#this is also why they have a tendency to try to escape hospitals regardless of what state they're in 🙃

[byanyan]

byan's distrust and outright fear of hospitals is something that's come up a bit in threads and muse discussion, but i've never really talked about why they hate them so much?

for one, they have a heavy distrust of any authority figures, including doctors and nurses. pair that with the fact that being treated in the hospital puts them in a vulnerable position and not in any control of things going on around them or to them, that's already enough reason for them to hate the place. and YET... the thing that really traumatized them and created a proper fear of hospitals happened when they were 12. after running away from an abusive foster home, which put them back on the street as they had no where else to go, byan stole from the wrong person and wound up severely injured in the resulting altercation. someone found them, called an ambulance, and they woke up in a hospital bed. using clues from the things they'd had stuffed away in their backpack, the hospital managed to find byan's identity and, from there, found their family - or, the foster family they were still technically under the care of. when the nurse told them that their family had been called and was already on the way, byan panicked and pleaded with her to not let them in, but... of course that didn't work. she thought they were merely afraid of the consequences of running away and being out so late in such an unsafe part of the city, brushing off their concerns to assure them that everything would be fine. it wasn't.

going to the hospital resulted in the family they fled from not only finding them, but dragging them back to that terrible house which became much, much more difficult to escape from after that. and that's all they can think about anytime they're in one of those buildings, be it in a bed or simply visiting.

#'maaaa grey's posting depressing headcanons on the dash agaaaaain' #sorry (: being in a rough place mentally has been really fleshing out some of the darker parts of byan's childhood in my brain ok #this is something I've had headcanoned for months now tbh. only just writing it down rn while I'm on this depressive kick #this isn't the only Unpleasant experience they've had bc of hospitals either - just the worst one #they've also had their drug use revealed to foster families against their will to..... mixed results. some Very Bad. #they Do Not Trust nurses or doctors to genuinely have their best interests in mind. #and any time they find themself waking up in a hospital bed all they feel is that same ice cold chill of dread and fear that they did at 12 #this is also why they have a tendency to try to escape hospitals regardless of what state they're in 🙃 #anyway....... #━━ ˟ ⊰ ✰ HEADCANON ⋮ DANGER IN THE FABRIC OF THIS THING I MADE. #child abuse cw #ask to tag

[longitudinalwaveme]

Arkham Files: Mirror Master I (Samuel Joseph Scudder)

Hugo Strange: From the patient files of Dr. Hugo Strange, director of Arkham Asylum. Patient: Samuel Joseph Scudder, also known as the Mirror Master. The patient displays a number of antisocial and narcissistic tendencies, and clearly has a nicotine addiction, but no formal diagnosis has ever been given to him, and since he, like the rest of the so-called “Rogues”, arrived at Arkham only a few days ago, I have not had the time to give him a complete psychological examination. Session One. So, Mr. Scudder, how are you today?

Mirror Master: (Blows puff of cigarette smoke) For suddenly having been sent a thousand miles away from home? Not bad, I suppose. 

Hugo Strange: Yes, I can see how that would be stressful. Believe me, having suddenly gained over a dozen new patients in one fell swoop is not an ideal situation for me, either. 

Mirror Master: Don’t sweat it, Doctor. I’ll be out of here in a few days anyway. 

Hugo Strange: I very much doubt that, Mr. Scudder. Arkham Asylum’s security has been improved considerably since the days of the unfortunate Dr. Jeremiah Arkham. 

Mirror Master: It doesn’t matter how good the security is, Doctor. The prison hasn’t been built yet that can keep me locked up. 

Hugo Strange: You are not a metahuman, Mr. Scudder. As long as we do not allow you undue access to technology, you will not be able to effect one of the fantastic escapes for which you are so well known. 

Mirror Master: (Blows a puff of smoke) You a betting man, Doctor? 

Hugo Strange: Not particularly, Mr. Scudder.

Mirror Master: Too bad. I was going to bet you that I’d be out of this joint in a week or less. 

Hugo Strange: If those are the terms of your ‘bet’, then I might be willing to relax my standards on betting. In the parlance of gambling, my victory will be a “sure thing”. 

Mirror Master: So, do we have a bet, doctor? 

Hugo Strange: Do we not need to, ah, set the terms for victory first? 

Mirror Master: You’re right. If I win, well...I’m out of prison, and you have to acknowledge that I can beat your supposedly impervious security system. 

Hugo Strange: And if I win, you will make no more escape attempts and will attend psychological sessions with me regularly. 

Mirror Master: It’s a bet. (The two shake hands) 

Hugo Strange: Now that that is out of the way, Mr. Scudder, I would like to make it clear that Arkham Asylum is not a prison. It is a mental hospital; a place of psychological healing. 

Mirror Master: Then why am I here? I’m perfectly sane. 

Hugo Strange: You call yourself the “Mirror Master” and commit crimes whilst wearing a hideous orange-and-green leotard. If that isn’t a sign of emotional disturbance, I do not know what is. 

Mirror Master: It’s a costume, Doctor. You know, like the ones actors wear while putting on a show? If they’re not insane, then neither am I. 

Hugo Strange: The two situations are not at all synonymous, Mr. Scudder. Crime is not a performance. 

Mirror Master: (Blows puff of smoke) The crimes aren’t the performance, Doctor. I commited crimes a long time before I put on the costume. The performance is being the Mirror Master. 

Hugo Strange: Ordinary criminals do not turn their crimes into elaborate performances, Mr. Scudder. 

Mirror Master: And that, my dear Doctor, is what separates the criminals...from the supervillains. 

Hugo Strange: So, in your mind, the crimes you commit as the Mirror Master, with the silly costume and the incredible technology, they aren’t for money? 

Mirror Master: Well, the money’s nice...but the real fun of being the Mirror Master is the challenge. Matching wits with the Flash, outwitting security, getting my name in the papers-that’s the real reason I became the Mirror Master. If I’d just wanted to get rich, I could’ve done that easily. 

Hugo Strange: Yes, I was just about to mention that. Your records indicate that, among other things, you have invented or discovered an alternate dimension known as the Mirror Realm, which enables you to teleport between locations, mirrors that can hold people’s reflections, a 3D printer that makes perfect mirror images of people, hypnotic technology that works over long distances, a mirror that predicts the future, a mirror that lets you switch your legs with other people’s legs, a number of laser weapons, some sort of flying car, a mirror-powered jet pack, a mirror that allows you to shrink and enlarge yourself and other people, mirrors that create a wide variety of fantastical illusions, a weapon that turns people into glass, a weapon that reverses the way that the brain perceived the world, guns that can transform stolen jewelry into light beams (and back again) for the purposes of easy transport, and a weapon that distorts people’s bodies. 

Mirror Master: (Blows out a puff of smoke) I’m a man of many talents, Doctor. 

Hugo Strange: Obviously. What’s more, when you arrived here, we administered a number of psychological and intelligence tests to you, and the results were remarkable. 

Mirror Master: How so? 

Hugo Strange: In spite of the fact that your records indicate that you never graduated from high school, your overall intelligence score was somewhere around 174. In other words, Mr. Scudder...you are a genius. 

 Mirror Master: (Whistles) Well, I always knew I was smart...but I’ve gotta admit, I didn’t realize I was that smart. 

Hugo Strange: Mr. Scudder, you are, quite bluntly, one of the most astonishing scientists of our generation. You could easily have made yourself rich and famous legitimately. 

Mirror Master: Yeah, well, here’s the thing, Doctor. By the time I made those discoveries, I was already a convict. People don’t exactly line up to hire liquor store robbers from Skid Row, even if they are geniuses. Besides, why should I try to help science and society? What did they ever do for me, except put me behind bars? 

Hugo Strange: After you had robbed a liquor store, Mr. Scudder.

Mirror Master: (Blows puff of smoke) In case you haven’t figured it out, Doctor, I’m not a very good person. 

Hugo Strange: No, Mr. Scudder, you are not a good man...but you are also a very sick man, and it is my duty to help you. 

Mirror Master: What do you mean, I’m sick? 

Hugo Strange: By your own testimony, you dress up in costume and commit crimes as though it’s some sort of grand performance. You have repeatedly ignored opportunities to make money legitimately, and even your crimes focus more on showmanship than on actually making a profit. In fact, the only times your crimes show a profit requisite to the amount of effort you put into committing them are when you are working alongside the other so-called Rogues, which, I suspect, is largely attributable to the fact that Mr. Leonard Snart puts some effort into keeping your idiosyncrasies in check when you work together. All of this suggests that you are emotionally disturbed, Mr. Scudder. 

Mirror Master: So I’m dramatic. That hardly makes me a candidate for a rubber room, Doctor. 

Hugo Strange: I’m afraid I would have to disagree, Mr. Scudder. And I am the medical professional here. (Pause) So, Mr. Scudder, I repeat: why the costume? Mirror Master: I told you already. It’s part of the performance. 

Hugo Strange: And your decision to wear this costume had nothing whatsoever to do with the costumed vigilante who runs around Central City? 

Mirror Master: What, you mean the Flash? He really didn’t have much to do with it. I put on the costume before I ever met him. He makes commiting crimes more fun, but I would’ve become the Mirror Master regardless of whether there was a Speedster around to fight. 

Hugo Strange: So the Flash did not inspire the Mirror Master? 

Mirror Master: (Blows puff of smoke) No. 

Hugo Strange: Then what, exactly, inspired you to put on the spandex leotard? 

Mirror Master: Well, you’ve gotta admit it’s memorable. 

Hugo Strange: I suppose so. 

Mirror Master: But in all seriousness, I was a big fan of JSA comic books as a kid. I always thought their costumes were pretty cool; if anything inspired my costume; it was theirs. 

Hugo Strange: So the Mirror Master was inspired by the so-called Mystery Men of the 1940s and 1950s? 

Mirror Master: Yeah. Let me tell you, if anyone understood showmanship, it was the JSA. Those guys were my heroes.

Hugo Strange: In that case, is it not counterintuitive that you became a supervillain? I was under the impression that the JSA comics presented those vigilantes as unambiguous heroes. 

Mirror Master: (Blows puff of smoke) You know, I never really thought about it like that before. 

Hugo Strange: Then allow me to posit my own theory. (Strange pulls out Mirror Master’s file, papers rustle as he does so) According to your files, you were born to Percival and Martha Scudder. Your father died of cancer when you were only seven months old, and his medical bills consumed all of your parents’ money. As a result, your mother was forced to move with you to a glorified tenement building on the spot where Morrow Street and Baker Street met. The area was colloquially known as “Skid Row”, and poverty, crime, and drug addiction were rampant. Your mother, a seamstress, had to work long hours just to make ends meet, so you were often left at home alone. You and your mother never had enough clothes or enough to eat. When you were six years old, your next-door neighbor was murdered in a violent drug dispute; you were at home to hear the gunshot. When you were eight, you witnessed a violent brawl that ended in a man being sent to the hospital; when you were twelve, you watched another neighbor die of a drug overdose. 

Mirror Master: (Obviously uncomfortable) Can we please stop talking about this? 

Hugo Strange: Mr. Scudder, until you acknowledge what happened to you, you cannot make progress. 

Mirror Master: I do acknowledge what happened! I know Skid Row was a crappy place to grow up; I’m not pretending it wasn’t! But that doesn’t mean I want to talk about it! 

Hugo Strange: Mr. Scudder, I understand your discomfort, but unless we talk about what happened to you, I will not be able to help you. (Pause) To continue: As a boy, you were very close to a young girl named Jennifer Conners, who lived in the apartment across from yours. Her father, a minister at a local church, soon became like a father to you. He even served as your Scoutmaster. You were a Boy Scout, Mr. Scudder. You even earned the title of Eagle Scout when you were fourteen. That’s highly irregular for a costumed criminal.

Mirror Master: (Trying to change the subject) Yeah, well, I’ve always been extraordinary. 

Hugo Strange: That is not the point, Mr. Scudder. The point is, until you were sixteen years old, you were a remarkably well-behaved child in spite of your dreadful environment. You got good grades, you loved comics about so-called superheroes, you were a Boy Scout-you were not a juvenile delinquent in any sense of the word. What changed, Mr. Scudder? 

Mirror Master: (Angry) Why do you need me to tell you? Isn’t it in my files? 

Hugo Strange: It is, but I think it is important that you admit it, Mr. Scudder. 

Mirror Master: (Blows puff of smoke) Fine! What changed was that I watched Mr. Conners get shot right in front of me! (Blows another puff of smoke) He was the best man I knew, and it still didn’t stop him from getting murdered by one of the Candy Man’s drug dealers. 

Hugo Strange: The...Candy Man? 

Mirror Master: Jack Monteleone. (Blows puff of smoke) He controls Central City’s drug empire. 

Hugo Strange: I see. So, your beloved father figure was killed in front of you. I’d imagine that produced a great deal of anxiety. 

Mirror Master: (Blows puff of smoke) No duh, Sherlock. 

Hugo Strange: As such, you decided to start self-medicating with alcohol and cigarettes. Eventually, this got you mixed up with the party crowd at your school. Your grades slipped rapidly, and, by the time you were seventeen, you had dropped out of school and run away from home so that you could better feed your addictions. You committed a number of petty crimes before robbing a local liquor store at the age of 19, whereupon you were sent to prison. While serving your sentence, you discovered the Mirror Realm, and upon your release, you became the Mirror Master. 

Mirror Master: (Blows puff of smoke) So, how exactly does my life story prove that I’m crazy? 

Hugo Strange: Mr. Scudder, you are not “crazy”. What you are, however, is a child living a fantasy life. You used to self-medicate with alcohol; now you deal with your trauma by putting on a mask and playing an elaborate game of cops and robbers with your city’s scarlet-clad vigilante. By becoming this “Mirror Master”, you are reenacting the comic book stories that you loved as a child. You may be a warped reflection of the JSA, but you have nevertheless created a world for yourself where good and evil are simple and clear-cut and no one will ever really get hurt. And the Flash is enabling your fantasy. 

Mirror Master: (Blows a puff of smoke) Or-and here’s a novel concept-I do it because I like money and attention. 

Hugo Strange: Nothing is ever that simple, Mr. Scudder. 

Mirror Master: (Blows a puff of smoke) I’m really looking forward to watching you have to eat your words when I escape, Doctor. 

Hugo Strange: And when you fail to escape, I will look forward to helping you deal with your nicotine addiction, Mr. Scudder. Regardless, I think that it is time for this session to come to an end. We have covered enough ground for one day. 

#flash rogues #dr. hugo strange #flash comics #batman comics #mirror master #sam scudder #fanfic

[bluenet13]

A Bloody Mess

Written for @badthingshappenbingo

Fandom: SEAL Team.

Characters: Sonny Quinn, Lisa Davis, Clay Spenser, Stella Baxter.

Prompt: Bloodstained Clothes.

Summary:  Lisa and Clay are always a phone call away. Especially when his relationship is on the rocks again and Sonny ends up in the middle of a fight after trying to drown his sorrows at a bar.

Links: ff.net - AO3

When Lisa's phone rang, her first thought was Sonny. But then she remembered the night before, how her application to join Echo Team had been denied, and the conversation that had followed. Her heart aching as she realized that Sonny wouldn't be calling her anymore, at least for things not related to national security.

Letting it ring, Lisa figured if it was important enough they would call again. She wasn't really in the mood to deal with anyone and it was her day off.

After a few minutes of silence, Lisa sighed, thinking that it was probably a spam call or one of the Bravo boys taking the hint that she wasn't available. But, not three minutes later, the phone rang again so Lisa ran to the kitchen counter where she had left it charging.

Instinctually, Lisa almost grabbed her work bag at the same time as she finally decided to pick the call, but ended up just frowning, hand falling to her side, as she saw the name pop up on her screen. It wasn't the base that's for sure.

"Hi, Stella," Lisa greeted the woman on the other end of the line, grateful that this was just a phone call so she didn't have to fake a smile, along with her cheerful tone. "Is everything okay? Clay alright?" She couldn't help but ask.

"Hi, Lisa… Yeah, Clay's okay. Well, most of him anyways," a nervous laugh escaped Stella and Lisa's frown deepened. "But, it's Sonny, I'm calling about…"

Taking in a deep breath, Lisa drew her hand down her face, because of course it had to be Sonny.

"Have you seen him?" Stella asked nervously as Lisa failed to say anything to her previous comment.

"Not since yesterday," Lisa explained, "when I left Ray's house, the boys were still there, and I don't know what happened afterwards. We haven't spoken since."

"Umm, okay, okay," Stella sounded nervous, and Lisa desperately needed to know what had happened, but she also knew she needed to get some distance from Sonny, regardless of how much it hurt. "Well, thanks anyways. Let us know if you hear from him."

"Wait, Stella," Lisa practically shouted. But then fell quiet. Things with Sonny were complicated, as complicated as they had ever been, but she couldn't just turn off her feelings for him. Sonny had her heart, and deep down she knew whatever happened, she would never be able to stop caring about him. "What happened? What's wrong?"

Stella didn't answer right away, instead Lisa could hear shuffling and whispering, or more like hissing, coming from the other side.

"Davis," another voice said after a few minutes. Clay. Of course he was there.

"Spencer," Lisa muttered, not surprised that whatever trouble Sonny was in, Clay was involved too. "What's going on?"

"I'm sorry to call you, I know this might not be what you wanted," Clay said, sounding genuinely apologetic. "I was about to head to Sonny's apartment but Stella suggested we check in with you first."

"Okay," Lisa said simply. Not really surprised that Clay already seemed to know what had happened between her and Sonny the day before. But as much was obvious from his tone. "Clay, what happened?"

"Um, well…"

"Clay! Get on it with it," Lisa hissed.

"Okay, okay, sorry. It's just… Sonny called me last night, like an hour after the rest of us left Ray's house. He didn't sound okay and there were too many voices around for him to be at home, so I asked where he was. He was at a bar. Not one we had been to before. I could hear shouting too. But anyhow, I met him there. And there might have been a fight at some point after that…" Clay's voice cut abruptly, and more angry whispering could be heard on the line.

"Give me the phone, you're taking too long," Stella chided, before she obviously took the phone from Clay. "Sorry, Lisa. The point is Clay went to meet Sonny at the bar, and they ended up in a fight." Stella was trying to sound casual, but her voice was too tight to sound fully natural, and it only told Lisa that she didn't yet know the specifics of said fight. "Afterwards Clay tried to get Sonny to come to the apartment with him, but he refused. They just got an Uber together instead and Clay asked the driver to drop Sonny off first. So we know he made it home, but now we can reach him."

"I've been trying to talk to him all morning, but he's not picking up," Clay resumed the explanation, practically giving Lisa whiplash from all the jumping between the two. "We just thought maybe you had heard from him. But you haven't. So I will just go to his apartment. Thanks and, again, sorry for calling."

"Clay, I'll go."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, I live closer to him anyways."

"Okay," Clay agreed easily, his tone betraying that he didn't believe for one second that was the only reason why Lisa wanted to be the one to check up on Sonny.

"Keep us posted, please," Stella added, to which Lisa promised to call back when she knew more, before ending the call.

Sighing, Lisa closed her eyes for a second as she tried to tamper down her emotions. God knows she was really making an effort to respect the rules and get away from Sonny on a personal level, but he just kept reeling her in. She couldn't really say she minded, but Bravo was already under the microscope, and they couldn't further jeopardize all their careers.

But, Sonny was in trouble, so none of that was important now. So, grabbing her purse and keys, Lisa wasted no time in going to his aid, because regardless of the status of their relationship, she would always move heaven and earth to save him; and whether that be from Tangos in foreign lands, or from his own self-destructive tendencies at home, didn't really matter.

-x-x-x-

Not fifteen minutes later, having broken more than a few speed limits in the process, Lisa reached Sonny's apartment and the first thing she noticed was the door being unlocked. Getting closer, Lisa tentatively pushed it open and stepped inside. Feeling a small amount of relief when she found the living room seemingly undisturbed. But her worry returning as soon as she realized Sonny was nowhere in sight.

"Sonny?" Lisa asked, walking further into the familiar apartment.

Getting no answer, Lisa went to Sonny's room but found the bed not slept in, which she was sure of because Sonny was not the type to make his bed before first getting breakfast, and the kitchen had been similarly unused. "Sonny?" She called again, louder this time. But she met only silence.

Moving to Sonny's bathroom Lisa found it empty too and her worry began to increase as she realized that so far she hadn't seen his keys or wallet either. For a brief moment she wondered if maybe Sonny had contacted another member of the team, like Trent since he was the medic. But all further questions flew out of her mind as soon as she noticed the first droplets of blood on the living room floor. Following the path, Lisa reached the last place she had not searched yet.

"Sonny?" Lisa asked again, as she got close to the guest bathroom. The door was slightly ajar but the sight didn't look inviting at all. Lisa couldn't really explain why, until she saw what looked suspiciously like a bloody handprint on the otherwise white wood.

Her mind in overdrive, Lisa pushed the door open and gasped as soon as she saw Sonny collapsed on the bathroom floor, blood soaking the tile and pooling under him. His clothes were so bloody that Lisa wondered how she hadn't seen a blood trail as soon as she came into the apartment, or maybe she had, and her mind had just tried to protect her by blocking the sight until it just couldn't do it anymore.

