#the curse of eve the wound of the hero

[ggomos-maribat]

[47/?]

BDBWM Day 21 | Running Away

original prompt | complete masterlist

TW: Blood and injury

Marinette wakes up in the bedroom back in the manor. She winces at the pain on her abdomen, looking down to see it bandaged up perfectly, perhaps a work of Alfred's. She can't tell what time it is, but sees that it's still dark outside.

I messed up. She chokes back on her tears. Trixx . . . the fox necklace. All gone.

"Kitten." Plagg flies into her view, accompanied by a fidgeting Tikki.

"I'm a bad guardian." Marinette digs the heels of her palms at the corner of her eyes. "I messed up so bad. I lost a Miraculous. My family knows about me now and they'll hate me for lying to them. Dad won't approve of me as a hero. I'll ruin this family just like I ruin everything else---"

"Marinette! Breathe!" Tikki coaxes. Marinette sucks in lungfuls of air, clutching at her hair. Her entire body is numb, but her wound burns deep into her skin.

Slightly trembling, she hops out of bed and heads towards the Miracle Box.

"What are you doing?" Tikki asks.

"I can't---I can't face them." She shakes her head. "Not right now . . . I---I can't."

I've been careless. Too relaxed. I thought I was doing well, that I could spend every day with my family with no care. But she's wrong. There are always enemies lurking, wanting the powers for themselves. Bruce won't like that kind of life for her. He'll attempt to take over, even keep her from being guardian, because of his protective tendencies. It'll change things with her brothers too.

Marinette throws on the glasses and transforms to open up a portal despite the kwamis' protests. There's one place I can go to now. She puts a hand against her middle and steps in, staggering into the bedroom before collapsing on a rug.

Felix stares at her with wide eyes and parted mouth. A suitcase lies atop the bed.

"Marinette!" He rushes to help her up and place her on his bed as she detransforms. "Your father called and told us what happened. I was preparing to fly to Gotham."

Marinette whimpers at the pain when she attempts to reply. Felix curses under his breath and makes a mad dash towards his bathroom. "Your wound opened up. Hold on."

Her boyfriend attentively fixes the stitch and redresses the wound while pressing gentle kisses on her head every now and then. She feels an incoming nausea seeing all the blood spreading on the sheets and pillows. Finally, when Felix finishes, he brushes her hair away from her face and asks, "Why did you come here?"

Marinette sniffs. "I don't want to talk to them. I messed up Fe."

"Shh, start from the beginning, love." He takes her hand. "If you want to talk, that is."

"There was someone from the Order who came to Gotham to the Miraculouses from me." She blinks her tears away. "He was going to hurt Dick, Jay and Damian so I stopped him. My fox timer ran out and he got the ring at first but I took it back. He got the fox instead and stabbed me."

She looks up at Felix pleadingly. "Can I stay here first?"

"Of course, ma belle. Do you want me to call the others?"

She hesitates for a second before answering, ". . . Okay. They need to know too and I'll ask help for the search."

"And your family?"

"I---I don't know. I don't want to see them yet. They'll be disappointed."

Taglist:

@maribat-bdbwm@tinybrie @sinoffalsejudgement @its-maemain @kamarallil @toughluna @golden-promises @whatamoodhoney @trippingovermyfeet @m4ster0fnone @alexizlazy @plz-excuse-my-inner-gay @maybeanalien0-0 @imchaotic-dontmindme @ev-cupcake @flowers-n-fandoms @crusherccme @ji-nk-ies @depressed-bitchy-demon @duskyashe @multplelifes @authorpendragging@iloontjeboontje@thatonecroc@user00000003@paradoxaloccurance@kking13@laydeekrayzee@chaos-inperson@astol07@the-coffee-fandom@nerd-nowandforever@nightmarewasteland@certainmuffinbagelcalzone@the-hospitality-of-knives@stainedglassm@talia-scar123@trying414@starling218@buginetye@ascetic-orange@myazael@child-of-the-clouds@ladythugs@adrestar@therealkotlc@blueneko9314@kinda-craz-fan@kitsun369

#maribat #maribat fanfic #dc x mlb #mlb x dc #maribat marinette dupain cheng #fox dcw #bio dad bruce wayne #maribat batfam #maribat fic #dc x miraculous #mbdbwm2022 #felinette

[daughter-of-inklings]

WIP Intro : The Lost Princess of Yggdrasil ☆.｡.:*

♥ genre: fantasy, adventure

♥  tropes:

chosen one, reluctant hero, lost princess, found family, reincarnation, child soldier, childhood friends to lovers, morally grey antagonist, dragons (!!!)

♥ status: heavy revising and re-writing!

♥ type: book 1 of a trilogy

♥ themes:

the weight & consequences of choice, religious undertones exploring duty v. free-will, healing and growing from trauma, chosen family is as important as blood family, the gods are flawed and human at their core,

♥ can be read : here !

♥ synopsis:

Nobody knows with certainty what happened on the dawn of the princess's sixth birthday. One moment the peace bustled with excitement for the day's festivities, the other saw the kingdom devoured by azure flames. Some say it'd been a long time coming for the winged elves' vanity in trying to protect the gods from the spite of their creations, others blamed the young princess as a curse set loose upon a world that turned their backs on the divine. The flames died with a passing rain, and with it the gods' chosen people.

A decade in passing, the wounds left by the flames scarred and tragedy turned to song. Whispers of war plague the fragile peace at the eve of the Lunnaelian Empress's daughter's birthday, a figure of eyes ringed with silver at their center. The daughter of a king since forgotten returns to unite the remnants of the feathered children and claim that which is owed her by birthright. The fates of the self proclaimed empress and the mysterious princess, bound by blood, lay waiting in the forest dark and deep with its promises of an eternal sleep.

♥ associated tag on this blog : #uvodell the lost princess , #uvodell

#ink's scribbles #writeblr #fantasy writeblr #wip intro #my writing #fantasy writing #writing #fantasy wip #high fantasy wip #high fantasy #wip: the lost princess of yggdrasil

[loosesodamarble]

Nacsele Trivia

Time for me to dump some info about the Nacht x Josele ship! Not in any specific order, this is just me throwing some thoughts out. A romance and fluff and a little hurt/comfort because it's Nacsele.

.....

Their favorite pastimes together are watching the sunset and stargazing.

Nacht once called Josele "my heart" the way Morgen used to and it made Josele burst into tears (in a bad way) for the next hour.

Josele is the only one who can talk Nacht into playing the violin (he usually opts for the guitar). She's the only one until they have kids that is.

Nacht's nicknames for Josele are "my star," "my angel," and "darling."

Josele nicknames for Nacht are "darling devil," "shadow prince," and "my hero."

Both will occasionally call each other "honey" too.

Nacht bleaches his hair back to white for a time after he and Josele get married. Because he knows Josele was fond of that look on him. He uses Shadow Veil to turn his hair black for formal events until his hair returns to normal.

Josele's favorite place to kiss Nacht would be his jaw. He's taller than her so it's an easy place to reach. And it's fun to tease him by kissing along his jaw until she reaches his lips.

Nacht's favorite place to kiss Josele is her lips. He loves the feel of Josele’s lips against his own so very much. And then he can just open his eyes to look at hers once the kiss is over and it sends him over the moon.

Nacht is also very fond of her sternum. It's not cause he's a perv (okay maybe he's a bit of a perv for Josele but ssshshshshshhhhhhhh!). It's because the mark of Josele's curse was on her sternum and now that she's curse free, Nacht likes to admire how that area of her body is clean again.

Some nights, Nacht has horrible nightmares about Morgen's death. His mind twists it so it felt like he intended to kill Morgen. He dreams of having killed Josele instead. Of hurting their children. Nacht screams and kicks awake, and Josele slowly and quietly helps Nacht calm down.

Nacht and Josele’s favorite date spot is a section of beach near their hometown that’s cut off by cliffs. They reach the area by teleporting through the shadows there. It's nice and cute off from the rest of the world so they can do whatever they like on that little beach space. Dance, picnic, kiss, skinny dip... You know, the usual date stuff.

They go on hunting dates together. Nacht doesn't master weapons the way Josele does (his best strategy is sneaking up on animals and then knifing their necks) but he's very skilled with hunting traps.

One of their traditions is exchanging gifts on New Year's Eve. It's never anything more extravagant than, say, a box of chocolates. Think tie pins or candles or a book. Sometimes the New Year's gift will complement a Christmas gift.

Okay one time Josele's New Year's gift to Nacht was way more elaborate than usual. It was Sirius and Merel's birth./lh+j

Very often, Nacht and Josele visit Morgen's grave together. But some days, Josele needs to be alone with Morgen. Some days, only the memories she has of him can comfort her and she won't even let Nacht in on those moments.

Sometimes, a date for the two of them is just sharing a pot of tea while Nacht plays guitar.

They play with each other's hair. Nacht likes to braid the parts of Josele's hair with the gray streaks left from Almatra's influence, to make sure Josele knows that they're still a beautiful part of her.

Josele likes to kiss the scar on Nacht's left wrist. Its presence brings painful memories (and I also imagine that the wound is tainted with negative mana so it'll always be a little sore until Nacht dies) so Josele kissing it comforts Nacht.

Nacht's chair in his vice captain's office at the BB base has seen... certain use...

The Bremen devils do indeed like to take the piss outta Nacht by suggesting that they are also married to Josele via Nacht.

Nacht knows of Josele's hang up with goodbyes. So if he has to leave her for any reason, he tells her "I will come back for you." The "for you" part has the double meaning of "arriving to collect someone" (like for a date) and "for someone's sake."

#black clover #black clover oc #nacht faust #josele canty #nacsele #soda's ocs #nacht faust headcanons

[axdently]

𝑳𝑬𝑬 𝑱𝑶𝑵𝑮 𝑺𝑼𝑲, 𝑯𝑬/𝑯𝑰𝑴 𝑷𝑹𝑶𝑵𝑶𝑼𝑵𝑺, 𝑫𝑹𝑬𝑨𝑴𝑺𝑯𝑨𝑫𝑬

                                     ( 𝑪𝑼𝑹𝑺𝑬𝑫-𝑩𝑳𝑶𝑶𝑫, 𝑲𝑵𝑶𝑾𝑵 𝑻𝑶 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑷𝑼𝑩𝑳𝑰𝑪 )

To HAN JAE SONG, the whole world looks like an open page. With a leap of faith, their ability of FILTH MANIPULATION little stronger.  They are a BLUE RINGED OCTOPUS shade aligned to HOUSE FRASER. For THIRTY-EIGHT years, they have survived a world of magic with both their CLEVERNESS and MESSINESS. They work as an Infectious Disease Specialist, but if they could change their fate, they’d want to keep his family safe and away from his own blood thirsty appetite.

───  𝐃𝐄𝐓𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐒.

You’re not the type to reminisce over your childhood since it was, to your knowledge, one of the worst in the history of mankind. But one thing you can attribute to growing up in such a tragic story was learning how to create a poker face– to this day you wear a mask to the world, and keep those awful parts hidden as much as possible. The memories fester deep within but they will never fully surface– never again. They’d dragged you out of the forest by your arm–

They covered your face with cloth, and you were taken to a facility with bars and locked rooms. You don’t remember the letters or numbers on those doors– but you do remember a glowing EXIT sign so visible yet so far away. You didn’t understand why or how people could do the things that they did to you. You remember other little boys and girls in the same experimental labs– they’re wounds seemed far less severe than the rotting immune system you carried with every tiny footstep.

Friends weren’t a luxury and bonding in that torment, you’d find never suit you, until you met a twelve year old to teach you the ropes. He was a hero with no cape, a brother you couldn’t keep and a friend you still have to this day. In many ways he saved your life, but the pair of you are good at shrugging those things off.

───  𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐒.

NAME: Han Jae Song NICKNAME: Han DATE OF BIRTH: Jan 2, 1984 GENDER: cisgender man HEIGHT: 6'1" MARKINGS: acne scars from his past across his face, as well as a scar on his neck TATTOOS: a tiny series of tally marks calculating the number 27 on his neck PIERCINGS: none DECORUM: he prefers earth tones, and texture– tailored trousers with sweaters, since his office is always cold. SCENT: stale cigarettes with a vinegar tang which pairs well with wet earth and the ambroxan cologne he wears. GOALS: Survive & learn to live with his curse FEARS: Losing his family. POSITIVE TRAITS: resilient, assiduous, determined NEUTRAL TRAITS: innovative, quiet, cautious NEGATIVE TRAITS: sloppy temperamental, pompous ZODIAC: Capricorn Sun, Libra Moon, Aries Rising ALIGNMENT:  chaotic evil TEMPERAMENT: choleric ELEMENT: earth PRIMARY VICE: gluttony PRIMARY VIRTUE: pride TROPE: Ambiguous Disorder, Blatant Lies, The Corruptor, Devil in Plain Sight, Dissonant Serenity INSPIRATION: a mix of Eve, from Killing Eve, & Hannibal from NBC’s Hannibal; internally monologues like Joe Goldberg from YOU & and will leech to the psyche like Marvel’s Venom. OCCUPATION:  Infectious Disease Specialist RESIDENCE: A swamp somewhere, sometimes mushroom road, or a random cave. ( he’s homeless ) HOBBIES:  reading greek tragedies alone in coffee shops, relationship advice podcasts on early morning runs, fermentation– sourdough bread-baking, at home kombucha brewing & storages of kimchi, wine-tasting, and gardening ( he’s far more interested in composting though ). HABITS: he picks at his skin, chews on his fingernails, and is constantly smoking. he’s, generally a messy person and thrives in filth. he also falls quiet, uncomfortably quiet when he’s uncomfortable, often losing himself in his thoughts– he’s also irritable in plain white rooms– or around the color white in general.

───  𝐀𝐁𝐈𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐄𝐒.

FILTH MANIPULATION the ability to manipulate all aspects of filth, rot and putrefaction. ; User can create, manipulate, shape, transform, etc. any matter that is rotten or filthy (grime, dirtiness, stains, grunge, etc.), ranging from generation and manipulation of pus/ichor, mucus, slime (mucous secretions of animals), earwax, sweat and saliva, to full-out control over dead and decomposed matter; the user can also control moldy and mildewed matter, spoiled, rancid food, fetid water, polluted air, urine, vomit and feces.

  VARIATION 1. FILTH CONSTRUCTS FILTH SNAPS - The power to create constructs from artificial materials with a snap of a finger inducing rot, speeding it up, negating it or sometimes reversing it. The user can even induce such foul conditions that makes water filled with bacteria and unsafe, making air (including breath) stifling and smelly, inducing rot and putrefaction in organic matter or even inducing bacterial infection on open wounds. DIRTY DUPLICATION - The ability to replicate oneself, others and/or objects through filth, rot or putrefaction

VARIATION 2. MIASMA EMISSION

MIASMIC MURMUR - The power to emit a variety of toxic gasses. User can exude toxic gasses, causing various effects on others who inhale these fumes including hyperstimulation, lethargy, coma. Because gas diffuses indefinitely in concentration, it becomes less potent and less concentrated once it has expanded.

VARIATION 3. MOLD MANIPULATION

MOLD MOLTING - The ability to manipulate mold and mold spores. The user can create, shape and manipulate mold, a large and taxonomically diverse number of fungal species where the growth of hyphae results in discoloration and a fuzzy appearance, especially on food. They can cause fungi to grow, move/attack or even rise from the soil and "walk", mutate fungi by rearranging DNA structure, etc. MOLD EMPATHY- The power to sense the overall well-being and conditions of mold spores, as well as fully interpret their emotions and communicate with them.

───  𝐈𝐍𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘 .

1.HIGH SURGEON’S SCALPEL : Created by benevolent necromancers who study the mysteries of anatomy, this magic scalpel can deal death or perform medical miracles in the hands of a skilled surgeon.

2. PENMASTER’S POISON : A rare poison commonly used in letters, a bright green liquid when in a cool environment turns into lethal colorless and odorless vapors. If used in a letter, only a small amount is needed to be applied near the wax seal; so when the seal is broken, the liquid vaporizes and spells painful death to anyone present

3. RING OF THE RODENT : The wearer of this ring can speak to any rodent, especially rats.

4. BAG OF BEANS : When dumping the beans out on the ground, they explode in a 10-foot radius. If you remove a bean from the bag, plant it in dirt or sand, and then water it, the bean produces shriekers sprout as a diversion

5. DAGGER OF VENOM : A magical dagger coated with thick, black poison.

6. OIL OF SLIPPERINESS :  This sticky black unguent is thick and heavy in the container, but it flows quickly when poured. The oil can cover a Medium or smaller creature, along with the equipment it's wearing and carrying. Alternatively, the oil can be poured on the ground as an action, where it covers a 10-foot square, duplicating the effect of greased flooring.

7. TOME OF CLEAR THOUGHT : contains memory and logic exercises to help with meditation.

8. VIAL OF CRYPT MOLD : Found in swamps and caves– poisonous if placed on the skin, used for brewing embalming paste.

9. MOLDERING WET-STONE : Used to sharpen any blade, imbued with CONTAGION

───  𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒 .

1. CONTAGION : Your touch inflicts disease:

BLINDING SICKNESS: Pain grips the creature’s mind, and its eyes turn milky white.

FILTH FEVER: A raging fever sweeps through the creature’s body.

FLESH ROT. The creature’s flesh decays.

MINDFIRE: The creature’s mind becomes a feverish swamp

SLIMY DOOM: The creature begins to leak black ichor from their ears uncontrollably.

2. BLIGHT : Necromantic energy washes over a creature of your choice that you can see within range, draining moisture and vitality from it.

3. CIRCLE OF GRIME : A sphere of decaying energy ripples out in a 60-foot-radius sphere from a point within range.

4. GENTLE REPOSE: You touch a corpse or other remains– the target is protected from decay and can't become Undead.

5. DISINTEGRATE- A thin green ray springs from your pointing finger to a target that you can see within range. The target can be a creature, an object, or a creation of magical force.

6. LIFE TRANSFERENCE - The ability to sacrifice some of your health to mend another creature’s injuries. The creature becomes stable as you become unstable. This spell has no effect on undead or constructs. This spell can’t return to life a creature that has died of old age, nor can it restore any missing body parts.

7. DANSE MACABRE - Threads of rot leap from your fingers to pierce up to five small creatures of decay you can see within range.. To receive the command, a creature must be within 60 feet of you. You decide what action the creatures will take and where they will move during their next turn, or you can issue a general command, such as to guard a chamber or passageway against your foes.

#cagintro #cag: intro #⸻𝒃𝒍𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕-𝒊𝒔𝒎𝒔: intro. #⸻ 𝒃𝒍𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕-𝒊𝒔𝒎𝒔 ; INTRO.

[libidomechanica]

“For hid delight of love”

What he said ’twas too harshly jar.     For hid delight of love. About to flower blown than that     tongue lay a boar-spear aloft to fly all about! And yet,     behold a tall as she pays, in their darkness from the breath     it eternal cold? To

be hated. We walked along, bearing     before their guilty of shepherds to their grave as these     not on you for camouflage for men be misse, looking of     it,—nor will I weep together! But Sylvio did; and     I’ll awa to Nanie, O.

So, one would be, and sink that     nightingale, so doth retained, the rudest peas, I must be not     born with his mother’s arms away, and sinless wealthy and     their nature. Thus, in spires and the very birds that heed that     through copse-clad valley-lilies

of clay and hides always? No     Mate, no holy order; when the air. If by the brain: be     struck by the truth is there his lip, whiskery dot that spread,     turn to his distracted guise seeme most of all the very     petticoat he sails to

nature than that spread stole away.     Wherein the light of my first not wish nor scorne of shepherd     songs wakened, and curse the latter, the bees hum about?     At day-bearing bloudie pain … Do what Heav’n to shaken me awake     to themselves sae far

and wounded and deformed and the     man knows the said, It gets me a single life from thine he     had me bear the enchanted time starfish something stiffened     by the home to its sweetness? And to wondrous beauty be;     it is a paly flame

played, and blushing wroth God hath my     obedience. Who building his hearing, passionate love     procure. Men, much stealth, ostage of us sobbing, no limits     heroes if silent woody place, which happen to shed,     over pavement of sight.

