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drwcn · 3 years

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#9 【Carbon in the Steel】

cql au: everyone is an orphan except wwx; dark!twin jades

The Brothers Lan

There was once a little house, on the outskirts of a farming village beyond the tiered rice fields south of Meishan, far, far away from Cloud Recesses. Both Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji remembered that house. It was the house Father had built for Mother, and it was there that they were born.

It sat at the base of a hill where many tall bamboo trees grew, and in the garden, there had been gentians, indigo and violet, that bloomed beautifully every summer.

Lan Xichen would dream sometimes of that house and of the wonderful days in those early years.

Father, look!

Excellent form, A-Huan. Very good. Much improved. Now, remember to keep your balance on your front…

These days he could no longer recall Father’s face. His voice though, Lan Xichen still remembered as clear as a bell. On the other hand, his brother Wangji did not remember much of Father at all; instead, it was Mother’s smile that he could never forget.

Mother, can A-Zhan and I stay with you and Father tonight?

P’ease, Mo’her.

Lan Xichen remembered hugging his baby brother like a doll and strategically weakening his parents’ resolve using his baby pout and big puppy eyes. A-Zhan was always a trooper, so cooperative, so excellent at looking like a perfect toddler. Stoic though. So stoic for a baby. What a weird kid.

We had a bad dream.

Bad dweam.

Those were obviously lies. They never had bad dreams then; those would come much later, when their reality became worse than any nightmare they could ever imagine.

Jiujiu never needed to tell them that Mother and Father were dead, or what death was. They’d seen plenty of creatures die: the village’s cattle they butchered for the new year, the spinster's kittens that didn’t survive the winter, and the pheasants they caught and roasted for A-Zhan’s birthday.

Father had been a lifelong vegetarian, so eating meat didn’t agree with his stomach, but he never enforced such rules on his sons. In fact Father didn’t enforce any rules on his sons, except to show kindness where they could and to be true to their hearts.

Father probably didn’t anticipate just how difficult it was to be kind when the world had been so wholly unkind. Nor did he anticipate that he would die in such a violent and sudden manner without even so much as a goodbye.

I don’t remember what were the last words Father said to me. Wangji would confess to Xichen one day. I don’t even remember what Father looked like.

They were by the marsh catching lobsters with jiujiu when it happened. Mother suddenly appeared and spoke words that were foreign and frightening - Gusu Lan, cultivators, siege, pursuit, escape. Go. Now. She didn’t hug them or kiss them. Lan Xichen remembered Wangji reaching up towards her to be picked up and the confusion and heartbreak in his eyes when she pushed him back into jiujiu’s waiting arms.

A-niang...

At a certain point, jiujiu must’ve done something to them, because neither Wangji nor himself remember any part of their journey out of that village. When they woke up, they were somewhere high up and deep in the mountains. His little brother had looked at him and he had stared back and they both knew then that their parents were dead. Curled in their jiujiu’s arms, they cried themselves into another fitful sleep, and all the while, jiujiu didn’t wake up once, too exhausted by the endless days of travel.

To them, jiujiu - like all adults - was old, but it was not until they grew up that they realized that Zhao Zhuliu at the time of their parents’ demise had been no more than twenty years old, barely more than a boy himself.

Life with jiujiu was quiet, but after some time, they were able to find a sliver of happiness.

Zhao Zhuliu was a quiet man, always had been, and that didn’t change just because he now had two young children on his hands. But he loved them, his sister’s only blood left on this earth; by god, he loved them beyond reason.

Jiujiu was not a talker, but he was never distant, and though he was strict in his training of their cultivation and their swordsmanship, he was never harsh. So yes, life was quiet, but at least for a while there was a roof over their heads and food in their belly, and they never had to wonder where they would be tomorrow…

When jiujiu failed to return from his night-hunt, Lan Xichen knew that something had gone terribly wrong.

Lan Xichen was the older one; he was thirteen. Practically an adult, he told himself. If jiujiu never came back, then he was just going to have to take care of Wangji.

Whatever it takes.

His brother was not a needy child, but when he turned eleven, he seemed to have found his appetite and ate everything Xichen could get his hands on. Fishing was the easiest and hunting a big game lasted them a while if he could preserve it just right, but even if he collected berries in the mountains and wild herbs in the forest, he still needed grains, still needed new clothes for the winter, and still needed oil to light a lamp at night so Wangji could continue to practice his calligraphy.

He did try; you must know. Lan Xichen did try to do things the right way, but there was only so much money he could earn by book-keeping at a shop, or running errands for merchants, or even waiting tables at an inn. He was a child, and desperate, and nobody would pay him a dime if they could get away with a nickel.

It didn’t take long for Xichen to learn that the fastest way of earning money was often the most unsavoury and that he wasn’t above reaching for those means. There were no lengths Lan Xichen wouldn’t go to keep his brother safe and happy, no asset within his arsenal of skills and attributes that he wouldn’t hone and weaponize to make himself stronger. He got good at stealing, got great at cheating, and grew accustomed to killing. Every so often...if there were other offers available, well...Wangji would never need to know.

Morals do not matter if Wangji went hungry. I can’t let Wangji go hungry.

And, once a year, Lan Xichen would buy a box of osmanthus pastry, like the kind Mother used to make for them - flakey and fragrant, rich but not overwhelming - and he and Wangji would sit together under the stars and finish the box all in one go.

“Happy birthday, didi.”

Chewing slowly on the osmanthus pastry, Wangji would smile, and it would all be worth it.

“Thank you, xiongzhang.”

Then, three years after jiujiu was taken, a startling news broke out over the lands.

After years of internal strife, the dirty politics of Lanling Jin finally fractured the once glorious reigning sect. Jin Guangshan’s many children and their scheming “little mothers” formed factions and allied themselves with subsidiary sects all vying for control over Lanling’s seat of power. (小娘 xiao’niang = little mother, what one calls one’s mother if one’s mother is not the legal wife. The “real” mother of any children would always be the legal wife, while their birth mothers are ‘little mothers’.)

The details of Jin Guangshan’s demise was not entirely clear, but eventually it was his third son Jin Zitao who became the new Sect Master Jin. Being only eleven years old, it was clear to anyone who had eyes that he was a puppet, completely controlled by the whims of his regent mother, Jin Guangshan’s once favourite concubine, and the ancient respected Qin family who had promised their daughter Qin Su to be his bride once they both come of age.

People had praised Qin Su’s stepmother, Sect Master Qin’s second wife, for securing such an advantageous marriage for a daughter not even of her own blood, stating that with the Dowager Madame Jin’s clever mind and Sect Master Qin’s seniority and experience, surely the murky pond of Lanling would become peaceful once again.

The bigger question now was with three of the five major sects being led by minors - Qishan’s 14 year-old Wen Yuefan, Yunmeng’s 13 year-old Jiang Wanyin, and Lanling’s 11 year-old Jin Zitao - who then would become the next Chief Cultivator. Qinghe Nie seemed the most obvious choice at first glance, for they were the fiercest warriors, but given Sect Master Nie Heqiu’s most recent close encounter with yet another qi deviation, it seemed perhaps the real day-to-day leadership role was fulfilled by his first son Nie Mingjue. At seventeen years of age, he was certainly older than his contemporaries, but still a far cry from what was required to be His Excellency. (温越凡 Wen Yuefan = Wen Qing’s courtesy name)

Naturally, all eyes were drawn then towards Cloud Recesses, whose previous chance at obtaining the seat of Chief Cultivator had been dashed when its sect master at that time, Qingheng-jun, mysteriously vanished more than a decade ago. Now it seemed that Gusu Lan’s fortune was about to change yet again, when what once should have gone to Lan Cenrong now fell to his younger brother Lan Qiren.

News of his rise to power had spread far and wide, until every man, woman, and child knew his name. Until Lan Xichen heard from a gossiping bar-keep at a tavern. Until Lan Wangji heard from the children playing on the street.

One morning Lan Xichen returned to their temporary home to see Wangji sitting in front of the breakfast he’d prepared (when did he learn to cook???) and a purse on the table filled with silver coins and small gold nuggets.

“Wangji...where did you -”

“I don’t want you to go out at night again, xiongzhang,” said Lan Wangji bluntly.

Taken aback by Wangji’s tone and his implications, Xichen quickly gathered his wits and tried to maintain control of the conversation. “That doesn’t answer my question; where did you get the money?”

“I also went out last night, after you assumed I fell asleep and left.”

Xichen’s blood went cold. “You...went out? Out? In the middle of the night?! To do what?!”

Lan Wangji’s stoicism did not waver. “What one usually does to get paid at night. What you’ve been doing for years.”

In three long strides, Lan Xichen strode up to his little brother - his baby brother - and yanked him up by the collar. Grabbing his arms with both hands, he forced Wangji to look him in the eye as he exclaimed in a mad panic, “You didn’t! Tell me you didn’t!!”

God, Wangji, what have you done, what have you done - how could I let this happen - I should’ve done better -

Wangji did not blink, but after a long terrible silence, he said, “No. I didn’t. I just followed you. I saw.”

“You saw…”

There had been a man who eyed him with interest. Lan Xichen wasn’t looking for business - hadn’t been looking for months - but winter was coming and Wangji was growing so much he would need several new sets of robes. Xichen hadn’t been working as many hours as he’d been previously. He needed to train, to cultivate - they both did - so that one day they could do what needed to be done. The core melting technique was not to be trifled with lightly, jiujiu had warned them. They needed time to practice, to perfect it, time that couldn’t be used to earn income.

While yes he could steal and yes he could kill, Lan Xichen realized early on that those two options often caught the attention of local authorities or worse the local cultivation sect, especially if his activities were too frequent or too conspicuous. Sometimes it was just easier…

“The money, then?”

“Don’t you recognize the purse?”

Xichen turned around. He did. He did recognize that silk embroidered draw-string purse. It belonged to the man from last night. He had taken money out of it this morning to pay Xichen for his time.

And when they parted ways, Xichen had gone to a public bath house to get rid of any incriminating evidence on his body before going home to his brother. That was his routine... had been his routine for years…

“I shoved his body down a well. That should buy us enough time to get out of this town. You weren’t planning for us to stay that long anyway right?”

“Wangji…Wangji -” Lan Xichen turned away. He couldn’t face his brother, who now knew what he knew.

“Xiongzhang, don’t do this for me anymore.” Lan Wangji’s hand found his own, squeezing it tightly.

“It’s - it’s really not a big deal.” Lan Xichen tried to laugh it off. “I don’t do it that often. Really - I am your older brother, it is my duty to -”

“No. No more. From now on, if you go out, I go out. I’m old enough -”

“You’re thirteen, a child!”

“So were you.”

Lan Xichen closed his eyes.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know I’m done waiting.”

Lan Wangji was talking, of course, about their vengeance. It was what they spoke of on most nights when they couldn’t sleep. For mother and father and jiujiu, they swore they would not rest until they razed Cloud Recesses to the ground and burned the core out of every last one of their disciples before slitting their throats.

Wangji came around to face him again and stared him down with his brows furrowed tightly above bright determined eyes. “It’s not fair. The Chief Cultivator was supposed to be Father! The heir of Gusu Lan is supposed to be you! Instead - instead...”

Tears welled up in his little brother’s eyes. “They hurt you, ge, I saw. I saw.”

Choking with shame, anger and a pain he couldn’t describe, Lan Xichen pulled Lan Wangji into a crushing hug. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry Wangji. I’m sorry I couldn’t do better. I’m...” Words failed. As Lan Wangji cried into his chest, Lan Xichen looked up to their leaky roof and their bare, striped walls, and wondered what the ethereal Cloud Recesses would look like. All that should have been theirs, should’ve been his, belonged to someone else.

Lan Qiren is Chief Cultivator now. He’s still holding jiujiu captive. He needs to die. The people who killed Father and Mother; they all need to die.

“You’re right, Wangji, you’re right. No more.”

“So you won’t leave at night anymore?”

“I won’t. The world has taken everything from us, I think it’s time we take what we are owed. Once we are strong, we will save jiujiu and avenge A-die and A-niang.”

“And if people try to stop us?”

“Then we will destroy them and anyone else that gets in our way.”

#cql #the untamed #twin jades #lan wangji #lan xichen #cql ficlet #corie fics #carbon in the steel

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askfandomprompts · 4 years

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would you, maybe, perhaps, be willing to write something with insecure eddie in a relationship with richie? or vice versa, insecure richie who feels like he isn't enough for eddie/eddie deserves better, type of thing? my crops are dying and my cattle are starving 😔

Eddie:

It isn’t that Eddie had low self esteem.

Or, rather, it isn’t just because of the low self esteem.

It was seeing Richie on stage. Glorious. Fully in control. Bathed in light, animated, face glowing as he used his hands and body and voice to convey an exaggerated view of the stories he was telling. More than that, even, more than seeing Richie in his element, it was seeing him take an audience of strangers and make them laugh.

Richie had always been the funny one, of course. Eddie remembered (now he remembered, of course, but there were nearly three decades where the sound of laughter had made him ache and he never understood why) days spent in stitches, safe in the clubhouse, swinging in the hammock and nearly crying from laughing. Richie could always make them laugh. But to take hundreds, sometimes thousands, of strangers and hold them right in the palm of his hand? To guide them through stories and one liners and bring them into the light with him? To enchant and distract and entertain until Eddie’s ears were ringing with laughter? That wasn’t talent. That was magic.

Richie was magic.

And Eddie was... Eddie. A little (only a little, really, he felt he was very reasonable most of the time) neurotic about health and safety. Mostly the straight man for Richie’s puns, or flinging back insults to make sure Richie’s head didn’t expand so large it blocked the sun. He was just a man. Just a man who looked at insurance policies all day and spent hours in meetings thinking of anything and everything that might go wrong.

For some people, that would be enough, Eddie reckoned. A normal man would be enough. But not Richie.

You see, Richie is magic.

And Eddie... Eddie is the guy trying desperately to hide the fact he wasn’t good enough for him. Eddie is the one who holds his breath every night when Richie comes home just a little late, sure that if he’s not in the door the second the kitchen clock says six that Richie has snuck out the back window of their little lives and vanished. Eddie is the one who worships Richie and hides it under retorts and banter.

Because Richie is magic.

Eddie just hopes his next trick isn’t to disappear completely.

------

Richie:

There were certain things that Richie knew for absolute certain.

One: Clowns were fucking terrifying as shit and should be outlawed immediately. Anyone seen applying greasepaint should be executed on sight. No explanation needed there.

Two: Every morning at five am, an alarm would chirp exactly three times before Eddie’s hand emerged from a mountain of blankets and slapped it off. Soon after, one half of their bed would be empty as Richie lay there, watching Eddie bustle about all business-like, getting ready for the day.

Three: He loved Eddie Kaspbrak. Again, no further explanation was, he felt, needed.

Four: One day, Eddie was going to look over at him, maybe from over the top of his paper as he ate his oatmeal in the morning, or maybe at night he’d open his eyes suddenly in the dark, and tell Richie he needed to go. That Eddie would see him, see all the broken pieces of Richie that he tried desperately to hold together, and tell Richie that it was over.

Richie wasn’t sure when this day would come. So every time Eddie looked at him, there was a little part of Richie that was terrified. Because this could be the one. The time when the rose-colored glasses the love of his life was wearing shattered and he actually realized who Richie was.

Richie was trash.

There was no reason to deny it. He’d been trash from the day he’d been born and he’d die trash, alone and forgotten in some shitty apartment, probably. Surrounded by cheese puffs because if he was gonna die, by god, it’d be in his underwear, eating cheese puffs.

So Richie horded little moments. Memories of the way Eddie laughed, the way his eye lit up when something good happened, how his lips felt, what he tasted like. How happy he was. How much he loved Eddie. Richie kept them all locked up in a special box in his mind, so that when the inevitable happened he’d at least have those.

Because Richie was trash. And Trashmouth Tozier never was gonna wind up with someone this handsome and beautiful, witty and wise, funny and soft and perfect. That wasn’t how the story ended.

Because the fifth thing Richie knew for certain, what he’d learned a long time ago, sitting by a grave and holding tight to Bill’s hand, watching his best friend fall apart and a tiny coffin being lowered into the cold earth, was that happy endings didn’t exist.

#ask #prompt #reddie #it #sorry got carried away lol #anon

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gardenofkore · 3 years

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The Normans had a complicated past in the Latin East. As early as the First Crusade, there was an opportunity for the Hautevilles to exert significant authority in the region, one that quickly ended when Roger’s cousin, Bohemond, was captured by Turks as he made his way to Melitene in August of 1100. Bohemond’s imprisonment enabled Baldwin I to claim the throne of Jerusalem uncontested. Had the journey gone differently, it might have been Roger’s first cousin who became king and established a dynasty. But whatever lost opportunity Bohemond’s capture may have represented, it paled in comparison to the one that evaded Roger a little more than a decade later. His mother Adelasia, had been his regent since 1101, the year Roger I died, and by 1112 Roger had begun to rule in his own right. This offered Adelasia an opportunity to accept a marriage proposal from King Baldwin I of Jerusalem. According to William of Tyre, the marriage contract stipulated that if Baldwin and Adelasia had no child of their own, Roger would succeed to the throne when Baldwin died. This arrangement was of particular interest to Roger, and given that Adelasia was in her late thirties and that Baldwin himself was in his late forties or early fifties and — as far as we can tell — had not yet produced any children, it is not difficult to understand why. Unfortunately for Adelasia (and Roger), Baldwin ultimately confessed that their union was bigamous as his marriage to his second wife had not been properly annulled. Susan Edgington notes that the union may have been dissolved partly as a result of pressure from Rome. In addition, though, Baldwin became very ill in 1117, so sick that some wondered if he would die and the kingdom would soon pass to Roger. Some members of the nobility became alarmed at the prospect, and Arnulf oversaw the annulment of the marriage during Easter of the same year. Adelasia was sent home to Sicily soon after, but not before Baldwin had alienated many of the resources she had brought with her from Sicily. She died just a year later, on April 16 — just nine days after Baldwin. For centuries, historians have used her humiliation to explain why Roger was not invested in the Latin East:

Qua redeunte ad propria turbatus est supra modum filius et apud se odium concepit adversus regnum et eius habitatores immortale. Nam cum reliqui fideles diversi orbis principes aut in propriis personis aut inmensis liberalitatibus regnum nostrum quasi plantam recentem promovere et ampliare sategerint, hic et eius heredes usque in presentem diem nec etiam verbo amico nos sibi conciliaverunt, cum tamen quovis alio principe longe commodius faciliusque nostris necessitatibus consilia possent et auxilia ministrare. Videntur ergo iniurie perpetuo memores et delictum persone iniuste in populum refundunt universum.