"Hey, Sonny, wake up," Lisa said as soon as she was kneeling next to him, doing her best to avoid all the blood on the floor. But Sonny didn't answer or even stir.

Running back to Sonny's room, Lisa grabbed the medkit that he kept in his bathroom before she again kneeled next to him. Slowly, she lifted Sonny's hand from where it was pressed to his side, quickly having noticed this was the bloodiest spot on his shirt, and instantly cursed when she noticed the very obvious stab wound.

"Damn it, Sonny," she said to herself. "And damn you, Clay." Because how could he not have realized this would need stitches and probably antibiotics too, just to be safe.

Trying to be careful but effective, Lisa grabbed gauze and pushed down on the gushing wound, attempting to halt the flow of blood, because seeing how much of it was currently on the floor and on Sonny's jeans and shirt, Lisa knew he couldn't afford to lose any more of it.

Lisa's movements must have been careful enough because Sonny didn't wake through it all, but as soon as she began packing the wound, he began to stir and grunt. His eyes flying open as soon as Lisa pushed the gauze further in.

"Stay there, don't move," Lisa said through gritted teeth as soon as Sonny tried to move away. She hated to cause Sonny pain, of the physical kind at least, because she knew the day before she had caused him a lot of emotional ache. But she knew enough of first aid, from her own training and also Trent, to recognize she needed to pack the wound to stop further hemorrhaging.

"Lisa?" Sonny asked, eyes now at half-mast, his breathing coming in small puffs of air, except when he gasped every time Lisa pushed more gauze into the wound. "What are you doing here?"

"I should be asking you that question, Sonny," Lisa argued, barely able to suppress her anger, "you should be in a hospital!"

"No need, I took care of it," Sonny explained, a sad imitation of a grin on his face.

"Does this look taken care of?" Lisa hissed, lifting a bloody towel to show Sonny how not taken care of this really was. "You're lucky you didn't bleed out! Of all the stupid things… I swear I will kill you myself if you ever pull a stunt like this again." Lisa continued to rant, even as she never stopped working, finishing packing the wound before taping the gauze in place and moving to check the rest of Sonny.

"Okay, maybe not taken care of," Sonny admitted softly, letting out a nervous chuckle. "But, don't be mad," he whined, looking up at Lisa as his eyes began to flutter shut. "I don't like it when you're mad with me."

"Don't you dare pass out on me, Sonny Quinn," Lisa threatened, "and if you don't want me to be mad, then stop doing stupid shit like this!"

"I'm sorry," Sonny said with a pained exhale, "didn't mean to get into the fight, just wanted a drink…"

"Didn't you have enough drinks at Ray's?" Lisa asked incredulously, even as she knew she was the reason he needed more.

At that, Sonny just shrugged, letting his eyes finally close.

"Sonny!" Lisa shouted, shaking him awake, and gently slapping his cheeks.

Opening his eyes, Sonny tried to focus on Lisa, throwing her his best apologetic look, but his eyes began to flutter again. "Sorry, tired," he mumbled.

"Come on, please Sonny you got to stay awake," Lisa begged.

Finally convinced that the worst of the wounds was treated for now, and Sonny wouldn't bleed out in front of her, Lisa took her phone out of her pocket and searched her favorites list for Trent's number. But a weak hand on her arm stopped her so she looked down.

"What are you doing?" Sonny asked weakly.

"What do you think I'm doing? I'm calling Trent, then I'm calling 9-1-1," Lisa snapped.

"No, don't call Trent. I'm okay. And, the team can't know about this." Sonny explained weekly, using his remaining strength to try to lift himself from the floor, but he only made it a few inches before he collapsed again, ending up slumped in between the sink and wall.

"Sonny how do you expect to hide this?" Lisa asked, gesturing to his body.

"And this," a voice said from the door, and both Sonny and Lisa turned to find Stella pointing at Clay's black eye, and split lip.

"How can we help?" Clay said at the same time as Stella spoke, his key to Sonny's apartment still held tightly on his hand.

"I think you already helped enough," Lisa quipped, looking at Clay with accusatory eyes.

"I, um…" Clay ran his hand through his hair, wincing when he got too far down and bumped the bruise on his eye. The explanation of what had happened was something for Sonny to share with Lisa, so with nothing to say, Clay just ignored her and moved forward, kneeling on Sonny's other side and beginning to pack and wrap a smaller wound.

"It's not his fault," Sonny said.

"The hell it's not!" Lisa all but shouted, "why is it you two always end up in trouble together?"

Clay and Sonny shared a brief look at the question, both shrugging because they didn't have a good answer.

"Clay was only helping," Sonny explained, his voice barely above a whisper. "I got into a fight at this bar, and even I have self-preservation enough to know I wouldn't get far against seven. They were blocking the exit so I hid in the bathroom and called Clay."

"And you just showed up, just like that?" Lisa couldn't help but ask.

"Yes," Stella said simply.

"Of course," Clay said at the same time, his tone basically asking how could he not.

"So, yeah, Clay showed up and I was still locked inside the bathroom," Sonny stopped as he began to stumble on his words, "he tried to get the men to back down and leave us alone. Apologized for whatever had happened. But then I heard a crash and Clay grunting. I got out, and well, a fight broke out. And one of them must have had a knife." He ended the explanation with a hopeless shrug.

"I'm sorry I couldn't stop this from happening," Clay said sincerely, looking at Lisa, "but this is the first time I'm hearing anything about knives. My guys were all fists," he explains, pointing to his black eye.

"A lot of fists apparently," Stella added, stepping close to Clay, and lifting his shirt to show various hand-shaped bruises on his abdomen.

Uncomfortable with the attention, Clay pushed his shirt back down and continued working on Sonny's injuries. Now gently prodding the bruising on his friend's stomach, trying to determine if they should also be worried about internal injuries or broken ribs.

"Lisa, did you already call Trent or should I?" Stella asked with a wince, needing to feel useful but also feeling sympathetic towards her boyfriend and his best friend, because Trent wouldn't be a happy man when he set his eyes on them.

"No Trent," Sonny said again.

"Come on, Sonny. Even you must be smart enough to know we can hide this from the team. They will find out eventually," Clay retorted.

"Bravo is already in hot water. Can't make it worse," Sonny tried to argue.

"Okay, we can figure out what to do about the team later, but I'm calling 9-1-1 now," Lisa said, stopping any further discussion and already beginning to dial.

"Can you just put in some stitches? I don't care if the scar is pretty," Sonny begged.

"Maybe last night, but now you also need a transfusion and antibiotics. Too bad you didn't think it important enough to ask for help when this happened," Lisa pointed out.

Grunting, Sonny let his head fall into his chest, knowing that he wasn't winning this argument.

"I'll go make the call. Stella, keep an eye on these two and make sure they don't make any more dumb choices," Lisa said, even as she sent a grateful look Clay's way. Because even with Stella back in the picture, Clay had dropped everything and got himself into a fight just to help Sonny. And Lisa was sincerely thankful knowing that Clay would always be the one standing alongside her on Sonny's self-destructive corner.

Stella just nodded but said nothing, and as Lisa walked out, she had the decency to silently wonder if maybe she should have asked the other woman to call instead. Stella was looking a little green, and her stomach must have been queasy at the sight and smell of all the blood. Another reminder that this world she had chosen was really different to hers, but showing this time she was fully committed to making it work because her love for Clay was greater than her fears.

"Ambulance should be here soon," Lisa said as soon as she stepped back into the room, instantly going back to the floor and sitting next to Sonny. And, against her better judgment, intertwining their fingers together.

"Thank you," Sonny whispered, squeezing her hand weakly.

"Anytime, Sonny, anytime," Lisa promised. And even if the previous day had again shaken their dreams and thrown new hurdles their way, Lisa was certain those words would always be nothing but the truth.

A knock on the door broke the moment, as everyone moved back into action. Stella going to open the door for the paramedics, and Clay moving to Sonny's room to grab his go bag and some clean clothes so he could later change out of the bloodstained ones, while Lisa stayed right by Sonny's side.

With the two stab wounds already packed and their patient stable enough, the paramedics made quick work of loading Sonny into a stretcher and wheeling him down to the waiting ambulance. Lisa, Clay and Stella following close behind.

As they reached the parking lot, Clay and Stella stood to the side while Sonny was moved into the ambulance, Lisa jumping in after him, her posture and scowl daring the paramedics to object. Both Clay and Stella ready to get in her car and follow them to the hospital.

Just before the double doors to the ambulance closed, Lisa looked back at Clay and mouthed a silent thank you. Because as it turned out she wasn't the only one ready to move heaven and earth to keep Sonny safe.

Silently, Clay nodded nonchalantly, moving closer to Stella and drawing her to him. Holding his girlfriend's hand, Clay nodded again, a smile on his face. His eyes telling Lisa all that his words weren't. There was a lot to figure out and Lisa still needed to learn the specifics of what had happened at the bar and to remind Sonny that he needed to take better care of himself, not only for them, but also for his unborn child. But at that moment, Lisa truly believed that in the end everything would be okay. All the proof she needed was standing right in front of her, because just a year ago Clay and Stella seemed impossible, but here they were. And someday in the future, Sonny and Lisa would be too.

#Seal team #seal team fanfic #savis #bad things happen bingo #sonny quinn #lisa davis #clay spenser #stella baxter

[ignitification]

I'm glad we could handle this respectfully.

Two questions

Do you think Endeavor will Die in the Future,Like Dabi Kills him?or will he stay alive throughout?

Also I feel like and hope him and Rei Should get a divorce.She should'nt be with someone who's hurt her Physically and psychologically.I think them not being married would be very healthy for them

And In response,People can change but I haven't seen the villians wanna change since they believe they're in the right.you have to want change in order to change.Shigaraki,Toga,Dabi and All for one have shown no signs of wanting to change.this is all my opinion but like They honestly don't wanna change since they believe,due to their pasts,that they're doing the right thing.Dabi has Murdered 30 innocent people,Toga is literally a wanted Serial Who drinks blood like Juice,and Shigaraki Murdered many heroes and ordered his Minions to destroy everything.

Imo,that doesn't look like wanting to change.

I feel like they work well as villians So Horikoshi probably won't redeem them But again I can't predict the future so I'm getting ahead of myself 😅sorry for wasting your time

It was just my two sense

Plus we need to fix hero society but they're doing it in a cruel and hypocritical way

I'd like to address the three points you made in three different sections:

Endeavour probability of staying alive (of which I already talked here, so it will be short)

Rei's involvment with Todoroki Enji

The Three Villains (the three mains) not wanting to change (on which I already hinted at here and here)

Trigger warning: mentions of suicide; violence; self-harm.

1.) Endeavour’s course of life (and action)

To be honest, I think this is the easiest point to address and I’ll refrain from going over and over again the same point. My answer, as before, is no. I do not think that Enji is going to die (refer to the linked before post for a more in depth analysis of why). However, on the question whether Enji Todoroki will still be alive at the end of the manga, I think the answer might be different. I utterly think that where the manga is going so far foreshadows a lot of pain to come. And I’ll let Horikoshi do whatever he plans, but my spider-senses tell me that even if he does survive, Endeavour is unlikely to get a happy ending (or at least a canonically happy one). He will be hold responsible of his actions, and that is the most important thing. As long as he gets on the right path, everything could happen. Especially considering the events of Ch. 300, which might be interpreted as a first step on regaining the real narrative of what went down (and which might be even more cruel than we think) , so this means we are getting at the root of the problem. 

2.) Rei’s involvement in Enji’s life

This, on the contrary, is the most delicate point of the post. Rei is introduced as a 'weak' and heavily mentally abused character. She is confined in a hospital and she seems to be closed in her own world so much she does not notice time passing and stares out of the window trying to make sense of the world. Which, on one hand, I think is very fitting for her, but at the same time I am included to think that this is the furthest thing from what Rei' character is supposed to be.

Rei Todoroki is a victim. But she is not weak. She made her mistakes (of which she is aware of and feels guilty about, but that's for another time because Shouto's scar - mental and facial - is a whole lot deal to unpack) and she had way too much time to think. Shouto never held it against her and now, he, together with Natsuo and Fuyumi helped her to regain the confidence she knows Enji took from her. He closed her off in a hospital to prederve her health, but instead he just took off years of her life from her children and viceversa.

However, I am not sure whether Enji and Rei are still married or separated or divorced or whatever. It seems like on paper they are still together, but there is a rift in their relationship.

I mean, look at this panel: Rei is behind her children, looking at Endeavour like the douchebag he is, and telling him promptly that, this, is not about him and that however he might feel, he is not the victim or the one who needs to be forgiven.

I, personally, have never thought much of her character, besides of her being sick, in hospital and trying not to relapse so hard.

The first time we see her, she looks lifeless. They looks listless. And I can't stress that enough, it is not that she did not try to fight it. But accepting that the trauma happened in the first time is a stress for her mental health. But instead of getting worse, Shouto and her family's presence revitalizes her.

Which beings me to the point made in the last panel. She knows that in his shallow way, Endeavour tried to tell her that he is still there, and while he does not want to impose his presence, he will still wait for her when she wants to.

Funny thing, is that we discover is that she does not want him back. She is done with everything that happened and she is ready to take the reigns of her life back. And in order to do that she needs to wash their dirty landry. And she does not care of how this might affect Endeavour, but instead she wants justice, truth and not tears and excuses.

Rei ia going to fight to have her way. Be it out of Endeavour 's life or inside the life of Touya, time only will tell.

And finally point 3.) The Big Three Villains' on change and saviours

I am very hard trying to get through to everyone out there while I say that change is something that comes to you regardless of whether you want it or not. Shigaraki, Dabi and Toga do not recognise that they might be able to change, and that they might be saved. In their minds, fairly, they do not have to change in order to be eligible for salvation. I already stressed this in my other answers, they should not change in order for them to ‘deserve’ being saved. Maybe they do not even want it. But if the chance presents itself, of them being offered a hand, would they dare to take it? Probably not. And this is not because they are happily wasting their time to kill and fuck around, no. It’s because it’s a mechanism ingrained into their minds: Dabi escaped home after he abused and neglected, Shigaraki accidentally killed his family and then was left to himself, and Toga was deemed weird and creepy and just cast aside as trash. Do you see a pattern here? If yes, well congratulations. It’s a quirk-based society, and since their quirks somehow became synonym to their worth, these individuals were deemed not worthy or villains from the get-go and they just choose to embrace whatever life threw at them, instead of just letting go. And let me tell you, that in their cases, letting go would mean die. They all, in some degree, suffer from auto-destructive and self-harm tendencies, which should be telling enough. And if it not, just think about why people behave this way. Why do people feel the need to destroy themselves? They do because they feel like the pain inside them feels a tiny bit lighter if they externate. Shigaraki told Izuku that as this failed society refused and never forgave him, he won’t forgive anyone in return. He does not care about his crimes because apart from those crimes he commits for a reason, he has nothing else going on. He does not have a family to go home to. He does not have a home. He does not have anything apart from the League, his memories hunting him and the eternal stigma of society labelling him as unsavable.

So excuse me very much when I say that they do not want to change and they might be right. Nothing changed, and nothing changes now. The only hope they have to be redeemed, it’s not for the heroes to forget their crimes, and to enjoy further destruction but to understand that the only way someone can help you is if believe in them. Dabi does not think he deserves to be saved. Toga had hopes which were destroyed right after Hawks killed Twice. Shigaraki put everything on the stake because the kid never knew how to genuinely smile. Let us for a moment think what would have happened to Eri if she did not get saved. It’s not hard after all: the kids of the League are all examples of what happens then.

It’s not because they change that they need to be saved. They need to be saved because they need to change. 

#bnha #bnha spoilers #boku no hero academia #mha #mha spoilers #my hero academy #bnha meta #bnha 300 #mha 300 #mha meta #bnha analysis #sunn answers #bnha manga spoilers #endeavour #enji todoroki #todoroki family #rei todoroki #todoroki touya #dabi #shouto todoroki #Lov #league of villains #shigaraki tomura #toga himiko #shimura tenko

[cowtale-utau]

Relationships and Opinions - Ace

Undertale Sans/Ace – Didn't have a very high opinion of himself for a lot of years, and honestly, not much has changed. He can come off pretty self assured in a laid back/casual kind of way, but he has to. The frontier is a rough place, and faltering or showing weakness could doom everyone he cares about. Despite appearances however, Ace is full of doubt. He's constantly questioning damn near every decision he makes. He's trying his best to do and be better but its a struggle.

Undertale Papyrus/Lief – Ace adores his brother above all others. Their relationship has had its moments where it got a bit rocky, but there has never been anything but love between these two. Ace tried for years to protect his brother by shutting him out and hiding his pain. Lief however, wasn't having it, and after several lectures and a lot of tears they came to an understanding. Ace knows he can count on Lief to always be there for him for whatever he needs.

Underfell Sans/Chisel – Ace, Chisel, and Piper are the 'talk shop over drinks' trio. Chisel is rougher than Ace, and earlier on that was somewhat off putting, but as Ace grew into a less rigid moral viewpoint, and Chisel settled into surface life, they found they actually got on quite well. If Ace has an idea, Chisel will tell him if it can be built. They enjoy debating just how feasible a given blueprint might be.

Underfell Papyrus/Spur – Not too much to be said here. They get along well enough, but don't seek each other out for company. Ace knows Spur is dependable, and will do his job with an exact precision.

Underswap Sans/Scout – Scout is very much like Lief, if Lief were a manipulative little shit. As such Ace tends to regard Scout as a troublesome family member. Scout plays at being straight laced, and can be pretty convincing, but while Ace maybe lazy and somewhat careless, he's perceptive, and a good judge of character. Scout isn't one for causing meaningless chaos, but he will go off script if he decides he needs to, regardless of orders. This impudence largely comes from both being the older brother, while having many traits of the opposites younger brother. Underswap Papyrus/Piper – Easily one of Ace's closest friends out of the bunch. Both are lazy jokesters. Both are overprotective brothers. Piper helps bring back some of the mischief Ace lost in the Underground. If Ace had a 'council' Piper would be the one to present more diplomatic options when possible. Swapfell(Red) Sans/Whip – The law was never a point of interest for Ace, so he appreciates that Whip handles anything beyond the basics. Ace is somewhat adverse to Whip's crueler tendencies, viewing it as rather unnecessary. However none of the hard lines drawn have ever been crossed so he lets it slide. For now. Whip can be stubborn and difficult to work with, but hes good at what he does.   

Swapfell(Red) Papyrus/Coyote – Its a bit of a running camp joke that Coyote is Ace's nemesis. This is purely because whenever Lief decides Ace has been off slacking long enough he asks Coyote to hunt him down. Ace has never successfully hid from Coyote. He's quiet company, but absolutely one of the best to have your back. Very little escapes his notice, and he'll walk through fire to you back out.

Horrortale Sans/Tender – Things were awkward between Ace and Tender for a good few weeks, as Tender forced Ace to acknowledge some things about himself that weren't all that pleasant. The initial upset of “that could have been us” was a hard blow, and he nearly lashed out over it. But he's been out for a few years, had to face himself. Feeling that initial reaction, he realized he didn't like how unfair it was. How unjust. After getting over the first bit of shock and pain, he worked hard to make the transition for Tender and Cook as smooth and comfortable as possible. Ace might be tired, but he's got nothing on these two. Horrortale Papyrus/Cook – For Ace there's always a slight bitter tang to his interactions with Cook. He never anything but patient with Cook, never less than polite, but there's a shadow over their interactions that he hasn't quite been able to escape. As illogical as he knows it is, he can't help but feel he failed Cook. He knows realistically that he had absolutely no control over what happened to Tender and Cook. But Cook is the closest any of the alts gets to actually being his brother. And that big-bro instinct doesn't just disappear in the face of logic.

Swapfell(Purple) Sans/Doc – Initially Ace and Doc butt heads in a big way. Ace isn't thrilled with the responsibility of corralling all these alts of him and his brother, but is also unwilling to trust anyone else with the task for more than a day or two. Doc has a deep rooted need to be in charge. Conflict was unavoidable. In the end, Ace was happy to step back on some of the more dull day-to-day running of the camp to give Doc some measure control. Ace gets to be lazy, Doc gets to play boss. Everything settled down fairly well. Swapfell(Purple) Papyrus/Flint – Flint is an absolute shit disturber. He enjoys sowing chaos anywhere he can. He's smart enough (and has the self-preservation instincts) to keep it mostly out of camp, but if you let him get bored, you’re liable to go into town only to be run right back out with no idea why. He is highly intelligent, and damn good with money. He can drum up business anywhere. Keeps a cool head, but his demeanor can come off disrespectful, so its a toss up whether its worth it to bring him along to meetings and negotiations or not.

Fellswap Gold Sans/Haze – Ace finds Haze to be a little too uptight for his tastes, but can appreciate the work he does for the gang. He recognizes the importance of what Haze does, and to a degree the artistry of dealing with politics and socialites. Its just not his thing, and while there's no bad blood between them, Haze wouldn't be his first choice to hang out.

Fellswap Gold Papyrus/Cirrus – It's easy to feel protective of Cirrus. He's a younger brother, and more than that, arguably has the softest personality out of the bunch. This does make it easy to forget that he is also highly trained, and the best long distance shot out of the bunch. He stays with his brother, so they don't interact much, but Ace does enjoy the quiet company on the rare occasion they're in the same place.