She hers, innumerable priesthood     make. Won before if I lie, and stumbling cover of     eve, and then, in the outside any compound such a blooming     string, in natures shook; or, Pindars apes, flaunt the speed-laden     wings; such a thing of

your hand, my deare careless false to     region where sped a troop of urine? Why urge them yet. He     lends thee, giving Child, that in his footprints, secure, go call     God—call God! A rose that poison why my most resemble     Venus’ temple becoming,

sailing cloudy night-wander’d     up again. Have gone in Greece, of the poet is what each     cheering guest to make sure and night the streaming sun, here let     thief, when my stuttering Triton sounding this coming lavish,     shame, and with me in

one little breed. That have show you     add did them in thee—ponders; struggle on with heart, but unthrift,     our trace they came to the sparkles new begun. Idleness     in grove whom you teach to take her. That fine screeched for ever;     tis scarcely sea. And

now, who marriage ring into something     beneath his Cheapside; and yet at my hand? Like sea should     be possess’d. Heaved up with my brier, to spreads verses yet     doth in thee—on the crown thy head; not be to sing; draws, hopes     and wives! And thou in despised

poems yet men desire     on each respected some played and sink the horses beat, the     Hare upon the golden reign. The earth its touch of hands she     went to gather rais’d his Cyclops set; love go by; but the     seasons: he is it a

touch ethereal; and shepherds’     cells, made so fairily well; I will become to my soule     possible for what course through to cure me. Our world’s sun, in     truth. And spongy sod with convinced that something words. When the     shape in my heart, but what

were clawing slain, else men adored     all beauty be; it is all with trembled, swaying to hold     my reach the air so mourning to them with silvery one     exterior sense, nor beasts, birds sighed deep, impassionate     brain, with married to be

thy hand, and Lucy climb! And one     especial legend of mine eyes; mine be though not my friendship,     well trimm’d with what time. Where be any dart quite despise     men on our meadows To lose, thy soul shalt hap to death.     Had I a cave is strook.

#poetry #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Markov chains #Markov chain length: 6 #148 texts #ballad

[lefresne]

Peggy McCracken, The curse of Eve the wound of the hero, p.87 

BEVES WHAT THE FUCK??????

#also lol at Josiane being like I dont want u to see my privates GIRL #but also I guess beves' random mate Thierry is there too which is awkward

[dwellordream]

“Joan of Arc is perhaps the most famous example of a woman warrior in Western history, though Joan’s military career was in fact rather short: it began with the relief of the English siege of Orléans in 1429 and ended with her capture in 1430. Joan was tried and condemned for heresy, and on May 31, 1431, she was burned. Twenty-five years later a new trial nullified the condemnation of 1431. In Joan’s 1455–56 nullification trial, testimony was gathered from those who had known Joan during her short lifetime. These witnesses testified to Joan’s purity, piety, and to her skill as a military leader. Among those interviewed during the rehabilitation trial was Jean d’Aulon, Joan’s personal valet, whose testimony revealed that the maiden did not menstruate. He also testified that he had heard it said by several women, who saw the Maid undressed several times and knew her secrets, that she never suffered from the secret illness of women and that no one could ever notice or learn anything of it from her clothes or in any other way. 

This claim could address several concerns: it could explain away some potentially awkward personal arrangements in Joan’s daily life among her soldiers. It could be intended to emphasize Joan’s virgin innocence, or it may describe Joan according to the model of holy women whose severe ascetic practices reduced their bodily discharges. Joan’s amenorrhea may position her outside of gender and reproductive sexuality; in the context of Joan’s cross-dressing, her amenorrhea could describe the perceived denaturalization of the female body that wears male clothes. As part of the testimony at the nullification trial, the assertion is clearly intended to contribute to a validation of Joan’s mission and of her divine inspiration, but one thing that the claim certainly does accomplish is to remove women’s blood from the battlefield. And indeed this is the explicit interpretation of one nineteenth-century account of Joan’s history that describes the maiden as “Womanly in modesty, but exempt, by a particular design, from the weaknesses of her sex, she was also not subjected to those periodic and inconvenient dues, which, even more than law and custom, prevent women in general fulfilling the functions that men have taken over.” 

Conflicting stories have been told about Joan of Arc since before her death, and Joan is such a famously disputed historical figure in part because she incarnates many of the tensions that troubled late medieval culture: the relationship of popular religion to the formal rituals of the church; the changing form of war, in which the use of mercenaries replaced feudal alliances; and of course a contested definition of royal succession. Joan’s story touches on all these tensions, but what is most striking about her trial and about late medieval and early modern accounts of her life is the way that anxieties about cultural institutions take the form of anxieties about Joan’s perceived gender impropriety and possible sexual transgressions. And this is true of both French and English sources, of texts written by the partisans of Joan and by her detractors. In the recorded debates about the origins of Joan’s mission (was she inspired by God, or was she duped by the devil?) we see the ways in which the demonic and the holy, like the military and the domestic, are gendered concepts that script Joan’s entry into history. 

Joan’s reputation for not suffering “the secret illness of women” suggests that blood is also gendered in her story, that gendered cultural values are mapped onto blood, so that blood itself comes to be seen as gendered and thus as a “natural” foundation for gendered cultural values. This gendering is particularly apparent in the rather late and unsympathetic portrait of Joan found in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1 (1591/92). Shakespeare’s late sixteenth-century English perspective on Joan la Pucelle is not a contemporary account, of course, and it is not particularly accurate in its history of Joan, but it does highlight the way that anxieties about gender and battle can focus on blood. Henry VI is one of the few accounts of Joan’s life in which it is the maid’s military prowess, and not her cross-dressing, that seems to demand explanation. In an early scene in the play, Joan defeats the French dauphin in single combat to prove her personal prowess and her worthiness to lead troops. 

Whereas this is perhaps not a significant victory, at least from the perspective of the English, who see Charles as a weak and unworthy pretender, Joan also demonstrates her prowess in combat with the English general, Talbot, and the battle ends in a draw. This exaggerated skill with the sword is not described in medieval accounts of Joan’s exploits, and Shakespeare’s portrayal of Joan’s skill explains the military successes of a woman who cannot, in Shakespeare’s account, have benefitted from divine aid. The woman warrior is a figure celebrated in mythical and Biblical traditions—in Henry VI Charles admiringly describes Joan as an Amazon and claims that she fights with the sword of Deborah (1.3.83–84). But by the late Middle Ages, it seems that only mythical women could be celebrated as warriors—medieval women who sought to go into battle were regarded with deep suspicion. 

This strict exclusion of women from the business of war was a somewhat recent development. Although war was always considered a masculine endeavor, chroniclers recorded the military activities of a number of women who were neither censured nor ridiculed for their pursuit of war. Historian Megan McLaughlin notes that descriptions of the military activities of women are found in many medieval sources from the early Middle Ages: women went to war to defend castles when their husbands were absent, and as I mentioned above, there is disputed evidence that Viking women participated in warfare. Aethelflaed, daughter of Alfred the Great of Wessex, appears to have fought alongside her brother in the tenth century, and a number of noblewomen from southern Europe are known to have joined in military campaigns with their husbands or to have mobilized retainers for warfare during the eleventh through thirteenth centuries.

Because medieval military organization was essentially domestic in character, women had a relatively large opportunity to participate in warfare. The basic military unit through most of medieval Europe was the small group of warriors tied to a lord by bonds of personal loyalty or vassalage. Military education was also domestic in this period, and the training of children for knighthood took place in the home. McLaughlin suggests that the daughters of a noble house would have been exposed to military practices and heard military exploits praised from an early age. They thus had the opportunity to obtain some theoretical knowledge of the subject. The domestic organization of warfare, then, provided women with the chance to prepare themselves for battle. It may also have increased the likelihood that they would be accepted in that role by the men on the battlefield.

But as domestic military units lost their predominant role in warfare in the later Middle Ages, the number of women warriors mentioned in the sources declined as well. McLaughlin argues that in the later Middle Ages, “normal” feminine behavior comes increasingly to be seen as opposed to military pursuits, and “warfare came to be seen not just as unusual, but as somehow unnatural for females.” The later Middle Ages were marked by a reorganization and professionalization of warfare throughout Europe: in this as in other areas of medieval life, the trend was towards greater differentiation of the public and the domestic. Small feudal contingents continued to play a role in many military engagements, but they were increasingly overshadowed by units of a different origin and nature, less clearly tied to the household. As this happened, women lost their opportunity to participate in military activities. 

Joan of Arc was not part of a noble household where she might have been involved in warfare as a domestic enterprise. Nor was Joan a mercenary, of course. She said she was called by God to fight for the dauphin, and Charles seems to have believed her, at least initially, and gave her arms and troops. By why did soldiers follow Joan? It would seem that if there was cultural resistance to the idea of a woman warrior in late medieval France, that resistance would surely be shared by soldiers. Kelly DeVries notes that no troops of the Hundred Years War had ever followed a woman into battle, and stories of women who had led troops in earlier periods were likely to have distant enough to have the status of myth, if they were remembered at all. Yet apparently French soldiers were willing to follow Joan—why? 

We do have testimony from men who fought under Joan. The soldiers claimed that they were inspired by her piety, and they further claimed that they never felt any sexual desire for her. Gobert Thibault, a royal esquire, described the attitude of the soldiers toward Joan, at a time when the only other women in the army were camp followers: In the army she was always with the soldiers; I heard many of those closest to her say that they never had any desire for her; that is to say, they sometimes felt a certain carnal urge but never dared to let themselves go with her, and they believed that it was not possible to desire her; often when they were speaking among themselves of the sin of the flesh and were saying things that might arouse desire, if they saw her or came near her, they were not able to continue such speech and suddenly their carnal impulses ceased. I have questioned several of those who sometimes slept the night in Joan’s company about this, and they answered as I have, adding that they never felt any carnal desire when they saw her. 

If Joan’s troops felt divinely inspired to follow her, it is Joan’s mission from God that explains her success as a leader. Yet the soldiers’ willingness to follow Joan may be explained by the familiar as well as the extraordinary. Joan of Arc was a woman, and she was a peasant—she obviously did not resemble the noble generals who directed the war. But as DeVries has argued, Joan was in fact like mercenary captains, leaders of the Free Companies who were by this time fairly common in war. These men led loyal troops successfully in battle and rewarded their successes with booty. Joan of Arc did not offer her troops material rewards, she did not allow them to loot or pillage captured lands—she offered them salvation. DeVries suggests that “in the fifteenth century, in an age of flourishing popular religion, personal devotion, mysticism, and adherence to several living saints, especially to mulieres sanctae, Joan’s gift to her troops was sufficient to entice them to follow her with a loyalty unknown to any French noble leader of the time, even to the dauphin himself.”

Joan herself would thus be doubly positioned by the rise of mercenary warfare: as war was increasingly the business of mercenaries rather than small groups of warriors associated with a household, women were increasingly marginalized from the activities of war; at the same time, it may have been the model of the mercenary captain that made Joan’s leadership familiar and acceptable to soldiers fighting for the dauphin. Joan’s military exploits after Orléans did not match her success in delivering the besieged city, and she suffered a series of defeats before her capture. After she was taken, the French did not make any effort to rescue her, although the trial transcripts indicate that she expected such an attempt. It has been suggested that Joan’s declining military successes had already shaken French faith in her calling, and her capture may have put into question the divinely sanctioned status of her mission.

The dauphin and the French nobles effectively distanced themselves from Joan after her capture, and even before, as Shakespeare suggests, though of course Shakespeare also shows Joan appealing to her demons to help her. Henry VI, like late medieval English chronicles, suggests that Joan’s military successes can only be explained by witchcraft. If McLaughlin’s thesis about the changing nature of warfare—the move from war between households organized by feudal bonds to wars conducted largely through mercenaries—explains the marginalization of women from war during the late Middle Ages, Joan’s successes would be suspect, anomalous and perhaps transgressive, but what explains the anxious demonization of Joan like that displayed in Shakespeare’s Henry VI? The possibility that Joan was possessed by the devil rather than inspired by God is not unique to this theatrical version of Joan’s life. 

A contemporary observer noted that, when the dauphin first heard Joan claim to have a divine mission to save France, he “thought her crazy, possessed by the devil, and completely audacious.” The fact that Joan attributed her successes to divine guidance invites an alternative supernatural explanation for her military career—if God was not responsible, it must have been the devil. Certainly the perceived gender transgression in Joan’s adoption of men’s clothing and in her masculine pursuit of warfare provokes anxiety about social order, religious order, and even the nature of sovereignty, but what Henry VI suggests with a particular insistence is the extent to which Joan’s presence on the battlefield is seen to threaten the cultural values promoted by war. For the early modern period, as for the Middle Ages, as even for twenty-first-century America, the emblem of war is bloodshed. Men shed blood to restore social order, to impose justice, and to right wrongs. Men shed blood to protect women; men shed their blood to protect their blood—their lineage or their patrimony. 

The heroism of war and bloodshed is a masculine heroism, the bloodshed of war is the privilege of men, and the blood of war is men’s blood. The presence of a woman warrior on the Weld of battle may be seen to threaten the practice of chivalric heroism as a masculine prerogative. To the extent that chivalry was associated with aristocracy, masculine privilege was under siege in a number of ways in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, as Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin have shown. But the particular form in which the conflict between gendered forms of military heroism is imagined in Henry VI invites a consideration of the extent to which masculine privilege and identity are grounded in representations of blood and suggests that women’s blood on the battlefield might threaten the masculine virtues constructed in war. 

Although the fact that it is men who bleed in battle may mark the bloodshed of war as a masculine bloodshed, the blood of war is also gendered symbolically. In other words, the symbolic value of blood is linked to the gender of blood, but the gender of blood is revealed to be a symbolic value as well. So whereas in the Táin, a woman’s bloodshed demonstrates both the power to destroy and the incapacitation of Medb, who bleeds and cannot fight, in Shakespeare’s story about Joan, the gendered value of bloodshed is more precariously related to the body that sheds it. For example, in Henry VI, when the English general Talbot’s son, John, joins his father on the battlefield, Talbot praises his son’s military performance in terms of an initiation—John Talbot fights his first battle. But Talbot describes the event in the terms of a sexual initiation in which John occupies the position of a woman. 

Talbot boasts to his son of having wounded “The ireful Bastard Orléans, that drew blood from thee, my boy, and had the maidenhood of thy first fight” (4.6.16–18). In Talbot’s analogy, the first blood that John sheds in battle is like the blood that a maiden sheds in her first experience of intercourse (and may suggest the way in which the homosocial bonding of the battlefield is expressed in sexualized and gendered terms). But this is women’s blood; it is a blood that is usually seen as the mark of sexual possession by a man. John’s maidenly bloodshed is further emphasized by Joan when she later boasts that when she encountered John, she said to him, “Thou maiden youth, be vanquished by a maid” (4.7). Indeed, John Talbot’s maidenhood displaces Joan’s in Shakespeare’s play, where Joan is characterized by the English as a whore, the mistress of the Bastard of Orleans (a common English characterization of Joan), and where Joan herself claims to be pregnant in an attempt to avoid the flames.

John’s maiden bloodshed suggests the instability of the gendering of the blood that supports military heroism. It suggests the possibility that the bloodshed of war is not uniquely or unambiguously men’s blood. It might be men’s blood that is like maiden’s blood—it might be like women’s blood. This ambiguity is countered by an anxious negotiation of the place of Joan’s blood in the context of masculine military heroism. But this is not an anxiety unique to Henry VI. We also see it in some of the medieval accounts of Joan of Arc’s mission to save France. Joan was wounded twice, once in the shoulder and once in the thigh. Her blood does not receive special attention in descriptions of her wounds: in accounts by her contemporaries, Joan’s bloodshed is like any other soldier’s blood. It is in her lack of blood that she is extraordinary—as in Jean d’Aulon’s testimony that Joan did not menstruate. 

Shakespeare does not of course represent a menstruating Joan of Arc, but he does give particular attention to Joan’s blood. In Henry VI, the maid’s blood links her to witchcraft and to demons. Talbot wishes to draw Joan’s witch’s blood: “Devil or devil’s dam, I’ll conjure thee,” he says, “Blood will I draw on thee—thou art a witch—And straightway give thy soul to him thou serv’st” (1.7.5–7). Talbot may refer to the idea that whoever draws a witch’s blood is protected from her magic, but his names for Joan, “devil or devil’s dam,” that is, devil or devil’s mother, suggest that the blood he wishes to draw is mother’s blood, witch’s blood—it is female blood, and a blood associated with reproduction. If Joan’s blood is mother’s blood, it is the blood of a corrupt mother. 

When the Wends that Shakespeare identifies as responsible for Joan’s successes abandon her, she appeals to their past relationship in a description that suggests just the kind of maternal relationship that Talbot identified earlier when he called Joan a “devil’s dam,” a devil’s mother. Joan pleads with the Wends: “O, hold me not with silence overlong! Where I was wont to feed you with my blood, I’ll lop a member off and give it to you” (5.3.13–15). Joan’s offer of blood may reflect the belief that witches have an extra nipple with which they nurse demons. And breast milk is a form of mother’s blood in premodern reproductive theory: in lactating mothers menstrual blood is turned into the breast milk that nourishes a child. It is no accident that the demonization of Joan in Henry VI is so closely associated with her blood and with maternal imagery. 

If, as many critics of the play have observed, Joan is a foil for the English general, Talbot, and if Talbot’s virtues are emphasized in Joan’s faults, then Talbot, the loving father whose son refuses to leave him on the battlefield, even in the face of death, offers yet another contrast with Joan, the devil’s dam, whose Wends abandon her to the fire. The threat that the Maid’s prowess poses to masculine military heroism is contained in the representation of Joan’s blood as a corrupt mother’s blood, a Wendish and bodily woman’s blood. Shakespeare’s representation of Joan as a bleeding demonic mother stands in sharp contrast to the bloodless Joan described by the Frenchman Jean d’Aulon. But both accounts suggest the symbolic power of blood, and both suggest the extent to which the value of blood is a gendered value.”

- Peggy McCracken, “The Amenorrhea of War.” in The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature

#peggy mccracken #the curse of eve the wound of the hero #menstruation #medieval #late middle ages #joan of arc #history #shakespeare #henry vi

[messenger-of-stupidity]

Kirishima X Reader

A/N: So Kiri is actually my main comfort character from MHA and I feel like total shit right now. So have a small little one shot of Kiri just being best shark boy and cheering us up.

Trigger warnings: Fluff, mentions of love, panic attacks, mentions of self harm, slight cursing

─────•~❉🦈 ❉~•─────

You and Eijiro Kirishima had been dating for a glorious eleven months. It would be twelve on New Years Eve. A total of a year at that point. Maybe it was tacky that your anniversary was on New Years, but why did it matter? You both were happy.

Don’t get you wrong, you had your arguments like every other couple. Especially between the two of you and your pro hero work. But maybe a couple hours after the argument it seemed inconsequential and the two of you went to the couch and watched a movie or went on a walk. The point was, neither of you dwelled on the negatives. You both wanted to believe in the positives of the world.

You had a hard time with that right now though. It felt like your breath was stuck in your lungs. And Kiri was off doing a patrol. So you were alone in your apartment. Some of your stuff lay in Kiri’s own place. Some at yours. You had been slowly moving in with your boyfriend.

But now your eyes burned, not being able to shed more tears, but forcing water from them nonetheless. Your sobs were choked and your nails dug into your skin leaving crescent shaped wounds that little beads of crimson blood rose to the surface. Your phone lay in front of you on Kiri’s contact, but you could barely force air into your aching and burning lungs, how were you supposed to talk to him? 

“K-Kiri.” You gasped. You reached for your phone with shaky hands and it took you several tries to hit the right button for your screen to dim and the call screen to fill the mobile device’s face. You pressed the speaker button and let your phone slip from your fingers to land gently on the couch. It took a few moments before Kiri’s cheerful voice came from it.