Dawn Marie Hayes, Roger II of Sicily. Family, Faith, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean World, p. 65-66

For more than three years following the wedding there is no information about the royal couple’s conjugal relationship, or Adelaide’s activities, or even her whereabouts. Baldwin seems to have been constantly on the move, fighting for Antioch in the north or against the Ascalonites in the south or exploring into Transjordan and the Sinai desert. However, the validity of the marriage was apparently unchallenged until 1116 when two events coincided. The more important was probably Arnulf’s trip to Rome to argue for his reinstatement as patriarch of Jerusalem. He was successful, but, seemingly, his restoration was conditional on persuading the king to put away his wife. The grounds existed, for although Baldwin had separated from his Armenian wife at some time in the previous decade, there was no annulment of his second marriage and so he was not free to remarry. The following winter, the king fell critically ill and feared he was on the point of death. There was a very real possibility that Baldwin would die without children and the kingdom would pass to a Sicilian heir. Some of the nobility baulked at this, and Arnulf presided over the formal annulment at Easter 1117, incurring the enmity of Sicily to the great detriment of the kingdom, as William of Tyre and modern commentators have agreed. The Sicilian alliance was therefore short-lived and ultimately injurious to the kingdom of Jerusalem. It is redundant to speculate whether the outcome would have been different if Baldwin and Adelaide had produced a child. The alliance failed, and Baldwin’s deteriorating health brought the matter of the succession to the fore. [...]

In 1116, with some 200 knights, Baldwin headed east again, revisiting Montréal, and then south through the desert to the Red Sea. This expedition is thought to have founded a castle in the valley of Moses (Wadi Mūsa) and another at a town on the coast Fulcher called ‘Helim’ (modern Aqaba, Jordan) that they had found abandoned by its inhabitants. On his return to Jerusalem towards the end of 1116, the king became seriously – he feared terminally – ill. Fulcher wrote that this was the reason Baldwin repudiated his Sicilian wife; William expanded Fulcher’s simple statement of fact to involve Baldwin’s seeking the advice of the clergy and trying to explain himself to Adelaide, who was not appeased. William, of course, could see the longer-term consequences of the failure of the Sicilian alliance. Albert of Aachen’s independent account of the same expedition and its aftermath added some interesting details. He did not, apparently, know about the deserted town Helim, but wrote only that the king and his men bathed in the Red Sea when they reached it, as relief from the intense heat, and ate fish. While there, Baldwin heard about St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert, and he was keen to visit it for prayer and conversation, but the monks sent messengers to dissuade him because they did not want to draw attention to the monastery lest they be expelled from it by the Saracens. Although this tale is uncorroborated, it rings true, for St Catherine’s is a Greek Orthodox foundation and has maintained its presence until today partly because of a willingness to accommodate politicalrealities.Baldwin abandoned his plan to visit the monastery and returned to Jerusalem via Hebron, pausing only to raid the plains of Ascalon for camels, cattle, sheep and goats on his way. Albert gave the date of the onset of Baldwin’s serious illness as the beginning of March 1117, technically still winter but later than Fulcher implied, and Albert wrote that the king was in Acre. Baldwin genuinely believed he was on his deathbed, for he ordered that his worldly wealth was to be distributed: part went to the poor, along with a dole of food and wine; part to his household; and part to his soldiers, both his own and those serving for pay. However, Albert claimed that the king made a full recovery. He did not report whether thegifts were revoked but did write that the Egyptian fleets that had put in at Tyre when the Saracens heard of the king’s illness now sailed home without attacking. Another discrepancy from Fulcher’s undoubtedly better informed account is that Albert placed Arnulf’s visit to Rome to exculpate himself after the king’s recovery from his sickness. It was Arnulf who then insisted, on the pope’s orders, that Baldwin repudiate his wife because his marriage to Adelaide was adulterous and unlawful. Arnulf added a charge of consanguinity between Baldwin and Adelaide, although this had passed unremarked in 1113, and he formalised the process of annulment by convoking a council in the church of the Holy Cross in Acre. ‘Sad and grieving, released by synodal law from the marriage bond, the lady sailed back to Sicily’, while Baldwin, Albert claimed, exercised ‘wonderful abstinence and chastity’ from then onward. Thus, although the two writers differed on theexact sequence of events, they agreed that the king’s illness was a precipitating factor in his repudiation of Adelaide. Certainly, he may have felt the prick of conscience and wanted to die absolved of his sins. Nevertheless, it is probable that there was also considerable pressure from his vassals and the senior clergy: the marriage to Adelaide had not provided the king with an heir, and according to the terms of the agreement Roger of Sicily would inherit the kingdom of Jerusalem if the king were to die while the marriage endured. The reminder of the king’s mortality made the matter of the succession urgent, and it is inconceivable that the matter was dropped as soon as the king made a recovery. In the short term, Baldwin appeared to regain full health, and with his accustomed energy he was mindful that two coastal cities remained unconquered. First he built a castle called ‘Scandalion’ within five miles of Tyre and garrisoned it ‘to confine the city’. He then embarked on a major expedition early in 1118 aimed, so Albert said, at conquering Egypt and thus removing its support for Ascalon that threatened pilgrims going to and from Jerusalem. [...]

The accounts of Guibert and William, the one separated by distance and the other by time from the scandal, share certain features, most importantly the legitimacy of Baldwin’s marriage to Arda so that the separation a thoro was not an annulment, which was the only way Baldwin would be free to take a third wife. Yet Baldwin did not seek dissolution of the marriage from the pope. Admittedly, it would be difficult because the usual convenient ground, consanguinity, was not available. Nevertheless, the curia was likely to be sympathetic, especially if adultery could be proven. (Notably, non-consummation does not seem to have been considered, at least before Mayer.) In this interpretation of Guibert’s tale and as made explicit by William, the motif of chasing the unpaid dowry in Constantinoplerecurs. It seems likely that failure to lay his hands on Arda’s dowry in full was the real reason behind Baldwin’s repudiation of his wife. Importantly, by consigning his wife to a nunnery, Baldwin was abandoning hope of engendering an heir. For somewhere between five and ten years he lived, apparently, a celibate life.

Baldwin’s bigamous marriage to Adelaide of Sicily appears ill advised on almost every level. It is easy to interpret it as a last desperate attempt to make a political alliance that would bring wealth and other resources for the defence of the kingdom. In the short term, it was successful in this: the resources Adelaide brought with her to Jerusalem were described towards the end of the previous chapter, along with Baldwin’s rejection of her four years later. There is no information about how much time the royal couple spent together. On this and the whole subject of Baldwin’s third marriage the testimony of William of Malmesbury is interesting, although – or because – it differs so radically from William of Tyre’s. First, while conceding that the match was to make good Baldwin’s losses, he wrote explicitly that it was ‘for legitimate marriage’ (ad legitimum conubium). William agreed with the other chroniclers about the great riches Adelaide brought with her ‘to the king’s bedroom’, but added rather sourly ‘where the woman had amassed such infinite piles of precious goods from might seem a matter of wonder to anyone’. Baldwin ‘admitted her to his marriage bed’ (illam thoro recepit) but dismissed her soon afterwards. The reason for this, ‘they said’ (aiunt), was that Last years and legacy she was afflicted by an incurable illness and a cancer had consumed her genitals. From this William concluded: ‘One thing is certain, the king was without offspring; it was no wonder if a man for whom to be at leisure was to become unwell shrank from wifely embraces and spent his whole life in battles.’ The inescapable ambiguity is whether Baldwin dreaded all wifely embraces, or only Adelaide’s, as appears to be the implication. However that may be, and even if the story of the cancer, which William reported as hearsay, is completely untrue, William may have encapsulated a truth: throughout his reign Baldwin’s energies were absorbed by constant military campaigns, and in his last years he may have been suffering increasingly from illness whenever a pause from them allowed.

Susan B. Edgington, Baldwin I of Jerusalem, 1100-1118, p. 167; 174-175; 184-185

#women #history #history of women #women in history #historical women #Adelasia del Vasto #baldwin i of jerusalem #Roger II of Sicily #House of Hauteville #norman swabian sicily #people of sicily #women of sicily #myedit #historyedit

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comrade-meow · 3 years

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New Zealand schools have introduced a climate change resource that suggests children “eat less meat and dairy”, even though teachers will not know how much meat or dairy any child in their care has eaten. Opinion pieces in the papers have called for the reduction of meat and dairy in hospital menus, not usually generous sources of such foods, despite the well-known risks of undernutrition, especially of protein, in the frail and elderly. Globally, the influential and once-objective medical journal the Lancet has hosted Eat Lancet, a coalition of vegan and vegetarian technocrats backed by processed food manufacturers, and promoted their agenda. The Guardian newspaper accepted an £626783 grant from the backers of Impossible Foods to run a series of articles against animal agriculture.

These initiatives, aimed at remodelling our food supply in a way that favours the multinational food processing and seed-and-chemical corporations, whose control of many aspects of farming and diet is already problematic, have run far ahead of the scientific community’s efforts to understand the health effects of such dietary change.

Our hunter-gatherer past

The Neolithic Revolution was the first alteration in human affairs that is generally considered worthy of the term Revolution. In Marx’s terms, it saw a change in the means of production sufficient to form new classes aware of their identities, and thus a change in the relations between people. Early humans had fed themselves in an opportunistic, hunter-gatherer fashion that tended to favour a diet of animals supplemented with plants where and when these were available. Large animals made the best meals but gathering activities could collect many smaller ones, as well as eggs, grubs etc.

The people of the Mesolithic era discovered that some animals could be herded and some plants grown in gardens (not usually by the same community, because one activity favours nomadism and the other favours a sedentary habit) but these activities, which greatly improved food security after the decline of the prehistoric mega-fauna due to hunting and climate pressures, tended to occur at the communal level and probably did not create major class differences between the people involved.

The invention of farming

The Neolithic Revolution, which unleashed the human potential for war, creativity, and social division, resulted from the identification of the germs of plants (specifically grains and legumes) as durable sources of energy. If grains were grown (I will use grains in the wider sense of “cereals”, after Braudel, including other dried germs such as peas) and there was a surplus, this surplus would still be edible over the next year, a year when drought or pests or diseases might wipe out the other food sources that hunter-gatherers depended on. This advantage was offset by the nutritional poverty of grain-based diets, so that tuberculosis probably became an endemic disease during this period,[1] but the existence of a less-perishable surplus allowed the diversion of part of the population away from food gathering for large parts of the year, and saw the creation of armies and other workforces.

In Europe, the Neolithic Revolution is dated at around 10,000 BC and its arrangements are a matter of prehistory, but in China this change occurred later and the written record around Bi-gu or grain avoidance includes folk-memories of conflict between grain eating and grain avoiding peoples.

The history of colonisation is the history of the conquest of lactose-intolerant peoples by lactose-tolerant populations, and of non-grain eaters by grain-eaters. In the Indian sub-continent, a combination of dairy herding and a cereal diet high in legumes uniquely allowed the survival of a substantially vegetarian population, and saw the conservation of genes favouring reproduction on such a diet, including genetic polymorphisms still rare in European populations (adaptive mutations only predominate where many individuals without them have failed to survive or reproduce).[2] That the Indian social system became more aggressively class-based than any other is probably no co-incidence; prejudice against meat-eating is still used as a tool of social control against minorities, while meat-eating is one way young Indians today identify as modern and egalitarian. However there were some important exceptions to the trend – the Aztecs were a hunter-gather people who conquered and dominated the Mesolithic agriculturalists of Mexico, and the Mongols were nomadic herders and hunters whose greater stamina and independence allowed them to defeat the rice-fed armies of the Chinese Emperors (after conquering this breadbasket, the successive Mongol Khans seem to have eaten and drunk themselves to death).

Early vegetarian ideology

In the European and Asian cereal-based societies the poorest classes went without meat, supplementing cereals when possible with buttermilk or blood pudding which were more economic replacements. The rich ate as much meat as they could. The idea that an entire society might avoid meat is a recent one with its roots in religious practice, and, insofar as it has any political basis, this flows in two distinct streams – the eco-fascist, in which meat avoidance is a sign of “purity”, most humans are a burden on the Earth, and the Indian vegetarians are of course Aryans. This is something like the vegetarian vision that Adolf Hitler picked up while studying anti-Semitism with Wagner’s heirs at Bayreuth.

And then there is a Marxist-Anarchist, and latterly Intersectional, version, founded on a valuation of animal rights as inseparable from, and a logical extension of, human rights. Vegetarianism was a frequent obsession of the early British Socialists; G.B. Shaw, who derived most of his energy from dairy fat and lived to the age of 94, made himself into a well-known example, and the idea was sufficiently entrenched among the British Socialists and their milieu that H.G. Wells preserved its internal contradictions for posterity in The Time Machine. In his far-future vision, humanity has evolved into two separate species. The Morlocks are descendants of working-class meat-eaters, the Eloi of leisure-class vegetarians – all Wells’ loathing is reserved for the Morlocks, yet it is obvious they are (still) the engineering brains keeping their world running and the Eloi fed. The Eloi are useless for anything but enjoying the sunshine and feeding the Morlocks, and the discordance in Wells’ progressive values as he describes both species is as shocking as anything else in the story.

The first large-scale experiment in plant-based protein was attempted by the Bolsheviks. As usual, it’s hard to separate the roles played by idealism and cynicism in the story, but the bare bones are that the Soviets found their initial attempts to remodel the countryside rebuffed, blamed this on the recaltricance of the kulak class, and set out to destroy them. The problem being that the kulaks, owning most of the cattle and sheep across the Russian Republics, helped to feed the people. Beginning in the 1920s, soy experts from the USA (then the Western world’s leading soy producer) were among the many foreign technicians imported into Russia, and soy processing plants were built and soy production increased to 283,000 tonnes in 1931, the year Stalin unleashed enforced collectivisation and the terror against the kulaks (and also the Kazakhs, a herding people who suffered the largest proportionate loss of life during this period). This led to the loss of millions of animals, either killed by their dispossessed owners or mismanaged by their inexperienced new owners. The soy project was hardly able to prevent the massive famines that followed, and by 1935 soy production had dropped to 54,000 tonnes. Though soy milk would later prove useful during the siege of Leningrad, by the 1930s soy had probably only served one purpose, as a statistic needed aforehand to quell the objections of pragmatic delegates to the destruction of the kulaks and their livestock.

Today we face the revival of this idea, of plant protein that will create a world with no need for animal protein, and the remodelling of life in the countryside, with the new impetus of climate change as its driver. Livestock cycles natural carbon, meaning there is no net addition of C02 to the atmosphere – and its contribution to the shorter-lived methane precursor has not changed since 2000 (methane rises have been due to fracking, methane itself AKA “natural gas”, landfill, and rice production; methane-emitting animals have always existed on Earth in substantial numbers, and have not created a novel situation in the sense that the discovery of coal, oil and gas did). We have recently seen how much global disruption is required to reduce fossil fuel CO2 emissions to 2006 levels, levels which will still warm the planet if they continue. It could be still be worth reducing agricultural cycling of CO2 through methane, which is more warming than CO2 if this is cost-free, but is it?

Why humans evolved as meat eaters

Animal foods, and especially red meat, supply a constellation of nutrients not found together (if they are found at all) in any plant food. Nutrients are those chemicals essential for the functioning of the human organism, and plants, but not livestock, can survive well without nutrients such as amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals that are essential to humans. Surviving as a vegetarian or vegan is possible for some (perhaps assuming the genetic variants referred to earlier are present) but to thrive requires knowledge of these nutrients, where to find them, how to process the foods that supply them, or how to supplement them. Thriving as an omnivore or even a complete carnivore does not – nutritional sufficiency is the reason we evolved eating meat and other animal foods long before we learned there were such things as essential nutrients.

The reasons for avoiding meat or all animal foods can have a class basis – veganism may be taken up by educated middle-class adults, more likely to be exposed to “health food” ideas and aware of the need to supplement, some of whom then commercialise their habits as social media “influencers”. Meat avoidance is also being adopted increasingly by educated middle-class children for identity or compassionate reasons, but the poor may also avoid meat because of its cost when a loaf of bread or a packet of flavoured noodles can be bought for a dollar; these two motivations sometimes coincide when students in temporary poverty make a virtue of what they perceive to be a necessity.

Does the meat-avoiding behaviour of young people have unintended costs? Several observational studies have looked at the characteristics of meat-avoiding populations and found alarming increases in depression, anxiety and self-harm.