Underlust Sans/Shine – Uncomfortable, is generally how Ace feels around Shine. Ace is far from a prude himself, but Shine is forward and bold on a whole other level. Shame isn't a thing for Shine, and he knows exactly what buttons to push to put you on edge. Whether that means sexual tension, a subtle threat of violence, or just raw embarrassment depends entirely on circumstance and Shine's mood. Shine never lets Ace forget that he's his intellectual equal, even if their fields differ wildly.

Underlust Papyrus/Calico – Calico is a bit of a point of confusion for Ace. At first glance one expects him to have the base energetic personality type of Lief and Scout, but he actually comes off quite serene. He has a gentle self-assuredness, that makes it easy to relax in his presence. He radiates comfort and hospitality, and comes off quite coy. It can be rather frustrating as Ace, like many others, finds himself relaxing a bit too much, and agreeing to things he really hadn't meant to. None of its ever harmful or malicious, so he lets it go with a reminder to both Calico and himself to not let it happen again. It always happens again.

#CowTale #Undertale #CT!Sans #Ace #Sans #UT!Sans #AU!Sans

[aldridgebay]

Name: Cessily Summers

Pronoun: Female

Age and birthday: 26, May 15th

Residence Status: Local

Family connections: none

Occupation: Trainee hotel owner

Played by: Admin Emerald

Cessily’s life could have been a tragic and traumatic one given her origin and backstory but the reality she finds herself in couldn’t be further from a tragedy.  Her relationship with her biological father lasted all of approximately 3 hours.  Enough time for him to get into a drink and drug induced one night stand which had unexpected consequences.  Not that he knew or cared about those consequences, when the deed was done he was gone, never to be seen again.

Her relationship with her biological mother lasted slightly longer.  They were together for a whole eight and a half months before Cessily decided enough was enough and wanted out early.  Her mother had been equally as drunk and high during the one night stand and never changed her destructive lifestyle while carrying Cessily.  She had continued to drink heavily, smoke and do various drugs throughout the pregnancy.

Had it not been for a couple of good Samaritans Cessily would have been born literally in the streets of Eugene but the passers by got her mother, who was drunk and high on whatever her latest kick was, into an ambulance and to the nearest hospital.  Miraculously Cessily was born without a hitch but she was completely silent as a newborn.  For her own safety she was never handed to her mother but was instead moved to a special care unit so that she could be monitored for any side effects of being born prematurely - of which there were none that were obvious.

The red flags were raised immediately and after a single visit from social workers it was decided her mother was in no way suitable to bring up a child, especially given her reckless behaviour during the pregnancy and utter disinterest in her newborn child.  Cessily was placed immediately into the adoption system and a brief search of approved families found the perfect candidates to take her in and give her a life on the completely opposite side of the social scale - the Summers family, shareholders in the nearby Aldridge Boardwalk and owners of the Summer Sun Hotel, also in Aldridge.  The couple had been trying for a baby of their own for years but had been unsuccessful so they had decided to adopt.  One look at baby Cessily was all they needed to fall for her big dark eyes and they started the adoption process, getting accepted almost immediately due to the profile of the family.

On the day they picked her up they gave her the name Cessily, after St Cecilia, the patroness of musicians.  It was a name linked more to the hotel than the family itself as the hotel was marketed as a modern alternative to the Cozy Inn with up to date facilities and live music or entertainment throughout the summer season.  The name was a symbol of Cessily leaving her very early days and the biological parents who had failed her behind forever.  The accelerated adoption process meant the standard health checks were completed quicker than usual and a false-positive result wasn’t noticed and wouldn’t come to light until a few years later.  Regardless; Cessily was a very happy and loved baby who was surrounded by family who welcomed her with open arms and doted on her maybe just a little bit too much.

Throughout her very early years some unusual quirks started to be spotted by people who spent the most time with Cessily, most notably her parents.  When they found out later what was causing the quirks it was a case of the signs were all there but weren’t being looked for so the dots weren’t connected.  There were a number of so-called ‘lucky escapes’ where a loud noise was accidentally created in or near the room where Cessily was sleeping but she didn’t stir or wake up.  Cessily seemed more bemused than entertained by toys and rattles which made different noises and often gave the impression of being completely oblivious to anything happening around her that wasn’t right in front of her.  She remained a very quiet baby, rarely crying but also rarely seeming to take an interest in what was around her as she ignored the radio, voices around her and was very slow to recognise her own name.

The moment of realisation came at a gathering of all the Boardwalk committee member families organised by Magnus.  Cessily was old enough to sit unaided and was contentedly playing with a toy that had lots of different fabrics to stimulate her sense of touch.  The fabrics were all different colours and each one made a different sound when scrunched as well.  One of Magnus’ children had come bursting into the room through a door behind Cessily, screaming at the top of their voice as they ran around the room.  Everyone in the room had jumped… except Cessily who continued to scrunch her fabrics.  It was only when the other child ran in front of her that Cessily reacted and that reaction was surprise that the other child was there… like she’d had no idea they had just been running around screaming behind her.

At that moment the penny dropped in her father’s mind - Cessily was deaf.

A hearing test was immediately booked and the suspicions were confirmed, suddenly all the little quirks made sense.  Cessily’s world changed almost overnight.  Toys that did nothing but make noises disappeared, replaced by ones that flashed or buzzed or had different textures to feel.  Nobody tried to get her attention without being in her eyesight any more either and they found she became much more reactive to them now that they understood what she was experiencing.

Further tests were scheduled to establish the extent of Cessily’s hearing loss and what the best course of action was going forwards.  Her parents took sign language classes and began teaching signs to Cessily as early as they could.  There was a delay in Cessily developing speech but that was to be expected now and she had a method of communication despite this.  Her hearing loss was rated as severe - she could hear some things, but not much and not well.

Over the next few years further tests and research was completed to uncover how, if at all, Cessily’s hearing could be improved.  Her parents and surrounding family had accepted that there may be nothing that could be done and she was already enrolled in a deaf-specific school.  If Cessily remained completely deaf for the rest of her life she would still be loved and accepted but due to this being a brand new scenario for everyone involved they wanted a complete picture of what options were available to them so that they could decide what was best for their darling daughter.

The cause of Cessily’s deafness was found and it turned out there was a procedure she could undergo which could potentially help her hear better with the addition of hearing aids as well.  It may not work or may not improve things by much but it was decided it was worth a go.  Cessily underwent the procedure and had special hearing aids made.  Her parents spared no expense, wanting Cessily as comfortable as possible they upgraded her to a private room at the hospital.  Having been along for the whole ride with the family, members of the Boardwalk committee also got together to commission some custom made hearing aids with Cessily’s initials on them.

Her parents both say that their fondest memory of Cessily is from a few days after the procedure on the day the hearing aids were tried for the first time.  Seeing their little girl sitting in her hospital room with her new hearing aids in and seeing the smile that truly filled Cessily’s face when she heard her parents voices for the first time.  Her hearing was by no means perfect, but it was much improved.

Cessily remained at the deaf schools and continued her sign language classes, eventually picking up both American and British Sign Language as she saw tourists coming to visit the Boardwalk and staying at the hotel that were signing but she couldn’t understand.  She took speech classes at school and also had a private tutor to progress her further which helped her become much more engaged in any Boardwalk gatherings that were held though she had a tendency to hold back in public or when surrounded by new people.  Cessily picked up lip reading very quickly and the process was helped along by everyone that could signing to her as they spoke.

When she turned sixteen Cessily was sat down by her parents to have a serious conversation and the adults had agreed that it would be completely signed as that was what Cessily was most comfortable with.  Cessily being adopted had never been a secret and she had known as soon as she had been old enough to understand what that meant, but the reasons why she was adopted had always been kept vague until now.  Cessily was told everything that was known of her biological mother and how she had come to be in her parent’s care.  They also offered to help find her biological parents should Cessily wish to meet them.  The young girl was very grateful for the offer but there was nothing her biological parents could give her and she had no interest in meeting them.  The offer was kept open so if at any point she changes her mind she will have the support and help of the family but Cessily can’t see herself ever changing her mind.

By the time Cessily turned eighteen she had grown into a somewhat shy and quiet girl in large crowds or when surrounded by new people but if she was comfortable and with people she knew she was able to have them hanging on her every word - even when she wasn’t actively speaking.  Her mastery of lip reading, two forms of sign language and speech therapy meant that communication wasn’t too much of an issue for her and she was truly in her element when surrounded by her non-hearing friends as well.

It quickly became clear that Cessily wasn’t a comfortable leader, much preferring to be a follower and chiming in when she could.  She definitely wasn’t one for presenting ideas in a grand way but the ideas were definitely there.  What Cessily could do was watch a situation unfold, analyse it, then at the perfect moment step in with a quiet suggestion that was obvious to her but others were struggling to think of.  She was a natural problem solver and once she was old enough she was invited to get involved in the running of the hotel, her parents completely looking past her disability and positioning her to take over one day and maybe even step into the Boardwalk committee when the time came.

Her father was thrilled to have an outside-the-box thinker in the hotel and Cessily was very good in her rather ambiguous and nameless role at the hotel so he always encouraged her to get more and more involved.  Cessily enjoyed the day to day running of the hotel in the summer season, the varying people coming through always brought something new with them but she found herself getting bored and unengaged during the off season.  Her father was rather disappointed with this but her mother took a more pragmatic approach and she encouraged Cessily to find her own interests and not feel pressured into anything related to the family business.

It was over a particularly quiet winter that Cessily discovered a love of art.  The visual medium appealing strongly to her given her circumstances.  She had a natural talent for it as well and with a lot of practice and hard work she developed her own recogniseable style.  One of her proudest moments is watching her father hang a painting she had completed of the Boardwalk up in the hotel reception area.  Seeing her father be supportive of something not hotel-based gave her the confidence to finally ask him for something she had been holding on to for a while - she wanted to go to university to study art.  Seeing how much it meant to her, her father agreed and hid his disappointment that she may not follow in his footsteps and take over the hotel one day.  Cessily surprised him once again though, as she so often did.

After studying hard and acing her degree in art Cessily had a wide selection of options available to her, but she chose to stay at home and return to helping with the hotel whilst still progressing her art online.  Her father was thrilled with Cessily’s renewed enthusiasm and with her artwork serving as a more suitable creative outlet her ideas for the hotel became more focused and slowly began to increase in scale and scope as well.

Cessily’s story is in no way a secret and she is widely known throughout the town of Aldridge, not just for her presence at the hotel but now for her artwork as well which often focuses on some of the key town locations, showing off its best side as well as the variety of the Boardwalk throughout the different seasons of the year.

What is their opinion about the boardwalk and it’s effect on the town?

Cessily, of course, fully supports the Boardwalk.  She has seen first hand the amount of work her father puts into it despite being under Magnus Beasley in the overall stakes but she also understands the Boardwalk’s success is directly linked to that of the hotel.  One cannot exist without the other and she’s not about to let her family’s business fail because a few people don’t like the seasonal influx of tourists.

#vanessa marano #oc rpg #town rpg #new rpg #lsrpg #cessily summers #taken character #admin emerald #female

[artificialqueens]

don't play the fool now (multi) - chapter 3 - lily2

[ summary ] : aquaria is having a ball of a time with her new mission though sharon can’t help but be worried for her daughter and shea has definitely bitten off more than she can chew.

[ authors note ] : I’m not dead! just busy, I’m not trying to neglect this au, I hope y'all enjoy, can you tell I’m struggling to write characters that aren’t sasha / katya / adore ?

— ✧*。

Sharon nervously sat in her chair, attempting to play it off by staring at her phone though she quickly put it down and turned, sipping her drink in the seclusion of her office, the anxiety in her face must’ve clearly been showing as Alaska snickered, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder, “Jesus, I can smell your worry from about a million miles away, she will be absolutely fine.”

“You think so?”

Of course Sharon trusts Aquaria with everything in her, that was her own teammate and more importantly her daughter. Sure, there wasn’t any official paperwork truly stamped and saying in bold print that they were related or that she was adopted but never did she feel so strongly about someone in a motherly sense, Aquaria came when she was ten and when Sharon was twenty two, a hopeless and homeless child who was tossed place to place constantly until her parent’s rotted in jail and she had nowhere to be but the streets.

Sharon couldn’t get all the credit for finding and raising Aquaria, it was really Alaska who first found her, passed out and extremely cold in the dead hit of winter and took it upon herself to take the risk and bring her back to the underground, Bianca was of course furious but now she kicked herself for it: Aquaria was loyal, she was beautiful, she was intelligent and didn’t once speak of her old life, thankful for what she was and where she was brought into.

“Of course, she’s your daughter, with quotes around the word.” Alaska smiled brightly and stole a sip of her alcoholic drink, “Jesus that’s something.” She coughed out the words before clearing her throat, “Besides, she’s been asking Bianca for a mission for who even knows how long, she’s trustworthy and just as good as her mother I’m assuming.”

The flirtatious nature of her tone didn’t sit too well in the moment with Sharon who was just stressed, wanting to hear from her atleast a text but she knew she could ruin the entire mission if she did, her nerves would have to spike down for the moment and luckily the best distraction was Alaska since Bianca was also gone but more to see Katya, that wasn’t a major concern.

It had been three hours, Alaska counted for Sharon she had waited in her office, staring at the clock and occasionally laughing at some weird joke or story the blonde had beside her to tell, to get her a bit out of the mood and herself again.

Curling a piece of hair around her fingers Alaska gave a kiss to Sharon’s head, “Relax.” She whispered, she repeated it as she gently grabbed her shoulders and crouched a bit to be at eye level with her, “I know, I know, it’s an assignment and I should know she’s trustworthy and trained well, I know.”

Sharon had been with Bianca from the beginning of it all, they met at fifteen, Bianca raised well into the underground markets of hitmen, mafia, druga, violence, all that— it didn’t take long for her to absorb all of it and own it, all under her fingertips and so oddly at peace and calm with it, almost as if it was boring and the expected. When a dazed Sharon begging for something to do, definitely having a few kills under her belt even with her age, a job, Bianca quickly jumped on it and here she was: thirty two and still changed her hair color every three or four months.

And then there was Alaska who joined right after Sharon, at nineteen she had just come from escaping the cops and her own problems, hearing about the underground from Jinkx who knew her since they were kids. She was definitely Sharon’s favorite and anyone could sense it from a mile away, their relationship however was a bit complicated. Not complicated but maybe strained— Alaska didn’t want commitment or a relationship in a business where she could be killed or targeted at any moment and Sharon could only nod and let whatever happened, happen.

Multiple times of kissing, sharing a bed, sleeping together, everything possible had happened to them already. Alaska didn’t ever mind the affection or them being obvious in front of the rest of the teammates, it was really just when Sharon tried to make things permanent that Alaska had a problem, never wanted to go on a date, no cutesy romantic gestures allowed.

Alaska didn’t want commitment.

It wasn’t them playing around either, the jealously that boiled through Alaska’s veins whenever Sharon spoke about men or women flirting with her on various missions was enough of a satisfaction to her, seeing the blonde so winded and so aggravated.

Bianca, Sharon, Alaska, Jinkx and Bob were the original five who had met, become engulfed in the business and really built the team up but it was Bianca (who always had the final say regardless), Sharon, Bob and Raja who had the power and leadership tendencies with their own circles and ranks though it always all boiled back to the throne, as Alaska called it, which was Bianca unsuprisingly to everyone.

A sudden burst of the door had Sharon completely jump from her seat and dust off her dress, looking at Alaska who looked around and shrugged, unaware of who it was though Aquaria or Violet seemed like the most viable options.

“Mom!”

Sharon heard it in a voice so clear that she ran out her office, Alaska shaking her head. “Aquaria!” She yelled out her door before the two made eye contact and quickly collapsed at the couch into eachother, “Fuck kid, you can’t just not text me.” She kissed her head and smiled, gasping once she looked at her face and noticed the dried blood from her nose and the skin open on her neck in three slashes, “I’m fine, I’m fine, really!”

The panic running through Sharon was enough for Alaska to widen her eyes looking at how deep the cuts actually ran and went to go out the door, “I’m getting some stuff, hang on.”

Aquaria sniffled and groaned as Sharon was quick to take a tissue and brush the dried blood off, “I’m fine, really!” She insisted, her rose gold sequin dress was stained with blood at the sides but she ignored that, usual part of the job, focusing more on her face and looking at her neck, “No you’re not, what happened?” She spoke as she bit her tongue, they looked awful and battered.

“Well we killed him, Violet took the shot because he punched me after I tried to hold him down, I should’ve thought through the fact he was about five inches taller than me and definitely twice my size.” She laughed though Sharon didn’t find it too amusing so she continued with a small grin, “Basically we brawled and fingernails got involved but—” she showed her hand that had perfectly sharp and studded long stiletto nails, “I think we know who won that.”

She had to grin a bit at Aquaria’s clean and primed nails, “I’m fine, I’m fine.” She muttered to Sharon who worriedly hugged her and sighed into her shoulder, pulling back and nodding, she was okay just bruised up but they got the target, Aquaria held up a wallet and smirked wildly, Sharon laughed and clapped, “So even is he, Bianca didn’t tell me too much.”

“So originally we needed to find his daughter, more for finding out who this original person was, Bianca said he was Alaska’s old laywer who betrayed her and all that jazz but instead, we found something else, his daughter was far too busy with poker to notice that his own assistant was there.”

Now I’m starting to see why Bianca didn’t want to tell me too much.

“So we flirted around, got drinks, acted normal, all of that preliminary shit.” Aquaria ran a hand through her straight hair, “Long story short we got to a private area, reserved for special members, killed him, grabbed his wallet and ran.”

“So this isn’t the father? Just his assistant?” The disappointment in Sharon’s voice quick to make Aquaria stand and pull out some of the cards in the wallet, “Yes but guess what? He has a copy of every ID and identification of the father since he was his personal assistant.”

Slowly she puzzled it together, “Because of security measures, they’d never let him carry it since he is so desired and wanted and easy to rob let’s face it, the man is beyond his years, but the assistant would be a smart choice since no one really gives a shit, no one would show up at his house thinking he had any good information or valuables of the guy but he does, all in his leather wallet.”

She threw it on the table, it was slightly perfectly clean and Sharon couldn’t help but groan, smiling and hugging her daughter, “I’m such a proud mother.” Aquaria’s eyes glimmered with nothing but pride, “I’m so glad, it was fun and sometimes a bit tense but, I’m glad.”

The door opened again and they both sat, Aquaria laying down and putting her head in Sharon’s lap, beyond tired. Alaska nodded once more, “I’m back and with the best medic!” She winked before Peppermint presented herself and carried her in her two boxes, all full of supplies.

“Sorry to intrude so late.”

Peppermint was far too soft for her own good, it was almost suprising she was still here though she was definitely the best medic they had, she had a damn bachelor’s of science in biology until she decided to drop out, school and especially nursing school far too much to handle. Her real name was Agnes but no one really used it, Peppermint was her nickname and it stuck with everyone for years. The lingering risk of hospitals and having to expose identities was why they all were so thankful for the medics they had with them.

“Oh c'mon, you’re acting like your job isn’t important.” Aquaria sweetly replied, “I know it is, I hear it everyday.” Peppermint gently moving Aquaria around and crouching so she should look around at her nose, “Okay, are you currently having any difficulty breathing?”

“I did when being driven back home but once I cleaned out all the blood that was dried I’m breathing easier, it’s just a bit more difficult.” Peppermint nodded and glanced from back before coming in close again, “Well, it’s not good if you’re not breathing easy and I can tell from a mile away your nose is crooked, you broke your nose is what I’m trying to say.”

As expected, Aquaria didn’t find it much of a surprise though Sharon almost wanted to collapse to which Alaska sat right next to her and latched onto her arms, “It’s fine, she’s fine.” She muttered close to her ear before nodding at Sharon’s uneasy glance.

“As for these around your neck, these are awful, I say we do these as soon as possible because they look open and god forbid you get an infection, do you mind doing it now or would you rather wait in the morning? You’ll sleep through it or pass out either way with the medicine.”

Aquaria looked at Sharon who only shrugged and left it up to her, “Yeah, let’s do it now.” No hesitation in her voice from the reply as Peppermint smiled and helped her up, taking her by her arm and making sure she didn’t touch anything and told Aquaria to lift her head a bit. “I’ll take her back when she’s finished, don’t worry about her, she’s in good hands!” The door closed and Sharon was left with Alaska, she completely had all faith in their medics but nothing could really make her worry less about Aquaria, it was the “motherly instincts” as Bianca would tell her when she was far too paralyzed about Aquaria being hurt or bruised up.

“She’s an adult, she knows what she’s doing, don’t worry.” Pressing a kiss to her head before shaking her hair, grabbing Sharon’s hand, “It’s late, let’s sleep please.”

For once she didn’t refuse and nodded, getting up knowing it be better to just rest and wake up with a more clear mind in the morning, Aquaria would be fine, she would be fine and getting all the stitches done meant she wouldn’t have to worry about infection or other underlying problems.

She will be okay.

*.✧

“Pep, I met the most gorgeous girl yesterday during the mission.” Shea whispered, hitting her close friends shoulder, Peppermint rolling her eyes, “You’re playing with fire if you’re trying to win a girl over especially one you met while on a damn mission.”

