiple rows of sharp, jagged teeth,” Annabeth answered, her sharp grin frightening those who hadn’t noticed her. Some forgot that she was Terran, because she was also half Minervan.

“I could tell you about whales. Beautiful, they come in black and white or grey or blue. But they can be as big as almost 100 feet long. That’s as long as most pirate ships. And they could fit about 400 average sized humans in their mouths. You don’t want to cross one of them. And they only live on the surface. The things that live in the deep,” Percy shuddered for effect. There were no Neptunians on the ship, so there were no natural water dwellers there, so all of his rapt listeners were shocked by this information. “There’s the anglerfish. They light up the dark with an antenna on top of their heads, and the light lures in prey. But it’s so dim elsewhere that you don’t see their big sharp teeth until you’re right up against them,” he murmured. “Giant squids are almost as big as whales but not nearly as peaceful and beautiful. They have eight arms and two tentacles that could wrap around any boat and crush it.”

“Ten limbs?” Nyssa whispered, clearly disturbed.

“Plus, the Portuguese Man o’ War,” Percy shrugged nonchalantly. “Also known as the floating terror. It’s like a big blue jellyfish that sits innocently on top of the water with huge blue tentacles that sit just underneath with a sting strong enough to kill a full grown human.”

“Don’t worry,” Annabeth grinned that shark grin again. “Percy won’t tell you about the stories of the old days. He doesn’t want to scare you.”

“That was the not scary part?” Novax gulped.

“Anyway, I just got notified that we’ll be back on Earth in a few days, so brace yourselves,” and with that, she stood and left them all staring after her. When the door clicked shut, Percy had all eyes back on him. He shrugged.

“Don’t look at me. I wasn’t going to tell you about the kr- nevermind,” he stood. “Di Angelo, with me,” the younger officer stood, back to business and was at Percy’s side again in a moment. “Clear your schedule, you’re spending shore leave with me, pal.”

“Great,” came the deadpan reply.

“Don’t sound so somber,” Percy rolled his eyes. “I’m just going to show you the beach and maybe a good gay bar. You need to let off some steam my dude.”

The other male reddened.

“That is so… That is…” he huffed. “Highly inappropriate.” he glared down at the ground and Percy felt a little bad, maybe the guy wasn’t out? But it was clear he had a preference for males. Oh well, that foot was already in Percy’s mouth.

“Fine. But I will be attending and I am a great dancer so you’re missing out,” he winked at the flustered officer and made his way back to his cabin. It would be an interesting few days.

He made a plan with Annabeth. Day one before shore leave, Percy would spread a rumor to Novax about the kraken. Bigger than a giant squid and meaner. Known to crush entire pirate ships in the olden days.

Day two, Annabeth would mention sirens to Nyssa. Hideous creatures that could lure you in with their voices and lead you to believe you were bringing your ship in to everything you ever wanted, when in reality you would crash your ships and then drown.

Day three, Percy would tell Leo about the Megalodon. A definitely very real shark so big you couldn’t even imagine it. Percy shuddered at that one.

“But, there are some good things,” Percy was speaking to Nico Di Angelo from his Commander chair, in ear shot of some of the participants of the conversation a few nights prior. “Mermaids, the siren’s nicer cousin species. And the lost city of Atlantis. Known to be a great and bountiful city, lost to the sea and cursed by the gods to be stuck down there forever. Some believe it still exists, but it’s within the Bermuda Triangle.”

“What, pray tell, is the Bermuda Triangle,” Clarisse sighed.

“Hard to explain. Ships just… go in… and they never come out,” Annabeth shrugged. “Planes go down. Ships wreck. People who go in don’t come back out, so we don’t know if Atlantis is really there or not.”

“That’s… terrifying,” Novax whispered as he walked by.

Percy was sure he had created a healthy fear of Earth’s oceans in his crew. And he meant to, because while he loved the beach and swimming, he did want to make them shy away from the depths. They wouldn’t do well to explore it.

#percy jackson #humans are weird #humans are space orcs #star trek #fusion #nicercy #percico #if you squint

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florrickandassociates · 3 years

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TGF Thoughts: 5x06- And the two partners had a fight...

I’ve been waiting for this episode for nearly a decade, and I didn’t even realize it. More under the cut.

(This is very long! Please fight me on stuff and disagree because I just wrote all these words about this episode and I STILL want to talk about it more, it was that interesting!)

This is the second episode in a row to start off with a TikTok video. 5x02 and 5x03 both ended with elevators. Is there some sort of pattern they’re going for here?

This case—which is, it’s important to note, in Wackner’s court—is about TikTok content creators and copyright laws. Probably not enough material for a full case, but definitely an interesting theme to explore.

Marissa doesn’t have her laptop volume off (which I suppose makes sense; she was just playing the TikTok videos) and a notification sounds. She shuts the laptop.

Wackner rules that the profits made from the TikTok dance must be split evenly between the guy who stole the dance for his video game and the creator. The thief does not like this, removes his moose costume (oh, yeah, did I mention they’re in costumes again?), and starts shouting that he’s going to sue and then moons the whole court. Okay!

He follows through on his threat, and next thing we know, Liz, Cord, Wackner, and Marissa are meeting to discuss strategy.

Liz’s computer makes the same noise Marissa’s did; she punches some keys.

Liz points out that Wackner’s biggest problem is that real judges are not going to like Wackner playacting as a judge. “I’m not playing a judge. I am a judge,” Wackner says. Liz notes that Wackner’s court lacks any way of forcing people to comply with his rulings, but real court can shut him down.

I guess whatever keys Liz punched did not silence the annoying notification sound.

She asks Wackner to try not to become the focus of the court case, since that’s how they’ll lose. “This is why I started a court,” Wackner says after Liz instructs him to only answer yes or no and to wear a suit.

Liz asks Marissa to keep Wackner in line. She says she’ll try.

Now we are at the Black Lawyers Association, where there’s a panel with leaders from Chicago’s four top black law firms. For reasons passing understanding, DIANE is on this panel. This makes absolutely no sense (I mean, unless only white people were involved in this decision, and even then!) and I’ll only excuse it because they mention later that it makes no sense for Diane to have been on this panel.

I wonder why everyone else’s firm gets named but not Diane’s.

Diane also gets the first question, which is, pointedly, about opportunities for black lawyers. Her phone starts making the annoying notification sound. Ever heard of silent mode??

The annoying sound happens every five seconds at the RL offices. According to David Lee, it happens twenty times an hour, but it seems like more than that! He, for some reason, goes to Carmen to ask how to stop the sound. He also wants to know what it is. Carmen explains that it is “Dawnk” which is a new messaging system within the company.

On Dawnk, you can talk about anything you want and be anonymous. Who approved this?! In one frame, I can see there’s someone complaining about someone being promoted too fast because of “the future is female bs.” In another, someone is upset that they are anonymous and wants to use their real name (only Jay, who is otherwise absent from this episode, seems to have figured out how to turn this anon mode off).

Sorry, before I can get on board with this plot, I just need to note for the record how phenomenally stupid the idea of using anonymous messaging software within a company is. This was obviously not going to end well! It’s like workplace YikYak... (remember YikYak?!)

David Lee hates the idea of a messaging software; Carmen says the associates prefer this.

Jay is being very nice in the chat and defends the person who was promoted “too fast”.

“Who’s ‘Anonymous Crab’?” David Lee asks. Well, I think the fact they are “anonymous” should be a bit of a hint there, David.

Anonymous Crab asks, “How the hell did this happen??! How did Diane end up at a Black Conference speaking for our firm?” Good question, Anonymous Crab.

Anon Crab also shares a video and David Lee doesn’t understand how to press play. Carmen plays it for him. Diane looks really awful on the panel. No shit! David Lee seems to enjoy Diane looking bad, even though he should be able to connect the dots between Diane looking bad and potential for bad things to come for the firm...

Not only does Diane get quizzed about why she’s running a firm that is still insisting on calling itself a black firm, she also gets questions about her insurrectionist husband. “He was completely cleared of those charges,” Diane notes. Oh, hey!!!!! Remember how last week I said I’d be more surprised if that was the end of the FBI nonsense than if it continued? I am surprised!! And relieved. Mostly relieved. Dealing with the consequences of that high profile, relationship-straining ordeal is so much more interesting to me than any FBI machinations.

Next Diane is asked if Kurt just took a job to revitalize the NRA. She hasn’t heard of this yet. I’m glad she’s getting grilled on this stuff... it is about time.

There’s a hint that Carmen will be representing Mr. Rapey next week. I assume that’s why there’s a line where David checks in with Carmen on Mr. Rapey’s case?

Anon Platypus says, “I heard she didn’t even have seniority. She just jumped past other black partners to become our name partner. It’s crazy!!!” Anon Platypus is correct—technically. Diane was a name partner at one of Chicago’s top firms before joining RL, so while she skipped the line... that doesn’t seem to me like the PRIMARY issue in bringing her on. The primary issue is that bringing on someone that senior from outside the company is more similar to a merger than a promotion, and Diane’s partnership meant changes for the firm.

Other anonymous animals also don’t like Diane. One calls her clueless; another says that “Liz needs to do something about this.” Someone responds to that, “Liz will never do it on her own,” which is an interesting sentiment I want to come back to in a little bit.

“What is Black Twitter?” David Lee asks Liz out of the blue. “People on Twitter who are black and talk to each other,” Liz responds. David Lee asks how he can find it. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” Liz jokes. And to think Jay said Liz wasn’t funny!

The Dawnk conversation shifts and now everyone’s ragging on Julius for representing Kurt and just generally being a Trump voter. There’s a lot of heated and racial language I’m not going to type here, enough to make Julius spit out his coffee and storm down to the associate floor.

He goes to Devin, who I’m not sure if we’ve seen before but is high ranking enough to have Lucca’s old office, to get information on the anonymous posts.

Anonymous Bison says, “Unpopular opinion: I blame Adrian.” Hey, Anon Bison, let’s be friends! I am with you. Adrian is the one who brought Diane on, who encouraged them to lean into Julius’s Trump connections, and who pushed the firm to pursue profit over everything else. Diane and Julius aren’t blameless (though I don’t actually think defending Kurt is a bad thing) but if there’s someone who actively strategized to make RL what it is today? Adrian all the way.

In what world does noting that Julius is pissed in an anonymous message do ANYTHING to stop people who are pissed at him? If they were that concerned about him being pissed they wouldn’t have said anything in the first place.

Liz and opposing counsel talk over each other in court until the judge makes them stop. I think we’ve seen both the judge and opposing counsel this season, making me wonder if there’s a bit of a COVID bubble situation going on here with the guest stars.

Judge Farley jokes about “contempt cards” that go up in value and Wackner, of course, is all, “Wow, I really love that.”

Liz, whose entire strategy was to not let on that anyone calls Wackner a judge, refers to Wackner as “Judge Wackner.” Come on, Liz! (I buy that she’d slip up—there's no one in the world I wouldn’t believe slipping up—but ugh!)

How did the opposition not realize that they could make this about Wackner’s “crazy court” by referring to him as Judge Wackner? You’d think they’d be all over that.

Judge Farley looks SO unhappy that Wackner would refer to himself as a judge; it’s phenomenal.

Now Marissa stumbles over stuff because she’s, for some reason, speaking in court. I bought Liz’s dumb moment more.

The plaintiff’s strategy is to make it look like Wackner is of unsound mind, and they’ve got video evidence. Remember how Del, Cord, and Wackner all chatted in the RL elevator? Well, turns out that lead to a reality show about Wackner for Del’s streaming service. Sounds about right.

I don’t really think Wackner cares about attention or anyone else’s motivations... I think he just likes the idea of budget and an audience and a platform.

Liz meets Del for a romantic dinner and asks him when he was going to tell her about Wackner’s show. Del doesn’t understand why she’s upset. He doesn’t get why he would’ve needed her permission to go into business with Wackner. (I don’t think he’s wrong from a business POV, but from a relationship POV, he totally should’ve let her know!)

Liz says he should’ve asked because they’re using it against her in court. “That is unfortunate, baby, but this streaming show could be really good for Wackner. It’ll draw attention to his court. And... as I say that...that sounds... okay, look I’m sorry,” Del realizes. I like that he sees that Liz has a point. He goes on to note that he would be totally open to Liz trying to go into business with any of his acquaintances, and I think he genuinely means it.

Del notes that this is what “power couples” do. Oh? So they’re an official couple? Don’t power couples also associate in public and not hide their relationship from their colleagues?

This is the place where I note, yet again, that it is always going to be more interesting to see a relationship that feels realistic than to see a relationship that feels like it takes place in a vacuum.

Liz doesn’t want Wackner becoming popular. Del argues someone else would’ve made the show if he didn’t, and that “disrupters gotta disrupt.” Oh God.

Are we going to remember that Liz has a child at any point this season?

Diane is reading the Dawnk discussion at home. It’s still lively even after work hours. The associates appear to be discussing the vaccine before someone changes the topic to “the Diane situation.”

One associate notes that the partners probably aren’t happy about Diane either and just have to vote her out. Kurt arrives home as Diane reads this, reacts to the loud music Diane has playing, the open alcohol, and her general demeanor and asks if they’re getting drunk. “Are we getting a job with the NRA?” she counters.

Turns out it’s not entirely untrue about Kurt and the NRA. They want him for a new role. It would pay $167,000. I can’t decide if I think that’s a lot (objectively that’s a high salary) or not very much at all (isn’t Kurt the top of his field?)

Kurt notes he doesn’t have a job so he’s considering it. “Diane, our politics are very different,” he starts. “I know,” Diane says. “I’m, lately, struck by just how different they are.”

“I would just like one week when I don’t have to defend you,” Diane says in frustration. Kurt doesn’t even know what that means at the current moment.

“You’ll tell me when they offer you the job?” Diane asks. “They may not offer it,” Kurt says. “No, they will,” Diane says, because she knows that it’s basically a done deal already.

In the middle of the night, Diane turns to Kurt and tries to ask him a question. That wakes him up. She asks who he voted for in 2020 and he doesn’t answer. Uh oh.

Dreaming now, Diane sits up and asks, “Hello? What do I do?” More on that later...

The HR nightmare known as Dawnk is still going wild the next day at the office. (Seriously, with HR that strict, the anon feature would’ve been disabled the second the first semi-controversial comment was posted.) Everyone’s obsessed.

The partners, minus Diane, all gather in Liz’s office to discuss Dawnk (and the topics of conversation on Dawnk). Madeline says they should ignore it. I say they should make STR Laurie shut it down and be the bad guy. It is nonsensical that this workplace would continue to allow Dawnk to continue! In addition to being an HR nightmare, it’s also a drain on productivity if everyone’s constantly glued to it, and I imagine STR Laurie cares about profit more than anything else.

But like I really don’t get why Madeline says they can’t censor their associates. Of course they can shut down the app if they want to! Someone put the app there in the first place, no? I do understand not wanting to look like you’re violating free speech (even though taking away anonymous commenting in the workplace would not be a violation of free speech) but I highly doubt it would be only the partners complaining. Tina, whose promotion was called into question, would be complaining too. Anyone trying to get work done, or anyone who didn’t like the toxic culture, or anyone who was uncomfortable with a joke made, would be complaining. There are more than enough reasons it would be perfectly acceptable to take the anon commenting away.

Now the partners are fighting about Kurt’s case too. “Diane is not responsible for her husband,” Liz says when Madeline says that Diane should’ve known better than to get involved. Um, Liz, Madeline is right. Diane isn’t responsible for Kurt’s actions but she’s sure as hell responsible for volunteering to represent him.

“In the real world of this firm, Diane’s billable hours speak for themselves,” Liz notes when a partner tries to call Diane’s unsavory associations into question.

“The rest of us put in the hours too, for the record,” notes another partner. I’m sure... but do you put in DIANE’S hours and have DIANE’S client list? My guess is no. If Diane weren’t the biggest earner at the firm we wouldn’t be having this debate. She’d just be gone. She’d never have been at the firm to begin with.

“Liz, when I joined this firm, it was because of your father’s legacy. It was about Black civil rights, activism, justice. That’s what people talked about in meetings. Now, people talk about billable hours, million-dollar clients, corporate payouts. Now, I know it’s not your fault. That was Boseman’s vision and we were trying to survive the Trump years by bringing in white lawyers, but those days are gone. They’re done with. And I miss being a strong black firm,” Madeline says. Everyone but Liz (and probably Julius) seems to agree with that.

This is one of many interesting facets of this issue. When Madeline argues against Diane, she’s not just arguing that she wants a black person running the firm for optics. She’s not saying that Diane-but-black would be an acceptable choice. She is saying she wants RL to be the firm it was at the very very start of the show—a firm committed to social justice, not maximizing revenue. A firm that didn’t just accept every client that came their way because they love profit. A firm that stood for something. So my question is: Does Liz want that firm?

Liz is hard to read throughout this whole plot, and I think that may be intentional. Liz isn’t a manager by training—she was an AUSA who suddenly became a name partner at a firm (if you want to talk about seniority and skipping the line, Liz is a way better example than Diane—you can even through some nepotism, twice over, in there). She doesn’t seem to have a clear goal for her firm other than maintaining the status quo and keeping power. Liz not taking a stronger stance from the start (either accepting that they are no longer going to be a social justice-oriented firm or pushing to get them back to that place) allows these kinds of questions to fester. It’s my hope that this becomes text instead of subtext pretty soon, ‘cause this is the kind of thing that if it’s subtext for too long will start to feel like bad writing/Liz being conveniently clueless. It’s way more interesting if Liz is just not yet good at being a manager... because she is learning on the job.

Anyway. I think the ideal solution here is probably that Diane and Liz continue to run RL: A STR Laurie Company (the fact they’re owned by corporate overlords kind of makes any decision about RL’s mission moot) since Diane wants to do that and Liz seems to be content where she is. Madeline and the other partners, instead of trying to force STRL to let them pursue the cases they want, can accept pay cuts and go start their own firm. Maybe they can even team up with Barbara Kolstad!

None of that’s to say that the dilemma here is easily solvable, nor is it to say that Diane shouldn’t consider stepping down. I’ll say more on that later. My point here is just that this issue is much deeper than just if Diane is on the letterhead or not. As long as they’re owned by STR Laurie and have clients like Rivi, Diane stepping aside would just be a band-aid.

(And that, I think, is intentional... they’ve been building the “why are we even representing x?” tension pretty consistently this season, so I imagine it’s on the writers’ minds.)

Diane stumbles across the secret partner’s meeting and knows something’s up.

“You gotta handle this, Liz. You cannot have a white partner leading a black firm. We’ll lose clients with that kind of hypocrisy” Madeline insists after Diane heads back to her office. I’ve already said it, but just to say it in a less rambly way: Madeline is right, but she’s right IF AND ONLY IF the goal is to be a black firm. So, Liz, is it?

(They’ll lose clients, sure, but which ones? They’ll lose the clients Madeline wants while Diane continues to keep bringing in business and Rivi and Cord and Wolfe-Colman and their elk* stay put.)

*I know this is not the correct word; see 6x17 of TGW

David Lee has also noticed the meeting in Liz’s office and thinks this may be the “beginning of the end.” Diane glares at him and he says he was just joking.

Diane schedules a meeting with Liz. Liz’s assistant doesn’t know Diane by voice, adding to her frustration.

Credits! We are 22 minutes in! This might be a record if 5x01 hadn’t saved the credits til the very end!

I’ve already written more than I did last week by a couple hundred words.