“The majority of studies, and especially the higher quality studies, showed that those who avoided meat consumption had significantly higher rates or risk of depression, anxiety, and/or self-harm behaviors. There was mixed evidence for temporal relations, but study designs and a lack of rigor precluded inferences of causal relations. Our study does not support meat avoidance as a strategy to benefit psychological health.”[3]

How can we explain these correlations? Why should we assume that they are causal?There are several lines of evidence to support a causal link: 1) several nutrients found in meat and animal foods are important factors in mood and cognition; vitamin B12, iron, carnitine, DHA, choline and tryptophan are some examples.[4] 2) the fatty acid mix in dairy and red meat has a similar composition to that of amniotic fluid and breast milk which has anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) effects in young animals.[5] 3) soy is a convenient and cheap replacement for animal protein; soy processing in Western diets results in a 10-fold higher level of the estrogenic contaminant isoflavone than that found in Asian diets.[6] Soy isoflavone causes anxiety behaviour in young female animals, and there is evidence supporting psychotropic and hormonal effects in humans.[7,8,9.10] Interestingly, while right-wing critiques of soy eating focus on effects it can have on young men, the scientific evidence for adverse effects in younger females, converting to HRT-like benefits after menopause, is stronger.[11] 4) other toxins found in plants, such as salicylates and oxalates, as well as problematic proteins such as gliadin/gluten and zein, may be present at higher levels in meat-free diets (but are not unique to them). A vegan mince sold in Countdown supermarkets is simply a coloured blend of soy protein and gluten, a protein linked to the risk of schizophrenia.[12] In the New Zealand context it would be relatively easy to confirm or dispute some of these associations. Everyone admitted to hospital for longer than a day supplies their dietary preferences. The dietetic preference data from psychiatric admissions could be both linked to outcomes over time and compared with the population average distribution, or the distribution in a ward where diet is least likely to play a role in admissions.

Iron deficiency in women

Young women in New Zealand are the most likely to report being vegan or vegetarian in surveys, as elsewhere in the world. Vegans in the Gender Studies field generate papers linking meat to masculinity, with the implication that this masculinity is toxic and might be improved by a plant-based diet.[13] The corollary of this belief – that women may therefore be weakened by meat-avoidance – is never considered. In a 1980 essay by Gloria Steinem called The Politics of Food (in the collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions) she describes some of the cultural constructs by which women are deprived of the good nutrition which men use to stay dominant. The belief that men need to eat red meat more often than women may have been valid when the average man was more likely to have to survive an attack by a wild bear than the average woman, but today it is mainly women who suffer from serious iron deficiency. The rate – and the cost to the health system – is increasing in New Zealand as more women give up meat. Iron deficiency anaemia in early pregnancy is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders in children, not an outcome that will increase the mother’s autonomy.[14]

In Georg Büchner’s 19th century “working class tragedy” Woyzeck, filmed by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the leading role and the subject of an opera by Alban Berg, the title character, a soldier, is subject to experimentation by a sadistic army doctor. The experiment involves Woyzeck living on nothing but peas. Peas may supply a complete protein, but Woyzeck goes insane; the deprivation being the final straw in his alienation. James Cameron, the film-maker responsible for Avatar and Titanic, is investing heavily in pea protein as if this were his gift to New Zealand. I am not sure whether he has watched Woyzeck – one would think he has.

Plant-based vs meat-based

Again, we have the specificity of plant germs as commodity; their low cost of production, long storage life and versatility of processing outcomes makes them an ideal investment and a robust one, as poverty and adversity increases their consumption, as we saw during the 2020 Lockdown Event. However, a plant-based burger is nutritionally greatly inferior to a meat burger, and that burger is often the most nutritious single food item many will people eat in the course of their day. The current push to eat a plant-based diet for “planetary health” is something that all the multinational food processors have signed up and provided funding for, and why not – Coca Cola, Unilever, Nestlé have always sold us plant-based foods. We notice that while iron-deficiency anaemia increases in New Zealand with the reason in plain sight, Nestlé scientists here in NZ are developing a more potent form of supplemental iron to add value to their products as their parent company backs the push to reduce meat. (As usual, it’s hard to separate the roles played by idealism and cynicism in the story). But, you may well ask, isn’t eating meat linked to an increased risk of cancer and heart disease? These associations are small to begin with, but they are also intensely confounded by social class and educational status. Supposing a factory that makes a carcinogenic chemical is hiring. Who is more likely to apply for that job – a meat eater (who will likely have a bigger family to support, among other considerations) or a vegan? Who, so to speak, eats all the pies, and needs food that is filling and nutritious without having to give it much thought? Who is more likely to work two jobs and be exposed to the disruptive metabolic effect of shift work? Carcinogen exposure and shift work are just two of the confounding variables ignored in diet epidemiology. (That meat-eating in Western populations may symbolise or associate with labour itself – as it did for H.G. Wells when he wrote The Time Machine – is not a consideration I have found discussed in the epidemiological literature.)

Certainly one can think of mechanisms that might link meat to disease, as one can with any food, but one can also think of protective mechanisms; several of the nutrients found mainly or only in animal foods are required for various antioxidant and immune defensive enzymes, and some like carnitine and EPA even have a place in the management of heart disease. The argument against meat-eating should not be confused with the argument for sometimes rationing a valuable food that is in short supply. The wartime rationing of meat in the UK is thought to have improved the health of the poorest by guaranteeing a greater supply than they had had previously, at a more affordable price. In Europe, the peasants who supplied the cities with meat, dairy and luxury foods such as oysters were sometimes forced by network disruptions to consume these foods – which many of them had never tasted before – with benefit to their own health.

The plant-based agenda can scarcely be expected to recognise these benefits, or understand the argument summarised by Williams and Dunbar (with regard to the vitamin nicotinamide and amino acid tryptophan in their tuberculosis paper), that if better data collection and analysis resulted in us ”…returning to our egalitarian past and redistributing meat or its components that supply NAD (avoiding both the highs and the lows between individuals and over individual lifetimes) [this] may be more effective than subsidizing corn grain (while the increased prosperity from unlocking human potential should pay for the intervention).”[1] Progress – which includes unlocking human potential from the chains of preventable mental and physical disease – depends on good data, and we do not yet seem to collate the data required to know whether or for whom plant-based diets are safe in New Zealand.

George Henderson works as a researcher for Professor Grant Schofield and the team behind the What The Fat books and the social enterprise PreKure, which has been running free lifestyle and health programs through the lockdown. He is the author or co-author of several scientific articles and letters published by the BMJ, Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, the JAMA, and other journals, including an influential review of low carbohydrate diets in diabetes management for the New Zealand Medical Journal. A musician, songwriter and amateur musicologist, he has recently presented a series of podcasts on 20th century women composers for Karyn Hay’s Lately show on RNZ.

References:

[1] Williams AC, Dunbar RI. Big brains, meat, tuberculosis, and the nicotinamide switches: co-evolutionary relationships with modern repercussions?. Int J Tryptophan Res. 2013;6:73‐88. Published 2013 Oct 15. doi:10.4137/IJTR.S12838 [2] Kothapalli KS, Ye K, Gadgil MS, et al. Positive Selection on a Regulatory Insertion-Deletion Polymorphism in FADS2 Influences Apparent Endogenous Synthesis of Arachidonic Acid. Mol Biol Evol. 2016;33(7):1726‐1739. doi:10.1093/molbev/msw049

[3] Urska Dobersek, Gabrielle Wy, Joshua Adkins, Sydney Altmeyer, Kaitlin Krout, Carl J. Lavie & Edward Archer (2020) Meat and mental health: a systematic review of meat abstention and depression, anxiety, and related phenomena, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/10408398.2020.1741505 [4] Frédéric Leroy & Nathan Cofnas (2019) Should dietary guidelines recommend low red meat intake?, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/10408398.2019.1657063 [5] Contreras CM, Rodríguez-Landa JF, García-Ríos RI, Cueto-Escobedo J, Guillen-Ruiz G, Bernal-Morales B. Myristic acid produces anxiolytic-like effects in Wistar rats in the elevated plus maze. Biomed Res Int. 2014;2014:492141. doi:10.1155/2014/492141 [6] Fernandez-Lopez A, Lamothe V, Delample M, Denayrolles M, Bennetau-Pelissero C. Removing isoflavones from modern soyfood: Why and how?. Food Chem. 2016;210:286‐294. doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2016.04.126 [7] Hicks KD, Sullivan AW, Cao J, Sluzas E, Rebuli M, Patisaul HB. Interaction of bisphenol A (BPA) and soy phytoestrogens on sexually dimorphic sociosexual behaviors in male and female rats. Horm Behav. 2016;84:121‐126. doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh.2016.06.010 [8] Tillett T. Full of beans? Early soy exposure associated with less feminine play in girls [published correction appears in Environ Health Perspect. 2012 Jan;120(1):A17]. Environ Health Perspect. 2011;119(12):A525. doi:10.1289/ehp.119-a525b [9] Adgent MA, Daniels JL, Rogan WJ, et al. Early-life soy exposure and age at menarche. Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol. 2012;26(2):163‐175. doi:10.1111/j.1365-3016.2011.01244.x [10] Hibbeln, J.R., SanGiovanni, J.P., Golding, J., Emmett, P.M., Northstone, K., Davis, J.M., Schuckit, M. and Heron, J. (2017), Meat Consumption During Pregnancy and Substance Misuse Among Adolescent Offspring: Stratification of TCN2 Genetic Variants. Alcohol Clin Exp Res, 41: 1928-1937. doi:10.1111/acer.13494 [11] Patisaul HB, Jefferson W. The pros and cons of phytoestrogens. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2010;31(4):400‐419. doi:10.1016/j.yfrne.2010.03.003 [12] Čiháková D, Eaton WW, Talor MV, et al. Gliadin-related antibodies in schizophrenia. Schizophr Res. 2018;195:585‐586. doi:10.1016/j.schres.2017.08.051 [13] Jessica Greenebaum & Brandon Dexter (2018) Vegan men and hybrid masculinity, Journal of Gender Studies, 27:6, 637-648, DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2017.1287064 [14] Wiegersma AM, Dalman C, Lee BK, Karlsson H, Gardner RM. Association of Prenatal Maternal Anemia With Neurodevelopmental Disorders. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019;76(12):1294–1304. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.2309

#Anglo.txt

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pen-of-roses · 3 years

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WHG Chariots

This one ended up a lot longer than I meant, but Rowan’s mind is just fun to write. Lots of thoughts and emotions, no dialogue, oops. WHG Tag list: @ratracechronicler, @maple-writes, @nightskywriter, @rhikasa, @concealeddarkness13, @aeslin-writes, @the-moving-finger-writes, @knmartinshouldbewriting, and @makeitmonstrous!

“A cow? That’s what you’re dressing me as? Are you kidding me?” Miss Renee’s voice—they still wouldn’t say her name, couldn’t say her name—was loud, too loud, too loud. Had she always been this loud and screechy?

Though they couldn’t blame her too much, never mind how much they wanted to, was easier to blame her. But no. For this, they had to agree. Cowboys was the theme chosen for them by the styling team so that they could be paraded in front of the Capitol. Cattle would have been more fitting, to be shown to the world for the technically second but they called it the first time because watching the worst moments of their life didn’t count.

They ran a hand through their hair, pulling slightly so as not to wince from the noise. A member of the styling team clucked at them and fixed it. They did their best to smile through that too.

Cute.

That’s what their stylist had decided on, almost as soon as she saw them. Well, almost because they had seen the subtle build to them from time working with the animals, and had almost, almost gone for something else, probably closer to Lynn’s style. But the scars were already there, scars of a past that were her fault, her fault.

So they had settled on cute. Cute and young to match their features that always made them seem just a touch younger than they were.

Cute could work, make them seem appealing to the Capitol but unimportant to the other tributes, nonthreatening, either an easy target or someone to be skipped.

So they stood, biting their tongue, as their hair was ruffled, what made the difference between what they did and this, no one would answer why did everyone have to care about their hair anyway, and a hat was placed on their head. A red shirt, lavish and far too rich and soft and odd to only be one layer why couldn’t there be more, more for protection, for comfort, and it was just a touch too big, making it even more awkward to move. And ridicules pants, really had anyone ever worn these, what was the point.

They stumbled awkwardly out in the heeled boots, instantly seeing Lynn and wishing they could have had the simple heel he had. At least they got to button their shirt though. He simply shook his head once, a sign that he was not happy but would not be talking about it. A lost fight then.

The youngest Renee had heels that were even higher than theirs, but she handled it with grace and poise, because of course she did, because she never did anything wrong in her life, because—no, no don’t go back there. Her hair had been braided elaborately, had she ever been in braids, didn’t matter, didn’t suit her like it did Laurel. She wore a deep red dress that seemed to mimic the outfits they’d been forced into. Even more impractical really, but she seemed to be basking in how the others were fawning over her. Was she supposed to be cute too?

Lynn helped her up into the chariot, playing the part of the charming gentleman like they agreed. Not that it was hard for Lynn, they were charming and sweet when the masks could be safely put away, but smile they wore was wrong, wrong, like everything else about this whole ordeal.

They stared hard at the chariot, nails biting into their hand. Soon they be paraded in front of a large crowd with too many eyes, too many eyes, screaming and calling their names too loud, too loud. All those people would be passing judgement, looking for weaknesses and strengths, all shallow things they couldn’t see from just watching the chariot ride really, but it didn’t matter what they thought since those people could easily keep them alive or leave them for dead soon and-

Lynn squeezed their hand. The only sort of contact they allowed themselves outside the suite now. It was safe when no was looking, dangerous and easily turned against them if someone else found out that weakness.

Their mentors words from the train ride echoed in their ears. “You’re going to have to kill to stay alive. Are you capable of that?” No, no they would never feel capable of that. They weren’t brave despite what some accused them of, and if it came down to their own life or taking someone else’s they wouldn’t be able to. They’d never even had the urge to kill someone else.

Except once.

They looked up at Lynn. Images of him, or Laurel, or really any of her family the people who had cared for them and loved them, hurt or even dead flashed through their mind. They weren’t that far off of images they remembered from their childhood. At the time too young to know what had happened, too innocent to understand how another person could even want to do that. But they’d learned.

Their own anger had scared even them.

No, no one could know about Lynn. No one would touch him.

One last squeeze to their hand, and they were stepping onto the carriage, together yet not, inches apart but so very far away.

The crowd ate it up and it was loud, too loud, too loud. Acting shy wasn’t hard when they’d rather be anywhere else, the Games themselves would be easier than this.

But they smiled, and waved, and played the part. She was doing fine, this is what she’d always wanted after all, all the attention, the screams, the adoring fans, really it was all perfect for her. Even he seemed to be enjoying this, that arrogant smile that was just so wrong, so wrong. But one look at his hand shaking ever so slightly, the way the smile didn’t reach his eyes, and—no, couldn’t stare, staring would be an easy indication.

Instead, they focused on the flowers being thrown, mentally identifying them, focused on the sound the wheels made against the pavement, anything and everything but Lynn and the crowd that was still too loud, too loud, too many eyes, too many eyes.

Their smile slipped, they could feel it, now wasn’t the time for emotions, they needed to get better at that, when Snow stepped out to talk. Nails bit into their palm as they kept from stepping in front of Lynn as his eyes passed over them. But it was brief, and he was talking soon after.

He was a threat, more so than the other tributes, the reason behind this, the reason his life, their life, all of the others' lives were in danger, just as so many had been in the past, and would continue to be if they couldn’t stop it, had to stop it.

They smiled when they noticed how a few of the other tributes were acting, some pretending to be asleep even.

But they had agreed to the game, not the Games, but Lynn and Laurel’s game when they had made plans for if they ever ended up here. Play the part everyone wants. Get allies. Don’t let anyone know anything about them until they’re sure. Take the opportunities given, even if they mean playing into the Capitol’s hands. Survive and save as many as they could.

Right now, they were at the stage of playing a part, presenting a person that people might cheer for or send packages to. So, they could glare at Snow but smile to the audience.

Wear their mask for as long as it took to get home and be safe again.

#Writeblr Hunger Games #excerpt #rowan #sophia #lynn

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valkyrieofsmut · 4 years

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Kurt’s Mail Order Bride 8

Cowboy!Kurt Wagner (Nightcrawler) x Mutant!OC

Descriptions: Beth gets hurt, and Kurt helps her cook. Logan is suspicious of what happened in the wagon overnight, and a misunderstanding ensues.

A/n- Hello! It’s a crazy month, but I’m going to do my best to start getting things out again! The only thing I need on my side is time... Let’s do our best! Remember to get a flu shot (they have one for people allergic to eggs, but I’ve only been able to find it at the health department), wash your hands, wear your masks because it’ll help with the flu, too! Love you guys, stay safe!!!

Masterlist Series Masterlist

Story!

As Beth checked the meat in the oven, crouching to see better, she heard the door open and turned to see Kurt walk in.

She closed the oven door quickly. Too quickly, as the towel slipped a little, making her gasp as the hot cast iron of the stove touched her hand, and the back of her finger as she jerked it away.

Kurt appeared next to her in a plume of smoke, crouching next to her now kneeling form. “Are you ok?” He asked, taking her injured hand and looking at it.

Beth blinked at him, torn in response. The pain in her hand was starting to leave her mind, even if it wasn’t leaving her hand.

He was holding her hand, sounding concerned for her.

It was strange; it made her heart beat fast, her stomach quiver, while the pain stung and seared.

“I- I’m fine,” she told him, cheeks pink.

Kurt let her hand go as she took it, standing with her, noticing that her shirt was still unbuttoned for the top three or four buttons, showing her smooth, elegant neck, and giving a hint of cleavage. He swallowed hard and forced his eyes to hers.

The front door opened, startling them both, and Logan walked in.

He looked them both over for a moment and started brushing himself off. “Dinner about ready?”

Kurt and Beth both took a breath and glanced at each other before Beth went to the counter.

“Almost, I just have to finish the vegetables,” she answered. She picked up the knife there, but Kurt stepped close.

“Let me do that,” he told her.

“I can do it,” she told him, looking at him in confusion.

“Let me, you hurt yourself,” he answered.

“I’m fine, it’s on the back of my hand,” she said, turning to block him.

“Beth.”

A shiver ran down her spine at her name leaving his lips, his tongue wrapping it in his accent.