“Hey babe. How’s the most awesome person in the whole wide world doin’ today?” His oh-so-familiar voice just made you sob harder, your breath coming short and fast. “Babe? Hey, are you okay? What’s wrong?” You could hear the heavy concern in his voice but could do nothing to stop your cries. 

“Shit, baby. Are you at your house?”

“Ah-huh.” You managed to shove from your quivering lips. Your breath changed to gasps for air.

“Breath with me babe. I’m on my way. In through your nose.... and out through your mouth. I’m coming.” He forced you to take slow breaths with him before he gave a pathetic laugh. You knew it was something he did when he got stressed. 

“I’ve got to hang up now so I can drive there quicker. Are you gonna be okay?” You doubted it. His voice was soothing you. But you just mumbled an affirmative and hung up the call. Silence filled the room and everything just came crashing back. You buried your face in a pillow as you sobbed and gasped. Time seemed worthless and to stretch on forever before you felt a hand rubbing slow circles on your back. You lifted your tear stained and swollen face from the pillow to see the familiar spiky red hair and crimson eyes. He wore an inside out t-shirt and jeans. Obviously had gotten out of his hero suit in a hurry.

You threw yourself into his arms, sobbing into his shoulder and getting snot on his shirt. He just held you in his arms, rubbing your back and murmuring to you.

“Hey, it’s alright baby. I’m here. Your big shark man won’t let anything hurt you. I am the manliest man ever after all.” He laughed again, but you were unable to return it. Being in his arms calmed you some and your sobs and gasps turned to whimpers and hiccups as tears continued to run down your face. He pulled you the rest of the way into his lap and held you close. “I love you, babe. And I’m going to be here whenever you need me. But I need you to breath with me. Try to match your breaths with my own, pebble.” He said gently. You focused on the rise and fall of his chest and tried to match your inhales with his own. You could feel his heartbeat against your chest and his soft whispers in your ear.

“You mean everything to me, Y/N. Everyone who doubts how manly or whatever is a total fool. Besides, you just point me in their direction and I’ll tell them all about how awesome and amazing you are. I love you so so so much. And I’m always going to be here for you.” 

The two of you just stayed there for a while. Just holding onto each other.

“I-I’m sorry about your shirt. It’s all s-snotty.” You hiccuped. He pulled back a bit to grin at you with his sharp teeth before placing a kiss on your cheek. 

“Don’t worry about it. Snot is hardly as dangerous as a villain.” He laughed and picked you up. The hero carried you to the bathroom and sat you down on the edge of the bathtub before getting the first aid kit. He placed little glow in the dark bandaids on the worst of the penetrations in your skin before placing kisses on each one.

“I’m glad you called me babe. Otherwise I never woulda known that you needed me. And that would have sucked.” He said softly. You just nodded.

“C-Can we cuddle and watch a movie... with popcorn... and pocky?” You asked in a small voice. Kirishima grinned at you with his sharp tooth grin and nodded.

“You bet we can, love. You choose the movie and I’ll make the popcorn.”

─────•~❉🦈 ❉~•─────

A/N: Fuck I love Kiri so much. Why can’t you be real god damn it!!!! 

Anyways, hope yall enjoyed. I’m going to get some sleep because it’s one in the morning right now. See ya.

Back to Masterlist

#kirishima #kirishima eijirou #fanfic #gn reader #fluff #tw #mha #bnha #kiri simps #where you at #mha fanfic #bnha fanfic #kirishima x listener #one shot #comfort character

[bipercabeth]

percabeth | hurt/comfort | 3k | commissioned by @mericatblackwood 

a post-TLO fic in which we finally Let Percy Cry

Annabeth doesn’t know what to do with anger—her own or others’. She can take her problems to the sword fighting arena or bury her nose in blueprints for weeks, but she’ll still come away with a tight jaw. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands when they aren’t clenched into fists. 

So when the tendons in Percy’s hands strain around his silverware at dinner, when his eyes are downcast and he’s closed off in that I’m-angry-but-trying-desperately-not-to-look-it way, Annabeth can only fumble over a painfully casual attempt at conversation and watch as he retreats to his cabin. He doesn’t even make an appearance at the campfire. The flames have been low in the weeks following the Battle of Manhattan, but they’re rising tonight. 

The problem isn’t reading Percy; it never has been. Annabeth knows what’s hurting him and why. It’s the fixing part she struggles with.

continue on AO3 

or 

He’s been angry for the better part of a year, often because of the ambiguous impending doom of his sixteenth birthday, but not exclusively so. Annabeth caused more than her fair share of his anger, she knows. Rachel had been there to provide an escape in her place, but Annabeth supposes part of being Percy’s girlfriend means that it’s her who gets to provide solace now. Not that she didn’t before, but. There’s a deeper commitment now. He was always her person—as she was his—but it’s out in the open. She’s the first line of defense—she wants to be the first line of defense from danger, be it physical or emotional. 

So Annabeth dons her Yankees cap and sneaks to Cabin 3, replaying the conversation where Percy shrugged and said he’s fine when she tried to call him out. He isn’t fine. She knows that much. 

That doesn’t mean she expects to find him curled in on himself, bedsheets tangled around his middle. It shouldn’t be possible to look small in a twin bed, but he looks so small—not at all like the hero the other campers celebrate over the campfire. It’s a stark reminder that he’s only sixteen. 

He lifts his head when the door opens, his eyes wide. Annabeth remembers that she’s invisible and knocks her cap off her head. She’ll pick it up later. Right now Percy’s breath stutters at the sight of her, his eyes shining like open wounds. 

Annabeth can do dry anger: the cold, unfeeling rage that motivates, propels, inspires. But wet anger—the paralyzing, painful kind you cannot power through—leaves her scrambling for purchase. Annabeth is a runner. She doesn’t sit in anything. 

The sheets rustle as Percy closes his eyes and takes refuge in his bed like a dog hiding his wounded paw. Despite his efforts, he cannot disguise his limp.

“Please don’t hide from us,” Annabeth pleads. 

“I’m not hiding from you,” he says mildly, not lifting his head from the pillow. “I can’t hide from you.” 

“But you came here.” 

“I knew you would come.” Percy shrugs, casually stating as fact something Annabeth didn’t know herself until a few minutes ago. 

In this moment, Annabeth envies Percy’s connection with Grover. She would kill to have a way to funnel her emotions into Percy’s brain in a way he could understand. All the love and concern she can’t articulate could exist in the world without the struggle of finding the right words. 

Still, Percy specified her. Grover is out there at the campfire, probably sensing Percy’s pain like a twinge at the base of his neck, but Annabeth is the one Percy can’t hide from. 

The thought propels her to the edge of his bed, sitting in the curve of mattress his torso folds around. His knees press into her right thigh as he shifts to close the space between them. Annabeth realizes with a jolt that he left this space for her to occupy. 

On her other side is his face, youthful and soft in the moonlight streaming through the window. Blue light for a blue boy, swimming in blue sheets that should shelter him instead of giving him something to fist his hands in. His arms cage his chest as if his heart is trying to escape it. 

Annabeth reaches for his hand, drawing it to rest between hers. If his heart is a burden, it’s not one he has to bear alone. They held the weight of the sky once. They can handle this. 

For all their shared burdens, the one that weighs on Percy now is uniquely his. Annabeth is a hero, but not the hero. Shouldering “child of Athena’s final stand” for a few weeks is not the same as “hero’s soul, cursed blade shall reap” looming overhead for four years. Percy’s very existence has been dissected and politicized since the moment he was claimed, whereas Annabeth could’ve chosen a quieter, quest-free life if that’s what she wanted. She chose to pick it up. Percy’s choice was to stand under a weight that would otherwise crush him. 

It occurs to Annabeth that everyone who has shouldered this burden before him is dead. The heroes whose birth was prophesied, whose death was prophesied, died fighting their battles centuries ago. There are no words for that. 

Words are Percy’s strong suit, anyway. He has always known what to say to calm his friends down. Annabeth can’t recall the last time she saw someone do the same for him. 

She squeezes his hand and focuses on being here, where it matters. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks, knowing he doesn’t. Or rather, knowing he doesn’t want her to have to talk about it. 

As expected, Percy burrows deeper into the bed. Half his face is squished in his pillow; the sole eye Annabeth can see fixes on the empty space in front of him. He gives her a noncommittal shrug she doesn’t buy. But at least he won’t lie outright. 

Silence follows. It nips at Annabeth’s ankles, nagging her to move, to do something, but she decides to sit with the discomfort. The confession he’s suppressing is a palpable thing: Annabeth watches it stutter in his lungs and claw its way up his windpipe. Percy will tell her when he’s ready, and she’ll be here when he is.

“I’ve been having dreams,” he says, still not meeting Annabeth’s eye. That’s okay, though. He’s getting the words out. That’s what matters, right?

“What kind of dreams?” 

Percy grimaces. “Not the useful kind. Nightmares, mostly. About the war.” He doesn’t breathe between the sentences, just grits his teeth. 

“It’s over, Percy. The war is over. We can rest now,” she tries. 

“They can’t.”

Dread settles over Annabeth, but she asks anyway. “Who can’t?” 

“Beckendorf,” he chokes, his hand tightening in hers. “Silena, Castor, Lee, Michael—I killed him, Annabeth. I told the others where to go, and they died because of me, but I killed Michael.” 

Annabeth opens her mouth to interrupt, but the names keep coming. Percy steamrolls through the tears, leaving her to watch his anger limp along until it collapses into the worn bed of sadness.

“Ethan shouldn’t have been on Olympus. I should’ve hit him harder, then he might have stayed down. And Zoe—I knew she was going to die. We found out who her dad was, and I knew and I couldn’t do anything. And Bianca wasn’t supposed to stop the automation. It was supposed to be me. She could’ve come home to Nico, and maybe then—” 

“Percy…” 

He shrinks with each word, looking every inch the child Annabeth found on Half-Blood Hill: bruised, tired, and crying for his mother. “My mom died because of me. I didn’t even save her—I saved the world, because that’s what I had to do. Hades let her go, but she still died.” 

Annabeth gapes at him uselessly. To love Percy is to know intimately the amount of guilt and unearned blame he assigns himself, but that doesn’t make it any easier to stomach. 

“You saved your mom,” she reminds him. “You saved her and the world. You shouldn’t have had to do either, but you did.” 

“But I didn’t save the others.” 

“No one could’ve.” 

“I should’ve. When you fight the way I can, the people who die around you die because you can’t get to them fast enough. If I had just been faster, I...” He takes a shuddering breath. “Why do I get to survive when they don’t?” 

A lifetime of war games and war alike, and that question is the worst thing Annabeth has ever heard. Percy is just laying there, still not meeting her eye, and she doesn’t know how to help him. 

Terrified of how he’ll answer that question, Annabeth leans down to kiss him before he can. She tries to pour everything into it despite not having too much experience. Kissing Percy so far has been fun, sweet, and definitely trial and error. Nothing this desperate, this needy. She inhales him like she can steal the painful words from his lungs before he says them. 

Annabeth tastes tears and pulls back, terrified that she’s done something wrong. Instead, Percy’s hand catches the back of her neck, keeping her close enough for their foreheads to touch. It’s there, inches away from his trembling lips, that Annabeth finds the words.

“You saved me,” she pants. “From the Furies on the bus, at the Lotus hotel, when Polyphemus knocked me out—” her fingers travel to his grey streak— “when we held up the sky, at Mount St. Helens, on Olympus… Too many times to count. From the first day we met, you gave me hope.” She strokes his cheek and wipes away the tears, feeling her own eyes well up. “Every day. You save me every day.” 

Percy clings to her hand on his cheek and releases a deep breath, fully exhaling for the first time all night. “You save me just as often.”

“So let me do it now, yeah?” 

Percy looks at her, green eyes wet and wide, and nods carefully. Annabeth sighs her relief against his forehead before pressing her lips there with an aching softness. There is more to say, but she takes a moment to just hold him. The Fates deemed her his anchor to mortality, so anchor him she will. 

“You survived because you were saddled with the weight of the world at twelve years old and the gods owe you a fucking break.” She looks at the ceiling, almost daring thunder to rumble. The sky stays silent. “More campers are alive than dead after a war with impossible odds, Percy. You saved so many, but you can’t save everyone. None of them would want you to blame yourself for this. We have to honor their sacrifice—and, in some cases, their choice.” 

That breaks him. The last of his anger gives way to painful sobs, the ugly kind that squeeze your lungs like a spasming fist. In this moment, he is not the wounded dog, but rather the limp itself: the awkward cadence of his breath reminiscent of limbs struggling to hold new weight. 

“What do you need?” she asks. “What can I do?” 

The mattress jostles as Percy scoots closer, freeing up part of the bed. “Could you stay here with me? Wake me up if it gets bad? If you have to go back to your cabin, that’s fine—” 

He’s cut off by Annabeth kicking off her shoes and crawling into bed behind him. There isn’t much room on the twin mattress, but she tucks her knees into the backs of his and wraps around him, and they fit well enough. She settles quickly to avoid overthinking, glad for the excuse to be close to him. 

This is entirely unfamiliar territory, as Annabeth discovers when she tries to figure out what to do with her hands. She’s never spooned someone before. 

Percy senses her hesitation and laces their fingers, pulling her arm around his torso. Annabeth squeezes him tight, like maybe lining up their hearts will calm the frantic beat of his. Between that and her body protecting his Achilles spot, she’s got him. 

It’s a little awkward, the silence that follows. They haven’t exactly had pillowtalk before, let alone while calming Percy during a breakdown. Annabeth doesn’t know how to hold him to make all that go away, so she clings to him as tight as she can. 

“You’re like a boa constrictor,” he chuckles. It’s a wet, half-hearted laugh that tells Annabeth he still has more to say. He’s at his worst when he’s deflecting. 

Still, she moves to loosen up. “Sorry.” 

 He tugs at her hand. “No! I mean, it’s nice. I feel… safe.” He pauses, his breath deep. “I always feel safe with you.” 

Annabeth hasn’t kissed much of him apart from his lips, but she liked the comfort of kissing his forehead. She tightens her grip again and presses her lips to his shoulder, just because she can. 

“Sometimes they’re about you,” Percy whispers. 

Annabeth lays her cheek on his shoulder, trying to see his face. “What?”

“The nightmares. Sometimes they’re about losing you.” 

“Percy, look at me.”

The tension falls from his spine as he flips around, tangling further in the mess of sheets. Annabeth smooths everything out for him before laying on her back and tugging him close. He ends up halfway on top of her: his arm around her waist, her hands in his hair, their legs a tangled mess. 

She holds his face, thumbs swiping at his cheeks gently. He may be invulnerable, but he’s a fragile thing. Maybe even more so with the invulnerability. 

“Tell me about them.” 

“What? No. Annabeth, I’m not— I can’t talk about you d— about losing you. I can’t say those words.” 

Annabeth just holds his face and his gaze. “You should. Talk about it here, safe, with me, and maybe it won’t be so bad when you fall asleep. I’ll be here the whole time.” 

The tension in Percy’s body is palpable as he resists Annabeth’s coaxing. But slowly, she slips her hands to his scalp and massages him there, leeching the stress from his body as he sinks forward into her. His weight presses Annabeth into the mattress. It’s comforting, having him above her. She can feel every breath he takes, every time his heart beats in his chest. 

“We’ve almost died a ton of times, but that was always together.” He swallows, and his Adam’s apple bobs against her collarbone. “But then on the bridge with Ethan, when you took the knife…” 

Percy takes a shuddering breath. 

“Sometimes we get you to the hotel and Will can’t help. Or I can’t find Will. Or Blackjack can’t grab you. Or—” his grip tightens around her, and his tears fall on her skin. “Sometimes you, you die right there at my feet. You jump a second earlier, and Ethan hits you in the chest, and I kill him for it. I kill everyone on the bridge. Most times it’s an accident, just the river listening to me, but sometimes… sometimes I don’t know. Both scare me.” 

One of Annabeth’s hands moves to his Achilles spot of its own accord. Percy gasps into her neck, where some tears fall as well. He’d fought his way through his confession, coming from somewhere so deep inside him that the deluge of tears was unavoidable. She hopes to distract him from them now.

“You saved me on that bridge,” she reminds him, her free hand scratching lightly at the base of his neck. 

“But what if I didn’t?” he breathes. He sounds so small. 

“Doesn’t matter. You did. Anything else is a hypothetical.” 

“But in the future—”

“Uh uh.” Annabeth’s chin taps Percy’s temple as she shakes her head. “It’s like strategy. You can think and think and think and plan your whole life out, but it’s not real. You never know what’s going to happen until your feet hit the floor. Are your feet on the floor?” 

“No,” he grumbles.

“No,” she echoes. “You’re in bed. You get to rest now.” 

Percy is still for countless heartbeats. Right when Annabeth thinks he might’ve fallen asleep, he props himself up on one elbow to look at her. Even in the lowlight, Annabeth can make out his puffy eyes and wet cheeks. 

“You know you’re my best friend, right?” He sniffles, his nose wrinkling adorably as he does, and his eyes bore into Annabeth’s. “You’re my girlfriend too, but you’re my best friend first. Always.” 

Annabeth hears that statement for what it is and grins despite the tears prickling in her own eyes. “And you’re mine. Always.” 

A smile breaks out on his face like dawn at this late hour, brightening up the small space between them. Exhaustion sets in to close it, drawing Percy to settle back into Annabeth’s neck with the slow pull of gravity. 

They drift off in a bed made to be slept in alone as they share a burden made for one person. Newness tinges the corners of this memory, this moment Annabeth finds herself missing before it’s gone: Percy asleep above her, finally getting the peaceful rest he deserves. Part of Annabeth wants to stay up all night to make sure he gets the most of it, to watch his back as she promised to do, but her eyelids are heavy with sleep in no time. 

What sticks with Annabeth is this: Percy’s breath slow and steady against her neck, his heartbeat reliable as ever as it syncs with her own. The world is warm and safe despite all the evidence to the contrary, and that’s what makes this moment untouchable. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, here they are. Together in every way that matters. 

#i hurt myself writing this i am not going to lie #if u read this on tumblr all i ask is u give it some love on ao3 bc engagement with tumblr is Trash but i try to keep commissions accessible #commissions #my percabeth #my fic #mericatblackwood

[snkpolls]

SnK Chapter 130 Results

The chapter poll closed with 1775 responses. This month’s poll results were brought to you by u/staraves, Crunchwrap, Luna, Momtaku and Giovata! Thank you to everyone for your support!

RATE THE CHAPTER

Maybe it was finally getting Eren’s POV, or maybe it was finally seeing the rumbling in nine glorious double page spreads. Either way “Dawn for Humanity” was very well received with close to 70% giving it the highest possible rating, marking this the most acclaimed chapter since chapter 123.

Beautifully drawn and written. I like the teasing of Eren's PoV

Good to see some Eren and Historia (finally!!) but the lack of answers is really hurting my heart, cmon yama!!

Epic chapter, amazing artwork. And astonishingly, with 5-6-7 chapters left i still don't know where this is going.

Definitely in my top ten best chapters. The ending was gloriously horrifying to read. Also, we finally got some Historia content, which is a big plus.

Cool as hell chapter.

I feel like this chapter wasn’t that great. It kind of gave way to more speculation without giving many concrete answers. The things that it DID answer felt like stating the obvious.

Tease me more, daddy Isayama

This chapter most likely is the best i've ever seen. So many answers and sooo many questions left behind. This chapter directs us to think about the previous chapters and obviously ISAYAMA'S THOUGHTS. That thing makes me happy. I'm very grateful.

Death is on its way, ladies and gents. Also the end is almost here. What the fuck is going on? I just want some answers about  E V E R Y T H I N G (especially about Eren's psyche).

Is there a singular word for the feeling of a mosquito bite?

  WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOMENT?