Two interesting things about the credits. First, this episode was written by Aurin Squire. Forgive me if I’ve mentioned this in a prior recap (I know I thought about it but can’t remember if I deleted), but I think Aurin Squire and Davita Scarlett are key to why TGF and Evil are both always so good. They’re the two writers other than the Kings who are in both the TGF and Evil rooms, and they both REALLY seem to be on the same wavelength as the Kings. I imagine that having four people who are in both rooms helps with managing both at basically the same time.

(This isn’t where I wanted to go with this bullet point, but I may as well shout out how great Evil is this season, too! It also just aired an episode by Aurin Squire about the lead white female character realizing her privilege!)

Second, this episode was directed by Brooke Kennedy. I didn’t know that going in, but seconds before the director credit popped up, I was thinking to myself, “this episode feels like it’s going to be a very important one. I bet Brooke directed it.” I was very pleased to see her name appear.

(For anyone who doesn’t know, Brooke is an EP who’s been involved in nearly every episode of both Wife and Fight and she tends to direct important episodes that require a lot of familiarity with the characters. She directed 5x15 of The Good Wife and she’s done a bunch of the premieres and finales that Robert King hasn’t claimed for himself.)

Diane and Liz meet in a bar to catch up. Diane’s still staring at Dawnk. Liz takes her phone and silences the notifications. “Who thought that sound was pleasing?” Diane complains. “All day in court today,” Liz commiserates. Carmen had to teach her how to silence the notifications. Liz, you’re using an iPhone, there is a very easy to use switch that silences your phone, like you would need to for court. I know you know this.

(I think Diane, despite her complaining about the sound, is captivated by Dawnk.)

Liz orders soda water instead of a drink. I assume that’s intentional, perhaps because she knows this isn’t going to be an easy conversation or a long night of drinking? She has wine in an earlier scene.

I love that Liz and Diane chat about Dawnk even though there’s no real plot reason for them to spend this much time discussing it. Little moments like this make me believe Liz and Diane are actually colleagues who get along well and make management decisions together.

Diane asks if Liz thinks Dawnk actually increases productivity. Liz laughs—she does not. But she knows the associates would “riot” if they got rid of it. She’s right. I still think they can get rid of it without too much blowback. But at least they’re acknowledging this.

“What do the partners think?” Diane asks, very intentionally shifting the subject. You can hear it in Christine’s voice and see it in her body language—Diane is looking for an opportunity to talk about what she wants to talk about.

“God, Madeline can’t even open it. She’s lost her password three times. She finally just gave up,” Liz says. This is concerning! Madeline should know how to open an app! Probably not unrealistic, though. When you’re that senior, you probably don’t need to know how to use a messaging app. And messaging apps can be confusing sometimes. Like, I still don’t understand how to use Discord.

The captions have a line I can’t hear in this scene—Liz (I presume?) saying “You know, ‘cause it’s Madeline.” This makes it sound like Madeline is a little less than competent, no?

“Thanks for sitting down with me, Liz,” Diane says in a quite serious tone. “Of course. So, you’re wondering about the meeting today?” Liz immediately understands. “I am.” “Yeah. Uh, it was about Julius. He’s being harassed on Dawnk,” Liz explains.

“Okay, and I couldn’t be a part of that?” Diane wants to know. “He’s being harassed because he’s defending your husband,” Liz explains. Diane doesn’t seem surprised (perhaps because she, too, would have read these messages?). “Well, that’s unfortunate. We’ve represented people far worse than Kurt, who, by the way, was found innocent,” Diane argues like they’re having a very different conversation. It’s one thing to represent rapists and murderers and drug lords—and I’d argue that the same people pissed about Kurt are also pissed about them!-- and another for your leadership to be married to/close friends with someone who you believe participated in the events of 1/6.

“I’m not saying it wasn’t. But, January 6th. I mean, we watched the Confederate flag make its way into the Capitol building. You know, those people that Kurt didn’t want to turn over to the FBI, those people. They don’t even want us alive,” Liz says better than I ever could. I think it’s important that Liz mentions a POV that likely wouldn’t have ever crossed Diane’s mind here. This is a small glimpse of why it could be so important to have black leadership at a black firm. Would Diane be thinking about the implications of having the Confederate flag in the Capitol? Probably not in the same way that Liz instantly does.

“Well, not all of them,” Diane Lockhart, who is suddenly an idiot, says. Liz looks at her drink and grimaces, and Diane realizes she’s said something wrong. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m certainly not defending those people. They’re all despicable traitors.”

“And now, that’s what people are saying about Julius,” Liz explains. “And me?” Diane asks, though she already knows the answer. Liz doesn’t want to answer that. Before she can say anything, Diane asks if she’s being pushed out.

“No. Not pushed out. You’re a name partner. You can’t be pushed out,” Liz clarifies. Diane knows there’s a but. “The partners just think you should do the right thing,” Liz adds.

“And step aside?” Diane asks. “No. Stay in the firm. Stay as an equity partner, just step back from your managerial role,” Liz says. Diane pauses. “Liz, I... I pull in the big clients. I... I get the billable hours. But still, ‘maybe you should step aside.’ Weren’t we going to form a firm led by women?” Diane argues. Oh, wow, I have so much to say.

First, I completely understand why Diane doesn’t want to give up her title or her power. She's Diane Lockhart! She’s been one of the best in her field for decades. She’s not wrong about the clients and billable hours. It’s just that every time Diane decides to be at this firm, making arguments about how she should retain her role in power, she’s saying that she values her own career/appearance more than the values she claims to care about. And every time she refuses to take a back seat or threatens to walk rather than sacrifice, she’s saying she’ll only through her weight behind her colleagues and their mission if she gets credit for it. To be clear, I don’t think it would be the shittiest decision in the world if Diane decided to walk, to take her clients to a new firm and to let RL become the firm Madeline and the rest envision. It’s asking a lot of her to give up that power and prestige. The interesting part of this dilemma is, to me, that Diane claims to value working for RL and to be active in the fight against racism... but the second she’s forced to choose between that fight and her own power, we all know what Diane is going to choose. There was never really any doubt. Diane doesn’t have to be on the forefront of this fight if she doesn’t want to... but she can’t claim to be invested in the fight if she isn’t willing to sacrifice, at all.

Second, LMAO at this firm led by women idea. Every time Diane talks about her firm led by women idea it sounds sillier! Not because a firm led by women is silly, but because Diane has a habit of saying this like it is a shared goal and each time she references it, it sounds less and less intersectional. For example, when she says it here, she’s essentially saying a firm led by women only has meaning if one of those women is a white woman (specifically a white woman named Diane Lockhart). Who’s to say that Madeline wouldn’t be made partner in Diane’s absence? Or Barbara (haha) or someone else we haven’t met? There is a very real possibility that Liz and another woman could run the firm and Diane would still be unhappy about it. Diane doesn’t ask Liz for a commitment that if she does step aside, her replacement would be female (idk if it’s legal to make this commitment but you get my point). Diane acts like asking her to step aside is already a betrayal of the female led firm.

“And I hope that it will be,” Liz says, basically hinting to Diane that there are women in the world besides her.

“But black women?” Diane says, agitatedly. “Diane, I... am not voting against you. I promised you that I wouldn’t. But there is growing anger here. They want to address it at the next partners' meeting. So just think about it,” Liz responds.

I think Liz is totally fair and forthcoming in this scene and strikes pretty much the right tone for this initial conversation. She gives Diane a choice and is honest with her.

“You’re a good person,” Liz adds. Diane does a double-take, understanding that Liz is actually telling her “You are a good person, so you know that you absolutely need to step aside.”

“No, I’m not!” Diane responds. As I said: Diane already knows what she is going to do. She needs to do mental gymnastics to excuse her actions, but her mind was made up before the question was even raised. (She did warn Liz in 5x01 she was going to fight any attempt to push her out.)

“Yes, you are,” Liz says again. She may as well be saying, “No, don’t try this. Everyone will think you’re in the wrong if you push this.”

Later, at home, Diane is doing some stretches on the floor and groaning. I don’t know if this scene is meant to show her age, but it does remind me that Diane is nearly 70 and started off this show by planning to retire. Retirement doesn’t seem to be an option for her here. (That’s fine by me; she is a workaholic whose career is her life.)

Kurt asks Diane what she wants to do. She says she wants to keep her name on the letterhead and “keep what I fought for.” Heh, I was just re-reading something I wrote about Cary a while ago and I’d pointed out that when Alicia and Cary discuss merging with what’s left of LG, Cary is also concerned about his name on the letterhead because even though he wants to change the world, he also cares about having power. It’s almost like Diane and Cary are really similar characters! (They are! That’s why the Diane/Cary moment in Hitting the Fan is so good!)

Diane calls her position as name partner a fight against “gender and then age discrimination.” She isn’t wrong, especially when you consider how meaningful it likely was when she and Stern went into business together. It’s very easy for me to forget that when Diane has such an attachment to fighting for white women’s rights, it’s not just because she’s out of touch and selfish: it’s because that was something she personally had to fight for. That doesn’t make it okay that she seems to forget the concept of intersectionality (which she’s definitely aware of) the second anything challenges her own power, but it does explain why a firm run by women is so important to her.

Diane is not wrong that she deserves name partnership and she’s not wrong to not want to step aside. Yet, starting a war to retain her position as name partner is a CHOICE. The best thing for Diane to do here (morally, I mean) would be for her to step aside and throw her resources behind the firm’s new leadership, using her experiences and stature to benefit the firm (this would also be a way for her to cement her legacy and mentor a new generation of leaders). The best compromise, I think, would be for someone to leave the current firm—either Diane or the dissenting partners, probably Diane since Liz seems to agree with Madeline—without any hard feelings. The worst possible choice is for Diane to insist that this firm is hers and force every single tension at the firm to come to a head, screwing over Liz in the process and potentially permanently ruining the firm’s status as a black firm. Sooo... yeah.

(I say it could ruin the firm’s status as a black firm because if Diane’s a white partner who happens to be there and the firm is mostly black, that’s one thing. If Diane is a white partner who fought all of the black partners to assert her own dominance over their firm... that’s hard to come back from. She can’t really call herself an ally, can she?)

“Diane, this is the first time I’ve ever heard you sound defeated,” Kurt says. “Because I can’t win this,” she says. She insists she can’t even after Kurt tries to cheer her on (of course he does, he probably thinks having an all black firm is just identity politics and therefore worthless).

“You just don’t want to,” Kurt says. He is not wrong. This is a winnable fight for Diane. Liz is smart but Diane has the experience, the clients, the power, and her own reputation to use in this fight. Liz has her dad’s name (and I don’t think it would come to this, but Diane knows how she can pretty easily destroy Liz’s dad’s reputation). (Liz is great, don’t get me wrong. Liz is also someone who happened into a name partnership because her dad was important.)

“It’s bigger than that. To fight this would go against every fiber of my being,” Diane says. “Every fiber in your being is about winning,” Kurt counters. Oh, damn. That’s a succinct way of putting it. He is completely right. Diane would love to think that every fiber of her being is about her commitment to social justice and women’s rights. It is not. If that were the case, would she really be a lawyer with clients like ChumHum, Bishop, Sweeney, Rivi, and Wolfe-Colman? We all know the answer to this. We all know Diane likes social justice a lot but winning, wealth, and power far more.

When I first watched TGW, now nearly a decade ago, I was a high schooler and my media diet mostly consisted of Desperate Housewives and a bunch of procedurals like Bones and Castle. The thing that hooked me about TGW—more than Alicia’s journey, more than anything—was that TGW never had easy answers to anything. Will tells Diane in 1x07 that “nothing here is pure and nothing here is simple” and that basically blew my mind. TGW always made it obvious that Will was morally gray, which fascinated me. But I struggled with Diane. Here was this woman who looked like she should be someone so impressive and inspirational I could write a college admissions essay about her (I did not, but that was my frame of reference at the time)… but the decisions she made... never seemed all that great?? I couldn’t comprehend it.

When Blue Ribbon Panel aired in March 2012, I wrote to a friend, “Diane confused me a little bit tonight. She didn’t approve of Alicia standing up to the panel, and yet, she’s supposed to care about people, the truth, morality, etc etc. I never understand Diane’s motivations– is her philosophy to help others whenever it wouldn’t hurt her, personally, to do so?”

At that point, Diane compromising her values struck me as something confusing because I wanted to think of her as a powerful role model and icon, and I didn’t know what to do with someone who looked like and often was role model material who also sometimes betrayed her values for her own self-interest. I had my analysis of Diane down: she her motivations ARE to help others whenever it wouldn’t hurt her, personally, to do so. All I needed to do was remove my question mark from the end of that thought.

I promise I’ll move on from quoting myself, but I also want to share a paragraph I wrote about Diane in March 2014 (during season five of Wife) because it says what I want to say now as well as anything I could write today:

Diane is driven and ambitious. Her initial actions can come as the result of intense emotions, but given enough time and space, Diane will always be strategic and pragmatic when it comes to business. She’s spent her entire life putting her career first, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. That she found love is just icing. Kurt aside, the two most important things to Diane are advancing her own self-interest and doing good in the world. These objectives appear to be a contradiction, and often, they are. Nine times out of ten, when it comes down to it, she’ll choose herself. I mean no judgment here: another central aspect of Diane’s character is that she’s upfront about her choices and stands by them, and this sort of moral ambiguity makes for a great character.

The reason I quote myself here is not to be like, ha ha, I was right. It's because I think this episode is even more powerful because I can copy/paste in stuff I wrote nine years ago or seven years ago (oh god, 2014 was seven years ago?) verbatim and it can hold up as analysis. Both Fight and Wife have always implied Diane’s selfish side and given more than enough evidence to make a convincing argument about it, but they’ve never really engaged with it directly (and if you ask the social media teams for either show, Diane is a #queen who can never do wrong). This episode interrogates something that’s always been an unpleasant part of Diane’s character, and I’m so fucking glad about it.

(I don’t think anyone’s accusing Diane of not growing as a person but it crossed my mind that this could be seen as lack of growth. I don’t think it is. I wouldn’t expect Diane to change. Her life and career are so set that growth on this without a LOT of struggle on her part would feel like a cop out.)

Another reason I quote myself is to highlight how friggin’ character driven this episode is. I’ve seen a lot of people saying this episode felt like old-school TGW—and it absolutely does; that’s also how I felt—and I think that’s because it’s so character focused and meaty.

But back to this scene. Kurt tells Diane that if she doesn’t try to win she should just give up entirely. Seems like bad advice.

“Kurt, I appreciate the pep talk, but I don’t think the way you think. I cannot put my interests above a whole group of people—black people—just so I can keep my position.” Sure you can, Diane. You just don’t like to believe that about yourself. You know how Diane says to Kurt earlier that she knows the NRA will offer him the job? That is how I feel about this scene. The writers go to great lengths to explain where Diane’s head is at when she decides to fight for her partnership, but they’d have needed to do ten times more to get me to believe Diane would step aside voluntarily.

Kurt basically thinks that Diane should fight because if her competition is actually talented enough to deserve name partnership, they should fight her for it. He’s missing the point here.

“But a black person’s talent has always been valued less than mine,” Diane counters. The fact she knows and understands this makes her decision even less forgivable.

Kurt knows he’s going to lose this argument and tries the same strategy he did on 5x01: telling Diane she’s right and should just give up and leave the firm. Diane doesn’t like that answer either.

Given how much I loathed Jay’s hallucinations, I was expecting that when Diane asks Kurt in the middle of the night if he believes the election was stolen and then sits down at her fireplace to have a chat with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I’d loathe what happened next. I did not! I actually really liked it!

I think this is more effective than Jay’s hallucinations, at least for me, because it's less gimmicky. It isn’t played for humor or quirk, and it gets to the character-driven point a LOT faster. This feels more similar to Alicia imagining Gloria Steinem is telling her she’s good enough to be on the Supreme Court in 6x03 than it does to Jay’s hallucinations.

I LOVE that Diane would dream that RBG would advise her on her work dilemma. Dream!RBG tells Diane that “any law firm would be insane to let you go.” (I don’t wanna spend too much time fighting dream logic, but I feel like the operative phrase here is ‘let you go’. Are the RL partners seeing this as letting Diane go? Or are they just trying to get at a different goal and Diane is in the way, and they don’t really care if Diane has top connections or billable hours? It’s almost like the other RL partners want a firm that stands for something and all Diane has stood for thus far at the firm is profit...)

Diane pushes back on RBG and RBG shares her “real” thoughts. This is where this sequence clicks into place for me, because it’s working on a LOT of levels. Obviously, Diane is going to imagine that her hero tells her to do exactly what she wants to do (the aforementioned mental gymnastics). But without losing the level on which this is dream!RBG and filtered through Diane’s POV, the writers are also... criticizing RBG for not stepping down herself!? It’s fascinating and pointed and makes her the exact right choice to play Diane’s conscience.

Dream!RBG shares her life story and notes how she was always asked to step aside, but she didn’t and that’s how she got to be RBG. “Don’t step aside because someone wants you to. Don’t step aside for politics. Men are always asking women to step aside so a man can go first,” RBG advises Diane. Even Diane knows that this isn’t exactly equal to her current situation-- “Even though I’m being asked to step aside so that a black person can take my place?” she counters.

So RBG asks if Diane can still do something “for women” if she says. Diane says yes, and RBG says Diane should do that instead of stepping aside—she should do whatever it takes. That’s the wrong takeaway, Diane! If you want to do something for women then a) you could do something for the black women at your firm lol or b) you could politely remove yourself from the firm, encourage your most profitable clients to stay on if they are wanted by the other partners or and/or c) you could choose to bring your talent and your stature to a non-profit. But, of course, these options aren’t on the table. There’s a reason the options are leave and lose everything or stay and fight for name partnership, and it’s that Diane cares about maintaining control of what she sees as hers and winning more than she cares about anything else, including or even especially her desire to help women.

And also what women is she even helping at RL? Herself? She’s certainly not helping Wolfe-Coleman's rape victim. The closest she’s recently come to helping women is when she told off Weinstein’s lawyer and tried to start #MeToo... in a DREAM.

The score for the next sequence sounds so familiar and I can’t place it. At first, I thought it was Hitting the Fan, but I’m not sure if that’s the right reference (also, damn, the Hitting the Fan score is REALLY GOOD!). I think it might be similar to 5x14 when Alicia’s pacing back and forth in the hotel room.

Anyway, Diane starts meeting with her (white, male) clients to tell them about how she’s stepping aside. She hasn’t run this past any of the other partners, of course. She’s doing exactly what they want, in the most malicious and calculated way possible.

One of her clients is a fracking client who wants to win over democrats by being a RL client.

Diane is so sneaky here! No one said that if Diane steps aside as partner she can’t handle the day to day on her cases... yet that’s what Diane tells this client since she knows it’ll make him mad!

Diane makes a point of showing her fracking client that his new representation will be Madeline. He doesn’t know anything about Madeline, and, as Diane was likely counting on, he isn’t confident in having a black woman he’s less “comfortable” with on his cases. I don’t know if Diane was going for the racial element here, but... if you’re really concerned about continuity, you don’t have this meeting without having Madeline ready to jump in and show she’s read up on the client. I’m sure it’s possible that Diane meant nothing in giving this client only Madeline’s name, title, gender, and race to go off of, but is that likely?

She hands another (white, male) client off to Julius, whom she describes as a “very competent lawyer.” What an introduction. She says she’s not retiring and the firm “just wants to let some other people step forward into a name partner position.” Diane knows how to sell clients on changes they won’t like. She knows this isn’t how you do it.

