#which in one way or another involve gender (obviously its not the ONLY factor there’s also race etc)

[mazpacheco]

.

#late night thotty thots #not to be fake deep but #in a perfect world (for me. this is how i personally feel) there would be no gender #of any kind #the concept of gender the attributes of each gender the whatever just no #its kind of tiring to have i wish we existed as energies passing through space and time just vibing #i also feel like a lot of the issues in the world in one way or another stem from having the concept of gender #bc people are socialized the way they are and that affects all their experiences #and everything that’s happened ever is the sum of the consequences of all the individual experiences everyone has #which in one way or another involve gender (obviously its not the ONLY factor there’s also race etc) #but think about it #wouldnt it be so much better if we didnt focus on gender and instead focused on finding balance between #different energies within and between us #yeah maybe there’s ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ energy or whatever you wanna call it #but i think if we find the right balance of these different energies and just vibed it’d make for a better life #i want to abolish gender fuck all of it i am so tired 😓 #me

[the-modern-typewriter]

Wanted to type this cause I don't know if it was just me who is bothered by it. The media has a tendency to portray people who are "bottoms" as dainty, quiet, shy, submissive, and etc. Of course there are people who are bottoms that fit these characteristics. But sometimes it is kinda overused in media. I think this portrayal is a huge factor of people's perception of lgbtq. I think this is why I lean towards reading writing that has a "power bottom" trope to overcome this. I adore how diverse and inclusive your writing is with all types of of sexualities and personalities. Also hope that wherever you live is doing good with the covid crisis.

That bothers me too!

Honestly, I think part of it is that people love to simplify most power dynamics, especially when elements like sexuality and/or gender gets involved. Bit of a tangential derail, but you see it in the example above, and also in things like:

guy and a girl are fighting, the girl is crying, so clearly she is the victim

When, actually, while this is definitely not always the case, tears can be weaponised, as can portrayals of femininity. And this is with the often perpetuated idea that crying is an inherently weak or more submissive thing to do. Submissive being coded as passive or obedient in the dictionary definition. Yet, the above example, to me, seems like obvious proof that actually we cannot take physical actions entirely at face value to universally mean one thing or another.

I raise femininity over masculinity here because I think most people have some familiarity with the concept of toxic masculinity, but the same critique is more rarely applied towards femininity because in terms of a structural, institutionalised power dynamic femininity is the one with less power. However, structural power is not the same as power in a situation between individuals.

This obviously has knock on impact on how LGBTQ dynamics are viewed and examined, because our expectations for gender have always been rather complicatedly entwined with our views about sexuality.

I often feel its people writing or trying to write about power dynamics, but never thinking deeply about 'who has power in a dynamic?' 'What power do they have?' and most often it's not as simple as X has 100% of the power and Y has none, or that physical dominance is the only kind of power available or the one with the most weight.

And, obviously, I appreciate that labels are there to simplify and communicate larger preferences in a quick and easy way so there is a place for that...but it is a place that gets tricky when you take a label (which is a starting point) and treat it like the end point.

What I don't know, but am curious about, is:

Do people like to simplify power dynamics because they want something clear cut and 'easy' in a world that can feel increasingly grey and difficult to navigate?

Or it something else? Is the simplifying a lack of critical thinking? Lack of knowledge?

Most likely, it's all of the above, and again depends on the individual. But it's a topic I find fascinating. I have completely derailed from the original topic now but...yes.

Or possibly I'm just over-complicating this hugely in my head, and people aren't just thinking that deeply about the stereotypes they portray.

So I'm going to stop before I go into full essay mode.

#writing #power dynamics #thinking

[whetstonefires]

Your post about romance was so spot on and this is from someone who really likes reading romances some of the time. I just wish there were more books where friendships (which after all make up the majority of people's relationships!!) were given the same weight and importance as romance gets unthinkingly. Like, I want books or fic which show the development of two (or more) new friends *as the plot and main part of the book*, and the same thing for the progression of pre-established friendship.

Human relationships are varied and complex and interesting and limiting writing to mainly concerning romantic or dating ones is infuriating! I enjoy reading character driven stuff, which is why I like some romances but I really want to see similarly detailed deep studies of friendship. Friendships are so important, and romantic relationships do not supersede them.  Obviously there is gendered bias against romance as a genre but that is not the only reason to be uninterested in romance damnit!

Sorry for ranting in your inbox about romance and thanks for the post

Hah thank and welcome. Very true!

Yeah, the problem is not just how ubiquitous romance is but the inevitability of it. So many people are so much in the habit of hanging their emotional investment on ‘couples getting together’ that not putting one in is a risk, as a creator, and the faint suggestion of a possibility that a romance might eventuate between two characters constitutes a promise that the audience will be outraged to see not followed through.

So making a story focus at all on a relationship between two people who are considered valid potential romantic partners means having to go through incredible backflips and contortions as a writer to get away with not pairing them up, or there will be outrage. There will be outrage anyway, but hopefully on a contained scale that doesn’t have people throwing your book away.

(The easiest way, of course, is to give one or both of them an alternate partner, but then you either have to build up that relationship as the central focus instead, because you aren’t allowed to love anyone that much and not be romantically involved or be romantically involved For Real with anyone but whoever you love most, or accept that you’ve plastered on a beard of some kind in a way that at this point makes your main duo look even more romantic to people who are looking for that in the first place, even if it lets you write a plot that doesn’t acknowledge this.)

This has contributed enormously to the cultural truism ‘men and women can’t be friends.’ They aren’t allowed to be. And this weird intense romantic pressure is now increasingly extending to same-sex friendships, and it’s like...it’s good that gay visibility and acceptance are growing! That’s great!

But it means that all relationships are increasingly exposed to this honestly fucked up set of expectations. That every single love of any intensity is romantic and probably sexual. That that’s the only love that’s real, or that really matters. With occasional exemptions carved out for parents.

And that’s cultural, I want to say. The inclusion of and an interest in the romantic lives of characters in fiction is definitely natural and practically inevitable, but the outsize role it occupies in our current media culture is abnormal and totally non-compulsory. The central role of romance in so much of narrative is just...a pattern, a narrative schema that currently holds sway, born of an assortment of historical accidents and trends, and I don’t think it’s a good one.

I think it would be better for us as a culture and all our individual relationships for that particular social construct to be broken down.

Because this cultural obsession with The Romance in media mirrors and continually recreates the obsession with The Romance in real life. You know how many people are making themselves miserable by either being in a relationship predicated on the need to have one, any one, rather than actual mutual affection, or about not having a love interest currently at any given moment?

Like, quite separately from the actual frustrated romantic feelings themselves, people feeling like they are less or failures or just...unfinished somehow, because they don’t have a romantic partner. It’s so harmful and absurd! We all know this!

And there are of course a lot of sociological factors that have led to that point as well, but it’s linked particularly closely I think to the atomization of modern society.

You’re not likely to retain any particular community for long--we move around so much over the course of our lives, anything you have is designed to be taken apart. School friends are only rarely retained after school, work friends are only until you get a new job, family is quite often something to be avoided or something you have to leave behind, and not usually an extended network anymore anyway.

We are always moving into new contexts, or knowing we might be moved, and holding onto relationships from one context into another is generally regarded as an unusual feat betokening particular, though not lionized, devotion, and leaning on these relationships ‘too much’ or pursuing them with ‘too much’ energy is regarded with deep suspicion.

This, too, is not particularly normal in the human experience. We are not psychologically designed for this level of impermanence. And we have developed very few structures as a culture thus far to make up for it, which is why the modern adult is so famously, dangerously lonely.

But we have all these social protocols for acquiring a person and holding onto them. A person who’s just yours, all yours, who it is promised will fulfill all those gaping needs all by themselves, and if they don’t it’s because you or they are wrong, and need either a different partner or fixing.

The fact that this is insane and not how romance works over 90% of the time is irrelevant to the dream of it, and the dream overwhelms and controls the reality. I agree that codependency is really fucking romantic, and having a kind and supportive mutual one is a lovely fantasy! It’s just...

A lot of harm eventuates from pursuing this fantasy in reality with a media-based conviction that it is 1) a reasonable thing to expect and 2) a necessary precondition for wellbeing and worthiness.

But we have poured so much cultural freight and need into this one single relationship format. At this point having need in any other direction is regarded as disordered and suspect and probably a misdirected application of sexual desire.

The law, too, has put a lot of energy into supporting the focus on seeking the romance as life goal, because the nuclear family is built on the codependent marriage, and capitalism likes the nuclear family very much. The nuclear family is extremely vulnerable to market pressures and bad at collective action, and tends to produce new tiny humans whose main social outlet has been within the school system, which is specifically structured to condition you to accept abusive workplace conditions as a normal precondition of existence, and not to attempt too much intimacy.

Ahem. Spiraled there. But! It’s all connected! Many of the privileges piled onto the institution of marriage were put there specifically because the nuclear family was considered desirable for the expansion of the economy. That’s clearly documented historical fact.

So yeah, the modern cultural obsession with the romance is a symptom of collective emotional disorder, and it chugs along at the expense of the more complex emotional support infrastructures most of us need and deserve.

It’s not just about me wanting representation, wanting an image in the narratives of my culture where I can see myself with the potential for happiness. Everyone needs this. We learn so much about how to be, how to relate to others, from media at this point, since the school system and other weird age-hierarchy stuff keeps us largely segregated from human society for a majority of our growing years and limits our exposure to live examples.

So the paucity of in-depth explorations of friendship, of mutual support, of widespread narrative acceptance that you can have a good life without a romance as its central support pillar, is harmful to people in general.

-

It’s funny, I get frustrated about this periodically, when a piece of media lets me down, or even when I’m following along a funny piece of meta and then the punchline is ‘and the ace character is obviously in denial about how they’re already dating their favorite person’ or whatever.

(The meta is annoying on a surface level and distressing on a deeper level because it’s a threat; so many times a good platonic relationship will buckle under public pressure and it doesn’t matter how asexual, how uninterested in romance, how emphatically platonic the affection has been established as being, The Romance arrives in the next installment of the story because it’s what people expect. Which reinforces the general perception that any other love is illegitimate, lesser, and as soon as it’s meant to be taken seriously it has to be crammed into that one valid shape, and invalidates future insistences in the same mode.

Seriously people stop doing this, we long since reached the point where a character saying in words ‘I have no romantic interest in [person]’ is perceived as a glaring neon sign that they’re destined to get together and that does not do good things for fostering a culture of consent. Obviously people are in denial sometimes but it should not be understood to be the rule.)

But I don’t get upset about it until someone starts in with reasons I’m bad and wrong for not liking these norms.

Like, whatever, media does not cater to my needs, I’ll cope, but when people start trying to get in my head and make me not only responsible for my own discomfort that I’m managing thanks but dishonest and malevolent I...get upset. There’s history there, okay.

‘You don’t care about this ship because you’re homophobic’ ‘you don’t want a love interest in the sequel because you’re racist’ ‘you don’t like romance in stories because you’re a misogynist’ fucking stop.

And occasionally it’s like ‘i guess you have the right to feel that way but how dare you talk about it where other people might hear’ which...well, is particularly common and particularly ironic in the context of people hung up on gay representation.

If we as a society had a healthy relationship with romance, there wouldn’t be negative side effects to that crowd’s pursuit of their worthy goal of applying that schema in places it has been Forbidden, but as it is we don’t, and there are.

#aromanticism #romance #society #social constructs #i throw salt #on a related note #i know The Untamed was Ambiguous because of censorship #but i was still enjoying not being able to tell dammit #you can ALWAYS tell normally #and that's so boring #people complain less about getting fake foreshadowing about who the murderer was than about not knowing who's interested in who #and who has a real shot with their target #being forced to be ambiguous was making those actors bring their A game #so i still wish i could have watched it play out without spoilers #because it's SO RARE that you can't immediately tell which way a story intends itself to be read on that front #and it was such a nice change #and i have legitimately cried several times over the loss of the joy i was getting out of that relationship not being so fucking dull #because like it's still fun and well done and stuff but it's not INTERESTING #i didn't even realize how much i was missing that until i briefly had it and it was taken away #so now i get sad a lot when i think about it #and it sucks that the forms for including romance in our media are so formalized #that the only way to get that realistic unclear coalescence of emotional energies #is by writing a romance and being forced to lie about it #a nonny mouse #ask #hoc est meum

[qqueenofhades]

Hi!! 💕I was reading across your medieval queer history tag, and I came to the part of Muslims and homosexuality where you mention the active / passive narrative that this activity had.

I had two questions and I don't know if you can help me with them. I was wondering if there was something similar to that position in Nicky's time (?) at the European part of the world. And based on that, would it be a problem for the sexual activities that Nicky and Joe might have had? (sorry for this insane curiosity) I don't know if I'm being clear, haha. I mean, would it be a problem being active/passive for Nicky and Joe? ( based on common Islamic and/or European thought of the 11th century)

Thank you!!

Hmm. I feel like this is a better subject for fanfic (i.e. how Nicky and Joe viewed their relationship in the early days) because it touches on something historians can’t answer: how historical individuals privately viewed their own internal/emotional decisions and preferences. Obviously, Nicky and Joe themselves are fictional, so the only inner feelings they themselves had about how their relationship first developed, whether in its sexual components or otherwise, are the ones that are created for them by a team of modern writers and showrunners. As a historian, I can offer some perspective on the institutional, legal, and societal mores and customs that influenced how queer behavior was collectively viewed, tolerated, or restricted, but I can’t say how any given individual would have then interpreted that to themselves. Obviously, some gay people have been raised in such deeply self-hating environments that their internalized homophobia is very embedded and they struggle for years to get over it. Some others have been raised in the same environment but have never actually accepted any of it and have less difficulty in leaving it behind. Once again, this goes into the realm of speculation rather than strictly provable history, and which goes double for fictional characters.

Queer people have always existed in a complicated and sometimes contradictory relationship with the mainstream (that is, often heteronormative) dominant society. Sometimes they accept all of it in an attempt to “pass” or because they have been taught to be homophobic, sometimes they choose to selectively adopt parts of it but try to live a secret “second life,” sometimes they reject all of it. These choices are conditioned by personal safety/family background, political, cultural, religious, and social environments, formal and informal education, kinship and friendship networks, positive/negative reinforcement, individual character, and so on. There is not necessarily a “wrong” choice for a queer person to make, because each course of action comes with its own risks and rewards, but if you’re choosing to embrace your queer identity and to live out its truth (as Joe and Nicky seem to have done relatively soon after they met), then that will involve an element of rejecting whatever constraints heteronormative society has placed on you. After all, the formal legal conventions about sodomy in the Middle Ages weren’t developed in consultation with actual queer people. They reflected the concerns of conservative establishment clergymen, who weren’t interested in promoting social acceptance of it (and yet again, this doesn’t touch on THEIR actual feelings or whatever they might have done in private). I’ve discussed the complexity of disentangling historical homoromanticism (which was pretty widely celebrated in the medieval era) and historical homosexuality (which had a rockier time, but as I wrote about in this ask, the attempted policing of sexuality and sexual behavior was as much the case for m/f relationships as m/m or f/f ones -- nobody got away from this and it wasn’t just for the gays.)

Basically, I personally don’t think that either Joe or Nicky would have had a problem with sex or certain sexual positions, just because if both of them had reached the point of deciding that a Catholic/Muslim was their true love and they were going to run off together and be a couple no matter what anyone said about it, that already entailed rejecting a huge amount of the ideology they were originally taught and grew up with. It’s again a subject for fanfic how much Joe and Nicky were personally comfortable with being queer before they met each other, so this would more likely be a rejection of religious teaching about the unworthiness/evilness of the rival faith (as Nicky says, the love of his life was from the people he had been taught to hate). Since almost all medieval queer behavior and views on queer people had a religious component, if Joe/Nicky had gotten as far as rejecting the religious tenet that told them the other was Evil, they were (again, in my opinion) extremely unlikely to use any of those old religious arguments for prohibiting or proscribing certain kinds of sexual activity. I’m sure they had to negotiate many issues in the early days of their relationship (as I write about in DVLA), but they’re clearly head over heels in love with each other, wildly attracted to each other and have been for almost a millennium, and eager to embrace the physicality of that relationship, so I don’t personally see this as being a major stumbling block.

That said, you did ask about European views on sodomy in the 11th century and whether there was a parallel to Islamic views on the moral acceptability of the active vis-a-vis the passive partner. Since antiquity, there has always been less “shame” attached to the penetrative/top partner in sex, no matter whether the receiving partner is male or female. Ancient Greece is another example of this, where the adult man could not be penetrated without insult to his manhood and dignity, but the fact of him penetrating a younger man/teenage boy was a fine and even accepted rite of passage. We can obviously talk about how this is related to phallocentrism and misogyny, because the person “receiving” sex is usually expected to be a woman or a woman-equivalent person, which entails lower social status. The dominant male can take whichever sexual partner he pleases, and it’s a mark of honor and status for him to be virile (the very, very ancient chestnut about why playboys are tolerated and admired while sexually active women are “sluts.”) The gender of his partners might not matter as much as their social class, their status in relation to his, his “right” to expect sexual availability from them, and a whole lot of other factors. This could be and also was the case in medieval Europe. But may we point out that the men engaging in these kind of explicitly unequal relationships, which are more about reinforcing power and control than real desire, are very, very unlike the equal and loving mutual partnership between Joe and Nicky, where they were clearly happy to please and respect the other in whatever way.

It has not always been the case that same-sex activity would automatically be defined and suspect, though yes, there has never been an instance in Western history where it was placed uncomplicatedly on the same level as opposite-sex activity. It had to be constructed that way. As I keep saying, modern homophobia is a lot more stringent and explicit than any medieval expressions thereof, because if “homosexuality” was not constructed as a clearly recognized identity, there was less ability to rail against it. In fact, the usual rhetorical tactic was to just ignore it. Sodomy is known as the “silent sin” or “peccatum mutum” in Latin, because moralists usually didn’t talk about it or discuss it or give it an actual framework for debate and thus implied legitimacy. There were obvious exceptions (Peter Damian, Peter the Chanter, Bernardino of Siena, Heinrich Kramer, etc, etc) and as the medieval era went on, homosexuality became more grouped in with other undesirables. But that also reflected a growing visibility/awareness among people as to what it was. As I keep saying, you can’t be anxious about something, you can’t be worried about people being susceptible to it, you can’t be worried that it’s happening in reality, if it’s just an abstract concern of rhetoric that only a handful of churchmen know about. The increasing visibility of queerness as a category of exclusion in late medieval polemics reflected a) the social stress of the crises of the late medieval world and the usual function of Others as a scapegoat and b) the fact that by then, people must have had enough awareness of it as a pattern of consistent behavior for clerics to get mileage out of attacking it.

Anyway. In an attempt to summarize: historians can’t possibly know how historical queer people felt about themselves, if they were influenced by societal or internalized homophobia (itself quite different from modern homophobia), how much of the dominant social narrative they accepted, the reasons for the choices that they made, if they saw their queer preferences as a sin or as a valid lifestyle, and so on. But it seems unlikely that historical queer people specifically in loving long-term relationships, such as Joe and Nicky, would be unduly tied to much of that, and that has always been the case.

#history #medieval history #queer history #history of sexuality #the old guard meta #anonymous #ask

[dajokahhh]

Alright, time for some pretentious sociological-esque rambling. This is gonna be long as hell (its 1822 words to be specific) and I don’t begrudge anyone for not having the patience to read my over-thought perspectives on a murder clown. CWs for: child abuse, 

I think a lot of things have to go wrong in someone’s life for them to decide to become a clown themed supervillain. A lot of people in Gotham have issues but they don’t become the Joker. I think that as a writer it’s an interesting topic to explore, and this is especially true for roleplaying where a character might be in different scenarios or universes. This isn’t some peer reviewed or researched essay, it’s more my own personal beliefs and perspectives as they affect my writing. I think villains, generally, reflect societal understandings or fears about the world around us. This is obviously going to mean villains shift a lot over time and the perspective of the writer. In my case, I’m a queer, fat, mentally ill (cluster B personality disorder specifically) woman-thing who holds some pretty socialist ideas and political perspectives. My educational background is in history and legal studies. This definitely impacts how I write this character, how I see crime and violence, and how my particular villains reflect my understandings of the society I live in. I want to get this stuff out of the way now so that my particular take on what a potential origin story of a version of the Joker could be makes more sense.

Additionally, these backstory factors I want to discuss aren’t meant to excuse someone’s behaviour, especially not the fucking Joker’s of all people. It’s merely meant to explain how a person (because as far as we know that’s all he is) could get to that point in a way that doesn’t blame only one factor or chalk it up to “this is just an evil person.” I don’t find that particularly compelling as a writer or an audience member, so I write villains differently. I also don’t find it to be particularly true in real life either. If you like that style of writing or see the Joker or other fictional villains in this way, that’s fine. I’m not here to convince anyone they’re wrong, especially not when it comes to people’s perspectives on the nature of evil or anything that lofty. Nobody has to agree with me, or even like my headcanons; they’re just here to express the very specific position I’m writing from. 

The first thing I wanna do is set up some terms. These aren’t academic or anything, but I want to use specific and consistent phrasing for this post. When it comes to the factors that screw up someone’s life significantly (and in some instances push people towards crime), I’ll split them into micro and macro factors. Micro factors are interpersonal and personal issues, so things like personality traits, personal beliefs, mental health, family history, where and how someone is raised, and individual relationships with the people around them. Macro factors are sociological and deal with systems of oppression, cultural or social trends/norms, political and legal restrictions and/or discrimination, etc. These two groups of factors interact, sometimes in a fashion that is causative and sometimes not, but they aren’t entirely separate and the line between what is a micro vs macro issue isn’t always fixed or clear.

We’ll start in and work out. For this character, the micro factors are what determine the specifics of his actions, demeanor, and aesthetic. I think the main reason he’s the Joker and not just some guy with a whole lot of issues is his world view combined with his personality. He has a very pessimistic worldview, one that is steeped in a very toxic form of individualism, cynicism, and misanthropy. His life experience tells him the world is a cold place where everyone is on their own. To him the world is not a moral place. He doesn’t think people in general have much value. He learned at a young age that his life had no value to others, and he has internalized that view and extrapolated it to the world at large; if his life didn’t matter and doesn’t matter, why would anyone else’s? This worldview, in the case of my specific Joker, comes from a childhood rife with abandonment, abuse, and marginalization. While I will say he is definitively queer (in terms fo gender expression and non conformity, and sexuality), I’m not terribly interested in giving specific diagnoses of any mental health issues. Those will be discussed more broadly and in terms of specific symptoms with relation to how they affect the Joker’s internal experience, and externalized behaviours.

His childhood was, to say the least, pretty fucked up. The details I do have for him are that he was surrendered at birth because his parents, for some reason, did not want to care for him or could not care for him; which it was, he isn’t sure. He grew up effectively orphaned, and ended up in the foster care system. He wasn’t very “adoptable”; he had behavioural issues, mostly violent behaviours towards authority figures and other children. He never exactly grew out of these either, and the older he got the harder it was to actually be adopted. His legal name was Baby Boy Doe for a number of years, but the name he would identify the most with is Jack. Eventually he took on the surname of one of his more stable foster families, becoming Jack Napier as far as the government was concerned. By the time he had that stability in his mid to late teens, however, most of the damage had already been done. In his younger years he was passed between foster families and government agencies, always a ward of the government, something that would follow him to his time in Arkham and Gotham’s city jails. Some of his foster families were decent, others were just okay, but some were physically and psychologically abusive. This abuse is part of what defines his worldview and causes him to see the world as inherently hostile and unjust. It also became one of the things that taught him that violence is how you solve problems, particularly when emotions run high. 

This was definitely a problem at school too; moving around a lot meant going to a lot of different schools. Always being the new student made him a target, and being poor, exhibiting increasingly apparent signs of some sort of mental illness or disorder, and being typically suspected as queer (even moreso as he got into high school) typically did more harm than good for him. He never got to stay anywhere long enough to form deep relationships, and even in the places where he did have more time to do that he often ended up isolated from his peers. He was often bullied, sometimes just verbally but often physically which got worse as he got older and was more easily read as queer. This is part of why he’s so good at combat and used to taking hits; he’s been doing it since he was a kid, and got a hell of a lot of practice at school. He would tend to group up with other kids like him, other outcasts or social rejects, which in some ways meant being around some pretty negative influences in terms of peers. A lot of his acquaintances were fine, but some were more... rebellious and ended up introducing Jack to things like drinking, smoking cigarettes, using recreational drugs, and most important to his backstory, to petty crimes like theft and vandalism, sometimes even physical fights. This is another micro factor in that maybe if he had different friends, or a different school experience individually, he might have avoided getting involved in criminal activities annd may have been able to avoid taking up the mantle of The Joker.

Then there’s how his adult life has reinforced these experiences and beliefs. Being institutionalized, dealing with police and jails, and losing what little support he had as a minor and foster child just reinforced his worldview and told him that being The Joker was the right thing to do, that he was correct in his actions and perspectives. Becoming The Joker was his birthday present to himself at age 18, how he ushered himself into adulthood, and I plan to make a post about that on its own. But the fact that he decided to determine this part of his identity so young means that this has defined how he sees himself as an adult. It’s one of the last micro factors (when in life he adopted this identity) that have gotten him so entrenched in his typical behaviours and self image.

As for macro factors, a lot of them have to do specifically with the failing of Gotham’s institutions. Someone like Bruce Wayne, for example, was also orphaned and also deals with trauma; the difference for the Joker is that he had no safety net to catch him when he fell (or rather, was dropped). Someone like Wayne could fall into the cushioning of wealth and the care of someone like Alfred, whereas the Joker (metaphorically) hit the pavement hard and alone. Someone like the Joker should never have become the Joker in the first place because the systems in place in Gotham should have seen every red flag and done something to intervene; this just didn’t happen for him, and not out of coincidence but because Gotham seems like a pretty corrupt place with a lot of systemic issues. Critically underfunded social services (healthcare, welfare, children & family services) that result in a lack of resources for the people who need them and critically underfunded schools that can’t offer extra curricular activities or solid educations that allow kids to stay occupied and develop life skills are probably the most directly influential macro factors that shaped Jack into someone who could resent people and the society around him so much that he’d lose all regard for it to the point of exacting violence against others. There’s also the reality of living in a violent culture, and in violent neighbourhoods exacerbated by poverty, poor policing or overpolicing, and being raised as a boy and then a young man with certain gendered expectations about violence but especially ideas/narratives that minimalize or excuse male violence (especially when it comes to bullying or violent peer-to-peer behaviour under the guise of ‘boys will be boys’). 