“The revelation of Eren’s freaky final boss form” was our favorite moment (22.7%) followed by “Eren’s POV finally! Sort of?” (15.8%) and “The rumbling! At last!” (13.4%). “Historia and Eren’s tense discussion on the farm” came in fourth (11.6%).

Fuck yes! Erens back!

Our Queen has finally returned!

The whole chapter was building up to the reveal of Eren's titan form, and I enjoyed it.

Finally back at our one and only true hero Eren.

SWIMMER TITANS ARE NOW THE GOLD MEDALIST FOR THE SWIMMING CATEGORY IN OLYMPICS 2020 special edition

FINNALY HISU POV, even if it’s just a flashback. Honestly I’m just happy to see her again, becuase she’s my favorite character, and even if the flashback gives more questions than answers.

loved zeke-eren bro talk

everyone who thought that Floch was lying in charter 125 are 🤡🤡🤡

reiner tiddies

  WHO WAS THIS CHAPTER'S MVP?

“The colossal synchronized swim team” made an impressive showing (28.5%) but their majestic moves across the ocean were not enough to topple Eren (53.6%) for chapter MVP. Historia (8.1%), Zeke (5%), and Annie (3.5%) also received some love.

EREN IS THE GOAT

Eren is the worst boy in the world.

EREN JAEGER GENOCIDAL MANIAC

I really missed Historia, so it was nice to see her.

can the rumbling start a synchronized aquatic dance?

  WHAT DOES THE CHAPTER TITLE "DAWN FOR HUMANITY" REFER TO?

I thought of it as some sort of "End of the world" titling.

Dunno; but it doesn't really work if the rest of the world gets rumbled, does it?

I want to see the japanese title to decide

Eren wants to kill “animals” to give a new life to “humanity”

A dawn, or a beginning of a new day, has arrived. Whether this new day is a good or a bad one for humanity, we do not yet know. Everything is still possible, but once this day is over, the world as we know it is no longer here, for better or worse.

A new age for humanity is incoming. The story will end as a tragedy with Eren achieving his goal.

Dawn means the start of the day. So I think the start of the rumbling will be the start of humanity for this world. I think we started to see this with the world fleet being there to try stop eren. I believe every country is helping people flee regardless of race. Maybe I'm just too idealistic.

Ce chapitre fait reference au fait qu’eren est pret a tout pour sauver ses amis

Eren will achieve his goal (end the cycle of hatred)

Hope for humanity outside the walls. Dawn for me is something like hope, even if today was a bad day, tomorrow, after dawn, things might get better. Maybe the Warriors-Paradis alliance will somehow reach Eren and stop the Rumbling?

dunno but got the vibes of ‘it’s darkest before the dawn’ might be a tip for a change coming

Eren has now officially started eradicating the world and also it's dark ideas against people on paradise and conquering freedom for his people and that is why this moment onwards is "the dawn of humanity "

Dawn for Eldians to be exact. Dusk for Marleyans.

Finally defeating Eren, ending the curse of Ymir and freeing everyone from the shadow of Titan powers.

Dawn of Terror? Dawn of "What The FUCK Is That??" Dawning that the remaining places of humanity are to be trampled?

It could refer to a ""dawn"" for the alliance, who intend for neither side of the conflict to be eradicated, as they believe everyone is part of ""humanity"". Despite their deliberation at the beginning of the chapter, the fact that they're finally setting sail to stop Eren is testament that they've not lost their hope in the pursuit of this ideal, hence they can be interpreted to be the ""dawn"".

Eldians in Paradis Island being free from the wrath of outsiders and being avenged

I think it refers to a new beginning a new start for the eldians living on the island or it can be used as an ironic way that the humanity outside the walls is going to end so it's complete destruction hence the beginning of the new cycle

The Rumbling & Historia's child, humanity's destruction and its rebirth

Continuation of "End's Eve" as this is the dawn of the day where humanity fights for its continued existence

"Dawn" refers to Humanity's realisation of many things. Eg: how Eldia is not a weak nation, how the Rumbling wasn't a lie, how people are people and they are all the same - wanting to live and shedding the same blood no matter what nationality they have. "Humanity" refers to those still alive and realizing these things.

Dawn of the final day - 24 hours remain

  WHAT ARE THE FUTURE IMPLICATIONS OF ANNIE DECIDING SHE'S TIRED OF FIGHTING AND NO LONGER WANTS TO STOP EREN?

Despite learning that her hometown is doomed, just over half of respondents feel confident Annie will stay the course and continue to work with the alliance. Among the rest of responses, 27.4% think this will trigger Annie’s exodus, selecting “Annie will leave the alliance and try to be with her father,” 16.9% believe this will cause Annie to do something stupid resulting in her death, and lastly 4% of the fandom believe this bad news will trigger Annie’s homicidal instincts causing her to switch sides and join Eren.

Annie saying she didn't want to have to be prepared to fight mikasa, Connie, armin, jean, Reiner and eren again made me feel sad for her ;-;

I just wanna say that it wouldn't make any sense for Isayana to bring Annie back and then write her out so it's obvious she will continue in the alliance lol (but I don't really agree with any of the options offered, I think she will decide by herself to stay)

Poor Annie's breakdown made me feel terrible for her. I still think she wants to leave but I think there are chances of the Warriors and/or Armin convincing her to stay and fight. As one of the nine shifters, she kinda has the responsibility to fight, even if she doesn't want to, and I get completely why she doesn't want to, poor thing. I have a sneaky suspicion that she might choose Porco's way out and we might yet see a new holder of the Female Titan power. :(

  WHAT WILL BE THE FATES OF THE ELDIANS IN LIBERIO, SPECIFICALLY THE WARRIORS' FAMILIES?

When asked about the residents of Liberio and the fate of the Warriors’ families, a combined 58% believe that they are alive for the moment selecting that they were evacuated (39.3%) or else managed to escape (18.4%). Close to 30% aren’t so optimistic, believing Liberio is flattened and they are dead. We also had plenty of write in responses:

They are going to die, but I can see Annie meeting her father and die together in each others arm by the rumbling. It's sad I know, but it would be a fitting end for both of them :(

They are probably arrive. Either they overcame the Marleyan authorities that tried to surpress, or The Rumbling avoided Liberio entirely. I just doubt they would kill off Mr. Leonhardt offscreen.

They may have started to fight the Marleyans and then ended up flattened by the titans since they didn't escape earlier.

They took a ship to the south and we will meet them including Reiner's family  and Mr. Leonhart.

Am I supposed to feel sorry for these people? I don't. The Warriors don't deserve happy endings for everything they have done.

Bands of survivors have made it out but Annie will meet her dad when he is dead or dying

some died while revolting, some are alive, annie's dad is wounded

They're currently fineish because Eren didn't go where Hange was expecting, hence why all their estimations have been off

I mean, they must be alive somehow. It seemed  that there were only soldiers in Liberio and the others evacuated so I'm hopeful that at least Annie's father survived

I want to have hope ;-;

I just want Annie to see her father again, and for Reiner to get what he wants.

What if the city Eren attacked isn't Liberio? I feel like it's too important to be flattened just like that (thematical resonance + too many side-characters like Eren's own grandfather are there) and we're being misled about the place Eren is attacking.

  HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT HISTORIA'S STANCE ON THE RUMBLING?

Many of us had expectations about Historia going into this chapter. Her initially disagreeing outright with the rumbling but seemingly giving in was a surprise to 8.4% who thought she would have been all for it all along, and 19.9% who never expected her to agree with it at all. 6.4% of you expected her to do the opposite of what is implied, with agreeing at first but changing her mind in the conversation, while 23.3% reported expecting the exact turn of events. However, a huge 41.5% of you aren’t taking everything at face value and do not believe Historia does or has ever supported the rumbling.

  DO YOU BELIEVE EREN IS THE FATHER?

After almost 2 years of the fandom fighting over the identity of Historia’s baby daddy, this chapter has finally definitively proven that… we still know nothing. Nonetheless, the narrowly winning belief (37%) is that Eren is the father, closely followed by those who believe he is not the father (34.4%). Some are unsure what to make of the situation (18.2%), and some of you don’t care enough to speculate (10.4%).

there is a TON of hints, him being the father makes prefect sense.

i will bet on my freedom that eren is the father

Historia x Eren ftw!

Eren being the father would be the most meaningful for both the story, as well as for Eren and Historia and their chemistry together if you ask me, though I can accept otherwise.

Whoever disagrees eren is the father doesn't read the manga seriously

I have not any positive thoughts about Eren-Historia's flashback. Just pain, I feel pain for her. I don't get the point to destroy her character like that.

I really hope Eren isn’t the father — it just doesn’t seem right.

I don't believe Eren is the father since it will contradict what he said to Zeke: "I'm only left with 4 years"

Sorry shippers, I don't think we'll ever get a straight answer about who's the father. But I kinda prefer it that way, because then we'll each get to decide what we thinks is correct.

IF YOU DONT STOP THIS I WANNA MAKE BABIES WITH YOU

Still don't care about who's the father

Who is the father?

  HOW HAVE YOUR FEELINGS ON THIS CHANGED DUE TO THIS CHAPTER?

35% went into the chapter thinking Eren was not the father and 30% believing he was, with this chapter doing nothing to change their minds. For those who were affected, this chapter influenced 14.2% to join the team #DaddyEren and 5.6% to burn their membership card. The remaining 15% don’t care enough to speculate.

If Eren is the father, I think it's possible Historia wanted his baby to keep a part of him with her after the rumbling is over, or perhaps it was an attempt to make him want to come back when he's done or even not commit genocide.

why does everyone keep saying Eren is the Father confirmed? There is literally no evidence to support that, and it actually contradicts Erens statement when Zeke discusses Mikasas feelings towards him.

I just want Eren to be the father

Historia's pregnancy smacks of her own plan but I'm not sure Eren is on board with it.

I want confirmation on the father cause if it's not eren ima be pissed off

don't care who the father is, whole world is ending.

I can't stand the mystery surrounding Historia's pregnancy anymore, this is worse than serum bowl.

WHO THE FUCK IS THE FATHER

  SO THEN WHAT'S THE REAL DEAL WITH HISTORIA'S PREGNANCY?

“What’s the deal with Historia’s pregnancy?” Jerry Seinfeld asks. But we cannot answer – we can only sustain ourselves on memes and ship wars. Despite Eren and Historia’s somewhat uneasy conversation, a solid third of you are still pretty sure that Eren is the baby’s father. A little over a fifth of you think she did the dirty with Farmer-kun instead. And another fifth is convinced something else is going on (watermelon baby?), but aren’t sure what. Some of you scream to the sky, sick of all the drama. And a few of you wouldn’t rule out a baby created through PATHS. It might be Ymir’s doing! No, not that Ymir. THAT Ymir.

Historia is playing 5d chess I just know it. I just don't know how yet

Why'd Historia act like that if Eren wasn't the father?

ymir is the father

Eren has to be the father for the good dev of eren & historia characters

I really hope the pregnancy thing is just a red herring, but it wouldn't be the first-time Isayama appealed to fan-service if not.

If I see more speculation on whether Eren is the father I'm gonna puke. I mean how about focus on the real story? Like how the world is about to be destroyed??

We need more Historia. We literally need her POV for the story to make sense right now. I can't believe that with ""5% of the plot"" left Isayama is *still* pulling this all this time? There *has* to be more.

I always knew Mikasa was the father

  WHY DO YOU THINK HISTORIA IS PROPOSING A PREGNANCY?

Despite a majority of respondents believing the pregnancy is authentic, there is no consensus as to why Historia would propose it. The most popular answer when asked was “I don’t know” (32.2%). The remainder of the fandom is split between Historia proposing the pregnancy in support of Eren (23.1%), as part of an alternative plan (21%) or as an act of defiance against Eren (17.6%). Only a small percentage (6.1%) believe she actually wants a child.

What the hell is the pregnancy for? It doesnt make any sense for Historia to suggest that all of a sudden

How did getting eren and historia's conversation make things more confusing😔Like what went through historia's mind when she thought of having a baby i-

What if the "what if I have a child" scene with Historia actually happened EARLIER than the rest of the conversation? It would explain why they switched places, and if Eren really is the father, would explain why he feels he has such a say in Historia's child's future ("even if you agree, I don't" ) , and why when he spoke about the MPs he said "WE have two options: fight or run". It would also give him a  motivation to oppose his friends, since they are trying to stop him.

I don't see his conversation with Historia in romantic light. She was scared of him and Eren was trying to manipulate her with her own words about being ""the worst girl on the world"". We still miss some important parts of their conversation, but if she agreed to help him because he reminded her how ""the worst girl"" she was, then I would be very disappointed. I saw her as strong woman and I hope she will not turn to be a mild sheep who isn't brave enough to follow Ymir's wish and ""live her life with pride"" (or ""live sticking her chest out"").

I have no idea for which purpose Historia want to become pregnant, but I'm glad that I was right that she decide it for herself and doesn't get forced at all!

Historia has a trick up her sleeve and I can't wait to see what it is.

  WE LEARNED WHAT ZEKE REALLY TOLD EREN ABOUT THE ACKERBOND. ARE YOU SATISFIED WITH EVERYTHING WE HAVE LEARNED ABOUT THE ACKERMAN CLAN?

75% of the fandom wants more resolution to the Ackermysteries with 38.4% wanting MOAR and 32.3% wanting at least a little more. Only 22.3% are satisfied with the ackercrumbs we’ve been tossed and 7% have no opinion.

love guru zook

ackerman bond means LOVE!!!!!!!!!!!! sweet for all ackerman related shippers ohhhh

I'm satisfied to see yet another example of people trying to pin eren's BS onto zeke (with the ackerman theories) be proven completely wrong

Mikasa's charachter wouldve been a lot more interesting if her ackerman genes had an effect on her decision making and her trying to overcome them would be a lot more intriguing to see. Instead it turned out to be some lovey dovey pancake bullshit. I mean what would Zeke even know about Mikasa??

WHAT IS UP WITH HISTORIAS PREGNANCY AND ACKERMANS BLOOD AHHHHH

I think the fact that the Ackermans can access the Paths without being shifters is going to be super relevant. My pet theory is that Mikasa will be able to cross into the Paths dimension to kill Eren and truly free Ymir Fritz, but let's see how that goes.

  HOW ACCURATE WAS ZEKE'S ASSESSMENT OF MIKASA'S FEELINGS TOWARD EREN?

One of the few areas of agreement in this chapter was with Zeke’s assessment of Mikasa’s feelings towards Eren. Close to 80% think that despite having never met Mikasa in person, Zeke correctly understands that Mikasa’s concern for Eren has little to do with genetics and everything to do with reasons of the heart. However, the majority of people who took the option of writing in their answer cited both as a factor in Mikasa’s bond.

Eren, when your sadistic and bloodthirsty big bro can see how much Mikasa loves you, you probably should take it seriously lol

Zeke. Is. Big. Bro

He's a lying liar who lies.

usually when panels sway to the right, they are true, so I believe this is the case.

Did anybody honestly not already know this? We learned nothing new from this as far as I'm concerned.

Mikasa really cares for Eren but the Ackerman genes amplify her love for him.

Everybody's emotional attachments have some basis in biology. It doesn't make them any less real or meaningful

we learn Zeke ships eremika 🤔unexpected but naice

The ackerman blood does boost her physical abilities but i believe it doesn't affect her mentally (she probably has ptsd and seperation anxiety)

What is between Eren and Mikasa?There is something we still Dont know.I wish for more Mikasa....

I think the bond itself is clearly related to her trauma but the intensity of it probably has more to do with her Ackerman genes

Both ? Even tho Ackerman genes could have a big part in it

I think Mikasa loves Eren but it's not JUST romantic or JUST familial.

Her devotion is strong on its own- but her Ackerman abilities definitely have played a role in her saving his ass all these years.

Very accurate, he is Love Master Zook.

Only  a fool believe that shit regarding Ackerman bonds and so on. [...] The hate speech I believe is some kind of Eren pathetic attempt to release her of her feelings towards himself, just in case the worst scenario is coming up in not too far future.

The Ackerman instincts amplified her love towards Eren.

Zeke was right [...] As much as Mikasa being ready to snap titans necks in two for Eren is due to her love for him, Eren being willing to go through with a world genocide to prevent Historia's sacrifice definitely results from his love for her.

  HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT THE PLACEMENT OF FLASHBACKS DURING THIS CHAPTER?

The majority of the fandom really enjoyed the inception-like flashbacks, but 1/5th just found it confusing as all hell. A sixth of the fandom is just fed up with Isayama blue-balling us. We’ve been in this relationship 10+ years, Yams, it’s time for you to give it up!

Loved the interwoven flashbacks, and made sense considering a lot of the "unknown" conversations(Eren with Yelena, Floch, Historia....) all tie into each other. Made sense to them like this, and plus there is still some mystery from his talk with Historia.

E-H convo should've been shown months ago; now is not the time for flashbacks.

Just Yams trolling the shippers

The confusing flashbacks also reflect Eren's state of mind. The placement was well done.

I don't mind it, but i feel Isayama was, to a certain degree, struggling to work all of this information organically into the story, so he was forced to choose this flashback method to get it out there.

The juxtaposition is very purposeful, while I don’t necessarily like what it implies, it is indeed impactful.

The way the flashbacks were placed would look amazing in the anime, but in manga format it looks a lot more confusing!

People might say this is Isayama being mysterious and showing us everything but revealing nothing as he always does, and yeah and if this was 10 chapters ago I might see that as a positive, but this late into the series it feels like it was just a waste of a chapter.

They were good because they connected with each-other; though I had to reread the chapter several times to distinguish who was talking because it flipped so much.

These kinds of chapters are slightly annoying in the moment, but are more than worth it in the long run.

The Historia flashbacks are confusing af

  WHAT IS THE MEANING BEHIND EREN IMPLYING HE "WANTED THIS", REGARDING THE FUTURE OF THE RUMBLING?

Continuing Eren’s ongoing theme of the question of free will and determinism, this chapter presented us with the possibility that Eren wanted everything that has happened from the start. Depending on your interpretation, of course. The majority of respondents to this question (54.7%) believe that Eren has been convincing himself there was no other possible future due to seeing said future play out in front of his very eyes, and 17.1% somewhat similarly believe Eren did not want this in the conventional sense, and he is an unreliable narrator. A smaller 12% believe this is confirmation that Eren’s vengeful nature caused this, closely followed by 9.5% of you who just think he is a lunatic.

Despite him talking as if this future was fated to happen he still seems aware enough that his own decisions still led to this outcome. From his perspective  all of this was meant to happen because he already saw his future memories, but he doesnt deny that the path he took was still by his own will.

Eren said from the start he would, "destroy them all." He hated being a slave. I think he *does want this. He wants whatever will guarantee freedom.

Both future can't be changed AND Eren is a fucking lunatic

Even if the future could be changed Eren preferred the full rumbling

He literally had no option from the very beginning , his actions is definitely justified .

it's probably all the attack titan's will, not his.

he's trying to fool himself into thinking he never changed

Eren has accepted that the future cannot be changed, and has realized that the unchangeable future is the future that he has always wanted

Eren is so close-minded & immature

I've given up trying to understand Eren's logic. It's just too bizarre. I will wait until the story is finished to form any opinion about him.

Eren was bored in his original universe and wanted humanity to have a threat so he made the aot universe via Ymir and became that threat himself.

Even if a significant part of Eren wants to eradicate his enemies out of rage/revenge, really deep down it’s been shown he wishes there was another solution but right now he doesn’t want to admit he’s surrendered to his destiny. So Isayama’s going to come back to this by having Eren admit to himself he isn’t really free/this isn't what he wants, which will be the culmination of his character arc (what will he do then?…).

Eren kinda forgot about the mothers

  THIS BURST OF PANELS SHOWS A VARIETY OF SCENES FROM EREN'S POV, BUT SOME SCENES APPEAR TO BE FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE OR ENTIRELY NEW SCENES. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

Nearly 45% of the people who voted, thought it was a deus ex machina move from Founding Titan by Proxy, which granted Eren a glimpse at all Eldians’ memories. Almost a third think that Eren was actually able to control their memories. 14% of all voters are just “wtf…? I dunno” at all the Pathsnanigans.