That phrase, “comfortable with you” is doing a lot of work, no? Both clients so far have said it, and while it might not be racially coded... it’s racially coded.

“Who should we call about it?” the clients ask. Diane can barely keep herself from smiling.

They call David Lee, immediately. He takes the call in the middle of a meeting, while someone else is talking—he is David Lee, after all.

The information on the screen in David’s meeting is quite interesting. It’s about STRL’s plans for RL. Here’s how the firm is described: “RL is a high-end mid-sized Chicago law firm that can consolidate its specialized brand within the American POC community and expand its national and global brand with STR Laure.” Soooo... yeah. For the corporate overloards, RL needs it to be just black enough that it appears like a black firm, but they care more about appearances and branding than anything of substance. (Notice how it says “POC” and not black? Notice how there’s this mention of national and global presence that doesn’t seem to be on the RL partners’ mind?)

There’s an area called room for growth, listing top clients—entertainment law, fracking, the DNC, and civil cases against CPD. Interestingly, two of these are Liz’s clients (entertainment and DNC), one is Adrian’s (civil cases against CPD), and only fracking is Diane’s... so maybe I didn’t give Liz enough credit earlier.

There’s also a plan of action that includes partners working with STRL and the 15-20% layoffs we already know about. I don’t think this text is meant to include any new info, but I assume one of the writers had a hand in writing it and it’s a good way of confirming things that had been subtext.

Wackner’s reality show looks... well, like his court, because his court always looked like a reality show. Cutting together the most out-there moments (audience reaction cards, Wackner singing “Come on defense!”, Wackner renaming himself Judge Shmuley for a day) makes Wackner look pretty bad.

Hey Liz, I thought you figured out how to silence your notifications for Dawnk permanently. (It’s not all high-stakes controversy over on the “R&L General” channel—the anon animals are now discussing a broken coffee maker.) (Though even this discussion is a bit political! Anon Owl says they bet STR’s coffee machine works, and Anon Dolphin wants to know why they don’t have more coffee maters at RL.)

There’s also a dance party—which Marissa participates in—in the footage of Wackner.

Hey, wouldn’t Marissa have reported the cameras to Diane and Liz? I feel like she’d know they’d want to know.

Wackner ends up on the stand to offer context for the strange-looking clips. In a smart move, Liz offers to just let Judge Farley ask questions—she knows that’s what Farley is really after.

Unsurprisingly, Wackner’s context makes his outrageous practices seem much more reasonable. There’s a scoreboard to keep lawyers aware of where they’re standing so they can gauge instead of guess at Wackner’s thought process. Shmuley is to honor a recently deceased relative. The costumes are to prevent bias and cut down entitlement.

Plaintiff’s counsel argues that Wackner is biased and the case continues even though Wackner’s (mostly) won over Farley.

The case next turns to something about copyright law that sounds downright silly—the point is to underline that Wackner’s court makes more sense than real court on some things. It makes more common sense and it’s less racist.

Del gets called into court. It’s interesting how these scenes are blocked together rather than spread out. The same is true of Diane’s scenes—after credits, we have Diane and Liz at the bar, Diane at home, Diane talking to RBG, Diane making moves, and then David Lee becoming aware of the situation. Then we have several consecutive court scenes (all of which feel like they have natural break points) of Wackner stuff. If I had to guess, I would guess that it’s to keep the momentum going. The Diane stuff plays better when it feels like a continuous chain rather than a subplot.

(The only thing that suffers is that I have no idea why there’s a court scene about copyright law right after the plaintiff argues they have evidence about Wackner’s bias? I probably wouldn’t have even noticed if the scenes had been spread out more.)

Now Cord’s involvement with Wackner’s court becomes an issue. It’s funny they need a witness to bring up Cord when Cord is SITTING IN THE COURT ROOM.

Apparently Cord is financing a company that would compete with the plaintiff’s company and this means Wackner is biased. As the next scene will explain, Cord wasn’t even aware of his investment in the rival company, and Wackner certainly wasn’t. But, regardless, it’s going to be challenging to prove that neither Wackner nor Cord knew about the investment, and the opposition is going to go after Cord’s financial records, which no one wants. Liz suggests a continuance, which would give Wackner about a year to keep working on his court before they have to come back to this issue.

Wackner HATES the idea of delays and is all, THIS IS WHY I HAVE MY OWN COURT and again, he isn’t wrong.

David Lee needs to see Liz, now. Liz and Diane meet in David Lee’s office and stare at their phones. Diane says she has no idea what the meeting is about, even though she basically set up the meeting herself.

“What the fuck is going on?” David Lee says. Diane feigns surprise and asks for more specifics. David Lee reveals that four top clients have called with issues about their representation shifting.

Liz knows what’s going on and aggressively says, “Diane, thoughts?” “Nothing from me. I met with my clients. I just told them of a restructuring that I was being told about,” Diane says like it’s no big deal. Liz and Diane both know that Diane forced this meeting.

“Is this a power play on your part?” Liz asks Diane. “No, it’s just updating my clients,” Diane says for David Lee’s benefit or commitment to the bit or something. It is definitely a power play, and a nearly unforgivable one done to an ally.

“David, Diane was told about frustration at the partner level about a white woman being a name partner in a black firm. And apparently, this is her response,” Liz explains. “I just told our clients what was going on,” Diane defends. David Lee doesn’t really care about what happened: he cares about one thing, and that thing is money.

“Diane’s a fucking name partner until STR Laurie says she’s not. No one decides until I decide. Now stick your race war back in its bottle,” David Lee says. I mean, basically, yeah, that’s what happens when you merge with a huge firm that only cares about profit.

I like that this ends up coming back to STRL. You can’t really have a conversation about RL’s identity without also acknowledging that RL is not independently owned. Sure, STRL will care at some point if RL loses its clout with the black community—but like most companies, they care about guaranteed loss of profit and the short term more than long-term what-ifs. It may sound cynical, but if Madeline and all of the other partners quit, STRL would simply put all their effort into keeping Liz or even just the Reddick name and would then hire black lawyers who think more like Julius than Madeline to keep the reputation. STRL does not give a shit about helping anyone, and that’s what Diane counts on.

I do not believe the version of RL that Madeline wants can exist when they’re under STRL’s control. I believe the version Diane wants (not really a black firm) can, and I believe the version Liz seems to want (one that’s mostly black and occasionally social justice focused) can, but this issue won’t go away until STRL does.

Sure, Diane, keep telling yourself you’re fighting the good fight out here.

(Perhaps “The Good Fight” is a more ironic and fraught title than it originally seemed.)

“That was a mistake. I am on your side, and you don’t even realize it,” Liz tells Diane afterwards. Interesting that Liz says “I am” and not “I was.” I would love to know what Liz really thinks about this situation and hope we get more from her POV next week. I think Liz wants to run a black firm, but I also think she wants to run a successful firm and likes working with Diane. Liz is on Diane’s side about as much as she can be while still advocating for Diane to step down.

Pissing off Liz is a very interesting move for Diane here, too. Diane wants to fight the one person who is on her side for control of a firm that doesn’t want her there, and she’s convinced herself this is the smart move! Kind of wild. What does Diane think the day to day will look like? I think I said this above, but in forcing this war, Diane is all but guaranteeing that if she wins, RL will only be a black firm in that STRL will say it’s one to make more money.

Julius and Diane chat next. Julius says he wants to start his own firm—with Diane. Her only reaction is laughter, but, like, this is probably happening. I’m not sure why she laughs. It’s not quite a case of unfortunate timing (Diane could’ve done this before she blew things up, and it’s not quite too late for Diane to commit to leaving and smooth things over with Liz), so maybe it’s just a “well, this sounds familiar!” laugh.

(If you think of Previously On as 5x00 instead of 5x01, that would make this episode 5x05, which would make this a Hitting the Fan callback. I can also do mental gymnastics!)

The episode could end there, but it doesn’t. We’ve still got a Wackner plot to resolve. Cord has some people beat up the plaintiff as a way of enforcing Wackner’s verdict and getting the real court case to go away. Marissa picks up on what’s happened faster than Wackner does, unless Wackner just doesn’t care.

It’s subtle, but throughout this episode, there’s a little bit of a trend towards Marissa becoming more skeptical of Wackner. She tries to keep him under control in court, tries to reason with him about the continuance, and in this scene, she just looks entirely displeased and alarmed every time she’s on camera.

We get another scene with RBG. “It’s different for me than it was for you,” Diane says. She notes that unlike RBG, she herself is up against another “dominated culture.” This other dominated culture is “black lawyers.” (I’m sorry, I just find the way she says “black lawyers” funny, partially because she says “lawyers” instead of people and partially because Diane seems insistent on only occasionally remembering that Liz is both black and female.)

I can’t tell if this scene was originally intended to close the episode or not. The blocks of scenes, the way the episode seems like it should’ve ended with Julius’s laugh but instead has three more scenes (guy getting beat up, Wackner’s court, this one), and the fact the Kings said this episode had to be almost totally rethought because both Christine and Audra had concerns about the original script all suggest to me that maybe some of the scenes in this episode got shuffled around to keep momentum and hit the right notes at the right time.

Diane acknowledges that RBG could’ve stepped down and we wouldn’t have a conservative majority on the court now if she had. RBG insists that she wouldn’t have stepped aside even if Obama had guaranteed that her replacement would be black. She says it’s because she only knows what she can do—not what others would do. And “what you know is always better than what might happen.”

Even if this was originally supposed to happen earlier (Diane saying she doesn’t know what to do makes me feel like it way), I like that we get to see it’s still weighing on Diane after the fact.

(Also, I have seen some comments about, for lack of a better phrase, the girl power energy of these Diane and RBG scenes. No! These scenes aren’t a tribute to RBG! She’s in these scenes because she didn’t step down and can thus help Diane excuse her own actions! These scenes aren’t exactly anti-RBG, but they are certainly critical of some of her choices!)

The topic shifts to Diane and Kurt’s relationship (another reason to put this somewhere other than the main part of the episode; this would slow down the momentum of the middle part of the episode) and its similarity to RBG’s friendship with Scalia.

Tbh, I don’t think a friendship and a marriage are all that similar on this front and I’d be curious to see Diane think about RBG/Scalia in the context of her potential partnership with Julius rather than her marriage.

RBG basically tells Diane to stay with Kurt. Diane thanks her, and then, back in reality, tells Kurt to take the NRA job so he’ll be happy—and then she’ll just sue him. Okay, that feels like an episode ending, so I am REALLY curious about all the re-writing and re-structuring that happened in this episode and what did/didn’t get touched. I can’t make up my mind about what feels out of place.

So we start out with Diane feeling like it might be the right thing to explore whether or not it still makes sense for her to be with Kurt, a suspected insurrectionist and future NRA employee, and Diane feeling like she wants to help her friends and partners at her mostly black firm do good in the world. And we end with Diane doubling down on her relationship with Kurt, giving her blessing for the NRA job, and fucking over her colleagues because she wants to keep her own power. Dark! I love it.

This episode does this all without making Diane entirely unsympathetic, which is astounding. While I think Diane knowingly makes choices that further her self-interest over the values she (claims to?) hold and I am definitely NOT Team Diane on her decisions in this episode, this episode could easily have been less interesting and complex. It’s understandable that Diane would not want to step aside from a firm she’s helped build—who would? It’s understandable that Diane might not feel the passion for a black firm the way she does for a female firm. It’s understandable that Diane might not want to blow up her marriage, despite her political differences from Kurt. This episode allows Diane to be just sympathetic enough she never becomes a flat villain, but never sympathetic enough that someone could mistake this episode for one that shows Diane as a morally pure hero. Personally, I love that in a TV show. That’s the exact kind of writing that made me love Alicia Florrick enough that I still spend a considerable amount of time thinking about her character arc even though TGW ended half a decade ago. It’s what’s been missing from a lot of TGF episodes for me, and why I’ve said that TGF seems like a show more about theme than character. It’s why I’ve written—oh god, TEN THOUSAND words—about this episode.

I have no clue what’s going to happen next, but I hope it includes more character-driven drama (ideally with a lot of good material for Liz) and not a lot of firm-jumping shenanigans.

#tgf thoughts #the good fight

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pearthery · 3 years

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Hi, Pear! I would like to toss the question back to you: What are your favorite Gintama episodes?

shiro!! hello!! thank you!!! ahaha, i would be lying if i said that i wasn't excited to get this question, because despite being typically unable to scrounge up any definite opinions, i've been raring to say at least a few words about my favourite bits of gintama!!

okay, so my own experience with gintama was: i was twelve, and i loved it from even those first and second no-context, utter randomness episodes. the episode where i sold my soul to gorilla sorachi was episode 11, with the very very very stupid strawberry milk speech and the old man with otose's hairpin.

i remember existing in daze after i'd binged through, what, perhaps fifteen?? twenty? episodes that i'd watched on my tiny phone screen in the dark with the absolute lowest volume possible without it coming to silence, on youtube, with the sound distorted and the video squished into a corner of the screen, and split into parts to avoid copyright. and, even still, i was Immersed. it was the most incredible experience i've ever had watching something, because the characters felt so intensely real. also, i was twelve, and i thought the dick jokes were the funniest thing ever. and, ahaha, i still do, because i am very dumb

anyway, my favourite episodes!!! this is going to be a little messy, as i often am, but:

• kagura-radio-exercises (episode 189).

it's been a fair while since i actually watched gintama in its entirety (i've rewatched a few episodes here and there) so i actually forgot that this was a half-episode ahaha. the first part is that dastardly troll of a joui 4 flashback that ended up being a gundam parody, and then the second part's the kagura radio exercise half episode, which made me cry. i cry a lot aesdjfjsjdj. i loved both parts of this episode - the teasing at the then-unknown past, the emotions that come with kagura and her friend, and then gin and all her OTHER friends doing the radio exercises with her ahghhhggh

• summer-journal-when-will-madao-bloom (episode 188).

aksjdjdja i didn't realise these two episodes were right next to each other, but there it is!!! anyway, i don't think this one needs much more explanation than just, MADAO. it's MADAO. he makes you laugh, and cry, and contemplate the nature of life when all seems hopeless, and I just think there's something so (clenches fist) so good about MADAO <3

• mountain-climbing-matsutake-mushrooms-bear (episode 73)

alRIGHTIO!!!! i have! such a deep affection for gintama episode 73 — it's like, it's around the middle of what i think is early-gintama? it's just a general sort of episodic story with the yorozuya, where they go on some Shenanigans, and then,,, the story wraps up on a heartwarming note,,,

it's been six(?) years since i first watched it, and i have rewatched episode 73 more times than i can count. without fail, i am always crying at the ending. adjdjrjwkdjfka, it's the combination of that stupidity at the beginning with otose and catherine Hunting the yorozuya down for rent, and then they go mushroom hunting in the mountains, and Instantly, i'm already seduced by the setting, the combination of humour and more emotional story in this episode gets to me. the way the yorozuya are too, aah — it's dadtoki and his kiddos on a day out, kagura beats up a bear and eats poisonous mushrooms, shinpachi has a delightful mix of being the straight man AND a goofball. they're all so wonderfully stupid, i love them so much

and THEN. THEN. then there's marinosuke the hunter, and masamune the bear, and they're minor characters who never show up again at all, and their bitter flashback story isn't nearly the most heartbreaking thing in gintama, but something about how Good the yorozuya are, and gintoki especially (they invite him to eat lunch with them! it turns out Real Bad, but it's the sentiment of the thing, yknow??) aaaaah it hits me right in the heart, right where i am most tender. gintoki's smile in this episode aasdjdjeiwifhjsj.

anyway, ahaha, now that i've built up to it, i'm going to spout untidy exuberance about the parallels i see between gintoki and shoyo's relationship, his and takasugi's too, and marinosuke and masamune's. marinosuke is a man who takes in ,,,picks up [cue shoyo's: i don't know who picked up who] a bear cub whose mother he had killed. because of pressure from his village, he ends up having to abandon the cub, and the cub grows into this monster of a bear who has been possessed by a parasite and has killed people around the village at the base of this mountain. marinosuke's come to shoot the bear because he feels responsible for what it's become.

aaaaah it's,?? ?? that idea of taking responsibility for your sins? a being that you had loved that is now something that must be put down?? you must take responsibility for this monster of your own making. (i'm tearing up as i think about it ahaha) to me, it resonates so much with gintoki and shoyo's relationship — how they picked each other up and became fond, "tamed" i guess?, and then in the end, shoyo had to leave and then gintoki had to kill him. this goes for takasugi too, in that gintoki's act of cutting off shoyo's head (like marinosuke's abandonment of the cub) was the catalyst for the beast that takasugi became??? aah i'm sorry if i am unclear

anyway, it's probably very evident by now that i am in love with episode 73 ahaha. i can't help but add, though, special mentions for all the shoka sonjuku flashback episodes (heartbreak), and battle on rakuyo, and the vacation arc, and most importantly: the kagura-can't-sleep-jerry-radio story <3 <3 <3

#ah i didn't expect to accidentally unleash my tearful soul about episode 73 but ahaha #that's the power of love!#thank YOU for giving me the opportunity shiro!!! i hope you find something cool in the straw pile of my emotions!#whoa an ask #untidy thoughts #gintama spoilers

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whumpster-fire · 3 years

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Hi, Tumblr! It’s your favorite cartoon star and overall badass, Wendy Weasel! IHC left a little crack in the fourth wall, and as you know us weasels can slip through a space one sixth the thickness of a human hair, so I’ve taken over this blog for April Fool’s Day. You probably won’t notice any difference other than the posts actually being on topic instead of making stupid jokes about a ship stuck in a canal.

And “on-topic” means... “whump?” Seriously, that’s a stupid name - anyway, apparently this sick fuckin’ creep made an entire blog dedicated solely to torturing fictional characters. Can ya believe it? Obviously even reading about such twisted, wanton cruelty is going to scar my young, impressionable mind for life, but based on my meticulous study of this blog, I think I can write prompts that are completely indistinguishable from the ones usually posted on this blog. Check this out!

(Jokes aside, this is going behind a cut for jokes about animal cruelty and suicide, read at your own risk)

Imagine the whumpee attempting to rollerblade down an endless flight of stairs. The moron. The dunderhead. The absolute buffoon. Imagine your favorite character immediately losing control, falling, and tumbling down the unyielding concrete steps like an idiot slinky. Imagine them breaking the sound barrier, hitting a landing, and their rollerskates disintegrating on impact. Imagine the whumpee lying, bruised and broken and mangled at the bottom on an infinite flight of stairs, in a pool of their own blood, as bystanders point and laugh and take videos to put on Youtube. Imagine a single rollerblade wheel bouncing down the stairs and smacking them in the face.

Imagine the whumpee slipping on a banana peel. And breaking their spine. And then being in a wheelchair for the rest of their life. But then their wheelchair also slips on a banana peel and flips over. And they can’t get up, so they have to crawl around everywhere. But then their strength gives way, and they collapse from exhaustion... onto the original banana peel. Which is really fucking gross because it’s been like a month by now. And that causes them to throw up in their mouth.