Beyond that, there’s the same basic prejudices and societal forces that affect so many people: classism, homphobia/queerphobia, (toxic) masculinity/masculine expectations, and ableism (specifically in regards to people who are mentally ill or otherwise neurodivergent) stand out as the primary factors. I’m touching on these broadly because if I were to talk about them all, they would probably need their own posts just to illustrate how they affect this character. But they definitely exist in Gotham if it’s anything like the real world, and I think it’s fair to extrapolate that these kinds of these exist in Gotham and would impact someone like The Joker with the background I’ve given him.

I have no idea how to end this so if you got this far, thank you for reading!

#clown in command ; ooc #i've got a million of 'em ; headcanon

[wolfpawn]

I Hate You, I Love You, Chapter 104

Chapter Summary -   After the night out, Danielle and Emma have to organise things around a small hiccup.

Previous Chapter

Rating - Mature (some chapters contain smut)

Triggers - references to Tom Hiddleston’s work with the #MeToo Movement. That chapter will be tagged accordingly.

authors Note - I have been working on this for the last 3 years, it is currently 180+ chapters long.  This will be updated daily, so long as I can get time to do so, obviously.

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tags: @sweetkingdomstarlight-blog @jessibelle-nerdy-mum @nonsensicalobsessions @damalseer @hiddlesbitch1 @winterisakiller @fairlightswiftly @salempoe @wolfsmom1

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Danielle curled closer to Tom, refusing to acknowledge the morning light that was ebbing its way in the bedroom window.

'How's your head?' Tom sensed she had woken beside him.

'Fine, I told you, I didn't drink too much and I rehydrated when I came home.'

'I need to get up.' Tom went to move but Danielle curled in closer to him. 'Elle.'

'No, you're staying in bed with me.' she held onto him.

'You need to get up too.' He chuckled as he tried to untangle himself from her. 'Jesus, you're clingier than you look.'

'No.'

'Elle, you know I need to go for a run.' He ceased fighting to get loose and instead tilted her head up, kissing her softly. 'I need to stay fit for you.'

'I don't care what you look like.'

'I am sure you do a little.' he argued. 'I am sure part of you wants me to be able to lift you up by the ass and press you against a wall and have the strength to keep you there as I ravish you.'

'Don't need to run for that, that is strength, not endurance.' She pointed out, kissing him again.

'True, but the endurance is needed to keep you satisfied too.'

'I still don't want you to go.'

'Five weeks is going to be hard, isn't it?' Tom ceased playing and instead looked at her solemnly. 'I am going to miss you.'

'You'll be too busy.'

'I will be busy, but that does not mean I will not miss you.' He toyed with her hair. 'I was wondering if you would do something for me when I am away?'

'Sure.'

'I was thinking about getting the kitchen redone, the presses are falling off the hinges at this stage.'

'Good plan.' Danielle concurred. 'What do you need of me?'

'Well before we go, I want us to decide what we want and I will organise the delivery if you...'

'Play the good little housewife and wait in for the guys to come and fit it?' she hampered a guess.

Tom's eyes widened. 'I never meant to imply anything like that, I know you have your own work to do.' he stated immediately.

Danielle only laughed. 'I know, calm down you silly man.' she kissed him lovingly. 'We'll go look at them today and we will arrange a date for the guys to come fit it when I am back from the US, alright?' she kissed him again.

'Today? Are you sure, you said you were busy.'

'Not too busy to spend time with you. Are you sure you want me involved?'

Tom pulled her over in a manner that she was on top of him, her legs straddling him, though not in a sexual manner. 'Elle, this is our home now, ours; meaning mine and yours. And that means when there is a large decision to be made, such as the kitchen, a place you tend to enjoy spending a considerable amount of time in, then you have the right to a say in it.'

'I do little to quash gender stereotyping with my love of cooking and baking,' Danielle laughed.

'You don't often bake,' Tom frowned.

'Only because I would end up eating it all and that is something I try to avoid, I am something of a glutton if left to my own devices.'

'That I can understand. So, I am going to go for my run, you are going to get ready and when I am back and we are both ready, we'll head after lunch, alright?'

'Perfect.'

'That means getting off me and letting me get out of bed Elle.' Tom nudged her slightly to see if he could get her to move any bit.

'Nope.'

'You're terrible.'

* 'For all your talk, you'd think you would have gone for a longer run.' Danielle laughed before turning around, one look at the person looking at her made her force herself not to laugh. 'You look tired.'

'Fuck you. Why did you let me drink all that wine?' Emma groaned.

Danielle put on the kettle and readied a cup with coffee and sugar before going to the medicine cabinet and retrieving another rehydration sachet from the pile she had used herself the night before and making a drink. 'This first, then coffee and toast.'

'How are you so chirpy this morning?'

'I only drank three-quarters of a bottle, you polished off your bottle, the last quarter of mine and another half bottle.' Danielle explained, 'And I drank that stuff when I came home last night.' she pointed to the glass containing the powdered liquid in her friend's hand. 'You refused, you told me you would be fine.'

'What have I told you before about drunk me? Ignore her, she is a sadistic bitch that enjoys causing me pain and misery.' Emma downed the drink before Danielle took the glass and filled it again. 'That stuff tastes like pond water.'

'Works well, though.'

'Evidentially.  Age is a factor in it too though.'

Danielle laughed. 'There are eight months between us.'

'Speaking of which, has Tom talked to you about your birthday yet?'

'My birthday is three months away.'

'But you'll be thirty.'

'That means nothing, I am not overly bothered by such things.' Danielle stated before giving her friend the coffee.

'Where is my idiot brother anyway?'

'Went for a run about fifteen minutes ago, I thought you were him when you came in.'

'That would have been a short run.'

'Hence why I said what I said.' Danielle handed her the lightly buttered toast. 'Do you remember us calling Jack last night?'

'Yes, I wasn't absolutely sloshed, thank you.' Emma scoffed. 'Today is going to be a long day.'

'Take a nice long shower, that will set you up better.'

'I am stealing your blue shirt, by the way.'

Danielle rolled her eyes. 'You have more of my clothes at this stage than I do.'

'Well, you're the big set person these days. Speaking of which, how is all that going?'

'Good, I have LA this week to do some sort of meeting.'

'That's fancy.'

'Yes, if only I didn't have to explain things to a boardroom full of men that I don't know and who are probably not too interested in what I have to say, only trying to dismiss me because what I am suggesting is going to cost them money.'

'Studios don't usually have an issue with spending money though, do they?'

'They spend them on huge salaries, fancy locations and big explosions no problem, spending them on "unnecessary backstage stuff" that they have a problem with.' Danielle explained.

'Fun.' Emma drained the last of her tea. 'What time did Jack say he would be here?'

'I think it is ten.' They looked at the clock on the wall. 'You better get ready.' Emma simply groaned and did as her friend suggested.

*

Danielle felt a pair of arms wrap around her. 'Guess who?' lips pressing to the side of her neck.

'Emma, I warned you your brother will be back in a minute.' Danielle sniggered as Tom growled. 'Hello, how was your run?'

'Alright, someone, and I am not pointing any fingers,' The pair looked at a somewhat guilty looking Mac nearby. 'Was busy trying to chase some little fancy thing in the park, though a few dogs were trying to get to her, I think she was in heat.'

'Mac, you're castrated, you're no use.' Danielle admonished. Mac gave a groan. 'and I don't think she wanted you for your personality, as incredible as it is.' Mac placed his head on his paws, appearing somewhat downtrodden.

Tom chuckled at the manner Danielle interacted with Mac. 'Is Emma awake do you know?'

'Yeah, she came down, feeling a little worse for wear and got tea and toast, she is having a shower now.'

'I'll grab mine.'

'Leave it a minute, she has to go into our room to steal my clothes.'

'I have to ask, do you ever steal hers, because all I ever hear is her stealing yours.'

'Yes, I tend to steal her jackets,' Tom frowned. 'Half the jackets here aren't even mine, they're hers.'

'I knew you would never buy a pink jacket.' Tom commented.

* 'Hey, Jack.' Jack looked somewhat startled as Danielle opened the door. 'She is nearly ready, the hairdryer is just turned off.'

'Good, Dad is in at quarter past eleven, with traffic and parking, I want us to be there on time.'

'What about your mum?'

'Some sort of "Women's only getaway" so he thought to come over here.'

'Good plan.' Danielle nodded. 'Tea?'

'Coffee, please.'

'That good a night?'

'I fell asleep on the couch and I am in bits today.'

'Not fun.' She handed him the mug of hot dark fluid.

'You two had fun, I hear.'

'Yeah, I...' Danielle stopped talking when Tom walked into the room looking worried. 'Hey, what's wrong?'

'That was the kennels, they overbooked and can't take Mac.' He held up his phone.

'But we leave tonight.' Danielle. 'What are we supposed to do with him? We don't have time to bring him to Suffolk.'

'We don't have a choice, do we?' Tom argued. 'I'll cancel the meeting.'

'We'll take him.' They turned to see Emma in the doorway, having stolen the dress Danielle had worn to the Kong premiere. 'Did you bring my shoes?' she asked her husband.

'They're in the car.' Jack replied, still somewhat shocked at his wife's declaration.

'Good. We'll take Mac, we are going to bring Bill to mum's anyway, we can drop him there.'

'That's perfect.' Tom sighed in relief. 'You don't mind?'

'It makes sense.' Jack smiled.

'Elle?' Emma looked at her friend.

Danielle said nothing for a moment. 'I have to be here for two days after I return to get everything sorted, but I did plan on going to Suffolk after that anyway. I need to sort something with the house and I did promise your mum I would redo her garden with her, so I planned on helping her then.'

'Sorted.' Emma smiled. 'By the way, you're not getting this back.' She grinned.

'I have nothing with you.'

'You stole my brother, I am stealing your clothes, fair deal.' Emma beamed. 'We better go.'

With only half a cup of coffee drank, Jack thanked his brother-in-law and friend before grabbing Mac's belongings as Emma and Mac made their way to the car and left for the airport.

'Poor Mac is pillar to post these days.'" Danielle sighed.

'I know, we'll be sorted again soon, once the filming is over, then he is here most of the time with us, or one of us.'

'I checked, I can bring him with me filming.'

'He'll love that.' Tom smiled, kissing her shoulder again after his sister and her husband had driven off. Danielle turned her head to kiss him again. 'We have a long day of work before we go.' she kissed him again. 'Shower together?' her answer was her guiding him upstairs by the hand.

*

Danielle looked around her as though to even move more than an inch would break something.

'Darling, relax.' Tom chuckled, taking the seat across from her and belting in. 'It's sturdier than you think.'

'I can see why people like to travel by them, though claustrophobia could be an issue for some I would imagine.'

'Yes, it would very much be likely to be magnified, in a tiny plane, thirty thousand feet in the air.' He agreed. 'That is not a concern for us though, is it?'

'No, I can think of several things to preoccupy me for the time it takes to get to Atlanta.' Tom's brow rose slightly, a smug grin coming to his face. 'Not that.'

'We'll see.'

#I Hate You I Love You #chapter 104 #wolfpawn #tom hiddleston #Tom hiddleston fic

[kittyprincessofcats]

MCU movies ranked by how well-written Loki was

Well, one person did tell me to post them, so here we go. This list ranks the 6 MCU movies Loki appeared in - solely based on how well-written he was. This list disregards how good/bad I thought the movie was otherwise, and also doesn’t factor in how well the story treats the character - it’s based just on how much I agree or disagree with Loki’s characterisation. (In other words if he gets brutally murdered or treated like shit by his family, that doesn’t necessarily mean he himself was ooc.) Also, this is of course just my opinion and very much up for debate :)

This ended up getting kinda long, sorry - I just really like talking about Loki :D

ALSO THIS LIST CONTAINS ENDGAME SPOILERS

6th Place - Thor: Ragnarok

Yeah... Sorry, I know people love this movie, but it really deserves last place on this list. Now, to be fair, I didn’t completely hate how Loki was written here, there definitely were some nice moments (”I’m here”), but overall I felt like the movie played Loki’s trauma for laughs to much, made him the butt of a joke too often and didn’t make him stand up for himself like he did in his previous movies - which is one of the things I liked most about him. I also didn’t like that the movie tried to retcon him into someone who’s been hurting Thor his whole life, or that they made his “redemption” involve forgiving Odin. And even though this movie is praised for its “anti-colonialism” message, it really fails to address that Loki was one of the biggest victims of Asgard’s colonialism and that Odin never really changed his ways after banishing Hela.

And beyond that, I just felt like there was something slightly “off” about how Loki was written here. It was his first time back on the big screen in 5 years, and somehow it just didn’t feel like the same character anymore. Ragnarok was the only movie Loki was in where I went out of the cinema and didn’t feel the need to read tons of fanfic about him. At first I thought it was just because I’d moved on in those 5 years and wasn’t as invested in his character anymore - but then Infinity War happened and (despite killing him off) absolutely nailed Loki’s characterisation and brought my love for him back full force. And that’s when I realized I hadn’t moved on - Ragnarok just hadn’t gotten Loki right.

5th Place - The Avengers

I initially wanted to place this higher, mainly because it’s such an iconic movie (that I really like) and because so many of Loki’s most iconic and well-known lines are from this one. Tom absolutely plays the sassy, charming but vulnerable trickster to perfection here. Then why is is to so low on my list? First of all, because I feel like there was a giant personality shift for Loki between this movie and the first Thor. Loki has previously stated that he never wanted the throne (of Asgard) and now he suddenly tries to conquer earth and we’re not really meant to question it.

Now before you all say it - Yes, I’m aware that Loki was tortured by Thanos between this movie and the last one. And while the movie doesn’t explicitly tell us that, I think between him looking like hell and limping in his first scene and his scene with The Other (”He will make you long for something as sweet as pain”), the implications were clear enough. Plus, there’s the whole revelation that the mind stone influenced his thinking. So yes, I think his personality shift is understandable - BUT I wish the movie itself had made that clearer instead of leaving it to fans to connect the dots and understand why Loki is acting so different now.

And lastly, I don’t like his “mewling q**m” line to Natasha. I think it’s incredibly misogynistic on the writers’ part (ahem... Joss Whedon again), and it’s also incredibly ooc for Loki, who subverts gender roles, is genderfluid himself if we go by the comics, and has always been shown to respect women, especially his mother. So I don’t feel like using gendered insults is something he would do.

4th place - Avengers: Infinity War     

Yes, the scene was horrible. Yes, it broke my heart and made me angry at the Russos. No, I don’t have the desire to rewatch it. BUT the one thing I do have to give this movie credit for is absolutely getting Loki’s character right. This was the movie that reawakened my love for Loki after Ragnarok failed to do so. Tom’s acting throughout this scene is brilliant and heart-wrenching and the dialogue features some of my favourite Loki lines. I mean: ”For one thing, I’m not Asgardian - and for another, we have a Hulk.” “The sun will shine on us again.” “You will never be a god.” Loki finally acknowledging himself as “not Asgardian” and “the rightful king of Jotunheim”? Loki repeating “We have a Hulk” - symbolizing that he’s on the same side as the Avengers now? Loki looking his biggest fear in the eye and choosing to sacrifice himself for his brother? GOOD SHIT. That’s some good shit right there!

Even Loki attacking Thanos with a butter knife isn’t necessarily ooc - He didn’t do it because he thought it would work, he was simply out of ideas and decided to distract Thanos and save Thor. He knew he would die. And if you tell me that wasn’t absolutely heroic then I don’t know what is. Though I do agree that the writers (not just of this movie, but of all of them) seem to have forgotten all the powers Loki is supposed to have and I’m also annyoed that they just make him stab people instead. And also, I don’t like that Loki calls himself “Odinson” in this scene. Forgiving Odin shouldn’t be a part of his redemption, bla bla, we’ve been over this. I like to headcanon that that part was more meant for Thor than Odin.

3rd Place - Avengers: Endgame

I know what you’re thinking - Does Loki even have enough screentime in Endgame for it to be on this list? And yeah, good point. It’s hard to be completely ooc when you basically have two minutes of screentime and I did consider leaving it off the list for precisely that reason. But, I mean COME ON. I just had to give a shout-out to how absolutely iconic those two minutes were. Imitating Cap? Sarcastically waving at the Hulk from the elevator? Dramatically rolling his eyes when Thor mentions Odin? Grabbing the tesseract at the first chance and just noping out of that horrible mess of a movie? ICONIC. Two minutes of screentime and he somehow stole the show. When could your fave ever?

2nd Place - Thor 1

This is the movie that made me fall in love with Loki in the first place, so obviously it had to be high on this list. The way he was written (and acted) here was absolutely beautiful, his story is heartwrenching in all the right ways, he makes all the wrong choices but as a viewer you understand why he makes them. He’s presented to us as this outcast who doesn’t quite fit in, who’s always in the shadow of his brother, kind of gets bullied by his brother’s friends, yearns for his father’s love - and who one day has to deal with the realisation that his life was a lie and that his father resents him for something beyond his control. The confrontation between him and Odin in the Vaults is still the best Marvel-scene ever, hands down.

Fun fact: I literally first watched this movie because I wanted to know “who that Loki-guy is and why people love him so much”. I finished watching the movie and was like “Ah. I get it now.”

My only complaint would be that they deleted all the scenes that explained Loki’s motives and made him more sympathetic. To be honest, I sometimes forget that they’re “deleted scenes” because I’ve watched them so often that I just consider them canon.

1st Place - Thor: The Dark World

Honestly, it was close between this one and Thor 1. I love them both, but while I think the first one is a better movie overall, Loki’s portrayal in the second one is probably my favourite. He starts the movie already disillusioned with his family and spends it unafraid of calling them out on their mistreatment of him. This is the movie where Loki won’t be silenced about the injustices he’s suffered, and I love that about him. I also love how he just replies to threats with sarcasm now (”You’ll kill me? Evidently, there will be a line.”).

I also like that his movie gave more depth to his relationship with Frigga, and also showed Loki being heroic: Helping Thor, never betraying him, protecting Jane, sacrificing himself for Thor. In fact, I stick by what I said before: Loki wasn’t a villain in this movie. There isn’t a single evil thing that he did in this film. NOT ONE.

I also love how this movie makes Odin’s hypocrisy more evident than ever (Telling Loki they’re not gods and that he shouldn’t think himself above Midgardians, but telling Thor he shouldn’t date Jane because Midgardians are “goats”... You get the idea). I also like the contrasts painted between Odin and Loki and how they think about Thor’s relationship with a mortal - Odin tells him he shouldn’t date Jane because she’s “beneath” him, Loki tells him he shouldn’t date Jane because she’ll die one day and that’ll break his heart. And that’s just one of the many contrasts between them in this movie.

And THAT ENDING! Thor getting his only bit of good parenting ever and it was actually Loki - Loki still being alive - Loki sitting on that throne. HELL YES.

(I seriously don’t get how people thought that ending meant Loki was evil? Hello?? He just freed Asgard from a totalitarian dictator? Last time I checked that was a good thing? Have some people not gotten the memo that Odin’s evil? This movie in particular was very clear about that.)

My other rankings: Thor | Steve Rogers | Natasha Romanoff

#Loki #MCU #Loki meta #Thor movies #The Avengers #Thor the Dark World #Thor Ragnarok #Avengers Infinity War #Avengers Endgame #Endgame spoilers #long post

[zombriekid]

“A Drunk Man’s Words...” [Alucard/Gender Neutral Reader]

Series: Hellsing

Summary: “...are a sober man’s thoughts.” aka you shove your whole foot in your mouth while drinking with alucard.

Warning: dialogue about virginity and sex; brief mentions of sexual activity (nothing explicit, however)

  “Is vampirism really determined by virginal status?”

  It’s over a bottle of wine that this question finds its bravery.

  The drink itself has some boujee French name that you can’t even hope to pronounce, and its age dates back at least fifty years before you were born- probably worth twice as much as you too. And though your palette is accustomed to the four dollars a bottle variety the wine’s color reminds you of your drinking companion and admittedly it’s rather damn tasty, fruity and light and sits sweetly on the back of your tongue, so when the drink was offered you accepted a glass graciously. 

  Then you accepted another glass, followed by one more... three and a half glasses in and you’re ready to discuss all of the subjects that are considered conversational taboo where you’re from. Instead of politics and religion, however, you opt for something He’s a tad more familiar with than most.

  The stemless crystal pauses a hair’s width away from His lips, and though He doesn’t spare you a glance it’s obvious that you have His attention. Obvious in the way the slight heat of His breath fogs the clear, glossy surface just a little, obvious in the way His scarlet eyes seem to flit over the scene of the drink, and in the way the arch of His brow tugs up in tandem with a broad shoulder.

  “That’s the theory, though I suspect that there are more conditions beyond one’s sexual experience.” Alucard replies, His tone suggesting an air of casual aloofness. “It seems that it’s the most plausible, however.” 

  From the back of your throat comes a thoughtful hum before you wash it down with more wine. Out of the corner of your eye you can see Him do the same, though far more elegantly due to the fact that you can’t even hear Him sip, and you take this moment to... consider Him.

  Consider His impossibly long legs, and how one crosses over the other with such poise- trapped, caged, restrained by them; consider the generous expanse of His chest, nearly too large for the dark vest that conforms around His slim waist- on top, weighing down, or underneath, firm support; how slender His fingers are, artistic, almost like spider legs in the way they curl around the glass’ globe- gripping flesh, neck, in between thighs- pianist fingers; you watch the sharp cut of His chin tilt back to allow more sour grapes to pour down His milk white throat- which bobs with every subtle gulp. Your drunken brain craves the visuals of clean bed sheets and sticky skin and the weight of His body, and it doesn’t tell you to peel the dried layers of skin from your lips with your teeth but you do it anyways cause it’s hot and stuffy in this room and you’re wearing far too much clothing.

  Alucard is... attractive. Terrifying, and awful, but attractive nonetheless. 

  This is a reality that you’ve come to accept, yet even on your best days do you refuse to let that thought linger, refuse to let it fester and chafe your already confused emotions. However, now... here, in a recreation room with plush cushions at your back and a bottle at your side, you might be tempted to...

  ...maybe it’s the wine talking, or maybe it’s the sharp peak of His large aristocratic nose... but you’re attracted to Him. Sober Murray would deny that, shut that shit down immediately and remind yourself of all of the torment He’s hurled you way, however you’re not sober Murray right now. You’re drunk Murray, and drunk Murray can only think about how well versed this creature is in salacious pleasure.

  Wait... is He? He has to be- well, no, He doesn’t have to be, just seems like He would be. How much experience does He have? Does He have any?

  ...is He still, and you hesitate to ask yourself this because the concept of “virginity” makes your eyes roll, but is He still a virgin?

  When your mind, unfortunately, finalizes that thought it supplies you with the following information: Alucard is looking at you, direct eye contact being made and maintained, with the drink in His lap and both of His dark brows pushing into His hairline.

  He looks... shocked? Which in turn surprises you cause you ain’t never seen Him caught off guard before. Perhaps you’re wrong? After all what could be so alarming to startle fucking Alucard?

  The corners of His lips twitch as the rest of His handsome face relaxes, red eyes no longer the size of dinner plates, and He regards you with a quiet, droning chuckle. “And why do you wish to know that, little hunter?”

  ...what? Know what? Did you ask Him something? What did you ask Him?!

    Ya asked if He’s a virgin, jackass, whatever remains of your sobriety reminds you, and though you could’ve swore that all of that internal dialogue was just that, in your head, apparently your sloshed brain is slower than your mouth and now you’ve opened up rather personal dialogue with a very powerful vampire.

  It’s time to back-pedal kiddo and you had better be quick about it.

  “W-well you’re vampire,” you blurt, ears and cheeks and neck feeling hot. “And if virginity is the determining factor here than obviously you were before, and I’m just curious if you are still.”

  The eye contact doesn’t break; you notice that His are moving, studying, though never leaving you, and your memory jogs with the numerous instances you’ve suffered when you have had His absolute, unwavering attention. Instincts haywire, brain sending confusing signals to gut because neither can determine what the threat genuinely is, heart pumping so rapidly that it nearly seems like it’s not even beating... In all twenty six years of your human existence you’ve never encountered anyone or anything that’s tapped so intimately into your primal monkey brain, so when He finally removes His graze it honestly feels like a tremendous weight has been lifted off of your shoulders. Crisis averted, Murray.

  “To answer your question, no I am not a virgin,” Alucard says. Not one moment later, a smirk slithers across His lips until it blows out into a full grin, and it’s wide enough to reach from one ear to the other, and any relief you’ve might have felt starts to fade. “Now that I’ve indulged you...” He glances at you out of the corner of His eye, “... it’s only fair that you return the favor.”

  There’s a heavy pressure wrapped around your right shoulder, a hand, judging by the fingers squeezing tight on your collarbone and the thumb gripping the back of your neck. It’s not coming from your vampiric fantasy companion- He’s still sitting in the lone chair, one hand cradling His nearly empty wine glass and the other on an armrest- yet instinctively, whether it be from generations of evolution or from years of mediumship, you know that somehow He’s involved.

  This is confirmed when you watch Him lean forward in His chair, fangs on display, and a small puff of hot air ghosts across the corner of your jaw.

  The gasp that’s forced out of your chest isn’t born from fear. 

  “So riddle me this, my curious little revenant.” The grasp on your shoulder stiffens a fraction, the fingertips curling into the bone while another cloud of breath passes down the pulse in your neck; His own fingers tighten around the glass, and His grin spreads some. “If I were to bite you right now...” another rush of hot air, this time on the curve of flesh and muscle that connects neck to shoulder, and you resist your body’s natural reaction to flinch, “... would you turn?”

  Your lungs expand as you draw in a deep breath. A tingling sensation erupts all over your body, goosebumps from head to toe with every single fine hair standing on end, and your heart pounds away at your ribs- a response that sends blood battering into your head, into your ears. You feel dizzy. And, again it might be the wine talking, yet you’re not scared. You’re not afraid. 

  Drunk Murray is not afraid of Alucard.

  (Well... not entirely.)

  And drunk Murray wants to rise to the challenge.

  It takes every inch of your spine to do this, but you manage to straighten your posture with squared shoulders and your chin tilted up. And after clearing your throat, albeit not exactly quietly, you dared to look directly in to His eyes and say “I guess you’ll have to find out.”

  You didn’t think it possible but the smile stretches across His face even more; for the first time ever Alucard looks pleased with you.

a/u: strong start weak finish, that’s how i feel about this. but considering the fact that i’ve been in a writing slump as of late, along with my arm recovering from the tat session this past monday, i’m just proud that i’ve managed to finish something, ya know? also i wanted to try a slightly different writing style, along with doing a saucy piece, so hopefully you guys will like it. if ya did, then please show your support through them likes, reblogs, comments, and criticisms! and if ya wanna request something, my inbox is always open. thank you for taking the time to read this!