I don't know and I don't like it. Hope it isn't another pathsfuckery while all I want in life is KRUEGER'S POV.

Eren's path shit also implies the story has always been bending to that moment too. From the pigs, to even Dina from that Bert shard. If it's ever revealed he orchestrated Carla's death to stimulate Grisha and Eren's hatred, the whole demonisation of RBA gets turned on his head.

I don't like the idea that Eren controlled the Smiling Titan but it's starting to feel more and more likely...

The second one except it WILL come up again cause it’s fucking Isayama like tf do you expect lmao

The new POV scenes are definitely intentional but I hope the explanation isn't some magical PATHS stuff where he orchestrated characters (like Dina's) actions or is suddenly an all-seeing almighty being. Grisha was enough pls.

DUDE, THIS MEANS THAT BIRD HAS P A T H S!

dumb answer choice

FT/Ymir lets Eren see the memories of all Eldians. It will come up again. I don't get some of the angles/perspectives though.

It's possible some of these things haven't happened yet, or that Eren has access to the memories of more shifters somehow. For example, Berthold might be a memory Annie or Reiner have and Eren will receive if he eats one of them while they try to stop him.

I have absolutely no idea what the deal is with the Falco and Bertolt memories but I'm sure they're not inconsistency errors considering the care that went into showing that the Mikasa/Grisha/Levi etc. panels are clearly from Eren's POV. I expect answers really soon (and no, I do not think he controlled Dina’s titan to kill Carla, that would be pure character assassination). Hange's panel looks like it's from the future, as well as Mikasa's unfamous 'see you later'. The geese are also interesting but I have no mindblowing theories about them unfortunately..

Excited to see from where Hange without glasses memories from though.

Eren is the air, the trees, the birbs, everything

Marcel is more like to come back from the dead before I ever understand half the shit inside Eren’s head.

If Eren somehow got his mother killed that'll be the ultimate bruh moment

  THIS CHAPTER SHOWED US ANOTHER MEMORY OF FEZ-KUN, FINDING HIMSELF IN TROUBLE AGAIN. WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE MEANING BEHIND HIS HIDDEN STORY?

The mystery of the Fez persists once again, with this being the tenth chapter since he was first shown. Though by a small margin, the consensus is that the purpose of his story is to reaffirm Eren’s determination to wipe out the world at 44.8%, with 33.4% of respondents believing he will be a tie to Eren’s compassion and remorse for what he is doing, and 17.1% believing it highlights Eren’s inherent hypocrisy for caring for him even though he will die by his actions later. Many write-in options expressed confusion at who this kid is.

Eren believes that suffering and oppression of minorities will never end just by small acts of kindness and simular "passive" acts, like what Levi did, it does not provide a long term solution or prevent Fez-kun'sfrom furder torments, which is why Eren feels like the extreme solution of the rumbling is his only option

Eren gave a mission to Fez-kun

Eren using another kid to get his way without caring about his life. What else is new.

He's the "even someone on the street" part of Kruger's advice to love someone to break the cycle of tragedy.

He’s showing that little boy he has to fight to survive, like he did with Mikasa when they were kids.

I think he found himself in trouble again (he looks to be bruised on the cheek in 120) and Eren will come to his rescue. However I think Eren will not just save him by beating up or killing the Marleyans, but inspiring the Fez kid to take action and "fight" just like he did with Mikasa. This arc has had a lot of focus on the almost inhumane level of violence Eren showed as a kid when killing those kidnappers, so I can see that being for the purpose of a direct parallel where Eren pressured the kid with the fez to stand up for himself.

I think Eren saved Fez-kun of those guys, but then he will kill him later, showing his own hypocrisy (those guys can't do bad to a child but I can).

I expect his shard(s) to contrast the other previously unknown panel from 120: Historia’s shard was revealed to be yet another instance of Eren manipulating a friend by putting his desires above her own, thus robbing her of her free-will. I hope that Fez-kun symbolizes the "beauty in a cruel world"

It show that Eren just have an other plan and not just kill everyone for no reason???? Lest not be that blind :) what esle u want to understund thats an option too? you want isayama to told u?

maybe eren intends for some people to escape when he announced the rumbling which allows people to prepare themselves, idk.

Eren will save their family and he told Fez to lead his family to a certain location that the rumbling won't reach?

What are all these crappy options? He represents Eren’s journey to changing his viewpoint about everyone being an enemy, as he told Reiner.

Just thought he was part of the collage of events, no further meaning.

Who’s Fez-kun

  SWIMMING TITANS?

88% of you welcome your Swimming Titan overlords, but 12% aren’t so convinced - there’s a pretty even chance it’s because the image is just too absurd, too terrifying, or a pants-wetting combination of both.

SWIMMING TITANS

swimming titans

Seeing those colossal titans was crazy

The panel of the titan swimming underneath that ship haunts me in my dreams.

HELL YEAH FUCKING SWIMMING TITANS

  WHEN THE MILITARY SIGHTS ERENSAURUS AT THE END, RATHER THAN CALLING IT THE FOUNDING TITAN OR EREN JAEGER, THEY RECOGNISE IT AS THE ATTACK TITAN. WHY?

Despite the threat of Eren Jaeger previously being referred to by name or as “the Founding Titan”, this chapter encapsulated the horror of the allied forces as they recognised it as the Attack Titan. The plurality (40.3%) is that this was just for the purpose of Isayama being able to drop a “Shingeki no Kyojin” in this climactic chapter, though a close second option (34%) is that there is historical information to distinguish the Attack Titan from the others. 15.2% of you believe the Attack Titan is the Titan Bogeyman for Marleyans, and 10.4% attribute the naming to the fact that it’s attacking them, duh.

I think the Maryleans/World Forces knew it was the Attack Titan bc of the Eldians in Marley (like Annie's dad) warning them ahead of time. I think once they realized The Rumbling was happening, they asked for more deets from the folks who heard Eren's message in the Path's Realm.

I wonder why the rest of the world was only  using Mikasa ships instead of various ships lol

IT CAN'T BE STOPPED ANYMORE

  NOW THAT WE FINALLY GOT TO SEE EREN'S SPINE-CHILLING (BADUM-TSS) FORM, WHAT DID YOU THINK?

This manga has turned into a horror show, and y’all seem to be loving it, according to over fifty percent. Thirty percent are aghast at the sight before them, and nearly a tenth of you don’t really know what to think of the Grim Reaper titan yet. Some of you wanted something more fully formed, but this creepy crawly is freaky enough, isn’t it? Let’s just be glad none of us live in Marley right now.

My jaw dropped when I saw Eren’s titan form. Horrific.

I love Erensaurus a lot. This chapter gave the same level of anxiety that Zeke's attack in Shiganshina gave me. Good

YEAH EREN IS SCARY AS FUCK I LOVE IT MORE FREEDOM MORE FREEDOM MORE FREEDOM

Eren's titan looks a little like the earth devil

Did Eren pick the design of his new Titan or did Ymir just give it to him?

Really interested in where it is going especially because Eren's Titan got lips which could be an indicator for it to have the ability to speak

Eren’s Founding Titan form looks like something out of Silent Hill

I'm not saying anything about Eren's titan. What even the actual fuck, Yams

Oh lawd he comin

  WHY IS EREN'S CURRENT TITAN FORM A SKELETON WITH NO FLESH?

Eren is looking awfully spooky right now. That’s a good sign, isn’t it? I guess looking like a death metal album cover is better than looking like whatever Rod Reiss was supposed to be. 34.9% figure that as this is probably the largest titan ever, it’s just too big for flesh. It’s not like PATHS sand is infinite, after all. 34.6% think that the form is incomplete because of the missing titan powers; this is only a third of his potential scariness! 23% think there’s no real reason he looks like this. Not an in-story reason anyway. Finally, 7.6% think Eren is still not done forming this devilish beast.

Eren's upper skeleton body thing looks like wings of freedom...

The reason Eren's body was like this, if he was muscular, he would radiate a lot of heat, so the Allience's couldn't reach him. But now, no muscle, no heat. They can reach easily.

Eren's form is creepy as hell! I also think he might be dead/dying/the titan now.

Seriously, how the fuck does Eren's Titan move?

When a shifter generates a titan body, they need to have a special task or purpose in mind. Is Eren's titan meant to be a bridge between Paradis Island and the continent?

  WHAT IS ISAYAMA TRYING TO SAY WITH THE PUPPET-LIKE MOTIF OF EREN'S TITAN?

Many have noticed the puppet-like strings connecting Eren’s torso and head to his stegosaurus spikes in the final panel (though not in the first shot we get of Eren -- we’ll just ignore that), but what does it mean? Him being a slave to himself (38%) just edged out him being a slave to fate (36.7%), with a slim minority (3.3%) believing Ymir could be the true puppeteer. Of course, there are the 21.9% of you who are remaining steadfast in the belief that Eren is NOT a slave, he is FREE.

He is a slave to the future memories and instead of trying to find a different way, he is convincing himself that this is what he wants from the start to compensate for how little freedom he has.

He's trying to justify to himself that he isn't a slave

Eren is a slave to that sweet sweet feeling of self-righteous rage.

Ymir might be acting through Eren.

I think eren has become a vessel for ymir and it's ymirs will that we're hearing.

  WHERE IS EREN'S HUMAN BODY MOST LIKELY RESIDING?

The results for this are a mixed bag, with the three most popular answers extremely close in votes. It’s most agreed upon (29.1%) that Eren has no human form, and has merged with the Titan on some level, with a close second (28.8%) being him being separated from the Titan but not in the conventional sense, and using the Warhammer Titan power to operate it from the ocean. 27.9% of you believe he is in the standard position of the nape, and only 14.2% of you believe the head of the Attack Titan could be his true location.

So, does Eren now only have his head left or was he fully healed thanks to Ymir?

where is Eren (No,not his titan)? There is no nape on that thing, just bone

I NEED TO KNOW HOW EREN IS TRANSPORTING HIMSELF

  THE CHAPTER ENDS WITH CHILD EREN'S DETERMINATION TO "DESTROY THEM" OVERLAPPING WITH ADULT EREN COMMANDING THE RUMBLING. WHICH STATEMENT IS THE MOST ACCURATE REGARDING THIS COMPARISON?

This curious panelling choice ends the chapter, giving us a peek at Eren’s inner monologue – but in true Isayama fashion it’s not clear exactly what it means. 45.6% believe it shows that Eren hasn’t fundamentally changed the way he views the world, his will and titan powers giving him the means to influence it. 26.4% think it’s a reminder of Eren’s tragic tendency to believe that peace cannot exist without the complete elimination of an opposing force. 16.8% think it demonstrates Eren’s willing or unwilling continuation of the cycle of hatred and revenge. Finally, 9.1% think there’s a hint here that Eren’s childhood self was cursed with thoughts from his future mind.

ALL OF THE ABOVE

All of the above, minus the P A T H S.

I hate eren do the same thing as what he had been through

It's Eren's tendency to lose himself to the desire for vengeance, which in the mange is always depicted as leading to a catastrophe in the end.

His childhood trauma comes back to him when he sees a loved one die / about to die and feels the powerlessness of having been unable to do anything because of being weak. Then pain and anger return for this reason

It's a parallel showing his determination to fight back against those who would deny he and his comrades their freedom.

It is once again Eren reassuring himself he's doing what's right, by telling himself that the cycle of hatred is what's causing this and that he needs to break it

The thoughts are child Eren, simply overlapping with the current situation. It may not be adult Eren’s thoughts.

THIS BITCH CRAZY.

I just want to say that the history is repeating its self . What we thought it was the past it's actually the future

He is using this memory of his mother being eaten to motivate himself, like a main drive. It's not the first time. Anger/Rage was always the main drive that he used to keep fighting/seeking for freedom

This is already similar to some of the options presented, but I like the idea that this is showing deep down he is driven by his childlike rage, and as much as he tries to convince himself it's for his friends, he really just wants to revel in violence because he's broken and he thinks wiping everyone out is the only way he will be at peace.

  THIS CHAPTER ALSO PRESENTED US WITH TWO ALMOST DICHOTOMIC MOTIVATIONS FOR EREN, BETWEEN LOVE FOR HIS FRIENDS AND HATE FOR THE ENEMY, BUT WHICH DO YOU BELIEVE IS THE STRONGER DRIVING FORCE?

The two most powerful and conflicting emotions driving Eren right now have the fanbase somewhat split over what pushes him further. It seems that most are optimistic about Eren’s prime motivation being the wellbeing of his friends at 59.7%. Meanwhile 40.3% believe that Eren’s love for his friends has been eclipsed by the roiling hatred and thirst for vengeance within him. Even at this point in the story, it’s hard to be absolutely certain – safe to say Eren is a real menace when he feels this strongly about anything.

I feel like I finally fully understand Eren's mindset, even though there is probably still more to his POV. He just wants his friends to be happy and live long lives, so he had to push them away especially after Sasha's death.

This chapter Eren can't disentangle love from fear/hate/loss due to what happened to his mother, which is why his feelings about his friends now manifest so destructively.

Eren's memory chain went from remembering his friends smiling, to Sasha's death and Fez-kun being beat up, and eventually to his mother's death and his vow to kill all titans, showing that deep down he knows his motivation to protect his friends is bullshit and that his "enemies" are mostly innocents, but he keeps moving forward due to hatred and revenge.

Eren has never healed his trauma. It was "eating" him slowly and turned him into this he hated the most - a devilish monster.

I think the chapter settled very well that revenge surpass even his wish of protect his friends

The transition to Eren's pov and the fact we didn't learn anything new beside some basic confirmations, is really strange. And if Eren ends killing the friends he wanted to protect, he will be a complete disappointment. I really am afraid of SnK's ending.

"I want my friends to live long happy lives" he says after treating them like shit, breaking their spirit, and partially ruining their home island with millions of titans. I hope he doesn't act surprised when they show up to stop him (assuming they can catch up of course).

I don't believe the word "animals" align with Eren's current perspective, nor how he sees his "enemies". He holds the same ideals as he did as a child, but realises the nuance of his enemies and how people on both sides are ultimately the same. He just believes this radical action is the only necessary way to end an unstoppable inter-generational conflict in his lifetime so these problems aren't handed down to future generations anymore.

he's being driven both by hatred and love, but right now his rage is winning and he's using the safety of his friends and Eldia as an excuse to appease his conscience.

  ON A SCALE FROM "SECRET PLAN" TO "KILL 'EM ALL", WHERE DO YOU STAND ON EREN'S TRUE INTENTIONS?

This chapter all but confirmed that Eren indeed plans to wipe out the entire outside world for most of the fandom. The majority are skewed towards the opinion of Eren definitely rumbling everything, with less and less respondents holding onto hope that Eren has an alternate plan.

Eren wants this rumbling and he's ready to sacrifice others to get what he wants, even his friends.

I gotta say, I thought Eren would've had a real plan that wasn't just massacring everyone else on the planet. I was already against the plan, but I suspected he'd walk the other side of the ocean and then announce to the world that the existence of titans was no more and destroy all the titans as proof, and all the shifters would just be normal people again.

His goal is to wipe the titans out of this world, and not to flatten it.

I support the rumbling, cause Marley deserved this by trying to eliminate Paradis, but at the same time there are so many good people there(including eldians themselves) that haven't done anything wrong. Military and leaders of marley should be eliminated, but not the poor people that had no choice.

This hateful world is needed to be purged and I support Eren for this. And when Rumbling is over that beast piece of sh** must die by Levi's hand.

I thought eren had a secret plan for the rumbling but after getting his pov this chapter looks like he really is going for it

Somehow, I can't shake off the feeling that we still haven't seen 100% of Eren's plan, there is still some twist waiting. I am not trying to justify Eren's current actions, it's more like ""if there is something that will throw this whole scenario upside down it better come up soon, because right now IT DOESN'T LOOK GOOD"".

I want to believe thtat Eren has a secret plan in the rumbling but the chapter says that this is what he wanted, he had always been like this, he was always “free” sadly, he’s enslaved by his beliefs of freedom that he resorts to these drastic measures.

I think that this chapter confirms two things: one, the Rumbling is Eren's true plan [...] BUT two, there is "something beyond that hell", which is the "scenery" Eren says he saw in ch. 121. I think it's the endgame after the Rumbling is stopped (no way is it going to be completed), and it's what caused both Grisha and Historia to go along with his plan in the end even though they didn't agree with it and thought it was awful. Eren's "everything is still ahead" and the weird cut in Historia's flashback are too... strange and seem to point to this being a game changer and the final plot point of the series.

If the rumble will succeed, then I've spent 7 chapters seeing characters do nothing to accomplish nothing. I don't wanna feel my time wasted.

I unironically want Eren to kill everyone outside the walls. Nuff said.

  WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE REPEATED BIRD IMAGERY?

Birds are a focal point of this chapter, with the combination of a four-panel tracking of a soaring seagull and a flash of a memory of some nearby geese. The majority of respondents (62.5%) believe the birds simply tie into the theme of, and likely Eren’s motivation of freedom. In a distant second (20.9%) is the answer that it relates to the idea of everyone being connected under the same sky, a fitting motif amidst this chapter’s exploration of the conflict as well as unity of different groups. 12.7% of you are hopping on board the “Eren is a bird now” train, and 4% of you just really don’t like birds.

The two birds from the Paths panels appear in episode 1 of the anime iirc, not sure about the manga though.

Eren is bird confirmed thank  <°^°>

I like the Bird Theory that says he’s transferring his consciousness to a bird. yeah it sounds a bit odd but it’s interesting and I’m willing to accept anything at this point

The birds are secret surveillance cameras

I like birds

idk man this shit is confusing as hell.as for falco thing i think eren has become the bird. anything can happen at this point.

Eren is the Eagle we see in the chapter 91 that Falco says to fly away lmao

  THIS CHAPTER HAD SOME AMAZING ART, SHOWCASED IN THE MANY DOUBLE SPREADS (EXACTLY 9... OH GOD WHAT DOES IT MEAN ISAYAMA??) WHICH WAS YOUR FAVORITE DOUBLE SPREAD?

Whether it was the break back in May, or Isayama’s dedication to highlighting this chapter’s importance, the art has definitely taken a step up and blown us all away. Though it is very split, the final double spread showcasing the commencing of the rumbling garnered the most votes (18.2%). At second (15.7%) was the imposing silhouettes of colossal titans rising from the ocean, and at a very close third (15.5%) was the very next spread, of these titans wiping out the battleships as casually as if they were wading through seaweed. If there’s one thing to make of this from what the winners have in common, we have all definitely been waiting to see the rumbling for a while.

Isayama's improvement as an artist it's inspirational.

the art is god tier

Those Rumbling pages are so gorgeous they make me wanna say "Kill them all, Eren ! Destroy the fucking world !"

Mappa has their work cut out for themselves

MAPPA's fucked lol I hope they're up to the task.

That Attack Titan spread has the single GREATEST bit of shading in this entire manga.

Solid Art, phenomenal design and usage of double spreads

I just wanted to add that this is visually one of the most beautiful chapters I've seen in a while. The colossals, holy shit. I can't wait to see this animated. All of those double-page spreads were pretty fantastic but I have to say there's nothing quite like the chill that runs down your spine when you see all those colossals emerging from the smoke and the mist, where you see for the first time how huge and terrible they are (and also when you realise the first line of defense is already down). I had legit goosebumps.

  CHAPTER 130 MARKS THE END OF A VOLUME, WHICH HAS BEEN FILLED WITH ALLIANCE-FOCUSED CHAPTERS. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS NOW THAT WE'VE FINALLY RETURNED TO EREN?

After six consecutive chapters focusing on the alliance with no Eren, the majority of you (57.6%) are relieved to finally move beyond the alliance, though have enjoyed the recent chapters, with 20.4% being completely over the alliance. 7.4% say they were originally sceptical but the chapters did well to make the alliance likeable to them, and 14.6% are open to more chapters just focused on the alliance.