Imagine a box of meowing kittens. Imagine all of them being taken home by kind, loving owners, except one. The kitten’s all alone in the box. Orphaned. No friends. And it’s raining. Imagine your favorite character walking by, and hearing the tiny kitten crying, and their heart being moved by such a pathetic sight. Imagine them reaching into the box and picking the little kitty up. Heartwarming, isn’t it? Now imagine them picking that little kitty-cat up by the scruff of its neck. Imagine them taking a lighter and, uhh, breaking it open and pouring all the lighter fluid on the kitten. And then taking another lighter and setting it on fire. And drop-kicking it onto the busy freeway. And the kitten being run over by a truck. And then as it’s lying there, guts all over the fucking pavement, meowing “Why doesn’t anyone love me?” imagine a guy on a motorbike stopping and walking up to the kitten. And stomping on its face. Because it’s still on fire. See, this is the realism and internal consistency Whumpster-Fire prides himself on, he’s really fucking full of himself. And then a limousine screeches to a halt, but runs over the kitten again anyway, and a Hollywood talent agent steps out. And he goes “Oh my god, what a heart-wrenching emotional performance! What do you call it?” And your favorite character says: “The Aristocats!” And then Mickey Mouse shows up and he runs the kitten through a meat grinder and sues it for copyright infringement!

Imagine a dragon. But it’s a nice dragon. It’s a nice adorable tiny baby dragon but nobody knows it because humans are mean and nasty. Get it, I’m subverting fantasy tropes by having the monster be the good guy. Aren’t I original? My Nobel Prize in literature’s in the mail, I swear. Anyway, imagine a bunch of evil knights kicking the baby dragon, and hitting it with swords, and then stapling its wings to a billboard and leaving it up there. Forever.

Imagine the whumpee’s this sad-eyed raccoon kid, who’s a criminal because raccoons are sneaky. And he gets caught and taken to jail because he’s not as sneaky and clever as he thinks he is. And all the other criminals all make fun of him because he has this stupid fucking fake British Oliver Twist accent. And his voice always cracks and gets really squeaky whenever anyone calls him a Trash Panda. So he’s sad and he ties his orange prison jumpsuit into a knot and hangs himself from the bars. The end.

Imagine the whumpee is a robot who gets kidnapped and they smash dents with her with a crowbar and force her to wear clown makeup, and go out on stage and perform for a bunch’a dumbass kids, but nobody likes her because clowns aren’t funny. So she snaps and tries to scare the kids instead, but nobody scared of her because clowns in horror is so fucking overdone. And they all boo her and throw tomatoes at her, and the clown robot just stands there and cries tears of oil that ruin her clown makeup.

Imagine the whumpee’s a fairy, but with bird wings because he saw what happened to the kitten and doesn’t want to get sued by Disney. But then he flies into one of those bug zapper things and gets electrocuted - but he’s still alive - and then a bunch of kids burn him with a magnifying glass.

Imagine the whumpee shivering, and trembling, and whimpering, and breathing heavily, for ninety paragraphs straight, until they pass out from exhaustion and boredom at the repetitive writing.

Imagine the whumpee getting stripped naked and chained to a bed... and then the bed getting thrown out a window and the whumpee getting sliced to ribbons by the glass cuts, and then falling into an icy cold river and nearly drowning! Gotcha, didn’t I? This is a family friendly blog, so that means no actual porn, only torture porn!

Imagine a cute, innocent puppy being horribly mauled to within an inch of its life by other dogs, and dragging itself across five miles of rusty nails and broken glass and barbed wire, but then the caretaker picks it up and cuddles it and gives it a band-aid so everything’s fine.

Imagine the whumpee slowly sinking into quicksand. Nah, how about a tarpit. Or that slime stuff they have on Nickolodeon.

Imagine the moment when the whumpee realizes they’ve just walked off a cliff and there’s no ground underneath them, and looking back with a really sad look on their face before they start falling.

Imagine the whumpee is a pokemon who gets caught by Michael Vick and forced to brutally fight other pokemon and get mauled over and over and over.

Imagine the whumpee sobbing into a bowl of Cheetos as they realize nobody reads their fucking animal cruelty torture porn or cares about their dumbass opinions, and nobody’s laughing at their shitty bloodstained solo cup background image.

Wow... y’know, I really think I’ve captured the essence of this blog perfectly. You might as well just shut it down after this, it’s all downhill from here. I’ve broken “whump” down to its bare essentials. All the emotion! All the character development! All the poetic imagery! Hey, maybe I should just run this blog all year round! I’m obviously a way better writer than you - although that’s kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Fuck it, I’m going to bed. Actually, nah, I’m printing this out for Riley to read. Maybe he’ll recognize himself in one of the characters, who knows...

#whump #whump prompts #whump meta #april fool's day #shitpost #Wendy Weasel (OC)#animal abuse tw #gore tw #fourth wall damage tw #suicide tw #I apologize for my OC's fucked-up sense of humor

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duhragonball · 4 years

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[FIC] Luffa: The Legendary Super Saiyan (130/?)

Disclaimer: This story features characters and concepts based on Dragon Ball, which is a trademark of Bird Studio/Shueisha and Toei Animation. This is an unauthorized work, and no profit is being made on this work by me. This story is copyright of me. Download if you like, but please don’t archive it without my permission. Don’t be shy.

Continuity Note: About 1000 years before the events of Dragon Ball Z.

[10 October, 233 Before Age. Interstellar Space.]

Luffa's star-yacht, the Emerald Eye was constructed as a civilian pleasure craft, but under her ownership it now served as the de facto flagship of the interstellar Federation she had created. As a Super Saiyan, she had little need for fleets or armaments in battle, but she needed the transportation to get her from one battlefield to another. The current war against a cult of alchemically-enhanced Saiyans had kept her very busy. When she wasn't liberating a Federation planet from Jindan cultists, she was recuperating from her wounds or traveling to her next battle. Today, she was en route to a conference with the Federation's civilian and military leaders to discuss the situation. In preparation for this, she contacted her allies in the field to compare notes. The dining room of her yacht had a set of video conference monitors. Luffa sat alone at the table, scooping reheated pottage from a large bowl and eating it with her bare hand while they spoke.

"I've fought this rock creature thing on a dozen different planets by now," Luffa said. "All of them were attacked by Jindan Saiyans beforehand. I think their mission was to prepare those worlds for whatever magic trick he's using. Whatever it is, it assumes the form of King Rehval, Seltiss' father, and it talks like him too. I've gotten pretty good at fighting them, but they're too strong for most of our forces. Katem might do okay on his own, and maybe a few dozen of Seltiss's troops could figure something out, but your fleet wouldn't stand a chance, Marshall."

To Luffa's left, a screen showed Seltiss, leader of the Saiyan Free Company, with Xibuyas. They were teenagers, and uncomfortable with Luffa for a number of reasons, not the least of which was her claim to be Xibuyas' mother. But Luffa was rather accustomed to making other people uncomfortable. To her right, Marshall Ryba Booth sat at a desk in one of his fleets' command ship. Physically unimpressive, Booth's only real power lay in his political savvy and his sway over the Federation's military.

"And how do we stop him?" Booth asked. "The Saiyan invaders have been difficult enough to handle without some indestructible rock creature backing them up."

"The one thing in our favor is that he only seems to be able to manifest himself in one place at a time," Luffa said. "So far, he only seems to be using this power to draw me away from his underlings. That tells me his main objective is something he needs his troops to accomplish. Maybe he wants them to take something from the planets he's been sending them to, or he wants to conquer and hold territory. His rock body can't move from place to place, or he'd do it himself."

"What's to stop him from destroying Federation planets?" Booth asked. "He has more than enough power. Even his weakest soldiers could do it."

"It's not a small thing, destroying a planet, Marshall," Luffa said. "I'll let the kids explain it, and we'll see if they learned anything."

Xibuyas opened his mouth to object to Luffa's tone, but Seltiss spoke first, and he remained quiet. "You're right, Marshall," Seltiss said. "It doesn't take a Super Saiyan to blow up a planet. I could do it, and I'm not nearly as strong as Luffa or Xibuyas. I know some Saiyans who are weaker than I am, and they still have the raw power to damage a planet's crust. That wouldn't cause it to explode, but it'd still be enough to render it uninhabitable. But most Saiyans know better than to use that much power carelessly. Tactically speaking, it just isn't worth it."

Luffa smirked with approval. "Very good. Your turn, Katem. Why's it a bad idea?"

"My name is Xibuyas, and I didn't come here to play your games," Xibuyas grumbled.

"Oh, chill out, Xibuyas," Seltiss said. "Just answer the question."

He sighed and did as she said. "Everything a Saiyan needs is on a planet," he began. "Food, air, water, the light of a full moon. Oh, there's battle to be had in space, but no one wants to be cooped up in a starship, afraid to cut loose for fear of wrecking their own life support system. Planets are sturdy enough to support the Saiyan lifestyle. They're too valuable to destroy. Only a fool would annihilate one without a very good reason."

"Well done," Luffa said. "Rehval's a coward, and a bastard, and a lot of other things, but he's not stupid enough to tear down a potential resource. If nothing else, he knows we have to stretch our forces pretty thin to defend the Federation. If he starts blowing up our planets, he'll make it easier for us to defend the ones that are left."

"My father still thinks of himself as a cosmopolitan head of state," Seltiss said. "I don't understand why he's taken this aggressive posture, but I'm sure he plans to advance his standing in the galactic community. He might conquer your Federation, or weaken its influence, but if he destroys it, he'll only be proving that he's a rampaging monster. He would be undermining everything that the Rehval Dyansty has been trying to do for the Saiyan people."

"No, it's worse than that," Luffa said. "Your father's got some kind of god complex now. It's not just about good standing in galactic politics. Now, he wants people to worship him. Either way, he can't blow up all the little people, or there won't be anyone around to thank him for it later."

"Can you defeat him, Luffa?" Booth asked.

"I managed to knock those rock bodies of his around pretty good," Luffa said. "The trouble is that he can just abandon it and move on. Make another one someplace else. I can't hurt him unless I find his real body, and that could be anywhere."

"Well, his followers won't tell us," Xibuyas groused. "I've interrogated plenty of them, and it's always the same result. They'd sooner die than betray him."

"There must be some limit to his power," Seltiss said. "His base must be close to Federation space for him to animate all these creatures."

"Even if that were true, it's still too big an area to search," Luffa said. "And we can't commit our forces to look for him because we're stuck on the defensive. Our only option is to whittle away at his goons. But it's the only option he's given us, so it must mean we're playing into his hands. The whole thing's pretty damned annoying."

"Which is why the Federation Council has ordered this conference," Booth said. He rested his elbows on his desk and steepled his hands. "It's been almost eight months, and if there really is no end in sight, then we need to plan ahead for a prolonged conflict."

"A waste of time," Xibuyas muttered. "We should be fighting, not wasting time with a gaggle of bureaucrats!"

"Oh, I agree," Booth said, "but this is what happens when wars grow old. Strategy gives way to policy, and the public has to be reassured that this is all worth doing."

"Cheer up, boy," Luffa said to Xibuyas. "You and I can spar a little if you get bored."

He winced with disgust at the suggestion, and Luffa grinned with satisfaction. King Rehval had raised him to hate her, and he still did, even after he had turned against the king. Teasing the young man was the closest thing they had to a relationship.

"We ought to think about how to search for my father," Seltiss argued. "I agree that we can't spare the ships, but there has to be some way to track down his base. Until we do, we're just treading water."

"What are thinking, Seltiss?" Luffa asked. "Hire a few bounty hunters to snoop around?"

"It's worth a try, right?" Seltiss said with a shrug. "They don't even need to find anything, just as long as they can point us in the right direction."

It pleased Luffa to have Seltiss on her side. Rehval had turned her son against her, so turning his daughter against him seemed appropriate. The girl was too interested in fashion and poise for Luffa's liking. Her bright pink hair dye and pressed suit coat made it hard to tell she was a Saiyan teenager, but she made up for it with her skills as a leader.

While they were talking, a crewman entered Booth's room and whispered something to him. "Hold that thought, ladies," Booth said as he began tapping buttons on his computer. "I've just received reports that a Saiyan surrendered to a patrol ship near Qongoding. He was dressed in the same red uniform the Jindan cult uses."

"Surrendered?" Xibuyas asked in disbelief.

"That fortuneteller of yours didn't say anything about this, did she?" Seltiss asked Luffa.

"No," Luffa said, "but Dotz can't predict everything, and she's been focusing on attacks. If this guy turned himself in without a fight... Where is he now, Booth?"

"On his way to you, apparently," Booth said. "He kept insisting he has vital information, but he refuses to talk to anyone until he sees you, in person. So the captain decided to grant his wish."

They all looked at one another for a moment, and Luffa finally said: "I think I'll be a little late to that conference."

*******

[12 October, 233 Before Age. Interstellar Space.]

So far, Guwar's plan had worked. Knowing as much as he did about the Jindan Cult's tactics, it was easy for him to enter Federation space without running into any invasion ships that might have tried to stop him. The trickier part was avoiding the Federation's Saiyan allies. Guwar had heard that bands of Saiyan mercenaries had joined the Federation cause, but he hadn't expected there to be so many of them. It gave him a shred of hope that King Rehval could be stopped, but it also made it harder to enter Federation space. He was certain that a Federation patrol would accept his surrender, but a Saiyan would show him no mercy at all.

And so, he couldn't truly relax until he was aboard Luffa's ship. Once the patrol ship took him into custody, they rendezvoused with her star-yacht, and a blue-skinned woman crossed over via a docking tunnel. Instead of leading him back to the yacht, she studied him carefully, without a word of explanation.

"Haven't I seen you before?" Guwar asked.

"I doubt it," she said.

"I'm sure of it," Guwar said. "The eyepatch, the red hair... I wouldn't just forget--"

"He's clean," she suddenly said. "I'm bringing him aboard."

It was then that he noticed the earpiece in her left ear, and he realized she was talking to her ship. Then she put a gun to his lower back and nudged him to lead the way through the docking tunnel. As they walked, he finally realized where he had seen her before. That bar on that planet where he first ran into Treekul and Endive. Endive had disguised herself as Luffa, and Treekul had been dressed up as a blue alien with red hair. It was all part of some test to see if Guwar could be trusted before they recruited him in the quest to find the Jindan Cult. He suddenly remembered that Lesseri, the third woman in their gang, had actually trained under Luffa for a short time, and she must have based Treekul's disguise on this alien.

It all felt like ancient history, but it must have only been a few months ago. He had lost track of time since joining the cult, but he was sure it couldn't have been that long ago. It hurt him to think of the others. He had harbored a certain affection for Treekul and Endive, and he had only recently learned that they each felt the same way about him. And now that he finally knew, he would probably never see either of them again. Well, it saved him the trouble of having to choose one of them, he thought bitterly. He disliked Lesseri, but he had no idea what had happened to her, and that bothered him more than he cared to admit to himself. For all he knew she was long dead, another martyr sent to the Federation to die in King Rehval's pointless war.

Though he knew it wasn't fair, he resented this blue alien woman for reminding him of all of this. He supposed that Lesseri's little test had failed. At long last, he had chosen to betray them to Luffa after all.

"In here," the woman said as she led him to a small room.

He noticed the word "brig" on the door, though the lavish accommodations made him wonder if he had misread the sign. There were two rooms which might qualify as holding cells, and each of them had a fake plant and a magazine rack. The whole thing looked more like a waiting room than a jail.

"I guess even rich people have to put their unruly guests someplace, huh?" Guwar said. The woman didn't reply. She just nudged him into one of the cells and activated a force field to seal him inside. Even in his weakened condition, Guwar expected that he could break through the field, or even smash through the walls around it. The woman seemed to agree with his assessment, which was why she kept her plasma pistol trained on him while they waited.

A few minutes later, Luffa entered the room. She ignored Guwar and spoke with the blue woman instead. Guwar wasn't surprised by any of this. This sort of treatment was what interrogations were made of. They would do whatever it took to rattle him and shake his self-confidence. What bothered him instead was how much shorter and younger Luffa looked in person. There were bandages wrapped around her shoulders and arms, and bruises on her face. He knew that she had the ability to transform back and forth from her glowing golden form, but she looked so normal right now. Almost pathetic.

This was the miracle warrior he had risked everything to find?

"I'll take it from here," Luffa said, and the blue woman left them alone. Luffa found a chair and shoved it in front of Guwar's cell before taking a seat. She didn't say anything at first. She just stared at Guwar, like a bird-of-prey regarding its next meal.

"I know where he is," Guwar said. "That's all you wanted to know, isn't it? The last time we met, you were chasing me because you thought I knew something about Rehval. Well now I actually do, and I'll tell you all about it."

"Nagaoka, right?" Luffa said. "I've never heard of it, but that's where you want me to go, isn't it?"

"You already knew?" Guwar asked, somewhat anxiously.

"The patrol crew who brought you here? They went over your ship's computer core," Luffa explained. "I was talking to them while you were moving into your new 'quarters.' Now, I'm pretty sure you could rip your way out of that cell, but I think you're smart enough to know what'll happen to you if you try to leave."

"I know things that weren't in the computer," Guwar said. He hadn't counted on anyone to backtrack his navigation logs, and suddenly he began to realize how expendable his life would be once he revealed all his secrets. "I was part of his cult. He shared the Jindan power with me. He took the power away from me when I left, but I know how it works, and how to deal with it. I can help you plan your attack, but you need to move quickly! He thinks he's invincible, but if he finds out you know where he is, he could pack up and move to a new hiding place--"

"Why should I believe you, Guwar?" Luffa asked. "You don't have much credibility where I'm concerned."

"I risked my life to come here!" Guwar exclaimed. "Doesn't that count for something?"

"Sure it does," Luffa said. "It means you're more afraid. Something's got you so scared that you'd rather risk flying into a war zone and turning yourself in to me. You figure if you give me some intel on my enemies, I'll protect you, instead of turning you into a red stain on the ground. But being desperate doesn't help your credibility. Kind of the opposite, really."

"I don't believe this!" Guwar snapped. "The last time we met, you were chasing me across the universe for information on Rehval that I didn't even have! Now I'm coming to you with his exact location and you threaten me?"

"Let's say I believe you," Luffa reasoned. "Most likely, you ran to Rehval because you thought he could save you from me. Now, you're running to me because you're afraid of him. That makes you a coward, Guwar, no matter how you slice it. Right now, I'm disgusted to breathe the same air as you."

She made a derisive snort as she crossed her arms, and waited to see how he reacted. The fearful look on his face was no surprise to her, but then his expression shifted, and he looked more insulted than afraid. And then she was surprised to see a flicker of defiance in his eyes.

"No," he said. "I don't buy it. That holier-than-thou act of yours doesn't wash with me."

"Really?" Luffa asked.

"If I'm so offensive to your presence, if you're so confident that you can get along without my help, then you would have killed me already. You can still kill me right now, so what's stopping you?"

"Suppose you tell me," Luffa replied.

"You're the one who's desperate, Luffa," Guwar said. "I can see it in your eyes. For all your power and majesty, you want to end this war more than Rehval does. That's why he's using attrition tactics against you. He knows you care about the people who live in the Federation, and that you can't stand the mounting civilian casualties. Oh, you may be an invincible warrior, but no matter how inevitable your victory is, you won't be able to bring back the war dead. You need a way to end this conflict quickly, and the only way to do that is to take the fight to Rehval, and this 'coward' you're looking at is the only lead you have."

Luffa glared at him for what seemed like an eternity. Then, at last, she jumped out of her chair. For a split-second, he expected her to tear through the force field and rip him to pieces. Instead, she simply laughed, which somehow felt almost as terrifying.

"Well, I guess you've got a little spine left after all, haven't you?" she said. "There might be hope for you yet, Guwar."