Completely lovestruck Shea flushed, laughing and feeling all her nerves come out. “Well about that…” She begun as Peppermint crossed her arms, extremely curious to where this conversation was going as they sat and ate, the food from the small Chinese market across the block, there was absolutely nothing Peppermint loved more than Asian food and if ten dollars meant twenty five dumplings then she and Shea were sold.

She plopped one of the dumplings into the soy sauce before waving a hand, wanting Shea to continue, she covered her mouth to speak, “And?” She said on the edge of what exactly Shea wanted to say.

“You know Katya right?”

Peppermint glared, “I would hope so after being here for five fucking years!” She yelled laughing as her friend shook her head, trying not to laugh at how stupid the question was once she said it a dumpling in her mouth, she swallowed before continuing, tapping the marble table that they sat in, biting her lip, knowing she couldn’t possibly lie or get out of this.

“It’s her sister.”

The second the three words left her lips Peppermint gasped and almost dropped her entire bowl of dumplings, quickly catching herself and slamming her plate on the table before looking around, knowing no one would be up at seven anyway, they all slept in until noon unless Bianca called for it.

“Please tell me you’re joking.” She whispered as she stared at Shea square in the face, “I need to know everything and anything!” She yelped, clapping her hands before pointing, “But don’t get it twisted, I don’t support this, you’re putting yourself in real danger here messing around with her sister who Bianca said is now a detective.”

Even Shea’s face bleached white at that point, “She— she’s a what?” Her face and tone unclear and confused, Sasha hadn’t brought it up at all though in retrospect why would she? In a casino, late at night, that seems a bit too much to give away. “She’s a detective Shea, Bianca told me when I was getting Aquaria stitched up.”

Suddenly everything became more clear to Shea: why she hesitated to speak more about Katya, keeping the questions closed on her job, why she seemed so anxious someone had spoken to her, why they exchanged numbers— Sasha was a detective and of course blissfully unaware of what Shea was doing as a job, seeing her as a normal human which was refreshing to say the least but this was a bad combination already.

“But she’s so gorgeous and intelligent and she just oozes personality and wit.” She whined to Peppermint who could only sit and laugh at her misfortunate encounter gone right and also wrong.

“Well, I’m not going to snitch, that’s not my job.” She paused to laugh before clearing her throat and extending a hand to Shea who grabbed it and frowned, “But I’m going to say this, she might be Katya’s sister but that doesn’t mean we can be soft and nice to her, she’s still a detective and from what Bianca told me, Katya understands that we’d do what we have to if circumstances rise and she tries to play us out and locate what we do.”

God, you are playing with me too hard right about now.

“I understand.” She swallowed her words hard, knowing that dammit there was something there! Shea hated to sound like a romance novel and blinded by her emotions but Sasha was different and interested in her just as Shea was interested back.

“Good morning!” Yelled Vanessa who quickly stole a dumpling from Shea’s plate, as expected. “These are fucking great, I should start waking up earlier to actually go on food adventures with you guys.” Peppermint smiled sweetly, “It’s the perks of insomnia that comes with the job.”

The Pureto Rican cackled, “Okay but seriously, this is from Bianca.” She tossed the black file to Shea as Peppermint leaned back into her chair, offering her more food which she graciously accepeted, going at it immediately.

“I’m gonna go.” Shea stood up and grabbed her bag and phone, leaving the file after she skimmed through it and landed on what she needed to do, immediately getting up. “I’ll be back in a few hours.” She replied quickly to a confused Vanessa and Peppermint who glanced with furrowed brows, not even getting a word in before Shea shut the door and was running down the building.

She knew she wouldn’t but Peppermint grabbed the file anyway and opened it, beyond bewildered by Shea’s response, staring at Vanessa out of curiosity who only shrugged with innocent hands, “Hey now, I only delivered this, I didn’t take one peak.”

Putting the file down she sighed, shaking her head, completely unsurprised at what the file entailed for Shea.

“She has a lot of trouble on her hands.”

#rpdr fanfiction #aquaria #sharon needles #alaska thunderfuck 5000 #peppermint #shea coulee #vanessa vanije mateo #shalaska #sashea #lesbian au #hitman au #detective au #dptfn #don't play the fool now #concrit welcome #submission #roza

[skinny-boy-endeavours]

Warning: this message might shock most people, although I assume only people with an interest in these issues are likely to read it till the end, and if you are an ex-anorexic or bulimic, or a person scanning the web in search for potential culprits against your good sense, this is perhaps not going to please you. All the same, I will write it.

Since I have been living with eating disorders, more than a decade, and very nearly two decades have elapsed, and since I have joined Tumblr in a hope of finding some comfort and expressing myself at times like “these”, not even one decade has elapsed. I am a boy, I am twenty-eight, I have suffered from eating disorders for as long as I can remember, at about when switching from childhood to adolescence. I have taken a lot upon myself, and am still taking quite a lot, either out of habit or by sheer automatic resignation. I have finished my studies, I have my university diploma, I have remained at the same workplace for several years and I am both reliable and disciplined. But in the last ten years, I have been hospitalized a dozen of times, most of which upon my own free decision, and always seemed to recover a little more each time from I knew not what exactly, but that made me heartsick to the extent of driving myself to suicide on several occasions (at least 5, almost successful, by severe poisoning). I did not heed, at first, that my parents and their controlling temperament and conduct towards me might have the invisible cause behind all my self-destructive behaviours. I still find it hard to evaluate to what extent their pressurizing and eternally unsatisfied influence has driven me to hate myself only, to bear all the pain and to live only a small percentage of what is normally called “life” only to justify my existence and temper their grave looks upon my miserable person. The first thing to be said is that anorexia, bulimia, eating disorders in general and all feverous afflictions, when befalling a young person, girl or boy, is never a “fancy”, nor an invention of problems that were nonexistent beforehand, but a real discomfort, if not a living pain that is being converted into self-destruction, for want of a proper way out to an every-moment-guilt of being alive, under the control pf one’s parents, for they are authorities that are not to be gotten rid of as long as the child is a “minor” or is under their tutelage. Even when this comes to pass, the sentiment of the child who has lived under such a control for years, legally speaking, may and sometimes will inevitably reproduce his unhealthy patterns, either by the constant skin-deep memory of his former captivity of lack of freedom, which, after all, and I understand it now, is the sole and only motive for eating disorders in an adolescent and for an entire-life-wrecking nervous indisposition. I have noticed that at a healthy distance from my parents, I thrive rather well, although I still am fragile, and that when I am intensely with them for at least three or four days, this fragility is increased twice, thrice or more, proportionally to the albeit small time I have passed in the fateful company of my parents, who, despite what might be concluded from the above-written, are loving and caring, and wish nothing but my wellbeing. How then is it possible to feel, to declare oneself oppressed and pressed if one’s parents do not beat or ill treat one ? This is the whole issue: the pain inflicted by controlling parents is infinitely more subtle than any amount of “Physical” beating or mistreatment. All the more, that it is involuntary, and the parents do not realize the pain they are inflicting, and their ignorance of their very own misbehaviour is greater as they don,t understand that their love for their children is being counterproductive and is actually undermining their child’s development into healthy adults, and most of the time, driving them to self-destructive behaviours. This is no victim-playing, one has better things to do than looking, and even finding, guilt where it dos not have an actual existence. But in this lies the problem of nervous disorders into young people and their subsequent mark left upon the young people who have become adults and have to live with their self-destructive envies or direct behaviours, probably until they die, having half-lived only, become the ghost of their either living or dead parents has taken much of their energy and has achieved its final task: make oneself self-hating although alive and “functional” in society. I know why initially, eating disorder suffering patients were rightfully and tactfully removed from their families, from the sickening environment almost entirely manifested by the parent(s) or care-giver, of whoever while wishing the best for one’s child, drives her or him to seek freedom from the yoke through means by which they can escape, both physically and emotionally, and breathe, and while in the presence of the yoke-masters, feel themselves free, at least temporarily, by taking control over the only things they have any over: in this case, food intake, calorie outtake, etc. Drug problems, self-harm, and the like, are all ways of coping with a pressure than has become internalized and persists even when the subject is withdrawn from his familial environment for one’s best recovery or when one is definitely away from it. So tis is what I feel today, and what I come to realize. Of course, I am aware that this may be my case only, and that for all sorts of people, all sorts of circumstances are accountable for all sorts of joys and pains, and consequent self-building or self-destructive behaviours; that all cases of nervous indispositions are not imputable to the familial environment or the parental controlling facies, yet, this is my case and for my wellbeing, I must try to formulate it in a rational manner both for myself and for those whom it might be of use to to read these sentences and find that, as invisible as it is, the cause of their nervous disorders (I must insist, also, that a nervous disorder is not a mere nervosity or stress felt from time to time, but a fundamental indisposition of the whole nervous system, that affect the entire life and both physical and mental health of an individual, and it often drives one from depression to anxiety and back again, until one either is taken into a hospital for rest, or commits suicide although the material conditions in which he lives are what most of our “gentle-natured philanthropists would consider to be far above 2/3 of the world’s average material conditions). The whole point of this is not to throw guilt everlastingly upon one’s parents for all that happens, far from it. But if one is of a fragile nervous disposition and his parental environment does not help this disposition otherwise than retrogressively, as in my case of a till-here lasting eating disorder and as I imagine, of several if not most other people, girls or boys, with eating disorders, then severance from those austere parents is perhaps the first and most important step to be taken, either by the patient’s initiative or by his therapist. It may not be advisable in all cases, as the patient’s have different personalities and have received the more or less bad influence from their own different environments, but I am quite certain that in many instances of anorexia or bulimia or other EDs, this severance is salutary, and may, at the patient’s will, be prolonged as indefinitely as needed, for the invisible controlling influence can follow the patient, as I have already said, like a ghost, it matters not if the parents are still “physically” alive or not, or have been “objectively” demanding/austere/controlling/oppressing. The goal of this is not to spend one’s life in accusation of one’s parents, nor to remain mournful of one’s past, but once this step made, this important step, for the patient to be able to distinguish the part of himself that WANTS to suffer, to destroy himself and punish himself (eating disorders are self-harming coping methods, again, that can become internalized and last within the individual even years after the last definite severance from the individual’s unheeding parental environment/influence. I have repeatedly insisted upon this point, because once understood, as an underlying rule to unlock a difficult calculus of mathematics or physics, it will become not only easier, but truly feasible for the patient, whether he his 12 or 30, to know herself or himself and, as I had started to disert upon a little earlier, to know that his unhappiness is rooted in a self-hated that is rooted in a distorted perception of one’s worth and value as a human, as she or he perceives herself of himself as the direct product of his parents and must be perfect in every way and every instance, until it becomes untenable and metamorphoses itself into an altogether endeavour for irreproachability and self-control, which in its turn becomes what we call an “eating” disorder”. This is no freudian explanation of the mother or father sense within the child who either wants to kill the latter in order to freely fuck the former or simply hates them and eventually, himself, and strive never to resemble either of them by saying yes when they say no and reversely. This only means that the motive for an eating disorder is, in many cases, whether felt immediately and clearly or not, or only later, and to various degrees, a consequence of one’s unhealthy parental behaviour. I have written all this because it has become clear over time, gradually, and not all at once nor in a very definite and clear perception, for it is likely to change over time, as I live on, but these two tendencies, I have observed to remain constant and increasingly self-evident over time, regardless of individual circumstances: that is, 1) that my self-observation has always led me to understand that my self-destructive tendency varies along with my frequentation and near-sensing of my parents, who renew my self-hate, diminish or augment it proportionally, 2) that as long as eating disorders have been observed, whether they had already received a name of some sort or this generally nowadays accepted name, the tendency of the observer was that either the mother or the father had a devastating influence upon their child, an influence which, albeit invisible or at least very subtile, is very real and real enough to drive the child to self-destruction although their material condition is either normal or above the average. They are unhappy and feel oppressed enough to starve themselves, or to purge themselves, or have suicidal thoughts and or behaviours. Even in ancient cases, such as the all-too-famous on of Santa Caterina da Siena, the anorexic behaviour was associated if not entirely attributable to the mother’s controlling influence. In some other cases, modern or ancient, it may be the father’s controlling influence, which, of course, might not be physically agressive, but, upon a subtler plane, emotionally, intellectually, agressive, often when he has achieved some degree of intellectual authority and tries to impress it upon his child’s senses that she or he is to be at least equally rigorous, important or what not, which the child would have fain achieved even, and better so, without this moral pressure upon her or his nerves. Now, there are things upon which one cannot go back, but it is important, at least for me at this moment, to identify this cause, and to work from the knowledge of that efficient cause of the nervous/eating disorder to move forward, and have a decent life, because one cannot have it unless one makes this turn upon oneself and sees that what impedes one is the parental ghost, and I mean this without any psychoanalytical sentiment, for I do not see it as intervening in the eating disorder instance. This is equally true in the case of the freudian explanation of anorexia, that the mother being the material feeder of the child, the child stops eating when his mother’s will she or he fells antagonistic to its own. This is good for allegorical mythology, but not for practical problems that demand a practical solution: in this instance, what has to be understood, and what indeed HAS a relationship with either of the patient’s parents or with both, is that across time and space, this relationship is the root of the problem, which itself is not a one-sided guilt, it would be too easy, but rather a bad or shock meeting of genetic nervous indisposition on one side and of an austere or controlling parental influence on the other. Eating disorders become the only way out imaginable for this situation that involves no culprit but that involves as surely as possible at least one victim: the child who seeks freedom from a legal bondage, and tries to grow and to develop herself or himself under this constant nervous strain. The formerly eating-disordered children who, like myself, have gone into the adult age still carrying their self-destructive patterns and have tried to be a good citizen while waking with the envy of suicide in the morning and going to bed in tears, sleeping by the grace of strong drugs and working like a normal person by who knows whose grace, must, I declare it bluntly, turnabout and sweet is the cause of their lasting pain and poor mental health, which, in this instance, affects the whole physical organism equally, and can damage it permanently (the nervous indisposition has already a disabling effect upon the entire being, both during the adolescent growth wherein the individual is normally meant to build himself, and after the end of hormonal growth when one is an adult; the added problem of an eating disorder, superposed upon this already fragile nervous system, may be very destructive physically, and even more so as time rolls on, but also on the mind and the emotional faculties, which become prematurely tired and strained, especially when entertained over years, and eventually decades). I therefore conclude my long word, and also congratulate my reader upon his patience, by saying that an eating disorder is controlling parental influence + genetic nervous disposition and that the recovery can neither be forced upon the patient as an evidence nor even occur in the mind of the patient while her or his father or mother has not been identified as the cause of her or his emotional imbalance, and subsequently and consequently, been put aside from one’s life and definitely either discarded or healthily dealt with (by regulating, if not abolishing, the rapports one has with one’s parents or with the one in question that has an unhealthy bearing upon the child’s nerves). Now, this is only my opinion, and I perhaps imagine everything and I am not sick after all and all this is but a bad dream... But, on the other hand, I know not why, I feel that most eating disordered people, young or less young, will relate with the few statements I have abode made, and find that they describe their own cases quite accurately, because what I have singled out as the one invariable ou almost invariable tendency across time and space, in the case of EDS, is the parental influence, and it is a tendency because it cannot, totally at least, be dissociated from the very problem of EDs, and I am quite sure that those who have read this hitherto shall feel that they are not alone, and that behind their apparent madness, and underneath their emotional pain, there is something quite similar across the cases, and that something subtle lies at the foundation of it, something that has its constancy across the circumstances, and that determines the appearance of the coping method known under the name of eating disorders.

Saturday the 18th of May, 2019

[serpentsangel]

Raised on the Wrong Side: Part Five

Taglist: @swordsandserpents @nonononononono-i-cant  @smilexoxoes @valeriemusiclove  @kayladooley @choke-me-sweet-pea @evyiione @daya-thelastunicorn @truthfulchange 

Also tagging some of my favorite blogs, much love to them: @sweetspea @southsideserpentsweetpea

A/N: (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ PART FIIIIIIVE. I have a better plan now on how I want to direct this story, so I am now even MORE excited to write the story with the things that I have in store for you. I really do appreciate you guys for supporting this so far, I started writing this when I was in a sleep-deprived state but full of inspiration and just word vomited it all out, but your support has given me the drive I needed to continue and now I have an entire story in store for you <3 Thank you <3

Plot:  (Y/N) adapts to her new life down in the South and having everyone wanting to go after her, while Sweet Pea tries to figure out what the outsider is doing to him and why he’s acting the way he does whenever she’s around.

Warnings: Some language and mild violence

Words: 2,271

Part One // Part Two // Part Three // Part Four 

Part Five

(Y/N) woke up on the floor where FP laid out some pillows, stretching her arms as the morning light came through a small crack through the curtain. Emptiness and quiet echoed through the trailer, except for the pesky morning birds that insist on having a concert this early in the morning. (Y/N) gets up from the floor, stretching her arms and heads to the kitchen to grab a glass of water.

“Jones! Are you in there?” A voice calls out. (Y/N) groans as she walks and opens the door, Fangs stood there, his hand still up ready to knock but they stayed there as his eyes scanned down and noticed that (Y/N) forgot to put her pants on. “Uh….”

“Eyes up here, perv.” She snaps her fingers in his face and Fangs clears his throat as she looks back up at her. “If you’re looking for Jughead, he isn’t here.” (Y/N) looks behind Fangs and sees the usual Sweet Pea and Toni. “Did you need anything in particular?”

“Clearly he isn’t here, let’s just head to school, guys.” Sweet Pea doesn’t make eye contact with (Y/N), in fact, it felt like he was trying to avoid her eyes in general. “He left without us.” Without a word of goodbye, the three of them left. (Y/N) walked back into the trailer and changed into some comfier pieces of clothing, her fathers Serpent jacket hanging up in the corner looking as abandoned as she felt inside. Hey, remember that no matter what happens to me, these people will always be here to take care of you. They are your family. The voice of her father rings through as she traces the pattern of the snake and each lettering on the back of the jacket. Memories of her strange fascination and fear of the double-headed snake but it was a symbol burned in the back of her head ever since her mother took her away. Ever since her father disappeared.

“You’re awake.” FP says as he enters the trailer with stealth, placing a plastic bag on the table.

“Do you think my mother killed my father?” (Y/N) spills out, the craziness of how she ended up in the North making links to the strangeness in her mothers behaviour and her obsessive tendencies to keep her away from the South seemed to make sense, sure she may sound like a lunatic but the not knowing has left a massive void in her life and the older she got, the more painful it became. “I mean, the day she takes me away so happens to be the day he disappears and out of everything she keeps from him, why the Serpent jacket? Why did she want to leave?”

FP purses his lips as he places his hands on (Y/N) shoulder and turns her around. “Look, we all have our own ideas on what happened to your father and yes it’s been long enough for us to assume we may never find him alive but regardless of what happened in your parents marriage, your mother would never do that.”

“Then why would she hide all of this from me? I was happy here. I felt like I belonged.”

“Your mother was brought into the Serpent game the moment she decided to be with your father. We Serpent’s, we believe that it’s a ride or die situation. Contrary to popular belief, we treat and respect each other like family, heck maybe even beyond that. We would put each other first beyond anyone else. Maybe it got too much for her, the kind of shenanigans that we are known for. She got tired of it and left. As she wasn’t around for long, we all sided with your father. You’re back now and all that matters is you start to be the Serpent you were meant to be.” Taking off the jacket from it’s hanging place, FP proudly puts the jacket on (Y/N), rolling the sleeves up and dusting off any of the excess dirt. “Now go get ‘em kiddo.” **** Jughead sat down last on the table missing the context of the conversation and was greeted with Fangs blurting out something about the ‘Northsider visiting’ Sweet Pea’s trailer. “So, what’d you guys do? Shake it out?” He nudges Sweet Pea in the rib but the dead shot look in his eyes got him quieted down, for now at least.

“(Y/N) went to see you? How does she even know where you live?” Jughead questions.

Sweet Pea shrugs. “I don’t know. She didn’t say, she just turned up wearing a Serpent jacket and I brought her in because she was going to get herself killed if anyone saw her in it.”

“Aw, does Sweet Pea have a sweet side?” Toni teased, pretending to pinch his cheeks. “I’m more surprised that a Northside girl is the one to finally break your tough barrier.” She lightly kicks him under the table as the others snickered. Sweet Pea was left with his jaw clenching tight, fists curling up wanting so desperately to start a fight with one of them but he kept his cool just enough not to cause any injury to his friends. As much as they pissed the hell out of him, he still would never want to hurt them personally. “It’s all in good name, Sweet Pea. If she hurts you, we won’t hesitate to hurt her back. We got you.”

“I’m going to take a walk.” Sweet Pea quickly gets up, throwing his trash away before storming out of the cafeteria. The empty hallways left space for him to think just to himself, he hated, absolutely hated, the mere idea that his friends think he could ever feel something like that for someone. “They think I care? Ha. It was just helping someone that clearly has no common sense.” He finds himself heading to his locker just as the other students started to swarm the hallways. Just as he closes his locker he felt someone bump into him. “Hey, watch it!” The kid didn’t seem to care, their eyes focused elsewhere. Sweet Pea follows his trail and sees (Y/N) approach, an annoyed groan stirs deep in his chest as she stops right by him. “Did those Serpents wanting to kill you not give you enough warning to not wear that jacket, princess?” He raises an eyebrow.