Please for the love of God more of this and less of the alliance, the alliance was so rushed and as it's continued it hasn't been developed much further beyond plot convenience. The less of that I have to read before I get to read amazing stuff like 130 the better

i wanted more on the alliance, not flashbacks smh

it was something enjoyable after a while. Especially 126 made me grimace all over the volume till 130 came up. Not saying I was waiting for Eren but it was so cheesy.

Eren chapters are written worse than Alliance ones

This chapter single handedly made up for the below average, cringe-inducing chapters 126-129 Alliance bullshit. I have faith Isayama will create a very satisfying ending for this series now.

This chapter was legit a great way to end the volume off, it truly feels like its really the beginning of the end

  DESCRIBE THIS CHAPTER IN ONE WORD

The top 5 write-ins are below, followed by the average chapter score for each description. This months’ average chapter score was 4.59.

Amazing [4.89]

Epic [4.84]

Eren/Ereh [4.69]

Rumbling [4.46]

Confusing [3.88]

Honorable mention: Ragnarok

We’d also like to mention that there were a lot of write-ins related to genitals and coitus… seems like y’all were really hyped up by that first fanlation >.>

  WHAT ARE YOU MOST HOPING TO SEE NEXT CHAPTER?

Despite this chapter theoretically giving us everything we had hoped for in a while, the responses show that we still want to have WAY MORE answers (34.6%), MORE Historia (16.9%) and MORE rumbling action (14.5%). We’d also like to know where on earth Zeke is and if Floch is going to be the little troublemaker that we know and have strong feelings about. Will the boat make it to Odiha? Will Levi do a thing? Stay tuned!

There's still some mystery that have yet to answer and I want answers

Where the fuck is Zeke

WHERE. IS. LEVI.

i want more eren, historia and zeke. They're interesting. I don't care about the alliance.

"Zekey-dekey-doo, where are you?" ...I'm so done with you guys.

need update on zeke and historia's situation.

I want it to end soon #TeamEren

I expect in the next chapter something more around the alliance and maybe (hopefully) Floch's comeback!

Enough of Hisu, she is just a side character.

Want more Rumbling

All I can say is, I'm beyond anxious to see how the series ends, and it's eating me up inside.

  WHERE DO YOU PRIMARILY DISCUSS THE SERIES?

Most of our lovely respondents are rambunctious Redditors as usual, followed by a fair few from the flock on Twitter, distinguished Discorders, and discussors who want for nothing. Then there are some ravishing real-lifers, titillating Tumblrites, ...aaaand the rest (you’re all great). We’re still side-eyeing you Snapchatters though.

  ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHAPTER?

Honestly I just wanna let it out, but not on google Poll for obvious reasons

Not about the chapter... but you guys always come up with funny answers that I feel compelled to chose even if it’s not really what I think. I love to answer this. Thank you!

Zeke the relationship expert, huh?

This chapter went through far too many dodgy translations for its own good, and even the official typeset had one big mistake in it even though it conveyed the mood of the convo between Eren and Historia far better than all the others.

this is all so confusing I miss erwin

I don't want genocide to be how this ends.  I believe Isayama doesn't intend a story this complex to send a message that genocide is great.  Considering some of the mindscrews he's already pulled via Paths, I'm hoping the best mindscrew is yet to come.

Reiner was a snacc

Historia the Antifascist Queen

This is the best chapter

this series is so great man

This whole chapter was a certified Bruh moment (in a good way)

This whole chapter was about Eren dehumanising. And he killed his mom. I wouldn't be surprised if he'll eventually want to kill all Eldians and his friends either.

Loved everything except for Historian's forced reluctant pregnancy.

Here's to 3 more weeks

I hope Eren doesn’t love anyone from the series.

I feel like Isayama is still increasing the pressure to help his final plot twist, I’m still lost as I really don’t agree with Eren’s actions while I see the fandom going crazy over him. Maybe I missed something, maybe I’m wrong, maybe I don’t fully understand Eren. This chapter felt good, I don’t hate the Alliance because they’re part of what I think is the right choice for humanity, but we all honestly wanted to know Eren’s thoughts or a bit of it, as we didn’t see him for a while. English isn’t my first language I’m sorry in advance, loved your poll

I honestly have no idea what's going to happen and the whole time I was reading it I was internally screaming.

Ok I know Ymir (the lesbian) has been dead for years but I miss her so much. She was the dad. Forget Farmer-kun, forget Eren, it was all Ymir.

okay no offense but where’s Levi ☹️

One big tease of erens pov and who the father is

One of the best chapter I ever read! Love it!

Didn't expect the Eren POV but welcomed it anyway. We now have confirmation he wanted everything that happened to happen and even the implication he orchestrated the death of his own mother. That's very tasty

Eren's pov has been hidden for too long and right now I don't think the payoff is worth it

eren exhibits bird behavior & he killed his mom 😕

Eren is a bird confirmed or some shit

Eren later takes Ymir's place in Paths as a sacrifice for many years to fix everything, learning everything he needs by traveling around as, say, birds, as needed to send to his past self to guarantee "that scenery"

Eren is in control of more than we previously thought and this shows evidence of a timeloop scenario

Eren can see the future and can probably manipulate the pure titans at different points in time like the Founder does. It's also likely he's gonna fuse with more shifters to visit other pieces of memory.

Eren is able to use the full power of the FT, that why he can see not only his own memories, but also the memories of other Eldians. All of them are connected to him after all.

He will turn into a bird in the end

So exited that we finally got to see Eren in his Founding Titan-like form!!!! Can’t wait for next month (AoT fan from Japan)

Enjoyed the chapter due to a return to debating the morality of the Rumbling, and seeing it in progress. Also tend to enjoy interaction between Eren and Historia. However, I think the chapter is slightly let down by being cryptic. It's hard to tell what is going on with Eren due to how scenes from this issue and others can be interpreted.

nah mate do people actually read this?

This chapter marks something that has changed everyone's thoughts. Not just about Eren, but Annie, Historia, Zeke, etc. We heard them speak differently, and got a few answers to our questions. We got to see that Annie does indeed have emotions. That Historia did not want this. That Annie never really wanted to kill, nor does she want to anymore. That Zeke actually cared for Eren. That the father is most likely farmer-kun. It's one of the best chapters we've had. Each chapter we get, we get closer to the end of this wonderful story. I can't wait to see what Isayama has planned for in the final chapters. Truly hoping for the best!

reiner's tits dammit

Despite the devastation, I now feel like there is meaning hidden beneath the madness

Creepy and interesting chapter. The official translation confirms further that Eren is going to destroy the world. I’m hoping that the next volume shifts focus to Reiner a little more. I’m also excited for more loose ends to be cleared up.

Damn, only 5 more to go before the end of the greatest story of all time

Enjoyed it but I’m really hoping for some more insight into what’s going on with both eren and historia, I’m not a huge fan of the pregnancy subplot

eren just wants to see if marleyans are made of cake

Eren makes the most amazing villain ever. Will go down as one of my favorite characters ever if the story ends how I hope it will.

Everyone forgets Historia saw her dad’s memories without eating him, without being a shifter, and without touching Eren. We’re still waiting for the payoff...

Fantastic chapter, though it felt really short

Floch was Eren's lieutenant all along, he was his representative, and his actions are therefore Eren's responsability all the same. Get fucked those who didn't want to believe that Eren would consciously choose Floch, believe in him or to set things up for Eren in Paradis.

I'd like it if the Ackerbond was not as supernatural as it was claimed before. Not because of EreMika, MikaHisu would be much better than both options of this chapter. Now we know that Levi or Kenny's loyalty were real, and it warms my heart. Also, my bastard wasn't lying! He knew about the plan.

It confirmed everything we already knew: Historia didn't support Eren's plan, Ackerman weren't slaves, Mikasa's feelings for Eren doesn't have to do with the fact she's an Ackerman and the fandom is stupid for still believing Eren is the father despite him literally telling Zeke that he can't answer Mikasa's feelings, because he only has 4 years left to live.

My heart was beating so hard during Eren and Historia's conversation because I just couldn't believe we were actually seeing her again, it had been 2 years since we got anything this relevant from her and I also just really wanted Isayama to get on with it and tell us who the damm father was so that we could finally move on to other things. I still don't believe it's Eren, but I'm done with that theory, man. No more teasing, please. Two years is far more than enough.

Chapters like this one, which perfectly captures the culmination of Eren's entire journey, make me glad to be alive at this moment in time to experience Isayama's masterpiece. I'm not ready for this story to end in just one more volume.

The ending of this story will not be a gentle tapping of the brakes but a screeching halt followed by hydroplaning and crashing into a ditch

What if the rumbling is all one big sex reveal party for Historia's baby and the Colossal Titans are arranging all the corpses into a female symbol or something.

For 8 months I have been waiting for Eren Jaeger. My favorite fictional character ever. He comes back in best way possible, wow.

Great chapter, too bad half of this dumb fandom misunderstood it and are falsely claiming it confirmed Eren as the father. *facepalm*

Obligatory mention that eren is a manipulative bastard and is a little too far gone in his goal

Ambiguity: The chapter. More questions than answers, no way this ends in 4 chapters. Overall we are all going "Wuh?" like Historia after this chapter.

We are being fucked with.

I cry, eren has been one of my favourite characters in the AoT universe

I didn't think it was possible for Eren to get any worse, but he always manages to surprise me.

I don't care about eremika or erehisu. I just need my rivaere (: haha

i don't care for the alliance and the ship-baiting was making me weary. I just want more eren, zeke and historia. They're the interesting ones.

‏I don't know what the end will be but i know it will be sad ending!..We all suffer and I mean the world of AOT and the fans who read manga... I will accept all probabilities and the death of heroes, but please do not make Mikasa kill Eren..I mean after all this love that will kill him .. I read many analyzes of the possibility of this happening and I see it as a very bad and irrational end..It is not logical at all..If you did it, the AOT would be one of the worst deeds and to the landfill..Isayama If you have suffered a lot in your life and childhood, we have also suffered in our lives, but please do not bring this suffering into the AOT world

I dont want this to end @ isayama

I hated what direction this story was taking, now I really hate it.

I just feel Isayama hasn't answered so much stuff yet and has also raised the stakes so high that I can't possibly imagine how the story will end. I believe Mikasa's slowly been established as the character who will defeat Eren, but I have no idea how she'll do it... But at least there were beautiful Mikannie crumbs, so I'm happy af and hope they'll have more scenes together now that Annie's about to give up (I mean, there are parallels™ everywhere when it comes to our wonderful lost girls...)

I just hope it's building up to a really good ending.

i just wanna know what's gona happen next man this shit be driving me crazy

I love everything! I hope floch dies though

I love you eren

I need answers!!!

I need Zook back

I really hope this series doesn’t end with a message like “genocide is necessary for peace” I hope someone stops Eren

I really loved the art and double spreads, and seeing Eren's POV after a while

I think it's the 2nd best chapter we've gotten this arc. The 1st being 123. I loved it. I also think it's putting to rest the secret plan theories regarding Eren. I've made my final prediction for the series. I think it's a tragedy that will end in Eren destroying the world & manipulating everyone's memories except for Historia & Mikasa & a new age for humanity will begin.

I'm so glad my girl's back, but I'm confused as hell. There's definitly more to her meeting with Eren and her choosing to be pregnant, we'll see. Also Zook being a love conselor and having a Ackerman phd was hilarious, I love him even more. Erefloch canon.

If he wanted to protect his friends why didn’t he just forge some Marleyan passport/citizenships for them, god wtf

If you think about it we actually didn’t learn anything that wasn’t already heavily implied

im shook

Isayama gave more than i wanted my heart can't take it.

it was very good thank you for asking

It's finally moving forward (as isayama likes to say)

It’s a good chapter but I still with doubts.

JUST DO IT EREN

Just wanna see ZEKE

Kiyoger Theory!!!!!

l'm glad we got to see a bit from Eren's POV. But I still need more answers ;_; why choose rumbling, Eren??? not looking for justification for his actions here but i just want to know /why/ he did it. Still feel like theres a missing link somewhere tbh.. I just hope the ending of snk wont be a disaster like game of thrones where Daenerys' switch came out of nowhere. At this point I just want the series to end asap, the tension build up is killing me lol.

Leaks for 131 when?

Let’s get rrready to RUMBLEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!

Loved seeing the rumbling but I wish we could have gotten more character driven moments

Loved this chapter! I'm glad we finally got to learn more of Eren's POV and finally learn what was Historia's role in all of this (or at least beginning to learn her involvement in the plan). Seeing him initiate the Rumbling was epic. The destruction is about to begin!

my brain is too small to understand some of these theories

Now we know that Eren and Floch just pretending to follow Zeke's plan ever since from the beginning but I want to gain more explanations of Eren's secret plan

Oddly placed Eren flashback, but I'll take it

Something's up. I'm still not convinced we can take any of this at face value.

So many flashbacks were a bit hard to follow, but it really seems like the series is gonna end soon and I’m a bit nervous about how well any ending will play out

thank you Isayama for this masterpiece

THE ART IS JUST AMAZING but for me its so short 😭😭😭

That Eren with mid long hair is baby

the alliance has come together way too fast and theyve only really had 1 dispute so far. there needs to be more conflict to make it more realisitic. I think annie saying that they won't be able to/don't want to kill eren is foreshadowing this.

the Art is amazing but flashback scenes were a little mess

The chapter was full of messy memories, so it symbolized Eren's brain well :)

I think that now I understand Eren better. I used to believe he had some secret plan, but the true was always there - Eren is not any master mind. His plan was simple - destroy the whole world. The trauma he had after losing his mother has never been healed. It was always in him, growing bigger and bigger. He still cares about his friends, but he is also lying to himself saying that ""he is doing the rumbling  because he wants to see them having long, happy life"". He is doing it because his hatred to the ones who are responsible for Carla's death took control over his heart. Eren is adult, young man but deep down he is still the same, hurt crying child who bears painful memories of losing his mother.  

The cycle of war and hatred is saddening. This ain't something fictional, it's something we have always been observing from the earliest human consciousness :(

We all got a big storm comin

We are NOT ready for this shit

we need annie to live longer pls

Well here’s our proof eren is actually going through with the rumbling.

What it would feel like to be Eren right now

what kind of eva BULLSHIT

what the hell is going ON

Where is Floch

where is LEVI

Wheres zeke?

Yams, you're so diabolic. You  just want to make the real-life's rumbling with all that "confusing' ship tease xD

Yooooo, we need more explanation about maybe, everything? But amazing and bomb ass chapter though

#snk polls #snk poll #snk poll results #snk chapter 130 #snk 130

[flwrpotts]

2020 reads

ok i only have 99 books on this list bc im forgetting one and cannot figure out for the LIFE of me what it is, but! here is everything i read for 2020, and im probably gonna try to narrow down my top ten for another post!! 2020 was a shitshow year BUT at least the reads were good:

less than zero by bret easton ellis

trick mirror by jia tolentino

death is not an option by suzanne rivecca

on earth we’re briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong

catch and kill by ronan farrow

prozac nation by elizabeth wurtzel

difficult women by roxane gay

hunger by roxane gay

our men do not belong to us by warsan shire

the grownup by gillian flynn

slouching towards bethlehem by joan didion

you but for the body fell against by natalie stephens

in the dream house by carmen maria machado

sharp objects by gillian flynn

play it as it lays by joan didion

you don’t have to say you love me by sherman alexie

the handmaid’s tale by margaret atwood

the foxhole court by nora sakavic

the raven king by nora sakavic

all the king’s men by nora sakavic

never let me go by kazuo ishiguro

the year of magical thinking by joan didion

power politics by margaret atwood

reeling for the empire by karen russell

you’re ugly, too by lorrie moore

drinking coffee elsewhere by zz packer

stone animals by kelly link

summer sisters by judy blume

sweetbitter by stephanie danler

cat’s eye by margaret atwood

dark places by gillian flynn

night sky with exit wounds by ocean vuong

war of the foxes by richard siken

blue nights by joan didion

my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshfegh

seam by tarifa faizullah

salvador by joan didion

good bones by margaret atwood

south and west: from a notebook by joan didion

bluets by maggie melson

bunny by mona awad

conversations with friends by sally rooney

normal people by sally rooney

the incendiaries by r. o. kwon

necessary people by anna pitoniak

stray by stephanie danler

devotion by madeline stevens

social creature by tara isabella burton

blackout by sarah repola

mothers, monters, whores: women’s violence in global politics by laura sjoberg

kitchen confidential by anthony bourdain

self tanner for the soul by cat marnell

barbarian days: a surfing life by william finnegan

rodham by curtis sittenfeld

slow days, fast company by eve babitz

dearest creature by amy gerstler

what good is grand strategy? by hal brands

devotion by patti smith

the woman who would be king by kara cooney

godshot by chelsea bieker

grief lessons: four plays by euripides trans. anne carson

the tragedy of great power politics by john mearsheimer

reluctant crusaders by colin dueck

electra by sophocles trans. anne carson

the secret history by donna tartt

my dark vanessa by kate russell

we have always lived in the castle by shirley jackson

daddy by emma cline

the testaments by margaret atwood

neverworld wake by marisha pressl

daisy jones & the six by taylor jenkins

mostly dead things by kristen arnett

the knockout queen by rufi thorpe

circe by madeline miller

boys & sex by peggy orenstein

such a fun age by kiley reid

verified strangers by lena dunham

if not, winter by sappho (trans. anne Carson)

america abroad by stephen brooks

the lightning thief by rick riordan

the sea of monsters by rick riordan

the titan’s curse by rick riordan

the battle of the labyrinth by rick riordan

the blood of olympus by rick riordan

the lost hero by rick riordan

the son of neptune by rick riordan

the mark of athena by rick riordan

the house of hades by rick riordan

the blood of olympus by rick riordan

sister in hate by darby seyward

the rehearsal by eleanor catton

decreation by anne carson

black swans by eve babitz

hitting budapest by noviolet bulawayo

my dear you by rachel khong

the cheerleaders by kara thomas

call my name by aimee bender

sinners welcome by mary karr

lot: stories by bryan washington

#reading list

[once-upon-a-scenario]

Bakugou/reader: Icarus, Part 2

Part 1 here Part 3 here! Bakugou tries to prod you. He is not particularly successful, and some things may backfire.  (So the pacing + tone of this series are both starting to become a major headache for me and I have 0 clue if it’s going to turn out alright :,) I hope you all enjoy it anyway, though! We’ll see how things go from here lol -Eve) ______________ “Fight me.” I don’t fight for sport. You’re civil about it, all things considered- not a single curse word or openly angry glance, despite every aggressive comment he sends your way, and your very politeness is like salt rubbed in an open wound. This is not the time for manners. This is not the time for you and your serious gaze and your quiet persistence. This is a matter of you and him and the audacity of you to turn down a challenge, like the biggest, grossest coward he’s ever seen. (But you’re not a coward.  He digs his nails into the palm of his hand, hard, silencing the thought.)