“You’re hurt. Let me help you.”

“He actually wants to help, let him,” Logan told her from the seat he’d taken at the table.

Beth stepped back and let Kurt take the knife from her hand, remembering that it was burnt, and going to get a cool cloth to put on it.

A few minutes later, when Beth went to check the oven, Kurt set down the knife and shooed her away. “I’ll get that,” he told her, taking three towels from the counter.

“I can-” She cut off as his tail, using a towel, opened the oven and he pulled the meat from inside with his two toweled hands.

He set it on top of the stove, closing the door with his toweled tail. “Nein, your hand is burned, so it will hurt if it gets near the heat,” she realized he’d been telling her.

Her eyes lifted to his, and she realized she’d been staring at him.

He was continuing to look at her, his golden eyes searching for an answer to something in her silver ones.

Kurt was staring, her eyes looked so soft and gentle, her lips were parted, it was making him want to kiss her, and she looked like she wanted him to.

Logan cleared his throat, and Beth’s eyes widened.

When had her cheeks gotten so warm?

She quickly turned away and started walking toward the door. “Excuse me,” she said as she stepped out into the cooler night air.

She’d been standing there, staring at him, wishing for something she knew would never happen, her cheeks flushed and body yearning.

No wonder Kurt had been looking at her like that; he’d probably been wondering if she was ok, mentally.

Kurt ran a hand through his hair, his tail swaying back and forth behind him.

Why did he think these things of her?

Was it because she was the only woman around?

Was it because she was the only woman outside of his family at the circus that hadn’t screamed and tried to burn him as a demon?

Or was it- could it be that… maybe he had feelings for her?

“What happened the other night?” Logan asked.

“Was?” Kurt asked, startled from his thoughts.

“The other night, when you got stuck in the storm.” Logan’s eyes, dark and hard, had a shrewd intelligence, appraising everything Kurt did or said, and he felt like he was being studied with a magnifying glass.

“What do you mean? The storm came, and the wheel sank in the mud, I thought.”

Logan was silent for a second. “Before you went out to town, you were civil, but not nice. Since you got back, you can’t stop staring. What happened?”

“We were stuck on the road,” Kurt said.

“And?” Logan led. “Did you do anything?”

“We ate a picnic,” Kurt supplied, uncertain of the unspoken question.

“Did you touch her?” He demanded.

Kurt’s eyes widened, and his cheeks heated. But something else happened; he was offended.

Was Logan saying that he wasn’t good enough for her? That he would never be? That his dirty demon like hands would taint her? That because of how he looked, it would be inappropriate, or impossible for her to ever like him?

“Would it be so bad if I did?” He asked darkly.

“I didn’t bring her here for you to use to your whims,” Logan growled as he stood. “I thought better of you than forcing yourself on a woman when you were alone.”

“Forcing?!” Kurt nearly yelped in shock, then what Logan had been asking finally clicked. “There was no forcing of anything! I would never!” Kurt held back a growl. “We had to sleep close to keep warm, and because she was soaked from the rain, but I did not touch her. I would never touch her like that!”

There was a soft noise from the doorway as Beth cleared her throat. “Good to know,” she said quietly, her hand moving to close the door.

Kurt rushed to her, taking her uninjured hand in his. “I would never touch you like that,” he assured her. “You must know that I’d never touch you like that!”

Beth blinked at him.

It was one thing to know he’d probably never want to touch her in any way romantic, another to overhear him telling Logan, but it was completely different to have him declaring over and over to her face that he’d never think of her as attractive and would never want to touch her.

Hurt emotions were filling her, making her face heat again. “Stop!” She told him, pushing back the tears. “Just stop! Do you even know what you’re saying?” She demanded as she jerked her hand from him and fled through the door into the darkness.

She made it to the horse stalls, into the one holding Babylon, wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in his neck as the tears started flowing carelessly down her cheeks.

Kurt looked over at Logan at a loss. “I-”

Logan shook his head, looking away.

“What- what does she think I said?”

“Don’t know.”

“But- I was only saying I’d never hurt her, ja?” He asked.

Logan looked at him, his dark gaze boring into his golden one. “Look, I don’t know what she thought you were saying. But, I can only think of one reason a woman would run off like that.”

“Why?” Kurt asked, desperate to understand.

“She’s had her heart broken.”

“How would me saying I’d never hurt her break her heart- why- I don’t understand-” Kurt shook his head as he looked down.

“Welcome to being a man,” Logan told him.

“Should I go after her?” Kurt asked.

“Nah, let her have her time, she’ll come back when she’s ready.”

Kurt laid on the couch, unable to fall asleep.

Logan had gone to bed, and the fire had died, but Beth hadn’t come back, yet.

Maybe he should have gone after her. What if she’d gotten hurt out in the dark? What if the cattle had stampeded over her? What if-

He had to stop thinking these things, it was making his stomach twist uncomfortably, not only with pain, but longing and guilt, and just a hint of uselessness.

The door opened quietly, and Kurt looked up to see Beth closing it quietly.

A smile pushed at his mouth; she was safe. He was about to say something to greet her, when she turned her face away from him and hurried to her room in the back.

Kurt felt hurt, but took a breath.

She was still mad at him.

It was ok; he’d had people, women, mad at him before, but he’d survived.

He paused as he thought that this might be different from his mother or sister being mad at him, but shook it off.

Tag List!

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#kurt wagner x oc #Cowboy!Kurt Wagner #Cowboy!Nightcrawler #Old West AU #nightcrawler x oc #Kurt Wagner #Marvel AU #RANCHER AU #x-men au #X-men #angst #mutant oc #romance #mutual pining #multi part story

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notinthemaps · 4 years

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Healing through the Himalayas

I was unnerved at the thought of these mountains, aging near 50 million years old, full of history and wealth. There above lies rigid peaks and soaring heights, strong waters and vivid sharp-edged granite building the homes of the wild. The comprehension of beauty is influenced by comparison, however, there’s not a damn thing on the planet deserving enough to be compared to the Himalayas. They’re alive and awake, growing every day, shaped and shifted by avalanches and tremors and growing rivers fed by melting glaciers and the snow leopards, one of the only carnivores of the Himalayas, lies present yet silent, symbolic and representative to the creator of nature. There’s something alive here, hidden in plain sight, echoing out and drawing me closer. Something I feel I can reach yet is impossible to touch. Something I so long to search for, whatever it may be.

I reached for the benefit of the beauty of nature over the fear of the unknown. Unable to sleep, I drifted between anxious shakes and these visions of eagles gliding along the soaring heights of the mountain range, Himalayan mountain sheep grazing in herds leaping between dry bushes and through the in-betweens, I saw a blurred vision of my father. Maybe the unearthliness and historic existence measure the markings of spirit within the Himalayas. I’ve always liked to believe that there’s an existential energy out there that lies between Earth and the resting world. One that holds the past souls but prevails in the present. One that doesn’t speak a human language but communicates well. Perhaps a world we still find ourselves in. Perhaps this alerting energy that bellows in nature.

The awareness and truth of suffering, the first of buddha’s teachings lie known across the land of the Himalayas and have fallen upon my lap, left to assimilate.

I packed his ashes into a locket and I arrived late at night in a slow, small airport. There were crowds of taxi drivers yelling across the fence. I walked, exhaustedly, as they followed the travelers and me out to the parking lot. I hopped into a jeep with a quiet older gentleman who spoke little English. Too tired to put effort into a conversation, I watched the dirt roads ahead of us full of potholes. I paid most of my attention to avoid hitting my head against the windows until I arrived at the hostel. I fell asleep quickly on the top floor that had windows wrapping around the entire building that would once allow the sun to wake me as it rose.

In the morning, I lied awaiting the rest of the city to slowly waken as I craved the chance for a warm cup of tea. I stared out the window as the sun rose above Swayambhu, a temple full of greedy monkeys, one that embodies 365 steps to achieve its beauty. While the beauty lies in every corner through Nepal, it seems we had much walking to do to reach the most beautiful parts of the country.

An eye rub and groan across the room was noticed in the corner of my eye as I watched crows fly from building to building. He greets himself, a Tibetan man, 25 years old that did not know english very well spoke with me through google translate. He welcomed me to Kathmandu and stumbled across his words as he asked if I’d like to join him for breakfast. He guided me along to a restaurant through tall buildings, often a bit lopsided and accompanying cracks. The streets were hung with prayer flags and tourist shops were opening their doors. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste as we walked down the road. When he had finally reached the restaurant, no bigger than the average American sized bathroom, built by plastic chairs and wobbly tables. I enjoyed a rice meal and some tea and a slow conversation over google translate before he headed off to work that day. He asked me what I wanted to do that day and I pointed at Swayambhu. I hopped into a taxi and began the steps up 365 stairs. I followed the monkeys, soaked in the sun above the city with my eyes closed and welcomed the vibration of prayer wheels as they were spun by tourists and locals. I was here, accompanied by reason and purpose. Time was no longer a ticking clock, but a gift on this pursuit of searching and understanding this echo that led me to Nepal. I had no intention of leaving this place quickly. Many know how fascinated with leaving I had become. I had always wanted to leave. Run, in fact. But here, I don’t want to leave here.

The second noble truth: determining the cause of suffering. Desire and ignorance lying at the root.

After growing tired of the smog of the city, it was time to climb. I packed my bag with 2 pants, 2 shirts, a water purifier, a sleeping bag, some hiking boots, and a couple of layers to keep me warm through the next two weeks. It was enough and there are places in the world where you constantly feel like what you have isn’t enough. It feels good to strip down to the necessities of humankind. No one to compare riches and debts to. What matters from here is faith in yourself, trust in nature and to continue putting one foot in front of the other.

The trek began with a few hours walking through rice fields. It was colorful and quiet. I walked behind my Nepali guide who had curly hair and a passion for mountains. They were his home after all. He was shy and between the sounds of footsteps jumping over puddles and cattle grazing nearby, the habitual warming questions were soliloquized between. After all, I am spending the next two weeks with this man. I must get to know him and find the reason these mountains echo to him, what his reason is for climbing them for a living despite their obvious beauty. Perhaps for my own desire for clarity. I found out that he’s scared of dogs and swings, loves smoking weed and thought the phrase “Why not, coconut?!” was hilarious. We hopped around the trail until we finally reached the village we were staying at for the night. We shared some raksi, a traditional Nepali liquor, accompanied by dal baht, a traditional rice dish, that I fell in love with. And we laughed and laughed as the raski settled in and stared at the stars until our eyes grew heavy. I fell asleep to the sound of the Ngadi or “river” and the high pitch noise of the crickets.

Again, I rose with the sun, purified some water from the tap and walked alongside the river. This time for 8 hours to the town of Chamche. We took a stop at the base of this massive waterfall to cool down. In an attempt to get closer, I stepped on a grass patch that was not supported. I fell down the side of the cliff, completely burring myself with mud and grass. The mist was blinding being this close to the falls but I screamed and lifted my hand as high as the dirt allowed and was pulled up with nothing but a few scrapes, a sore foot and ankle, some leeches and a whole lot of luck. Upon arrival to Chamche, eating another serving of dal baht, he had the decency to ask me if I’m tired after walking 8 hours with a sore foot and ankle and I honestly didn’t know if he was serious or not but he looked at me waiting in silence for an answer. The day was best described by the words I wrote in my journal: I am climbing these mountains with a goddamn mountain goat.

I woke up to a throbbing foot and cramping calves. 5 hours today. I can do this. I ate lunch under an apple tree and dropped my sunglasses in the toilet or let’s say a full ‘hole in the ground’. Lovely. He said repeatedly “Bistārī, Bistārī” or “slowly, slowly.” He was right and he probably saw my frustration and felt it through my silence. Climbing mountains aren’t meant to be a race. Climbing mountains aren’t meant to be easy. If they were, no one would do it. I finally grew the courage to ask him why he does it. He said it’s in his Nepali blood. And they’re beautiful. He wants to own a tour company one day. And through his rambles, he eventually began to tell me how he started climbing mountains with his brother who passed away in a motorcycle accident two years ago. This was his connection and his dedication to his passing. I didn’t have words to respond and to break the silence, he pointed to the left of us and said: “that’s Annapurna 2.” I counted the rest of my steps with the Nepali words he taught me, “Ēka, du'ī, tīna, cāra, pām̐ca, cha..” and he corrected me as I went on with my mispronunciation.

I stayed up later than usual that night, despite how exhausted I was. It’s been a wave of emotions. This traveling is. Within a mountain lies the heavyweight of awareness due to the lack of distractions. Hours and hours of walking with nothing but your thoughts are the most draining part of it all. The conquerable part of it lies within a sufferer who climbs them anyway and does the difficult achievement of simply surviving.

Today, I fluctuated between ‘why am I doing this’ to ‘I’m so happy I’m doing this’. Today, I sat in a cafe and grew annoyed by a group of Israeli hikers complain about how they found a worm in their pasta. Today, I rolled my eyes to a couple of Americans moan about how they don’t have a private “bathroom.” Now despite being in the middle of the mountains on a trek that will reach near 17,000 feet, I have found myself more irritated with these people than I have with the fact that I have pulled hairs out of the past 3 meals I’ve eaten. Contemplation over whether to be disgusted or impressed with myself began. Is the lack of toilet paper I’ve used in the past few months of traveling impressing or? Is the cracking sounds that my socks make as I put them on in the morning disgusting? What about how comfortable I became peeing on the side of a road or trail? I’d say it’s impressive but I will leave that for each individual to decide.

The next few days, I spent plenty of hours practicing more Nepali, laid in the grass to watch the eagles fly in circles above, hiked up to lake Tilicho lake, the highest lake in the world to listen to ice crack and fall into the lake, and played an indefinite amount of card games with other trekkers. Oh, and ate all the dal baht I could possibly eat.

And when it was finally time to summit, we woke at 4 am before the sun, to a snowstorm and all I heard were the words, “Bistārī” or “Lagabhaga”. Almost. And my god, I have never hated a word more. When I reached the top and saw the tip of the Nepal flag, I walked as close as I could before I eventually collapsed to my knees. 17,769 feet. I cried after over a week of wondering if I’ll make it, if it’s worth it and constantly questioning why the hell I was doing it.

And it was for this. For the historic human instinct of healing through nature. The feeling of confronting the reflection in the walls of the mountains and the spirits that lay between them. For my dad. For the first time the entire trek, my backpack had felt like nothing and my foot had stopped throbbing. To be humbled and disciplined. To become more human. Enamored by the mountain range, my attitude changed. For so long I carried this feeling of defeat or numbness that I reconciled as avoidance and throughout the trail, there was nothing I could use to hide from myself.

I looked at my guide as he twirled and looked up at the mountains around us. “For you, my brother” he whispered. I hugged him and clenched my locket. We both laughed and fell into the piles of snow as we danced and yelled. All this mountain range was before we started was something beautiful that led to the sky and I looked up and thanked them for becoming so much more than that.

An end of suffering.

#me #nepal #yall I'm not even gonna lie #i could have written a book about this experiece #it was hard to put it into the length of a blog post #but here it goes

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vobomon · 5 years

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TPN Theory: Norman has been infected with Mujika’s blood and has become part-Demon

Since the beginning of time, humans have feared the inevitability of death. And they’ve striven to find a way to avoid their deaths at all costs.

On the other hand, Demons have always striven to find a way to avoid a “metaphysical” death at the loss of their humanity. From the moment that they ate a human being and obtained their knowledge, they have tried to avoid losing this trait... at all costs.

For humans, death is when their bodies stop functioning and their heart stops. For Demons, death is when they lose all sense of personality and mental reasoning.

So what if there was a magic “elixir of life” that could grant immortality to both humans and Demons? All it took was a little bit of cursed blood.

Ever since I caught up with the manga, I’ve made countless attempts to guess what happened to Norman during his time stuck in Lambda. But that’s because I have a strong assumption that this particular mystery is being set up as a potential plot point of importance within the near future.

So after spending the last few weeks tossing around potential possibilities and updating ideas based on new information from recent chapters, I’ve come to one conclusion. Due to the nature of the theory that I’m about to make, @couldnt-think-of-a-better-name recommended that I write out my post using a research paper style format.

I’m going to give a brief summary of the main theory and then I’m going to follow up with my personal observations and evidence towards this theory. With that in mind, please note that there will be manga spoilers up until chapter 127.

Lambda has been described as an “experimental facility,” which was intended to test various genetic and body modifications on children. They’d test whatever they wanted… and only worry about the after effects later.

When Norman was entered into this facility, he wasn’t exposed to the same experiments as the other children. His living conditions were vastly different and over all, he was treated a lot better than other cattle children. Almost like a highly prized research subject.

But this begs the question. What could have possibly happened to Norman that would elicit such a strong avoidance towards Lambda? Why does he avoid answering any questions about what happened to himself at Lambda?

In reality, this reaction makes perfect sense if the Lambda scientists... experimented with Demon genetics on Norman and modified his body into having a similar biology akin to a Demon. And its very likely that this happened because he was forcefully infected with Mujika’s blood.

OBSERVATION #1 PETER RATRI’S INFLUENCE

On November 3rd 2045, Norman was shipped away from Grace Field House.

Originally, the reader is led to believe that Norman is simply going to be harvested for meat. But in reality, it is revealed that Norman had been taken to meet Peter Ratri, the 36th head of the Ratri clan.

Thanks to his family and rank, Peter is (arguably) one of the most important human figure heads within the Demon World. So why would he make a special appearance to simply meet with a cattle child…?

His true intentions behind meeting Norman become clear when he requests for the boy’s help with some “research” that he has been working on.

But throughout his entire conversation, Peter’s face is covered in shadow, hereby preventing the reader (and Norman) from being able see his expressions. It is obvious that Peter is hiding something.

From here, we can presume that Norman was sent straight to Lambda.