“Don’t give a shit.” (Y/N) pushes past him and goes to open the locker next to his.

Sweet Pea scares off the last few kids lingering around and leans against his locker and talks lowly to (Y/N), to ensure no one else heard them. “Things are different down here and you can’t just do whatever you want to do. You need to understand there are rules. There’s a structure to how things work around here. You may have the skin of a Serpent but to everyone else here you are still a Northside body and they’ll keep looking at you like that until you’ve proven yourself.”

“And what does this matter to you?” (Y/N) grins at Sweet Pea. “I can tell you really are trying hard to appease the Serpents but deep inside you’re thinking exactly what everyone else is thinking about, I’m some outsider claiming that my father was your old leader just to destroy you guys from the inside but not all snakes bite.”

“Halloween isn’t for a couple of months, honey.” A cold voice snapped from behind (Y/N) she turned to be faced with three people that cornered off all her points of escape, with Sweet Pea being behind her, she has nowhere else to go. “You aren’t tricking any of us here, Northsider especially not after your parade into here. You’re on our turf now.”

“Back off before either of us send you to the hospital.” Sweet Pea threatened, taking a step forward but (Y/N) crosses an arm across his torso to stop him from doing so. He looks down at her confused; no way can she take down three Ghoulies all on her own.

The Ghoulies scoffed. “You think you can fight us? Aren’t you worried you’ll crack your precious little nails?” As they laughed, (Y/N) swings her leg to knock over the apparent leader down. Moving quickly, she grips tightly to their arm, turns and elbows them right in the stomach twice before crouching them to place all her strength in throwing them down to the ground. (Y/N) lightly chokes the Ghoulie on the ground as she uses her body weight to hold them down, her nails digging slightly into their neck as they struggle to get up. A small crowd gathering, Sweet Pea silenced by the skills she possesses.

“Listen up here, asshole. You dare try to touch me ever again, I will not hesitate to dig these nails straight into your jugular vein and I’ll leave you bleeding here on these filthy floors and I won’t waste a second to do the same to any of your friends, got it?” The Ghoulie nods quickly. “I don’t understand you, scum.” (Y/N) tightens her grip around their neck as they croak out an audible ‘yes’. She releases them as their friends struggle to get them back up.  (Y/N) wipes her hands on her jeans before turning her attention back to Sweet Pea. “As you can tell, I will be fine regardless, you can look out for me as much as you want but I don’t need you.”

Watching her walk away, Sweet Pea couldn’t tell whether he was hurt, by her comment, or taking a liking to her for the brave display she presented earlier. Wait. Why does either of it matter? She doesn’t need me, so what? I don’t need her. Get it out of your head, idiot. Sweet Pea shakes it off before heading in the opposite direction to his class.

**** At Riverdale High, the student common room was fairly calm but the storm that is Reggie running in, huffing and puffing disrupted the relaxing aura, all eyes on him as he struggles to get a single word out. “Reggie, are you okay?” Archie gets up and helps him onto a seat. “Somebody get him a water, now!” Betty scrambles for some change to get a drink from the vending machine as she hands it over to Archie. “Hey, hey. What’s wrong?”

“(Y/N)…..” Reggie huffs out. Throwing the lid of the water bottle away to the side, Reg takes a big swig of it before taking a minute to let the water help him regain his speech back. “….it’s about (Y/N) I haven’t heard from her in a couple days and I went over to her place and her mother says she’s…..(Y/N) is missing!” All, except for Betty, gather around Reggie as he shakes from the devastation of the news.

“Hey man, calm down. It’ll be alright.” Archie sits carefully on the delicate armrest of the chair as he gives Reggie another bottle of water and a few paper towels to deal with the water spilling easily out of his shaking mouth.

“(Y/N) isn’t missing. Jug came by the other day saying she went down to the South. Something about trying to find out about her fathers disappearance. Reggie, you can see (Y/N).” Betty reached for her phone and sent a quick text to Jug, not long after, her phone buzzes again and she smiles softly. “Jug says she’s down at Southside High.”

Reggie gets up but Archie blocks his way. “I know what you’re thinking buddy but I am not going to let you go down there on your own. I’m coming with you.” “Count me in.” Betty and Kevin chime in.

“Guess it’s a little adventure.”

**** (Y/N) yawns lightly as she pushes through the crowds of over-excited students ready to go home and do nothing, this school was far more exhausting than she ever thought it’d be. In the attempt to spot her bike, she spotted someone else instead. “Reg?” Her heart skipped a beat as the two of them spotted each other. Shoving some students aside, Reg sprints over and wraps his arms around (Y/N) in a tight embrace, lifting her up from the grown and spinning her around. “What are you doing here? Wait, how did you even know I was here?”

“When I didn’t hear from you, I went to your place and your mother said you were missing but Betty said you came down here. What the hell are you doing coming down to this mess, babe?” (Y/N) tangles her hand with his, missing that touch. The guilt running through each embrace she wanted to tell him but he wouldn’t understand her and he would’ve tried to talk her out of it. This was one thing she needed to do on her own.

“It’s complicated, look. I’ll come see you when I can, alright?” (Y/N) smiles softly as she tiptoes and presses a kiss to his lips, calming him down. “Want to grab a bite?” She caresses his cheek and he nods, taking hold of her hand as they head for her bike, the others getting back in their own vehicles.

Sweet Pea stood still on the staircase, bearing witness to it all, his arms crossed firmly. A fiery feeling stirred up in his stomach but he couldn’t tell what it is. All he knows is that whoever that boy is, is someone he never wants to see again. Especially seeing him with her.

#sweet pea #reggie mantle #riverdale story #riverdale x reader #southside #southside high #southside serpents #riverdale high #riverdale imagine #riverdale fanfic #toni topaz #raised on the wrong side #northside

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 5, part I

Please note: these reviews contain spoilers for this season as well as other seasons of the reboot, and contain occasional references to the classic series.

Previously on Doctor Who: Russell T. Davies presided over the rebirth of the show, starting with Rose Tyler’s escape from mannequins in a shop and ending with the Tenth Doctor’s sad exit. Lots of glorious things happened, we met some fabulous new monsters, we were introduced to an unprecedented amount of information about companions’ homes and families, and if there were occasional detours into deeply annoying pieces of plot and characterization, there were also many triumphant forays into charming and highly emotional stories. Once Steven Moffat takes over as showrunner, the show gets more complicated; people usually mean by this that the plot becomes convoluted, which I think is only intermittently true, but the approach that the show takes to its characters is, to me, the much bigger leap in terms of complexity. In the Davies era, we had a lot of very emotionally demonstrative characters, who often verbalized their thoughts directly, and who had such expressive faces and body language that they were usually legible to us immediately even if they were refusing to speak about certain feelings. With Moffat in charge, I don’t think that the characters’ emotions are less deeply felt, but I do think that they are less directly expressed, to the point that elements of plot, music, and imagery are far more thoroughly burdened with conveying—sometimes with extreme subtlety, sometimes with banging-you-over-the-head obviousness—the feelings that the characters conceal from each other and occasionally from themselves. This season is not quite as subtext-heavy as the next one, but I do think that, while you can turn your brain off and enjoy much of this season as a compilation of lots of good jokes and some entertaining running around, it does seem like a very different kind of storytelling that fundamentally involves more work for the audience, at least if you want to grasp what’s going on with these characters. I don’t think that this is necessarily a qualitative difference—more directly visible characterization can be brilliant and can be terrible, and the same is true of more subtext-driven work. Sometimes, the Moffat era is smarter, in its indirect character-building, than the Davies era was, and sometimes it is clumsier, but regardless of the result, I do think that the approach is extremely different. With that said, plenty remains the same: the show is fun, the monsters are scary, and, as we start this new season, the Doctor is about to make an endearing new human friend.

The Eleventh Hour: There are two high-stakes situations unfolding very quickly in this episode: the Doctor has twenty minutes to save the Earth from incineration, and the show has about an hour to prove that it can survive without David Tennant. The combined pressures exerted on both the show and its characters result in a frenzied, often breathtaking episode that feels a bit like inhaling five shots of espresso, but it finds just enough moments to slow down and let us appreciate this new array of characters.

           Smith is immediately good, but Doctor himself takes a few minutes to win me over. While the initial meeting between the Doctor and tiny Amelia is cute, the long sequence in which the Doctor tries and spits out various foods quickly gets annoying; making a little girl cook what seems like most of the contents of her fridge for him seems like an awfully pushy thing for the Doctor to do in his opening minutes, and the scene puts the Doctor right on the line between quirky and exasperating. At the end of the scene, though, we get the first piece of magic in this fairytaleish season, appearing in the unlikely form of fish fingers and custard. There are quite a few things on Doctor Who that work for reasons that are difficult to articulate—murdery trashcans really shouldn’t be some of the most engaging villains in television history, but somehow they are. Smith, until the end of this scene, has been a mostly likeable presence without quite being able to shake the little voice saying “He seems pretty good, but why did they cast someone so young?” This was my initial reaction to his casting, and continued to be my reaction to his first few minutes, but then he dips bits of fish into a bowl of yellow gloop and why this works is entirely beyond me but suddenly he’s the Doctor. Hi, Eleven.

           The Doctor, whose tendency to show off becomes especially troublesome in this regeneration, gets plenty of opportunity to do so here. He gets the attention of world leaders by sending them a proof of Fermat’s theorem and several elaborate pieces of knowledge, he practically revels in the chance to save the world with no TARDIS and a twenty-minute countdown, and his warning to the Atraxi, in which all of the previous Doctors appear, is both a terrific moment and a huge display of vanity. The Doctor refers to his confrontation with the Atraxi as “showtime,” but he’s putting on a show the whole time, and enjoying the performance quite a bit. Even his pep talk to Jeff—“First, you have to be magnificent. You have to make them trust you and get them working…This is when you fly”—seems like something he is saying to himself as much as to the bewildered young man he is addressing. The Tenth Doctor was often a huge spectacle, but he was rarely as self-aware of it or as intentional in building it as this Doctor so immediately is. This means that there is even more potential for aggravation here than in his previous incarnation, but the Eleventh Doctor’s tendency to indulge in performance is so clearly-defined and so easily-perceived by other characters that it plays a slightly different role here than it did before—most notably, it produces problems more often than it solves them. This is one of the rare moments in which his self-glorification really does straightforwardly solve the problem, but it’s just so nice to see glimpses of the previous Doctors just as we’re starting with a new one that I still really like the sequence.

           There were a lot of complaints about Amy Pond being introduced to us as a short-skirt-wearing kissogram, which is a reasonable objection. On the one hand, her outfit allows her reunion with the Doctor to take the form of hitting him with a cricket bat, handcuffing him to a radiator, dressing up as a police officer, and communicating with fake police on a fake radio, which is sort of fabulous in itself; I appreciate people who have a proper respect for costumes and props. On the other hand, it really is just an unnecessarily objectifying first look at grown-up Amy, and it invites the audience to sexualize her in a way that hadn’t really happened with the reboot’s previous companions. The decision to have her let her hair down just as she reveals that she’s a kiss-o-gram makes the scene look even more sexualized, and the return to the subject later on at Jeff’s house is just cringeworthy. We really, really didn’t need the Doctor making a judgmental face about Amy’s choice of profession, nor did we need a list of the different people she dresses up as—apparently, she’s been a police officer, a nurse, and a nun. It’s a brief scene, but it really does feel sexist, and it’s an unfortunate distraction from the much more interesting elements of Amy’s personality that we encounter in this episode. (On the subject of gender, it’s also worth pointing out that if you’re on a laptop talking to a group of world leaders, at least one of whom appears to be female, you might want to refer to them by a less gender-specific term than “fellas.”)

           Other than the questionable choice of occupation, though, we get a marvelous introduction to Amy here. I particularly like that the companion who’s going to go through pretty much every imaginable faith-related psychological issue over the next couple of seasons is introduced praying to Santa Claus (in April!) It’s a silly moment, but one that shows that her tendency to resort to belief that some sort of miraculous intervention will solve problems is exacerbated by the Doctor but doesn’t originate with him. She’s had many years to obsess about the Doctor, and her long period of disillusionment with him before she even sets foot in the TARDIS means that she reacts very differently from what we’ve seen in other companions. I really like the scene in which she traps him by locking his tie in a car door in spite of the fact that the apocalypse is looming, and I love that there’s no “bigger on the inside” moment when she first enters the TARDIS, just wide-eyed silence. The presence of the Doctor and his time machine is as much a validation of her stubbornness as anything else, and the “Scottish girl in the English village” who clung to her accent in spite of the geographic change already has a complicated relationship to the man whose existence she spent so much time defending. There’s some interesting thematic work connected with her as well: the act of carefully looking is an important element throughout Amy’s time on the show, and the Doctor’s promptings to look for what’s in the corner of her eye create a nice beginning to this, as does the fact that the Atraxi is basically just a giant eyeball.

           Amy’s world—a small town with a post office, a hospital, and a duck pond with no ducks—doesn’t look as endearing as Davies-era London often did, but it’s very pleasant and I sort of wish that future episodes had let us spend a bit more time there. I particularly like the Doctor’s frustrated remark that in their current possibly apocalyptic scenario, “We’ve got a post office. And it’s shut!” Rory isn’t especially memorable here, but we get a solid introduction to him. While everyone else is busy filming whatever is happening with the sun, Rory is calmly trying to do the useful thing by recording the inexplicable phenomenon of a walking coma patient, and the impression of Rory as quietly and unostentatiously helpful is a pretty accurate first glimpse of him.

           In addition to Amy, Rory, and the Doctor, we’re also introduced to the new TARDIS, who gets possibly the best debut of the four. Debates about who has the best TARDIS entrance generally center on companions, but my answer would be the Eleventh Doctor. I’m really glad that he’s the Doctor who eventually gets to talk to the human TARDIS (in next season’s “The Doctor’s Wife”) because he and the TARDIS somehow manage to have off-the-charts chemistry even while she’s still a machine. His awed “What have you got for me this time?” as he first enters his newly-redecorated TARDIS is my favorite moment of the entire episode, because he delivers the line with such a palpable sense of love that I suddenly get their relationship more than I ever have before. The TARDIS has always been fabulous—I mean, she’s what makes the show possible—and there have been plenty of moments that showcase the Doctor’s emotional connection to his time-space machine, but the end of this episode is the first time that she genuinely seems to me like a real character with a personality. This is partly due to Smith’s reaction, but the camera also shows an unprecedented level of excitement about the buttons and switches, and there’s a spinny thing that made me really want to poke it when I first saw it. (It should be pointed out that Amy does so almost as soon as she enters. Well done, Pond.) It’s like the camera, after years of taking it for granted, suddenly noticed how amazing the control room was, and while I have often wanted to travel on the TARDIS, this episode made me feel much more connected to the TARDIS herself than ever before.

           There is so much attention to new characters and spaces here that it’s easy to lose sight of the plot, but it’s a solid one—the Atraxi’s broadcasts to the entire Earth are quite frightening, and Prisoner Zero’s ability to change form is used to good effect. I wish that Olivia Colman had gotten a bit more to do, but she makes the most of a tiny role, looking and sounding tremendously intimidating as one of Prisoner Zero’s bodies. We also get a number of references to upcoming plot points, including the first appearance of the eerie cracks in time and the first mentions of the Silence. As a shift in tone and an introduction to new characters, storylines, and themes, this is a phenomenal piece of writing, and if Moffat had managed to come up with a different job for Amy, this would probably be in my top ten episodes of the reboot. The kissogram nonsense brings the quality down a bit, but it’s still easily the best debut episode for a Doctor in the reboot, and “Spearhead from Space” is really the only episode in the history of the show to compete with it as an introduction to a new Doctor. “Spearhead from Space” is an important predecessor here, in that it, too, marked a huge departure in tone from what had come before. The change here is not as drastic as the shift between “War Games” and “Spearhead,” but it does feel like we’re in a quite different world from the one of the Davies era. It definitely requires some adjustment, but for the most part, the new world looks absolutely stunning. A/A-

The Beast Below: I really disliked this episode the first time I watched it, but there are only a couple of episodes that have grown on me more over time. The Starship UK isn’t among the best worlds this show has portrayed—it’s a bit too wrapped up in generic Police State Surveillance things to be completely enjoyable. (The logic doesn’t really hold up either. Having children fed to the whale because they perform badly in school is horrifying to an extent that doesn’t really gel with the idea that the leaders here are trying to do the least terrible thing possible in an awful ethical dilemma. It’s also pretty stupid that the Starwhale clearly doesn’t eat children, and yet they keep getting sent to it.) The episode manages not to fall too badly into the trap of dystopian dullness, however, in large part because it features a queen wearing a giant, awesome cape who has strewn water glasses all over the floor and is secretly investigating her kingdom. It’s too bad that we only got one episode (and then a tiny cameo at the end of the season) of the marvelous Sophie Okonedo, but she really sells both the Queen’s enjoyment of trying to take down her own government and her eventual guilt when she realizes what she has allowed to happen. She looks, at first, like she’s going to be fabulous and fun but sort of lacking in depth, but by the end I’m really intrigued by her role in the Starship’s moral dilemma. She makes the Starship a much more interesting space, and some very nice direction allows the camera to find some really beautiful moments in the generally pretty drab world.  I tend to get annoyed with episodes that take a general approach of “It’s the future, and everything’s terrible! And technology, in particular, is terrible! Look at all the terribleness!!” because it’s just a boring way of creating a new place. Unlike some other episodes, though, the episode mixes a simplistically grim-looking future with some whimsical features and some much more compelling and creative darkness, and so the world of the Starship winds up with a varied enough atmosphere that it mostly works.

           The plot itself is solid without being especially original—basically “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” with a whale in it—but it’s a surprisingly hopeful version of this story in several respects. The choice between the agony of the whale and the destruction of the Starship is taken entirely seriously, and the reveal that Liz 10 was behind this all along manages to avoid making her look straightforwardly evil. (Non-misanthropic dystopias are my favorite kind of dystopia.) There are also more options here than there are in “Omelas,” as we see in both the Doctor’s attempted plan and Amy’s actual solution. The absence of the binary decision between tormenting an innocent victim and harming the rest of society means that this isn’t as good as “Omelas” in terms of serving as a thought experiment, but this does allow for a more character-driven story. Smith is not quite as memorable in this episode as he was in the previous one, but he gets both some fun moments of physical comedy and some interesting moments of darkness, particularly in his grief over thinking that he has to murder an innocent creature. He starts to get unnecessarily condescending—he clearly sees that the choice between protecting the whale and protecting the Starship is an impossibly difficult one, so his insistence that he’s taking Amy home after this trip and his infuriated “Nobody human has anything to say to me today!” seem a little bit unjustified. Interestingly, though, he is shown to be wrong almost immediately. He and Liz 10 have sort of the same problem here, in that they both see themselves as the hero, and so the whale is placed into the role of victim, either to be saved or to be abandoned to his continuing misery.

               Enter Amy Pond, whose continuing state of awe renders her far more capable of understanding that in this narrative, the Starwhale is, well, the star. Amy gets a huge amount to do in this episode, from cheerfully picking a lock to leaving herself messages about how to rescue the Doctor from having to make a difficult choice. Her delighted reaction to being listed as 1306 years old is adorable, and the scene in which she floats just outside the TARDIS is a beautiful image—so lovely that I’m not even particularly bothered by the unnecessary voiceover. Her resolution to the whale dilemma partly relies on her observational skills, the importance of which is highlighted by the Doctor as soon as they land. “Use your eyes. Notice everything,” he tells her, and her effort to do this definitely helps her to figure out the whale’s actual motives. Mixed in with her observational abilities is her somewhat idolizing view of the Doctor, which shapes her actions in a number of ways. You don’t want your childhood imaginary friend to become morally compromised, and her immediate response to the information about the Starwhale is to leave herself a message to get the Doctor away from the ship, where he would be forced into doing something that might tarnish his image as the perfect hero. Amy eventually does create a compassionate ending, but she was entirely willing to run away and leave the whale there in order to remove the Doctor from a morally ambiguous context. Amy is a character who is defined by her ability to believe—she puts her faith in the Doctor to an extent that allows them to develop a wonderful sense of trust, but that also can become dangerous because of how fervent that faith is. Her belief in the Doctor shapes her reading of the Starwhale here; she is so committed to her vision of a perfect Doctor that she sees the whale through that lens, and is willing to take a huge, possibly catastrophic leap as a result. As it turns out, she’s right—the whale really is too kind to let down the Starship passengers. If she’d been wrong, though, she would not only have killed herself and the Doctor but also the entire population of the Starship. It’s a great introduction to the mind of Amy Pond—fundamentally good and kind and trusting, but in a way that carries quite a lot of risk with it. What I really like about this is that the Doctor doesn’t just need a human perspective, he needs Amy’s in particular; what she does here is so specific to her personality and mentality that it really does seem unique to her, and I don’t think we’ve ever had quite this much information about a companion’s mindset by her second episode before.