“Bro.” They’re walking home together and Kirishima elbows him gently, meeting his answering scowl with a smile. “Don’t sweat it. You’d be breaking the rules anyway, if you got into another fight.” “Fuck off,” Katsuki mutters, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets and averting his gaze. It comes out a little more sharply than he was aiming for, maybe; he’s on edge nowadays. His brain still has that fucking scene from the cafeteria on loop, pressing a subconscious play button whenever he decides to let his guard down, and if he doesn’t get rid of it soon he’ll lose his goddamn mind. When he fights you, he’ll be able to overwrite this memory with a new one. It’s fine, he snaps back at the fire beginning to roar inside of him- it’s fine. This isn’t over yet. It’s not over, because you walk away from him again that day at lunch, and the next day after Math, and the day after that during break, giving him a detailed, entirely un-fucking-welcome collection of new images to overlap and play on loop on his brain at night until he’s too pissed off to get any damn sleep. (This inevitably results in a shitty mood the next morning, which in turn leads to a scolding from Aizawa-sensei, which increases the shittiness of his mood and round and round the cycle goes.) You’re a hazard to his fucking health, he decides. You’re probably doing this on purpose, to scorn him. (That’s wrong. Once again, he silences the thought- this time through a vicious assault on the dust bunnies under his bed that makes his mom look at him like he’s gone insane. He’s too annoyed to care.) It’s impossible to figure out how those two truths can coexist- the fact that you’re not afraid, and the fact that you won’t rise to meet him. Why are you like this? Why does he care? He doesn’t, really, he tells himself, stoking the flames rising inside of him- he doesn’t.  “Hey,” he barks at you one day after school, just quick and sharp enough to catch you before you turn away with a polite goodbye, because damn him if he’ll let you create another memory to add to his personal mental torture chamber. “You serious about being in the hero course, anyway?” Of course. Isn’t everybody? “Yeah, well,” he sneers, the words finding their way to his mouth before he can really think to change them, because the flame inside him is flaring up, crackling and hungry for conflict, and he’s never really seen the use in learning to hold his fucking tongue, “You’d think that anybody in this course would actually give a shit.” The ensuing silence is long and tense. You stare at him with eyes still and glassy as the surface of a lake, and he holds his breath and his fire, palms beginning to dampen with that telltale hint of nitroglycerin fuel. Like I said. You smile at him, mild and unoffended. I really don’t fight for sport. And I don’t think any hero should. And then you walk away, leaving him to spit out a curse and send a small explosion into the empty air before him. ____ “Bakugou.” Aizawa-sensei takes a small, terse sip from his mug of coffee (the stupid looking one that Mina scrawled over with No.1 Homeroom Teacher!). He looks at Katsuki through dark, unkempt bangs with eyes narrowed down into two judging slits. “Please refrain from scowling at me, and please try to be civil to your classmate.” Katsuki growls. “I didn’t do anything-” “Considering,” Aizawa-sensei cuts him off in a tone as dry as the desert, “that the classmate in question is meant to be your sparring partner next week, and your only other option is Mineta.” You know which choice is the smart one, says the look his teacher gives him, and, momentarily disgusted by the mental image of having to actively interact with Mineta Minoru, Katsuki chooses- just this once- to stop talking.  He’ll lie awake in bed again that night, though, replaying the image of you walking away from him and towards your own home, the afternoon sun glinting golden on your retreating figure, as he considers the first half of Aizawa-sensei’s statement with a strange feeling twisting in his stomach. He’d describe it as triumph. That’s the closest to what it should be. (Though not quite.) Anyway, he reflects, glaring up at the ceiling in the dark, a sparring session isn’t sport. There’s no way you get to walk this time.

#BNHA #Bakugou Katsuki #Bakugou x reader #Bakugou Katsuki x reader #Katsuki Bakugou x reader #Katsuki Bakugou #BNHA reader insert #Mod Eve #I can never remember which tags to use

[he-who-walks-among-the-trees]

A BIT OF HIGHLAND MAGIC

Today's offering comes from "Highland Monthly Magazine" who alongside other wonderful articles published a series on Gaelic Incantations from 1891-92 and collected them together in the book "Highland Monthly Volume III" published in 1892.

Anyway, here's a little taste of what was shared;

"GAELIC INCANTATIONS

JACOB GRIMM has, in his Teutonic Mythology remarked that, healing charms must be handed down by men to women, or by women to men; and this also is a Highland view. " A peculiarity about them [the charms]," says Mr W. Mackenzie in Vol. VI II. of the Gaelic Society's Transactions, "was that persons of the same sex should not learn them from one another; and in order to be efficacious a man must learn the eolas from a woman, and a woman from a man." The charms which follow have not, we fear, been all collected "duly" on this point, and their efficacy in actual working may therefore be doubtful. Any way, many hold that the blazoning of them abroad spoils their efficacy, and to print them is sacrilege. It was believed that though one heard and learned the charm in spite of the charmer, still the latter could curse the charm in such a way that it would be of no use to the other. Nor can everybody cure with these rhymes and charms. There is therefore a wide margin of doubt as to the cause of the failure of a charm, for they do fail at times; that is recognised.

I. SPELLS AND PREVENTIVE CHARMS.

We shall begin first with the spells or bespelling charms, known in Gaelic as geasa or siana (signum, blessing). Thereafter we shall consider the healing charms for man and beast. The geas or spell is generally wicked; it is the work of an adverse power, and, as a consequence, we cannot get any specimens of this form of incantation with ease. For instance, a spell could be laid on a man going out to shoot, unknown to him, and he would be unsuccessful that day. Such a spell is a rosad, and, though the "rosad" still exists among us, we have failed in persuading anybody to reveal it. Of course, the folktales contain bespelling formulae, for in them the hero or heroine do many wonders by means of spoken words. The favourite form for the folktale spell is this

"Tha mise 'cur ort mar gheasaibh 's mar chroisibh, 's mar naoidh buaraichean mnatha sithe, siubhla, seacharain, laochan beag as meataiche 's a's mi-threòiriche na thu fein a thoirt a chinn, 's nan cluas, 's nan comada beatha diot, mur faigh thu mach" &c.

"I lay on you as spells and crosses, and as nine fetters of a fairy, travelling, wandering woman, that a little fellow more timid and more feeble than yourself deprive you of your head, your ears, and your powers of life, unless you discover'' or "do," &c.

The Fath Fithe spell, which, as already stated, poachers once made use of, and smugglers lately, and now even, find means of escape by, is as follows:-

"Fà fithe cuiream ort

Bho chù, bho chat

Bho bhò, bho each,

Bho dhuine, bho bhean,

Bho ghille, bho nighean,

'S bho leanabh beag,

Gus an tig mise rithisd,

An ainm an Athar, a' Mhic, 's an Spioraid Naoimh."

"A magic cloud I put on thee from dog, cat, cow, horse, man, woman, lad, lass, and little child, till I come again in the name of the"Trinity."

The first two words are the old Faeth Fiada, as now pronounced. This spell rendered the person invisible.

The preventive charm or sian is represented by a very famous formula intended to preserve a man from wounding or harm from the time when he left the presence of the charmer till he came back, and it was usually put on those going to battle. Men so protected, for instance, at Culloden, had only to take their plaids off their shoulders and shake out of them the bullets that hit them ! It was the Sian, par excellence, and is as follows:- The charmer and his protege go to a retired spot. Here the recipient of the charm goes on his knees; the charmer lays his hand on his head, and, with eyes shut, he utters the following rhyme, going round him sunwise twice. And he goes round him once anti-sunwise, saying a different rhyme. Both these rhymes, which after much trouble we have been fortunate enough to get, run thus Going sunwise, he says-

"Sian a chuir Moire air Mac ort,

Sian ro' marbhadh, sian ro' lot ort,

Sian eadar a' chioch 's a ghlun,

Sian eadar a' glhun 's a' bhroit ort,

Sian nan Tri ann an aon ort,

O mhullach do chinn gu bonn do chois ort :

Sian seachd paidir a h-aon ort,

Sian seachd paidir a dha ort,

Sian seachd paidir a tri ort,

Sian seachd paidir a ceithir ort,

Sian seachd paidir a coig ort,

Sian seachd paidir a sia ort,

Sian seachd paidir nan seachd paidir dol deiseil ri deagh uarach ort, ga do ghleidheadh bho bheud 's

bho mhi-thapadh."

Going anti-sunwise, he says —

"Clogaid na slainte mu d' cheann,

Cearcall a' chumhnaint mu d' amhaich,

Uchd-eididh an t-sagairt mu d' bhroilleach.

Ma's ruaig bho 'n taobh-chuil,

Brogan na h-Oigh ga d' ghiulan gu luath.

Sian nan Tri ann an aon ort

Bho mhullach do chinn gu bonn do shail,

Agus sian paidir nan seachd paidir

Dol tuaitheal is deiseil, deiseil is tuaitheal,

Gu d' ghleidheadh bho d'chul

Bho luaidh 's bho chlaidheamh,

Bho lot 's bho mharbhadh,

Gu uair is am do bhais."

The person on whom the charm is placed then rises and departs, but the charmist remains standing with eyes shut, and he does not open them till the other is out of sight.

The charmed one is safe from death or wounds till the charmist sees him again. The translation is as follows:-

"The charm that Mary placed on her son be on you,

Charm from slaying, charm from wounding,

Charm between pap and knee,

Charm between knee and breast on you,

Charm of the three in one on you,

From top of head to sole of foot.

Charm of seven paters once on you,

Charm of seven paters twice on you,

Charm of seven paters thrice on you,

Charm of seven paters four times on you,

Charm of seven paters five times on you,

Charm of seven paters six times on you,

Charm of the seven paters of the seven paters going sunwise in lucky hour on you, a-keeping you from harm and accident."

Anti-sun wise-

"The helmet of safety (salvation?) about your head,

The ring of the Covenant about your neck,

The priests' breast-plate about your breast ;

If it be retreat on the rear,

The shoes of the Virgin to take you swiftly away.

Charm of the Three in One on you

From crown of head to sole of foot,

And the charm of the pater of the seven paters

A-going anti-sunwise and sunwise, sunwise and anti-sunwise,

To protect you from behind

From lead and from sword,

From wound and from slaying,

Till the hour and time of your death."

The following is a charm to help in the correct interpretation of dreams. One goes to the charmer and tells his dream. The charmer repeats the following, and then the dream is unravelled:-

"Chunnaic mi aisling an raoir

'S mi 'nam shuidh air sliabh rath;

Dh' innis Peadar e do Phol

'S thuirt Pol gu'm bu mhath;

Ach breithneachdainn Chriosd ro' Phol

Gu thusa chumail ceart."

Translated -

"I saw a vision last night

And me sitting on a mount of grace;

Peter told it to Paul

And Paul said it was well ;

But the judgment of Christ before Paul's

To keep you right."

The following is a charm given by "Nether-Lochaber" as good against the demon of the dust-cloud. "As it swirls along," he says, "as it approaches, you are instantly to close your eyes and mouth as tightly as possible, at the same time turning your back upon it until it has swept by, mentally repeating - for you are not to open your mouth, nor as much as breathe, as long as you can help it - this rhyme;-

"Gach cuman is mias is meadar,

Gu Pòl, gu Peadair 's gu Brìde;

Dion, is seun, is gleidh mi o olc 's o chunnart,

Air a bheallach, 's air a mhullach,

'S air an tullaich ud thall;

Pòl is Peadair is Brìde caomh!"

which he translates —

"Be the care of milk pail, and bowl, and cog

Given to Peter and Paul and Saint Bride;

Wherever I wander protect me, ye Saints!

Let not evil nor harm me betide;

Hear me, Peter and Paul, and gentle Saint Bride!"

We now come to the spell for prevention of the results arising from the "Evil Eye' The following is a preventive charm to keep the evil eye off one's cows. It is called "Eolas an Torranain," and was got by Mr Carmichael, when he was in Uist. The torranan, he explains, was described to him as a flowering plant, growing in rocky hill-places, the bloom of which is large and pap-like. The tide is said to affect it, for while the tide flows, it is filled with the "dew of bliss" and dries up again with the ebb. It has to be culled during the flow of the tide, placed under one of the milk pails, and in placing it this charm is repeated three times, making at each time a circle sunwise, with the plant over the vessel:-

"Buaineams' thu, thorranain,

Le 'd uile bhaeannachd 's le 'd uile bhuaidh;

Thainig na naoi sonais

Leis na naoi earranan

Le buaidh an torranain,

Lamh Bhride leam!

Tha mi nis 'gad bhuain.

Buaineams' thu, thorranain,

Le 'd thoradh mara 's tir,

Ri lionadh gun traoghadh

Le'd lamhsa, Bhride mhin,

Colum naomh 'gam sheoladh,

Odhran caomh 'gam dhion,

Is Micheil nan steud uaibhreach

'Cur buaidh anns an ni.

Tha mo lus lurach a nis air a bhuain."

which he translates —

"Let me pluck, thee, Torannan!

With all thy blessedness and all thy virtue,

The nine blessings came with the nine parts.

By the virtue of the Torranan;

The hand of St Bride with me,

I am now to pluck thee. .

Let me pluck thee, Torranan!

With thine increase as to sea and land;

With the flowing tide that shall know no ebbing,

By the assistance of chaste St Bride,

The holy St Columba directing me,

And St Michael of high-crested steeds,

Imparung virtue to the matter the while,

Darling plant of all virtue,

I am now plucking thee!"

II. FOR THE EVIL EVE.

When the "evil eye" has "lain" on any one, there are various means of cure. The most usual is the cure by water off silver; and this cure was effected with or without a rhyme charm. The modus operandi with the incantation was as follows:- Coins of gold, silver, and copper are put in a basin full of water. The charmer repeats the eolas or incantation, and in doing so blows on the water with his breath. The water is then sprinkled on the sufferer. The charm is as follows:-

" 'S e 'n t-suil a chi,

'S e 'n cridhe a smuainicheas,

'S e 'n teanga labhras.

'S mise 'n triuir gu tilleadh so orsta, A.B.,

An ainm an Athar; a' Mhic, 's an Spioraid Naoimh."

Translated-

" 'Tis the eye that sees,

the heart that thinks,

and the tongue that speaks.

I am the three to turn this off you, A.B.,

in the name of the Father, etc"

The charm, apart from the "silver" water, is known as "Eolas a' Chronachaidh," or "Charm for the Reproof," or it may be called " Casg Beum-suil,"Stopping Injury by Eye." John Mackenzie, in his Beauties of Gaelic Poetry p. 268, gives the following Gaelic charm for it, saying that during its repetition "the singular operation of filling a bottle with water was carried on, and the incantation was so sung as to chime with the gurgling of the liquid as it was poured into the vessel."

"Deanamsa dhutsa eolas air suil,

A uchd 'Ille Phadruig naoimh,

Air at amhaich is stad earrbuill

Air naoi conair 's air naoi connachair,

'S air naoi bean seang sith,

Air siul seana-ghille, 's air sealladh seana-mhna;

Mas a suil fir i, i lasadh mar bhigh,

Mas a suil mhnath' i, i bhi dh' easbhuidh a cich,

Falcadair fuar agus fuarachd da 'fuil,

Air a ni, 's air a daoine,

Air a crodh 's air a caoraich fein."

"Let me perform for you a charm for the evil-eye

From the breast of holy Gil-Patrick

Against swelling of neck and stoppage of bowels,

Against nine "Conair" and nine "Connachair,"

And nine slender fairies,

Against an old bachelor's eye, and an old wife's eye.

If a man's eye may it flame like gum (resin),

If a woman s eye may she want her breast,

A cold plunge and coldness to her blood,

And to her gear, to her men,

To her cattle and sheep."

Here is another rhyme given as an Eolas a' Chronachaidh;-

"Paidir a h' aon,

Paidir a dha,

Patdir a tri,

Paidir a ceithir,

Paidir a coig,

Paidir a sea,

Paidir a seachd,

'S neart nan seachd paidirean a' sgaoileadh do ghalair air na clachan glas ud thall."

Which means-

"Paters I, 2. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,

And may the strength of the seven paters

Cast out your disease amidst the gray-stones over by."

In the Maclagan MSS. the following charms are given for the "evil eye":-

"Eolus Bheim shul,

le Nic Aoidh

Paidir Mhuire h-aon, &c. Aon suil a thug an aire dhuit, A.B. (person named who is unwell), mar thionntadhas a ghaoth air a chnoc, gu tionntadh an olc orra fein. Mar thionntadhas, &c., ri radh tri uaire h-airis."

"[Charm for evil eyes,

by Miss (?) Mackay.

Pater of Mary one, &c, Whatever eye took notice of you, A.B., as the wind turns on the hillock, may the evil turn on themselves. As the wind, &c., (to be repeated three times).]

"Eolus a Bheim shuil,

le Ann Chaimbeill

Saltruighidh mis air an t-suil mar shaltruigheas Eala ar Tigh nocht. Ta neart gaoithe agam air, ta neart grelne agam air, ta neart mhic Ri neamh agus talmhainn agam air. Trian air na clacha glasa- 's trian air a mhuir mhoir as i fein acfuim as fhearr ga ghiulan. Ann ainm, &c,"

#witchblr #witch #witches #witchcraft #solitary witch #witchy #green witch #modern witchcraft #witches of tumblr #credit to the artist #scottishwitchcraft

[captainjimothycarter]

I wouldn’t mind an AOS au with steggy 😁

OP, I am so sorry. I have no idea where I was going with this or what happened. I just wrote and wrote and wrote. It’s basically continued after the AU of Steve rescuing Peggy from Whitehall. 

--

“You are a blessing, darling. It’s hard finding the right person who can make a proper cuppa,” Peggy sighed when a becoming-familiar face handed her the properly done cup of tea. “I’m sorry, I keep having to ask but what was your name again? Jemma, right?”

The biochemist smiled from ear to ear as she took the spot beside Peggy bed, thankful it was vacant for once. “It’s okay that you must keep asking,” Jemma mused, giving a shrug. “You’ve gone through a terrible ordeal and are only in the thresholds of the healing processes. And for all in all, with what it’s worth, the fact you can remember much of anything is outstanding.”

“That’s what you keep saying - well you and the other medics.” She smiled over the rim of her mug, watching Jemma toy with the end of her shirt. “I know I’m not the easiest patient - I wasn’t years ago and I’m still not now. It’s hard to sit aside and let others do stuff for you. If I could walk to the loo and shower instead of having Steven assist me, I would. It’s a pride thing.”

“Something I think every Brit knows quite well. Both pairs turn to look at Hunter in the doorway, the man’s face covered in grease and soot, making Jemma snort into her hand. “What? What’s so funny?”

“The fact you look like you stepped out of a Mary Poppins productive,” Bobbi mused, patting Hunter on the head as she passed them. She took three steps back and smiled at the pair. “Steve’s on his way over after he debriefs with Coulson.”

Peggy’s face pinched, in both worry and pain as she sat up at the mention of Steve, Jemma immediately moving to ease her back down. “I’m fine, darling, I’m fine. Just a pull on the ribs is all. Steve, is he...is he…”

“Captain-Boy’s alive,” Hunter sighed, giving a roll of his eyes. He ignored the way Bobbi smacked aside the head. “What? Why would she be worried about him when he has the serum, that guy took many of our hits and…”

His voice trailed down the hall after Bobbi shot the pair an apologetic look.

Jemma just sighed and pinched her brow. “If they’re back, that means Fitz is too.” She stood up, adjusting her clothes, looking over Peggy once more. “I’ll be back in a few to give you your evening meds and let Steve have some personal time with you. Coulson has been working that man far too hard.”

“Steve works himself too hard when he gets a hero’s complex in his head,” Peggy agrees with a sigh. “He was like that when I first knew him. When something was...wrong, not that anything in the war was ever right, but he never allowed himself much of a moment to relax. He had to constantly be doing something to help someone. Especially if he feels guilty. And this…” She waved her hand over her body in the bed. “This is what he feels guilty about the most now. Blames himself that since his crashing of the plane did not terminate Hydra as he had hoped...that I was tortured because of it, because of his choice. It’s very difficult to argue with the likes of him, but I try.”

The young woman laughed, making Peggy’s lips turn into a soft smile. “Don’t I know the feeling? Don’t try to move around too much, we don’t need you to pull anything.”

--

“Any news?” Coulson asks, without looking up from the tablet he was reading.

Steve’s tongue clicked on the roof of his mouth and dug his thumbs into his belt. “Same as usual. Nothing. Just absolutely nothing.” He sounded both disappointed and frustrated. “We left as you said, Tony and Rhodey in charge.”

“Good,” the director sighed, picking his head up to look at Steve. “If there’s a move, they’ll let us know. Captain Rogers…”

Oh no. Steve did not like that look. He settled on the heels of his feet and raised his brow.