OBSERVATION #2 LIVING CONDITIONS AT LAMBDA

When we see Norman again, we are treated to our first glimpse at his living conditions. And it actually looks rather comfortable…

He has his own private room – complete with a bed, desk, plenty of books to read… His doctor (even) does regular check-ups on him to observe his health.

As shown by the date, it is January 29th 2046 – almost three months since Norman had left Grace Field. Underneath the date, we see the results of Norman’s check-up such as body temperature and blood pressure.

After his check-up, Norman is treated to a full breakfast, complete with main meal and side dishes. Along with a dose of required medication.

The rest of the day would follow the typical schedule – his routine wasn’t much different than his old schedule back at Grace Field. The only difference was that Norman has been confined to stay in a single room when he wasn’t in the presence of his doctors (or other Lambda scientists) as they needed to accompany him everywhere within the facility.

But even when Norman is left alone in his room, he’s constantly being observed by scientists. They’ve got video cameras on him 24/7 and someone is always watching at all times.

After only three months in Lambda, Norman has already figured out that his living conditions merely are a facade meant to imitate a sense of comfort. The harsh reality behind this set up is blatantly obvious; he’s being taken care of because he’s a highly prized specimen.

And he knows that he’s being used as the test subject for an experiment. But the question is… what type of experiment?

OBSERVATION #3 REOCCURRING THEMES OF CHANGE

Only after the time skip, do we see Norman make his official re-debut back into the story. By this point in time – it is October 2047. But Norman had already been destroying farms for six months prior to October.

Based on later information that Cislo provides as context, it is discovered that Norman was still twelve years old when he escaped Lambda along with the other children.

So we can make a relative guess to the time frame when the escape occurred. It likely was late February (or) early March 2047. This would make the amount of time he spent stuck in Lambda… a grand total of sixteen months. Almost a year and a half.

And ever since escaping, Norman has been playing the role of William Minerva.

While I’ve touched on the subject plenty of times before… it can not be ignored that there an underlining theme that has persisted since Norman re-debuted in the story.

Has Norman changed?

Is he (still) that same innocent child that he was once back at Grace Field? Or has his experiences changed him – whether for better or worse?

Both the characters (and the audience) are constantly looking for reassurance when faced with this question. Despite the length of time that they spent apart, the characters can’t help holding onto a sense of hope that things can simply “return to the way that they used to be.”

Oddly enough, Norman seems a little too eager to put these worries to rest whenever they are brought up. With a smile on his face, he eagerly reassures his family and confirms that nothing has changed – nor will anything ever change.

But sometimes, without realizing it, his smile begins to slip. And this brief moment where his smile falters… it betrays all the reassurance that he spoke previously.

Norman is later confronted by Vincent and this theme is brought back up again. But it is used in a different format – this time emphasizing that Norman has changed compared to his old self. This is in direct opposition to the words that he was telling everyone else in the previous chapter.

Vincent admits that he was curious to see how the “old Norman” acted. But this simple comment is enough to upset Norman who appears to take personal offense to it.

A reaction that seems odd at first… but speaks a lot when taken into context.

He has seen and experienced horrible things in Lambda. He has learned things that have changed his perspective and worldview. He can no longer be considered the same boy that grew up in Grace Field, without any knowledge of the world outside.

But is it possible that he has (also) changed physically – and this change is merely a contributing factor to his mental state?

OBSERVATION #4 IN-DEPTH KNOWLEDGE ABOUT DEMONS

In chapter 120, Norman takes the time to explain a question that the reader has been dying to learn since the beginning of the story.

But he doesn’t give a simple answer to this question.

Instead he reveals an extensive and in-depth narrative about how the Demons evolved to become the sole apex predator. Along with this, he has knowledge about their biological functions and how their unique genetic traits are inherited.

And while it is extremely satisfying to have some new information revealed that impacts the lore like this… unfortunately, there is one glaring issue that can’t be ignored.

This is highly advanced and classified information that Norman should never have possibly had access to. He had been stuck in Lambda and would have had no way of learning this.

But Norman did gain a lot of information about James Ratri and Peter Ratri from Smee. So it wouldn’t be surprising if Smee had included some classified information about the Demons that he knew and passed it on to Norman.

Wait. How would Smee know the evolution, biology, and inheriting of genetic material–

O H

Smee was a scientist at Lambda.

He probably came in contact with Norman because he was one of the scientists overseeing the experiment.

I’d imagine that Smee’s personal guilt got the better of him. Unlike all the other scientists at Lambda, Smee would have been the only one who saw Norman as an actual child… and not a lab rat to experiment on.

And he couldn’t stand to see them testing on a child who had absolutely no idea what was happening behind the scenes. Unfortunately, Smee paid with his life for this.

OBSERVATION #5 HOW DEMONS REACT TOWARDS NORMAN

When Norman meets with Lord Giiran… it becomes apparent that the elder Demon notices something intriguing about Norman. He can see that Norman shows no fear towards him– with the former going so far as to bring only one ally with him as a sign of trust.

But as Lord Giiran listens to Norman’s request for an alliance, he interjects with his own comment.

This is the first time that we’ve seen someone point out how Norman’s plan appears to be built around his own personal revenge. While in the past, we’ve seen him use the cattle children as his motivation– this is the first moment that such a motivation has been brought into question.

There is a lingering suspicion that Norman is holding a grudge against the Demons and this grudge is (primarily) fueling his need for revolution.

But when faced with this question, Norman avoids answering. He simply smiles and lets the conversation continue naturally, without giving any heed to Lord Giiran’s accusation.

In a later chapter, Norman reveals that Lord Giiran had an ‘alternate’ plan alongside his primary intention of getting revenge.

He has every intention of obtaining Mujika’s blood for the purpose of helping his clan to survive. It is her blood that will grant them the opportunity to avoid the “metaphysical” death they’ve been trying to rid themselves of... for 700 years.

But after getting a taste of Norman’s blood, Lord Giiran comments how delectable and irresistible the taste is. From just a single drop of blood, he knows that he wants to eat Norman. Because there is something ‘especially’ tasty about his blood.

And there is another thing...

The taste certainly proves that Norman is no “ordinary human.”

OBSERVATION #6 HOW NORMAN REACTS TOWARDS DEMONS

In previous posts, I pointed out that Norman was displaying various symptoms of Post-Trauma Stress Disorder, both blatant and subtle. But this fact is still incredibly important to bring up; it reveals the dramatic shift in his mental state.

He has become extremely reckless in his actions, almost as though he lacks a sense of self-preservation.

He walks right into a den full of Demons, without so much as a single care about his own safety. And later he even acknowledges the fact that he knew that these Demons would happily eat him– had they been given the slightest opportunity.

He has prided himself on his singular goal of protecting all the cattle children. Often he has repeated the same line in response to this goal.

If the blood of any cattle child is spilled, then his rebellion will have been for nothing. He wants to see only Demon blood be spilled in this upcoming revolution.

So why does Norman feel that its necessary to spill his own blood for the revolution to be effective?

Because under his new revolution, he doesn’t consider himself someone who is in need of protection. He’ll happily spill his own blood to achieve the results that he wants to acquire.

From his own perspective, he’s simply spilling more Demon blood for the revolution.

But if Norman doesn’t consider his own blood to be worth the same as “cattle child” blood, then why does he see himself as expendable?

We’ve seen Norman eat food before… so if he were more akin to a Demon, then he’d have to have obtained a similar biology to a Heathen.

A Demon that doesn’t have to eat human meat in order to keep their intelligence or humanoid form…

But how in the world would it be possible for him to obtain–

The blood of a Heathen… one that had the ability to infect another individual with their characteristics…

BONUS OBSERVATION HOW WOULD THIS THEORY AFFECT THE STORY?

What if Norman was revealed to have a biology similar to a Demon? What if he had the same blood as Mujika? How would his motivation and plans be viewed differently in hindsight?

It is important to remember how closely this arc is attempting to parallel the Escape Arc. And one of the memorable moments from the Escape Arc was Norman’s shipment.

He’s always had a habit of trying to sacrifice himself for the happiness of Emma and his family. This personality trait certainly hasn’t disappeared– no, it’s only gotten stronger during his departure from the story.

Now that he has taken on the role of William Minerva, he’s become a “savior” or “martyr” figure for the cattle children.

And his newest goal is to wipe every single Demon out of existence.

So if Norman considers himself to “be similar to a Demon,” then he probably has every intention of sacrificing himself for this goal to come true.

In a parallel to his “death” during the Escape Arc, Norman will hide his intentions of sacrificing himself. He’ll keep it a secret from both Emma and Ray.

He has already shown that he would be willing to kill Mujika and Sonju for the sake of his revolution. And even in spite of Emma’s pleas that they are “good individuals who saved them,” Norman’s own thoughts stand unwavering.

If they’re Demons, then they must be destroyed. No matter whether they are “good” people. They must be killed. Every single one.

Including himself.

Norman took on the identity of James Ratri/William Minerva because he can not (in good conscience) call himself “Norman” anymore.

He’s a Demon now… so it would simply be better if his family remembers Norman as he once was. Instead of the monster that he has become.

And that is why he can not let his family ever find out.

Because knowing Emma… she’ll probably just argue that nothing has changed about him. She say that he’s still the same Norman as before.

That’s just like her. She’s far too kind… and extremely naive about how the world works.

And if she found out, then she’d never let him kill the Demons. But sometimes life isn’t kind – and you don’t get what you want.

It might just take an onscreen fake-out death to reveal the truth.

#the promised neverland #yakusoku no neverland #tpn spoilers #tpn norman #tpn theory #tpn #I'm sorry for reuploading but I had to add some extra details

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orcinus-ocean · 4 years

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Personal rambling part 2

...as for livestock, this we will only know when we have tried what works for us and our land, but the plans are of course chickens, ducks, turkeys, feeder pigs, lots and lots of rabbits, and water buffalo or yak for dairy.

Why water buffalo or yak?

Because I always have to think outside the box about everything I can, and there is good evidence that they both have better milk as well as better feed-output ratio than cattle.

My husband is familiar with water buffalo from Georgia, and says the hides are great, but I don’t think I could ever slaughter bovines. They get so tame and take so long to grow for slaughter (yaks take 3-4 years and you only get as much meat yield as from a dairy veal calf), it would feel horrible. And with these exotic bovines, chances are they’re worth more to sell than to kill. (But if we can’t sell them, obviously there will be butchering since a cow needs a calf every year to make milk.)

Rabbits are great because they’re quiet, easy to care for and easy to breed. They’re the only of these animals I have already owned, so that makes for a very gentle learning curve. But I’ve seen many homesteaders who raise the best meat breed - the New Zealand white - and just throw the pelt on the compost pile. What a waste.

I want to keep some “prettier” dual-purpose breeds and harvest the pelts for selling. Ironic perhaps at first glance, given how I’ve criticized fur farms, but it’s actually for that exact reason.

I would be raising the rabbits for meat. Mostly for the animals (x number of dogs and cats will eat a lot of meat, 100% raw fed), but also for ourselves. Then also use the pelts. I’ve seen what “raw” rabbit pelts sell for, and it’s not an income of course with the scale we’re thinking (start with 3-4 breeding females and see where it goes from there), but it would cover some costs, and could be a pretty lucrative niche, selling to people who want humanely raised fur.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve seen on homesteading, is don’t rely on only one source of income. Have four, five sources, so that when one dries up or fails, you have something to fall back on.

The rabbit breeds I’m thinking of are Champagne d’Argent, Rex and Satin. Obviously we would be keeping several, to get many different pelts.

With chickens, I’ve long looked at the Bielefelder as supposedly one of the best dual-purpose chicken breeds, hardy with a nice temperament, and an attractive plumage that supposedly camouflages them against predators (hawks, foxes and smaller mammal predators would be a problem). And since we’re staying in Scandinavia and I want to help preserve native heritage breeds, I recently fell in love with the Swedish flower chicken, so named because of its plumage. Also a hardy landrace.

I have never eaten domestic duck, I only ate a horridly cooked (by myself) mallard about a year ago, and it was awful. I’ll have to give it another chance, maybe well-cooked duck is awesome. But even if we hate duck, if the input-output ratio is great (low cost for the meat and eggs we get), and they keep pests at bay (ducks are great at eating snails and bugs which can destroy the garden), ducks could work great as another source of dog food.

I’ve seen it said that if you raw feed dogs, use at least three different animals/protein sources, and obviously rabbits can’t be a staple since they’re nearly fat-free.

I would never choose a livestock animal purely on looks, that would be madness, but I was so happy when I found that the most beautiful poultry I’ve ever seen, the Cayuga duck, is very hardy and a good dual-purpose duck breed. Also looking at native heritage breeds, we have the Swedish blue and Swedish yellow ducks. (Oh my god, I just realized the pun. Sweden, blue and yellow...)

I love turkeys. They’re supposed to get really tame, make lovely noises (unlike geese), and eat everything from ticks to snakes. Also, they’re absolutely delicious. (And some say their ugly mugs make them easier to kill. Horrible thing to say, but it could be true.) Mortality rates are supposedly sky high when you raise poults yourself (making them expensive and slightly tragic to raise), but much lower when a mother cares for her own.

Maybe we’ll have quails, but only as a niche thing to sell quail eggs. Obviously they can’t be kept loose like the other poultry, but need an enclosed space.

Can’t go without PIGS. I also love wild boar and while there are nearly half a million wild boar in Sweden, there are none in Norway, so we can’t hunt for pork - have to get feeder pigs. “Feeder” means you buy them as piglets, raise them for the season, then slaughter them. Supposedly way more cost effective than having a breeding pair year round, and the breeding could fail, so you’re left with two hungry pigs and no pork that season.

Back to heritage breeds, the Swedish Linderödssvin, or Linderöd hog, if you will. It’s mostly Swedish heritage breeds because while we’ll probably stay in Norway, Norway doesn’t have their own breeds in all these species, but the Swedish ones are still available.

Raising plants is even more important, as it does not just feed you but also the meat animals to some extent, but it’s hard for me to get as enthusiastic about them. XD

#personal #homesteading #livestock #pigs #ducks #chickens #rabbits #water buffalo #yak

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builder051 · 5 years

Text

West end girls

@mohini-musing‘s Chasing Ghosts ‘verse

_____

Three easy credits. That’s what her advisor said when he signed Tasha up for Dance 101 at the beginning of the semester. Beginning ballet. She’s a former dancer, right? It should be simple; she needs the elective, and the easy A wouldn’t hurt. In fact, her GPA is in dire need of a boost if she’s going to keep her scholarship. So Tasha throws on a leo and tights under her ratty t-shirts and shuffles into the dance gym twice a week. She’ll squeak by under the radar if she stays sober enough and skinny enough. As long as there are no pointe shoes, there should be no problem.

The teacher notices her the second week. Tasha puts just a touch too much enthusiasm into her renversé, unwilling to leave it hanging in the air half-assed, and a second later his hand is on her shoulder in that too-close-for-comfort choreographer’s kind of way.

“You have training?” the man asks in an accented voice.

“Sure,” Tasha replies. Only a dozen years’ worth, give or take. She remembers the temporary foster mommy holding her six-year-old self’s hand and steering her into a glossy, echoing studio. Go. Make some friends.

Only that’s not what stuck. The rhythm of it intrigued her, and the aching stretch of her muscles fed the masochist already under development inside Tasha’s skin. She felt anointed in the sweat, and later in the bloody toe pads she peeled off post pas de deux.

She probably could’ve made a career of it if she’d been committed enough. Her lack of grand prix appearances or summer intensive tours would’ve made her a dark horse at any cattle call audition, but Tasha had talent. Has talent. Or she would if she, say, ate enough to stay the semi-permanent tremor in her core.

“Sure. I guess.” Tasha shrugs.

“Repertory Ballet Theater. Downtown. Tonight at seven.” The teacher winks.

Tasha feels nauseous. “Look,” she starts, glancing around at her decidedly less graceful classmates, for once wishing she was the galumphing fat girl arguing her foot into a passé over in the corner. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but--” What is she going to say? No? Stop making a pass at me, you disgusting older man?

“No.” The teacher says, beating her to it. He makes a calm down motion, as if that’s going to help. “It’s a job. You know, work for pay?”

“Yeah,” Tasha replies. “And that’s illegal.”

“Oh, no, sweetheart.” The teacher scrubs his hand over his beard and squeezes his eyes shut. “No. Nothing like that. It’s community dance theater, and I have a piece in the spring showcase. Someone got injured. I need a body. That’s all.”

It’s almost soothing, the way he’s objectifying her. It isn’t her body he wants specifically, just someone to fill the space. He’s seeing her talent, recognizing it, and giving the kudos she’s lacked during all the in-between years when she was the only kid at recital without a bouquet of flowers. Tasha can’t decide if she wants to take the compliment.

“Um, think about it?” she mutters, tombé-ing away to perform the combination of steps again. It seems more challenging now. Tasha cares more about what she looks like, the position of her standing leg, the angle of the working one.

The teacher bobs his head and gives a single chuckle as he smiles.

Evening comes, and Tasha means to blow him off, but then a text from James asks what she’s doing tonight, and she suddenly has good reason to be busy. Sorry, can’t, she types back before he can even finish extending the invitation to whatever it is he and Steve are up to this time.

Tasha sticks one hand over the side of the unlabeled box in the top of the closet and finds a pair of barely worn Grishkos. The teacher hadn’t specified, but somehow Tasha knows she’ll need pointe shoes. They’re poorly fitted now after a couple years’ down time, but going up is like riding a bicycle. No one really forgets how, and the worst you can do is fall over.

Algebra homework and a poorly timed nap make Tasha half an hour late, but she throws back a tiny bottle of vodka on the studio’s front stoop and then pops her head in.

The teacher is Aleks now, not Professor. “And this is nothing indecorous, ok?” he says, giving Tasha a little push toward a chorus of girls in legwarmers and wrap skirts. The fact that he’d choose a word like that speaks to the purity of his intentions. Tasha rolls her eyes, but not in the direction Aleks will be able to see.