"Please," he said wearily. "You have to listen to me. You've got to believe me."

"Oh, I will, Guwar," Luffa said ominously. "I just need to confirm something first. You say you were part of Rehval's cult, but I can't sense the Jindan power in you."

"I already told you," he said, "it was taken from me when I turned against him."

"Sure, and I can sense how much weaker it's made you," Luffa said. "But that could just mean you've gone soft without any battles to fight. No, there's only one way to be sure you really were part of his cult, and I was kind of hoping you'd admit you were lying to me so that I wouldn't have to check." With that, she shut off the force field and stepped into his cell.

"What are you doing?" Guwar tried to ask, but before he could finish the question, Luffa planted his hand on his face and concentrated.

"Rehval fixed up his goons with something called the 'Mindworm'," she said. "It keeps telepathic beings from reading their minds. The last time I ran into it, it felt like I poured hot spices into my skull. So if you're only pretending to be in with the cult, I'll see it in your thoughts. But if you really joined Rehval's side, then you should still be... Aaaah!"

She released him and staggered backward as she grimaced in pain. Guwar stepped towards her, unsure how to proceed, but Luffa waved her hand in a wide, awkward sweep, producing enough of a ki force to knock him away from her and onto the floor.

"You idiot!" he shouted. "The Mindworm is a booby trap! Even a brief exposure to it will put you into a coma!"

It had never occurred to him to warn her about the Mindworm. He didn't think she would do anything so impulsive, so reckless, and now she was seconds away from becoming a vegetable. To think he had pinned all of his hopes onto this stupid girl! He had begun to wonder if she might really be a Saiyan messiah after all. Against King Rehval, anything less wouldn't be enough to save their species. But no, she was no better than the rest of them, and when she fell, there would be nothing in the universe that could protect him...

"Wrrrrrrong," Luffa growled through clenched teeth. "I told you I encountered this once beforrrre, and it didn't stop me thennnnnn..."

She screamed, and then balled her fists and tensed her body until she was transformed. She couldn't see Guwar with her eyes closed, but she could smell his fear and sense him scooting across the floor in a feeble attempt to put some distance between them. He didn't have to worry, but Luffa saw no pressing need to tell him that. Instead, she focused on the battle that mattered, and as she turned her immense power inward, she began battering her hands against her head and chest.

"I'm... not just another pretty face!" she snarled. "Creeps like you think they can get the drop on me once in a while, and that somehow proves I'm not so tough after all. But there's more to being 'invincible' than just winning lots of fights. It's about... unngh... about taking the worst shots... and finding ways to overcome them!"

She cried out one more time and when the light of her aura subsided, she opened her eyes and stood before Guwar completely composed. The effects of the Mindworm lingered, but she had dispelled them much more quickly than before.

"There," she said, still maintaining her glowing golden form. "That wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Maybe I should try that again some time and use a stopwatch to track how long it takes me to shrug it off."

"You... you...!" Guwar babbled. Luffa shook her head and walked towards him. Before he could try to scramble away, she grabbed him by the shirt and lifted him up over her head.

"Oh, calm down," she said. "I'm not going to hurt you. Not while there's a chance that you could be useful to us. Even if you are lying to me, there's no doubt that you've been involved with the cult."

"I'm not lying!" Guwar pleaded. "I can prove what I'm saying, I swear it!"

"Good for you," Luffa grumbled. "Because you're going to get your chance. I may not be able to interrogate you telepathically, but Marshall Booth has all sorts of people working for him who know a lot of creative ways to get information out of people."

She tossed him into a nearby chair and chuckled as he nearly fell over.

"Welcome to the Federation, Guwar," she said. "It might be an unpleasant stay at first, but if you give me Rehval, I promise we'll make it up to you later..."

NEXT: To Win the Peace

#dragon ball #fanfiction #lssjluffafic #super saiyan #luffa #zatte #xibuyas #seltiss #guwar #ryba booth

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emisonme · 5 years

Text

Lauren's path..........

I'm not even sure, where to begin. People are banging their heads against the wall, trying to figure out, what the hell is going on, with Lauren and her career.

Again, the first thing you need to understand, is Lauren is still with Syco. If Simco Ltd. owns the copyright to her solo music, she is still under contract with them, period!

It's pretty clear, the initial rumors that Camila and Lauren had solo options in their contracts, were correct. It's also clear, Syco picked up those solo options, as they are the only two still connected to Syco. Syco didn't have solo options on the other girls, but Sony still had control over their recording contracts. After the hiatus, with the exception of Ally, they split the other girls between the Sony Labels.

Camila stayed with Syco/Epic. Lauren is with Syco/Columbia. Normani went to a RCA imprint, with distribution through RCA. Dinah went to LA Reid's new label, that is still connected to Sony. Sony cut Ally loose, and she signed with Atlantic, which is a WMG label.

OK, now, we got the "rumor" that Lauren was signing with Columbia, back in January of last year. A year ago. If they were spreading the "rumor", then the deal was pretty much done. So, she has been a Columbia artist, for at least a year now.

Lauren has said, she didn't start writing her own MUSIC, until the beginning of 2018. It appeared, she was contradicting herself, when she stated she wrote MTT 2/3 years ago, a long ass time ago, and before she started "dating" Ty. I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt, and say, she wasn't necessarily lying or contradicting herself.

We all know, Lauren has been writing poetry, and song lyrics, for years. Even before X-Factor. But, lyrics are not the only aspect of a song. Those lyrics have to be set to music, to make a song. I can believe her, when she said she didn't start writing or composing music to go with her poetry/lyrics, until last year, because I think that's what she actually meant...If not, it's just another bullshit lie, among many.

Moving on. In June, they had her opening for Halsey's SA tour, where she performed three of her new solo songs, Expectations, Toy, and Inside. The fans started demanding the studio version of Expectation, so in October, we got it, with a video. Columbia never sent it to radio. It was a promotional single.

In November, she performed two new songs, at the MTV vote after party. They were More Than That and Freedom. The fans asked for MTT to be her next single, and a few days ago, that's what they got. The video will be released Friday. Columbia hasn't set a radio impact date, as of yet. Maybe they are waiting to see what the video will do.

I, too, will wait for the video, to do any kind of analysis of MTT. I will say, the production was subpar. Whoever did the sound mixing, done Lauren a definite disservice.

Lauren said, she is still trying to figure out her sound. That translates to, the Label is still trying to figure out how to market her and her music. It is the Labels responsibility to market the artist and promote their music. The label will monitor the internet, and collect the data, to find out what a particular artists demographic is, and they will cater the artist, to that demographic.

The artist will compile a big song library, for each album. Usually for the first solo album, they will have around 30/40 songs in the can, ready to choose from. The artist and their manager, will work with the label A&R, to choose the best songs for the album, based on the data collected. Columbia had multiple chances to collect that data. BTM, AN, Strangers, IYP, Expectations, Toy, Inside, MTT, and Freedom. They were all used for data mining. The Label A&R will use that data, to guide the artist in the direction to best connect to the public in her demographic.

Once they figure out Lauren's marketing strategy, it is up to the label to promote the music, to the GP. Thy choose the official singles. They choose when and if a single gets sent to radio. If it doesn't get sent to radio, it gets labeled a promo single, and it's up to the artist and their fans, to push it.

Radio looks to Shazam, and the amount of streams a promo single gets, to decide if they want to dedicate air time to it, or not. The more Shazam streams, the better chance it gets ait time. That's why people are always reminding the fans to stream on Shazam, as well as Spotify, YouTube, and other streaming sites.

It's also, usually, up to the label, to get a single put on popular playlists, and which, if any, television appearances for the single.

It's up to the artists management, to promote the artist. They do this, in conjunction with the label. It is the managements job, to create and control the artists/brands public image. They manage how the public sees the artist, when the public sees the artist, and where the public sees the artist.

The PR Teams and Talent Agents, work in conjunction with the management, to get the artist out there, to get attention from the media and therefore, the public.

It is the artist themselves, that has the most important role in their own career. The Label can market the artist, the management can get them attention, but it is completely up to the artist, to make a connection to fans and potential fans. If an artist isn't making a connection to the public, then the rest of it doesn't even matter.

Lauren is more than capable of making that connection. The problem is, her image is turning people off, and I'm not just talking about fans, but also potential endorsements. Her public image, right now, is not a good one, and she knows it. Unfortunately, her damn managers would rather promote Ty and a dog, more than Lauren.

Don't get me wrong, Gracie is cute and Lauren's interaction with her, is adorable. I know they made sure she, and her dog, got nominated for one of the most ridiculous awards ever, but I'd much rather Lauren be promoted and recognized for her talent, than her cute little pet.

Columbia needs to get her a presenter spot at the Grammy's, so she can walk the carpet, and be seen on prime time television. They need to get her a performance spot on the iHeart music awards. Those air on March 19. Hopefully Columbia is ready to release an official single, and she can perform it there, like Camila did.

Honestly, her next single needs to be about something personal. Something inspirational. It doesn't have to be a slow ass ballad, but it needs to be about something that makes folks want to get to know Lauren. Expectations would have been a good choice...IF they hadn't turned everyone off to it, by saying she wrote the damn thing about Ty not being there to cuddle when she wanted him to. (that was literally one of the dumbest explanations for a song, I had ever heard)

I really don't think MTT is that song, either. The subject matter has turned even her own fans off. (I have my own theory about the song, but I'm waiting for the video to see if I'm even close to right) The problem with MTT, is the subject matter automatically takes people's minds to her "cheating" with Ty. Even though she has said, she wrote it before she even started "dating" him. The lyrics just took people there, and that was a turn off, for many. Her next single needs to be something that represents her. Not her fucking "boyfriend", not her fucking dog, but her.

She has plenty of music ready to go, so they really need to get her out there, performing at some of these Festivals. They may not all know who she is at those things, but that's the point, to get her out there, seen and heard.

She really needs to do some of the more popular radio shows, like Zane Lowe. She did good on Zack Sang, but Zane is a pretty good interviewer. He doesn't throw softball questions, so she needs to be ready, and willing to answer all the tough questions.

She hasn't been to Europe or Great Britain since what, 2016. She needs to get over there and show her face. Do some interviews, especially BBC Radio, or whatever it's called. Really, she needs to be doing a lot more than walking around propping Ty's ass up, and packing around her pooch.

Maverick needs to do their damn job, and take her for a sit down with the Spotify and YouTube folks, and make a deal with them, herself. Her Label isn't doing much, but she can talk to them and get them to sponsor her and promote her, for exclusive content. That will get her on all the popular playlists, and billboards. She doesn't need to rely on Columbia to do all this shit for her. She can help herself out, as well.

They need to scrub her SM, especially her Instagram, of anything that might be deemed problematic. The big Brands will not even consider her, for Celebrity Endorsements, if all they see is her partying it up, smoking dope all the damn time.

Lauren is a solo artist, now. She is no longer handcuffed, by a group image, or the set plan for that group. As a solo artist, she does have more say in her career, but she isn't as free as she is letting on. She has more freedom, than she had as a member of 5H, though.

Lauren needs to take some of that new found freedom, sit her management team down, tell them what she wants and expects for her career. If Maverick isn't willing to manage her career, the way she expects them to, then she needs to fire their ass, and find a manager who will.

Yes, she can fire them. As a solo artist, she pays them 15% of her earnings. If they aren't earning that 15%, she can hire someone who will. Camila did. Normani did. She can, too.

They need to put an end to all these stupid narratives. They need to.....You know what, I could sit here all day, and say what I think they all should do, but I'm not Lauren, her manager, or her Label. Maybe they have it all figured out, and are just slow walking her, I don't know. But, I do know, what they have chosen to do thus far, isn't really working, and it's really pissing me off.

Lauren has the talent to succeed in this damn business. She has the intelligence to succeed in this damn business. I just hope she has the will to succeed in this damn business. It's not really going to get any easier, at least not for a while....I really hope she achieves that dream she had when she was younger. I hope she finds that solo success, she always knew she was capable of. I know I'm rooting for her.

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goddessofthundathighs · 5 years

Text

DISTRACTION

Just a little filth based off of this post because I feel like I’ve been neglecting my lovelies.

_____________________________________________

“Bro, what the fuck?” Erik yelled angrily into the headset. He’d just returned from a two-month long mission in Colombia and all he wanted to do was relax with a nice game of Battlefield 4. He checked the time on his kimoyo beads. He knew the Princess would be home soon so he removed the headset from one of his ears to listen out for her.

It had been four months since the couple had last had sex, given both of their busy schedules, and Hennessy was more than a little needy. When she came home from work, she noticed his boots and duffle bag laid next to the front door.

“The fuckum?” She paused looking around. “I know this nigga didn't...” she complained as she put away her things and made her way to the game room.

Her husband’s dark brown eyes squinted as he concentrated on the screen, his fingers tapping the controller vigorously. The voices of middle-aged men shouting in his ear made him grumble for what had seemed like the millionth time. Though she was grateful that he still kept in touch with his battles from his time in JSOC, she hated how they sometimes kept him away from her for trivial things. As he reached the end of a heated battle, he heard the light footsteps of his wife come to the door.

“Well hello to you too,” her tiny voice rang out over the loud explosions and gunshots on the TV. He could practically hear her folding her arms.

“Oh hey babe,” He called as he glanced over his shoulder briefly before returning his gaze back to the TV. Who knew that one simple phrase could make her blood boil the way it did.

“How long have you been back?”

“Couple hours,” he responded, clearly still distracted by the video game.

“And you didn’t think to —,” her voice trailed off as her anger rose. Typically he made sure to stop by her office when he returned from a mission, but today was different. Today he chose to engage in an online video game battle instead of making an effort to spend time with her.

“Sorry babe,” he grunted as he restarted the game.

“Nah, you good,” she replied as she headed for the stairs. Bratty Hennessy was in full effect and by the time she was done, Battlefield 4 would be the last thing on Erik’s mind.

—————————

Fifteen minutes passed before she reappeared in the doorway of the game room.

“How long are you gonna be down here?”

“I don’t know Princess, why wassup?” He asked as he finished one of the game’s missions.

“Oh I don’t know, I haven’t seen you in two months, haven’t touched you in four. Get where I’m going with this?”

“Yeah, I get it baby. Gimme like 10 minutes and I’m all yours, I promise.”

“10 MINUTES?! NIGGA?!” she screamed exasperatedly.

“Okay, okay, 6 minutes,” he responded as he went back to angrily tapping the buttons on the controller.

“Fine,” she pouted as she walked over to the stereo system.

The sounds of Booty by Blac Youngsta filled the game room as the Princess distracted herself. Erik’s head began to nod to the beat as she bounced around the room.

Girl, I wanna see you twerk

I'll throw a lil' money if you twerk

I don't really think you can twerk

(Toot toot) twerk

If you broke, go to work

Make that big booty twerk

(Toot toot)

Can I touch that booty?

That booty, that big old booty?

Shake that booty, can I lay on the booty?

Mike Tyson on the booty

“Babe, C'mon now.. Move…”

He was so focused on the game that he hadn’t noticed his curvaceous wife’s attire. She’d traded her tan flounce jumpsuit for a navy two-piece lingerie set with a matching see through robe. As the song continued on and her best friend’s verse came on, the tiny princess decided to kick it up a notch.

Yeah, smack it up, flip it, rub it down, BBD

Yeah, I know you heard the news about that BBC

Yeah, greatest in that box, RIP Ali

Mmm, she say she love my kids, taste my legacy

Ooh, she go stupid, I'm no Cupid, I don't cuff her, I can't lose it

What she say I'm sleepin' on her, I just said she just caught me snoozin'...

As Trey continued to rap, Hennessy purposely placed her body in Erik’s line of vision and began throwing her ass like she had entered a twerk contest.

“Hennessy I said —,” his sentence was cut off as his eyes lifted to fully take in her presence. “Gahdamn,” he groaned as he reached out to move the fabric of the robe, giving him an unobstructed view. He stared like a predator watching prey as her plump ass gyrated in his face. The groans of his battles brought him back from the trance she’d successfully put him in. Pausing the game and throwing his controller to the side, he watched her hips move with ease to the beat. Before he knew it, her ass was on his lap, grinding and popping to the music as the bass thumped throughout the room. Groaning lowly, he moved the mic from his headset down to his mouth and spoke to the men who had been complaining in his ear the entire duration of the song.

“Aye niggas, I'll be back. I don't know when though.” The men's voices were cut off as he turned the PlayStation off and tossed the headset on the table. He bit his bottom lip as his calloused hands began kneading the tender flesh of her ass before giving it two harsh smacks. She moaned softly, but continued her ministrations, turning to face him now.

“You just couldn’t wait, huh? Needy ass,” he teased as he pulled her down to straddle his lap. His lips curved into his signature smirk, revealing the gold fronts that she loved.

“Nah, you wanted to play the game, remember? Keep that same energy fam,” she said as she slowly tried to slide out of his lap. His arms locked around her like a constrictor, effectively stopping her escape.

“Nah, the only game I’m tryna play is how many times Daddy can make Hennessy cum,” he growled, lifting from the couch.

————————

Hennessy’s legs shook as he feasted from her, his tongue darting back and forth with impeccable speed. Her hands moved from the sheets of the bed to his unruly dreads, tugging on them as he sucked on her clit.

As his tongue lapped over one of her more sensitive areas, she yanked his hair and moaned. As if her body wasn’t already seconds from overstimulation, a growl erupted from the beast between her thighs.

“F-fuck don’t growl at me…” She whimpered as she stared down at him. As his lips turned into a sly smirk, he chuckled softly.

“Mmm. Why not Princess?”

“Y-You know why,” she whined as his long tongue wrapped around the sensitive bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs. He growled again, causing her to gush into his mouth as the vibration traveled up her body.

“Daddy I’m cumming,” she whined as she rocked her hips against his face. He stared up from his place between her legs, dark eyes fixed on hers as he continued to lick slow patterns on the swollen bulb.

“Let it go Princess,” he growled as he attached his lips to her clit and sucked. Her orgasm hit her hard and fast, but his tongue never stopped it’s quest. He continued feasting until orgasm number two had her clawing at his back. He licked his lips as he watched her body shake, determined to have her sated and asleep by the time he finished.

He climbed up her body slowly, kissing and biting at her skin along the way. A firm tug to his dreads had him eye to eye with the curvaceous cutie, her brown eyes piercing his.

“As much as I like the slow, sensual treatment, I’m way too horny for you to be taking your sweet grandpa time. It’s been four months, I need you to break me.”

“Say less ma,” he replied thrusting forward until he was completely buried inside of her. Her legs locked around his waist as he began delivering the powerful strokes that always left her sore and hoarse the next day.

“That’s right,” she moaned. “Act like it’s been four months since you’ve had this pussy, nigga.” He chuckled softly, leaning down to press open-mouth kisses along her cheek and jawline.

“Fuck I missed your fine ass. I missed the way your lips feel against mine, I missed the way your face scrunches up when I hit that spot, and I especially missed the way that pretty pussy clings to my dick like a life vest.” Her inner walls fluttered at his words. She had always loved how nasty he could be during sex. He sat up on his knees and pushed her legs up so that her knees were almost beside her ears.

“Grab them ankles,” he ordered as he lined himself up with her dripping core. She barely had time to comply before his hips snapped forward with electrifying force. This was one of her favorite positions because each stroke had him tapping her g-spot with deadly precision.

“Daddy,” she moaned out, feeling the familiar tingle in her lower belly.