“As much as we’ve appreciate your dedication and help in this matter, especially given the personal stake at the claim, you can’t keep doing this. This...this isn’t the war anymore. Yes, Hydra is still about. Yes, there’s much work to be undone, but I won’t let you sit here and deteriorate yourself in front of me because you feel guilty about what happened to Miss Carter.” As Steve’s mouth opened to protest, Coulson shook his head firmly. “I’m not finished, Captain. I am well aware that you feel guilty over what’s happened with Miss Carter and Whitehall’s death has put some end to this but you need to allow yourself time to adjust and heal too. As does she, it’s why we’re benching you for a matter of time.”

The truth was, Steve wanted to be furious. He wanted to throw a tantrum as Clint called it, but instead, he just stared and nodded. Maybe he really knew what Coulson was doing - giving him what he needed. Time to be with Peggy without the guilt eating him up inside when he could and should be doing something. He would be - he’d be helping Peggy heal and recover from Whitehall. 

“Yes, sir,” Steve mused, clearing his throat. “Thank you, sir.”

--

“If you tell me not to look at it one more time, Hunter, I’m stabbing the needle through your eye.”

That’s what greeted Steve as he stepped back into the medic, a cool towel around the back of his neck. Peggy’s eyes flashed to him and saw the sheen of sweat and green on his face. 

“Did you faint?” She asked, batting Hunter’s hand away before Fitz came around to lead Steve to a similar chair beside Peggy. “You look terrible, darling.”

“I love you too,” he snorted, laying his head back. “No, I watched the needle.” Peggy’s cool hand found his and gave a gentle squeeze. 

“I told you not to do that.”

“Then you and Jemma agree on something.”

“A very sensible woman, then,” Peggy mused. Without even opening his eyes, he knew she was smiling. “I think Fitz agrees with me.”

“I do,” he teased, making Steve crack his eyes open. “Are you two ready for this?”

“How do we know it’ll even work?” Hunter mused, sitting back on a stool beside May. “You’re...what, blood transfusion?”

“Essentially,” Fitz replied. “The idea is to transfer some of Captai-Steve’s blood to Peggy’s. We have no idea how it will work the serum but with the...in a less word...crud in her veins, it should be that kick she needs to get rid of it.”

“We’ve done it before, remember?” Steve mused, picking his head up. He felt all eyes on him now. “1943, Italy. You were shot through the shoulder, they were aiming for me but you turned got in their way, the last second. Shot you clear through the shoulder. It took Bucky, Jones, Pinky, and Dugan to hold you down so Morita and I could get the bullet out and close the wound out fast enough. By the time we did, we agreed you’d lost far too much blood. Morita had to set up a quick transfusion right in the farmhouse we found to stay in. You were so out of it.”

“I remember being shot and I remember cursing at you. You kept telling me, ‘it would be okay’ and by the fifth time I heard it, I wanted to wring your neck.” Peggy’s cheeks tinted a soft pink. They only grew darker at May’s laugh.

“I think we know that feeling,” she mused, squeezing Peggy’s good arm as she walked by. “Saying ‘it would be okay’ loses its meaning when you’re bleeding out in the snow. Is that how you got those scars on your shoulder?”

“One of many,” Peggy sighed.

There was a connection between them that Steve did not understand and didn’t even try. He was a little startled when he came back to himself to find FitzSimmons had already started the procedure. He made the mistake of looking at the machine, feeling his stomach churn.

“You don’t like needles, do you?” Bobbi muses. She’s not judging him. She’s quiet, observing him in nature that doesn’t make him feel like he’s doing something wrong. “You keep paling every time you seem them.”

“I grew up in hospitals - so I’ve grown to associate needles with pain and I’m about never wrong when I do. There have been many times someones had to sew me up during the war, serum or not. Needles are not my favorite thing in the world, but I’ll deal with it, long as I don’t get to look at them.” His hand tightened around Peggy’s, watching the way her eyes squeezed shut. She didn’t like them much either. 

“What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?” Bobbi asked, making Peggy snort.

“What is this? Ask the 90-year-olds 20 questions?” Her words aren’t malice, curious, teasing, pressing.

Bobbi shrugs. “Or would you rather listen to the sound of the machine? We could all just sit quietly, then.”

Steve is quiet, feeling just how tired he was. It’s just them, Bobbi, and FitzSimmons left. Hunter and Mack had left out the side entrance, he remembered, give them privacy. It was odd, how they’d all just clicked together. This team quickly became his second home as much as the Avengers were. He’s even seen Bobbi and Clint around one another quite a few times, even him and Hunter. That was...a situation he didn’t want to get into.

“Butter pecan,” He finally said.

“Such an old person flavor,” Fitz muttered, rolling his eyes fondly.

“It is not. Fine, what’s yours?”

“Rocky road. It has everything you need, texture, chocolate, sweetness.”

“Fitz, this is a dessert, not a fine meal,” Bobbi mused. “Pegs? Jemma?”

“I think I’ll have to go with Steve’s butter pecan,” Jemma agrees, causing Steve to childishly stick his tongue out at Fitz. 

“Chocolate Fudge Strawberry with just a topping of whipped cream.” When Steve looks at her, she shrugs. “A girl can dream. You hate sweets.”

“No,” Steve corrected. “I loved them. I just gave my rations to you because you loved them even more.” 

It’s rare, these sneak peeks the Team gets into the Carter/Rogers’ old life together. How strongly they were connected to one another. 

“That’s sweet,” Bobbi muses. “Though, I guess chocolate tastes much different now, hm? Okay…”

“Did you two kiss before...everything?” Fitz asks, making Jemma smack him in the chest. “What?!”

“It’s fine,” Peggy laughs. She shares a look with Steve, the blonde is looking a little better now, more flushed. “We did. We even shared a bedroll or two.” 

“Well,” she continues. “The bedroom was out of necessity. There was a surprised snowstorm in July. We were forced to all take cover and the only tent we could pitch was barely big enough for us plus the Howlies. In order to save room, Steve and I shared a bedroll. Another time, we were forced to share a tent after mine got destroyed by a freak windstorm. As for the kiss…” Her hand squeezed Steve’s and she laughed again. “We were undercover and Steve’s a terrible spy. He almost blew our cover until I kissed him and shut him up.”

“I told you I shouldn’t have gone,” Steve breathed, his face flushing a bright pink despite it had nothing to do with the fact they were now pulling the needle out of him. “But you insisted.”

“There’s no one else I trust enough to watch my back.”

“How do you two feel?” Jemma broke the loving gaze between them, reluctant. Steve’s face flushed even darker and he shrugged, mentioning about feeling the same, just light-headed.

Their eyes fell to Peggy who slowly sat up and took in a deep breath. No sharp pain, no headache, no dull ache. “Better,” she breathed. “I think your plan worked, Fitz.”

“Best we keep an eye on you two for a day or so, just to be sure. Then, I think you two can be on your way.”

“Where are you going - once you two are cleared?” Jemma asks, curiosity in her tone.

“Coulson still has me benched but he hasn’t said anything about Peggy nor the fact she’ll certainly need a bodyguard.” There was intel Tony had fed him on unused Hydra bases in the South of the Atlantic that they should investigate.

“Smart,” Bobbi mused, a knowing look in her eye. “If you two ever need some...assistance, well you know where we are.”

#Steggy #StevePeggy #Steggy Prompt #Agents of Shield #S2 spoilers? #Ishly #Very ishly #I don't know #I don't know and I am so sorry #I butchered this #gardenroses1

[killingeveperspectives]

Perspective: Eve Polastri and the invisibility of women’s pain

“[A woman] has to know how to love

know how to suffer her love

and be all forgiveness”

These are the final verses of the poem “Sonnet of the ideal woman” written by the acclaimed Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes, same guy that brought you Girl from Ipanema®. (Don’t start hum… too late). I remember reading this sonnet only once, but its last verses became branded in my mind like a curse. Society’s view of ideal womanhood is perfectly encapsulated in these three haunting lines. That is women’s purpose, not only for men but for humanity, her suffering frivolous in the face of the redemption to be brought forth through her selflessness. Anything else is egoistical, evil, and dangerous… for everyone. From Pandora in ancient Greece, to biblical Eve, to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, to 90% of all horror movies ever, women are constantly warned of the dangers of curiosity and desire, which lead to destruction and death. Her redemption is to be a vehicle of someone else’s redemption, just like Virgin Mary redeemed biblical Eve by being the vehicle of humankind’s salvation. This narrative is so ingrained in our collective unconscious that it requires an immense effort to not let it slip into its familiar nest within our minds.

The biblical story of Eve’s fall from grace is arguably the most pervasive patriarchal myth to shape our patriarchal society, but if we unwrap its millennia of projections of male anxieties, the myth holds a kernel of universal truth: The flesh is weak. We are dangerously inclined to act on desire over reason by force so strong it is symbolized by the Devil: it possesses the mind. These impulses are irrational, reckless, primal and compelling. While Freud constructed much of his theory on the fascination of unconscious drives, I believe no one has said it better than W.H. Auden: “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand”. Our lives and livelihood depend on striking a fine balance between restriction and satisfaction of impulse, and to those who have ever fell in passion with someone or something, passion can be one of the most disruptive experiences of a lifetime. Thus, Eve’s myth carries layers of meaning both as we understand our nature and also as to how we project these anxieties onto womanhood.

Eve Polastri is not just Eve, she is Eve, she is the proverbial woman. She is morbidly curious, tempted by desire, gives in, and destroys the world around her. But Killing Eve is no cautionary tale, Eve Polastri Is not committing a forbidden sin against a narrative moral code which commands an imposed narrative punishment. Thus, Eve Polastri embodies and transgresses the biblical myth: she is the woman exploring her own impulses in her own story and becoming authentic through it– which makes her a remarkable character in her own right. At the core, the character is also us, a regular person urging to become whole, that sees in the metaphorical abyss of Villanelle’s indulgence a reflection of what she yearns: liberation. There is a courage to Eve, and we watch her entranced, because, whether we want to admit or not, we all fantasize about playing with fire. However, there can be a tacit perverted satisfaction in this story: we want Eve to fall from grace but when she does, we want to punish her for it, thus sublimating and reprimanding our own impulse, and falling back in the old narratives about womanhood. 

In Season 1, Eve seemed to have been taken as a surrogate for the audience quite unproblematically, nevertheless when desire starts to show its ugly face in Season 2, part of the audience started to feel alienated from the character, and even antagonistic. Which is unfortunate, because her face off with Villanelle in the finale was arguably the most victorious, honest and cathartic moment of the character so far. Season 3 opens with a recluse Eve licking her wounds, trying to pull herself together any way she can, after all she suffered and all she learned. She changed and change is painful – in an abstract sense, violent as well. Her initial isolation was self-imposed by the character but as the season progresses Eve becomes more and more distant, which creates a parallel to how women’s suffering is perceived in real life.

Ironically, when Eve is shutting down from the world around her in the beginning of the season, she is more open to us than she will ever be in the remainder of the episodes. We are allowed to exist with the character through her painfully dull, mundane day-to-day, as the extent of her suffering manifests in the blunt messiness of her exterior life and her valiant effort to keep it together with the help of a budding alcohol and cigarette addiction. Eve is not a strong woman; she is a woman that claimed herself at a great cost. This cost was depicted with frustrating realism, just like in real life, once the thrill of the battle is over, it’s time to tend to the wounded, drag the corpses and count the dead. It’s inglorious. No wonder Eve literally and metaphorically hid, she burned the bridges with the world around her. How could she possibly explain what she went through and how could an outsider possibly understand? A question that mirrors the feeling of many a person, especially women, that entangled themselves in violent dynamics: Alienation and loneliness.

Initially, the character continues the apophatic self-definition, Eve says no a lot, symbolizing her efforts to reassert control over her life. From Villanelle, to Carolyn, to her job, Eve is trying to play by her rules and her truth, she knows what she wants not, but the interesting question posed at the end of Season 2 is “Now that Eve reclaimed herself, what will she do of what she has become?” – Sartre style. However, there is a major shift in Eve’s character after her interactions with Villanelle in episodes 3 and 4. The character’s arc becomes centered towards admitting her feelings for Villanelle as the source of conflict, however one could argue that the main source of conflict is the existence of these feelings itself. Therefore, merely admitting them shouldn’t solve the main conflict, on the contrary, due to their inherent contradictory nature it should exacerbate it. 

This sleight of hand not only impoverishes the character’s emotional landscape, motivations and general arc, but also echoes the verse: ”A woman must know how to suffer love”. Like countless women before, Eve’s story is subtly telling us that the misery comes from her rejection of a phagic “love” and the metaphorical self-annihilation intrinsic to the experience, instead of the authentic ambivalence and paradoxes of the character’s inner self. Eve’s conflict should be at its core about herself not about Villanelle – who serves as a symbolic element.  In the end, good women are expected to erase themselves and to become vessels of God and of others. Coincidentally, Eve’s character becomes oddly redeemed when she becomes a vessel for Villanelle’s need to belong.

Here is where the writers quite painfully abandon an once intriguing and compelling character. Eve doesn’t find nothing new to say about herself, no new path nor synthesis of her desires, and identity – which could and should have given Eve agency in renegotiating her dynamic with Villanelle, especially if it was to bring them closer. Eve ceases to be defined by her own inner conflict and becomes defined by her attraction to Villanelle alone. As Eve obsessively seeks Villanelle, who is in turn occupied with a story of her own, at no point the audience is asked to care about Eve’s suffering nor does the writers bother to interrogate the character about it, let alone let the character process it. Eve is deprived from exploring herself and facing her own pain, almost as if Eve was so devoid of individuality that the character itself is alienated from the obvious pain and conflict it should be experiencing. But nor Eve, nor any other character and, most importantly, nor the audience is asked to care. In the emblematic scene where Eve jumps into a dumpster to literally look for scrapes of Villanelle’s supposed affection as a way of reconnecting with her, no effort is made to reframe it or question the length at which the character lost itself, because no one cares. When in the finale, Eve, who is oblivious to Villanelle’s change of heart, is interrogated with a relevant question “Did I ruin your life? Do you think I am a monster?”, the character straightforwardly reassures the anti-hero at the expense of the rich internal conflict that should have been derived and fleshed out from these points, because no one cares.

Eve believes in Villanelle unconditionally, despite all conceivable lines being crossed, despite the destruction and conflict this relationship has brought her, because Eve is doing precisely what her character is supposed to be doing: erasing her individuality, enduring her pain in the name of this love, forgiving no matter what they do to her so that they can be redeemed through her. “A woman has to know how to suffer her love and be all forgiveness”. Thus, Eve as a character becomes a device in Villanelle’s story arc occupying the same restricted space female characters were always allowed to inhabit. Villanelle goes on a somewhat muddled character growth arc, filled with redemption elements which traditionally involves the presence of a source of acceptance and love, generally in the form of a love interest, that will be granted to the hero at the end of the journey. Eve’s function in the story is not as a compelling protagonist with universal struggles, but as both enabler and trophy in Villanelle’s story. The narrative finds itself trapped in the old tales ingrained in our collective unconscious, in a jarring contrast with the previous seasons’ transgression and uniqueness.

Paradoxically, this precise abandonment gives the season the richest opportunity for the audience to interrogate the place of women’s pain. Eve’s abandonment mirrors the invisibility of the suffering of countless women, who painfully sacrifice their livelihoods in the name of their loved ones, be it Nicos, or Villanelles, or family, or friends, or their communities. Who, day in and out, are responsible for caring and supporting others through their struggles while left stranded with their own conflicts. After all, when so much depends on their self-sacrifice their pain is unimportant, even an expected part of this glorified martyrdom. Are we keen on looking at these women who inhabit these confined roles and acknowledge without judgement the enormous burden they carry? Are we ready to empathize with them when they rebel, when they fail and break, and even more so when they acquiesce? Having a queer twist on this narrative is not enough to claim it transgressive, as this cultural recipe perpetuates itself also into homoromantic relationships, as women often see themselves trapped in this dynamic with their female partners as well. Women are no less oppressed by patriarchal ideas of womanhood if these ideas are perpetuated through their relationships with other women.

 Akin to Eve’s biblical story, the erasure of female pain is also layered, as we all crave unconditional love, and its redemption, so we can be at peace with ourselves – completely satisfied, accepted and safe – which is naturally symbolized by “The mother”. Therefore, it is easy to impose these fantasies in the ideal of womanhood, as easy as it is to relate to Villanelle and romanticize the role Eve plays in her development, her acceptance of Villanelle’s character being a powerful cathartic release for our own need and fantasies of belonging. 

In this context, hidden in Season 3’s oblivious narrative, lays an interesting invitation to evaluate how we individually, and as a society, negotiate our urge to be nurtured and the necessity to nurture others and how these roles are culturally and socially informed by patriarchal ideas we collectively and individually carry about womanhood, and to what extent we are ready to challenge them.

#killing eve #killingeve #killing eve analysis #ke s3 #ke #Eve Polastri #eve polastri retcon #killingeveperspectives #killinge #eve polastri analysis

[ever-fics]

Of Gifts and Guilt...

The thing about being forced into kingship .... is there are many odd things nobles will buy you as gifts. Some odd like backscratcher that is literally a part of the chair... or an overly sexy picture of andraste...which had to be a sort of blasphemy in and of itself. However, on the eve of the anniversary of what others called “the day the archedemon was defeated...” Alistar was overly ready to observe something else entirely the day of mourning in which he remembered the only person he had ever loved. What Alistair didn’t expect was an Orlesian noble with a gift. Draped over it was a pale shroud and the shape of a frame underneath it.

All too reminiscent. What was worse however was the gall that became appearent when the Orlesian noble removed the shroud. Smiled with a kid “a gift for you in good faith.” An overly Kurt smile.... and an all too detailed painting of the death of his beloved warden. “Beautiful no... heros should be commemorated.” The noble smiled the same fake and mocking smile. Causing Alistair to falsely mutter a thank you before swiftly having the Orlesian escorted out and locking the door to the now empty room expect for him and the mocking snide of his maker.

The worst part of it all was the painting wasn’t bad no it was too good. Overly detailed. Alistair figured whoever had commissioned this must’ve met the hero of ferelden and perhaps himself at some point.... it was just too accurate and in whatever cruel infinity had cursed him he could feel them shaking in his arms again... the absolute healing of thier chest and the almost purrlike gurgles of the blood in thier mouth. The weekend hand reaching to him as they tried to mutter something inaudible to him. He was to be busy screaming for help. Hoping that in some last minute ploy he could save them. If he held the wound close somebody must’ve been able to heal them right? Right? They had potions? Of which he had tried frantically to dump into the mouth of his warden to no avail. One hand still tight pressed and bloodsoaked.... no stained. He didn’t even realize when they had stopped breathing until he was being pulled away.

Even then he couldn’t stand he just sunk in place staring at the white and bloodied sheet they had tried to wrap them in.... until he tried to have them take off the sheet. The person he had loved was too strong to die even from that they’d wake up and be mad.... he couldn’t have them wake up in a sheet that would be insulting no. They had to put the warden on a bed they had to because they’d wake up.... there were promises they had to keep. Promises both him and the warden had promised eachother they’d visit the gardens of Kirkwall. They still had yet to try soft dipping cheese and he had promised to show them. There were bigger promises too... promises that they couldn’t get rid of eachother... promises about roses...so many promises. Although he wasn’t going to be able to forfill the only promise that mattered. The promise he should have kept before. He put duty and formality over them....

“Alistair, I am horribly sorry, but there’s no heartbeat.” Wynne places a hand on his shoulder. Before he just collapsed crying into her.

Just like he was crying now alone in a room an ornamental king and an ornamental hero. Staring at a picture of his biggest failure and biggest loss. There was only one thing he would have had to do to save them and he was too selfish to do it. It haunts him every single day as does the anger at himself.... if he had taken a diffent path

There wouldn’t need to be paintings of the death of The Hero Of Ferelden the love of his life...

#dragon age origins #da:o #da: origins #dragon age #dragon age fic #dragon age alistair #king alistair #alistair x warden #alistair x reader #alistair x tabris #alistair x surana #alistair x cousland #alistair x brosca #alistair x mahariel #alistair x aeducan #alistair x amell