#hellsing #hellsing alucard #hellsing alucard x reader #hellsing alucard x you #alucard x reader #alucard x you #alucard #hellsing ultimate #hellsing fanfic #hellsing fanfiction #writing #hunter murray

[cadeeelewis-blog]

Annotated Bibliography

Cade Lewis 

Annotated Bibliography 

Fish Burton

November 27, 2019

Annotated Bibliography

“Are Electric Vehicles Really Environmentally Friendly?” Energuide, https://www.energuide.be/en/questions-answers/are-electric-vehicles-really-environmentally-friendly/197/.

      When we talk about electric cars, we usually perceive them to be zero omission cars. But that is just not the case. There’s a few different things that we can look at that will confirm this. Basically, even if we drove an electric vehicle and it didn’t create very much air pollution or harm to the environment, we need to take into consideration how the energy is being generated and how it is being used. 

      What I mean by that, is that even though driving a Tesla down the road may not cause a lot of harm, we need to take a step back and realize how that battery was made inside the Tesla and where we are getting our energy from to charge the Tesla. From reading this article I understand that about 60% of the energy that we use in the United States comes from fossil fuels. What that means is that 60% of the energy comes from gas or coal which are fossil fuels. 

      This can be a very bad thing considering that quite a few people have electric cars. Another bad thing is that this is only the charging aspect. Now if we take a look at the battery, we can see that they are made in factories which create even more pollution in the air. 

Biswas, Asit K., and Cecilia Tortajada. “Electric Vehicles Are Changing the World. And They're Only Just Getting Started.” The Conversation, 27 Oct. 2019, http://theconversation.com/electric-vehicles-are-changing-the-world-and-theyre-only-just-getting-started-90402.

      There’s something really significant that I would like to point out about this specific article about how electric cars can change the world. And that is that about 90% of the world runs off of liquid fuels. And this holds true especially for businesses and companies that use semi‘s in trucking to transport goods from one place to another. 

      I believe a very good question to ask ourselves is, “are we using a lot more fossil fuels to run our regular vehicles then if we had electric cars? Even though electric cars do use fossil fuel, would they significantly reduce how much fossil fuels we are using rather than using liquid fuels in our cars? “ I think this is something very serious we need to consider as we move forward in this essay. 

      I will use an opinion that comes directly from my immediate family. Although I would love to have an electric car, my whole entire family has vehicles that use liquid fuels. And none of my family would consider an electric car at this moment.

      CatClifford. “Elon Musk: Tesla's Work '.Supersedes Political Parties, Race, Creed, Religion'.” CNBC, CNBC, 6 Nov. 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/05/elon-musk-teslas-work-is-important-to-the-future-of-the-world.html.

      “This supersedes political parties, race, creed, religion, it doesn’t matter. If we do not solve the environment, we’re all damned,” Musk said. This statement really made an impact on the way I look at electric cars and how others look at electric cars. 

      I think the statement really holds true to the fact that doesn’t matter what color you are or race or gender or political party. When we look at both electric cars and gas cars included, we need to realize that this is an important factor in the next 40 to 50 years of our life. This is going to change everything and we really need to think about what is going to be the best for us and for the environment. 

      Just like Elon musk stated, if we don’t figure this out, we’re going to be screwed. Electric cars are emerging from the depths of the earth score. And Tesla is becoming cheaper and cheaper. What are we to do in the future, and what is it going to take for electric cars to be completely omission free and be able to have a positive impact on the world.

Clemente, Jude. “More Electric Cars Mean More Coal And Natural Gas.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 25 Jan. 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2018/01/24/more-electric-vehicles-mean-more-coal-and-natural-gas/.

      Electric cars are a very fast growing market. In a study done in 2017, electric vehicle purchases were up 30% to about 200,000 units. Personally when I look at this I feel that that is a significant amount of electric cars that were purchased in one year. Especially given the fact that the Tesla model 3 was barely on its way. 

      There are quite a few initiatives in multiple countries that are now banning the sales of oil based vehicles. This is said to happen within the next couple decades, but what they are doing is trying to weed out all the gas vehicles so that their air will be cleaner and more efficient. A few of these countries will be China, India, and Norway. Given this fact, what we don’t realize is that again, the electric car is still using fossil fuel. 

      How could this be possible? Is because most of the electricity that comes from electric cars is produced by coal plants or sometimes gas. All of these limiting factors are fossil fuels, and will inhibit us from proceeding in the future because of our continuous use of fossil fuels. It is important to note that a few countries are trying to stray more towards green energy which would come from solar panels and other things such as those.

Dia, Hussein. “Jobs, Tax and Politics: Three Ways Electric Vehicles Will Change Our World.” The Conversation, 4 June 2019, https://theconversation.com/jobs-tax-and-politics-three-ways-electric-vehicles-will-change-our-world-84910.

      If we take a look at China, we can see that they have the largest car market in the world. They are working to stop the production of fossil fuel powered vehicles, to be able to make the atmosphere and the environment a cleaner place. India, believe it or not, has also issued a statement that they are going to make all of the cars electric by the year 2030. 

      They’re doing this in hopes they can make the environment a little more green and save fossil fuels. If you look at the factories, we can see that electric vehicles including their batteries is less labor and time and energy compared to the vehicles and batteries of petrol vehicles. In turn,  this could be very bad because by the year 2030 we could have a loss of 600,000 jobs. 

      And that would just be in Germany alone. But, going all electric by the year 2030 will also create a lot of stress on businesses who owned the oil companies. A Stanford economist named Tony Ceba and his team have a vision, and they believe that the desolation will come much sooner as early as the 2020s.

“Electric Car Innovation: How Electric Vehicles Are Changing the World.” None, https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/resources/electric-car-innovation-how-electric-vehicles-are-changing-world/.

      Right off the bat this article talks about someone that drove through Silicon Valley and saw quite a few teslas.They say and a lot of people I’ve talk to say, that Tesla is one of the most popular vehicles on the road today. We can back this up by how many teslas that the company itself has sold in just the past two years. 

      Not only that, but Elon musk was going to go bankrupt, but obviously he hasn’t since he has released the model Y, the new 2020 Tesla roadster, and now he has just released the cyber truck. People who are all over the world are trying to convert to the electric vehicle to not only save money on fuel, but to help the environment. They claim that in the future, specifically in future cities, you will be able to see Tesla’s more and more on the road. 

      Surprisingly, there is more than 40 electric car models available in the world today. According to JP Morgan, by the year 2025, most electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles will account for 30% of all the cars that are sold in the United States. Additionally, CNBC says that by the year 2030, the amount of electric cars on the road will increase from 3 Million to 125 Million. 

Hawkins, Andrew J. “How Tesla Changed the Auto Industry Forever.” The Verge, The Verge, 28 July 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/28/16059954/tesla-model-3-2017-auto-industry-influence-elon-musk.

      The first statement of this article that “Tesla’s have changed the world” is pretty bold. I believe this is the start of something great, and people all over the world are searching for the next best thing that is going to save the environment and save our fossil fuels. Is this Tesla? Let’s find out. When Elon musk first released the Tesla model 3, he gave it out to the first 30 customers which we think to be his employees. 

      We don’t realize exactly how far him and his company has come until we take a look at the numbers that they have produced. Another factor that we have not taken into consideration, is one that I feel like is very important in the realm of the electric car industry. We always take a look at electric cars, the way that they’re shaped, the way that they look, and how they drive. We also look at the cost of them, and their fuel economy and how well they are going to save our fossil fuels and be better for the environment. But I personally feel like there’s another element involved in this. 

      And that is, that Elon musk came out with a feature called auto pilot. Now we always wonder if electric cars will be our future. But come to find out, this auto pilot feature may not be exactly what we need at the moment. Or maybe it will be. There was quite a few case studies of people using auto pilot who took their hands off the wheels and crashed the car because they were reckless. 

      Now, this always happens when there is a new product or a new service provided. We all know that one person who got something new and then ruined it because they didn’t take the proper precautions. 

Horrell, Paul. “How Green Is an Electric Car, Really?” Top Gear, Top Gear, 26 Apr. 2019, https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/how-green-electric-car-really.

      We can’t ignore the fact that energy from electric vehicles comes from burning fossil fuels. Which in turn is CO2. We can’t ignore the fact that the more people buy electric vehicles, the more people are going to use coal burning elements to charge and fuel their electric vehicles. 

      But we also have to factor in, that power stations are more efficient than car engines. What that means is that an electric car only uses half of the CO2 per mile than a regular gas car would. So in turn, maybe the electric vehicle is actually more efficient and uses less fossil fuels then a regular petrol or diesel vehicle. 

      But, believe it or not, the UK actually gets all it’s energy sources from renewable energy. Now something even more interesting. I will share a part of the article that talks about carbon impact. It states, “The most recent studies I’ve seen, including one by the immensely thorough ICTT (the guys who unearthed Dieselgate), put the carbon impact of manufacturing an EV at just under three times a piston car.” 

      So now we can see that an electric vehicle only makes 1/3 of the carbon impact compared to a gas vehicle. Additionally, a lot of people don’t know that electric car batteries can be used for more than one purpose. Electric car vehicle batteries can be used for grid power storage. 

McFadden, Christopher. “7 Ways Electric Vehicles Are Set To Change The Future.” Interesting Engineering, Interesting Engineering, 16 May 2019, https://interestingengineering.com/7-ways-electric-vehicles-are-set-to-change-the-future.

      The title of this article. Seven ways that an electric vehicle can change the future. How bold is that? Let’s read more in depth about this article. The article states that as electric vehicle prices drop in performance increases, there will be more room and more opportunities for people to buy them. 

      I think it’s very interesting because at first electric vehicles were very, very expensive. Not very many people could afford them unless you were rich, or very wealthy. But now, as Tesla has released the new model 3, a lot more people are able to afford an electric vehicle. Not only that, but there is quite a few models including the Chevy bolt, and the Nissan leaf that are very affordable models.

      But one question to take in the consideration. As people buy electric vehicles and more purchases are made, will the energy grid be able to support them? But, as the article states, there could be a solution to this. And the solution could be the people could be their own energy producers, and have such things as solar panels or self-sustaining energy that can actually power their Tesla and charge it for them. 

      This would make it so they wouldn’t rely on the cities energy grid, and this could make it much easier for people to buy an electric vehicle. It would also help, because it would make it so that the scientists and engineers wouldn’t have to think of 1000 ways they could extend the energy grid, because the people would just be supporting themselves and using their own solar grids. 

      Lastly, the other benefit of an electric car is that maintenance and repairs will be very cheap. Since an electric car doesn’t use things such as spark plugs, mass air sensors, fuel pumps, or oil just to name a few, there won’t be as much need for maintenance on electric cars. 

Tim Urban, WaitButWhy. “How Tesla Will Change the World.” Business Insider Australia, Business Insider Australia, 4 June 2015, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-tesla-will-change-the-world-2015-6.

      There was a woman named Christie Nicholson who first met Elon musk at a party in 1989. Elon joked a lot about electric cars in the first couple minutes of meeting with her. She remembers that he said, “do you ever think about electric cars?” 

      Electric cars was probably not the most common thing to think about in that time period, but it was what Elon musk was thinking about and what he wanted to do with his life. The article talks a lot about how Elon owned SpaceX before he owned Tesla motors. I think this is really interesting that he wanted to go to Mars and have a city there before he even wanted to make a simple electric car. But, Elon partnered up and he started the company called Tesla motors. 

      When Elon launched this company, he had three goals in mind. One, to make a production car available for the rich. It would be a car that was close to a Ferrari that he could charge over $100,000 for. The next, would be a car for the middle class that would be over $70,000 and still really fancy. 

      And lastly, he would make a car for mass production, that anyone could buy and use. I think this concept is really interesting that he would make different cars for different people. But it makes perfect sense knowing that this would be the best for his business and for the company overall.

[whitehotharlots]

TERF war

I took feminist lit and theory courses as an undergraduate, in 2003 and 04. For the time, the courses were incredibly trans inclusive (bear in mind this was a year before Jon Stewart would dismiss Dennis Kucinich’s suggestion of appointing a trans SCOTUS justice, referring to the hypothetic appointee as “the honorable chick with dick”). A good 20% of the course was dedicated to reading books by and about trans people. We even got a visit from Leslie Feinberg—the person who literally coined the term transgender, and one of the kindest souls I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.

The foundational, explicit understanding I was taught in these classes was that biological sex is innate, a fixed fact of a person’s bodily being, whereas gender is a fluid and malleable social construct. No one could have gotten through these classes thinking the opposite.

The utility of this understanding is easy to grasp: by denying the fixity of gender, feminists were able to undermine social and interpersonal structures that had traditionally denied women freedom, choice, dignity, and agency. A woman was not biologically destined to a life of domestic servitude; nor was she naturally inclined to be more submissive or deferential. Most germane to this discussion, this understanding validated the existence and experience of gender non-conforming lesbians: just because they were not traditionally feminine didn’t mean they weren’t women, or that they were in need of any fixing.

Very recently—within the last 5 or 6 years, as the abstract language of feminism has permeated the wider culture and gotten watered down for sake of digestibility—the poles have shifted. Now, we are told, it is actually gender which is fixed and innate, a metaphysical force lurking within us, suppressed by social pressures, unleashed gloriously with the aid of surgery and supplemental hormones. Biological sex, meanwhile, is a construct that doesn’t exist and shouldn’t even factor in to one’s analysis of gender relations. Sex is hereby an utter fabrication, a projection of the sick evils of normalized (cis male) consciousness engrained upon people’s erstwhile blank bodies.  Taken to extreme, we are told this therefore means trans women can get periods and that there is “literally zero” difference between trans and cis women. Ergo, having a uterus doesn’t make you a woman, biological or otherwise—it simply makes you a “uterus haver.”

The utility of this shift comes from the fact that trans self-actualization relies not just on social positioning but on bodily experience. Trans peoples’ mental wellbeing often hinges on their having access to the medical interventions required to get their body to conform to their innate sense of gender. Since we live in a country where few people have access to basic healthcare, trans people have had to medicalize their position—assert a fundamental and harmful mind/body disconnect—in order to have these interventions regarded as essential, rather than elective.  

So while it’s perfectly understandable and useful, this shift nonetheless represents a profound upending of decades of feminist thought, and I’m shocked that it doesn’t appear to have even been deliberated upon. It was asserted through tumblrs and tweets and everydayfeminism dot com posts, everyone kind of nodded their heads in agreement, and that has been that. For the most part.

Now, we might able to say that the reversal is simply academic: trans people and cis women each need to advance their respective theories of gender and sex to serve as the basis of political programs that might afford safety and respect to each group. There’s no need, necessarily, to concern ourselves too exclusively with the details. Consider a parallel: anyone who was actually involved in theoretical side of gay rights in the 70’s-90’s knows that saying gay people were “born gay” was not a universally agreed upon assertion. Many argued that this was essentially a reactionary frame which stigmatized homosexuality, making it seem like gays would have chosen to be straight if only their brains or genes hadn’t screwed things up. Eventually however, the “born this way” line prevailed, became mainstream, and was the basis of most of the gay rights campaigns of this century. Most of the people who disagreed with it on academic grounds still supported it, at least publicly, once they became aware of its political utility. Why can’t we do the same with today’s split conceptualizations of gender and sex?

Seriously, why can’t we?

The sex/gender-fluid/innate reversal came around the time when trans people started receiving their first regular, non-dismissive appearances in US media. This was the first time most people had been bothered to think seriously about gender, and the first time that the existence of trans people was admitted to as something that wasn’t freakish or a punchline. That’s a huge positive, obviously. And it happened with surprisingly little mainstream pushback (compare the responses to Laverne Cox’s appearance in Orange is the New Black with the intense outrage that accompanied Ellen Degeneres coming out just 15 years earlier—the difference is astounding).

This is where things get troublesome. Many established feminists, especially second wavers, were upset to see their life’s work upended in such a way. Some reacted horribly dismissively. Others wrote thoughtful, seemingly even-handed pieces that nonetheless seemed calculated to subtly dismiss the experiences of trans people, like by repeatedly misgendering trans authors. And still others respectfully expressed objections to or concerns with mainstream trans rights assertions. These writers tended to operate in either academic or upper-middlebrow spaces, and their prose is consequently calm, erudite, and often super dense. The rebuttals to these pieces came from places like jezebel, loveisarainbow dot com, or geocities.com/sunsetstrip/3765/madtransbitch. These pieces are easily digestible, frequently angry or even violent, and hyperbolic without exception, accusing the cis feminists of fomenting or even committing violence against trans people. In the court of woke public opinion, the second wavers did not stand a chance. They were accused—sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly—of abject hatred of trans people, blamed for suicides and murders, and grouped in with the racists and homophobes of yore. Within a very short period of time, those who haven’t learned to be quiet have been shunted away to the darkest academic backwaters (or they live in the UK, where university cultural studies is dominated by second wavers).

But, again, why not just be quiet? Honestly, that’s my preferred approach. Maybe it would be different if I had based an academic career on one assertion over another. But overall it seems like both groups should still be able to pursue their own political agendas on their own terms, so why bother discussing this contradiction? And just on a personal (that is, cowardly) note, I might not agree that biological sex is a construct, and I certainly don’t think gender is innate, but I also think trans people should have easy access to medical intervention, so why not let the inversion stand? 

But herein lies the problem: politically, the two groups are not separate. One of the most frequently levied criticisms against certain feminist authors and movements is a lack of trans-inclusivity. Pink pussy hats were verboten within hours of their debut. Colleges have cancelled productions of The Vagina Monologues (not because it’s overwrought treacle, but because it talks about vaginas, which makes it de facto transphobic). These incidents may seem trifling by themselves, but they serve as avatars of a very real and important conflict: cis feminists are being demanded to center their feminism in an understanding of sex and gender that directly contradicts the base of their ideology. Because of this, actions and symbols that were recently taken as signs of love and solidarity are now being cast as hate speech. Cis women are being told, literally, that they have no right to call themselves women (trans women are “women,” cis women are “menstruaters”). Cis lesbians are called homophobic for not being attracted to people with penises. In short, a trans movement that purports to dedicate itself to ensuring that its purveyors be given the right to be recognized by own their self-understanding is doing so by denying that same right to others.

The only possible result here is a complete collapse anything resembling a unified feminist movement. Meaning, I guess, that it fits in perfectly with the atomized understandings of social justice that stem from internet-based discourse. I suppose I could end with a plea for decency and understanding, perhaps even outline a alignment that would allow for trans advocates and cis feminists to recognize tactical points of departure from one another without fear of committing literal assault or denying the existence of one another. But we’re past that point, I think. There’s no more space for humane liberalism. Everything’s a knock-down, drag-out these days. We don’t even pretend to want to help one another.

Addendum:

People are raising the fair point that a vast majority of trans people don’t subscribe to the sort of wrecker beliefs I outline here. That is absolutely true and part of what makes the shittiness of online gender discourse so tragic. I did not mean to suggest that these beliefs are at all common among trans people. I intended to criticize only the shitty woke media apparatus (everydayfeminism et al) that occludes any attempt at effectively theorizing gender because it prioritizes hyperbolic victim mongering over achieving political goals.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

It's Not Easy Being Green

by Dan H

Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Dan gets his Minority Warrior freak on, big time~

So here's the deal.

Once upon a time, a heterosexual, white man from Oregon wrote a book dealing with complex issues of race, sexuality, imperialism, slavery and Otherness. Then a heterosexual, white man from Oxford read that book and decided that the heterosexual, white man from Oregon was Doing It Wrong and proceeded to complain about it on the internet.

This is one of those iffy things where I'm trying to defuse my own hypocrisy by drawing attention to it but I do genuinely feel that it's a problem when white people use racism as an excuse to score points off of other white people, or when men use sexism as an excuse to score points off other men (this last being one of my major issues with a lot of later Joss Whedon). This of course creates a bit of a paradox (paradox (n): convenient excuse for behaving like an inconsistent jackass) because you can't say “this guy is trying to use sexism to score points off other men” without doing the exact same thing yourself.

So umm ... yeah, that's what this article is going to be about. It's going to be me trying to score points off a guy called Jay Lake by complaining about the fact that he's trying to score points off me, while criticising his work as being skeevy on a variety of levels.

For what it's worth, part of the skeeviness in Green involves a certain amount of discussion of rape so: trigger warning.

Also spoiler warning, but you should expect that by now.

Where to begin:

Reverse Racism

One of the many quite positive things to come out of Racefail '09 were some interesting essays/articles/blogposts on the concept of “reverse racism”. Broadly, as far as I can tell, this was a reaction against a lot of discussions along the lines of, well, of the introductory sequence to Everyone's a Little Bit Racist where the white puppet “exposes” how racist the monster puppet is being for not letting him come so their Monster's Support Group. It's the sort of apologist claptrap you get all the time where somebody “insightfully” points out that having – say – an award for Music of Black Origin is racist because you couldn't have an award for Music of White Origin.

On the other hand there's another side to the whole “reverse-*ism” issue which is just as pernicious as the first.

A little while ago I had a trawl through the archives of

Girls Read Comics (and They're Pissed)

and found a post about a guy who had shown up and complained that they felt that female superheroes didn't make sense. But wait, they weren't being sexist, oh no. Because you see the thing is that they thought that women were too sensible and mature to be superheroes. Because you see superheroes are basically just adolescent power fantasies, and isn't it just us silly, silly men who need to dress up in tights and have fun beating up baddies. Aren't women so much betterthan that, with their caring natures and their ability to listen. Needless to say the girls at Girls Read Comics... were not amused.

Green reads a lot like that guy. All the bad guys are men. Most of them are white men. This wouldn't be a problem in itself, and I most certainly am not suggesting that it's “racist against whites” to have the bad guys all be white people. Rather the problem is that the whole book is shot through with some slightly creepy, faintly Victorian attitudes to women and to non-white cultures. Bad guys all white men? Fine. Bad guys all white men because they're the only people that appear to have volition and agency, while everybody else just kind of sits there quietly starving, not fine.

So anyway, I'm six hundred and something words in, and I'm still ploughing through disclaimers, I should probably start actually talking about the book. As always this isn't really a review, it's a response. The rest of this article is basically going to be in four parts. I'm going to take a look at the overall plot, then at the way the book deals with sexuality, then at how it deals with gender, then how it deals with race and the trappings of Empire.

The Story

The story of Green is as follows. Green lives until the age of three in somewhere that is vaguely like India. It isn't spelled out at the time, but she basically lives a life of grinding poverty and desperation. She is sold by her father (her mother and grandmother have both died – this is the start of a long sequence of Green suffering misfortunes because of Men) to a man named Federo, who carries her across the sea to Copper Downs. There she is raised at fantastic expense as a courtesan on behalf of somebody called “The Factor”, while Federo and a catgirl “dancing mistress” train her up to be a kickass ninja assassin.

At the age of twelve she escapes from whore school amidst much angst (there's a lot of angst in the book) but is still recruited by Federo and the Dancing Mistress to take out the immortal Duke who has ruled over Copper Downs for four centuries. This she duly does, before fleeing over the see to Selistan, her homeland.

She returns to Selistan, and finds her father's farm, only to realise that it's a horrible poverty-stricken wreck and that being a slave was probably the best thing that could possibly have happened to her (the “being enslaved and oppressed was the best thing that could happen to these people” theme is a recurring one, and one of my biggest sources of trouble with the book). Then she hangs out on the streets of a big quasi-Indian city, gets recruited by a temple of all-female death-worshippers wherein she has sadomasochistic lesbian sex. Then she gets sent back to Copper Downs to fight a God, where she has more lesbian sex. Then she has sex with a man and gets pregnant. Then she kills a god, and makes her father's ox into a new God of Patience. Then she settles down to raise her kid. The end.

It's three hundred pages long. It feels longer. Which is odd because not much actually happens in it.

Anyway, on to the things that I want to score points over.

Sexuality

Green has a whole lot of lesbian sex. Like a whole lot of lesbian sex. It starts at the temple in Kalimpura, where she leses up with the other initiates and the older “Mothers.”

Couple of things about this.

First off, at the time she is in fact somewhere between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Again, I know that gender reversal isn't always the best way to judge these things (again it comes down to the reverse-ism problem) but for a book that is so preoccupied with notions of sex, slavery, sex slavery and rape it's a tiny bit problematic that it completely glosses over the fact that it's not okay for forty year olds to shag fourteen year olds, even if both parties are women.

Now I know that Green is set in a pre-industrial society. I know that most fourteen year old girls in such a society would already have been married off but guess what: the text is very, very clear about the fact that this is bad. But apparently all these issues of consent, power, society and duty of care evaporate like spit on a soldering iron the moment it's time for a bit of girl-on-girl.

Ages ago I wrote an article about

Nice Guy Syndrome

and pointed out that Nice Guys and a certain variety of feminist-identified-man go to extraordinary lengths to demonise male sexuality. Green only “lies with” one man in the entire book, and he's a priest who normally takes it up the arse:

“You re my first woman.” Something in his voice grew very shy. “My first entry, in truth. I have only been the vessel, not the seed, within the temple rites.”

You later meet his high priest, and he's obviously evil, and gloats about priest-dude's tight arsehole. It's a theme that's repeated throughout the book: penetration is evil, but being penetrated builds virtue through suffering. Green encounters literally no heterosexual men (okay, tell a lie, there's one one-legged cook) who are not either rapists or would-be rapists. The fear of rape is something that dogs Green from the first page of the book to the last and rears its head every time she talks to somebody with a penis (unless that penis has been rendered safe by a good buggering).

Again (you see now why I put that long disclaimer at the start) I'm not claiming that this is “reverse sexism” or “reverse homophobia”. I'm claiming that it is regular sexism and regular homophobia.

Here is Green on the discovery of a gay man aboard a ship:

Love between women I could understand, but men were such careless brutes that I did not see how two of them could love without someone to dampen the blows and soften the curses. This opinion was a legacy of the Factor's house, I now know but some of those habits of thought were years in the erasing.

Two things. Firstly in the Factor's house, Green met literally no men. She was raised and trained entirely by women, many of whom beat her at the slightest provocation, so how she came to those conclusions I have no idea. Secondly that simply isn't a woman's perspective on gay sex. Not even a gay woman's. It's a heterosexual man's opinion, forced uncomfortably into the mouth of a young girl. It's an attitude grounded in the idea that women are the natural objects of sexual desire and men the natural agents of it.