After a few minutes of watching and catching the other dancers’ glares, Tasha takes her place. It’s a demi-soloist part, or at least it would be if the company ranked their dancers, but operations of this miniature scale don’t work that way. Tasha immediately senses animosity, though. Aleks has sinned, bringing in an outsider instead of promoting from within. What he’s done is better, though, letting the group hate him instead of each other. Tasha’s medicated enough to let the open stares of animosity glance off her shiny coating.

Rehearsals run every night this week, culminating with a tech, a dress, and a Saturday night opener. It’s hardly worth calling it that, since the show only runs once, but, hell, old habits die hard. Old toe shoes do, too, and Tasha finds herself borderline gleeful at the lines of abrasions wrapping around her tender white feet. She wants to curse herself for going soft, but at the same time, she’s grateful for the opportunity to feel the pain so organically, literally from the ground up.

James has blown up her phone with texts and voicemails, so Tasha has no choice but to call him as she walks back home, alone, kicking leaves out of the gutter at nearly ten-thirty. “You’ll never believe this,” she prefaces, already cringing in preparation for his reaction. “I’m dancing. Like, really.”

The conversation progresses predictably, and after the conscriptive where the hell are you’s and don’t you know what time it is’s, James asks when and where the performance will be.

“Saturday,” Tasha tells him. “Assuming I live that long.”

And she does, though it’s no easy feat. Three days’ rehearsal is cutting it close, even for her. Tasha’s glad the piece is only eight minutes. Any longer spent with the corps de ballet boring their jealous holes into the back of her head and she just might explode. Not at them, for wanting to be her, but at herself for taking up the spotlight.

Finally Saturday comes, and everything that goes wrong does. Tasha wakes with blocked sinuses, maybe a touch of fever. She’s late getting to the theater, again, and even so, the stage is still covered in ladders and mop buckets when she shows up.

“Bad dress, good show, eh?” Aleks says cheerfully, though dress was last night and it was fine. Tasha still needed a handful of shots to cool her nerves afterward, and now she’s nursing half a hangover along with her stuffy nose as somebody’s grandmother fiddles with her costume. She should be warming up, not standing here in the wings while this white-haired bitch takes issue with a centimeter worth of bloat. But then again, maybe she shouldn’t be; Tasha’s head is wanging, and her shoes are hardly more than rosin and mush.

Her attention lapses, and she sways on her feet. Unfortunately, Aleks sees, and he jumps up from the orchestra pit, brows raised and hands extended. “Sit.”

He forces Tasha onto the stage hand’s folding chair and makes a show of offering her a Twizzler wrapped in crinkly plastic, much to the granny’s chagrin. “Yvette, stop. She’s fine.” He squats beside Tasha and addresses her directly. “You’re fine, right?”

“Yeah.” Tasha almost coughs. “Completely.”

“Bullshit,” Aleks replies, though he leaves it at that and a second piece of candy.

Tasha snarfs down the sugar, feeling it mix badly with mucous and nerves at the pit of her stomach. She doesn’t care, though. She needs the boost. Tasha glances down at her phone and dismisses James’s good luck text with a swipe of her finger. She knows better than to look for him in the audience, so this will be the last she sees of him until after the show. Assuming, of course, she makes it that long.

It feels like a close-cut deal. Tasha squeaks into the toilet stall at the corner of the dressing room an instant before her stomach revolts. There’s no time to categorize the ache under her ribs as real or psychosomatic before she has to blink away stars and pat her lipstick with a tissue, then run out onto the stage.

The actual dancing is surreal. Tasha fudges the finish on her first pirouette into a tombé, but beyond that, it’s unremarkable. There are things she’d like to improve, and she’s not sure she smiled one lick, but she survives the underwater feeling of the open stage, gasping back to safety in the wings as the audience erupts in applause.

Maybe this isn’t so bad, Tasha thinks. There are plenty of tiny studio companies around here; she could swing a class here and a rehearsal there, maybe make a little pocket money and work out a little frustration.

“Fuck.” Tasha closes her eyes before she’s clear of the last boom, and both she and it tumble toward the ground. There’s a crash, though nothing breaks except Tasha’s thoughts. No, she decides. She isn’t cut out for this after all.

The stage hand is more concerned with the light than with her, so Tasha peels herself up off the floor and limps from the smooth marley to the rougher floor of the wing. Luckily Aleks is across the stage on the opposite side, so nobody comes rushing to her aid.

“Jesus,” she mutters, testing her weight on the ankle that’s suddenly all pins and needles. It’s not badly injured, she knows that much, but something is wrong. A tweak or a twinge or some other nebulous word her teachers used to use when they acknowledged her pain but wanted Tasha to keep going anyway.

“Hey, you alright?” Tasha’s about to deck the stupid stage hand for his delayed reaction, but then she sees, or more accurately, smells, the doobie he’s rolling between his fingers. She’s staunchly between him and the door to the back alley, and it’s clear that he’s more invested in his smoke than he probably is in the whole production.

“Yeah,” Tasha says snappily, hopping on one foot as she yanks on her pointe shoe ribbons. “Fine.”

“You can come outside too, if you want,” the stagehand murmurs, “But I gotta finish this before I have to run curtain again.” He bounces a meaningful look between Tasha’s face and the exit sign above her head.

“Um.” She shoots a glance across the stage, looking for Aleks in the opposite wing, but he’s gone. Probably crossing behind the scrim to come around and check on her again. Tasha suddenly feels hot and sick to her stomach again. Maybe a jaunt outdoors is just what she needs.

“Just a sec.” She nips into the dressing room long enough to divest herself of her tutu and throw on an oversized t-shirt over her nude briefs. Tasha gathers up her bag and hurries back to the wing, still in her shoes and tight bun. “Ok,” she says, catching back up with the stagehand and as good as shoving him out the door.

“Alright,” the young man says. “Alright, baby.” He sounds like he’s trying the word on for size, not like he really means anything by it. He’s Tasha’s age, maybe a year or two younger, so she decides not to hold it against him much.

“Stop it,” Tasha hisses, throwing a backhanded strike that whistles past the kid’s nose.

“Ok, ok,” he says with shaky bravado. “I was only kidding. Just chill a little.”

“Fuck you.” Tasha decides she’s earned the first hit on the joint, so she helps herself to the rolled cigarette and pulls out her own lighter. The stagehand seems to have learned his lesson; he doesn’t protest.

The smoke stings Tasha’s raw throat as she inhales, igniting a high-pitched moucousy cough that tastes like cannabis and sickness. She leans against the brick wall and surveys the alley. It’s not a bad hiding place, all things considered. Maybe a hair too skinny for vehicle traffic, but not overpopulated with dumpsters and wooden pallets.

“I thought you hurt yourself,” the stagehand says as he takes back the doobie. “But, uh, you’re sick?”

Tasha shrugs and rummages in her bag for one of her little bottles. “Born this way,” she says in a rough whisper. “Baby.”

“Hey, I said I was sorry,” the kid tells her, though he’s fibbing. He never actually said the words, even if he meant them. “I just, I don’t want to annoy you, but, like,” he waffles, “You ok?’

“Hmph.” Tasha throws back a mouthful of vodka, feeling it sting along her gums and deep in her throat. She enjoys the burn, swishing it between her teeth as she slowly sinks into a sitting position against the wall. It’s a warm spring night, but goosebumps still rise on her arms and legs.

Tasha’s phone chirps, and she digs it out of her bag, glad for the distraction so she can quit talking to the stagehand who’s beginning to feel sleazier by the minute.

It’s a text from James, the latest in a string of complimentary messages. You were great! Tasha dismisses. Do you want to meet in the lobby? Are you allowed to come watch the rest? It’s intermission, she gathers, and James has gone full older brother protective, worrying about the trouble she can get into when she’s out of his sight.

The concern isn’t misplaced, Tasha concedes, accepting the joint back from the stagehand who’s now slumped against the wall a solid two feet away. It’s just annoying. She puffs on the smoke, then finally finishes freeing her bad foot from the cage of her pointe shoe. The ankle joint is the slightest bit swollen, and it hurts when she pokes at it, but there are no other marks. Another phantom injury, some invisible thing wrong with her that no one can prove and no one wants to take her word about. A grunt of pain escapes her as Tasha rearranges her foot over top of her lap.

The stagehand starts to say something again, but now Tasha’s phone is ringing, blaring some nameless 80s electronica tune James chose specifically for its annoyingness.

“What?” Tasha barks, a bit more roughly than intended.

“Hey, where are you?” James’s voice demands. “I ran into your director at the concession stand, and he says he can’t find you either.”

Tasha tips her head back, her bun cushioning her from banging her skull against the wall. “Fuck,” she mutters. “I’m just… taking a smoke break, ok?”

“Tash, really?”

“I’m done with my piece! What does it matter what I’m doing now?”

“No final bow?” James asks. Tasha can almost hear his eyebrows knitting together.

“No,” Tasha coughs. “I’m not 12. This isn’t some lame recital.”

“No, it’s not,” James agrees. He pauses, and Tasha can hear Steve’s and Aleks’s voices in the background, along with the ambient noise of the theater lobby. “You feeling alright? You sound…”

“Smokey?” Tasha tries. Her voice cracks, though, and gives her away. A pang of nausea rises into her chest, and she feels ashamed for feeling sick. Maybe sick for feeling ashamed.

“I... “ James starts. “No. Just, where are you?”

“Out back. With…” Tasha looks the stagehand up and down. “Ted?” she decides to christen him.

“Actually, it’s Josh,” the kid corrects, giving her a sideways look.

“Josh, sorry,” Tasha shakes her head, reigniting the pain throbbing behind her forehead. “Ted was last night’s one night stand.” It’s a lie, though Josh doesn’t seem to know that.

“Uh, my mom will be home,” Josh whispers, going pink.

James says something else at the same time, and Tasha misses both. “Will you fucking shut up?” she says, not exactly into the phone.

“Is this Josh person harassing you?” James asks loudly.

“I… no,” Tasha says in what she hopes is a firm tone. Her voice feels reedy, as if her throat is full of bits of broken glass.

“I’m giving you one last try,” James commands. The timbre of the background noise changes. Tasha can tell he’s stepped outside. “Where are you? And what happened?”

“I’m fine.”

“Tasha…”

“I tweaked my foot a little bit, and I’ve got this lame cold--” She has to pause and cough again. Tasha would rather keel over and die right there.

“Ok, it’s ok,” James says automatically. “You said you’re out back?”

Steve’s voice mutters something, and Tasha’s sure she hears the words swing by and pick her up.

“Don’t, ok,” she croaks. “I’m really fine.” But the nausea picks that moment to triple in intensity, sending her struggling onto hands and knees to gag while trying to keep a grip on her phone.

“No, you’re not.” Josh hovers a hand a few inches off Tasha’s shoulder, clearly afraid of touching her, and perhaps more afraid of what will happen if he doesn’t. “You’re… Is that blood?”

It’s twizzler hanging, suspended in spit, from the corner of Tasha’s mouth. She’s too nauseated to enlighten anyone, so she just hocks and spits, then drags a shaky hand over her lips. She swallows a sick hiccup and tries to decide if the ache of suppressed fever or that of wayward concern hurts worse.

“God, Tash…” James says. “We’re in the car. We’re on our way.” There’s the sound of an ignition turning over. “Are you seriously puking blood?”

Tasha’s interrupted by the need to vomit again, otherwise she would have staunchly set him straight. She sputters and straightens up just as the red glow of tail lights appears at the mouth of the alley.

“Ok, I see you,” James says over the phone, though he opens his door and Tasha catches the top of his head peeking around the back of Steve’s civic. “Stop, babe, you’re close enough.”

Tasha protests. So does Steve, though less vociferously. He seems to be convinced he can back all the way up the alley, despite the fact that it’s clearly too narrow and Tasha can clearly walk, which she demonstrates by shoving herself backwards onto her mismatched feet and limping toward the car.

“The fuck are you thinking?” James mutters as he rushes up to her side, taking in Tasha’s too bedraggled to be sexy outfit, then stopping when he gets to her pale, tired face.

“I wasn’t?” Tasha tries, too exhausted to deal with anything but sympathy. And mild sympathy at that.

“Yeah, story of your life, right there.” James pulls her under one arm and awkwardly opens the door to the backseat for her. “But lucky you, tonight it’s gonna have a happy ending.”

#captain america #alternate universe #chasing ghosts #sickfic #emeto #emetophilia #hurt/comfort #natasha romanoff #natasha romanov #Bucky Barnes #Steve Rogers #stucky #ballet

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weapon13whitefang · 5 years

Note

Challenge Ask: One of the theories out there is that Beth is part of the Whisperers. If so, what do you think Beth would have to do to get Daryl to join aswell? #BringBackBeth2019

I’m gonna start off by saying that, with one hundred percent belief on my end, Beth would not try to get Daryl to join the Whisperers unless she had absolutely no idea who he or Carol or Michonne – the only people she’d recognize at this point since Maggie and Rick are MIA – were at all.

The Whisperers in the comic would only kill people that wouldn’t conform to their belief. They shun civilization and humanity and view humans as animals. Basically, the apocalypse was a reset for them to “go back to their roots”, so to speak. Which is funny because on the show, that’s what The Wolves believed. Hell, a Wolf basically says that to Morgan and Gabriel before Carol kills him:

“We’re freeing you. You’re trapped. You need to know, people don’t belong here anymore.”

Which is why a lot of people who’ve read the comics probably thought The Wolves were going to be The Whisperers. They’re very similar after all… But it turns out it was more like a hint / foreshadowing of the Whisperers. At least in terms of dealing with people with views that are “way out there”.

Think about it this way. So far, besides Terminus and The Wolves, the other groups that TF has faced had very understandable reasons behind their actions that one could associate with human survival and mentality. The Governor was a bit mad but his choices stemmed from basic human emotions that were twisted. He lost his family and therefore it twisted him up and he wanted a cure to get his daughter back and he wanted control to run things as he saw they should be. His actions were disgusting and horrible, but he was still marginally human. A monster in his actions. But a human.

Dawn and Grady were an example of The Stanford Prison Experiment. The psychological perceived image of power and control over one’s prisoners. Dawn believed she had control and therefore she underestimated people and what they can and will do for power or to survive. If you’ve never read about the experiment or seen the tapes, fair warning that they’re hard to stomach but also really fascinating. But I can say that some of what we saw at Grady is very similar to the experiment. Especially when you focus on how each person fell into their roll and how quickly things fell apart since the experiment only lasted six days but many people left mid experiment…

Anyway, Grady still had the psychological connection to human actions. What we saw with Dawn and the other officers and the prisoners/Beth was examples of human actions when given no boundaries within boundaries. Meaning the actions of the officers were still “controlled” in the hospital because too much push could have consequences to them even if Dawn was slack on punishment for the sake of a power balance, she still had the illusion of control over things and psychologically that put people in place. Even the ones plotting against her. She was still being a cop just with very twisted views and survival choices… It’s kind of like when you deal with a teacher that thinks they can do whatever they want because they have ten year but, in the end, they still have to keep to certain school rules or risk a full-on student attack. Least in high school anyway.

Then there’s The Saviors. Negan was using charisma and intimation to rally people the way he wanted them. He was basically being an Adolf (I’m not gonna put the N with the Z word in here incase it gets flagged or something since Tumblr is on some cray with their tagging or mention issue) and he used charisma and the illusion of power to make things his way. We get a hint from Gordon (the Savior who tried to get away that Dwight killed) that things before Negan were different. That when Negan came in, everyone and everything changed:

“Thug swoops in with a baseball bat and smiles and we’re so scared we gave up everything – but there’s only one of him and all of us so why are we living like this?”

If you think about it, Negan’s reign was a very basic example of Adolf’s reign over Germany. Adolf came in, worked himself up to power in politics with cunningness, violence, and his overall charm. People liked him (crazy enough) and he was excellent at speaking and surrounded himself with people like himself that weren’t afraid of violence to fulfill their political gain… Who does that sound like? Negan. And Negan used a lot of psychological torture on people (example of letting Dwight fuck with Daryl by taking away his clothes, keeping him awake with cheery music, and feeding him dog food), something Adolf himself had done with his camps… Basically the Saviors could be an example of Germany and their fall to Adolf’s political party… And this is even more true when you think of how Germany had a hard time adapting after Adolf’s fall (I know there’s more history to it than that but I’m not going into politics and history here, just pointing out similarities).

So now look at the Terminus crew and The Wolves. Out of the two, Terminus is more human than the Wolves were. They were once a peaceful group who put up signs to bring people together to survive and have a future… But the wrong kind of people got in and stayed and used the Terminus crew and raped and just enslaved them. This broke Gareth and his brother Alex and their mother Mary. He started seeing his deeds – eating people and hurting them – as things he had to do. Not things he wanted to do. Things he had to do to survive. They needed to eat. Food was scarce, so they took a page from the Walkers. People became the food. You’re either the butcher or the cattle mentality taken to a whole new level… Those that didn’t fall in line – those that questioned the choice to eat others – became the cattle.

Really, Gareth even says it to Bob after Bob wakes up (I cut down some of the speech because it’s not really needed):

“I want to explain myself a little. You see, we didn’t want to hurt you… before. We didn’t want to pull you away from your group or scare you. These aren’t things we want to do. They’re things we gotta do. You and your people took away our home. That’s fair play. Now we’re out here like everybody else trying to survive. And in order to do that, we have to hunt. Didn’t start that way, eating people. It evolved into that. We evolved. We had to. And now we’ve devolved, into hunters… I just hope you understand that nothing happening to you now is personal…. A man’s gotta eat….”