“Wassup?” he smirked, gold fronts gleaming in the purple light of the bedroom. “You close, Mama?” She wanted to answer, but her words were caught in her throat as he continued to fuck into her. He thrust forward a few more times before pulling himself out and smacking it on her clit.

“Answer me, Monaé!” he growled, shoving himself back into her. She bit her lip and nodded, still unable to verbally express her pleasure.

“Cum for me, Princess. I feel the way she gripping me. Show Daddy he can still make that kitten purr.” At his command her released washed over her, coating both of their lower halves with her essence.

“Fuck,” he groaned as he released himself into her. He lazily kissed her lips, swallowing each moan that came in the aftershock of her orgasm. He pulled out slowly and headed for the bathroom as sleep threatened to overtake the tiny vixen.

—————

Once he cleaned both of them off, Erik pulled the Henny close so that her head was tucked under his chin. He kissed her forehead as he slowly began running his fingers through her curly hair.

“Sorry about your game,” she said, yawning into his neck.

“You’re fine Princess. You’ve always been my favorite distraction.”

———————————————

TAG LIST: @vibranium-soul @imagine-mbaku @mareethequeen @greennightspider @eriknutinthispoosy @hearteyes-for-killmonger @theegoldenjaguar @muse-of-mbaku @shesfromwakanda @thehomierobbstark @youreadthatright @tgigoldie @killmongersgurl @dameshaemonique @princessstevens @princesskillmonger @amethyst1993 @iamrheaspeaks @laketaj24 @bidibidibombaclaat @allhailnjadaka @whatmoredoyouwantamericaa @forbeautyandlife @yaachtynoboat711 @panthergoddessbast @inlovewithmakeupcomicsanimelove @dacreskars @thadelightfulone @drsunshine97 @wakanda-inspired @wawakanda-btch @hold-me-like-a-heart-beat @ayellepea @madamslayyy @blowmymbackout @vikkidc @champagnesugamama @sociallyawkward18 @chasingsunlight @dabluestsky

THE HOUSEHOLD: @alyshastevens-udaku @wyldjuan @itsangeludaku @thehomiekillmonger @lovemecharlie @itskimorafireudaku @poosypoosy @bastioncarterstevens-udaku @killmongersprncss

#vanity writes #killmonger smut #daddy erik #erik stevens #bde #killmonger fic #my shit #erik x henny #i’m an artist #and i’m sensitive about my shit #erik killmonger #the kompound

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missmelpcmene · 5 years

Text

The Breaking Point —Chapter 5

Originally posted on Fanfiction.net in January of 2009.

DISCLAIMER: The places and characters featured hereinafter are the property of Warner Bros., Joel Shumacher, Janice Fischer, James Jeremias, and Jeffrey Boam and no attempt is being made by the author to claim ownership or profit from the use of the aforementioned characters. The views represented herein do not necessarily represent the views of the original authors and any character names or places mentioned in the original works belong to the copyright holders and are used in this story for nonprofit entertainment purposes by an amateur writer. The original characters used in this story are the creative property of Miss Melpomene and are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "

"Missy."

It's a funny thing, waking up the first morning in a new environment. There's that first moment after opening one's eyes, when nothing seems familiar, and one's first instinct is to panic. It is never a wise decision, naturally, to be the person standing over someone when that moment of overwhelming, sudden panic strikes.

The first thing that Missy was aware of after opening her eyes wasn't that her blanket seemed to have fallen or been ripped from her body in the middle of the night. It wasn't that Alan was standing, well, was doubled over, beside her bed. It wasn't even that Alan's lip seemed to be bleeding.

No, the first thing she noticed was that she was hungry. That painfully deep, gnawing variety of hungry that can only come from being too frightened to eat for a day and a half. It turned her insides so viciously that for a moment, Missy mistook the feeling, and feared she was about to be sick. "You kicked me!" Alan's hand appeared in her line of sight, and his finger waved in front of her face.

"You shouldn't have been standing over my bed." Missy said, but she grabbed the hem of the shirt she'd slept in and lifted it away from her stomach. "It's already stopping." She dabbed at his lip, frowning. "You're going to have a split lip for a couple of days, though." Alan was adamantly avoiding looking at her, glaring instead at the wall behind her head. His face was red, and she thought he must have been embarrassed about a girl giving him a bloody lip. "Look, see, it's finished now." She let her shirt drop back down and smiled.

Alan just grunted at her. "Edgar's getting you up from now on." He turned around and headed for her door, leaving Missy to fight off a smile once his back was turned.

A good portion of her first night in Santa Carla was fuzzy, and the events of the night before were blurred together in her mind. She wasn't sure if skunk head or the boys in front of the video store had been real, or just a product of her exhaustion, but one thing was abundantly clear to her as she listened to her angry stomach snarl. The tour that the Frog brothers had given her hadn't included a kitchen. "Hey, wait!" She called out, and from the hall, past the door where she could no longer see him, Alan's voice came back.

"What?"

"Do you have a kitchen?" There was a moment or two of silence on Alan's part, and Missy worried he might still be sore about her hitting him, and was ignoring her . "Alan?"

"Sort of." Missy stared at the door across from her bed, her sluggish morning mind trying to process what it had just been given.

"Wait, sort of? Alan!" She rolled off the bed and ran through her door. Alan was at the top of the stairs now, and her hand shot out to grab his bare arm. "That doesn't make any sense!" He turned his head and glared at his elbow. Her eyes followed his to her pale hand on his darker skin, and she let him go. "How can you sort of have a kitchen?"

"I didn't say we sort of had a kitchen." Alan corrected her, and as much as he was frustrating her, she waited for him to continue without comment. "I said it was 'sort of' a kitchen."

That made, if possible, less sense to her, and Missy frowned at him. "What do you mean?"

"See for yourself." Stupid cryptic Frog brother. "It's in there." She followed his finger and found herself staring at the closed door to the Frog brothers' parents' bedroom. She heard the stairs creak behind her and knew Alan was gone without looking. She wasn't sure how she felt about going into the Frog parents' bedroom without their permission. She didn't want to walk in on them sleeping, or worse, awake. It was a lot easier, she was realizing, dealing with Edgar and Alan, who were closer to her own age. What if the Frog parents experienced a, from what she could garner, rare moment of lucidity and realized her for what she was? Would they throw her out, or worse, would they call the police who'd, in turn, call Renee?

"What are you standing in the middle of the hallway for?" Life with the Frog brothers was going to take some getting used to, Missy realized as for the second time since waking, she found a Frog had snuck up on her. Living with Renee, they had each of them done their part to avoid the other. It had been a lot like living alone, really. It wasn't the same with Edgar and Alan. She couldn't seem to shake them if she tried.

Edgar was standing in the bathroom doorway, watching her, with a blue toothbrush in his right hand, a tube of Crest in the other. He was glaring, an expression that Missy was becoming used to seeing on him. She was surprised to see him with a toothbrush, though, because from everything she'd heard about teenage boys, she hadn't thought that they had the initiative to brush their teeth without being told to. "Are your parents in there?" The younger Frog sneered at the word, and she made a note in her head not to use it around him anymore.

"They're down in the shop already." He disappeared into the bathroom and slammed the door behind him. She heard the water in the sink start running and glanced at the parents' door again. No time like the present, she figured, and it was better that she learn the state of the sort of kitchen before she went grocery shopping. Her hand wrapped around the knob and she took a breath for courage before turning it. The door swung inward, and she felt along the wall for the light switch, flipping it. The room was only a hair bigger than hers, and she found it hard to believe, from the state of it, that anyone lived in the room. The bed was made, but the comforter was wrinkled like someone had been sleeping on top of it. The curtains were drawn, and made of a thick, heavy material that blocked out the light from the windows. If she had been half as paranoid as Edgar and Alan, she might have been concerned that the boy's parents were vampires.

To her a right she could see a short wall that jutted out from the other, only partway into the room. She walked around the partition and she realized at once what Alan had meant. It was a kitchenette, like the one that had been in their room the time that she and her father had stayed at a hotel to be closer to her mother in the hospital. There were two cabinets up high and a shelf beneath them, with a microwave on it. Beneath the shelf was a counter with a small sink on one side, and an empty box of cereal on the other. Set in the counter, closest to the floor, were two more cabinets, and a small white fridge. Kneeling, she pulled open the fridge and looked inside. A carton of milk, expired. A container of beef and broccoli, a half eaten burger with a handful of fries, and something fuzzy that might have once been a piece of fruit. Disgusted, she shut the fridge and turned to the cabinets instead. The two lowest cabinets were both empty, and between the top most ones she found an unopened box of cereal, and three bags of chips.

She shut the cabinets and left the bedroom, jogged down the stairs and cornered Edgar and Alan behind the counter. "You don't even have bread!"

They glanced at each other, and back at her. "What are you talking about?" Edgar asked her, and she turned and pointed up the stairs.

"How are you two still alive? You've got nothing at all up in that kitchen." Alan snorted and Edgar rolled his eyes.

"We're on the boardwalk." The younger Frog grunted at her and hoisted a box of comics up off the floor. "Go get something if you're hungry."

"You can't honestly expect me to believe that you survive on nothing but cotton candy and corn dogs." When neither of them answered her, she groaned in disgust. "Oh my god! I'm surprised you both are still breathing! It's not healthy to eat nothing but fried food all day!"

"Stop lecturing and go put some pants on." Edgar snapped at her, and she winced. Alan looked up from his box and zeroed in on her bare legs, turning red again. "This is a business, you can't be running around half naked."

Missy folded her arms over her chest and rolled her eyes. "Fine, do you have a pair of scissors I could borrow?" The boys looked at her like she was on something.

"What do you need scissors for?"

"It's hot." Missy said, slowly, like she was talking to a pair of five year olds. "I want to use the scissors." She made a cutting motion with her left hand. "To cut my jeans." She ran her hands down her legs to symbolize pants, and pulled them back up her thighs for shorts. "Into shorts." Edgar grunted at her and leaned over to open a drawer. He came back with a pair of scissors with black handles. He held them out to her, handle first, and she took them from him. "Thank you." He nodded and Missy turned away from the brothers and jogged back up the stairs, humming.

She dropped the scissors on her bed and opened the armoire. She wanted to see what Santa Carla was like in the sun, but first, she knew, she wanted a shower. Bad. She was grateful that as big a hurry as she had been in when she left the house in Seattle, she hadn't forgotten to take a few essentials from the bathroom. She doubted the Frog brothers even knew what conditioner was. She shook her head and threw a pair of jeans over her shoulder at the bed. She'd packed for cooler weather out of habit, and the balmy beach air was warmer than she was used to. She was sure a cool day in Santa Carla could rival Seattle's hottest scorcher, no trouble. While she had always been a summer sort of girl, and was certainly enjoying the new climate, it spelled bad things for her wardrobe. The only thing she'd brought with her that didn't have sleeves was a yellow, floral print camisole, and she weighed her options. She could cover up, and be miserable for the rest of the day, or she could show a little more skin that she was used to, and be somewhat comfortable. She tossed the camisole on the bed with her jeans and shut the armoire. Heck, she thought, when in Rome…

A shower had been just the thing she needed, she realized, to feel like herself again. No, she felt like a brand new person, and as she ran her brush through her hair, she was impatient to get out on the boardwalk again and see the world with the new Missy's eyes. Cutting the legs off of her jeans hadn't been as difficult as she had feared it would be, and when she was finished, she pulled on the edges until they frayed. "Perfect." She buttoned her new shorts right as her bedroom door came open, and she whipped around to glare at the intruder. "It's called knocking," she discovered that the intruder was Edgar. Figures.

"My house." He snapped.

"My room." She shot back, and he grunted. "Look, I don't want to fight you, Edgar, did you need something?" She didn't like how cranky the younger Frog made her. She wasn't used to being so disagreeable to someone who wasn't Renee, and she decided then that she would make an effort to be more amicable with Edgar from now forward.

If Edgar thought that her radical change in demeanor was unusual, it didn't show. "We wanted to know if you were going out."

"I wanted to see the boardwalk." Missy replied. "I didn't really get a chance to look around last night, what with the running around and trying to find a place to stay, and I think I'd really like to ride the carousel-"

Edgar waved his hands at her and stopped her. "If you're going out, can you pick up something to eat on your way back?"

Missy scoffed. "If you think I'm going to perpetuate your foul dietary habits you're crazy." Edgar made a face like he was either going to interrupt her, or ask her what perpetuate meant. Either way, she shushed him with a wave of her hand. "I wanted to go grocery shopping, anyway. There's tons of things you can make, even without a stove, and I'm not going to eat myself into an early grave just because you two don't know the difference between corn and a corn dog."

"Whatever, here." He tossed something at her, and when she bent to retrieve it, she realized it was a twenty dollar bill. "Try and get stuff that we're going to actually want to eat."

Missy just smiled. "Burgers and hotdogs are fine on occasion, Edgar, but not to live on."

"Yeah, well, we've survived just fine until now, Mom." He grunted the last word at her and walked away. She stared at her empty doorway for a few seconds before she let herself smile. Life with the Frogs was going to be difficult for all of them, she realized, but the twenty dollar bill in her pocket said that maybe, just maybe, Edgar and Alan were willing to try and make it work with her. She fished a fifty from between the pages of Oscar Wilde and it joined the Frogs' money in her pocket. She slipped her feet into her sneakers and laced them up, patting her thighs once and pushing off of the bed with a renewed sense of adventure.

She found Edgar behind the counter, ringing up a customer, and Alan, milling around the racks, putting out new comics. "I'm off." She called to them, her whole body itching with the excitement to be out on the boardwalk. Edgar looked up from his clipboard and she heard Alan stop. Edgar's eyes met hers, and he nodded once.

"Be careful."

Missy rolled her eyes at him and smiled. "Now who's the mom?"

Edgar glared. "You think we're kidding around with all the monster stuff, but we're not. Santa Carla is crawling with vampires."

Missy nodded her head, waving her hand dismissively. "I saw the memo, I got it."

"No, you don't get it." Edgar growled, and his sudden animosity paralyzed her. He came around from the counter and stopped in front of her. "You need to start taking us seriously, or you're going to get yourself killed out there." A shiver went down Missy's spine, and despite the fact that she was standing in the sun, she felt cold.

"Look, Edgar, Alan." She added, when she noticed that the darker haired Frog had snuck up behind her. "I hear you guys, I do, and I'll be careful. It's daylight, right? And vampires can't come out in the day." The Frog brothers stared out at the world beyond the door, bathed in sunlight, and visibly relaxed. "So I'm perfectly safe."

"Until sundown." Edgar amended, and Missy sighed.

"Right. I'm going now." She backed out the store, hesitating just outside the door. "If the Wolfman calls, take a message for me, would you?" She winked and turned away, but not quick enough to miss Edgar's last word.

"It's always funny until somebody gets eaten."

Missy wasn't going to let the Frogs' paranoia get to her. Vampires didn't exist, and even if they did, why would they come to California of all places? Wouldn't they be living some place where the sun didn't shine so vehemently?

The boardwalk was a different place during the day. It was like someone had flipped a switch, and Missy realized that things didn't seem quite as magical with the lights turned on. There was still something charming about the daytime boardwalk, and there were twice as many people during the day than she remembered there being at midnight. People heading to and coming from the beach, bathing suits everywhere she turned, and the roar of the roller coaster as it dipped and winded, its passengers screaming around every turn. She rode the carousel twice, and decided that she would try to ride a different horse every time until she'd ridden them all. Judging from the number of horses, and it was difficult to count them all when they were spinning, it would take her quite a while to ride them all.

The beach was packed with people. Adults with young children, and several groups of young men carrying surfboards under their arms. She walked the sand for ten minutes before she found a place that wasn't occupied, and sat down, undoing the laces on her shoes and wiggling her toes in the sand.

It was hard to relax. Even on a beach, with the sun warming her all over, all she could think about was what sort of progress Renee and the police might be making. She wouldn't be eighteen for another couple of months, and in the meantime, Renee could come along and take her back as soon as she was able to find her. Hiding was essential, she realized, but she wanted to enjoy her new life. How was she supposed to enjoy being away from Renee for the first time since she was twelve if she was constantly checking over her shoulder for her?

"Ugh!" She cried, kicking out at the sand and flopping onto her back, glaring up at the clear sky. Renee wouldn't give up, she knew that. Not until she turned eighteen, maybe not ever. How long would she have to keep looking over her shoulder until she finally saw Renee there?

She wondered if the Frogs had a television, she hadn't seen one, but it would be nice to be able to watch the news. By now, Renee had to know where her bus had been headed, and before long, the Seattle police would be in contact with the Santa Carla police, and they'd be looking for her. She would just have to hope that the local police wouldn't take the search for her too seriously.

Edgar and Alan didn't seem as happy to see her with grocery bags as she would have expected, and neither one of them seemed to appreciate the fifteen minute walk away from the boardwalk that she'd had to take to find a grocery store. She also noticed, as she struggled with the bags, that neither one of them seemed to have a chivalrous bone between them. "Um, help?" Alan was the first to react, coming around the counter to take the bags from her that were cutting the circulation off to her hands.

"You did see the fridge right?" Edgar asked her as she handed him a bag to carry. "All of this isn't going to fit."

"Oh, it's mostly dry or canned stuff, you'd be surprised." Missy led the way to the small kitchen and dropped the last few bags on the floor. "Okay, dry goods, top cabinets, canned goods, bottom cabinets. That way, if something falls out of the top cabinets and clonks you on the head, it won't be a can!" She chirped, and the brothers winced at her cheery nature.

"Did you get a lobotomy while you were out?" Edgar raised an eyebrow at her, and she glared.

"Shut up and help your brother put the groceries away."

"You're not helping?" He asked, and she scoffed.

"I carried them all the way here. But you two have fun!" Missy slapped him on the back and left, leaving them to stare after her back, and wonder what exactly they'd gotten themselves into.

Thank you for reading.

#{;the breaking point}#the lost boys #lost boys #lost boys fan fiction

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fumpkins · 6 years

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How a lesbian love story is bypassing the Indian censors

Image copyright Jio Movie Theater/LonerangerProductions

Image caption Lesbianlove story Maaya 2 would have struggled to make it on to Indian TELEVISION.

Low- expense smart devices and inexpensive mobile information mean Indians are now hungrily taking in material over the little screen. And this is opening a brand-new world of innovative flexibility for the nation’s show business.

Film director Krishna Bhatt states the web has actually provided her “the power to show exactly the story I want to tell”.

She has actually made 2 web-based programs. One of them, Maaya 2, centres around a lesbian love story – a topic that would have been extremely challenging to enter into movie theaters or on tv inIndia

“To show lovemaking in a theatre I will have to go through 10,000 censor rules,” states MsBhatt

“My kisses will get cut based on very stupid things. You’re not allowed to show something like that even on TV.”

While movies and tv series are governed by rigorous censorship guidelines in India, web-based programs have actually been mostly uncontrolled – up until now a minimum of.

Image caption DirectorKrishna Bhatt states digital has actually provided her a”new sense of freedom”

“If you can give everything you want to give without anybody breathing down your neck, it’s like a new sense of freedom, it’s like independence,” states Ms Bhatt.

“That’s what digital does for you.”

Indian prime-time TELEVISION is mostly controlled by household dramas that frequently go on for many years, including countless episodes.

This not just restricts chances for other programs to get on air, however likewise limits the type of stories that can be informed.

So stars, authors and directors are taking pleasure in new-found liberties that online provides.