Green has a lot of sex, but she never really has sexual agency. Yes, most of the time when she has sex it's because she chooses to, but what you never get from Green is the sense that she is, for want of a better term, horny. She never actually gives the impression of experiencing sexual desire, of looking at somebody and just plain wanting to fuck them. Much like Inara in FireflyGreen has sex as a kind of benediction. She has sex with the women in the Temple as part of an all-girls-together bonding ritual. She has sex with priest-dude because he, in essence, proves himself worthy by talking to her about mythology (and what gets fantasy writers hotter than their own mythology).

Lake's demonisation of male sexuality and valorisation of lesbianism reaches its height in the confrontation against the Big Bad. The villain has captured Green and the catgirl Dancing Mistress, and is getting ready to cut them both into pieces so that he can reclaim the last shards of the power he needs to become a full on god. How do Green and the Dancing Mistress get out of this situation? Why they les up! And the truly stupid thing is that it works. It works so well that the Big Bad actually stops torturing the two of them to death and – I shit you not - sits down and starts masturbating. Here's how it plays out:

I crawled back up to nuzzle her face. “Oh please,” I moaned, “kiss my thighs.” My voice would have had the Lily Blades falling out with laughter, but Federo just echoed the moan. He was the rankest of boys. Facing Federo as I sprawled on the floor, I ran my tongue across my lips. Mistress Cherlise had shown me a number of such little bits of playacting that would arrest a man's attention. The Dancing Mistress gripped my thighs hard and kissed me back and forth along the inner line of each leg, working down towards my knees. When she reset her grip to my calves and eased herself further away I nearly shrieked. Instead I rolled slightly to my left so Federo could see my right breast. He wasn't looking any more. His eyes were closed, his back arched in his chair as he stroked himself very hard. Outside, thunder rolled almost continuously.

If this was just stupid, I'd let it go. But it's not just stupid, it's stupid and it's sexist. And just to be very clear, to say for the third time something I am sure I will say again, I don't mean that it's “reverse sexist” or “sexist against men” I mean it's sexist. It's an offensive, patriarchal stereotype which harms women far more than it harms men.

The attitude expressed in the passage above, and repeated throughout the whole of the book, is that male sexuality is intrinsically corrupt, fundamentally violent, and ultimately controlled by women. While men (white men at least) are morally responsible for all of the evils in Green the practical responsibility lies always with women. When Green returns to Copper Downs, it is revealed that after she killed the Duke, the Factor's house where she was trained was destroyed, the remaining Mistresses killed, and the girls who were kept there raped to death. And who was responsible for the girls being raped to death? Why they were of course! Once the Duke was dead, there was nobody to restrain the guards, and so they did what all men will naturally do when faced with beautiful women, they raped them until they died. “Because of their beauty” as Green herself puts it.

This is a world of not okay. Yes, the novel is written in the first person, and Green's perceptions are likely to have been shaped by her extremely fucked up upbringing (although if that was the case, you'd expect her to be more comfortable with the notion of being sold into slavery, since it was all she had known) but the text routinely operates from the assumption that men are Slaves to Their Lusts, that when faced with a hot woman, men will completely lose their reason and cease to be responsible for their actions (if you want an example, scroll back up and read the boss-fight-wanking-scene again, is that the description of a man who is in control of himself?). Green's attitudes are not deconstructed or shown to be false or harmful, quite the opposite. By the end of the book, Green is assumed to be in possession of a true and accurate understanding of the truth about men and women, at least as Lake sees it.

This is wrong. Rape is not some kind of natural disaster, something that just happens like a hurricane or an earthquake. It is not an occupational hazard of having a vagina, and it most certainly is not a fucking compliment (“because of their beauty” my arse). By the same token, lesbian sex is real sex, and lesbian sexual abuse is real sexual abuse. An institution in which forty year old women fuck thirteen year old girls is exactly as abusive as one in which the forty-year-olds are men.

Gender

I've touched on this already, but I'll just go over the basics again.

Men = bad people who have nasty things like ambitions and desires and sexual appetites.

Women = good people who have nice things like patience and wisdom and did I mention patience?

Again, I should come clean here and mention that the reason I'm so profoundly sensitive to this kind of thing is that I really do appreciate the temptation of this line of thinking. It's amazingly comforting as a man to bury your sexist, patronising bullshit under layer upon layer of “well really, I think women are superior to men” but sexist, patronising bullshit it remains.

Green (the novel) is preoccupied with Women. Green (the character) is preoccupied with Women as well. Unfortunately neither the novel nor the character are actually interested in women. For the benefit of those who don't have the patience for my smug games with capitalisation, the distinction I'm alluding to is between “Women” with a capital “W” - a broad impersonal concept chiefly designed to allow men to score points off of other men – versus women with a small w, actual people with names and personalities. Again this is something I've been guilty of myself, allowing my very real concern for the way that Men treat Women to blind me to the way I personally was treating actual people.

Green is obsessed with women, and in a peculiarly self-conscious way. She habitually uses the word “woman” to mean “people in general” (and even more peculiarly, sometimes uses “girl-child” to mean “children in general”). Now in all seriousness I do get that there are issues with using specifically masculine pronouns to describe people-in-general, but Green was born in one patriarchal society, and raised in another, where did she pick up the habit of using feminine pronouns?

Similarly she spends the entire book talking, talking, talking about how badly she wants to protect Women and children and did I mention Women. The problem is that she never actually does anything about it. Now I know she's only fifteen by the time the book finishes, but we spend the entire book being told how utterly precocious and omnicompetent she is and you can't have it both ways. Either it's a book about a powerful, independent woman who triumphs in the face of the horrors she faces, or it's about a broken woman who is destroyed by the people who enslave her and remade into their image. If she's as awesome as everybody says she is, she should damned well do something about those injustices instead of just talking about them.

It doesn't help that while Green goes on and on and on about Women and Girls, there isn't a single woman or girl she actually displays any compassion for or indeed interest in. Green as a character is relentlessly self-absorbed. One gets the impression that we are supposed to take the mere fact of her being a woman as evidence of virtue.

This is, in itself, mildly irritating, but it's so all pervasive in the text that it goes beyond “irritating” into “faintly skeevy”. Green (the novel) consistently refuses to allow women to be responsible for their own actions. Green herself never actually makes a decision, she gets bought at the age of three, and is then controlled entirely by the Factor, then by Federo and the Dancing Mistress, then by the Lily Goddess. Worse, she makes up for this by beating herself up about things that she has no control over whatsoever (like the aforesaid raping to death of the girls in the Factor's house). It all contributes to a worldview in which women are seen as incapable of acting for themselves, or controlling their own destinies. Even when female characters do things which are genuinely morally repugnant (violently beating a twelve year old girl, engaging in sexual activity with minors in their care) those things are either assumed to be acceptable (see “sex, lesbian”) or blamed on Men (see “beatings, violent”). Even Green's decision to cut up her own face is explicitly taken away from her and given to the nebulous They.

Basically Lake is so fixated on making the book about Women, Women, Women that he completely forgets to include any well-realised, sympathetic female characters.

Green (the book) is full of Goddess imagery. There are constant references to the obligatory maiden, mother and crone, and it is I think deliberate that Green starts the book as a child and ends it as a mother. Similarly virtually all of the female characters fit somewhere into the Triune – often explicitly, such as in the Lily Temple where the initiates specifically progress to being “Mothers”. Of course the problem with this is that it essentially reduces all women everywhere to three archetypes, and worse because it romanticises those archetypes it fails to recognise how limiting and constricting they are. It puts women in a box, then puts the box on a pedestal.

Race and Empire

This is the difficult bit. As ever there's nothing more dangerous than invoking the spectre of (whisper it) racism.

Once more I should say very, very clearly that I'm not actually calling Jay Lake a racist. He did sit down and write a book about a pseudo-south-Asian protagonist (although she is, of course, white on the cover) and much as I like to complain, the pseudo-Indian city of Kalimpura has as much imagination invested in it as Copper Downs. The book deals with some extremely complex, extremely sensitive issues, and if I were feeling like less of an asshole I'd probably give it some major points for trying. But I'm not, so I won't.

Green deals with some extremely complicated issues such as slavery, abuse, imperialism, and human trafficking (much like Dollhouse in fact). One of the most difficult things to deal with when handling the subject of abuse is the extent to which an abuse survivor is shaped by their experiences, the extent to which they – to use a loaded term – owe who they are to the events that shaped them. Post-imperial or post-colonial cultures have a similarly difficult relationship with their past, an occupying force brings stability and infrastructure and the removal of that infrastructure frequently causes as much trouble as the imposition of it. When a great injustice occurs – either to an individual or to a people – it can sometimes be hard to tell how much of what follows is because of that injustice, and how much is in spite of it.

Green beings the book being sold into slavery by her father. She observes, early on, that the food she is given by Federo is better than any meal she has had in her entire life. This itself isn't a problem. It's entirely reasonable that the food available to a rich human trafficker will be higher quality and more abundant than the food available to a subsistence-level rice farmer. To begin with, the issue of contrast between her old life and her new life is handled with sensitivity, Green seems genuinely conflicted about the fact that she is, in many ways, better off in Copper Downs. This feels believable and relatively respectful to Green, her culture, and her circumstances. She obviously feels a lot of guilt about finding some aspects of Copper Downs better than her old life, and the things she prefers are basically issues of material comfort.

It gets worse, considerably worse, when she returns to her home. Suddenly Copper Downs goes from being not merely more affluent than her homeland but objectively better. Green states, quite clearly, that:

My captors had been right. Rather I should have been on my knees thanking the Factor for what he had taken me from.

Now I know that this is partly Green giving in to despair, but nothing in the text challenges this conclusion. It's rather an object lesson in the dangers of taking on too many genre stereotypes at once.

Had this been the story of a white man who was taken away from his pseudo-European farming village and conscripted into the armies of the Dark Lord of Evil then I would have been overjoyed to find him returning home to realise that his long lost homeland was a poverty stricken shithole and his father was a bastard who never cared about him. It would challenge the assumptions of a genre that frequently glamourises poverty, and it wouldn't have any creepy overtones (unless you want to make a big thing about militarism).

Make the white man a south-Asian woman, however, and you start getting into difficulties, because now you're not saying “being poor sucks” you're saying “being foreign sucks”. Turn conscription into slavery and you're not saying “you might be better off in the army than on a farm” you're saying “you might be better off as a slave in Europe than as a free man in your own country.” Add in the courtesan angle and you're saying “it is a good thing for south-Asian women to be sold as sex slaves to European men.”

I hope I don't need to point out that this really isn't okay.

Green (the book) takes another hop, step and jump closer to a pit of utter fail when Green (the character) notices that her father's Ox – an image she clung to from childhood – has grown old in her absence:

He was a beast too, of course. Though somehow less animal than Papa, now.

That's right folks, the book directly compares poor people from hot countries to animals(compares them unfavourably to animals, in fact). Now to be fair her father has gone mad by this point (mostly it seems in order to conveniently prevent Green from finding out her birth name) but that only makes it ablist as well as racist. Sorry, I mean “possible to interpret as racist” because while comparing brown people to animals is dodgy, suggesting that a white man might be prejudiced is unforgivable.

The fucked up imperialist dogma actually reaches its peak, however, with the treatment of the “pardines” - the race of cat-people of whom Green's Dancing Mistress is one (the pardines do not tell their names to outsiders, much like the jellyfish dudes in Mass Effect). Now an early plot point in Green is that the power which allowed the Duke to maintain his immortality had been stolen from the pardines, much to the detriment of their people.

At the end of the book, Green confronts the ghost of the Duke (who was also the Factor, by the way) and he explains to her that actually stealing the power of the pardines was the right thing to do:

“Your crime,” I growled, “was to strip power from a peaceful people and bind it to yourself.” “How peaceful were those people?” Now his face flared with passion to match my own. “Do you know of the last war this city did fight? Under me, as a living man? We battled the pardines. In their time they were terrible hunters and raiders. Others followed them, thinking by their appearance that they were wise and powerful. The shared path they have instead of souls lent them a strength in this world that could not be matched. Over a thousand men were lost wrestling them down. I took what they used to wreak the death of farmers and children and traders, stripped it from them, and made peace for Copper Downs. I even made peace for them.”

Now as the subjective self-justification of the ghost of a tyrant, this is all well and good, but the problem is that it isn't. It's a pure statement of fact. Green accepts it as gospel and – and this is the really weird bit – so does the Dancing Mistress, who had up until that point been specifically trying to recapture the power of her people (as well she might).

Indeed the conversation between Green and the Duke's ghost seems – in the eyes of the text – to objectively redeem the Duke from all possible sins. It is even revealed that Green was being educated as a woman of four centuries past because the Duke was lonely and desired companionship of the sort he remembered from his youth. I get the distinct impression that we are actually supposed to sympathise with this (again this calls to mind Dollhouse and its seeming belief that it's okay to rape somebody if you pretend they're your dead wife). It is, in essence, a plot twist in which it is revealed that the Duke who Green thought was evil in fact is not.

Here is Green's summary of the story of the Duke and his theft of the pardines' collective power, as she relates it to an angry mob who have just torn apart a mad godling:

“Let me tell you a story,” I repeated “about a people who gave up their power long ago. A city man took it from them. Some agreed to this, but not all.” The silence held, I continued: “The man made himself prince of his city. He ruled for generations. There was peace, prosperity, a time of quiet. The gods fell quiet for the power was like a blanket to them. This took the soul of the people, for what are gods if not the sum of everyone who follows them? Choices fell away, as the power cares only for itself. Even so, the bargain was good for most.”

First of all, how the fuck does Green get from “I stripped them of their power and made it my own” to “a people gave up their power, the bargain was good for most”?

Second of all, I'm sorry but that's really fucking offensive.

I have no idea how deliberate this is but what you have here is a relatively modern culture which owes its strength and prosperity to resources that it took by force from the people who had them originally. People who, according to the guys who took those resources in the first place, were basically a bunch of raiders, hunters and savages.

Doesn't that sound rather a lot like the history of America?

Imagine, for a moment, Green standing up and making that speech (substituting, if you wish “land” for “power”) to an audience of Native Americans.

Umm ... pretty fucking offensive, isn't it.

Now I know, I know, I know that this is a fantasy setting, and the pardines are a fantasy race, but in a book which engages so directly and specifically with issues of race and imperialism you cannot avoid drawing parallels with the real world. Green's apologia – substituting “bargains” for conquest and talking about people “giving up” their power - is exactly the sort of historical revisionism that goes on with stories of the American West.

Ironically for a book all about a non-white gay woman, the whole thing is positively dripping with white male privilege. It's fantastically easy to make big speeches about how power is bad and corrupting, and how really people are better off without it, when you're part of the group that already has all the power. It's easy to praise women and non-whites for what you perceive as their superior qualities of patience and endurance, when you haven't had to be patient or endure, because you live in a world where you can get what you want when you want it. It's easy to write about how people should never try to change the way things are when the way things are primarily benefits you and people like you.

And breathe.

Taking a step back, it is possible that Lake is aware of all of these issues, and that the whole book is working on a much more subtle level. It is possible that the extent to which Green internalises the prejudices of her captors is supposed to be her final tragedy. The only way I could ever find this out, however, would be to read the two sequels which Lake is apparently working on and that I most assuredly will not be doing.

In Conclusion

Green engages with a variety of complex themes, but there is a fine line between engagement and apologia.

Earlier I mentioned the Avenue Q song Everyone's a Little Bit Racist. Some people (I know Rami's one of them) are big fans of this song, because it's really important to recognise that racism is pretty much endemic in society, and nobody is entirely free of it. It's also important to break some of the taboos surrounding racism, specifically “accusing” people of racism.

On the other hand, the song puts just slightly too much emphasis on the “racism” of non-whites. The whole thing is started by a white guy as a means to deflect an accusation of racism, and it works.

Green has similar problems. She starts the novel abducted and enslaved by a western imperial power, but the book focuses so much on the negative aspects of the life she would have had otherwise that it winds up justifying, if not glorifying, her initial enslavement. It's the same issue of uneven historical accuracy that leads to so many skeevy gender issues in Fantasy. Because the western imperialist culture is, to an extent, romanticised – we see very little of the grinding poverty that existed in nineteenth-century England for example – and the eastern agrarian culture is not, you wind up with a situation where Green's only protection from marital rape and early death is to be taken as a slave by a more “enlightened” culture.

So yeah, Green. Not something I'd suggest reading. It's ponderously written, pretentious, boring and full of fail.

And Finally...

Fantasy Rape Watch:

Number of Women Raped: Innumerable, possibly “every woman born in Selistan” depending on how you read the text.

Number of Women Raped to Death: Twelve

Proximal Causes of Aforesaid Raping To Death, According to Green, by importance:

Green's Failure to Save Them: 60%

Victims' Own Beauty: 20%

The Nature of Men: 20%

Actual Decisions Made by Rapists, Over Which They Had Ultimate Control and For Which They Bore Ultimate Moral Responsibility: 0%

Number of Times Heroine “Raped”: 0

Number of Times Heroine Engages in Sexual Activity to which She Does Not and Can Not Properly Consent for Reasons of Age and Power But it's Okay Because it's With Other Women: Countless, over the course of several years.

Number of Times Heroine Threatened with Rape: 3

Number of Times Heroine Meets Heterosexual Men other Than Federo: 3

Themes:

Fantasy Rape Watch

,

Books

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

,

Minority Warrior

~

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Wardog

at 10:36 on 2009-11-17I really rather wish I'd had the bollocks to say all this in my SH review but I felt I couldn't accuse a writer of this degree of fail on somebody else's website.

Green was astonishingly terrible book, and I hated and despised it.

Also what's with the cover? Why is she upside down and devoid of trousers?

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Arthur B

at 14:45 on 2009-11-17That looks painful. It's funny how the author, coming from a completely different angle, seems to have ended up portraying a situation remarkably like the

Gor

novels - in which men are violent and brutal and forceful and dominant, and women like it that way because of their intrinsic urge to be enslaved. It's just that John Norman celebrates this idea whereas it seems like Lake is trying to condemn it. In a sort of half-hearted fashion involving porno-style lesbian scenes.

But Dan, surely the inclusion of a catgirl was the warning sign that something was awry? I've never seen fantasy/SF authors use catgirls for anything but suspicious and unsavoury purposes.

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Arthur B

at 14:46 on 2009-11-17Wait, I tell a lie, there's a short story by Gene Wolfe about a man who gets really creeped out by his friend buying a genetically engineered anthropomorphic sex pet. The moral of the story being "Jesus Christ guys, what is it with you and the catgirls? I'm almost ashamed to write in the same genre as some of you."

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Sister Magpie

at 15:55 on 2009-11-17Wow. This book sounds like it could win some kind of award if they gave awards for things like this.

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http://fightsandtights.blogspot.com/

at 16:11 on 2009-11-17Yikes. Sounds like a very uncomfortable read all round. Is it just me, or does it sound like a deranged and sexist rip off of the Assassins of Tamurin? Green certainly sounds like she couldn't hold a candle to Lale Navari, though...

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Rami

at 16:55 on 2009-11-17

Earlier I mentioned the Avenue Q song Everyone's a Little Bit Racist. Some people (I know Rami's one of them) are big fans of this song, ... The whole thing is started by a white guy as a means to deflect an accusation of racism, and it works.

Right at the beginning, Princeton does admit "I'm sorry, I guess that was racist". Which isn't entirely a deflection. But the song does derail the conversation entirely, I will admit. Part of the reason I like it, and like to refer to it, is that it provides a convenient lighthearted reference I can make to defuse privilege-born defensiveness.

you're saying “you might be better off as a slave in Europe than as a free man in your own country.”

Unsurprisingly enough that really gets my back up. If we're reading it generously, I could see it as internalising her oppressors' cultural imperialism, which would be extra-tragic (and not uncommon; hell, I'm guilty of it myself) but that's something that readers are really rather unlikely to see in it IMHO.

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Melissa G.

at 21:03 on 2009-11-17Yikes. Just yikes.

That whole seduction to win the boss fight thing really irks me. First of all, it just seems utterly ridiculous and probably some of the laziest writing I've ever heard of. I can't even take it seriously; it's just comical.

And although I'm a woman, I find it extremely offensive to men to suggest that no matter how determined, focused, etc a man is, if a woman starts touching herself or each other, he'll just fall apart and forget all his plans as his jaw drops open and he just yelps "BOOBIES!". I mean, come on.

I'm sure that my rage is also compounded because I just had a conversation with my friend about "girls (in comics) in refrigerators" and how women are poorly treated in comics and there are a lot of similarities to how this man seems to want to portray women in his book.

Also, and I can't help but to add this as I just received another rejection yesterday, but HOW is sh*t like this published while I am sitting on my ass waiting for rejection after rejection to roll in on my own novel? It's just damn frustrating!

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Melissa G.

at 21:18 on 2009-11-17Excuse the double post, I just thought of something else about the deus ex seduction that bugs me. It also implies that sexuality would be the only possible way for women to win fights against men. Which, yeah, fully pisses me off.

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Rude Cyrus

at 21:21 on 2009-11-17A lot of people have some seriously fucked up trains of logic. What's scary is that many don't realize it.

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Dan H

at 22:24 on 2009-11-17

Unsurprisingly enough that really gets my back up. If we're reading it generously, I could see it as internalising her oppressors' cultural imperialism, which would be extra-tragic (and not uncommon; hell, I'm guilty of it myself) but that's something that readers are really rather unlikely to see in it IMHO.

It's an interpretation I'd considered, and there was always a nagging sense that maybe Lake was making a really subtle point and that I wasn't giving him enough credit. The problem is that I think you consciously have to read it into the text. Part of the problem is that Green is at least in *theory* supposed to be narrating the series from a position of maturity and strength so when she says she "realises" something you don't really have much room to disagree with her.

Which makes it a bit fucked up.

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Dan H

at 22:28 on 2009-11-17

And although I'm a woman, I find it extremely offensive to men to suggest that no matter how determined, focused, etc a man is, if a woman starts touching herself or each other, he'll just fall apart and forget all his plans as his jaw drops open and he just yelps "BOOBIES!". I mean, come on.

It also implies that sexuality would be the only possible way for women to win fights against men. Which, yeah, fully pisses me off.

Yeah, it's one of those nasty bits of sexism that cuts both ways. Although as ever I rather suspect that it's the ladies who come out worst. It basically gives us guys carte blanche to act like douchebags because we totally can't control ourselves.

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Viorica

at 00:13 on 2009-11-18It ties into the "Well, she was wearing a short skirt/walking alone at night/drinking" defence you see in rape cases. It's always something the woman did; the rapist just couldn't help himself.

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Guy

at 02:40 on 2009-11-18I think there's something interesting in the question about sexism/"reverse sexism" and racism/"reverse racism". It makes me think that what's happening is a sort of... reversal of terms that are already based on a set of binaries or polarisations and all that happens is a switching around of the moral weightings or moral judgements that go with them. So if we think of "classic sexism" having an ideology along the lines of "Men are vigorous and active (and this makes them good), while women are docile and passive (and this makes them bad)", then the kind of "revised sexism" (revised rather than reversed) seen here just switches the part in brackets; men are vigorous and active, which makes them bad, &c &c. An adherent of this kind of "revised sexism" may believe that they've overcome their patriarchal prejudices, when actually all that's happened is that that prejudice has taken a different form. I would argue that these kinds of diminishing-identity-constructions are an inevitable consequence of identity-based logic, and that no matter how carefully you work to ideologically perfect such a logic then some form of diminishment or deformation creeps back in... but I suspect that's a topic for another post.

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Dan H

at 11:53 on 2009-11-18

An adherent of this kind of "revised sexism" may believe that they've overcome their patriarchal prejudices, when actually all that's happened is that that prejudice has taken a different form

Pretty much, and the scary thing is it's terrifyingly easy to do.

Although ironically I don't even think there's change in the moral judgments attached. "Classic" sexism doesn't actually say women are *bad* for being docile and passive, quite the reverse - feminine virtues are usually considered extremely important, look at Victorian England - so it's not even "revised" sexism really, it's just sexism repackaged.

The same is true for the race issues. The concept of the noble savage goes back centuries and still exists in one form or another today.

Basically it all falls under the broad heading of "fetishisation of the other" and it's a horrible, horrible minefield.

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Robinson L

at 22:02 on 2009-11-19Wow! And I thought I'd set a pretty high standard for Minority Warrior with my first contribution. Should've known you'd top me, sooner or later. Fantastic article; probably one of your best.

I remember Ptolemaues reading one of Lake's books a year or two ago. I think by the time she reached page 30 he'd already overheated her clichédar. Apparently, she never finished it.

I remember that Girls Read Comics post. One of the earliest ones, I believe. Well done on distilling the logic of that argument.

This tactic of putting Women on a pedestal is actually a long-standing mechanism of patriarchy. Howard Zinn discusses (in a chapter about the oppression of women in the United States after the war of independence) the ideological underpinnings of the double standard in treatment of men who sleep around/have premarital and extra-marital sex and women who do the same.

As Zinn explains, while such sexual behaviors were and are looked down on by the mainstream culture, it was taken for granted that men are base and incapable controlling their own sex drives, so they get a pass on sexual "immorality." Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be made of purer stuff - they're not even supposed to enjoy sex anyway. Thus, when a woman does indulge in "immoral sex" it means she obviously is not a proper Woman, and deserves to be persecuted.

I imagine attitudes were similar in Victorian England, which you've alluded to a couple times now, Dan.

a pseudo-south-Asian protagonist (although she is, of course, white on the cove

Of course.

Melissa G.: Also, and I can't help but to add this as I just received another rejection yesterday, but HOW is sh*t like this published while I am sitting on my ass waiting for rejection after rejection to roll in on my own novel? It's just damn frustrating!

Law of inverse quality to publishing. Think Rowling, Meyer, Salvatore, etc. You can do this, just keep working at it!

Basically it all falls under the broad heading of "fetishisation of the other" and it's a horrible, horrible minefield.

That's fetishisation of the

Other

. And yes, yes it is.

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Wardog

at 23:32 on 2009-11-19I would rather prefer you boys could contain yourselves from quite this degree of wanking self-congratulation over your minority warrioring, a title I bestowed upon Dan in recognition of his sense of self-irony.

This tactic of putting Women on a pedestal is actually a long-standing mechanism of patriarchy

Good heavens, is it really? I'm stunned and appalled.

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Melissa G.

at 23:51 on 2009-11-19"Law of inverse quality to publishing. Think Rowling, Meyer, Salvatore, etc. You can do this, just keep working at it!" (Can't get the quote thing to work 'cause I'm dumb)

Thanks Robinson!! :-)

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Dan H

at 23:54 on 2009-11-19

I would rather prefer you boys could contain yourselves from quite this degree of wanking self-congratulation over your minority warrioring, a title I bestowed upon Dan in recognition of his sense of self-irony.