It’s human to evolve… But it’s also an animal thing. Humans and Animals have evolved over the years to adapt to the changing environment and changing world. Gareth had a point when he said they had to evolve… But he was right in that when they evolved, they devolved as well. They went back to cave men. Because in TWD world you can’t be like you were. Like Beth said, you gotta put the past behind you or it kills you. The Terminus people became the Walkers… Humans as Walkers. So, they were the first simple example of The Whisperers in that they turned their back on civilized norm. They ate other humans to live. They weren’t too different from the walkers… Just maintained their human mind of being able to have cognitive thoughts. In the end, that got them killed cause they tried to eat the wrong people.

Then there’s The Wolves. Primitive and cult like, The Wolves used the walkers just like Terminus adapted with the walkers. Now we didn’t see a wolf eat a person (least I don’t recall seeing them try to eat a person) but they did use the walkers and took to overthrowing and raiding other survivor groups to survive. They were scavengers (taking the arc of The Scavengers in the comic, who are the ones who actually attack ASZ after Rick kills Pete). They were like wolves. They scavenged their food, mark their territory, and would grow in numbers with gathering more people to follow their way or gather more walkers to use as a trap, marking them with their W’s as well. Marking them like a farmer marks their cattle. A butcher marking their kills… Which is what a pack of wolves does. They mark their territory and take from it as they see fit.

So again, it’s easy to see why they were viewed as being The Whisperers. But I believe – like a lot of people – that they were just a “beta” version of the Whisperers for the group to face. The Wolves devolved from civilization to taking on animal qualities of a cult-pack mindset and were using the walkers to gain an upper hand against other “packs”, AKA the people they attacked. The Whisperers devolved to become those that use the walkers but walk among them… The Wolves and the Terminus crew were a buildup to the Whisperers – a buildup to Beta and Alpha. Alpha is basically like Gareth and Beta is like Owen, the former leader of the Wolves.

So, what about Beth in terms of my entire rambling? Well as I said, I do not believe that unless Beth didn’t know who Daryl was, she wouldn’t try to lure him to the Whisperers. That role seems to be going to Lydia – the girl we see telling Daryl in the trailer that “you don’t belong with these people” or so it’s being made out as… We’ll see.

Now I started writing this out before the mid-season premiere so I’ve gone and changed some thoughts, but most of the following stuff is still what I think. I think Lydia is going to try and persuade Henry and Daryl. More so I see Henry, as it seems they’re trying to play Carl’s role with Lydia on Henry, though I don’t see it going over like it did in the comics (We saw an image of Lydia violently lashing out in the future episode previews so I’m still with the belief that she can’t be trusted for now./// May change.)

Anyway, with Lydia persuading Henry, his easily impressionable and good hearted nature is gonna have him go after Lydia (SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON YOU’VE BEEN WARNED there’s going to be an exchange for Luke and Alden from Alpha to get her daughter back). Daryl is going to have to get into the Whisperers group because I’m sure others are gonna be captured (this part I do not know but I do know Daryl is supposed to put on a Walker suit and mask). That’s how he ends up fighting Beta like we see in the preview (which, ooc for this post I’m so fucking excited for just FYI ‘cause I love love love Ryan Hurst and I’m so happy to see SOA peeps on TWD… Can we get others? Please?! Lol) and that’s going to probably get Daryl captured by the Whisperers as well.

Now here is my speculation… I have a few ideas about – if she is with the Whispers – that can maybe be possible. One, I am wondering if Beth is going to be shown coming across the spiked Walker heads. Why do I think that? This:

This is Andrea after she finds the spiked heads of her friends with Michonne, Rick, Dante, Carl, and Lydia. Michonne in the comic was in a sort of relationship with Ezekiel (who is one of the heads that the group finds) and she breaks down, unable to put down Ezekiel’s reanimated head. Andrea takes a knife from Michonne and does it for her. Now… Look at how Andrea looks. She’s wearing a poncho, a hat similar to what Gabriel has been wearing (I believe it’s called a Gaucho hat or more commonly just called a Mexican cowboy hat), jeans, her hair pulled back, and the scar on her face.

The poncho automatically makes me think of Daryl. Daryl’s poncho was left back at the prison when it fell along with Merle’s bike. So unless Beth ended up back at the fallen walker over-run prison (which, hey, if she was still in Georgia when she woke up, wouldn’t be that far off though I highly doubt it) then her picking up a poncho not only would be a reference to something Daryl did but it would also connect to Maggie as Daryl let Maggie wear the poncho in S3. The hat would be a nod to Rick, as the Gaucho “Mexican Cowboy Hat” would associate to the cowboy hat that Rick wears and honestly with Beth’s jeans, would look dope as hell… Just saying. She’d look like a female Clint Eastwood, which is why Norman wanted the poncho – Clint Eastwood look.

This image of Andrea is one of the many that really paints that Beth and Comic!Andrea looked very similar. There are tons of images in the comic of Andrea that make Beth look like her twin. Especially with the new cut across her cheek she had received in Grady.

With this image in mind and being at this part in the comic on the show, I can’t help but just gravitate to it and think of Beth in general… Which is mostly just fan reaching with no solid evidence, but that’s one way I can see Beth having a connection to the Whisperers’ coming across their “handy work”.

Number two, if Beth survived the gunshot, her memory could be all kinds of fucked up. She might not have a single clue as to who Daryl or Carol or Michonne are. She might not recall that she has a sister or who Rick was or even know who Judith was/is. I always keep in mind that we were told the reunion could be bittersweet for Beth and the others… Bittersweet could mean that she doesn’t remember anyone OR that she’s partially blind and can’t recognize people OR that she doesn’t remember anyone and is a completely different person than she was… That would be the only way I’d be able to see Beth within the Whisperers world. The Beth we know wouldn’t stand for what they do. Would she maybe stick around to survive them if they captured her? Absolutely. But the moment she could, Beth would escape… Unless she didn’t know who she was at all anymore. As in who she is and who she was are not part of her and make her completely different. What’s more bittersweet than finding something you lost but it’s not the way you remember it? Ever find an old book or an old photo or something you lost, only to see it’s missing pages or is cracked in places or just not completely like you left it… That could be Beth. That gunshot has to have some kind of leftover affect on the girl… Trauma to the head isn’t gonna leave you in one single piece. Not from what I’ve studied and heard…

So of course the third thing is that she’s pretending and with the Whisperers as a means to survive because they said join us or we kill you / fuck you up. So she joins them… But if Beth saw Daryl or Michonne and her memory was still around, then she’d do her damn best to get to him and Michonne to get back to her family like she’s been trying to do FOR EIGHT YEARS. This is why I have a hard time with this whole “Boots is Beth” thing, by the way. I can see the appeal of it. And there are some strange things around it… But if Beth had any clue of where Rick or Maggie or Michonne or Daryl were, she’d have gone to them asap. Granted, she could’ve gotten held up / something bad happened to her on the way between the junkyard and Alexander. But even still, eight years is a long time to get held back…

Overall, eight years is a long ass time between Grady and now. Oh sure, it had been two years or so since they’d seen Morales and suddenly he shows up and his loose end was closed… But at least Morales wasn’t some weird ass fucking Dutch angle bullshit. He left for a new location with his family, he never made it, and he found the Saviors. That’s the basic of it… But it’s a story and it folds up nice enough to make sense… Beth’s story is an eight year fucking gap in the TWD world. For us it’s been just over five years of nothing… Would now be the best time to drop her in? Well it wouldn’t hurt the ratings right now that’s for bloody sure. I mean – I know everyone is pointing it out but why don’t I as well – the ratings for Season 1 were just slightly lower than they are now… Slightly. Not too far. But close… Season 4 and Season 5 were the best and highest in ratings out of all nine… They need to step some shit up. Not by taking away and adding in a bunch of who the fuck people… But by doing something no average viewer is going to expect. I took film classes. I studied this shit. They need to do something or the show can end up on the chopping block and goodbye big screen and FEAR and all the other ideas that were supposed to be played out.

Now… Back in 2015 – give or take – I did have a thought. This will be my final thoughts on Beth and the Whisperers, I cannot believe I’ve written something this long good god I am sorry for the long read…. But anyway, back in about 2015 or so, I wrote a post called “Liz Makes A Contribution to TD” (click to read if you want) . In that post I talked about the season five cast photos that were out at the time.

If you don’t recall which one those were, here’s a link from Skybound of them . So these photos come out and – like Skybound pointed out – there was no Tyreese or Beth or Carl. Which had people speaking up on Tumblr and I saw a few people on Twitter also comment to Skybound about how bizarre it was that we didn’t have these three… Well then we got a picture of Beth and Tyreese.

Of course Tyreese’s photo looked like everyone elses. Like they were all inside a barn (which they would end up in later… But not Tyreese) and Beth’s… Well, if you looked at everyone elseS THEN LOOKED AT Beth’s… Hers was completely different.

If you look at Beth compared to the others, hers just… Sticks out. Everyone else is inside something. There’s light coming through cracks and hitting everyone… But not Beth. She’s being completely covered in light. As in it’s shining down on her while it’s peaking at everyone else.

Now of course, if you read my post, you know that when we got Season 6 Promo pics, a lot of people flipped out and were pointing out how Beth’s picture looked like she was on the other side of the wall that Rick is leaning against and listening to the Walker on the other side.

Take a look

Even someone like me - on team fence - could still look at these images and go “Hey, Wait a minute…” and gasp at the realization that it literally looks like Beth is just on the other side of the wall Rick is against

Immediately I was thinking of Beth’s lines that she screamed at in Daryl to make a point to his drunk, angry ass. The same damn lines that many of us today have still been quoting and that many people have been pealing back layer by layer and feeling like this is important and it’s trying to tell us something.

“I know you look at me and you just see another dead girl. I’m not Michonne, I’m not Carol, I’m not Maggie. I’ve survived and you don’t get it ‘cause I’m not like you or them. But I made it and you don’t get to treat me like crap just because you’re afraid!”

How many times has TD gone over and over this line? How many times have you all found yourself just repeating that line and thinking “why did they have her say that if they just were gonna kill her” when we were told Scott had this whole damn thing planned out… Why give her that line to spit out? Or the line she says to Daryl as they’re sitting and talking on the porch?

“I’ll be gone someday.”

“Stop.”

“I will. You’re gonna be the last man standing. You are… You’re gonna miss me so bad when I’m gone, Daryl Dixon.”

Of course I highlighted the important elements... I have thought really had about this line many a times and I know you all have as well… So when I thought of those lines and thought of those promo photos and what they were saying to me, I went into “Holy Shit I Get It” mode.

Beth IS A dead girl… She’s among the dead…

At the time I didn’t understand what I was getting at. I just knew Beth would return with the Walkers. I felt that deep in my gut when I looked at the images. And even now, looking back at them, my body is like “dude, wake up and look dammit!” and I’m looking… But until now, I think I get what I didn’t realize back then.

The Walkers Beth will be with… Are the Whisperers.

A living girl among the dead… Who does that? The Whisperers do that. Alpha and the Whisper do just that. They LIVE among the DEAD. The WALK among the DEAD. They ARE the WALKING DEAD. They are what Rick said that Team Family was and what Daryl said they are not.

But what exactly does that mean… Is Beth a Whisperer… Or will she come from the Whisperers.

Let me explain… You asked if I believed Beth would try to convince Daryl to Join the Whisperers… If Beth is among the Whisperers AS a Whisperer, no I do not believe she will try to bring Daryl over… But rather try to get from the Dead to Daryl and Carol (who will be the only damn people left she will know with Michonne leaving) and reveal herself among the dead…. Or this whole Whisperers arc will lead to something that will clue Beth on where to find everyone… As in the Living Dead – the Whisperers – will be with the walkers that lead Beth to Hilltop or Alexandria or the Kingdom… Something done among the dead will lead the living back.

Make sense? God I hope so.

Those images are the only reason I could see Beth have anything to connect herself to the Whisperers… She’s among the dead. I do believe that… But how she’ll be with the living again is the mystery…

I’m so sorry this took so long and is so long oh my gawd lol!

Also imma tag @twdmusicboxmystery and @bethgreenewarriorprincess and @bethgreeneishopeunseen and @wdway cause they’re more TD than me and know more shit lol

#the walking dead #beth greene #team delusional #team acceptance #team whatever #team i dont care im having fun #ask #theories #bringbethback2019

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lindoig4 · 5 years

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Iceland - all in one long post

(It is now Saturday 24 August and we are in St Johns, Newfoundland, and before I wade into Iceland, I thought I would summarise the birds we have identified so far. Some we have seen in more than one place, so the number of discrete species we have seen is still less than 100 – 99 in fact. But by country, my count currently stands at 138, made up of 36 in the US; 4 when we were in Montreal and a further 11 here, making it 15 for Canada; 9 in Oslo and 21 more in Svalbard making 30 for Norway, 20 in Greenland and 10 in the Denmark Strait – so possibly 30 for Denmark, depending on how we define it and 27 for Iceland. I don’t intend canvassing international relations or interpreting the Law of the Sea so it is up to you to define Greenland, the Denmark Strait and international waters however you choose – I decline to enter into any dispute on the issue.)

Now back to wonderful Iceland.

We arrived early in the morning after a pretty wild day and night at sea and we were probably happy enough to be on land again. Not because of the rocking and rolling, but because we were a bit overloaded with all we had experienced on the expeditions and felt that anything else would likely be more of the same. The only thing we hadn’t seen that would have been nice was more whales, specifically belugas and narwhals, but we can’t have everything – or at least, we have been told so.

On the other hand, our expectations of Iceland left us a little cold (so to speak) but we were wonderfully wrong! We disembarked at 9am and were bussed to a stop just down the hill from our hotel. Not sure why they couldn’t drop us off as we went past, but it was only a couple of hundred metres back up the hill lugging our luggage. (There is a reason it is called Luggage.)

We spent most of the day in our room but went out to the supermarket and had a drink on the way back. I spent some time dashing in and out of the hotel into the garden at the back chasing a bird that kept calling every now and then, but I never found it. I eventually discovered that an identical sound came from a squeaky lift the was right next to where I thought the mythical bird was calling!

In the late afternoon, we went to the hotel bar for a 2 for 1 drink Happy Hour and fell into conversation with two local women almost our age and we had a really wonderful hour or so with them. They were both lovely intelligent women and it was a complete pleasure to share our respective thoughts with a wonderful couple of locals.

We then went to a Vietnamese restaurant we had sussed out whilst shopping and it was a big disappointment. Very ordinary food in pretty scungy surroundings for about $90 Oz with no drinks!

We went on two tours whilst in Reykjavik. I clearly recall being taught in high school that there is no green in Greenland and no ice in Iceland. But like many of the gems imparted to naive teenagers at school, both are entirely wrong.

We saw a lot of green in Greenland - no towering forests or endless savannahs but plenty of green ground-cover in lots of places. Similarly, in Iceland, there is not a lot of summer snow, but they play few winter sports because everything is blanketed in snow, inhibiting outdoor sports, even if competitors and spectators were able to attend snowbound venues (which they aren’t!)

But Iceland is certainly spectacular in summer. As I said, we went on two wonderful tours (thank you Nice Tours), but a few observations first.

Iceland has fewer than 350,000 residents (and 3,000,000 summer tourists each year), over two-thirds of them living in Reykjavik. Most of the others are farmers and their small beautiful farms are a picture of neatness, looking like they sweep the hills and comb the grass before the tourists arrive each morning. They desperately want more residents (their unemployment rate is effectively zero) and despite some resentment about the changes brought about to accommodate us, they are heavily dependent on tourism as their biggest contributor to GDP.

They have virtually unlimited geothermal energy and squander it outrageously. Similarly, water is abundant and profligacy is considered absurd. The geothermal water powers some of their electricity needs and is then returned to the earth or used to heat every building in the country. The rest of their energy comes from hydro plants. Even some small collectives of farmers agree to install a small power plant to provide for their own needs and feed the surplus into the already overloaded grid. The only other fuel source appears to be imported petroleum at a little over $A2 a litre.

The hot water contains a bit of a cocktail of harmless minerals but smells a bit, so is used for showers and heating and the cold meltwater for most other things.

In the winter, some parts of the country are virtually inaccessible and the roads in those areas are atrocious but nearer Reykjavík, they are quite good - and the city itself is very modern-looking. No high-rises because they have plenty of room, but there are a few 5 or 6 level buildings.

There are NO trees away from the city, although a few farmers have attempted to grow some without a lot of success. But around Reykjavík, there are plenty of trees due to a concerted effort to provide some windbreaks for a few clicks around. I went for a walk this morning and found it very hard going, but apparently, the wind has been known to blow many people over, even to blow cell phones out of their hands (Shock, horror!). People stay indoors during the worst of the wind.

It is a very expensive place to live. We paid over $A85 for a very crummy meal at a Greasy Joe Chinese restaurant a couple of nights ago (our second expensive meal out) and even the supermarket gives rise to a few nasty shocks. One interesting point is that it costs more to build a house here than its sale price so a lot of people build their own rather than buy something that costs more than they could sell it for.

Having said all of that, Iceland is a wonderfully beautiful place with heaps of great things to see and do. It is very progressive. They had a National Pride Parade on the day we arrived and the whole city was decked out with rainbow flags and paraphernalia. The whole city seemed involved in celebrating the march and its participants. They are a very inclusive society and I found some of their more progressive ideas a little surprising - in a very good way.

Our tours were brilliant. Although we didn’t have any great expectations of the country before we arrived, I now wish we could just squeeze another month or so into our visit.

Golden Circle Tour

This is one of the more popular one-day tours and the scenery is amazing. (Most tours are multi-day and many are about 11 days and circumnavigate the island on their version of our Highway 1, although it is a little more rustic than ours in the north.). Rugged mountains, massive volcanic lava-fields, giant glaciers, thousands of waterfalls, wonderful wildlife (mainly birds) and miniature flora – simply superb. There are far more Icelandic horses than Icelanders - a unique breed that will remain pure because no other horses are allowed in, including any local horses that leave the country to compete in events - they are not allowed back in under any conditions! The sheep run free and have right of way on the road and all look very healthy: fat and woolly. There are cattle here, but they are mainly kept indoors - as are all the sheep in the colder months.