Media playback is unsupported on your gadget

Media captionBollywood skill discovers brand-new audiences on phones

AtChandivali Studio in north Mumbai, for instance, they’re shooting a Hindi language program called Apharan (Kidnapping).

It will be a long day – shooting started early in the early morning and will go on up until late in the night. The race is on to total the 11 episodes that are set up for release in November over ALTBalaji, a web-based video-on-demand platform offered in 96 nations.

On an al fresco set, constructed to appear like a street market in a little Indian town, Arunoday Singh is playing the protagonist in a plot about a previous police officer captured in a kidnapping failed.

He has actually appeared in numerous mainstream Bollywood motion pictures, however constantly in smaller sized functions.

“I’ve gotten a bit pigeonholed in the Bollywood system for the last four to five years,” he states. “I didn’t end up being a huge star, however neither am I unidentified.

Image caption ActorArunoday Singh states he got pigeonholed inBollywood

“So casting directors feel like they know what I’m capable of and they don’t even give me an audition.”

Online home entertainment has actually opened brand-new doors for him.

Apharanis simply among lots of web series being made in India this year, as focus has actually relied on the chances provided by web-based home entertainment.

“For actors, for writers especially, there’s a lot more opportunity now, which is always nice, because it’s a very cut-throat kind of a business,” states MrSingh

Foreign business see the possible too, with Netflix and Amazon investing greatly in the Indian market.

Image caption Apharanis due for release inNovember

But how do any of them wish to earn money?

Ina mass market like India, where there are more than 300 million mobile phone users, memberships might be a huge income source.

“Unlike television, digital is an over-the-top or OTT business, which means it eliminates the distributor or the middle man,” states Nachiket Pantvaidya, president of ALTBalaji.

“So you get the entire amount that a viewer pays to subscribe to your content. That is something that is really attractive about the digital business for content producers.”

ALTBalaji wants to reach as numerous as 200 million audiences. But there are numerous difficulties – getting the rates right is among them.

Image copyright ALTBalaji

Image caption ALTBalaji states it needs to get its rates and its content right for its customers.

“What is extremely important is that we want to keep our net pricing to the consumer at less than a rupee a day (1p; 1.4 cents),” states MrPantvaidya

“I think that’s the point at which individuals will buy into this phenomenon.”

Then, it has to do with making the ideal material.

“Ninety-five per cent of Indian homes have only one television, so individual choice is restricted. We are not catering to someone who’s dropped off television. We are catering to a person who likes to watch something different when he or she is watching it with their family, and something different when the consumption is individual,”Mr Pantvaidya describes.

“To define that content and to target it has been a challenge.”

MoreTechnology of Business

But this boom depends greatly on mobile information rates staying low inIndia

That’sthe outcome of an extreme cost war in the nation’s combining telecoms market, with business like Vodafone Idea, Airtel, Jio and BSNL, combating difficult to draw in customers. No- one is rather sure for how long the mobile operators will have the ability to sustain such low costs.

But while they do, web-based home entertainment continues to promise to the 10s of countless stars, directors and authors lingering in Mumbai for their huge break.

FollowTechnology of Business editor Matthew Wall on Twitter andFacebook

Click here for more Technology of Business features

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2018/10/02/how-a-lesbian-love-story-is-bypassing-the-indian-censors/

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theteamoth · 7 years

Text

Massive Ask Meme

I was tagged by @grey-skies-full-moon Rules: Tag 20 people (I don’t know that much people, but I’ll do my best)

Well, here goes something, mates.

Your last:

1. Drink: Coffee with spices, just a couple hours ago.

2. Phone Call: from my friend Liyba.

3. Text message: also from my other friend, Jenya.

4. Song you listened to: Mother Of Flame by Miracle Of Sound ft. Sharm. Randomly appeared on my playlist, but I like Gavin Dunne and the vocals are just... Epic and breathtaking.

5. Time you cried: I... think it happened in June. For personal reasons.

Have You:

6. Dated someone twice: Nope.

7. Kissed someone and regretted it: Kinda. Maybe. I don’t know anymore.

8. Been cheated on: Technically? Yeah, it happened once.

9. Lost someone special: Yes.

10. Been depressed: I still am! xD But seriously – yeah. I’m slowly getting better, though.

11: Gotten drunk and thrown up: Actually, no, never. Hangover... That’s a whole other (and messy) story.

List 3 Favorite Colors:

12. Electric blue.

13. Black

14: Grey and grayish colours.

In the last year, have you…

15. Made new friends: I’ve met new people, so yeah, I hope I can consider them my friends.

16. Fallen out of love: Heh... Yes. Should’ve happened f*cking lot sooner.

17. Laughed until you cried: Once or twice. Also I tend to hiccup and snort. xD

18. Found out someone was talking about you: Nope.

19. Met someone who changed you: ...probably. Don’t know yet.

20. Found out who your friends are: People I can rely on and trust with my life. Even if we literally (and figuratively) drifted apart.

21. Kissed someone on your FB list: Excluding family members – yes, And it made things and a friendship very complicated for a while.

GENERAL:

22. How many Facebook friends do you know in real life: A small number, maybe 8 or 10 people.

23. Do you have any pets: I had a cat before, but now... I WISH I COULD AFFORD A PET DAMMIT. T_T

24. Do you want to change your name: My last name, yes. I became dissatisfied with it over time.

25. What did you do for your last birthday: I spent it alongside my friends – they organized a great party!

26. What time did you wake up: I often wake up at random times and turning off alarm while asleep is the new norm. Today it was at 6:47.

27. What were you doing at midnight last night: Watching YouTube and talking to a friend via VK.)

28. Name something you can’t wait for: When I can live my own life.

29. When was the last time you saw your Mom: Right now.) She sits on my right.

30. What is one thing you wish you could change in your life: I wish I could regularly see and touch all my friends and loved ones.

31. What are you listening to right now: Game of Thrones soundtrack. Specifically, “Mhysa”

32. Have you ever talked to a person named Tom: My close friend is called Tom. Or Toma.)

33. Something that is getting on your nerves: Family rows, all that shouting and screaming and blaming. Also, myself – sometimes. But mostly I am chill and calm... maybe too calm. At least I think so. I want to get better. I’m getting there. Slowly, but I do.

34. Most visited website: YouTube, VK, Tumblr and my frpg forum.

35. Mole/s: I’ve got one on the back my neck and on my forehead. Also one on my back.

36. Mark/s: Several scars – on my neck and face (had an operation), a gunpowder burn right under my knee, several long thin scars on my chest from a knife... Those are the most prominent and fresh. Other scars faded with time, but are still visible if you take a closer look.

37. Childhood dream: A lot of them. Can’t remember all anymore, but I dreamed to be a superhero.

38. Hair color: Light-brown, maybe... blonde?? Don’t know. xD

39. Long or short hair: Short at the moment. Had shoulder-length hair for a long while, but grew tired of ‘em. Besides, this summer was fricking HOT – nearly 40 C.

40. Do you have a crush on someone? ... yes. Wish I didn’t.

41. What do you like about yourself: Uh... I don’t know, actually. But I’m loyal to those I consider friends and family, maybe to a fault. I like to think I’m creative and smart, even

42. Piercings: Nope.) I thought about it but it ain’t my style.

43. Blood type: B +.

44: Nicknames: Novac, Dobric, “that feathered smartass”... xDD

45. Relationship status: single.

46. Zodiac: Leo/Year of the Rooster.

47. Pronouns: He/Him.

48. Favorite TV show(s): Can’t say I have ONE. But I have a lot of favorites – Marvel series (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, etc.), Fullmetal Alchemist, My Hero Academia, Game of Thrones, Brooklyn 99... Those I do enjoy for multitude of reasons.)

49. Tattoos: Nope. Not yet, anyways. Considering it – permanent mods should have personal weight and meaning; at least, for me they should reflect something.

50. Right or left hand: Right-handed.

51. Surgery: The most serious operation happened in 2014. I had (and still have, but it’s non-malignant) a tumor; bone tissues were slowly growing through my head. Right under my hypophysis, right behind my left eye and near my carotid artery. It wracked me with migraines and flashes of intense pain, occasionally I blacked out from pain and lack of blood supply (it was kinda strangling my carotid artery). So, doctors cut almost everything out by going directly through my face and carotid artery. So, like that. But hey, I’m alive!

52. Hair dyed a different color: It’s a nice idea, but I can’t decide on a colour.

53. Sports: Swimming and yoga!

54. Vacation: If I could go with all my friends at Crimea, it would be awesome. Unfortunately they all live abroad and getting to Crimea is problematic as f*ck. Also, money is the issue.

55. Shoes: Good sneakers are pretty great, occasionally sandals... But I love my grinders to death – solid, comfortable, practical shoes. Also good in a fight.

56. Eating: YES

57. Drinking: Yep.)

58. I’m about to: post this ask meme and tag people.)

59. Waiting for: Something good to happen.

60. Want: to understand what I want from myself and life. And to get over my inconvenient crush.

61. Get married: definitely not now and not in the next few years. If it happens, it happens. But not soon.

62. Career: video game writer, writer, lawyer, psychologist... Maybe. I am at loss right now. Now I just started working as a copyrighter.

WHICH IS BETTER:

63. Hugs or kisses: Can I choose both? Both is good! But kisses from someone I love and cherish are the best. And yeah, I also want a hug followed with a smooch.

64. Lips or eyes: Both!

65. Shorter or taller: Honestly... Being almost 6,5 feet – or 1,97 in metric – makes me higher than most. Can’t say I have a preference, but inevitably my SO’s were significantly shorter than me. Maybe I do have a thing for shorter people.

66. Older or younger: That depends.

67. Nice arms or nice stomach: I... don’t know? Can’t say it matters to me that much.

68. Sensitive or loud: … Again, a bit of both.

69. Hook up or relationship: Relationship. Demisexual here!

70. Troublemaker or hesitant: I’m hesitant for the most part, and easily get stuck in routines, but I can be a troublemaker too. Both are good in their own ways and time. But I love a little chaos and fun, that’s for sure – it is necessary not to stagnate.

HAVE YOU EVER:

71. Kissed a stranger: Such thing happened.

72. Drank hard liquor: Define HARD. xD The hardest liquor I ever drank was undiluted absinthe, 80%. Delicious!~

73. Lost glasses/contact lenses: I wear glasses since 4, but had never lost them.

74. Turned someone down: Yes.

75. Sex on first date: No. It’s too fast, too much for me.

76. Broken someone’s heart: I think so. Yes. Out of necessity.

77. Had your heart broken: Multiple times.

78. Been arrested: Almost. I can be fast when it’s necessary.)

79. Cried when someone died: I sobbed and screamed.

80. Fallen for a friend: Yes. And THAT is what makes our friendship complicated. She doesn’t need it, I understand it and agree with her – she doesn’t know about my crush. My emotions... Well, they ain’t making things easier. Stupid heart.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN:

81. Yourself: Not exactly. I try to.

82. Miracles: Weird shit happens so yeah! xD I try to keep an open mind and consider myself agnostic.

83. Love at first sight: Hard to say. I don’t think so – there may be strong attraction (which most people confuse with lust), deep understanding and some solid intuitive feelings, but not love. Love is something you understand and gain through work, through understanding, knowing your SO on a much deeper level, both physical and spiritual.

84. Santa Claus: HOW CAN YOU ASK THAT QUESTION THERE ARE CHILDREN ON THIS SITE

85. Kiss on the first date: Maybe. It depends.

OTHER:

86. Current best friend: Which one?) I’ve known mine for ages and I will kill for them, if needed. They saved my life and mind and I am grateful beyond simple words.

87. Eye color: Blue-grey, but some people say I have a hint of green.

88. Favorite movie: “The Intouchables”. SERIOUSLY GUYS HAVE YOU SEEN IT?! MY HEART. MY HEART.

tagging: @saisai-chan, @breeeliss, @ferisae, @jaeger-of-freiheit, @missdreawrites, @midnightfuckingmayor, @charmer-of-wind, @thehollowkidvg

#me #ask meme #heh it really was fun!#also #my 666 post! xD

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wendynerdwrites · 7 years

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Im glad that u also like archer. Ive been rewatching it (im on s2) and i feel guilty as a feminist for liking it so much :( i know a lot of the jokes are supposed to be ironic but i still feel bad for laughing, and my bf has made comments abt "how can u laugh at that as a feminist" (he isnt one, hes using it as a gotcha). How do u feel about this? Any advice for separating myself from toxic fandom to just be able to enjoy something problematic? Love ur blog btw happy friday 💋💋

Thanks, and don’t worry, anon: You’re not a bad feminist.

It’s funny you ask this, but I used to have an entire essay series on this exact topic, and on Archer, particularly!

My philosophy is: don’t ignore the problematic, examine it. Use it as a springboard for analysis so you can learn more about the issue conveyed. Use your problematic responsibly! Because, let’s be honest, there ARE no unproblematic pieces of media. So just use it to educate yourself instead. For instance: my love of West Side Story (starring Natalie Wood as the Puerto Rican Maria) got me to learn more about the issues of white-washing.

Being a feminist is not about being perfect, it’s about learning and being open to examination and learning. Use your fandom for good!

Laughter is the balm for the soul. And listening to your boyfriend telling you how to be a feminist… less so. Kind of the opposite.

My old articles are lost, for the most part, but under the cut, I’ve pasted them for reference and included a great video on satire that also very easily applies to this discussion (just substitute feminism with the Holocaust)

Our Faves Are Problematic (And So Can You!)

Nothing and no one is perfect, so isnt it about time we learn how to call out the things we love?

We are all familiar with guilty pleasures: those things we like in spite of ourselves, that we are ashamed to admit we enjoy. Usually the term is applied to something we enjoy despite a perceived “lameness”, or because we’re not the right demographic for something. For instance, I still have a deep, abiding affection for Sailor Moon: that colorful, stock-footage-laced Japanese phenomenon that still gets me shouting “MOON PRISM POWER!” when I’m in the right mood. Yes, childhood is over, and yes, the show’s American dub did give me incest panic as a child, but I can’t help but love it.

But then there is the more difficult brand of guilty pleasures guilty pleasures that involve actual guilt instead of “mild embarrassment”. I’m talking about problematic faves the stuff that we love despite it containing clearly objectionable material.

willing18

(Image copyright Vertigo Comics)

…This is a panel from Bill Willingham’s Fables. The character there is Bigby Wolf, one of the main (anti) heroes of the story and the character the writer identifies with most. The person Bigby is waxing poetically on pro-Zionism to is someone literally called “The Adversary”.

Fables also happens to be one of my favorite comic book series on the planet.

Safe to say the issues surrounding Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East are a bit more complicated than that. And my own feelings on the matter are far more complicated. But this glorification of Israeli military policy is… um… in very tame terms… uncomfortable. After reading this, I resolved to only check Fables out of the library: a way for me to enjoy these comics in a legal way without financially supporting these ideas, however indirectly.

There are other problems with Fables: a lack of ethnic diversity, some murky racial and class commentary, and instances of some objectionable tropes, but there is a lot to recommend of these books as well. The stories are fantastic, the art brilliant, the characters well-fleshed out, and there is a definite progressive take on issues like gender and sexuality. But as much as I love this series, there is no getting around the fact that these stories have issues.

No excuses.

But it’s not just Fables that has disappointed me in the past. I am now and forever a Trekker, yet despite how horribly sexist episodes like “The Turnabout Intruder” are, or the very troubling anti-Semitic coding of the Ferengi. The Star Wars prequels famously had racist caricatures with the Trade Federation and the infamous Jar Jar Binks.

In the world of media, there’s no shortage of problematic content. From the novels of Robert Heinlein containing pro-fascist commentary, to HBO’s Game of Thrones misogynistic adaptation decisions, there’s nothing that is quite free of some messed up messages, subtle and blatant alike.

Now, when we talk about such media, we don’t merely mean triggering factors (i.e. the presentation, portrayal, or discussion of potentially traumatizing issues like domestic abuse, racism, hate crimes, substance abuse, or sexual assault), but rather how these matters are portrayed. A piece of media, such as Marvel and Netflix’s excellent Jessica Jones series, can portray certain issues (such as sexual assault, domestic violence, and mental illness) in a respectful, progressive, and sensitive light. Thus, while the content of the show can be triggering, the skill with which they portray these matters keeps it from being problematic.

In contrast, something like Game of Thrones, which portrays sexual assault in a thoroughly insensitive, exploitative, and misogynistic manner, is highly problematic.

Unfortunately, progress has been a slow-moving process, with many issues such as race, gender, sexual identity, mental illness, substance abuse, and violence only being examined in a more nuanced way fairly recently. As a result, almost all media is problematic in one way or another. Especially since even today, the majority of executives crafting, publishing, and greenlighting books, shows, comics, movies, and other forms of media are in fact cisgendered, heterosexual white men.

So what do we do?

Good news: here at Fandom Following, we don’t believe in dropping something you like just because it’s problematic. Why?

Because knowing, examining, and yes, even appreciating problematic content can be incredibly important. While certain content can be damaging, it can also teach us a great deal. Not only about current issues, but also about how to go about discussing these matters, and constructing narratives in general.

The racial issues in things like Star Wars and Star Trek can teach us much about how coding works, and how to avoid reinforcing stereotypes. The exploitation of women and rape on Game of Thrones can open up a dialogue of how to portray these things properly and improperly.

There are three tricks to enjoying problematic media: 1) Recognizing that there is an issue, 2) Being ready for a dialogue, and 3) Not ignoring or silencing the complaints about said issues.

Well, we here at Fandom Following have decided to tackle this issue head on with a series called “Our Faves Are Problematic (And So Can You!)”, where we will be exploring specific media franchises, creators, and works and, specifically, the problematic content they contain. In this series, we’ll be examining the issues, talking about why they’re important, discussing what this piece of media did wrong, how to approach the issue in a more progressive way, and the best ways to go about discussing the issue itself. Various writers will be contributing to this project, and we’re excited to present this feature to you!

So let’s get down and dirty, people. We all have our problematic faves. Let’s talk about them.

My Face is Problematic: Archer

Honestly, doing a post like this on Archer, a show which is deliberate in its dark humor, is a bit hard for me. Not because I like the show, but because I think there’s true validity in the argument that humor and narratives about really messed up, problematic stuff has its place. The show exists to be as outlandish and absurd as possible. The extremes and the awfulness of the characters’ personalities and their actions is the point.

I VUZ BORN IN DUSSELDORF AND THAT IS VY THEY CALL ME ROLF!

Joking about awful things, awful circumstances, and awful people is hardly new ground for comedy to cover, nor does it send a poor message, necessarily. Mel Brooks wrote a movie in which one of the characters was a Nazi, who wrote an overblown pro-Nazi musical produced by men deliberately trying to make a flop. Springtime For Hitler, as it exists in our universe, is not problematic. The Nazis are the butt of the joke, in which any pro-Nazi sentiment can only function if it is wildly fabricated and over-the-top, and even then, it will still be taken for satire. Because Nazis are utterly terrible, they built their movement on total bullshit that they dressed up in shiny boots and Hugo Boss uniforms and German exceptionalism and “glory”. This song-and-dance number about “Don’t be stupid, be a smartie, come and join the Nazi party” only ever deserves to be a joke, as the Jew who wrote it can tell you. Nazis fucking suck and it’s hilarious that anyone would ever suggest otherwise.

There’s justice in reducing Nazis to self-parody, and doubling down on that by making a joke about them being reduced to self-parody. Especially when said self-parody and depiction of it is crafted by the very people Hitler tried to destroy. No one enjoys or masters mocking Nazis like the Jews. Plain and simple.