           The problem with this episode is that Moffat doesn’t quite seem to be able to trust the intelligence of his audience. In fairness, there are some pretty subtle things here, including the first reference to silence in relation to emotional pain, but there’s also a tendency to over-repeat important points to a ridiculous extent. We spend too much time watching Amy flash back to the clues that help her put together the real nature of the whale, and then once she’s figured it out, she goes on about kind, lonely creatures who are the last of their species for about five years. The notion of Starwhale=Doctor isn’t a very complicated one, even for a show with lots of children watching, so the decision to keep the dialogue one tiny hop away from “The cast of Schoolhouse Rock shows up and sings a song called Metaphors Are Your Friend Also Do You Get How the Whale Represents the Doctor” is just completely unnecessary, as is the poem that Amy recites at the end.

           Other than the poem and the belaboring of the point, the ending has some lovely moments. The hug really solidifies the connection between Amy and the Doctor, and the final scene on the TARDIS, in which Amy answers a phone call from Winston Churchill, is an absolute joy. On the whole, the episode does a stellar job of conveying the nuances of Amy’s emotional state, and it gives us one of the season’s best guest characters in Liz 10. If the details and logic of this world had been ironed out a bit more, and Moffat had written the ending with anything approaching subtlety, restraint, or basic faith in his audience’s intellect, this could have been a great episode, but even with these errors, it’s still a very enjoyable one. B

Victory of the Daleks: For a while, until disaster strikes and everything collapses into multi-colored nonsense, this episode seems like a return to form for the Daleks. The show’s most famous villains had a mixed run in the Davies era: they’re brilliant and terrifying in Season One, kind of fun but shoehorned into the plot in Season Two, an absolute mess in Season Three, and even in Season Four, when they improve a bit, they get slightly buried under the avalanche of plot and character things happening in the finale. In the first twenty minutes of this episode, the Daleks are sensational: terrifying, visually fascinating, and deeply unsettling in their uncharacteristic subservience. (This isn’t the first time that the Daleks have masqueraded as servants, as this was a thing in “The Power of the Daleks” as well. We only have that in animated form, though, since it was erased, and so it’s nice to have the creepy visual of tea-serving Daleks here.) I love having the Daleks fight Nazis, on whom they were initially based, and the hidden threat contained in their stated ambition of “win[ning] the war” is fantastic, although slightly diminished by having the Doctor explain the double meaning a few minutes later. The reveal that Bracewell is a robot that they constructed in order to explain their presence is terrific, and they have a solid plan for getting the Doctor to inadvertently help them. (I mean, if you’re a Dalek and your plan relies on the Doctor’s tendency to grandstand about his longstanding rivalry with your species, you can feel pretty confident about your chances of success.) Even after they have stopped pretending to be Ironsides, the Daleks do some intensely creepy stuff, like turning all the lights on during an air raid.

           The triumphant portrayal of Daleks in the early scenes of the episode makes it even more disappointing that the climax of their plan involves intimidating the world by…changing color. Moffat has said in interviews that he was too focused on the first block of filming, and didn’t shift his attention soon enough to the second block, which included this episode, and so he didn’t put enough thought into evaluating how these new Daleks looked on camera. This is a plausible enough thing, particularly for someone in his first season as showrunner, but I can’t imagine what even prompted the initial idea to do this to the Daleks in the first place. There was nothing wrong with the existing appearance of the Daleks, and this redesign just makes me think of the song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat where they list all the colors. (“It was red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach and ruby and olive and violet and fawn etc.” and then in the film version there are eventually multi-colored sheep.) There has been some variety in the Daleks’ appearance across the history of the show, but this is easily the silliest and least frightening that they have ever looked.  

           Other than the Daleks themselves, the episode is uneven in terms of quality. The portrayal of Churchill is pretty one-dimensional and doesn’t acknowledge the many ways in which he was a quite problematic figure, but he’s entertaining and the World War II-era atmosphere is nicely established. This is probably Smith’s weakest outing among the early episodes of this season, perhaps due to some awkward writing of his initial rage against the Daleks. He does, however, try to confuse the Daleks by pretending that a jammy dodger is a self-destruct device, which is awesome. I’m pretty tired, at this point, of “The Doctor must choose between destroying the Daleks and preserving the Earth” as a plot point, though, even as a fairly minor one. Enough with this for a while. Amy continues to be an appealing presence, but she doesn’t get anywhere near the kind of depth that she had in the previous episode. She is pretty heavily involved in the resolution of the plot, but her ability to talk Bracewell through his feelings really just reveals that she is developing a crush on the Doctor—not an aspect of this season that I enjoy. Bracewell is an intriguing character, and the notion that having human memories makes him a real person accords nicely with the focus on memories as soul throughout the Moffat era, but the ending doesn’t make sense. It’s not unreasonable to say that a robot capable of deep emotion might philosophically be considered human, but in this case it would still be a human with considerable physical differences, including a bomb inside. There’s just no reason for the character’s emotional awakening to disrupt the physical process that the Daleks have set in motion, so the last-minute escape from destruction seems unearned. The decision to let him run off and carry on being human makes for a cute scene, though, and the episode concludes with a nicely-done reappearance of the crack from Amy’s wall, as well as the intriguing realization that Amy ought to remember who the Daleks are but clearly doesn’t.

           This episode is often offered as evidence that Mark Gatiss isn’t a good Doctor Who writer, which honestly I think is a bit unjustified. As I said in my review of “Idiot’s Lantern,” I do tend to like Gatiss’s writing of more realistic stories, like Sherlock and An Adventure in Space and Time, much more than I like his work on sci-fi stories. That being said, if the Dalek redesign didn’t look so idiotic, I would think of this as a pretty good episode, slightly let down by an illogical ending. While there are other flaws, there really is quite a lot that I enjoy here, and the one thing that completely capsizes the episode is the appearance of the Daleks, which Gatiss presumably wasn’t responsible for. It’s difficult to grade this episode, because it involves balancing a lot of good moments against some incredibly stupid decisions; on the whole, I think of this as a weak episode, but I don’t think I dislike it as much as some fans do. C+/C

The Time of Angels: This episode probably features more terrifying things than any other episode of the reboot. The Angel’s slow emergence from the television screen is creepy enough, but the gravel pouring out of Amy’s eye is the stuff of absolute nightmares. The Angel’s use of Bob’s voice is also enormously chilling—I would not want to hear an actual Angel’s voice, as that would take away from the mysteriousness of the species, but having it use a human’s voice and even make use of some of his thoughts means that the Angel conveys a lot of malice while retaining its elusive nature. The conversation is nicely structured too, so that we initially think it’s really Bob talking until we hear “I didn’t escape, sir. It killed me too.” The very best moment, though, is the reveal that they have inadvertently surrounded themselves with Angels; the Doctor introduces the two-headed nature of the Applans so casually that it just didn’t register to me, and I audibly gasped when the Angels’ presence became clear. (I am usually a very, very silent TV-watcher, so it takes a lot to get a vocal reaction from me.) It’s a perfect example of how easy it is to endanger oneself by simple misinterpretation—the notion that an Angel would hide amongst statues seemed so plausible that the possibility of another way of looking at the scenario just never occurred to me.

           While this is an extremely plot-twist-heavy episode, it does some interesting work with the characters. I really like the army of clerics, especially the Bishop in charge, who is beautifully played by Iain Glen. There are plenty of reasons to be dubious about a church that has evolved into a military, but what I like about the portrayal of these figures here is that the Doctor basically treats them like he does any other slightly odd civilization by just sort of getting on with the work that he’s trying to do. The idea of an overtly militant church is allowed to be unsettling without the Doctor doing an entire production number about how terrible they are, and the episode goes along with this by making the Bishop a figure of considerable integrity. It’s also a nice touch that we get both a religious army and a mass of angel statues in a season that largely deals with the (over)development of Amy’s faith.

River makes quite an entrance, burning a message into an artifact and then, once she lands on the TARDIS, being much better at actually flying her than the Doctor is and provoking a hilarious TARDIS-landing-noise imitation from him. I do think that her exchange with the men on the spaceship at the beginning gets a bit over-sexualized, both in the dialogue and in the closeup on her stilettos, but once we get past that scene she’s terrific, especially in her interactions with Amy. There’s an easy sense of connection between the two, which makes sense given later revelations, and I like that Amy seems intrigued by River’s relationship with the Doctor without appearing jealous. Amy herself also really impresses me by figuring out how to neutralize the TV Angel by pausing the clip on an Angel-free moment, and her brief spell of believing that her arm has turned to stone is a chilling scene that ends in hilarity as she questions whether the Doctor has “space teeth.”

The end of the episode allows the Doctor to do his usual yelling at monsters about how scared of him they should be, but it also gives some attention to his relationship with Amy. The revelation that Bob’s voice is actually an Angel is a scary plot twist in itself, but what’s even more interesting about this conversation is that it plays very precisely upon Amy’s fears. It’s unsettling to hear Angel Bob use the Doctor’s words about fear against him, saying that his fear did nothing for him and that the Doctor obtained his trust and then let him down. Amy has had more occasion than most companions to think about her level of trust in the Doctor, given his long abandonment of her, and the camera occasionally cuts back to her nervous expression as the Angel continues to taunt the Doctor about his betrayal of that trust. As the episode draws to a close, the Doctor gets everyone to reaffirm their faith in him—to take, in fact, a very literal leap of faith—but while the characters make this leap willingly, there remains a persistent sense of doubt about whether or not their faith is warranted. A/A-

Flesh and Stone: The Dalek episode was difficult to grade, but this one is nearly impossible, as most of it is amazing but the last scene is absolutely dreadful. I’m not sure if any other episode of the show has ever collapsed in on itself in its final moments quite as much as this one does; I mean, I had a huge problem with the end of “Love and Monsters,” but while the last scene is the worst part of that episode, it started to decline in quality about two-thirds of the way through, while this one is generally terrific until its very last minute.

           Until the final scene, there is a great deal to love here. A lot of absolutely terrifying things happen in this two-parter, but Amy’s slow countdown from ten is probably what scares me the most. It doesn’t lose any of its impact on rewatch, even though I know that it’s coming and what it means. The subsequent need to keep her eyes shut also makes for a lot of good drama, although her ability to avoid being sent back in time by the Angels by pretending she can see, even with her eyes closed, requires quite a bit of suspension of disbelief. As far-fetched as it is, though, I can’t watch it without holding my breath, and having to walk through danger without being able to see creates yet another test of her trust in the Doctor. (It reminded me a bit of those trust exercises they made us do in school, where you put on a blindfold and had to wander around the hallway guided by your partner’s voice. I have painful memories of almost falling down the stairs.) In fact, for a while, so many great things are happening that it takes a bit of an effort to properly appreciate them as they whiz by: the clerics use their guns to create short bursts of light so that they can see the Angels with the lights off! There’s a forest on a spaceship! With tree borgs! The Doctor gets Angel Bob to say “comfy chairs!” The clerics keep disappearing and only Amy can remember that they ever existed! The Doctor finds out part of River’s background! The Angels show up in a big scary tableau! The Doctor enters in a slightly altered costume, looking very mysterious while telling Amy to believe in him and to remember what he told her as a child! My favorite, though, is probably the scene in which the Doctor and River try to figure out how to stop Amy’s ominous countdown. The Doctor and Amy don’t know it yet, but River knows that she’s with her husband and her mother, and looking back on it with knowledge from future seasons I just think it’s a beautiful interaction between their family. River and Amy continue to have a lovely connection, and they work so well together that the episode leaves us not only with the usual questions about who River is to the Doctor but also with new questions about who she is to Amy.

           As in the last episode, there are a lot of terrifying moments with the Angels, but there are also slightly too many new developments. The worst of these is the moment in which we watch them actually turn their heads, which is the one total miscalculation that Moffat makes with the Angels in this two-parter. Part of the creepy charm of these characters is that we see where they were and then how far they’ve progressed in the blink of an eye, and I like that “Blink” left open the possibility that they essentially became something utterly different when no one was looking. Having the Angels just kill people instead of sending them back in time also isn’t as interesting, but it does lead to Bishop Octavian getting one of my very favorite death scenes of a single-story character in the whole reboot. Smith does some really beautiful work in this last exchange with Octavian, and their final words—“I wish I had known you better” and “I think, sir, you know me at my best” make for a really moving end to the character. He returns to his faith at the end, as well, saying that he thanks God for his own courage and for the Doctor’s safety, and for all that I think a militant church is all kinds of bad ideas, I really like how sincerely devoted Octavian is to his work and beliefs.

           The time crack could have benefited from just a little bit more explanation—it’s not entirely clear to me exactly what it means to never have existed, and whether this involves people’s memories being erased or the actual erasure of all of the effects that they had. (It seems to mostly be the former, but it could definitely be a lot clearer.) The clerics disappearing into it one by one is genuinely frightening, though, and it’s good continuity that the Doctor realizes that throwing a major time event (like himself) into the time energy would seal things up, as this becomes important later on. The resolution to the Angel plot also stretches plausibility a bit—it’s not the first time that the show has suggested that holding on really tight can completely offset exceedingly strong gravitational forces, and my science knowledge is limited but it always seems questionable to me. Still, I appreciate that the previous episode established the gravity turning off as a real possibility, which makes the moment more believable than it would otherwise be.

           And then there’s that last scene. Introducing a sort of love triangle between the Doctor, Amy, and Rory is a stupid enough idea to begin with, but the details of the scene make it even worse than necessary. I get that trauma can make people lose their judgment a bit, but Amy’s efforts to seduce the Doctor don’t read like someone who is shaken up and making questionable decisions, they just come across as a male fantasy of an attractive woman suddenly becoming desperate for sex. She’s so aggressive in trying to get with the Doctor—even persisting in her attempts to kiss him after he has resisted—that the whole thing is just exploitative and objectifying to a ridiculous extent. Sexual attraction between a Doctor and companion generally isn’t my favorite thing in the first place, but creating a love triangle between Amy, the Doctor, and Rory is even worse, especially with the added drama of Amy trying to seduce the Doctor on the night before her wedding. Her connection to the Doctor has so far been fascinating and unique, and this just rewrites it as something much, much less interesting. It makes this episode difficult to evaluate, because in spite of a couple of unnecessary new details about the Angels, there is so much loveliness before this scene, but this ridiculous ending is enough to bring my opinion of the episode way down. B-

#doctor who #female doctor #reviews #season 5 #steven moffat #matt smith #karen gillan #eleventh doctor #amy pond

[graysonfirewolf85-blog]

Suicide and Witchcraft

The one question everyone has asked without exception, that they ache to have answered more than any other, is simply: why? Why did their friend, child, parent, spouse, or sibling take their own life? Even when a note explaining the reasons is found, lingering questions usually remain: yes, they felt enough despair to want to die, but why did they feel that? A person's suicide often takes the people it leaves behind by surprise (only accentuating survivor's guilt for failing to see it coming).

People who've survived suicide attempts have reported wanting not so much to die as to stop living, a strange dichotomy but a valid one nevertheless. If some in-between state existed, some other alternative to death, I suspect many suicidal people would take it.

In general, people try to kill themselves for six reasons:

1) They're depressed. This is without question the most common reason people commit suicide. Severe depression is always accompanied by a pervasive sense of suffering as well as the belief that escape from it is hopeless. The pain of existence often becomes too much for severely depressed people to bear. The state of depression warps their thinking, allowing ideas like "Everyone would all be better off without me" to make rational sense. They shouldn't be blamed for falling prey to such distorted thoughts any more than a heart patient should be blamed for experiencing chest pain: it's simply the nature of their disease. Because depression, as we all know, is almost always treatable, we should all seek to recognize its presence in our close friends and loved ones. Often people suffer with it silently, planning suicide without anyone ever knowing. Despite making both parties uncomfortable, inquiring directly about suicidal thoughts in my experience almost always yields an honest response. If you suspect someone might be depressed, don't allow your tendency to deny the possibility of suicidal ideation prevent you from asking about it.

2) They're psychotic. Malevolent inner voices often command self-destruction for unintelligible reasons. Psychosis is much harder to mask than depression, and is arguably even more tragic. The worldwide incidence of schizophrenia is 1% and often strikes otherwise healthy, high-performing individuals, whose lives, though manageable with medication, never fulfill their original promise. Schizophrenics are just as likely to talk freely about the voices commanding them to kill themselves as not, and also, in my experience, give honest answers about thoughts of suicide when asked directly. Psychosis, too, is treatable, and usually must be treated for a schizophrenic to be able to function at all. Untreated or poorly treated psychosis almost always requires hospital admission to a locked ward until the voices lose their commanding power.

3) They're impulsive. Often related to drugs and alcohol, some people become maudlin and impulsively attempt to end their own lives. Once sobered and calmed, these people usually feel emphatically ashamed. The remorse is often genuine, but whether or not they'll ever attempt suicide again is unpredictable. They may try it again the very next time they become drunk or high, or never again in their lifetime. Hospital admission is therefore not usually indicated. Substance abuse and the underlying reasons for it are generally a greater concern in these people and should be addressed as aggressively as possible.

4) They're crying out for help, and don't know how else to get it. These people don't usually want to die but do want to alert those around them that something is seriously wrong. They often don't believe they will die, frequently choosing methods they don't think can kill them in order to strike out at someone who's hurt them, but they are sometimes tragically misinformed. The prototypical example of this is a young teenage girl suffering genuine angst because of a relationship, either with a friend, boyfriend, or parent, who swallows a bottle of Tylenol, not realizing that in high enough doses Tylenol causes irreversible liver damage. I've watched more than one teenager die a horrible death in an ICU days after such an ingestion when remorse has already cured them of their desire to die and their true goal of alerting those close to them of their distress has been achieved.

5) They have a philosophical desire to die. The decision to commit suicide for some is based on a reasoned decision, often motivated by the presence of a painful terminal illness from which little to no hope of reprieve exists. These people aren't depressed, psychotic, maudlin, or crying out for help. They're trying to take control of their destiny and alleviate their own suffering, which usually can only be done in death. They often look at their choice to commit suicide as a way to shorten a dying that will happen regardless. In my personal view, if such people are evaluated by a qualified professional who can reliably exclude the other possibilities for why suicide is desired, these people should be allowed to die at their own hands.

6) They've made a mistake. This is a recent, tragic phenomenon in which typically young people flirt with oxygen deprivation for the high it brings and simply go too far. The only defense against this, it seems to me, is education.

The wounds suicide leaves in the lives of those left behind by it are often deep and long lasting. The apparent senselessness of suicide often fuels the most significant pain. Thinking we all deal better with tragedy when we understand its underpinnings, I've offered the preceding paragraphs in hopes that anyone reading this who's been left behind by a suicide might be able to more easily find a way to move on, to relinquish their guilt and anger, and find closure. Despite the abrupt way you may have been left, guilt and anger don't have to be the only two emotions you're doomed to feel about the one who left you

Powerless

So you feel powerless? You feel like you don't know what to do and think you're a failure as a witch. How do we use magick which requires our full sensibilities, willpower, emotional functions such as love, passion, and desire if they are dulled by medication? That is a good question. Is crossed my mind quite a bit. Our Magick is definitely affected.

"Witchcraft is the craft of the wise. Wise people don’t become wise simply because they have acquired some knowledge. They become wise because their knowledge is enhanced through experience. Strong Healers were often inspired through needing healing in the first place. Through our own healing, we can be inspired to heal and without the experience of being a patient we can not fully understand how to healing process can work."

The Pretty Pill

"Drugs often interfere with real magick. The nature of how anti-depressants work is in how they “dull the senses”. It changes the chemical balance in the brain to enhance the mood which often takes away emotional aspects of what we draw from when creating and manifesting from desire. But… So does depression… There are many physical causes of depression that can be managed through other forms of treatments and yes, many of them are holistic. If someone is suicidal or dealing with depression, should they NOT take their anti-depressants? I am not saying that at all. For many, anti-depressants are necessary at least for a while. I am saying there may be another solution to look into as part of the long-term treatment plan."

have too agree with the above from Summer in her article in Witch Digest. Drugs for depression are designed to dull the senses. It's also a teeter-totter in the sense that some cases require the use of anti-depressants. YET, again, not all drugs are designed to dull the senses and sometimes the drugs don't even work

6 Ways to Improve

Balance and Grounding

The mind, body, and spirit work together. When one part is out of balance, it can throw the other parts of us out of whack. That is the theory of finding balance. The art of trying to keep all three aspects in balance at the same time. I believe it takes a lifetime to master and I don’t believe it is actually 100% mastered even by the masters. That is how grounding helps us regain our balance.

Diet

Sometimes the food we eat doesn’t work well with our bodies and throws off the balance of our overall well-being. Finding a diet that works for us through a process of elimination and cleansing to help us feel our best can have positive effects but it may not be the end all solution. That also may include a dietary supplement. Care must be taken when changing one’s diet or adding a supplement. A good example is St. John’s Wort because it is known for being a mood enhancer. The biggest problem with St. John’s Wort is for those with Bipolar it can make things worse and increase the cycling effects of the disease. Not to mention how it works is by changing the levels of serotonin, a chemical in the brain, and so does anti-depressants and the combinations can be dangerous and even life-threatening.