Umm ... yeah, I was about to say. The title "Minority Warrior" is an ironic one which we use quite specifically to say "we are aware that this actually strays quite close to being fucking patronising". It originally started as a private joke between Kyra and I, we'd be watching Buffy or Angel, and there's be one of those awful bits where Joss Whedon says Something Very Serious About Being Black or A Woman and we'd shout "Fear Not Ladies! I Am Joss Whedon! Minority Warrior!"

I *actually* feel really bad about laying into Green as badly as I did, not because I feel bad about Jay Lake (dude wrote a boring book) but because I feel genuinely uncomfortable getting on my high horse about these sorts of issues because as I say in - in fact - the start of this article, they often stray dangerously close to me using issues of race and gender as an excuse to score points off of other white men.

This is *not* a game of "more feminist than thou". I'm *not* in a competition to see who can spot the most racism. I'm *not* trying to set standards. You might have noticed that in a lot of my posts about race and gender issues, what I tend to say is "these attitudes are very common, and I understand why they are so common because there is an extent to which I share them".

This is a *world* of not about keeping score.

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Arthur B

at 23:58 on 2009-11-19I'm just glad Robinson clarified the capitalisation of "Other".

Clearly an important and relevant aspect of this discussion!

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Robinson L

at 00:30 on 2009-11-20Okay, yes, on reflection that was rather unnecessary and patronizing for this site. My apologies.

My comment about other/Other was intended mostly as a joke, but I can see now that doesn't come across at all, and it's still rather smug. Again, sorry.

@Melissa: it took me a while to figure out as well.

The standard html tag

for quoting is "blockquote," but I usually just use "i" for italics.

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Melissa G.

at 00:31 on 2009-11-20

it took me a while to figure out as well. The standard html tag for quoting is "blockquote," but I usually just use "i" for italics.

I got it! Thanks!

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Wardog

at 09:30 on 2009-11-20Alternatively you could just use the handy 'quote' function. Highlight any text any where on the page and click the 'quote selected text' button in this comment form. Try it today! The handy in-built quote function! 9/10 users recommend it! New from Rami Industries!

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http://oiooo.livejournal.com/

at 10:51 on 2009-11-20Yr cmmnts bt sxsm wld wrk bttr f hdn't jst rd th rtcl whr y cm ff lk th whnst f Slythrfn whl tlkng bt crtn "smg btch".

Editor's Comment: This comment has been disemvowelled. We welcome your comments here at Fb but if you disagree with something please address the article or the comment in question, rather than the style or nature of the writer.

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Dan H

at 11:16 on 2009-11-20For what it's worth I do actually realise that referring to J.K. Rowling as a "smug bitch" is, in fact, rather sexist. I'm afraid that I sometimes allow my sense of rhetoric to override my sense of what is appropriate.

However as the editors have pointed out, this comment is not really pertinent to the article or the arguments presented within it.

I would genuinely be more than happy if you were to leave a comment on the original article pointing out that my use of gendered insults to attack a female writer is not okay because it is, well, absolutely not.

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Melissa G.

at 13:36 on 2009-11-20

Try it today! The handy in-built quote function! 9/10 users recommend it! New from Rami Industries!

mwahaha! Is that how it works? I kept trying to select text that was already in the comment box, haha. Thanks!

And sorry to clutter the comments section with this stuff but I want to say a proper thank you. ^^

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Viorica

at 23:14 on 2010-08-30I thought Jay Lake's name seemed familiar when I read this article, but I couldn't remember where I heard it until I was linked to

this

. Turns out he was

involved

in RaceFail (on the Elizabeth Bear/Will Shetterley side, natch) and subsequently refused to attend a con because he thought that he would be "unsafe" there as a white, male author. So, yeah.

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Arthur B

at 01:19 on 2010-08-31Tempest's blog post is awesome. It's amazing how quick people can go from "Behold, I am Jay Lake, Minority Warrior!" to "It just ain't safe for a white male author at a con these days."

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Wardog

at 09:17 on 2010-08-31Gosh, is he terrified of all those angry black people resorting to violence?

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Michal

at 02:50 on 2011-06-19Ho boy. I read Lake's Mainspring, and in the first few pages I had this creeping feeling and a voice in my head kept saying "put this down, don't waste time on this, it's not worth it", but then, in my idiocy, I picked it up again. By the time I got to the part where my inner critic was screaming at me to stop, I was already too far and in my stubbornness ended up finishing it. It's only later that I found out he started Racefail, but my impressions from Mainspring were not at all good. For instance, I giant wall separates the northern and southern hemispheres. And when the main character finally crosses that wall into sub-Saharan Africa, instead of interesting cultures allowed to develop without European influence, we get ape men and evil black sorcerers. My jaw dropped.

Then the main character has sex with an ape-woman.

Then he saves the world with the power of love.

Yeah.

Looks like Lake continues on the same path in Green.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/0txE6GYMzdiwjPOqDTwLdeHMvOdijS5Jm1c-#9995a

at 03:32 on 2011-06-19You know, on one hand I feel that the entire "women are purer than me" should be a compliment to women. On the other hand, it's the same old tactic of "put 'em on a throne then stab 'em in the back" as with the supposed glorification of women, whilst surreptitiously ridiculting the notion.

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Arthur B

at 04:02 on 2011-06-19The thing about defining some other category of people as being purer than you is that it simultaneously lets you off the hook for your own bad behaviour ("I'm just a stupid ol' man, how can I be expected to behave differently?") whilst simultaneously lets you hold that category of folks to a higher standard - and therefore get correspondingly nastier with them when they fail to meet the standard you've imposed. ("I'd have expected that from a man, but you, I thought I could trust you to do better. What sort of woman are you?")

It's basically yet one more flavour of creepery that needs to be pointed out for the creepery it is.

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Wardog

at 19:31 on 2011-06-19@Michal

Youch. I remember tying myself into knots of pure anguish trying to review this thing for Strange Horizons - I genuinely felt uncomfortable barging onto someone else's site and yelling that this white woman thought this dude was being a big racist, so I ended up talking about his creepy creepy attitude to sex instead. So this review from Dan, racefail and further commentary on Lake's general skeeviness has been, in some ways, quite cathartic. Sounds like Mainspring is continuing in the general Lake tradition of fail fail fail though.

Incidentally I just re-visited the cover of this book - just because she's upside-down doesn't detract from the fact it's basically fantasy crotchshot #27362. Not that I'm blaming Lake for his cover art or anything but just ... sigh.

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Cammalot

at 21:46 on 2011-06-19"And when the main character finally crosses that wall into sub-Saharan Africa, instead of interesting cultures allowed to develop without European influence"

Does anybody write this? Seriously, could somebody direct me to a place where this exists and is well written and I can have lots of it, please? Because my beloved Jacqueline Carey kind of falls on her face on this score, Stephen Barnes demonstrates homophobia in his modern-set works that makes me afraid to try his version, and everything else I've encountered has been about subjugation and death of such culture, not flourishing, and I get enough of that on my own planet, this is supposed to be fantasy here. Basically I resort to watching a bunch of historical KBS dramas for a non Western fix.

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Cammalot

at 22:00 on 2011-06-19(Speaking of which, I always thought the girl on this cover looked far more like a cross between Choi Jung-Won and Kim Sung-Eun --heavier on the

Kim Sung-Eun

side -- than any white girl, though that still doesn't really fix its problems--still wrong ethnicity/skin tone and yeah, the crotch thing...)

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Michal

at 22:08 on 2011-06-19Imaro is your answer, Cammalot. Imaro, by Charles R. Saunders. 4 books of sub-Saharan sword & sorcery without a white person in sight.

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Cammalot

at 22:16 on 2011-06-19Fantastic. :) And again the Ferreters deliver with speed and quickness. Love this site so much...

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Arthur B

at 22:23 on 2011-06-19I've wanted to read the

Imaro

stuff ever since I read a Saunders quote saying that his main inspiration for writing the things was wanting to see a black hero who could kick Conan's ass. And goodness, the sword and sorcery subgenre direly needed one.

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http://koboldwhisperer.livejournal.com/

at 22:43 on 2011-06-19Imaro is fantastic stuff; I have a spare copy if anyone wants it, actually. It should be noted that there are two substantially different versions of the Imaro books floating around: the original Imaro book from 1981 had a section ("Slaves of the Giant-Kings") which Saunders removed from the recent reprint because it paralleled too closely the events of the Rwanda genocide and he didn't want to be seen as profiting from that tragedy. So much of the series, and the relationships of some of the characters to one another, changed subtly because of the alternate chapter he used in the reprints.

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Michal

at 22:58 on 2011-06-19

I've wanted to read the Imaro stuff ever since I read a Saunders quote saying that his main inspiration for writing the things was wanting to see a black hero who could kick Conan's ass.

Actually, Tarzan's ass.

Saunder's hasn't been too skimpy on

praising Robert E. Howard

, but with obvious reservations. Imaro is a great retort to the charge that fantasy/sword & sorcery is inherently racist, and I wish Saunders had more publishing success than he did (he's still having a bitch of a time with it).

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valse de la lune

at 18:25 on 2011-06-21I just learned from a friend that Lake wrote

Green

for his daughter. His adopted

Chinese

daughter.

Oh god no.

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Michal

at 18:40 on 2011-06-21

I just learned from a friend that Lake wrote Green for his daughter. His adopted Chinese daughter.

You're not the first person to be a bit squicked.

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valse de la lune

at 19:15 on 2011-06-21Oh, found a whole new reason to hate this book and Lake:

I enjoyed seeing the Southeast Asian-inspired part of Jay Lake’s world in the second arc.

Die in a fire.

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Wardog

at 19:48 on 2011-06-21

I just learned from a friend that Lake wrote Green for his daughter. His adopted Chinese daughter.

I believe remember reading somewhere that was part of Lake's justification for why everyone's criticisms were wrong.

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Arthur B

at 19:49 on 2011-06-21Did this justification go "I'm not racist, I allow a Chinese person to live in my home?"

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Tamara

at 20:19 on 2011-06-24My boss had us let off steam a while back by having us make a giant list of all the phrases/words/terms that we thought were sexist and wished would go away, everything from "bitch" to "soccer mom" to "I want to have your baby." I threw out "the world would be a better place if women ran it," and my boss actually vetoed it. Basically, I wonder if it might not be a generation gap to some extent - i'm 24, she's in her 50/60's. To me thats obviously a continuation of a harmful dichotomy, de-individuation of women, patronizing, etc, and she just said, "Women never have run the world, and I do think it will be a better place if more of us did." And honestly i'm not sure what to answer to that. (This is entirely tangetial to the book, I suppose, which seems to be more concerned with the possession of power than with the use of it.)

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Dan H

at 21:22 on 2011-06-24

To me thats obviously a continuation of a harmful dichotomy, de-individuation of women, patronizing, etc, and she just said, "Women never have run the world, and I do think it will be a better place if more of us did." And honestly i'm not sure what to answer to that.

I think you might have been talking at slightly cross-purposes here, from her response it's possible that she sees "if women ran the world" as being a hyperbolic way of saying "if women were as involved in running the world as men are". It might also be a generational thing, my Mum was also fond of women-are-better-than-men rhetoric.

(This is entirely tangetial to the book, I suppose, which seems to be more concerned with the possession of power than with the use of it.)

I think it ties into the same set of assumptions. Certainly one of the things that squicked me out most about Green was the fact that there was no engagement at all with the fact that the Lily Temple basically sexually abuses Green, because the assumption seemed to be that in was a female-dominated institution serving a female divinity and it was therefore *utterly impossible* for it to be harmful to individual women.

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Arthur B

at 21:33 on 2011-06-24But Dan, it's OK, Jay Lake spent several years living in the temple of an all-female child abuse cult.

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valse de la lune

at 20:48 on 2011-10-25Amazon has notified me that the sequel to this book will be out on 8 Nov.

Take one for the team, Dan? :D

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Dan H

at 22:30 on 2011-10-25

Take one for the team, Dan? :D

I think I might actually prefer to mutilate my own face.

... d'you see. Because the heroine in the book mutilates her own face...

I actually found the original so *utterly* boring that I'm not sure I could be arsed. I think my terrible-book-reviewing career is likely to be on hiatus until the conclusion of the Kingkiller chronicles (because having read two thirds of the damned thing, I'm going to *have* to finish that fucker).

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Robinson L

at 18:30 on 2013-05-11According to a recent post in a fiction group I'm part of, Jay Lake has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. That's pretty grim.

#Ferretbrain #Green #Jay Lake #Minority Warrior #Fantasy Rape Watch

[marsixm]

edit sorry this post is both long (if the readmore fails i am truly truly sorry) & longwinded im just reflecting and thinking; (another edit: u can probably just read the tl dr and get it)

anyway allow me to spin some very personally based theory here for a mo while i put off/warm my fingers up from the cold in preparation to email my therapist

so growing up i had, i think only, het ships, but i never quite had the ones you were (narratively speaking) “supposed to” have

in most media i recall when i was a kid, there were like, 2 diff structures of character romance plot arcs in media i consumed, there was the main lead and 2 best friends model, where thered be the star of the show who had outside romantic leads and the 2 best friends (who were always a boy and a girl) would have their secondary romance, OR there were ensemble shows where there was a more clear romance set up between the main boy and main girl, then side characters whod pair off in whatever ways ended up happening. in the first, see: hannah montana, the second, see: zoey 101. obv this isnt a hard rule and there were loads of exceptions but like, lets just say i tended not to care for the romances set up for the main girls in the trio models, or quite as hard for the main boy and girl in the ensembles, and in general if there was an obvious romance between two leads i either didnt care or outright hated it

basically i never liked the ships they set up for us in straight media, as a kid (namely, a girl) i liked being that “ew pink!” “i hate valentines day” sort of contrarian, but what i remember actually disliking was the predictability of it, because i clearly still shipped characters, so it wasnt /really/ that i hated romance, per se

looking back on it i think it was probably or at least to a degree more like that i hated the hetero expectation of it- i can nit pick down to more specific examples of why i disliked the main pairings (kataang, for example, i thought was weird bc katara acted like a mother/older sister figure to aang, and i didnt feel like there was romance between them at all except where it felt shoehorned in) - maybe it was also that i thought it made more sense for a main character to be with someone they clearly already spent a lot of time with and not some random new hot boy in town (i very distinctly remember shipping miley and oliver on hannah montana, and i believe that was the first time i ever read fanfiction @ age like... 11 lol) as is often the case w like these things.

theres another level to this though, which is that i notice i tended to ship characters who were more vaguely similar to each other, like, physically (ie, similar heights, or hair colors mainly) obviously this is funny now since my main pairing is johnlock which is such a physically different ship we can construct them from basic shapes and colors and theyre still recognizable as who they are, but i have some thoughts about this- but i think there might be two interesting things about this again in retrospect

first of all, this sounds silly ik, but shipping the vaguely similar ones as a child’s way of queering heterosexuality is an interesting concept and not that difficult, like, two boys are also vaguely similar to each other in a similar way a boy and a girl with the same hair color and height might be, which is something i thought of a while ago

the other way in which this is really interesting to me now, that i think might have been more actually pertinent to myself as a trans child, is that i think i shipped the characters i did in an attempt to morph the concept of boy and girl? to find the boy counterpart to every girl??? that second one makes more sense actually. anyway, i digress

2 start off i definitely had gender feelings starting from a very young age so i think these observations ring more true than just reflections, PERHAPS

so the first thing i remember shipping, ie wanting them to be together, thinking about it an inordinate amount of time outside watching the films, even imagining them eating ice cream together in their pjs (i was NINE DHFJGghfkg) was jack sparrow & elizabeth swan from potc (basically my franchise of choice as a kid bc i never read harry potter) now this doesnt quite fit the “visually similar” thing bc actually orlando bloom looks more like kiera knightly and is prob due to them like making out in one movie, but i think this works for the “shipping as gender expression” theory, because elizabeth swan dressed up as a boy, spent most of that movie wearing boy’s clothes, etc- meanwhile jack was a wacky pirate which like hello duh i’d want to be. so i wonder if beyond the fact that they kissed and flirted, there was something to this concept of me wanting two characters to be together, meant i wanted to marry together two conceptual things happening with two characters, or absorb the cool dude and the boyish girl characters into each other to make one whole archetype for myself? i likewise shipped aang and toph (toph who, normally doesnt really have anyone to be shipped with, since she likes sokka but he has a gf) who we all know is the VERY boyish girl character, so boyish im p sure her actually being a trans dude later in life is a p decently accepted headcanon (i dont actually delve into aatla fandom though so i can only hope) 

another thing about this ship thing, is most of my ships had brown hair (like miley and oliver), just like i always have, and in certain cases the girl character would look a LOT like me (i also shipped logan and quinn on zoey 101, which to my surprise n delight actually came true later (although looking back im like... 11 yr old me is glad they made out a lot but adult me is like uhhh why were the kids on this show making out a lot? anyway thats another issue) and i def was a weirdo girl with glasses and long brown wavy hair) which sort of further fuels my feeling that this was an attempt by my brain to do 1 of 2 things, if my own involvement really was a greater motivating factor in this thing, 1. ship MYSELF with a boy (which is like def possible for my gay kinnie ass, but not quite my thesis here) or 2. morph these boy and girl counterparts by imagining them together, seeing them together, etc

for example, i realize now, when i was a kid i drew an avatar sona for myself and said sona looked an awful lot like how id imagine a katara/zuko fusion would be, and the fact that i shipped zutara (very hard lol) was what lead me down this thought path rn

i feel like even to me this concept sounds weird and far fetched but like, gem fusion made enough sense for someone to write with its clearly, usually, romantic implications and we all “get” that, so whom knows???

another thing ive noticed while writing this is for a good few of these ships you can argue the boys in them can be read gay, like jack sparrow and zuko and aang, which feels even more strongly like me trying to marry my gay boy feelings to my tomboy realities [thinking emoji]

the biggest reason i think this makes sense to me is because when i was 10 i became obsessed with the idea that this boy i was friends with and i were secretly twins separated at birth, like i was so into the concept that we looked alike, i like hoped and wished so hard for it to be true, i wished a christmas miracle would happen for fucking real and a magic door in my house would open and be his new room and itd all work out perfectly! and you might think this was a manifestation of my difficulties with my family and wishing to leave it, but in my dream world my parents were still my parents and he came to live with us- which makes me think the obsession of ME looking like this BOY was a manifestation of my gender feelings, which i think can maybe be traced to this concept of pairing a visually similar, possibly gay, brunette boy to every brunette and/or tomboyish girl

anyway. if you actually read all of this id love it if you lmk somehow (doesnt need to be a like) like this is clearly very long and strange but i hope it makes sense. i think i stop myself a lot from ever commenting on gender or theory or whatever but i am a living breathing trans person who has experienced things and i have opinions and i dont think im claiming anything destructive with this lol i think its not unusual to reflect on the way you interacted with the world as a gay/trans kid

also im obviously not saying that shipping straight things is somehow inherently queer, im not trying to retroactively claim something about straight ships, like, those two characters are still functionally straight, and i definitely also shipped probably all of them for normal shipping reasons (although, kid ones, so less “oh theres a lot of ACTUAL romantic subtext between these two” but rather “oh theyre friends and would be cute together!” (or like they kissed and i was like O: )) but im just trying to theorize about something its possible my tiny trans brain was trying to express- and who knows maybe im not the only one!

anyway i guess the TL;DR is: when i was a kid i had a lot of “unconventional” straight ships- i already observed that i eschewed the main canon pairings in kids media in what was probably my tiny baby brains rejection of hetero culture, but i also actively shipped side characters who looked like me, and also looked like each other (ie, both tall and brunette, a boy and girl counterpart of Each Other) OR characters who seemed to be a gayish boy and a tomboyish girl, and im theorizing that maybe the reason that was was my tiny trans brain wanting to gem fusion those two together because of my Gender Feelings and fuse the boy with the girl and this desire manifested in shipping therefore thinking about a lot these pairings of boy and girl counterparts

#please dont be weird about this post i hope its like understandable what im trying to think about here? #like i dont think its that weird to consider nor am i claiming anything bad or destructive about ppls lives n genders n whatever #purely an observation about myself and the way i consumed media ages like 8-12 #in reflection as a gay/trans adult and thinking about what those things might have potentially been expressing or something #i dont know any official queer theory stuff n i dont think that should stop me from thinking my own thoughts so here u go #also i am TRULY sorry if this readmore doesnt work

[ambitionsource]

AMBITION Season 1 ♫ “The World Will Never Be the Same” [ 1.12 ]

CREATED BY Esther (rapunzles) & Maggie (quincywillows)

WHILE THE WALLS COME TUMBLING DOWN – The auditions for the coveted summer immersion program unfold. Riley and Lucas attend the Jacobs Arts Gala, while Zay and Charlie make bold choices. Farkle makes a statement, and the sophomore class realizes that in real life, there are no rehearsals.

66 Minutes (18K words) || No warnings apply.

[ ← Before the Storm ] [ S1 Synopsis ] [ Season 2 → ]

( Follow along with the music on Spotify here! )

Cue title sequence.

Over the opening titles, we hear Farkle murmuring to himself and clearly trying to get something in order. As the title sequence fades to black, it seems like he’s got it figured out.

Farkle: Okay. I think – okay. Here goes nothing…

INT. AAA - COSTUME LOFT - DAY

Open on a tight screen, emulating the format of an iPhone video. FARKLE MINKUS is alone in the costume loft for a semblance of privacy, the camera in selfie mode. He’s preparing to record, and clearly a man on a mission.

He appears more polished than we’ve seen yet, back in his sharpest blazer and with his hair neatly coiffed although still somewhat untamed. It’s a complete u-turn from how he was starting to mellow over the course of the season.

When he starts to speak, however, that put together facade quickly loses some of its credibility. As he figures out what he wants to say, he’s a bit manic. He’s himself, but also not quite himself at all. Something is off, but he’s indisputably in a frenzy. That much is certain.

As he starts to speak, the purpose of his video becomes clear – and the fact that he doesn’t necessarily intend it to be meant just for him.

Farkle: Obviously, I don’t want my name on all this, but – I don’t know. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how to lay it all out there. You’re good at that. I’m just recording rather than typing because… [ a breath ] It’s a lot. There’s a lot I have to say. So, without further ado: a conclusive series of explanations as to why Farkle Minkus was robbed of a coveted Kossal audition spot, when he deserves it more than anyone else. And here’s why.

This can’t end well. Farkle is impassioned as he kicks off his rant, and as he shifts focus to each subject of his tirade…

INT. MAYA’S APARTMENT - DAY

… we’ll be following them while his monologue voices over it. He starts off guns blazing with his former best friend, MAYA HART. She’s in the midst of getting ready for school, rehearsing her Kossal audition number as she goes. She’s practicing 24/7 at this point, she may very well be singing in her sleep.

But she’s also obsessive over it. She’ll hate the way one note came out and start the whole thing over from the beginning, becoming increasingly frustrated with herself. Trying incredibly hard to get that vocal power just right.

Farkle: So, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Maya Hart. Sure, Maya has the vocal chops, and she can do runs for days. But is that really deserving of an audition slot on its own merit? When other candidates were clearly as good, if not better? I mean, we’ve all heard me – I mean, Farkle – sing, I think we can attribute that there’s a clear superior performer between the two.

As she grabs her bag and reaches for her phone, she checks her message thread with Farkle. Their conversation has gone totally dry, the two not having exchanged words since the Kossal school-wide picks went up. However, there’s an ongoing message in her chat box, depicting that she’s been drafting a message for a while to send him.

It’s somewhere between a lecture and an apology. Somewhere between being pissed at him for being so selfish and not being happy for her, but also sincerely sorry that he didn’t get the opportunity when she thinks he deserves it too. Not enough to give it up herself, of course, but definitely starlet empathy. More than anything, it’s clear that she wants to talk to him. She wants them to be friends again.

In the end, she deletes it. Opting not to say anything at all.

As she heads out the door, she passes KATY HART, who is at the tiny kitchen table. She’s working with the sewing machine and doing painstaking alterations to Maya’s audition dress, having basically made it herself.

Farkle: So then, why Maya, if their criteria are so similar? Well, one might go for the obvious gender route, but it’s much more likely that the administration felt their scholarship student might need a little bit more of a boost. Yes, that’s right, Maya is on scholarship – insane, considering how terrible her grades are, am I right? But you know, it’s true, nothing is more compelling a support system than sympathy…

Maya gives her a kiss on the cheek as she leaves, thanking her for working on the dress. Katy pats her cheek, sending her on her way.

INT. RILEY’S BEDROOM - DAY

Next up is RILEY MATTHEWS, starting off her day by adjusting pieces of her moodboard. She’s pinning up her honorary invitation to the Jacobs gala – right next to the “you’re better” notes exchange. She lets her gaze linger on both, a smiling brightening her face as she pulls her bag onto her shoulder.

Farkle: Speaking of sympathy, there’s a lot of that at play when it comes to Riley Matthews. Not necessarily towards her – I mean, who needs sympathy when you’ve got so many power players in your court to uplift you whether or not you earned it. Think about it, her father is a teacher, her uncle is counselor and essentially second principal and was, in fact, one of the four on the panel for judging. So of course they’re going to give a spot to Riley, especially given how much dirty work she’s done for them this year…

On her way out, she touches the beautiful lavender evening gown hanging on the back of her door. It’s clear she’s far more excited about the gala than she was before.

INT. AAA - BOYS DRESSING ROOM - DAY

Focus shifts from Riley to LUCAS FRIAR, not in the technician’s booth but the boys dressing room. It may be the first time he’s ever willingly stepped foot in the space.

He’s in front of the mirror, fumbling with his hair in an attempt to make it look presentable. This is likely the most effort he has ever put into his appearance, and it’s clear he’s not having an easy time of it. No matter how much he fusses with it to make it look neater, he’s not pleased with it.

Farkle: I mean, why else would she put in the effort to befriend jackass Lucas James Friar, other than by special request from her favorite counselor uncle in an attempt to make sure he doesn’t make a hit list or some shit considering he’s so openly pathetic. Riley Matthews doesn’t need sympathy, but she’s sure good at giving it…

A text comes through on his phone, disrupting his stress. It’s from his mother. “Let me know about MC ASAP please. App deadline this weekend.”