Joking about awful things and how terrible they are can be a good way to process things and not allow them to hurt you anymore. Comedy, at its core, is a defense mechanism against horror and pain. There’s a reason slapstick is a classic subgenre of comedy that people have built entire careers around. Laugh at terror and pain to make it go away. Unfortunately, some of the things we manage to find humor in can really make you wonder if were all just terrible and have no limits.

Angela’s Ashes is a memoir by Frank McCourt about his impoverished, abusive, dangerous childhood in Ireland. In it, he chronicles his own starvation, life-threatening illness, abuse, and suffering at the hands of alcoholism and brutality from adult authority figures. He was a child laborer who went days without food while his father drank away the family’s money and abused the rest of the family, who often came down with horrifying illnesses as a result of the terrible conditions he lived in, and spent his formative years suffering along with all the people he loved. Three of his infant siblings die within the space of a chapter. We get a glimpse of the time when his father, overjoyed at the birth of his daughter, finds the will to stop drinking, stop mistreating his family, go to work, provide for his family, and just generally be a better person so that his children don’t have to suffer. For a short period, the McCourts have food, heat, and happiness. Then the baby promptly dies and Frank’s father is back in the pubs, once again squandering any pay he manages to acquire on alcohol and returning home at three am to scream at and beat his wife while his remaining children try to cover their ears and sleep on the cold ground.

Along with being praised for it being a both an unflinchingly brutal depiction of poverty and a testament to the triumph of the human spirit, the book is also praised for its humor.

Remember: Angela’s Ashes is a true story written by the very man who suffered through all of these horrible things. And it’s considered a pretty funny book. And the author who, once again, is the person who actually suffered all of these horrible things, actually did intentionally try to make people laugh as they read about that time he was in the hospital with Typhoid Fever and enjoyed it because it was the first time he’d been in a place where he was fed regularly and got to sleep in a warm bed.

Hilarious.

That being said, there’s satire and dark humor, and there’s just gratuitous, shock-jock bullshit. There are jokes that are terrible simply because of what they’re about and how they’re handled. George Carlin said that anything can be made funny, even rape, if you imagine Elmer Fudd raping Porky Pig.

If we can build entire films and musicals about how any pro-Hitler sentiment can only ever be taken as satire, isn’t that proof that you can joke about anything?

Yes, you can, but that doesn’t mean you should try, that the joke is funny, or that it’s alright, necessarily. Maybe Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, and Springtime for Hitler prove that anything can be made funny and that’s okay. But if that’s true (and no, I’m not saying that it is), that still doesn’t mean every attempt at making something funny is either acceptable or funny.

Springtime for Hitler is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for any attempt to make a terrible subject the object of humor. Standards need to exist.

Unfortunately, the line between good or acceptable dark humor and simply gratuitous, insensitive, inherently problematic jokes can blur. The excuse of humor can only go so far. Yes, make light of Nazis. But there’s still a point where “humor” is used an excuse for people to act like assholes. And it’s an excuse that is used all too often. Radio Shock Jocks have been using that excuse to help reinforce racism and rape culture for quite a while. Whether certain dudebros like it or not, there’s a point where it stops being gross-out and just starts being gross.

Which brings me to Archer, the animated spy comedy on FX that premiered in 2011. Like many comedy series like Seinfeld or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a major part of the premise is that certain characters are, quite simply, terrible people. These characters and their abhorrent behavior is the joke. And, as the show is about spies, these terrible people are often put into highly dangerous, outlandish, and traumatizing situations.

So, the main characters, by virtue of their profession, spend a lot of time killing people in cold blood. Or trying to seduce or manipulate enemies. Or engaging in clandestine operations of sabotage that harm a lot of people. Horrible, violent things are going to happen, things violent enough to serve as narratives on their own. But most of the characters are as awful as the situations they encounter, so the horror is amplified. And it’s a comedy.

Indeed, in the first episode of the fifth season, we get the whole main ensemble recounting all of their actions and experiences working for the spy agency ISIS that we’d witnessed over the course of the show’s run at that point. Drag racing with the Yakuza, knee-capping the Irish mob, encountering human traffickers, 30 year affairs with the head of the KGB that only ended when the guy was blown up because one of the ISIS members had choke sex with the victim’s cyborg replacement, actual piracy, paying homeless people to fight for spectators, defling a corpse, defiling a different corpse, sexual assault, kidnapping the pope, blowing up oil pipelines, “smuggling Mexicans”

Yeah.

There are comedic arcs about cancer, illegal immigration, kinky S&M bondage murders, cocaine addiction… a lot of stuff, basically.

Now, take those situations, and add in characters who get aroused by things like homeless people, being choked, sex with food, and the thought of their mother dying. Who spend their weekends starting fires, making hybrid pig-people, rubbing sand into the eyes of their employees, competing in underground Chinese Fighting Fish tournaments, and calling in bomb threats so that they can get a table at a fancy restaurant. You get the idea.

And it’s all totally awesome and hilarious and god damn it I kind of love these characters.

This show has a season-long sub-arc about one of the main characters getting so aggressively addicted to cocaine that she not only consumes (literally) half a ton of it in the space of a few months, but almost gets her head chopped off for buying amphetamines from the Yakuza with counterfeit money. It’s one of the most incredible things the show has done.

Pictured: An absurdly self-centered man feeling genuine dismay and concern over his friend risking her life to achieve an unrealistic standard of beauty.

The title character has a butler named Woodhouse who practically raised him. One of the first interactions we witness between them is Archer not only threatening to rub sand into Woodhouse’s “dead little eyes”, but making him go out and buy the sand himself and check if they grade it, because he wants the sand to be coarse. He’s also done things like make the man eat a bowl of spiderwebs and deliberately keep him in the dark about his brother’s death and funeral.

Another character is a mad scientist and possible clone of Adolf Hitler who kills a young intern by giving him a drug designed to turn him gay. That’s one of the less disturbing things Dr. Krieger has done.

Frequent gags on this show include one guy repeatedly getting shot, another character repeatedly getting paralyzed (it’s complicated), people trying to remember the inappropriate puns that they wanted say as one-liners, the horrific abuse and neglect Sterling Archer has received from his mother his entire life, and basically everyone being a sex-maniac.

There are plots revolving around mind-control, drugging people, and hypnotism. You can imagine the paths some of those episodes go down. Yes, there is a character that has tried to sexually assault one of her sleeping co-workers. And later deposited two unconscious, naked coworkers in a bathroom stall with an octopus, in an episode that has already made tentacle hentai jokes. Yes, the openly gay character on the show is often the target of jokes about him being gay or a woman from his coworkers. Yes, the female lead, a black woman, is referred to as a “quadroon” at one point by one of the characters.

Yes, the following exchange of dialogue does take place in an early episode:

“Oh my god, you killed a hooker!”

“Call-girl!”

“No, Cyril, when they’re dead, they’re just hookers!”

And yet… Oh my god. How it manages to play around with stuff in an amazing fashion. For one thing, it is amazing how often this show skewers micro-aggressions and fucks around with stereotypes. And, despite how unabashedly messed up it is, the writing in it actually manages to be oddly pro-social progress in ways that most modern media doesn’t even seem to be aware of.

I take pride in my sex work and I will not put up with your bullshit!

For instance the “hooker” referred to in that exchange? (spoiler alert: she wasn’t really dead) She’s Trinette, and she an unbelievably refreshing and strangely progressive depiction of a sex worker. While she’s a minor character, every time she shows up, it’s awesome. Trinette is a sex worker who is unashamed of her job, a woman who truly does take pride in and enjoy her work, who does not put up with poor behavior from her clients, and is just generally awesome. She call people out and makes them pay for any mistreatment she receives, from calling out micro-aggressions by insisting on her preferred terminology for her profession (“Call-girl, you puke!”), shaming men for their sexual misdeeds (“How can you cheat on Lana bare-back?!”), demanding restitution for any injuries or threats she’s suffered (Threatening Archer into giving her his car after he fakes her death and stuffs her in a rug to fool Cyril into thinking he killed her), and determining her work and clients (“What about Trinette? She said that? Damn it!”). When she has a baby, she gives it her last name along with his father’s (“Magoon-Archer”) and she unapologetically proud of her Irish heritage. She’s easily one of the most functional characters in the show, and every one of her appearances on the show manage to defy at least one whore-phobic trope a minute. She’s the best.

Then there’s the show’s handling of race, which is mixed. While arguably the most important female character in the series (the show, despite its name, is very, very much an ensemble, especially as the series progresses. But in the early episodes when they focussed on fewer characters, she was the one who got the most screentime) is Lana Kane, a highly-competent (for ISIS) African American woman who is really, really well-developed, there is also the fact that she’s the only POC in the main cast. Granted, part of that IS the point. One of the earliest episodes is “Diversity Hire”, where, aside from Lana, the spy agency is so overwhelmingly white that they hire a “diversity double-whammy!” Conway Stern, a black Jew.

“Sammy Gay-vis Junior!”

Now, granted, that doesn’t sound great the way I describe it, but there are so many great moments in this episode alone. For instance, when Mallory Archer, terrible woman and owner of the spy agency mentions their lack of diversity, Cyril, the tragically white accountant and “nice guy” puts his hands on Lana’s shoulder and says he thinks they’re pretty diverse, a statement Lana finds hilarious. Cue Sterling Archer, other horrible person, telling Lana she’s “black-ish”, then responding to her offense at this with “Well, you freaked out when I said quadroon!”. The framing of this entire discourse is that Cyril and Archer are fucking idiots and Lana is of course taking offense because, duh, she should. The episode proceeds with a lot of references and discussion about racism, highlighting casual racism in a nuanced, funny, and organic way. For instance, Archer’s relief that Conway didn’t sleep with his mother. While Archer freaks out about anyone sleeping with his mother, regardless of race, Conway believes it’s racism on Archer’s fault. And in no way does the narrative act like he’s overly-sensitive or irrational for thinking that. Because the stereotype about black men seducing white women and fear from white men about this is still a very real, pervasive thing that has somehow managed to survive in our “enlightened” times. Of course Conway encountering a guy who displays a downright violent fixation on whether or not his new black coworker is sleeping with his mother will assume it’s a race thing. Because why would anyone be so preoccupied with such an idea? In that situation, it’s almost certainly based on the long-standing paranoia white men have about black men’s sexuality “conquering their women.” It’s one of the most common varieties of anti-blackness in existence.

Of course, since it’s Archer, who has kidnapped a LOT of people under the suspicion that they were having sex with his mom, we know this is the one case that it isn’t racism. It’s Archer’s disturbing, Oedipal relationship with his mother. He even kidnapped and threatened his role model, Burt Reynolds, for dating his mother. When he says “Not in a racist way” to Conway in this episode, it’s actually true. He’s just honestly that screwed up where his mother is concerned.

Conway’s conclusions on this, regardless, are still framed as a totally understandable. To the point where the episodes suggests that it would make no sense for Conway to think otherwise. Part of the joke is that no, Archer isn’t a horrible racist at all. He’s way too screwed up for his actions to be motivated by racism.

And before anyone asks, no, this wasn’t the “episode that acknowledges that racism is a thing.” You know the ones… The episodes that talk about race and why racism is bad to prove to the audience that they’re not racist, then proceed with the rest of the show, which never acknowledges race and racism again. There are frequent instances of highlighting racism, from violent outright bigotry to common micro-aggressions to clueless white people demanding how the thing they just did/said could POSSIBLY be considered racist! They’re not racist! How is THAT racist?! Cue Lana face-palming.

I just really, really like this. It doesn’t just end there, either. Racism is called out pretty frequently on this show, and not in a cliche, strawman way. Nor is it treated like something that only exists in the form of aggressively bigoted bad people shouting slurs and holding cross burnings. Nope. The “heroes” of this show just say shit that you could easily imagine someone saying in real life, shortly before getting defensive about any racism on their part. It’s treated as a common, pervasive thing that Lana and other PoC have to deal with every day, and the offense they take at it is treated as nothing short of sympathetic or justified (even in the cases of misunderstandings, like with Conway). This includes Mallory telling Lana to “put [the race card] back in the deck!” as reminder of how much of an unapologetic douche Mallory is.

It’s made clear: people say and do some super racist shit on a regular basis with realizing it or meaning to, and regardless, it’s still uncool and people have every right to get upset and call you out on it. See: Ray’s bionic hand at the end of season six.

Lana’s reactions and how they’re framed is usually pretty awesome. Mostly they come in the form of small, reasonable confrontations, which are never framed as an overreaction on her part. The fact that she “freaked out” when Archer called her a quadroon is framed as “well, duh, of course, she should.” Then there are instances like when she, Archer, and their child visit a high-end nursery school where they encounter a pretty obvious racist. The guy ignores and dismisses Lana at first, then expresses surprise at the fact that she’s the mother of the child (despite the baby being black), remarking about the “times we live in” and telling Lana “good for you!” when she informs him that yes, she is the mother, not the nanny or the maid.

Not all of the racism stuff stems from Lana being back, either. They skewer bigotry against Latinos on a pretty regular basis. When an Irish mobster rants about Latinos (he doesn’t refer to them by that name) “taking American jobs!”, Archer immediately calls bullshit, recalling actual history of the Irish being accused of that exact same thing during the mass immigration of the Irish to America during the potato famine, and it’s just as shitty and bigoted to say such things about immigrants now as it was in 1842. He is extremely irate about a mission ISIS is assigned to do on behalf of border patrol to arrest people who just want to get a job, and he ends up siding with and befriending the Mexican illegal immigrants he encounters. All of this while aspects of certain Latinx cultures are often highlighted, often very favorably (“Ramone is Latino, so he’s not afraid to express affection.”)

That being said, there are still a lot of issues in the show. The lack of diversity is definitely an albatross around this show’s neck. Especially so many seasons after the “Diversity Hire” episode. While I do praise Archer for not treating racism as a thing that is rare and only needs to be addressed in one twenty-minute block of time, it is telling that the lack of diversity at ISIS is never addressed again.

Then there’s the approach to sexuality. The show loves gross-out sex humor, especially regarding Krieger. And the depiction of sexuality is actually pretty mixed. On one hand, the openly gay character in the show adheres to a lot of stereotypes about gay men: he mocks Lana about her “knock-off Fiacci drawers”, his go-to alias is “Carl Channing”, his free time is spent at raves, and he loves to make effeminate poses. He’s also a frequent target of homophobic jokes and remarks. His outrage at this is treated as being every bit as valid as Lana’s, but it doesn’t change the fact that their main gay character is basically ALL of the stereotypes, as are a number of the other gay characters.

“Alright! Were off to get our scrotums waxed!”

Then there is the sexual assault. Which, once again, is called out for being what it is, in defiance of many common biases (such as the idea that female-on-male sexual assault isn’t a thing). But this show is way too flippant about this.

While I consider Archer to be very sex-positive, allowing every character, regardless of sex, age, or orientation, to be comfortable and expressive about their sexuality without judgment (a lot of jokes, yes, but not any that come off as particularly shaming). Almost every character, male or female spends a fair amount of time naked or scantily clad. We see Archer stripped down just as often as Lana. And the fan service isn’t relegated to just women who adhere to the typical youth and weight obsessed eurocentric standards we all know and hate.

Pam, who is a big woman (and often the target of fat jokes, which the show always treats as nothing short of detestable) is a total sex goddess who grows to be utterly confident in herself as a woman to the point where she’s giving Mallory (one of the most desired women on the show) advice. When she reveals that she keep ingesting cocaine because it’s made her thin with big boobs, Archer is utterly dismayed, telling her she was way better off the way she was, acting horrified that she’d risk her life to be “hot”, and just generally freaking out about Pam’s desire to be thin. It manages to avoid being cliche or empty given that Archer considered Pam the best sex he ever had before she got thin, to the point of blowing off assignments just to have sex with her, because she’s just that awesome. After she gains the weight back in season six, she’s still sexy, making Archer’s jaw drop in the episode “Edie’s Wedding.” She’s also unapologetically pansexual, which is awesome.

Mallory, meanwhile, is still actively sexual and treated as desirable. While sex and sexuality are always sources of gags and jokes on Archer, never do the jokes about Mallory’s sexuality ever come across as ageist. Sure, some characters make ageist comments on the show, but it’s never treated as valid. Mallory is still treated as being extremely sexy and confident about it. While Mallory is generally a horrible person, her enthusiastic sexual agency is never once treated as a flaw or something disturbing or gross. What’s disturbing, gross, and worthy of ridicule is her son being so preoccupied and reactionary about his mother having a sex life. It’s clear: if you have a problem with Mallory having a lot of sex and enjoying it, you’re the one with issues.

Even the one young, thin, white woman in the main cast gets to be unapologetic about her kinks. It’s really only a problem when her desire for choke-sex motivates her to lead a KGB cyborg to the ISIS safehouse. Or when she coerces Cyril into sex. And generally acts like a violent, awful person.

Essentially, there’s no tolerance for shaming women for being sexual. All of it, regardless of preference, age, size, or race, is nothing but fun and should be enthusiastically represented. “Can’t talk, got a pussy to break!”

Being a predator is shameful. Having belly rolls is not.

Who on Earth finds this funny?

But, then there’s the flippancy about sexual assault. There ARE gags about Pam and Ray dropping their pants when encountering an unconscious Cyril. And sorry, but the framing of it is all manner of screwed up. There’s tons of sexual coersion as well. Another one of the most problematic instances comes in an episode of season two, where Archer is repeatedly sexually assaulted by a sixteen-year-old German socialite. The show goes out of its way to make it clear that Archer explicitly refuses consent, that he’s being violated, yet the show treats this as funny.

While I get that this is a comedy show and that in-depth exploration of the trauma of sexual abuse isn’t going to be something they can spend a lot of time on, the option they should have gone with is, you know, not base an episode around a german schoolgirl raping the main character. It’s not funny, guys. It’s not necessary. It’s actually just uncomfortable and off-putting.

The show mentions things like alternative gender identities, emotional triggers, and sexual exploration in ways that treat these things as totally valid, which is good. It also frequently portrays poor people as jokes in and of themselves, which is a lot less good. While materialism is lampooned frequently, it’s not treated as a joke in and of itself the way poverty is.

The way the show often portray legitimate abuse for laughs also often goes overboard. While the show does a good job of exploring and following through on all the ways Mallory’s abuse screwed up Archer, there’s a point where the volume of “abuse humor” gets to just be downright gross. Dark humor is one thing, not being able to go an episode without a “Haha, ten-year-old archer was abandoned in a train station at Christmas!” joke is, uh… Not great.

Archer is an awesome, immensely watchable show. But it’s not one I always feel clean watching. It’s a show that celebrates extremes, yes, but there’s a point where certain lines are crossed and it’s just problematic rather than gallows humor.

Archer is one of those series that really makes me struggle to distinguish the gallows humor from the simple tastelessness. To give pause to the idea of problematic content being the “point.”

The line blurs with Archer. A lot. It often manages to distinguish itself with the things it gets right, especially since they often do well on things that most shows, movies, and books are often terrible at. And that’s enough to buy it some goodwill for when they screw up.

But seriously, guys, please stop treating sexual coercion and child abuse as bottomless gag wells. I would have really preferred to have Pam and her awesome sexuality without her sexually assaulting Cyril and Ray. It’s not funny or clever or edgy. It’s just gross.

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#archer fx #your fave is problematic #anon #feminism

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