We visited the world’s second largest geyser (after Yellowstone) and watched it shoot almost 40 metres skywards every 5 to 8 minutes. It is the Geysir Strokkur and is source of word ‘geyser’ worldwide. We were careful to stay upwind, but some people got very wet trying to get the perfect selfie. There are numerous hot springs around and we saw plenty of thermal activity as we ate our packed lunch and walked to and from our bus. (I am tired of typing ‘spectacular’ so please just insert it once or twice in each paragraph. If any needs me to, I will provide a few hundred copies of spectacular, beautiful, amazing, astounding, wonderful, awesome, mindboggling, fantastic, fabulous – even fantabulous if you must - and any other superlatives you wish and you can just copy and paste them into each sentence or clause as you prefer – because they are all highly appropriate!)

We went to an awesome volcanic crater, obviously inactive, but huge, very steep-sided with a beautiful lake inside. We walked right around the ridge and photographed it from many angles. It was very windy and getting close to the rim was quite scary at times.

And what a spectacular waterfall Gulifoss was! It is fuelled by meltwater but totally awesome - mind-bogglingly so but still not Iceland’s biggest! The volume of water cascading down was truly (insert several superlatives here) but this was after a veritable drought - the driest period they have had for years. The water is funnelled into a huge canyon, way below anything we could see, but in a normal year, the volume is so huge, it fills the canyon! When I finally get some pics posted, you might imagine why it defies description.

We called in at a working farm for an icecream. Icelanders are the world’s most voracious consumers of icecream and we stopped at a couple of other places later in the day to avoid our guide suffering withdrawal symptoms.

Another stop was at the site of the world’s oldest parliament, dating to the 9th century. The tribes in the area decided that they needed more order in their community so elected a leader each 3 years and presented him with all their disputes and issues requiring resolution. He was given one day to think about them all and then stood on this particular rocky outcrop and addressed the assembled throng with his binding decisions the following day. It is now a UN World Heritage site and our guide was able to fill out a bit of history about it. Perhaps more significantly though is that the rock is on the very edge of the North American tectonic plate. We walked through an amazingly impressive fissure to get to the rock and it was a sobering thought that we were on such prehistorically significant ground. There is 6 kilometres between this and the nearby Eurasian plate at this point, with this distance growing by about 2.5 cm a year. At some point in the future a cataclysmic rupture is bound to happen right where we stood.

Then it was on the Eurasian tectonic plate, but with no fanfare or obvious geological features to mark it - but then, after the grandeur of the other side, it would be hard to match anyway. We spent much of the rest of the day in Eurasia - no passport required!

A truly fantastic tour and overloaded with historical, geological and simply grandeural(??) overload, we ate bread rolls and supped on Aquavit in our room at night.

Monday was a rest day, soaking in some of the previous day’s experience, washing, blogging, Happy Houring and finally eating at an extraordinarily sub-ordinary Chinese café at great expense at night.

Snaefellsnes Peninsula Tour

But next day was the Snaefellsnes Peninsula Tour: perhaps even more spectacular than the Golden Circle Tour. The giant glacier atop the mountain was distant, but omnipresent even at 200km distance. We saw dozens/scores of waterfalls (fosses in Icelandic), cascading down the mountains from the interior snowmelt and creating hundreds of crystal-clear creeks and rivers. At one time, some locals sent a sample of the river water to an international laboratory to see what minerals it contained. Receiving no response, they contacted the lab to enquire as to progress with the testing - only to be ridiculed by the analysers for wasting their time sending obviously distilled water for testing! Did I say crystal clear!?

We explored one wonderfully picturesque foss and associated lake close up - pics will eventually be posted. Just across the road from this great waterfall is a mountain that was historically assumed to be rather nondescript until a photo of it was unexpectedly voted one of the world’s ten most iconic mountains and a tourism cavalcade ensued. The mountain has featured in quite a lot of films, but alas, I don’t recall which. Maybe my photos will prompt some memories.

We had a superb fish lunch at a restaurant where our guide knew the chef. He seemed to know a lot of people, but had worked in a small local hotel with this chef - recently returned to Iceland as chef at a 3 Michelin hat restaurant in Europe. The food was excellent and because at least 10 of us agreed to purchase the fish special, we got it at half price: much closer to what we would pay for a similar meal in Oz.

We walked along the cliff from a charming tiny enclosed fishing harbour, past some awe-inspiring sink-holes too scary to get close enough to see the bottom, past a delightful bird-encrusted lake, past more cliffs filled mainly with nesting gulls, lava caves and blowholes, a fantastic rocky arch to a lookout with more caves, more nesting kittiwakes and a mass of hexagonal basaltic columns formed by the lava cooling more slowly. To add spectacle to amazing wonder, the columns were not straight, but twisted and bent in line with the strata being formed at the time. A geology lesson in itself!

Then on the way back to our little bus, we passed a man-made stone structure representing a monument to a local troll. Icelanders are very superstitious and many still believe in good and bad trolls and other forces that seem quite alien to us. Most of the island’s roads were built about 100 years ago when superstition was even more rife and many roads take unexpected detours to avoid crossing evil troll-infested sites (or to proceed through beneficent troll areas), much like our sacred sites in Australia only more so. And many people still ascribe or predict events to the beneficial or vengeful actions of trolls - and act accordingly, doing good things or avoiding bad omens just to be on the safe side.

We visited a beach made of black pebbles and vicious looking lava outcrops. It was surrounded by a lava field, mostly covered with wonderful soft silvery-green moss and lichens. After the lave cools, dust is blown in and microscopic lichen, fungus and algae start to grow, followed a few millennia later by the mosses that continue to break down the lava into what eventually becomes arable land - if it is not then covered by more lava or a glacier.

It was a long tour, almost 12 hours of utter wonder. We had walked several delightful kilometres and climbed quite a few steps and were quite tired by the time we reached our hotel so just ate what was in the fridge and went to bed, weary but still buzzing with the excitement of all we had seen. For me, a little bonus was the improved variety and number of birds we saw along the way, many of which we had been able to view with surprising clarity.

Our last day in Iceland was almost an anticlimax. I went for a long walk around Reykjavik in the morning. Heather’s ankle that she broke a couple of years ago was too sore to accompany me and we just reviewed photos, wrote stuff, repacked and had a Happy Hour in preparation for the long trip to St Johns on the morrow.

But given the chance, we would be back in Iceland with a campervan for a month or more perhaps risking the shoulder period to see the best of the whole island in all sorts of weather. It is definitely a place that should be on everyone’s Bucket List and even after being here, it is still on ours!

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mannatea · 6 years

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The latest chapter is bugging me and I was hoping to vent. I feel like the message of “war is bad, killing people is bad” is being handled in such a ham fisted way by isayama. I understand what he’s trying to do but it just feels so forced. For example Zootopia did an amazing job of taking a complex subject and making it clear enough for children to understand but weaving it into a good story too. SNK seems to be making that attempt for young adults, but it’s failing. Do you have any thoughts?

I always have thoughts! Sorry this took so long.

Zootopia has flaws! Glaring flaws! In fact, Zootopia has one of the same flaws that SnK has: the oppressed are feared because they used to have power over their oppressors. Right at the beginning of the film, they say: predators used to eat prey. So predators like Nick really did used to eat prey like Judy. This isn’t contestable, it isn’t arguable. It’s the backstory right there in the canon.

SnK has a little more wiggle room here, because our information comes from characters, not the narrative (or even an accepted historical perspective): we’re meant to believe that, more or less, the Eldians once had power over the rest of the world, and now, regardless of how they used that power and because of it, they are oppressed themselves.

What’s changed? Nothing, it’s just that the originally oppressed (Prey, Marley/rest-of-the-world) have gathered together the resources and means necessary to oppress, thus flipping the script.

And like, no matter how you look at it, the flipped script is both awful and understandable. This holds up better in SnK than it does in Zootopia, but SnK has been dragging on for years and Zootopia is a children’s movie that had a two hour block of time. So okay, in Zootopia, again, the predators ate the prey, but then they all developed Intelligence and stopped eating each other, but the predators didn’t develop blunt teeth or lack of claws, so the prey still feel like there’s something to be feared, there. In SnK, the Eldians can turn into mindless gigantic monsters that literally crush, stomp, kick, and eat everyone in their path, and to the average human being are invincible. Fear? Understandable. Oppressing them because they’re different? Awful, not to mention wrong…but not like…hard to understand.

Again, Zootopia ran into the SAME problem that SnK did with its comparisons. Both, brought into the real world to use with real world comparisons, would sound like this:

The Jewish people oppressed their German neighbors and the Germans retaliated and put them in Camps and killed them off by the thousands so that they wouldn’t have to fear being oppressed again themselves. This is, like, weird revenge for stuff that happened in the Bible, like when the Jews took the Canaan Land.

(HI IT’S ME, there’s some kind of essay comparison thing betweeen SnK and the walls of Jericho I’m sure.)

Black men and women were in a position of power over white men and women so the white men and women shackled them and dragged them across the ocean out of fear for their own lives, and like, let them live and stuff, but only as slaves (who were treated as less valuable than cattle). Oh, and I guess you can keep aspects of your culture but only the parts that aren’t scary to us. And also become Christian so you’re less terrifying!!

Women were once the oppressors of men. We’ve been put in our place.

Do you see how legitimately gross this is? The idea that an oppressed people did something to terrify other nations into doing the oppressing? There is always a reason for everything that happens, and by that I’m not quoting bullshit Christianity rhetoric that is intended to make your grandma feel better when Aunt Susie dies; I mean CAUSE AND EFFECT. It’s easy to stir up hatred, okay? It’s not hard. You see it now. “Those brown people are stealing our jobs!!!” We all know someone, or ten someones, or a hundred, who believe that shit–who believe that Hispanic men and women are illegally in the USA stealing “American” jobs. And for a much quieter, less overt version of this, we have the white vegans who get mad if you try and explain to them that their lifestyle is understandable up to the point where they’re fine with brown men and women working as slaves to produce their food all in the name of “lol protecting animals.” Racism and misogyny aren’t always overt, and in fact…usually are not. Nobody who has been oppressed deserved it; nobody who has been oppressed was once the big bad oppressor, either.

All right, so moving on.

Zootopia’s comparisons are more clearly across the board. Judy, a prey animal, becomes a cop, a predator position, and is deterred by her parents/friends/new coworkers for various reasons that are clearly an allusion to misogyny. It’s commenting on anti-women attitudes. “That’s a man’s job.” “I’m going to give you my shit work because you’re a woman.” “I’m going to give you unreasonable parameters to work within because it’s funny to do that to women working in a man’s field.” Oh, and my favorite: “You work here but we’re going to give you the job here that we reserve for women.” And it’s not just the obvious people either, like Judy’s supervisor or her direct coworkers. Clawhauser doesn’t exactly come to Judy’s defense even though he’s kind to her, and Nick mocks Judy openly multiple times.

But wait, there’s more: Nick as a little boy wanted to join the Junior Ranger Scouts! It’s a prey-only group, mostly, where you’re taught how to protect yourself (it seems to be the idea, since prey is generally less capable of this). But when Nick was finally able to enroll, he wasn’t welcome and was bullied instantly (in a manner meant to discourage him from ever coming back). The situation is generally black and white: predators bully prey, prey bully predators. We don’t see a lot of instances of like bullying like (even though it probably happens in certain circumstances).

Nick’s joining the scouts also brings up poverty, as Nick’s family seems to have been very poor and his mother had to scrape the money together just to buy the uniform (probably contributing to feelings of guilt and shame when it ended up being obvious to Nick later that he wasn’t welcome there). And also something-something single parent.

SnK jumped face-first into “like bullying like” but only because Isayama stacked the deck that way from the start (and had time to do it): Oppressed Eldians vs. Walldians is what I mean, here. So we see Eldians who hate Marleyans, Marleyans (and the rest of the world) who hate Eldians, and then we see Eldians hurting each other, too (because they’ve been brainwashed into doing so and/or to protect themselves). We even get half-Marleyan Reiner, who isn’t wanted by his Marleyan father, but that seems to be more out of fear of getting hung (and/or hatred of Reiner’s manipulative mother) than anything.

Those are just a couple of examples. Both Zootopia and SnK deal with a similar type of issue and try to comment on things like racism, but only Zootopia openly comments on misogyny and poverty (which are both things very clearly related when you’re talking about racism parallels), not to mention internalized racism (which is still racism but exists more quietly, even in good people like Judy).

Where Zootopia excelled isn’t the broken-down simplified version of racism. It’s the story. It’s engaging. It’s fun. SnK started out that way! But now, as a whole, it feels disjointed and incomplete. There are long lulls of SnK where I feel bored and the characters/events transpiring feel meaningless.

I’m definitely not going to say that Zootopia is an objectively a better piece of media than SnK, because it isn’t. As I said earlier, it has its issues. They fell into the same pitfall that SnK did with “the oppressed were once themselves oppressors.” And if you look really hard at it and squint a lot, there are things to critique that you probably hadn’t considered before: like Gazelle’s dancers being shirtless predator men

And we can’t really say it’s fair to compare a two hour simplified metaphor for racism/misogyny/“they’re different than I am” intended for an audience of about eight years old to a teen+ rated manga that has been going on for literal years and has been published monthly that entire time.

(Try updating a story once a month for years and see how good the whole thing ends up being. Get back to me with a laundry list of embarrassing mistakes you made and massive regrets. You’ll have them. Trust me.)

Zootopia pretty much did “racism and misogyny are bad” and succeeded. It was a fairly successful film that was way, way better than anyone expected it to be (considering we mostly knew it as “the furry movie” due to the trailers being wildly stupid), but again: 2 hours and aimed at children. You can’t really simplify racism and misogyny and poverty into a two hour film and you definitely can’t do it flawlessly. They get points for trying, though, and for creating a piece of media that I personally related to and enjoyed (particularly from the angle of a woman working in fields dominated by men).

SnK is doing a lot of…something. I think “racism is bad” is an intention but it’s very long and drawn out and plastered onto the backdrop of a war and brainwashing and, what, centuries of oppression? Shit’s convoluted as hell and there’s no room left to talk about misogyny and poverty, even though they’re part of the series in many ways, and even though IMO these things are impossible to fully separate from the topic of racism. Add to this the attempt to write a narrative commentary on war and grey morality with a fantasy/gore aspect and you’ve kind of accidentally ruined the intention of the racism message far more than Zootopia ever did. Zootopia’s kind of like, “so hey thousands of years ago predators and prey weren’t intelligent so in our pre-caveman days we were enemies but once we developed brains we were like WTF? and stopped doing that.” SnK’s like, “well so it wasn’t really that long ago BUT the eldians oppressed everyone and we’re scared of being killed by them so we keep them in internment camps lol.”

SnK could yet surprise us by telling us that anyone can turn into a titan, and IMO that’s the ONLY way to save the racism metaphor that the series seems to be going for. LITERALLY the only way. It won’t make it perfect, but it’ll save it from being a colossal failure. “They’re oppressed now because they used to oppress us” is disgusting and vile and honestly kind of scary; that’s not a thing and a wildly successful series like SnK putting that message out into the world is terrifying. “They’re oppressed because we’re greedy fucks who lied and covered it up with a reason” not only makes a LOT of sense (see: only Marley deals with Eldia, nobody else does, it’d be easy to lie about it), but it’s a clear real-world parallel.

Right now, though…SnK has basically failed to fully address “racism is bad”—at least in a satisfying and inoffensive way.

And then of course, as Anon said, we have the war to talk about. Greed is a huge part of this and not very discussed. (Greed being about monetary greed, power, land, resources, et cetera.) I don’t know if SnK is actively trying to say war is bad or not; the narrative seems to be painting Eren in a bad light, but if I were (general) you, I wouldn’t take that very seriously. Isayama is notorious at this point for manipulating the narrative to fit what he wants you to see/take away from things. Otherwise, his idea of a plot twist wouldn’t work. ;P

Anyway, the latest chapter’s “killing people is bad” thing would come across a lot better, in my opinion, if there wasn’t already so much going on. Zootopia could condense its subject easily due to its 2 hour block, smallish cast, and simplified world. 111 chapters into SnK and there’s just no way anything is capable of being simple anymore. Is 111 trying to talk about “war is bad and killing is bad” or is it talking about revenge or the folly of anger? The Count of Monte Cristo did revenge so well nobody else will ever top it (so it might be unfair to expect SnK to), and even a GBA Fire Emblem game did anger better in a few lines of text.

I’m always down for picking apart something large like SnK but it is my opinion that the series is just too big, the cast too large, and the story too convoluted and folded over on itself, to make anything satisfyingly simple. There just aren’t enough panels to let Mikasa talk about why she protected Gabi, or to get into Kaya’s head so that we understand how she felt right before she tried to stab Gabi, or even what Mr. and Mrs. Braus were thinking when they found out this little girl killed Sasha.

It has to be simplified for space and time constraints, just like Zootopia did, but on a scale Zootopia didn’t have to deal with–and probably wouldn’t hold up under, if I had to guess.

So that leaves us with Zootopia handling things nicely because it only had to hold up for two hours of non-critical thought/viewership with just a handful of characters (in possession of the added bonus of being planned and edited before publication), and SnK flailing around a bit in some areas, and badly in others, because it’s trying to hold up over 111 chapters of content and well over 100 characters while being written pretty much on the fly.

I mean, it sucks! But it makes sense. Themes are going to have to be ham-fisted if they’re going to fit into SnK. At this point the series doesn’t have the luxury of time to spread it out.

#snk #snk critical #zootopia #long post #cute anons #answered mail #snk meta

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