Lucas takes this reminder in, glancing at himself in the mirror once again. Still fundamentally dissatisfied. Lots to think about… lots riding on his hair not looking like a mess…

INT. FOSTER HOME - KITCHEN - DAY

For ISADORA DE LA CRUZ, the morning involves dodging her younger foster siblings as she tries to get half a meal in before rushing off to school. TESSA CHAN bumps into her while chasing JULIAN NORTH (12) around the kitchen, causing her to snap at them both.

She grabs her phone before she heads out, checking another text from Riley. It’s clear she’s gotten quite a few from her over the past few days, essentially begging her to take her audition slot for Kossal. An interesting choice…

Farkle: Which explains why of all the people she could be attempting to pawn off her audition slot to, she picks Isadora Smackle. Oh, sorry, I mean De La Cruz. She’s had a rough year, with all her famous mom business coming out, so I guess it makes sense that she deserves one shot to prove she actually can live up to the family business without having to do any work for it. Sucks that it’s so late notice her best friend won’t even be there, as he’ll be too busy on his pity date with Riley. How tragic.

Isadora doesn’t answer, shuffling out the door.

INT. AAA - DANCE STUDIO - DAY

ZAY BABINEAUX is rehearsing his routine for the auditions, clearly having been in the studio for more than an hour or so already. He’s drenched in sweat, shaking his head, his nerves throwing him off. He can only practice it so many times over before it starts to fall apart.

Farkle: I’d mention Zay, but considering he’s always bragging about how he’s so above all the drama, I guess we’ll see how he feels when he’s not mentioned at all. He does claim to be so constantly overlooked, after all.

Zay finishes another round, obviously not happy with it. He collapses into a sitting position, tugging at his hair before hiding his head against his knees. Pushing himself to the brink.

INT. AAA - COSTUME LOFT - DAY

Farkle rounds out the rant, letting out a resounding exhale. Considering how breathlessly he delivered it, it’s amazing he didn’t pass out. He concludes the recording by sharing the same sentiments he declared all the way back at the start of the year – he’s the next big thing, he’s not going anywhere, and this belongs to him. Regardless of what other people have decided or what other factors try to get in his way. And no one should ever damn forget it.

As he ends the recording, the screen returns to normal. Farkle takes a moment to save the video, preparing to send it. After a moment, it becomes clear to whom: AAA Confessions.

He types out a quick message explaining again that he simply recorded the video because there was a lot of content to type, they should put them into separate posts and do whatever with the images, etc. He doesn’t want credit, he just wants these truths known.

A second of hesitation conveys that Farkle isn’t as war-mongering as he seems. While his thumb hovers over the send button, there’s the distinct feeling that he knows this can’t be the right avenue for dealing with things. There’s a part of him who wants to take it back before he even puts it out there.

Yet, he hits send anyway. He releases a huge sigh, exiting out of the private messages and checking the page for himself. It’s been abnormally quiet the last week or so, no new posts present since Wyatt was brought in for questioning. Some are even wondering if the page is dead for good. It’s not clear whether Farkle believes that or not.

While he feels a bit cleansed just to vent all of his frustrations, he doesn’t seem nearly as satisfied as he thought he would be. Something still feels empty.

Song Cue ♫ ♪ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” as performed by Tears For Fears || Performed by Farkle Minkus

The opening tones of the track trickle in as Farkle makes his way down the ladder of the costume loft, back into the darkened and empty auditorium.

INT. AAA - AUDITORIUM - DAY

He launches into the song as he makes his way into the glow from the ghost light at center stage, illuminating him in shadow. In spite of its upbeat vibe, Farkle’s rendition of the song speaks truthfully to the ominous undertones that the lyrics provide.

INT. AAA - HALLWAY - DAY

Farkle continues the solo as he parades through the halls. The school is shifting around them, gearing up for summer. The remnants of sophomore year are tumbling down… nothing ever lasts forever…

As Farkle wraps the track, he saunters backwards and disappears into the crowd of students. Focus shifts to CHARLIE GARDNER instead, heading towards the studio classrooms. He’s carrying a thermos and moving with an impressive amount of enthusiasm for so early in the morning. As he finds the correct studio and steps through the door –

INT. AAA - DANCE STUDIO - DAY

Charlie enters just as Zay is wrapping up another run through of his audition, having managed to pull himself out of a heap on the floor to do it again. Charlie hangs back for a moment to watch, entranced as usual, before he announces his arrival. It totally disrupts Zay’s flow, causing him to jog and turn off the music.

As they get to talking and Charlie asks how it’s going, Zay’s nerves about the audition become more evident. He’s frustrated that he keeps messing up steps, somehow he’s always a couple beats behind or ahead, and he doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s totally wigging out, which he never has before.

Charlie reassures him, placing the thermos on the piano top with Zay’s speaker so that he can grab his shoulders and tell him to get a grip. He’s stressing way too hard for someone so naturally gifted, and there’s no way the judges aren’t going to like whatever he does.

Charlie: I mean, at this point with Riley maybe or maybe not participating and Maya distracted by beefing with Farkle, you could probably walk on that stage and do Teach Me How to Dougie and they’d still pick you.

Zay: It’s just “dougie” – nevermind, I don’t have the energy to explain this to you.

Zay laughs mockingly, not buying it. Charlie claims he’s got a pretty light week, so if it would be useful, he can put in the time to help him rehearse.

Zay: You really don’t have to do that.

Charlie: Nah, it’s cool. I want to.

So now we’re doing things because we want to, huh? Charlie grabs the thermos as Zay gathers his things, handing it to him when they’re back together. He questions it at first, before Charlie goes on to explain that it’s his mother’s chicken soup recipe. It’s basically a certified energizer potion, and he knew he’d been working himself to the bone so he figured he might need it.

Zay: [ after taking a sip ] This is like witchcraft. I thought you Catholics didn’t believe in that nonsense.

Charlie can’t help but laugh, patting Zay on the shoulder as the two of them head to class.

INT. AAA - HALLWAY - DAY

Riley is at her locker, killing time before class but keeping a careful eye out in the halls. She double takes when she spots Lucas leaving the dressing room hall, quickly closing her locker and jogging to catch up to him.

He slows down and turns to look for her when she calls his name, waiting for her to reach him. The two of them keep walking as she greets him enthusiastically, before getting distracted.

Riley: Did you do something new with your hair?

Lucas: What? Oh, no. No, uh, just [ with air quotes ] “woke up like this,” or whatever.

Riley: Oh. Well, it looks nice. You’re still coming on Friday, right?

Lucas: Planning on it. Unless you were thinking – ?

Riley: No! No, no change of plans. Just wanted to confirm. I’ll text you deets later today, Eric is supposed to give me the whole spiel this afternoon.

Lucas: Okay. Cool.

Riley: Cool… yeah. Yeah, cool. Super cool.

Lucas asks if Riley was able to figure out the whole conflict with the Kossal audition. He reiterates that she should go to that if she wants to and shouldn’t even bother with the gala just because she already extended an invitation to him, but she waves him off. She states that she’s working on the fix, but as far as she’s concerned she’s going to the gala – audition resolved or not. So he shouldn’t make any other plans.

As she flutters away, Lucas watches her go. He can’t help but smile a bit before he heads in the other direction.

INT. AAA - ATRIUM - DAY

Maya is on the front steps with DARBY WINTERS, SARAH CARLSON, and CHAI FRESCO, back to her old throng now that she and Farkle have cut ties. She’s holding court while Darby plays with her hair, trying out some new styles for her upcoming audition. Chai and Sarah are researching makeup palettes, but Maya vetoes everything they come up with. It’s clear she has no idea what her “look” is going to be like, and this is because of the fact that her dress isn’t finished yet.

Chai points out that it’s taking an awfully long time for her to get her aesthetic together, considering the audition is in like three days. Shouldn’t she know her dress by now? Maya manages to redirect, claiming she’s best when she’s working on the fly. The dress is simply taking so long because it’s being custom-made by a New York designer that she has connections with as a favor. She doesn’t want to rush an artist.

Sarah and Darby are impressed and chatter about it, but Chai doesn’t look all that convinced as she goes back to makeup palettes.

Farkle appears at the other end of the hall, locking eyes with Maya when she raises her head from her phone. They hold eye contact for a long moment, but neither of them move to say anything. Farkle heads in the other direction.

Darby pulls her hair too tightly, pulling her out of the moment. She winces and slaps at Darby’s hand, earning a quick apology from her.

INT. AAA - JACK’S OFFICE - DAY

ANGELA MOORE is seated across from JACK HUNTER, the mood bittersweet. She’s finalizing her resignation paperwork.

Jack reminds her that it’s hardly an official goodbye, as he has the paperwork for her part-time position right there on his desk. She laughs anxiously, grateful for his attempt at making this feel less serious than it is. She admits that she mostly just can’t believe that she’s trying her hand at this crazy dream again.

He reaches out and pats her hand, assuring her that she is one of the most talented people he has ever met. She has what it takes, just like any of the students they teach every day. Angela clearly takes the sentiment to heart, squeezing his hand back before releasing a sigh and passing over the signed paperwork. Despite how many times this dreamy drama coach and analytical principal have butt heads, it is clear they hold an unwavering respect for one another.

Jack asks her how the students reacted to the news, revealing that Angela actually hasn’t told them yet. He’s surprised, and urges her to break the news sooner rather than later. She doesn’t want to leave them hanging only to not be there the way they expect next year. She’s hesitant, but she knows he’s right. She doesn’t have any idea how.

Their conversation is interrupted when Lucas shows up in the doorway. Jack expresses surprise, wondering if he forgot a disciplinary meeting or something. Lucas claims he just wants a second to talk, but he gets the vibe from Angela that maybe he’s interrupting something important and can come back later.

Jack waves him off, dismissing Angela warmly and shaking her hand as she gets up to leave. As she passes Lucas in the doorway and he steps inside, she gives him a tight nod. Then she’s gone, leaving the two of them alone.

Lucas nosily asks what is up with Miss Moore, but Jack changes tracks back to the subject at hand and asks him what he stopped by for. Lucas claims it’s sort of a weird request, to which Jack blithely points out that there has never been one conversation between them that has not weirded him out in one way or another.

Lucas: Do you have a suit jacket I could borrow?

Jack, somewhat amused: Considering my typical workplace attire, I’d say yes, I probably have one I can spare. Dare I ask why…?

Lucas: Well, Riley invited me to this gala thing, and it’s supposedly a pretty spiffy to-do or whatever, so…

Jack: Oh, you’re going to the Jacobs gala?

Lucas: Is that a problem?

Jack: No, no. Not at all. Not what I would’ve anticipated if you asked me six months ago, I’ll admit, but certainly not a problem.

Jack goes on to explain that he’ll also be attending, and plans to carpool with Eric and Riley.

Jack: If it would be helpful, I could swing by and pick you up on the way to get them. If that’s something you’d be interested in.

Lucas: Uh, yeah. Yeah, that would be great actually.

Jack: Excellent. Sounds like a plan, then.

Lucas: [ clearly weirded out by the pleasantness of the conversation ] Okay. Great.

Jack: Great.

Lucas blinks at him, then reaches forward and knocks the pen Angela was using off the desktop before rushing out.

Jack: Not every conversation we have has to end with you knocking something over!

Lucas: [ from outside ] Weird!

Jack shakes his head, but he can’t help but smile in amusement. He picks up the pen from the ground, looking over Angela’s paperwork with a sigh.

INT. AAA - HALLWAY - DAY

Everything is falling into place – except one slight detail. Riley chases after Isadora as they make their way to the auditorium, making one last plea for her to take the audition spot on Friday. Despite Riley’s enthusiastic ramblings as to why she should invest in the opportunity, Isadora is highly skeptical. She asks why she doesn’t just give the spot to say, Farkle, since he’s being such a brat about the whole thing anyway.

Riley concedes this point, admitting that she could surely give the slot to any of their classmates. But she wants to give it to Isadora, as she tries to make clear as they enter the auditorium.

INT. AAA - AUDITORIUM - DAY

A few of their classmates are already seated in the first few rows, Riley and Isadora some of the earliest to arrive. Riley manages to slide in front of Isadora, walking backwards down the aisle in front of her and trying to get her to listen.

Riley: Izzy, you are talented. So talented. And I know that you don’t believe it, so you’re never going to take the steps to get these opportunities yourself. [ off Isadora’s irritated look ] If you take this one, maybe you’ll see that this is something you were born to do, just as much as the rest of us. Please. Please?

Isadora: [ hesitating, then sighing ] I may have brainstormed a couple of potential numbers in the off-chance that you didn’t let this go –

Riley: Yes! Yes!

Riley claps excitedly and basically skips the rest of the way to their seats, already pulling Isadora into eager conversation about it. So it’s settled – Isadora will be taking the third Kossal audition slot for AAA.

As the rest of the class files in, SHAWN HUNTER takes center stage and works to gather their attention. He gives a brief overview of what the last week of classes is going to look like, discussing their final exams which will involve solo performances or projects of their choice and will be presented to Shawn and Angela only.

While he speaks, Maya waits impatiently in the front and center seat, bouncing her legs and exchanging tense eye contact with him. Finally, Shawn sighs, wrapping up his opening spiel and deferring to Maya who clearly requested permission to take the stage beforehand. She leaps up without hesitation, jogging up onto the stage as Shawn exits.

All eyes on her, Maya claims that in spirit of camaraderie – and also in the search for feedback – she has already prepared her Kossal audition ahead of time and would appreciate if she could give a preview performance. She also makes a subtle dig at Farkle, which is pointed considering her whole number is about to be a rather large “screw you.”

Maya: And just in case anybody had forgotten, I earned my audition. Hopefully, this will remind you all of why.

Song Cue ♫ ♪ “Diamonds Are Forever” as performed by Sabrina Carpenter || Performed by Maya Hart

A ballsy and banging vocal display, Maya shreds through the pop track with an energy that could only be described as defiant. It’s as impressive as her solo from the pilot and her audition just an episode ago, but it’s alive with something much more raw and intrinsically her. It’s on fire, and that’s a whole other level for Miss Hart.

Still, there’s something about the performance that doesn’t deliver right. Because it’s driven with such a petty edge, it doesn’t quite land. On one of the repetitions of “Money don’t buy class,” she make a very pointed head tilt towards Farkle and they lock eyes. He slouches further in his seat, crossing his arms and looking away.

Circling around her, the light throws her in shadow as we transition…

INT. AUDITION HALL - THEATER - NIGHT

… to Maya’s actual audition, flash forwarding to Friday evening. The lighting is far more dramatic, the auditorium unfamiliar and grandiose. Maya is in her finished audition dress, a killer black number with stunning hair and makeup to match. The stage is backlit behind her and a spotlight shows her in her full diva glory.

In the darkness of the auditorium, a panel of judges lift their gazes, jot notes, etc. They’re shrouded in shadow, and far less reactive and friendly than the familiar faculty judges. It’s impossible to tell what they think of the performance, despite how damningly good it is.

This version of the performance carries us to the end, the angle of the camera lining up so that the fiery mezzo is cast in shadow. Leaving the atmosphere tumultuous, a bit uncertain…

INT. AAA - AUDITORIUM - DAY

Maya wraps up the number as the piano tinkles out the last couple chords, obviously more emotionally vulnerable than she intended to get. She takes a deep breath, letting out a curt little “thank you” before excusing herself from the stage.

Everyone else hangs in the quiet, not sure how to react or what to say. Farkle watches her disappear into the wings, clenching his jaw.

INT. AAA - TECHNICIAN’S BOOTH - DAY

Isadora joins Lucas in the booth, taking a minute to find him. He’s back by his nook, gathering some things to take back to his apartment for the weekend. When he asks what she wants, she begins to explain before getting stuck on another change.

Isadora: [ with a sneer ] What did you do to your hair?

Lucas, embarrassed, fusses it up with his hand and shrugs offhandedly, mumbling an explanation. But Isadora is already past it, explaining that she’ll be auditioning for the Kossal program. When Lucas expresses shock, she elaborates.

Isadora: Riley passed her spot off to me. She said she had some other conflict that she deemed more important.

Lucas: Oh. [ a beat ] Oh…

Isadora is clearly excited about the opportunity, in spite of how aloof she’s attempting to come off. She questions if he’ll be able to help her rehearse, or at least guarantee that he’ll be there. Everything is unfolding so fast, Lucas can hardly keep up.

Isadora: You are going to be there, right? I don’t think I can do this if you’re not there. I know it’s not your scene at all –

Lucas, blankly: I can’t. I have another commitment.

Isadora: Seriously? [ snorting ] What else do you have going on?

Not an unfair comment, but a bit harsh. Lucas gives her a look, and she apologizes quickly before reiterating how important it is to her that he be there. Lucas stares at her, clearly torn. He doesn’t want to let her down…

Lucas: I’ll see what happens. Maybe I can get out of the thing early. Might need a convenient escape route, actually, depending on how things go –

Although Lucas says it all noncommittally and doesn’t sound optimistic, for Isadora it’s as good as a guaranteed yes. Her strength has never been taking tone or verbal cues into consideration, so in her eyes it’s a done deal. He’s going to be there. She can move forward with it because she knows he’ll have her back.

Oh, boy.

INT. AAA - DRESSING ROOM HALL - DAY

Farkle is waiting in the hall outside the girls dressing room, nervously checking the AAAC. As it has been for days, it remains dead quiet. As if that doesn’t make his anxiety about the whole thing worse… it’s not clear whether he wants it to update or wants confirmation that it will never post again.

He’s torn from it as Maya emerges from the dressing room, pulled back together but cheeks flushed. She snaps at him, asking what he’s doing hanging around. He straightens up and clears his throat, claiming that she said she wanted feedback before launching into a list of every single imperfection of her performance in a passive-aggressive tirade.

Maya elects to continue ignoring him, brushing her hair out of her face and heading towards the doors to the rest of the school. It’s the dismissal that truly makes Farkle snap.

Farkle: What, do you really think you’re so much better than me all the sudden? Just because of one audition?

Maya: Bye, Farkle.

Farkle: As if the only reason you have this spot over me isn’t because of charity?

Maya freezes, totally hit by that comment. It knocks at the one insecurity Farkle knows she has, that she’s been desperately trying to keep a secret for so long.

She whips around, marching back over to him and getting right in his face. The intensity of the movement startles him, causing him to fumble back against the wall before he manages to regain his composure and match her glare. Maya claps back at him for his terrible attitude, lamenting how horrible of a friend he is. Her words are sharp, but not necessarily untrue.

Maya: Yeah, maybe I don’t have any money. Maybe I can’t afford to come to this school or dress the part without a little bit of help. And if people knew, maybe that’s all they’d see. But at least I have respect. At least I’m not so consumed with inferiority that I have to turn on people the moment they prove themselves an actual talent. At least I have friends.

[ Farkle clearly doesn’t know what to say. He swallows, jutting out his chin. ]

Maya: [ looking him over ] Well, one less friend, now. But that’s nothing.

Farkle absorbs the blow, hanging back as Maya storms off. She wipes a couple of tears from her eyes as she pushes through the doors in a huff, but he doesn’t see them.

He waits until she’s long gone to deflate, falling back against the wall before sliding down and crumbling into a crouch. He tucks his head against his knees, like he’s trying to disappear.

As the contrastingly upbeat tones of Zay’s rehearsal track fade in…

INT. AAA - AUDITORIUM - DAY

Song Cue ♫ ♪ “The Greatest” as performed by Sia || Instrumental

Thursday. One day left before the auditions.

Zay and Charlie are rehearsing his number together, the latter having picked it up surprisingly fast. They both perform the choreography with equal vigor, side-by-side on the stage and helping one another keep the pace. It’s a lot of fun to watch them dance it, each of them bringing their own little touches to the moves but also maintaining perfect sync – but it’s somewhat telling that Charlie seems to be outshining Zay. He’s loose, uninhibited, whereas Zay is stiff. Too in his head. Truly a role reversal.

Nearing the end of the routine, Zay steals a glance at Charlie to see how he’s faring. This throws off his precarious hold on the choreography entirely, causing him to stumble and trip right into Charlie. The two of them collapse in a heap with a resounding cuss from Zay and a yelp from Charlie, landing on the stage with a pointed thud.

Charlie slams onto his back and Zay fumbles on top of him, immediately apologizing and trying to check them both for serious injury.

Zay: Man, I’m so sorry. I know you’d offered to help, but I don’t think that involved breaking your limbs. Are you okay?

It’s hard to say. Charlie seems just about brain dead, mouth parted open as he tries to catch his breath and staring at Zay hovering over him. For a tense moment, it seems as though he might say something… perhaps might do something…

Charlie: [ clearing his throat ] Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.

They disentangle themselves, Charlie wincing as he pushes himself into a sitting position. Zay blithely points out that that impromptu ending is exactly how his prospects feel at the moment, like they’re going to crash and burn any second.

Charlie watches him for a long moment, then explains that he still thinks Zay’s form is too strict. Ironic, considering he’s never had an issue with that before. He tries to figure out why Zay is putting so much stake into this whole thing – he’s never seemed too bugged by auditions in the past – but Zay redirects and asks why Charlie didn’t bother to audition. He knows he’s going through some stuff right now, but so is he. So is everyone. Charlie shrugs it off.

Charlie: It’s not a big deal. I’m just a supporting player, you know.

Zay: No, you’re not. How many times do I have to tell you that you’re just as talented as the rest of us? Especially given that you just danced my own routine better than I did.

[ Charlie huffs out a laugh, dipping his head down and looking at the floor. ]

Zay: You’re some of the best we’ve got… when you let yourself be seen.

Charlie locks eyes with him, letting the sentiment sink in. Then he shrugs again, pointing out that he has a major family obligation the same evening as the district-wide ones anyway. It didn’t seem worth the stress. Zay is a bit put off by this reveal, as he sort of hoped that Charlie was going to be there to see him audition.

It’s evident Charlie didn’t even realize that was something Zay would want. He starts to try and come up with a solution but Zay waves him off, assuring him that it’s no big deal. And good thing, because Charlie doesn’t have any simple fixes to his scheduling dilemma. Unfortunate.

INT. AAA - TEACHER’S LOUNGE - DAY

Angela is with Shawn in the teacher’s lounge, lamenting how she doesn’t know how the hell she is going to tell the students that she’s leaving. Shawn points out that she’s only got two class periods left considering she won’t be here for the last three days next week, so she better figure it out lest she leave them scarred upon their last week of sophomore year.

Teasing aside, Shawn basically dishes out the same advice she is constantly giving all of their students. That if this is truly important to her, then she should just talk from the heart and the message will come through. Or you know, whatever.

It sounds like he’s got the right idea. Angela nods, smiling lightly and leaning forward to give him a light kiss.

INT. AAA - AUDITORIUM - DAY

All of the students are assembled for class, discussing the end of the year. Maya asks Zay how he’s doing in preparing for his audition, which he does not want to talk about. Charlie speaks up and claims that Zay is going to do great, which Farkle – seated by himself a couple rows away and isolated – states must be true, because it would be super difficult to do worse than Maya.

Before she can fire back, Riley begs all of them to stop the stupid bickering. The techies nod in agreement, Lucas piping up from next to Riley.

Lucas: It was so nice when you all were tolerable for like two months there.

Maya: Oh, as opposed to you who has been tolerable… never?

Angela interrupts the cat fights as she kicks up class, stating that she needs to share a major announcement with them. All of the students, particularly the performers, perk up and give her their undivided attention.

It’s hard to speak with all of them looking up at her so trustingly. She glances to Shawn in the row behind the techies, who gives her an encouraging nod. She takes a deep breath, going on to explain that she’s been offered a role in an off-Broadway production. She allows a pause for them to break into excited chatter, applauding and congratulating her enthusiastically.

Then she takes the reins again, voice a little shakier as she continues with the fact that she will be stepping down from her position as performance coach at AAA and thusly, as their instructor. She intends to stay on faculty part-time, so it’s not a total goodbye, but there will be a new teacher coming into the role next fall.

All of the students are surprised. The performers are stunned speechless, especially the divas. Farkle looks absolutely shattered, jaw hanging open and expression blank.

Angela pauses, gathering her composure before getting out one last sentiment. It may be the most important speech she thinks she’ll ever make.

Angela: When I first started at this school, I felt it beneath me. It felt like something to do to pass the time, an unwelcome detour on my personal trip to the top. I thought that there was nothing for me to gain out of this place other than a paycheck and a way to get my parents off my back. I have never been happier to be wrong. [ a beat ] There are things I’ve learned here and experienced here that I would never find anywhere else. About passion, showmanship, collaboration, compromise. The joy of seeing all of you so brimming with talent and ready to share it with one another, with the world, that it reminded me how to find my own again. So even though this isn’t goodbye, I want it to be clear that you will always be one of my most important stops.

Lastly, she wants to give back to them one of the many countless moving, brilliant, impassioned performances they’ve given her over the past couple years. Without further ado…

Song Cue ♫ ♪ “What I Did For Love” as performed by A Chorus Line Original Broadway Cast || Performed by Angela Moore (feat. AAA Sophomores)

Angela starts the classic Broadway tune off softly, still emotional and not sure she’ll be able to make it through without losing her resolve. But as she looks out at the faces of her students – proud, sentimental, in shock – she manages the power to keep going.

As it progresses, the students begin getting up from the seats and jogging to join their teacher on the stage. Even the techies make their way up to join the group, hanging back to allow the performers to have their moment but paying their respects to Angela all the same.

Angela shares a small moment with each of the performing students, giving them hugs and hand shakes and soft smiles. She gives Charlie a hug and then ruffles his hair. Zay is given a warm hug, and Maya gives her a little cheeky bow once they pull apart.

Farkle is the last to receive his goodbye, choked up as he accepts her embrace. When he hugs her back, it’s clear that he’s holding on for dear life. He lingers longer than anyone else, not wanting to let go.

As the number draws to a close, Angela hangs in the moment harmonizing with her beloved students. They stand in a close circle with the techies hanging back and watching respectfully. The camera eases out and disappears into the dark of the wings, leaving them in peace…

INT. FOSTER HOME - ISADORA’S ROOM - NIGHT

Isadora is attempting to practice for the audition tomorrow, but she can hardly hear herself think let alone rehearse. CATHERINA GONZALEZ is pacing and chatting loudly on her phone with a friend, and the younger siblings are causing chaos just outside the door.

The situation is unbearable. Desperate for a change of scenery, Isadora heads into the hall.

INT. FOSTER HOME - ENTRYWAY - NIGHT

Isadora is already gearing up to head out, phone pressed to her ear. She’s impatient as she heads down the stairs, letting out a curse under her breath.

Isadora: Come on, pick up –

She frowns, pulling her phone back into her hand. It’s clear that she’s trying to call Riley, but the line is coming back as busy.