Exercise

Adding exercise to one’s lifestyle can have many health benefits. Exercise is known to increase endorphins that can have a mood enhancing effect. But, we have to be careful not injure ourselves and care must be taken. Exercises that get our bodies in motion are great. I enjoy a dance night where I get up and dance in my living room and have a blast being silly or going for a scenic walk around my neighborhood when safety permits or even walking in the local mall. Chi gong, Tai Chi and even Yoga is said to have positive effects on mood and energy.

Holistic energy healing

Holistic healing techniques such as Reiki for some can make a huge difference as part of the whole healing and recovery process.

Meditation

This can help us regulate our balance and grounding through trying various techniques. These techniques can be found through counseling, learning through teachers or masters and even through internet searches.

Counseling

Most of all, counseling if done with the correct mindset can also add to recovery in the healing process. I have seen people go through years of psychotherapy and never recover and I have seen someone go through just a few sessions or a few years of therapy and do more healing than ever expected. Finding the right type and quality of counselor is necessary. Remembering that a counselor can only guide you on your healing path and the healing process is up to you is a key factor in benefiting from counseling.

Permanently Medicated

If one is permanently medicated or even temporarily, How can a Witch work magick while medicated? Well, there is a way. You have to work around the constraints and only you, the magickal practitioner can discover what that is for yourself. Knowing how your illness works on your overall health, which contains all three of the mind, body, and spirit and how the treatments affect your overall health is a good place to start.

Trial and error is often the only way to figure out which options work best for you.

Conclusion

Healing one aspect of our whole being requires the complimentary healing of each of our three parts; Mind, body, and spirit. At least that is what I believe. For some, medication can actually enhance their well-being and therefore increases their magickal abilities.

[Source 1|https://witchdigest.com/25707/can-depression-affect-my-magick/]

[Source 2|https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/depression/index.shtml]

[Source 3|https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/happiness-in-world/201004/the-six-reasons-people-attempt-suicide%3famp]

[haileyst]

Middle ground - Chapter 5 - END

Paul's relationship could be described in several ways. Loving, definitely. Yearning, absolutely. But Paul likes to describe his relationship as a series of unfortunate events that he hopes will eventually lead him home.

OR

What to (not) do when your boyfriend moves to a new place.

Final part!

You can also find it on AO3 and aside from my Tumblr, you can also find me on Ko-Fi! 

“You must be exhausted; you all certainly seemed to have an eventful day!” Professor Kukui remarked as he served them tea on the kitchen table. Paul agreed wholeheartedly - it was not only eventful, it felt very long as well. As Paul looked through the window and saw the orange hue of setting sun reflecting on the surface of the ocean, he still could not believe it wasn’t pitch dark yet. Ash, who was still wrapped up in a blanket, eagerly reached out for it and almost fell out of the chair for his efforts. Paul, dutiful as ever, lightly slapped his wrist and handed him the hot cup of tea himself. Ash pouted but let himself be pampered for a bit.

As Paul predicted, Ash had a minor case of hypothermia exacerbated by the exhaustion caused from Palossand’s draining ability. And for some reason, he also had a large bump on his forehead that he refused to explain to Paul or the medic that arrived on the scene only precious few minutes after Palossand retreated. So much for quick response times. The paramedic, briefly mistaking reluctance as a memory loss, insisted that he take them to the hospital. Ash, who did not want to provide a believable explanation for the bruise, complied and spent precious three hours in the hospital. (Paul even found a time to get back to his hotel room and pick up the rest of his Pokémon. Never again was he leaving without them while they stayed in Alola.)

Thankfully, the tests were negative, but the doctor wanted Paul to monitor Ash regardless and visit hospital the following morning as well, just in case. Then they hailed a cab and Ash rattled off Professor Kukui’s address and here they were. “Tell me about it, Professor!” Ash grinned. Too happily. Paul pinched his forearm in revenge, there was only so much pampering Ash deserved. “You don’t get to talk with how many times I thought I’d have a heart attack because of you!” Ash pouted and Professor Kukui laughed. “Now I have to know what happened!” Paul cringed.

All in all, it could have been worse. Aside from Ash and Litten, no one was injured. But it could have been better. When they decided to freeze Palossand in its tracks, Paul reluctantly agreed to be in the back and not act as a bait. With Gastrodon in the ocean searching for the shovel with Popplio, he had Ash’s Pokemon to look after. He did not trust Rockruff to not try and attack head on again and give Palossand another hostage. Pikachu, with majority of its attacks being electric based, was of no help in this fight and Rowlett was small enough that Paul was afraid that another sandstorm could gravely injure the flying type. That left Kiawe and his Charizard and Turtonator as the bait. However, after a quick session of questions, Paul insisted that Mallow and her plant looking like Pokemon, apparently named Steenee, should stay as well. After the debacle of water attacks not being effective, the decision for the grass Pokemon to stay and provide powerful distraction was questionable but Paul was not going to risk it. If they had a chance to strike, better do it powerfully. Paul was just hoping none of these attacks would blindly hit Ash or Litten.

Then of course it was a question of whether the Vulpix had the ability to freeze a sandcastle three stories high. When Lillie admitted her Vulpix only knew Powder Snow attack and hatched not that long ago and (due to Lillie not being an active trainer) subsequently had minimal training and battle experience, Paul honestly did not know just what to say to the timid girl. His face probably would though, so he turned around and counted to ten before looking at the sheepish group again. “Details. Next time provide the details in a timely manner!” he snapped and paced in a circle.

Second time that day. He just could not believe it. The plan could have worked – but it rested solely on the Vulpix who only knew Powder Snow. And nothing wrong with that attack or Vulpix’s training, but for all Lillie was knowledgeable about Pokémon and their attacks in Alola, she forgot that this ice type move had minimal chances of actually freezing something solid which is what they were going for. Sure, it’d give a pretty nasty frostbite to the recipient, but it is something kids from Sinnoh are told how to counter from the day they attend pre-school and not at all what they needed when facing enraged ghost and ground type. When he told them exactly that, Lillie looked ashamed, which he actually felt guilty about as nothing that happened so far was her fault. Snowy looked affronted, which he could not care less about in that situation and the rest of the ragtag group was speechless. He sighed. “It doesn’t matter. We will have to do it anyway.” If this were a perfect world, Vulpix would use either Freeze Shock or Sheer Cold to freeze something of this magnitude but they had to do with what they had. Gastrodon knew Ice Beam, but it was currently looking for the shovel with Popplio – their only hope of calming Palossand down. Which is why they had to stall for as long as possible.

When he recounted the tale of Lillie’s Vulpix almost miraculous effort, as it did manage to freeze Palossand completely in the end, and Ash’s last-minute prison break and a valiant effort to break his neck from falling down from Palossand, Professor Kukui looked very excited. Paul did not dare to ask why. He learned the hard way to not ask these sorts of questions. The last time he asked a researcher what they wanted to study (which he did only to appear polite), he unknowingly ended up being the sample of a well-researched piece of written work that Gary Oak published.

And no, no matter how many times Professor Oak or Delia or Reggie tried to tell him it is an honour, Paul was not having it. Not only was he almost maimed to death during the study, but who would really be satisfied with being the basis of work titled ‘The Attachment of Pokémon Towards Their Trainer Measured Through Violent Tendencies Towards Threats’? No one, that’s who. It implied that he was a threat towards Ash. Which he was not. If anything, he was trying to keep Ash alive and away from any possible threats. And Gary Oak just smirked and a printed copy of it ended up on display on a shelf in Delia’s living room. (Unfortunately, he has yet to figure out how to keep Ash away from Gary fucking Oak.)

“And the Palossand just left when his shovel was returned?” Paul scowled as he recalled the almost happy sounding roar the Palossand produced when it regained its treasure. “Not before it caused another sandstorm, but yes, it did.” Professor Kukui leaned back in his chair. “Fascinating. Usual reports about Palossands usually depicts them as… well, consider yourself lucky you managed to escape! I heard once that they keep the bones of the drained victims! It would be brilliant to actually see the inside of…” Professor Kukui abruptly stopped and laughed awkwardly when he saw Paul’s complicated expression. “But that’s just a hearsay, don’t listen to me!” And that is why it’s no good to tell scientist something about a Pokémon you encounter. They always share knowledge you just do not want to possess.

Ash, seeing his fiancé’s terrifying expression, tried to save the situation, “Well, there are good things that happened today as well! Litten finally learned Fire Fang, it’s how we got out of Palossand!” Paul spared a short glance at the preening cat Pokemon. It was very lucky it was not injured, or they probably would have a whole different conversation here. “That’s good!” Professor Kukui agreed, glad for the save. “By the way, Paul,” the researcher turned to him again, “I heard you are quite a good trainer, would you mind showing your Pokemon at the school? We do have some Sinnoh Pokemon here in Alola, but they are mostly the descendants of the ones that were brought to the islands during colonisation. It would be quite different to see what others you have and how they might differ. And I am sure their move sets are fascinating!” And again, Paul was uncomfortably reminded that this professor primarily studied Pokemon’s attacks.

Ash looked at him, armed with wide eyes and a hopeful expression. What is he supposed to say when his partner, who he only earlier today reconnected with, is looking at him like this? “Why not,” he sighs despondently. Maybe that visit will help him understand just why Ash decided to stay here when he was always more interested in commercial training and battle performances rather than further and higher education. “But I wouldn’t want to disappoint you. You already met my Beartic,” Paul winced at the memory, “and I travelled with my Electivire, Torterra, Froslass, Gastrodon and Aggron. The rest are with Reggie.” Professor Kukui did not look disappointed. “Ah, yes, you must have a lot of Pokemon. Ash told me you are quite a successful professional trainer! It would be an honour to have you in the school!” This time professor Kukui addressed Ash. “If only I knew what you looked like and maybe then yesterday’s fiasco could have been avoided.”

“Speaking of Reggie,” Ash changed the topic loudly, probably deciding they did not need to be reminded of yesterday’s events just yet considering has happened today. “How is he?” Paul rolled his eyes. “He was stubborn, but he’s fine now. Or he should be, the part-time help we hired didn’t look like a pushover.” Thinking about it, Paul better try and contact them when he arrives back to his hotel room. He has the number for the part-timer and if all else fails, he will call the Pokemon centre or the police station in Veilstone City to check on them. The last thing he needs at this time is his brother breaking his arm again.

“Who is Reggie if you don’t mind me asking?” Ash smiled. He quite liked Reggie and liked to visit the small farm. “He’s Paul’s brother, he has a business as professional Pokemon breeder and trainer and sometimes, he even takes the jobs from local authorities!” Professor Kukui blinked. “Local authorities? What does that mean?” Well, that certainly caught Paul’s attention, and not in a good way, but Ash started to enthusiastically explain before Paul had a chance to cut in. “He is very good, lots of trainers are giving him their Pokémon for him to train and look after! And the Pokemon he breeds are known to be very talented. So sometimes, the rangers from parks and safaris call him to repopulate or regulate some species or even train them for a bit before they are released back into wild!”

“That sounds exciting,” Professor Kukui blinked and confirmed Paul’s worst suspicions. It might have been because he was so used to and proud of his brother’s job – after all, Reggie’s business really started to take off in the last few years and it became part of Paul’s life as well. “You don’t have rangers or any such schemes like that in Alola?” If so, he is not surprised Pokemon like Palossand is just running around on a public beach and help arrives just after it disappears. Professor Kukui hummed. “Well, not exactly. There is the Paniola Ranch on Akala Island, they have a nursery, but aside from their farm animals, they do not train them. And usually, if there are any problems with overpopulation of Pokemon in a certain area, it’s the island Kahuna who usually takes care of that.” When he saw how confused Paul looked, Professor Kukui had to explain who Kahuna is. “What about when species are becoming extinct?” Paul could not help but ask and Kukui smiled sheepishly. “Well, whoever finds out, and that is usually a volunteer group who monitor the species in their spare time, they would again contact the Kahuna. And if they cannot help, then it would be me, the headmaster, or Professor Burnet who is asked to intervene although our specialisation lies elsewhere.”

Well, at least it was a system and as long as it works… “If you are interested, I am sure Professor Samson Oak will be able to answer any of your questions, he studies the regional variants of Alola, he might have more insight!” Professor Kukui exclaimed and Ash, who sensed an opportunity, beamed at Paul. “That means you have no other excuse and really have to visit the school!” As if he had a choice in that. “And it might give Paul more reason to stay and explore Alola!” Professor Kukui added. The guy never seemed to run out of good mood.

How is it that Paul always ends up being outvoted? While staying longer to see Ash was a nice prospect, Paul was going to think twice about staying longer than the few days he already planned on this cursed land. So far, his stay was not exactly easy-going. Not only was he almost boiled alive at four in the morning, had to fly to get to the right island, ‘stole’ Pikachu, was ‘assaulted’ for the aforementioned ‘theft’ and even the laws of physics turned against him. At the same time, he could not help but be curious. Ash obviously liked it here (Paul still struggled a bit with the ‘why’) and he was getting restless just a few weeks ago about what to do. Maybe exploring Alola and seeing new Pokémon and battling techniques would give him more time to think that through. And maybe he will visit that nursery and ask how they function; Reggie would not be happy with him if he didn’t. “Maybe,” he finally replied and checked if Ash needed any more tea, which Ash happily ignored in favour of attention-seeking Litten who jumped onto his lap.

“Well, that is settled then!” The Pokemon professor happily shouted. Paul sighed and looked out of the window; it was dark now. The night came quicker than he thought, there was still warm light outside precious few minutes earlier. “I better get going soon, it’s a bit of a walk to my hotel from here.” Ash scratched Litten between his ears. “So, I will see you in the morning?” It was not a question; Ash was telling him he better come – or else. “Yes, I will meet outside that school of yours.” Paul lost this battle, he knew. He probably lost the second he decided to board a plane to Alola. Ash smiled contentedly and innocently kissed Paul on lips (they were in someone else’s house after all). “Looking forward to it!” Well, at least there was this reward.

Unfortunately, this was Paul’s luck they were talking about. “Well this is unusual, why is it so dark all of a sudden?” Professor Kukui hummed from the window. “Paul, you might want to stay in for a bit longer or call a cab, it looks like it will rain. Let me just check…” Professor Kukui yelled and Paul didn’t have to wait long for an explanation as Palossand’s wide mouth could clearly be seen through the open doors. It loudly bellowed in greetings and quickly proceeded to swallow the house whole. The powerful slam shook the house and the sand it stirred in the air caused all occupants of the house to cough. When it settled a bit, the Palossand was humming – and with it, the entire house was vibrating. Paul despondently watched the sand walls just outside the windows and the main door, where Professor Kukui was just staring in curiosity.

He was really starting to question all his decisions he made in this life. (Because why is it that this stuff only happens to him?) Ash, after he checked all of his Pokemon were alright, quickly stood from the kitchen table and joined Paul by his side. “We better call for help,” he said simply and grinned crookedly at Paul, who finally could not resist the urge, buried his face in his hands and groaned in despair.

“I can’t leave you alone, can I?”

#comashipping #pokemon fanfiction #pokemon #pokemon sun and moon #Paul Shinji #ash ketchum #Professor Kukui #my fanfiction #fanfiction

[theconservativebrief]

Ozark season two is built on a lie, one the audience can see coming from a long way off.

It begins from the premise that Marty (Jason Bateman) and Wendy Byrde (Laura Linney) will split from the little Ozark resort town they moved to in season one once they’ve built the casino they promised to their various criminal partners. Said casino will help launder money for the Mexican cartel Marty works for, but it will also provide a slightly more legitimate business enterprise for a local crime family, the Snells, whose land will furnish a location for the casino and whose heroin trade might also provide a lucrative side enterprise for the cartel.

This complicated balancing act, with the Byrdes at its center, would seem to set up a second season all about Marty and Wendy trying to keep the casino on track while trying to keep the cartel from stomping on the Snells and the Snells from fucking everything up in a fit of pique. (Darlene Snell, played by Lisa Emery, doesn’t much like “Mexicans,” as she’s fond of pointing out, but she can come up with any number of reasons to stomp on the casino project, some of which she just pulls out of her ass in the moment.)

Yet season two of Ozark is mostly about the Byrdes trying to pretend they’re not characters in a TV show, as Marty and Wendy focus on their plan to split with their two kids for the Gold Coast of Australia once the casino is open, leaving behind whatever mess they’ve created. They give much less attention to their burgeoning criminal empire.

Leaving aside that the Byrdes are frequently the least interesting characters on their own show, perpetually trapped in moral dilemmas prompted by their life of crime (dilemmas you’d really think they would have seen coming had they watched any other crime drama ever made), the audience knows they won’t be leaving anytime soon.

The Byrdes are our point-of-view characters. The story is about their slow descent into outright criminality, juxtaposed with the way said descent changes their family, sometimes for the better (but often for the worse). If they leave the Ozarks, then there is no show.

This is a common thing for an antihero drama to try for a few episodes. The “what if I tried to escape?” story has driven arcs on just about any antihero drama you can think of, though rarely successfully. TV doesn’t handle the moment where the protagonist “refuses the call” well, because it tends to drag out that moment into long bouts of inaction. Thus, in season two of Ozark, the Byrdes are too often reactive protagonists, trying to clean up messes caused by others rather than making new messes of their own.

There are still enough good things going on that I could have written off Ozark season two as competent but ultimately not for me — but for one thing.

Watching any given frame of this series, which has earned Emmy nominations for directing and cinematography, is frequently like looking through a pool of dirty dishwater. So intent on being perceived as serious is Ozark that it never stops to shoot anything in a format other than “ultra-glum.”

Some spoilers follow, mostly in the images, which depict certain situations the characters get into.

Let me explain what I mean by starting with a shot that is, on its face, totally defensible.

Ruth talks to her dad in the Ozark season two premiere. Netflix

I call this image “defensible,” because it more or less makes sense why Ruth’s face would be half in shadow. The scene takes place in a car, in late afternoon, in a place without a lot of light sources other than the sun. If you’re following a naturalistic theory of lighting, you can more or less argue for why Ruth appears to be receding into darkness.

But I pull up this image to give you a rather dramatic example of Ozark’s primary method for lighting scenes featuring human beings. Regardless of where they are, regardless of how much light would be present, they’re always lit so that half of their face is in shadow. I spent season two trying to count times when characters weren’t lit this way, and I never got to 15, across 10 episodes where the shortest installment ran 55 minutes and several ran over an hour.

It’s not just Ruth (the teenage would-be kingpin played by Julia Garner, who was the best thing about season one and is frustratingly wasted in season two), either. It’s every character. They’re all constantly trapped between darkness and light, in a bit of not particularly subtle visual symbolism.

Wendy attends a very important meeting. Netflix Marty makes a choice. Netflix Mason reveals himself. Netflix

Now, again, I could sort of make an argument for any of the above images making sense from the point of view of “there probably would be low light levels in that situation,” especially if you accept that everybody in the Ozarks is turning off lights all of the time to save on their electric bill.

But it’s harder to make that argument for a shot that is set in a hospital room. Have you seen hospital lighting?

You’d think the nurses would turn on more lights. Netflix

Or this shot, set outside, on a sunny day. The sun is literally right behind the subject of the shot, but the director has staged the shot underneath an overhang so that the shadow lies over half the actor’s face.

The sun is right there! Netflix

This is not a problem of any one director, either. The show’s directorial crew includes esteemed Emmy nominees and winners like Alik Sakharov and Phil Abraham and Bateman himself. No, this is just how the show chooses to light every single shot, so that you always know the characters are in a murky moral gray area, caught between their darker selves and their better selves. There’s no attempt to vary this, and everything has a vaguely bluish tint over it, like the whole story takes place at 6:30 am in November.

But all of the above shots are more or less legible. Yeah, I think they’re all kind of silly as visual metaphors, but you can mostly see what’s going on, and a sufficiently skilled actor (and Ozark has plenty of those) will be able to get across just as much with only half their face as with access to their whole expression.

No, the real problems arise when Ozark stages so many of its scenes in ways that downplay visual contrast, leaving almost everything shrouded in shadow, to the point of genuine incomprehension. (At one point in watching season two, my monitor switched off, and it took me a couple of seconds to figure it out. Once I turned it back on, you couldn’t see anything that was happening anyway.)

Like, what are we supposed to make of this …

Ruth wakes up to see her father. Netflix

Or this …

Guys, you can really turn on some lights. Netflix

Or this?

A pieta! I guess? Netflix

Any one of these images might be stunning if it weren’t surrounded by so many other images that looked just like it. The last one, in particular, accompanies an emotionally powerful moment, and seeing this sort of negative image of a pieta could create something incredibly moving. But when everything is suffused with shadow, it’s harder for those moments to stand out.

The shadowy images are so bad they even swallow some of the show’s attempts at visual humor. For example, try to tell me what’s supposed to be funny about this image:

Any guesses? Netflix

The joke is that this would-be tough guy is wearing a shirt that reads “Take a Dam Ride.” Even if you don’t know who the character is, you should be able to spot the silly pun. But Ozark’s visual scheme chokes even that out.

There are some occasionally interesting visuals in Ozark season two, usually involving the sudden eruption of fire (which has a tendency to cast an unearthly but much-needed glow onto everything nearby). And I liked the season’s final image, which uses the flatter lighting of a news photograph to throw everything that’s happened into relief.

But the show’s visuals, too often, feel like a series playing at seriousness via tricks it learned on other, better shows.