INT. RILEY’S BEDROOM - NIGHT

That’s because Riley is already on the phone. She’s pacing her room, unable to stay still as she converses with Lucas on the other end of the line. She’s giving him all of the last minute details for tomorrow evening.

INT/EXT. LUCAS’S BEDROOM / LUCAS’S FIRE ESCAPE - NIGHT

Lucas is cooped up on his fire escape, listening intently to everything Riley says. She asks if he’s sure he wants to come along, and he assures her that he’s not going to bail on her now. She checks to see if there’s anything else they need to work out, or if there’s anything she should know about before tomorrow.

There’s a beat of hesitation, where it is clear Lucas is thinking about Isadora. But he opts not to get into it, stating he’s all good and that he’s looking forward to it. Riley returns the sentiment, both of them bashful as they hang up.

INT. FOSTER HOME - ENTRYWAY - NIGHT

Left hanging, Isadora is forced to go to her next best option. There’s a moment of uncertainty as she scrolls through contacts, hovering over one name in particular. This person has been helpful and harmful in the past, but at present it feels like the only chance she has…

She hits dial, raising her phone to her ear once again.

INT. MAYA’S APARTMENT - NIGHT

Maya escorts Isadora into her cramped apartment, not bothering to be shy about it considering Isadora is already aware of her scholarship status. Maya makes a point of introducing Isadora to Katy, who is hunched over the sewing machine and doing the finishing touches on Maya’s audition dress. Isadora explains that they’ve met before through the diner, but Katy happily greets her anyway and claims it’s nice to see her again.

Katy informs Maya that she thinks she’s just about done, lifting the gown so that she can see. Maya is elated and incredibly grateful, running up to marvel over it and holding up against herself. She gives her mother a kiss on the cheek and showers her in thank yous, Isadora watching the warm exchange with mild interest. Such familiarity between mother and daughter is obviously new to her.

Then Maya pulls Isadora further into the space, gearing up to get some practice in as promised. Maya is already monologuing about how they can perform for one another and give each other notes, but it is evident that Isadora is simply happy to have any assistance at all.

INT. MINKUS HOME - NIGHT

Family dinner is on again at the Minkus house, this one even more lively as EZEKIEL MINKUS (20) has returned home from his first year of college for the summer. Undoubtedly the golden child of the Minkus clan, Ezekiel exudes easygoing confidence and soft temperament that not many of the other Minki possess. He mellows the room just with his presence, and it is no wonder that he is Farkle’s favorite sibling.

He holds court as dinner progresses, detailing all of the adventures of his freshman year to his captive audience. JENNIFER MINKUS listens appreciatively and EZRA MINKUS reacts accordingly in between stabbing at his peas, but none of them are as enraptured by the seemingly charmed promises of friendship, fun, and belonging of university life as Farkle. He’s giving Ezekiel his rapt attention, his food long forgotten on his plate.

LILA MINKUS looks less impressed by her older brother’s bragging. She stabs at her food and keeps her head down, URI MINKUS similarly not paying much attention and waiting for the chance to ask to be excused. In fact, he does so, but Jennifer shoots him down and berates him for trying to rush off so quickly when even more of their family is present than usual. He’ll be able to retreat to his bedroom and block them all out again soon enough, so he can wait a few minutes longer.

Jennifer asks Farkle if he’s looking forward to his last week of classes. He shrugs, claiming that nothing exciting is going on and that his favorite teacher just announced that she’s leaving. The family empathizes, particularly Ezekiel. He recommends that Farkle make the effort to make sure that teacher knows how much she impacted him as her student.

Ezekiel: Considering your admiration is bold enough to state she’s your favorite, I think you’ll want her to know. People only know how much they mean to you if you let them know, as connections are only as meaningful as the effort you put into them. Coming off my first year away, I feel like I know that better than anything.

Lila subtly rolls her eyes at the usual golden brother antics, but Farkle actually seems to be listening. He chews on the notion as the conversation shifts off of him and back to Ezekiel.

INT. AAA - HALLWAY - DAY

Friday morning has finally arrived. As if to commemorate the excitement, AAA Confessions reboots itself with its first post in days. Farkle gets a wave of panic when he sees the notification that they have posted on his phone, immediately going to the app to check it.

It’s nothing major – in fact, it’s hardly a post at all. There’s a blank photo, the caption seemingly celebrating how close they are to the end of the year. “Fear not, AAA starlets. The grand finale is nearly upon us.”

Farkle heaves a sigh of relief. He’s growing to dread the moment that his earlier submission might see the light of day. So long as the page isn’t discussing him or his friends, he figures he’s in the clear.

He shuts his locker, scurrying off to class.

INT. AAA - AUDITORIUM - DAY

Zay is painstakingly running through his routine one more time, Charlie watching intently. He claps out the beats for him, pacing. When he sticks his landing, at least without falling this time, Charlie transitions his timekeeping into actual applause. He tells him that he’s doing a great job and it came together – it is him, after all. Would be hard for it not to be great.

Zay does not seem convinced. He’s still alight with anxious energy, but he takes the compliment anyway. Not like he has much time left anyway. Charlie lets his gaze linger on him for a few moments, then decides to speak.

Charlie: Can I be brutally honest?

Zay: You? If you think you can.

Charlie: [ laughing, then pausing ] … I think you’re relying too heavily on your dance ability.

There’s a long pause. Then Zay raises a finger at him, trying to silence him.

Zay: You shut your mouth.

Charlie hastens to explain his perspective, pointing out that Zay is a brilliant dancer. Certainly one of the best they’ve got. But he’s an awesome vocalist too, and this audition he’s crafted doesn’t speak to any of that. He’s putting himself in a box when he’s far too dynamic for that. He’s hiding behind his dancing, and if he really wants to make an impression for Kossal he should just forgo all of the pizazz and glitz and tricks and just perform. Give them something from the soul, because Charlie knows he’s not short on that. Just stand there, sing, and show them how indisputably talented he is.

It’s a nice sentiment, and honestly holds quite a bit of truth. But with the audition looming so close and his nerves already shot, Zay is not in the headspace to hear it. He snaps at Charlie instead, telling him that he’s wrong and he thinks he should just leave him alone. He wants to get another practice in before class.

Reluctantly, Charlie obliges. He wishes him luck that evening, assuring him that he’ll give it his best before disappearing into the wings. Zay waits until he’s gone then exhales a sigh, kicking at his duffle bag and rubbing his face. As the bell rings –

INT. AAA - BLACK BOX THEATER - DAY

Angela is in her classroom as the week comes to an end, finishing up boxing up her things. She stands for a moment in the nearly empty classroom, wondering how much it will change next year in her absence. Soaking up the memory of it before she bids it farewell.

Farkle comes by, knocking lightly on the door and asking if she has a second. She welcomes him in happily, stating that she figured he would come around at some point. But she warns him playfully that he’s not going to be able to change her mind on this, so there’s no point in kicking off one of his infamous arguments.

He raises his hands in surrender, pointing out that what she’s about to do sounds like the dream. He would never try to convince her otherwise. He saunters further into the room, stuffing his hands in his pockets and nudging her into conversation about how she’s feeling about the change. It must feel crazy, having made it after struggling so long for her shot.

Angela pauses, thinking about it. She comes around from behind her desk, speaking plainly with him and being completely candid. She explains that it feels more meaningful now than it would’ve back then, she thinks.

Farkle: Why?

Angela: Believe it or not, the goal itself isn’t everything. There’s such a difference in accomplishing something you’ve worked so hard for and then being able to turn to someone you love and share in that moment with them. Now that I have people in my corner and didn’t just drop them in pursuit of it all, the strides I’m making feel so much more… real. You know? In some ways, I have to wonder if my approach to it the first time was what ended up fucking me over.

[ Farkle takes this in. Angela gives him a smile, lightly touching his shoulder. ]

Angela: The dream is all-consuming. It’s true… but there has to be room for other things, too. There has to be, otherwise it’s just… empty.

This strikes Farkle in a way he wasn’t expecting. She squeezes his shoulder before getting to her feet, focusing back on packing her things.

EXT. NEW YORK - NIGHT

Night falls over the city as the most important evening of sophomore year looms closer. As the night comes to life, the auditionees prepare for their debut.

INT. BABINEAUX HOME - NIGHT

Zay descends from the second floor of his house, dressed comfortably but fashionably and ready to make an impression. DONNA BABINEAUX, OMAR BABINEAUX, and JADA BABINEAUX all applaud him as he comes down the stairs, a bit sarcastic but also genuinely proud.

Jada begins nitpicking his outfit as Omar grabs the car keys. Donna gives her son a kiss on the cheek before ushering him out the door, wishing him luck.

INT. MAYA’S APARTMENT - NIGHT

Maya does the finishing touches on her makeup in the mirror on the wall, looking like a total knockout in her long black dress. Her mother completes the look by handing her a faux fur coat, classic yet statement-making at the same time. After she dons it she gives Katy a tight hug, accepting a kiss on the top of the head before she breezes out the door.

INT. FOSTER HOME - ENTRYWAY - NIGHT

BLUE NGUYEN is waiting around in the entryway, tossing his keys impatiently. He raises his eyebrows as Isadora descends the stairs with BEATRIX TORRES and Tessa, the two of them having helped her piece together an ensemble and look for the event. Rather than a gown or glamour approach like her fellow auditionees, Isadora is sporting a look that feels more true to who she is, just with the volume turned up – plaid statement pants, a cropped dark top, and of course the classic combat boots. She looks bold, potentially a star in the making – if she can manage to come out of her shell.

As she’s heading out the door, she crafts a text to Lucas to see if he’s on his way or not.

INT. LUCAS’S BEDROOM - NIGHT

The message goes unread, Lucas far too distracted in nitpicking his own appearance. He’s trying his best to feel comfortable in the borrowed suit jacket, unable to decide between tucking in his shirt or leaving it be and resisting the urge to mess up his combed hair. He looks more put together than he has… probably in his entire life. Scrutinizing his reflection in the glass of his balcony window rather than a mirror probably isn’t helping.

He’s pulled out of his self-deprecation when he sees Jack’s car pull up by the curb below. Lucas grabs his phone and gala ticket, stuffing them into his pocket and darting out the door.

EXT. AUDITION HALL - NIGHT

The three auditionees pull up around the same time, Maya emerging from her cab as the other two hop out of their family vehicles. They all size one another up, exchanging cordial head nods and lingering in the peace for a moment as their drivers pull away.

Then it’s a mad dash for the building, all three racing up the steps in a break-neck battle to decide the order of who will be performing when.

INT. AUDITION HALL - ENTRANCE - NIGHT

Maya’s heels click against the floor as they race through the lobby, capturing the same energy as Maya, Farkle, and Zay scrapping to take center stage back on the first day of classes.

Zay makes it to the check-in table first considering he’s not in a dress or heels. He slides up to the sign-in depot and introduces himself breathlessly, triumphant as the check-in person gives him his choice of AAA slots. He opts for the final of the three, tossing a grin to Maya and Isadora as they sidle up behind him. He gestures for them to step up, bowing cheekily before leisurely making his way to the dressing room.

Zay: All yours, ladies.

Maya makes a face at him, before exchanging a look with Isadora. She defers to her, allowing her to choose next seeing as it doesn’t matter much now. Isadora takes the middle slot, giving Maya first string. The check-in person jots this down, giving them general directions to the dressing rooms and theater.

Isadora: [ after Maya marches off ] Sorry about… all that.

Check-In: It’s okay, you’re all like this. We’re used to it.

INT. ERIC’S APARTMENT BUILDING - NIGHT

Song Cue ♫ ♪ “Ratatouille Main Theme” as performed by Michael Giacchino || Instrumental

Eric eagerly lets in Jack and Lucas as they arrive, explaining that Riley is still upstairs in his apartment but should be down any minute and then they’ll be good to go. Eric cheerfully tells Lucas that it’s nice to see him joining them, and he’s like… yeah, okay.

Lucas zones out as Jack and Eric begin discussing the technicalities of the evening and sharing administrator gossip, only getting pulled back into the present when Jack makes an out of place exclamation. He gives him a funny look, following his gaze to try and figure out what prompted the declaration of surprise.

The moment Lucas looks over his shoulder and sees Riley descending the stairs, it’s as if the whole world stops. He stops breathing. She looks like certified royalty, with her flowy lavender dress and hair pulled back so intricately and her sheer shoulder wrap. She locks eyes with him and immediately smiles, holding his gaze the entire way down.

When she makes it to the main floor and joins them, she gives the group of them a bashful smile. Lucas can’t even look at her, staring at the floor and swallowing.

Riley: I hope I didn’t keep you all waiting too long.

Jack: Oh, please, it’s nothing. Believe me, your uncle has taken longer.

Eric: Oh, hardy har har. You’re hilarious.

As Jack and Eric settle into bickering, Riley turns her attention to Lucas. She lightly touches his arm, waiting for him to meet her eyes.

Riley, softly: You look good.

Lucas, stammering: Pfft, I mean, me? [ scoffing ] Okay…

In whatever unintelligible language Lucas speaks, this is likely a compliment of some kind. Luckily, Riley is learning to be fluent in that dialect, so she accepts the sentiment with a smile.

Eric rallies the troops.

Eric: We best get going or we’re going to be late, and Haverford is going to have something to say about it.

Jack: Always do when it comes to us.

Eric: Precisely. Let’s go, then, team! Roll out!

INT. CHARLIE’S CHURCH - NIGHT

The church springfest dinner is in full swing, lots of families in their Sunday best on a Friday night and mingling together. ELEANOR GARDNER is clearly having the time of her life, humoring her colleagues and fielding compliments from all the planning she did for the event.

Charlie is hanging out by one of the food tables with ROSAMUND GARDNER, watching her gorge on carrot sticks as she complains about how bored she is. He assures they all have places they’d rather be, but it’s important to mom that they’re there. She rolls her eyes, stuffing another carrot into her mouth and crunching it pointedly.

As Rosamund gets dragged away by friends, Charlie receives a text message. It’s from Zay, letting him know that he secured the closing slot. Despite his confident demeanor earlier, however, his next couple of messages convey that he’s still fretting over the performance and might be spiraling a little bit.

Charlie drops the celery stick he was chewing on and focuses on a text back, reminding Zay not to panic and to lean into what he’s good at. Do what he’s always telling him, feel it and not overthink. He hits send just as AMBROSE GARDNER saunters over, curiously asking who he’s texting.

Ambrose: Must be serious business. You’ve got quite the look of concentration on.

Charlie: Oh, it’s just uh… Riley. My friend. You remember her, from the winter showcase?

Ambrose: Oh, sure.

Charlie: Yeah. Yeah, she just needed homework help. Last minute.

Ambrose: With two and half days of school left?

Charlie: … well, yeah. That’s why it’s serious business.

Ambrose doesn’t question it, helping himself to a snack from the vegetable tray. Tentatively, Charlie broaches the query of whether it would be at all possible for him to leave a bit early. Like, just a tiny bit. His dad is intrigued and not immediately opposed, so Charlie goes on to explain that there’s this major performance thing going on for his friends at AAA, and he’d really like to be there if he could.

Ambrose contemplates this, taking his time as he chews his celery. Charlie is holding his breath.

Ambrose: Suppose we can see how this function is unfolding by then. What time are you thinking?

Charlie nods, relieved that it’s not a definitive no. This holds promise.

INT. JACOBS ARTS GALA - LOBBY - NIGHT

The Jacobs Arts Gala is in full swing, and it is certainly a fancy shindig. It was bound to be, because theater nerds love to dress up and pretend they’re important and glamorous. Students and administrators from all over the tri-state area weave their way through the crowds in their best formal wear, heading towards the ballroom where the main ceremonies are unfolding.

Lucas is standing in the midst of this crowd, sticking out like a sore thumb simply because of how overwhelmed he looks. He stares up at the glitz and awe of the fancy setting and even fancier guests, shaking his head lightly.

Lucas, under his breath: Lucas Friar, what have you gotten yourself into…

INT. JACOBS ARTS GALA - BALLROOM - NIGHT

On the small stage at the front, a swing band keeps the evening going with music as students from the different schools step up and perform selections. Currently on stage is BRANDON RIVAS (16), a sharp-featured and suave sophomore from AAA’s rival, Haverford Prep. He snaps as the band counts him in…

Song Cue ♫ ♪ “Fly Me To The Moon (In Other Words)” as performed by Frank Sinatra || Performed by Brandon Rivas (of Haverford Prep)

Brandon’s silky smooth vocals take on the Sinatra classic as it floats over the assembled crowd.

Riley is running through the paces of playing student representative, introducing herself to all the important figures. This includes none other than MICHAEL JACOBS, who saunters up to greet her cheerfully. Not struck with nearly the same mythic knowledge of him as her classmates, Riley is able to maintain her cool as she shakes hands with him. She assures him that she’s heard only good things about him, which he seems tickled by.

When he informs her that he’s looking forward to hearing her performance this evening, it’s evident that she has no idea what he’s talking about. Eric slides up and interrupts, laughing and thanking Mr. Jacobs before excusing both them and pulling Riley to the side.

Eric tells her not to panic, but what he neglected to mention to her is that typically, each student representative is slated to perform a song during the ceremonies (i.e. like Brandon). Riley freaks.

Riley: What? I’m sorry, I’m supposed to do what?

Eric: I knew if I told you ahead of time, you’d freak out and potentially not accept the invitation.

Riley: UH-HUH?

Eric: Listen, listen to me, niche. You will be fine. You’ll be fine! You’re best when you’re working on your feet anyway. Just go with your gut. [ off her stunned expression ] Now… go! Enjoy the party! Ha ha.

Riley scoffs, stomping off and muttering to herself as she disappears into the crowd. Eric cringes to himself, watching her go as Jack approaches from behind carrying two flutes of champagne.

Jack: Looks like that went well.

He hands Eric one of the flutes, proposing a toast to the two of them. Sure, it’s been a hell of a year, but they survived it. Didn’t they? The school came together, their biggest adversary seems to have gone into hibernation for good… not too shabby for an analytical principal and his overly involved head counselor.

Eric will definitely drink to that. They raise their glasses, knocking them together with a clink.

Riley has managed to find Lucas, the two of them surveying the dessert table out on display. It’s an assortment of pretty typical yet gourmet desserts, even more intimidating just from how fancifully they’re designed. Riley gestures for Lucas to take one and he shakes his head, keeping his hands clasped together in front of him.

Lucas: No. Mm mm. Don’t trust that.

Riley: What? Why?

Lucas: Doesn’t look like real food.

Riley: [ with a laugh ] What, just because it’s not the staling Oreos in the bottom of your stash in the booth, it’s not real food?

Lucas still refuses, and Riley rolls her eyes. She claims he’s being silly – how is he supposed to know if he doesn’t like something if he won’t give it a chance? He claims he has all the expertise necessary to know not to trust something, but she ignores his rebuttal. Instead, she chooses one of the little pastries and holds it up for him. Patiently waiting, as if she’s going to feed it to him.

He stares at it, then her.

Lucas: I have two hands.

Riley: Well, you’re not using them, are you?

She holds it up indicatively again, raising her eyebrows. Lucas eyes her suspiciously, slowly leaning forward and allowing her to pop it into his mouth.

As it turns out, the pastry isn’t so bad. Lucas chews it thoughtfully while Riley watches in amusement, waiting for the victory of being right in this scenario. She’s startled when a woman taps her on the shoulder, coming over to introduce herself and catching Riley by surprise.

She introduces herself as EVELYN RAND (50s), prominent school board member and Jacobs patron, overseeing the district from Haverford to AAA. She’s heard many good things about Riley, and so she’s been eager to get to meet her. Riley seems genuinely flattered by the notion, the two of them exchanging further niceties.

Evelyn catches sight of Lucas still loitering behind them, calling out to him and gesturing for him to join them. He sheepishly saunters up next to Riley, shaking the hand Evelyn offers him.

Evelyn: Are you a representative as well?

Lucas: Oh, no, I’m uh – I’m just the plus one.

Riley: He might as well be. Lucas is our best student technician at Adams. He can do anything.

Evelyn: Is that so? Yet here you are, Miss Student Representative.

Lucas: Well, she’s the best we have to offer.

Riley locks eyes with him, a soft moment passing between them. Evelyn watches interestedly, raising her eyebrows. Then Lucas backs off, clearing his throat and claiming it was nice to meet Evelyn before sidling back over to the dessert table.

Evelyn watches him go with a twinkle in her eyes, turning her smile back to Riley as she claims she better keep making the rounds. But she emphasizes how nice it was to meet her, and that she cannot wait to see what all of them at AAA accomplish in the next few years. Before she goes, she leans forward to whisper conspiratorially.

Evelyn: [ re: Lucas, approvingly ] He’s cute.

Evelyn gives her a wink, patting her arm and then fluttering back into the crowd. Riley takes a second to catch up to her commentary, a bit caught off-guard but suddenly thinking on the matter. She turns around to look at Lucas again… who is in the process of stuffing another pastry into his mouth. Considering his former indignation, it’s damn charming.

Lucas pauses when he catches her looking, caught. He rolls his eyes, giving her a subtle thumbs up to give her the victory and acknowledge that she was right. Riley can’t help but laugh, and she definitely can’t help but agree with Evelyn’s assessment.

Brandon wraps up his Sinatra impression with a flourish, the orchestra bringing it on home.

INT. AUDITION HALL - THEATER - NIGHT

Isadora is pacing in the wings, about to go on for her audition. She’s pushing it until the last possible second, checking her phone obsessively for a text from Lucas. No such luck.

Maya comes up behind her, informing her that she really needs to go on at this point. Isadora doesn’t look at her, but she ventures the question they both know she’s wondering.

Isadora: Is he here?

Maya, hesitantly: … not that I could see. No.

Isadora steels her gaze, growing more closed off as she stuffs her phone into the pocket of her dress. Maya tries to comfort her, but she brushes her off. She marches onto the stage before she can talk herself out of it.

She squints as she steps into the spotlight, searching for the judges but unable to see anything through the brightness of the lights. In some ways, she supposes that’s better. Easier to pretend that her best friend didn’t neglect to show up on the one night she needs him most if she can’t see the evidence of it.

Once prompted, Isadora introduces herself boldly. Then, she starts to sing.

Song Cue ♫ ♪ “Here - 2 A.M. Version” as performed by Alessia Cara || Performed by Isadora Smackle

As the mellow chords float in, Isadora lets her emotions pour out through the lyrics. The spotlight is on her on the dark stage, no theatrics, just her standing with a microphone. That’s all she needs. She’s bitter, frustrated, overwhelmed, and so over this whole night.

But that makes the performance all the more endearing. Whilst wrapped up in how she’s feeling, Isadora seems to forget that she’s performing in front of a judging panel and audience, and this is the best we’ve ever heard her sing. Her voice is powerful, and it fills the theater as everyone watches in silence.

As the song goes on, Isadora remembers flashes of the past year when she’s felt isolated: trying to rehearse with the performers for Les Mis but not fitting in, seeing Riley and Lucas dancing together and walking away, being in a room full of her siblings being loud and playing games where she’s sitting in silence with a blank look on her face.

Her voice gets louder and more powerful, and she finishes the song with tears of anger spilling from her eyes. She’s done hiding who she is, trying to mold herself to how people expect her to be. She’s not a techie, she’s not a performer – she’s Isadora freakin’ De La Cruz, and she’ll do whatever the hell she wants.

And right now she wants to get out of this theatre. She storms off stage, shoves the microphone to one of the stagehands, and heads out. Zay and Maya go to congratulate her on her performance, but she ignores them. She’s figuring out who she is in a world where she can’t depend on Lucas anymore, the one person she thought would always be there for her.

INT. MINKUS HOME - NIGHT

Despite everyone else’s busy Friday evening, Farkle is wasting away an anticlimactic evening at home. He’s in the living area helping Ezra with homework, but he’s hardly much help. His mind is elsewhere, zoning out of the conversation. He’s also fidgety, restless, and can’t much focus on anything at all.

Ezra complains about all of these facts, indignantly claiming that Farkle isn’t acting like himself. Jennifer calls him back to get ready for bed, freeing Farkle from any further accusations.

Ezekiel is reading a book on the far end of the couch, but he observed the exchange pointedly enough. He stretches his foot out and pokes at Farkle’s arm, getting his attention as he grimaces and swats his socked foot away from him. Ezekiel asks him if he’s okay, which he shrugs off, but he does utilize the opportunity to engage in conversation.

Farkle asks him to elaborate on what he meant about what he said at dinner the other night. About connections, and all that nonsense. Once he’s able to sort of figure out what exactly Farkle is requesting to hear, Ezekiel states that he doesn’t think any of it is all that deep but basically he simply meant that for things in life to hold meaning, you have to put time and effort into them. You need to be present for your claims of importance to hold any water.

Ezekiel goes on further, explaining that with his transition to college and everything, he had an epiphany of sorts about how positivity is so crucial. All of the negativity around them, the constant conflict and pushing people around is just white noise.

Ezekiel: That’s how dad rose up in his business, after all. He always operates as a friend, a partner, a supporter rather than a detractor. He’s an ally, and that’s an attractive trait. Makes him win in the end. That’s why he’s so good at what he does, at least from my perspective.

Farkle questions whether that principle just applies to the business world. Ezekiel shrugs, stating he’s fairly certain it applies to everything. Doesn’t matter who you are.

More than anything though, he just meant that it’s important to spend time with the people you care about while you have them so that they know how much you mean to them. Ever since he left for college he’s been thinking about that a lot – especially in regards to his family.

Farkle absorbs this, managing a smile when Ezekiel reaches forward to pat him on the back. He clearly has a lot to think about the later the night stretches on.

INT. JACOBS ARTS GALA - BALLROOM - NIGHT

Riley is gearing up for her performance, obviously nervous. She wrings her hands as she expresses her task to Lucas, who listens calmly as she rambles on about it. Once she takes a second to breathe, he has the opportunity to speak. Lucas doesn’t have much advice in the realm of performing, naturally, but he claims that she’ll be fine because she always is. He can’t think of a time when she wasn’t good.

Riley: Oh, yeah? Really? You literally told me I wasn’t that impressive during the first week of classes.

Lucas: No, I didn’t –

Riley: Are you kidding me? You said I was an “unassuming chorus member” –

Lucas: I meant that you were holding back. Which you were. That didn’t mean you weren’t good. You were always good.

That’s a lot of perspective altering to throw at her all at once when she’s already overwhelmed. Lucas shifts focus back to the task at hand, essentially giving her the same guidance that Shawn gave Angela – that she should just sing from the heart or whatever it is that they’re saying all the time. Riley absorbs this just as Eric comes to grab her, telling her that she has to get ready to take the stage.