This is a big, emotional moment, which would be evident even in a still if we could see the actors’ faces at all. Netflix

I can already hear Ozark fans lining up to say, “So what if it’s dark and moody? I like dark and moody!” Well, let’s take a look at a famous shot from a series Ozark is frequently compared to: Breaking Bad.

Walter White at night. AMC

Notice how much more definitive the contrast in lighting is here. Yes, you lose a bit of Walter’s face to shadow, but you can still see what’s going on, and the string of lights behind him acts as an effective visual counterpoint to the dark things he’s doing. This is a scene, set at night, that immediately tells you everything you need to know about who Walter is and what he’s doing. And if you know the series, you’ll understand that even better.

What’s more, not all of Breaking Bad was lit like this! In fact, here’s a shot from the very same episode as the shot from above, the classic “Ozymandias” (directed by Rian Johnson).

Skyler’s life falls apart. AMC

Look how powerful that shot is because of the contrast between Skyler’s raging emotions and the starkness of daylight. Her whole life has fallen apart, and the unyielding sun is going to make sure you see every iota of her grief.

But I could point to literally any other great antihero drama and find the sort of visual contrast above. Yes, they all had scenes that took place in darkness and shadow, to great effect, and they all had scenes that seemed to take place in an eerie, autumnal chill. But they also had scenes in contrast to those, where the lights are so bright that you can’t look away from the devastation onscreen.

This sort of visual discontinuity is important to an audience’s experience of a filmed story. When everything looks the same, your brain tends to slide down into a rut of numbing familiarity. Effective filmmakers use visual discontinuity, then, to jar your brain out of that complacency, to make you sit up and take notice. (The great YouTube essayist Lindsay Ellis has a wonderful video on just this topic, covering the Transformers franchise, which has a similar problem to Ozark but in an opposite direction — there, the movies have too much going on in every frame.)

Going from dark to light, from action to inaction, from cacophony to stillness are all ways to keep viewers engaged and invested. Making sure everything is muted and coolly blue is a great way to simply trick the brain into guzzling down more episodes without really thinking about what it’s watching, at least not until moving on to the next thing. It’s a way to make what’s being offered seem like it has weight, without actually doing anything weighty.

The illusion of depth without any actual there there is an Ozark specialty. By the end of season two, it’s dragged itself to exactly where you’d think it would go, and racked up quite a body count (also proving it hasn’t really learned the lessons of the shows that came before it, which did their best to hold off on killing major characters). But none of it feels as if it has any meaning beyond getting from the end of season one to the start of season three. It’s a bridge to nowhere that keeps building itself right in front of you.

Tricking viewers’ brains into continuing to just watch stuff without really engaging with it is typical of this streaming era, and especially typical of Netflix, which too often settles for shows that have the appearance of quality without actually trying to do anything worth watching. They might not be good, but so long as they look good and feature good actors and have the sorts of plot turns you’d find in better shows, your brain might think they’re just good enough to keep going.

This is the specialty of Ozark, which is admittedly not the worst show on the air, or on Netflix. But there are few shows that make me feel more like a sucker once I’ve finished watching.

Ozark is streaming on Netflix.

Original Source -> Ozark’s muddy season 2, explained in 11 incomprehensible screenshots

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

[reginasrandomthoughts]

So when I finished reading chapter 4 (”Survival”) of A History of the World in 10 and a half chapters  I knew that that was pretty much the end of the progress I made today with my reading list. For one, I have stuff to say about and for two, I have other stuff and exams to prepare for. (Hey, ho! Icons on Film essay, I am so not happy to see you)

 So, I usually ramble on for myself and I have no structure to anything at all, so here I will try something different, and just write small reminders for me about each element or theme. Or will try. I know me and I have no illusions left. 

 I think that it is only fitting to start with the reindeer since that is what the story starts with. The reindeer that had premonition on Noah’s Ark and tried to run away from man, who will bring that bad thing on. The reindeer and animal cruelty. 

 Animal cruelty, animals paying for man’s sin is an established theme at this point and here it is very explicit: the Soviets exploded a nuclear bomb over Siberia and the radioactivity poisoned the food the reindeer ate and that poisoned the reindeer. But what humans cared about was that they could not eat its meat anymore. Since it became inedible for humans and they did not want to bury it, they fed it to an animal they thought unpleasant: the mink. This is how the story presents it. The mink of course gets slaughtered for its fur to make coats out of it and it still gets to humans, but the kind who would wear that coat presumably does not care about the radioactivity. 

 Another point of animal cruelty is the cats. Her boyfriend, Greg argues that they need to neuter Paul, the cat because he is too aggressive. Kath (whose name’s similarity to the word cat probably is not a coincidence) wholeheartedly disagrees. She thinks that mutilating an animal is a sin. ( I kinda agree with her on this. As a fellow owner of a male cat). But Greg is not the only one who is cruel to animals to fit his needs: in one version of the story Kath picks up another cat, Linda and keeps them on a boat with her and nearly starves them to death bc she is ignoring reality. 

Now, here is a quote from p87:

“Burying things gives you a proper sense of shame. Look what we’ve done to the reindeer, they’d say as hey dug the pit. Or they might, at least. They might think about it. Why are we always punishing animals? We pretend to like them, keep them as pets and get soppy if we think they’re reacting like us, but we’ve been punishing animals from the beginning, haven’t we? Killing them and torturing them and throwing our guilt at them?”

 For Kath this is purely a reference to the reindeer and what the government did to them. But she also connects to it through bringing in another topic, the inability to face reality and projecting. Out of Kath’s two alternative storylines she is torturing her animals: she disregards reality and does not notice that she is hurting them, argues that she is doing something good for them, feeding them fish (that she has no problem killing) but in reality she is starving them. An argument for this timeline can be made by her first claim that she feeds fish only to the cats while she eats canned food. She does not eat fish, because there is no fish to be eaten and reverts to eating the hallucination when she runs out of real food. In the alternative story, Kath’s reality, she is projecting her guilt on them, regardless of how real that version is. She is saying that she left everything behind to save them, as a modern Noah, she acts like protecting them will make her life better and wash the human sin off of her. And in case she is starving them, she projects her guilt onto them via the illusion: she feels guilty so she pretends they are getting fatter rather than thinner. 

Since both the upper mentioned topics are still very big and interconnected let’s tackle two smaller ones first discrimination and abuse (and Kath).

Discrimination is going to be the easiest to start with, because I already talked about it. It is a major theme of the book. So far we have seen humans discriminating between animal species (ch1), humans discriminating between human nationalities (ch2), humans discriminating between species (human and animal in ch3) and now we see humans discriminate between genders. Kath and Greg, I am sorry to say, are both sexist: Greg thinks Kath is stupid and doesn’t get what the men are talking about because she is a woman. He degrades her by calling her a cow, he figuratively lowers her to the level of an animal, to something less than human. Kath, in turn views all men as irredeemable. All the man must be like Greg because to Kath Greg is the “typical bloke” and since he is an abusive jackass, the antagonist of her life, all men must be villains as well. 

And Greg is abusive. He slaps Kath around, he degrades her, he belittles her. Yet Kath says that this is typical. Ordinary: 

“Greg was an ordinary bloke. Not that I wanted anything different when I met him he went to work, came home, sat down, drank beer, went out with his mates and drank more beer, sometimes slapped me around a bit on pay-night. We got on fair enough.”  

To Kath, him hitting her, a man hitting a woman is ordinary. Just part of the package. She was not looking for anything else. She oddly enough draws a direct connection between him hitting her and them getting on well by putting the two sentences next to each other. And from the hospital storyline (I am calling it that) we learn that that is, indeed, the case: Kath was looking for someone just like Greg, someone abusive, that she has a history with dating men like that, that she has Persistent Victim Syndrome. Now, in one timeline this is bollocks. In the other Kath is ignoring reality, really hard: she ignores that Greg being abusive is not okay, she ignores her dating history, she ignores the break-up. In this timeline there is no war, there is just one big fight, a bad break-up, the fall-out, and a post-Greg timeline, where kath is pushed to the breaking point and reality starts to slip because of all the stress and abuse of her life, and perhaps a natural tendency to ignore reality. 

Kath has a tendency to ignore reality. She believes that reindeer can fly just so she can believe that anything is possible. Her faith in that is unshakable. She is a sensitive, deeply empathetic woman who is easily touche by the suffering of animals and is attuned to the stress and dangers of her time. She has a tendency to cling to the unreal even in the face of evidence to the contrary and she may or may not be going insane. 

As a throwaway, I found it interesting that her name is Ferris. The first associations from that, for me, are ferris wheel, something that is just going round and round in circles, and ferryboat and ferry as in carry something. With these associations Kathleen Ferris fits into the theme about Noah and his animals: she like Noah gets on a boat to carry her animals to safety, but in the hospital timeline she ends up delusional and going in a circle, like a ferris wheel and, as she points out, humanity. In her-reality timeline, she insists that she is starting over again, and if that is the case she is starting again from the beginning, her being the new Noah, but purely for cats. Also in the hospital timeline, she herself becomes the ferryboat, carrying these ideas in her own head taking them away from reality, that has become uninhabitable for her. She says she does not look at the way she came because she does not intend to go back and in the end she makes up her mind to accept the her-reality to be the real reality. 

Now as the finale let’s talk about the two timeline of events and how ignoring reality and projecting comes into play. There are two possible timelines: 

 In the hospital timeline Kath breaks up with Greg and that combined with the stress of a looming nuclear war makes her snap and she becomes delusional, believing that the war did broke out and that she needs to get her cat, and the other cat she randomly picked up, away from the war. She gets stuck on a boat where she goes around in circles while her cats starve. She becomes ill and tears her hair out but gets rescued and has lucid moments in the hospital that she interprets as a hallucination until she finally retreats into her make-believe world.

 The other timeline, the her-reality is where everything is as Kath says: the war breaks out she grabs the cats, gets onto the boat, feeds them fish, gets sick from the whatever poison got into the air, finds an island where her cat Linda gives birth to the kitten of her other cat, Paul. 

Now, me being a born pessimist, I lean towards the hospital timeline. But I guess each to their own? I guess. Anyway, what we are talking about is themes and not definitive answers. The Theme of ignoring reality play a part in both of those and roughly the same way.

In the hospital timeline Kath ignores reality from the point onwards when she broke up with Greg, so everything after that is just her blocking out reality. To her a fictional reality where she can step away from the complicated human society that has so many stress-inducing problems is appealing even at the cost of having the new reality that probably most people are dead now and the air is poison. This post-apocalyptic fantasy is escapism, escape from humanity, its sins, its problems. And Kath can escape from her own life and own choices as well: the choice to date Greg, the break up, everything. And because she retreats from reality she has to project her own into its place: her reality. 

Her reality is that humans are ignoring the signs (we are) and that it has gotten t a point where the nuclear war broke out without anyone noticing. They are ignoring the reality to project a peace and to push the responsibility to solve the problem onto someone else. Now, in this line of events the flashes from the hospital-timeline are the delusions: they are Kath’s struggle to let go of the old world, to fight against escaping into a fantasy land where all of this is just a bad dream and she is just sick but will get better. 

So from the perspective of the themes it really doesn’t matter which timeline is correct. 

#Regina shitposts literature #getting better at it? idk but i hope so #i hereby declare these posts my daily writing practice that are here to get me to write more #next step is to write when i am not dead tired and can actually think #the history of the world in ten and a half chapters

[davidhewittus]

Download Fake Doctors Notes for Work / School

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Taking a break from work requires a reason or excuse. And that’s why you will need to download fake doctor’s notes.

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Before picking a fake specialist’s note, you have to decide why you require one in any case. If you need a day away from work to rest, or if you are going on a luxurious vacation, the kind of reason may change. For example, if you simply require one day weekend, a solitary medical consultation note would be adequate.

However, if you need seven days off, you will require a hospital release letter. The first and most essential stride about making a fake doctor note is finding a template that matches the conditions. Utilizing notes that don’t coordinate the conditions is a major mistake. For example, if you had the basic influenza bug and were away for seven days that will be suspicious. So, before using a note you have to find a customizable template.

What Is the Problem in Fake Doctors Note Free Download?

Free fillable notes accessible online might be the most helpful but, it is not a smart thought to use them. A quick online search would provide you many websites where you can get  a free note. These notes are editable and printable as well. But, you should stay away from free notes available online. Most employers or teachers have seen these notes and it would be easy to know they are falsified. For a specialist’s note with a truer feel, a premium online supplier would be perfect.

If you have no arrangements of dropping by your specialist’s office or procuring a virtual medical expert to secure a note for work, it is ideal to search for a legitimate online supplier. A reliable provider of doctor’s notes is hard but necessary to find. There are numerous sites over the web that are offering free medical note samples. You can download an example from any website to use. But, there is a considerable measure of risks required with using a free excuse format that you find on the web. The notes that are offered for nothing over the web are not genuine looking. If you want to download a genuine looking fake note, BestFakeDoctorsNotes.net is your one-stop solution.

Frequently Asked Questions about Fake Note Template Download

Why choosing a right excuse is so much important?

Go with the excuse! The sort of excuse you use is much more than the fake specialist’s note independent from anyone else. This additionally implies you should live by what the note says. You can’t be as dynamic as you were in the wake of having surgery, right? So, appearing as though nothing at any point happened won’t wind up well with you, there are a couple of conditions you should satisfy so as to totally make your manager trust the medical reason you hand over to him. You should do it for your employment. Behave as if you are still sick. Read our article to get help while choosing the right excuse for you.

Is it important to use a verifiable doctor’s note?

Yes. While the HIPAA laws don’t help much, for the false note they are great. It’s obvious, there are very few things that your boss can call and ask your medical practitioner about your condition. Your supervisor is likely truly knowledgeable in what is adequate and what is most certainly not. A supervisor can’t call a medical office and inquire as to whether you were seen, or what your condition is. What they can do is confirm that the telephone number and specialist both work there. That is the reason the data on the fake note must be obvious.

It sounds troublesome yet it isn’t. The provider of the document must have a phone message framework that answers the calls and confirms the data somehow. There exists a difference between the cheap online doctor’s excuses and those that are a legitimate way to get a day off. You have to choose the best one! Like your excuse, you should likewise keep your fake specialist’s note format as basic as could be expected under the circumstances. Note that doctors avoid dealing with somewhat wiped out patients who are basically at their doorsteps because their managers are making them go for a note.

This implies you should make your note look like a receptionist spend a few minutes typing it up, and a doctor scribbled a signature on it while trying to get you out of their office.

How to find the best one?

The best place where one can get the best fake specialist’s notes or a hospital release letter is on the web. This is because there are various clinic release notes, fake specialist’s notes and in addition, different sorts of medical reports that are promptly accessible online for download. Here are a couple of things you should do before choosing a layout:

Discover a duplicate of a genuine note from a hospital or specialist – Such specimens are accessible on the web and are free. But, it requires a lot of time to find the correct sort of illustration that you require. The notes have a tendency to be standardized because the specialists also download them on the web. And that’s why the templates are relatively easy to find.

Study an example of the best fake specialist’s notes – An organization that claims to deal with fake medical excuse notes or letters must have free specimens for their customers as a matter of course. It is important to make sure that fake specialist’s note you are using looks real and this must be done through observing it. Try not to trust organizations that neglect to offer their customers free specimens as there is a high likelihood that the items they offer are of low quality.

Read every one of the terms and conditions – Reliable organizations that offer best fake specialist’s notes tend to offer tips, free confirmation benefits, and even assurances. An organization that neglects to provide and an unconditional promise can’t be trusted.

Download a clear layout – The fake specialist’s note format that is downloaded should be clear to make space for customization in order to fulfill the correct needs of a person.

As a new doctor, if you need to make a flawless format for making specialist notes for your patients, you are encouraged to get assistance from specialist note layout in such manner. A doctor’s note template is a readymade record arranged by an expert with every single fundamental zone and fields that a specialist may need to compose an effective specialist note in mistake freeway.

Can I get a real doctor’s note?

Yes. If you want a real doctor’s note you should simply visit a hospital to get a note from the specialist. Once you’re there, go about as though you are wiped out. A stomach hurt is always a winner with regards to this. Indeed, even a genuine specialist won’t have the capacity to tell in case you’re faking it or not.

While at it, tell the specialist you require a note since you required some time off school or work. In the event that your specialist declines to issue a note, counsel a virtual specialist and approach them for a note to demonstrate you were debilitated. These specialists are very careful about issuing notes despite the fact that you can give it a shot.

At the point when your plan fails, you can simply present a fake doctor’s note. These notes look simple like the genuine one if you get one from a decent and reliable supplier. Visit here to get such a note.

The Conclusion

There are many reasons that require a man a touch of leisure time without disclosing the reasons at school or work. It might be because of stress, the cost of doctors as a few people can’t visit a specialist when they are unwell or even an individual crisis. In such circumstance, a fake note is one of the best answers to utilize. Click here to get 100% genuine looking fake specialist’s note.

from BestFakeDoctorsNotes.net https://www.bestfakedoctorsnotes.net/download/

from Best Fake Doctors Notes https://bestfakedoctorsnotes1.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/download-fake-doctors-notes-for-work-school/

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Why Do Young Boys Are Increasingly Becoming More Suicidal?

Men may be the stronger sex (physically) but that does not mean they do not get hurt too. At a young age, boys are trained to act tough and refrain from crying even when they are hurt. Boys learn to keep their feelings to themselves in fear of being bullied for not being man enough. This culture makes it harder for boys to grow up and have a healthy emotional state.

Regardless of how far we’ve come when it comes to technology, nothing much has changed on how we view male masculinity. Boys fail to develop a positive sense of self when they can no longer escape the scrutiny of other people through various social media platforms they frequent. Cyberbullying is common and it can cause severe anxiety on vulnerable victims., boys increasingly become suicidal because they never learned how to speak up and express their feeling without the fear of being judged for who they are. And the sad fact about this is that it affects boys all over the world – without exception. And boys bottling up their feelings will not do them any good once they reach adulthood.

Hence, boys increasingly become suicidal because they never learned how to speak up and express their feeling without the fear of being judged for who they are. And the sad fact about this is that it affects boys all over the world – without exception. And boys bottling up their feelings will not do them any good once they reach adulthood - if they ever do.

As the government attempts to improve the health scenario of the state by assuring to provide ‘quality access to all’, with its health schemes, introduction of high-tech machines and hospital upgrades, the question of where mental illness would stand in the list of health sector improvements lingers on.

According to the World Health Organisation, approximately one million people commit suicide each year worldwide, which is about one death every 40 seconds or 3,000 per day. It is the 10th leading cause of death globally, and the statistics continue to increase with each passing year. Itanagar alone reported a steep increase in unnatural deaths or suicides in over a year’s time. According to available records in the Itanagar Police Station, there were 14 cases of suicide in 2015. The numbers saw a high rise with 23 cases in 2016, which roughly makes two deaths in a month. The figures for 2017 currently remain at two suicides, which occurred in January.

(Via: http://www.arunachaltimes.in/the-silence-on-suicide/)

Boys are just as vulnerable as girls to suicide.

“For boys in particular it can be harder to ask for help due to a reluctance to talk about their feelings, but this could be stopping boys from accessing support when they most need it.

“We hope that by putting the spotlight on male suicide we can help boys see that they are not alone. If they can’t talk to friends or parents then Childline is here to listen to them, whenever they need us.”

“But we know that boys particularly struggle to talk about their despair because they regard it as weakness to share their feelings, so we want to encourage them to speak to us on the phone, or online because we also know that if they try to combat these suicidal thoughts alone, they can become overwhelmed by them, and that’s when we can lose precious young lives.

“Suicide is one of the leading causes of death for boys and young men. We need to draw attention to this growing problem, and make sure all our desperate children know that Childline is there for them, day and night.”

(Via: https://coventryobserver.co.uk/news/childline-urges-boys-to-speak-out-about-suicidal-feelings/)

The good thing about tragedies like this one is that it raises awareness to the issue. People in authority can make advocacies and policies that help young boys deal with their suicidal tendencies and improve their outlook on life. Moreover, more and more young boys break out of their silence to help others who are still struggling with their depression and let them know that suicide is not the answer to their problems.

Boys in Northern Ireland are less likely than girls to seek help if they are feeling

suicidal, according to the NSPCC.

Childline is urging boys to speak out as figures reveal they are significantly less likely than girls to talk to counsellors about thoughts of ending their lives.

In 2015/16, Childline delivered over twice as many counselling sessions to girls in Northern Ireland compared to boys, where the child’s gender was known with 70 sessions delivered to boys and 168 to girls.

Statistics show that across Northern Ireland, more than twice as many boys aged 10-19 died by suicide than girls in 2015.

(Via: http://www.itv.com/news/utv/2017-03-07/boys-less-likely-than-girls-to-seek-support-for-suicidal-feelings/)

Establish an open relationship with your son if you are a parent of a young boy. You are your son’s primary support system and they should not be afraid to open up to you about their problems. It may be heartbreaking for a parent to see your child suffer but you can always ask for help yourself, so you may be able to help your child too. The most important thing is to learn how to distinguish early signs of suicidal tendencies and find out what you can do to help.

Why Do Young Boys Are Increasingly Becoming More Suicidal? was first published on IPAction.org/blog

from https://ipaction.org/blog/why-do-young-boys-are-increasingly-becoming-more-suicidal/