INT. AUDITION HALL - DRESSING ROOM - NIGHT

Zay is in full panic mode, totally freaking out about his performance. He’s forgetting steps, overthinking it just like Charlie warned him not to. He can’t believe he’s about to blow everything on the one chance he’s given to really show what he can do.

Suddenly, he’s struck with inspiration. He looks through his phone, scrolling and scrolling until he finds a new suitable avenue. He nods to himself, trusting himself to take a different approach.

Then he grabs his choreography sheet off the counter, giving it one last look before tearing it up.

INT. JACOBS ARTS GALA - BALLROOM - NIGHT

A rosy hue glows throughout the ballroom as Riley steps up to the stage, conferring quietly with the instrumentalists. It’s evident that she’s figured out her song, and when she steps up to the microphone and adjusts it as necessary she takes a moment to find her stage presence. She searches through the lights to find Eric in the crowd, standing with Jack and watching her proudly. Just a few paces to the right, she finds Lucas.

She’s got support. She’s not alone. Taking a deep breath, she nods to the violinist to kick off the performance.

Song Cue ♫ ♪ “That Would Be Enough” as performed by Hamilton Original Broadway Cast || Performed by Riley Matthews

Starting with the open violin and the first “Look around, look around,” Riley skips the duet portion of the Eliza solo and jumps to the core of the song about a minute in. It’s an excellent choice, both for her vocal range as well as the crowd considering it’s hip musical theater.

Even more pointed is how well it applies to her emotions at the moment, which is exactly why she picked it. The first verse she sings for herself (“Look at where we are, look at where we started…”), marveling over how far she’s come in the past year and allowing herself the moment to soak it all up – the beautiful insanity of AAA, the rush of performing and being surrounded by artists who love it too, to be a thousand times stronger than she was before.

As she hits the next verse, however, her focus shifts. She finds Lucas in the crowd again, using him as her anchor as she ventures further into the performance. The lyrics ring particularly true here, too, as she sings directly to him (“I don’t pretend to know the challenges you’re facing / the worlds you keep erasing and creating in your mind…”).

Jack leans over to Eric, whispering that she’s absolutely stunning. Eric, a little choked up, wholeheartedly agrees.

Considering the captivated expression on his face, it’s safe to say that Lucas agrees. He can’t take his eyes off of her, and with how intently she’s staying grounded to him it could very well be a performance shared only between the two of them (“If I could grant you peace of mind, if you could let me inside your heart…”).

It’s a beautiful, delicate performance, and a perfect showing for AAA. The applause that she earns from the assembled appreciators of the arts is well, well earned.

INT. CHARLIE’S CHURCH - NIGHT

Charlie is still present like the darling son he is, but he’s growing impatient. He’s tapping his feet, checking the clock on his phone incessantly.

He makes eye contact with Ambrose from across the room, waiting for some kind of signal that he’s free to go. His father seems to think on it for a long, torturous moment… then he smiles, nodding him along. Charlie exhales, returning the beam and inconspicuously sneaking his way out of the gathering.

EXT. CHARLIE’S CHURCH - NIGHT

Charlie emerges into the brisk New York evening, only pausing for half a second before breaking into a sprint down the street.

INT. AUDITION HALL - THEATER - NIGHT

Zay emerges from the dressing room hall, sporting a different overall ensemble than he was before – much more of an eye-catcher with his Prince-esque floral suit jacket than the dance clothes he was wearing earlier. Maya and Isadora greet him and wish him luck, noting the change in his appearance. Maya questions how he’s feeling, and Isadora points out that he’s probably not going to be able to dance very well in that new attire.

Zay: You’re right. Because I’m not dancing.

Maya and Isadora both drop their jaws, wondering what the hell he’s doing. Maya tries to stop him and ask him exactly that, but Zay is already marching onto the stage.

EXT. NEW YORK STREETS - NIGHT

Charlie is sprinting with everything he’s got, dashing through the nightlit avenues in his Sunday best. Running against the clock, just to get a few blocks away… closing the distance with every ticking second…

INT. JACOBS ARTS GALA - BALLROOM - NIGHT

Riley is fielding compliments and praise for her performance from gala guests, obviously unprepared for all the attention. Lucas meanders over to join her, somewhat saving her from further niceties with strangers. He shares a similar sentiment of congratulations, although his awe seems to run far deeper than that of the other patrons.

Lucas: You were – I don’t know what you were worried about.

Riley: Well, thank you. I think.

Lucas: Always good. I don’t know how you do it.

Riley: Hmm. I guess it’s just because I’m “too damn talented.”

It takes Lucas a second to get the reference, then he exhales a sheepish laugh. They hold each other’s gaze for a long moment until Lucas clears his throat, asking her if she wants to dance.

Riley: I’m sorry. Am I hearing that right? Lucas James Friar, willing to dance?

Lucas: Well, I figure if I’m playing the role tonight, I may as well play it right. [ a beat ] And I’ve had a pretty good teacher.

He holds out his arm, waiting for her to take it if she so chooses. She does, shyly, as Zay’s introduction to the judges pre-laps.

Song Cue ♫ ♪ “Ain’t No Way” as performed by Glee Cast || Performed by Zay Babineaux

As the opening swell of the soulful ballad floats in, Riley and Lucas make their way towards the center of the ballroom.

INT. AUDITION HALL - THEATER - NIGHT

Zay delivers a killer rendition, doing exactly what Charlie said he would – blow everyone out of the water with his raw talent. All year long he’s been forcing his dancing expertise, it was easy to forget how powerful a vocalist he is as well. There’s a reason he earned a ranking as one of the sophomore divas, and after this, no one is ever going to forget it again.

INT. JACOBS ARTS GALA - BALLROOM - NIGHT

The performance also underscores Riley and Lucas at the gala, venturing their dance. They start off in proper waltz posture, just like she taught him… but as the song progresses, they loosen up. Adjust their stance, close some of the distance, shift more into a slow dance.

At some point, Riley leans forward and rest her head against his shoulder as they sway together. Lucas honestly looks dumbstruck, as though he can’t believe this is actually happening. Any of it. He’d pinch himself, if he wasn’t so preoccupied by her or ever wanted to wake up from it.

EXT. AUDITION HALL - NIGHT

Charlie continues his sprint, darting up the steps two at a time and pushing through the doors.

INT. AUDITION HALL - THEATER - NIGHT

By the time Charlie makes it into the auditorium he’s out of breath, but he’s just in time to catch the latter half of Zay’s performance. He stumbles forward against the handicap rail in the back of the section and takes it all in – Zay’s inarguable stage presence, his outstanding vocals, the fact that he took his advice and is giving nothing but soul.

Charlie is totally entranced. He isn’t catching his breath any time soon.

INT. JACOBS ARTS GALA - BALLROOM - NIGHT

By the final act of the performance as Zay is heading into the final chorus, Riley shifts out of their posture and leans back a bit to look at Lucas. They lock eyes, searching one another’s expressions… and leaning into their first kiss.

It’s slow, uncertain, and over before either of them realize it. But it lingers, and their lips only break apart for a few moments before they initiate a second one. This one is a little bolder, a bit more certain, an active choice on both their ends rather than a tentative curiosity. Riley tightens her hold on his jacket to pull him closer, Lucas lifting a hand to cup her face.

INT. AUDITION HALL - THEATER - NIGHT

Zay finishes the number, totally bringing down the house. Charlie is starstruck. Maya and Isadora are in shock in the wings, able to see the writing on the wall. It’s more than clear who is going to the Kossal program that summer.

INT. JACOBS ARTS GALA - BALLROOM - NIGHT

Lucas and Riley pull back from one another, just enough to exchange hesitant eye contact. Then Riley breaks into a bashful giggle, easing the tension in an instant. She tilts her head against his, Lucas licking his lips and unable to hold back his smile.

EXT. AUDITION HALL - NIGHT

Song Cue ♫ ♪ “The Louvre” as performed by Lorde || Instrumental

Maya steps out into the night, inhaling the fresh air. She takes a deep breath, closing her eyes and taking a moment. She knows she’s not getting that summer program, not after Zay’s performance.

But she’s used to disappointment. It’s never stopped her before. Onto the next thing.

She exhales through her nose, opening her eyes. Then she descends down the steps, leaving the lost opportunity behind.

INT. AUDITION HALL - DRESSING ROOM - NIGHT

Zay is gathering his things, still shaky on adrenaline from a stellar performance. He hesitates, finally getting to exhale. He almost can’t believe all the stress and strain is done.

Charlie manages to find his way to him, appearing in the doorway. Zay glances up and spots him in the mirror, eyebrows shooting up as he whips around in surprise. He literally can’t believe he showed up.

Zay: Charlie. You’re here.

[ Charlie smiles, nodding. He saunters further into the room, treading cautiously. Not because of Zay, but because he isn’t sure he trusts himself. ]

Charlie: After being so brutally honest, you thought I wouldn’t show up?

Zay: No. No, I just thought – you said you had –

Zay shrugs. He doesn’t really know what he thought, and he supposes it doesn’t really matter. It’s nice to see him there. Really nice.

Zay: I took your advice. So.

Charlie: Yeah, I noticed. And dare I say, I think it worked as intended.

Zay: You think so?

Charlie: Dude, you were amazing. There’s no way they’re not going to pick you.

Zay waves him off, not nearly so sure. Not wanting to jinx it. Charlie has made his way well across the room now, joining him by the counters and much closer. Dangerously close.

Charlie: I’m serious. You should’ve heard yourself. You were mindblowing.

Zay: Come on.

Charlie: I mean it. I mean, you always are. Stunning. Breathtaking.

Charlie can’t look away from him. He’s mesmerized, and still somehow damningly out of breath. He feels like he’s never going to be able to breathe again. Zay lifts his gaze to meet his, searching his expression. Not believing he could be reading the situation correctly.

Charlie shrugs wordlessly. Then he licks his lips, letting out a ragged exhale.

Charlie, breathlessly: Who needs oxygen?

Before Zay can question the statement, Charlie grabs the lapels of his suit jacket and pulls him into a kiss. It’s fumbling, a bit of a disaster to start, the two of them bracing against the counter and Zay reaching out to hold him mostly to keep him from falling over.

But they figure it out pretty quickly from there. Charlie hesitates for one last second, taking another glance at him before going in for another one. Eagerly. Decisively. Making his choice.

It doesn’t take long for Zay to get on the same page once the initial shock wears off. He kisses him back, tugging him closer and reaching up to start undoing his Sunday best tie.

The auditions may be wrapped, but it’s clear the two of them aren’t going anywhere for a while.

INT. JACK’S CAR - MOVING - NIGHT

Jack and Eric chatter in the front, lightly discussing the gala and the performances from the evening. Completely oblivious to how everything has changed.

Riley and Lucas are quiet. They’re seated in the back, not looking at each other. They can’t. It’s too much to ask of them with so much shifting between them, and with their faculty right there in front of them.

Riley glances away from fiddling with her purse to steal a look at him. He’s keeping his eyes trained out the window, absentmindedly chewing on his thumbnail. So, so far from the intimidating first impression he made at the beginning of the year. She shifts her gaze to his hand instead, resting on his leg and fingers tapping anxiously against his knee.

Gently, she reaches forward and touches the sleeve of his jacket. Lucas freezes, his fingers hovering over his leg. He tosses a glance in her direction out of the corner of his eye, uncertain what she’s going to do and wholly certain that he can’t brave looking her in the eyes.

Her fingers brush the back of his hand, before she lets her hand come to rest on top of his. Venturing that simple touch, rubbing her thumb against his knuckles. Lucas stares at their hands, still frozen. Still unable to look at her.

Then, he flips his hand over and links their fingers together. It’s that easy.

They don’t look at each other. They don’t give anything away. But light smiles bloom onto both of their faces as they direct their gazes out the car windows and towards the city lights.

INT. LUCAS’S APARTMENT - NIGHT

Lucas enters the apartment as silently as possible, trying not to disturb whoever else might be around or asleep. Further inspection reveals a light on in the kitchen area, indicating that his efforts to go undetected might be futile. He frowns, stepping towards the room.

GRACE FRIAR is seated at the kitchen table, up late rifling through paperwork. When Lucas softly asks why she’s still up, she jumps slightly and lifts her head. It’s an immediate relief when she sees that it’s only him. She manages a smile, taking in his full attire.

Grace: You look nice. Where did you get that suit jacket?

Lucas: [ after a beat ] A friend.

Lucas avoids her gaze as she questions whether he had fun, busying himself by getting a glass of water. He pauses to actually consider the question, before confirming he did. He starts to make his retreat before he doubles back, posing a new discussion topic.

Lucas: Do you still have the application for McCullough? [ off Grace’s nod, and a beat of contemplation ] Forget about it. I’ll be fine at Triple A.

Grace, surprised: Are you sure?

There’s another beat of hesitation. Then, Lucas’s expression softens.

Lucas: Yeah. I am.

He bids his mother goodnight, disappearing from the kitchen doorway. Grace watches him go, a bit bemused. Sensing a major change of heart in her son, absolutely clueless as to where it came from. But it doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Not at all.

After a moment she smiles, returning to her work.

EXT. MAYA’S APARTMENT - NIGHT

Maya is seated on the steps in front of her building, the street glimmering with the lights of the city and early morning dew. Farkle appears around the corner, marching towards her with his hands in his pockets. It’s not clear how far he’s walked alone in the middle of the night.

He’s frantic, full of nervous energy. She doesn’t bother to acknowledge him as he approaches. He stops in front of the steps, waiting for an invitation. When he doesn’t get one, he plops down next to her anyway. He bounces his legs restlessly, a sharp contrast to her plaintive calm.

They’re silent for a long moment. Maya clears her throat, ready to tell him off.

Maya: Are you lost, Farkle? It’s midnight and you live across town –

Farkle: I don’t want to be alone.

The statement takes Maya by surprise. She frowns, turning her gaze to him. He keeps staring straight ahead, rubbing his palms on his knees. Still fidgeting. His speech is scattered, panicked.

Farkle: I don’t know why I’m like this. Why I get this way. I tell myself it’s just the ambition, the drive pushing me towards my destiny, but I don’t know. I don’t think your destiny is supposed to feel this suffocating. Claustrophobic. [ a beat ] It’s like, if you’re going to do anything in this world you’ve got to be the best. And if you’re gonna do something as stupid as performance art, then you really have to be the best or else you’ve got nothing. And I didn’t want to be a nothing. I can’t be a nothing.

Maya listens intently, contemplative and somewhat stunned. Almost a year of friendship, or whatever the two of them are, and he’s never been this vulnerable.

Farkle: And if you’re going to be the best, that means fuck the rest. Right? If you’re at the top, then it means no one else can be. That’s what I always thought. That’s what made sense. But I’ve got this… it’s like I’ve got this whole other side to me that has a new motivation. And I don’t think I can survive with two. It’s like I’m splitting down the middle. But I know they’re both true. They’re both all-consuming. [ a beat ] I want to be the best. I want to get the auditions and the summer programs and get everything I deserve. I want it so badly, it’s blinding.

Maya waits, a bit more guarded. This much, she already knew.

Farkle: But I want to share it, too. I want to do it with people who are just as talented and star-bound as me. I want a team. I don’t want to be alone.

Farkle finally looks away from the street, forcing himself to meet her gaze. He hesitates, then speaks definitively. Like if he doesn’t say it, it’ll suffocate him.

Farkle: I want my friend.

Maya takes this all in, before softening a bit. After a moment she sighs, running a hand through her hair and trying to gauge the situation.

Maya: You really mean all that?

Farkle: Yes.

Maya: You done with all of the bullshit? All of the stupid –

Farkle, without hesitation: Yes. Yes.

It’s so difficult to figure out what’s real with him. Whether or not he’s telling the truth. But somehow, Maya wants it to be true.

Maya: You really mean just as talented?

Farkle: [ with an eager nod ] Maybe more.

The statement is sincere. And this, it seems, is the ticket to earning back her approval. She gives him a hesitant smile, nodding as well and letting her gaze drift back to the street. They continue to sit in the cool May twilight, the winds of change kicking up a breeze around them.

This friendship may just stay afloat yet…

INT. AAA - HALLWAY - DAY

The last couple days of sophomore year seem to promise an unusually little amount of chaos compared to the usual tenor of AAA. Farkle is at his locker on his phone, and we can see that he has messaged the AAAC multiple times over the weekend requesting that his submission be deleted and forgotten about.

The page hasn’t responded, so it seems like a moot point. For what it’s worth, the AAAC seems to have finally given up.

Farkle accepts this, closing his locker. Glancing down the hallway, wondering what an entirely new year is going to bring.

INT. AAA - HALLWAY - DAY

On the bulletin board outside the black box, Zay has been announced as the summer program recipient. The assembled classmates congratulate him, including a genuinely complimentary Maya and a very enthusiastic Riley. Charlie gives him a pat on the back, and they exchange a soft look – suddenly a lot more meaningful between them than before.

During this celebration, however, they all get notifications on their phones from Instagram.

INT. AAA - HALLWAY - DAY

Farkle gets it as well, still in a different part of the school. It informs him that AAA Confessions posted a new video, followed by one more message specifically meant for him.

“Too late. Self-destruct sequence initiated. Happy summer, Farkle Minkus.”

Consumed with dread, Farkle stops frozen in the hall and opens his phone. As he jumps to the app, his hands are shaking so badly he nearly drops the device. When he goes to check the page, all of the color drains from his face.

It’s worse than he expected. Not only is the content of his video posted, it’s him saying it. AAAC simply posted the video in its entirety, only having adding a caption explaining that the post is their swan song confession – and they’ve exposed everyone who ever posted on the account.

As Farkle’s voice on video begins to rattle throughout the school halls, he takes off at a mad dash down the hallway –

Song Cue ♫ ♪ “The World Was Wide Enough” as performed by Hamilton Original Broadway Cast || Instrumental (up to 4:00) - Performed by Farkle Minkus (4:00 onward)

INT. AAA - HALLWAYS - DAY

It’s chaos as everyone tunes into the video and sees the AAAC’s final post. Their final message is true to their word – scrolling down on the page, they’ve added a “signature” to every single original caption revealing who submitted it in the first place. All that power of anonymity, gone in an instant.

Friends are confronting friends about items posted. People are tuning in to Farkle’s video, in total awe and horror of the mere existence of it. Each piece of it is repeated in snippets as it passes through the halls, accenting the instrumentation of “The World Was Wide Enough.”

As Zay reads the caption on the post, he turns to look for Charlie. But Charlie is gone, having disappeared the moment it became clear exactly what was going on.

Charlie himself is hiding in a nook of a hallway closer to the atrium, looking like he’s going to be sick. As he frantically scrolls through the page, we discover what it is that has him so flustered – all of the posts about him and Riley were submitted by him. All that effort put into using it to keep suspicion off of him, and now he suddenly looks more curious than ever.

Panicked, Charlie jogs towards the front entrance and pushes through the doors. Taking off at a run without looking back.

INT. AAA - AUDITORIUM - DAY

The techies are huddled in their usual back section sans Isadora and Lucas, watching Farkle’s video with a distinct mix of horror and fascination. JADE BEAMON is hiding behind her hands, she can’t bear to watch it for too long. DAVE WILLIAMS can’t look away, jaw hanging open.

Lucas enters from the audience doors, noticing the tension in the congregation and asking them what’s going on. DYLAN ORLANDO and ASHER GARCIA immediately attempt to stifle the sound and hide the phone, assuring him that it’s nothing. But naturally, this adamant denial doesn’t sell convincingly on either of them.

He can tell something is seriously up. He repeats the question, approaching the group and coming to stand in front of them again. Dave tries to claim ignorance as well but Lucas is faster than them, reaching over and snatching Dylan’s phone from his hands before he can protest.

Lucas tunes into the video just as Farkle is wrapping up his section on him, transitioning to Isadora. Asher tries to tell him he’s stupid and he should forget about it, but Lucas isn’t listening to him anymore.

Farkle: … I mean, why else would she put in the effort to befriend jackass Lucas James Friar, other than by special request from her favorite counselor uncle in an attempt to make sure he doesn’t make a hit list or some shit considering he’s so openly pathetic. Riley Matthews doesn’t need sympathy, but she’s sure good at giving it…

Asher and Dylan are watching him like a hawk, not sure what to say. All of them are watching him with evident worry, and that just makes everything worse.

Farkle: … I guess it makes sense that she deserves one shot to prove she actually can live up to the family business without having to do any work for it. Sucks that it’s so late notice her best friend won’t even be there, as he’ll be too busy on his pity date with Riley. How tragic.

Stone-faced, Lucas drops the phone to the ground and marches from the auditorium. Dylan calls after him as Asher scrambles to pick up the phone off the ground. Dave starts to go after him in concern but Jade pulls him back.

INT. AAA - HALLWAYS - DAY

Farkle continues his desperate sprint through the halls, frantically trying to get to the black box to do damage control before everything unravels. He arrives and barrels through the doorway just as the gun shot in the instrumental goes off, kicking off the empty, tense backing of Hamilton’s free verse.

INT. AAA - BLACK BOX THEATER - DAY

The moment Farkle appears in the doorway, a dozen heads snap to look at him at once. Most of the sophomore class is assembled, nearly all of the performers except Charlie and including Isadora. They’re all staring at him, a myriad of unpleasant emotions on their faces.

Considering the fact that all of them are also on blast because of what the page did to the captions, Farkle is truly stepping into the full brunt of everyone’s betrayal and anger.

Maya breaks first, questioning how the hell he could do something like this. He really did blow up everything – including reveal her scholarship status to the whole school. Her eyes are glossy as she scrutinizes him, but the rage is enough of a deterrent to hold back any tears.

Farkle isn’t so lucky. He’s already choking up as he tries to defend himself, stammering through his words. He tries to point out that it wasn’t him who posted it, and he frantically tries to explain that he basically begged to have it deleted. He never wanted it to be shared. He didn’t mean it.

Maya: But you sent it. You said it!

The vitriol escalates pretty quickly from there, Zay pointing out how pathetic the whole thing is. Riley questions why he would put other people’s interpersonal relationships on blast, to which Isadora follows up that it’s obviously because he can’t imagine what having actual friendships must be like. Guess if he can’t have them, then no one can.

Farkle takes hit after hit, being the straw man in a scenario that has no good ending. But the whole thing gets far worse when Lucas storms into the room, asking if it’s true.

It’s like all of the air gets sucked out of the room. The performers turn to Lucas warily, wondering the hell he’s going to do. He repeats the question, voice quiet and sharp – which is honestly scarier than if he were shouting. Farkle swallows, certain he’s not going to live to see tomorrow.

But Lucas doesn’t focus on him. He zeroes in on Riley instead, locking eyes with her and looking at her for a long moment before asking about what he actually cares about. When he speaks, it’s barely above a murmur.

Lucas, mockingly: … pity date?

Riley: [ stunned ] No. No, Lucas, I didn’t – I never –

But it’s too late. It’s like Wyatt said – words are toothpaste, and they’re not going back in the tube. The sentiments have left their mark, for everyone involved.

Lucas huffs out a laugh, but it’s not a humorous one. Then he launches into a tirade about how he should’ve known better, they should’ve seen this coming. That, of course, the performers would default to this kind of petty and sadistic behavior, because that’s all they ever do. It’s been that way forever, and nothing is going to change it clearly. It’s a pretty staggering deconstruction, and he bookends it by stating he hopes they’re all really pleased with themselves. Really damn pleased.

Lucas focuses back on Farkle, voice dropping back down to a wavering murmur.

Lucas: [ letting out a scoff of a laugh ] … fuck you.

[ Farkle can’t look at him. He keeps his gaze trained on the wall, a couple of tears slipping down his cheeks. Lucas shakes his head, backing up. ]

Lucas: Fuck… [ raising his voice ] FUCK all of you!

Lucas storms out, pushing WYATT LIVINGSTON out of his way as he shoves past him to escape. Isadora shoots a murderous glare at all of them before chasing after him. CLARISSA CRUZ hides her head behind HALEY FISHER’S back, both of them crying. A tear escapes Riley, but she’s so shell-shocked she doesn’t even think to wipe it away.

The sophomore class starts to file out, trying to escape the unbearable tension they all had a hand in creating. They file out one by one in varying states of shock until it’s down to Farkle and Zay, the latter stopping in front of him as he makes his way out.

Zay: Was it worth it? Is it finally enough?

He scoffs, shaking his head in disgust as he leaves Farkle alone. Farkle stands there in the center of the classroom alone, completely frozen.

INT. AAA - TECHNICIAN’S BOOTH - DAY

Isadora catches up to Lucas in the technician’s booth, intending to confront him about the commentaries leveled against him – particularly that he totally just blew her off to go on some date with Riley without bothering to clue her in. Because that’s not so hot either, and she was counting on him to be there. She needed him to be there, and he wasn’t. She expresses how idiotic she felt and demands to know what the hell he was thinking.

Lucas claims he doesn’t want to talk about it right now, obviously on the verge of a major emotional hurricane. Anyone else would be cautious to be near him with such a chaotic potential in the air – and understandably so – but Isadora knows him better than that. She’s not scared of him, and at the moment she’s pissed. So she won’t let it drop, pushing and pushing until he finally cracks.

He yells at her, begging her to shut up. He can’t deal with it right now, so would she just let it drop? She winces, shocked enough by the outburst to stop the badgering. Lucas blinks at her, turning away and collapsing back against the electrical cabinet. He slides down to the floor, all of the anger gone in an instant and just left with… everything else.

He covers his face with his hands, letting out a shaky “fuck” and pulling up his knees in front of him. Isadora hesitates by the lighting board, realizing now isn’t the time for the confrontation. They’ll have that conversation later, she knows that they will. For now, she thinks he needs her to be present in a different way – even if he wasn’t there for her the way she expected he’d be.

Tentatively, she approaches him and sits down against the cabinet next to him. She cautiously puts an arm around his shoulders to comfort him – a big move, coming from Isadora – and that moment of vulnerability is what shatters the flood gates.

Lucas leans into her embrace, breaking down in tears as the sting of everything falling apart finally starts to sink in. When he said that when he cared about something, we would know… well. That’s more evident than ever before.

Isadora holds him and allows him to melt down, lightly propping her chin on his head. Her expression is grim, holding it together so that at least one of them remains stalwart.

INT. AAA - AUDITORIUM - DAY

Farkle takes over the vocalization of “The World Was Wide Enough,” tuning in on “Now I’m the villain in your history…” He’s walking along the edge of the stage on his own, balance precarious. Like he could fall at any second, but at that point he doesn’t care anymore.

His eyes are glossy but the tears are done. He’s blank-faced, trying to comprehend the fact that his world just turned upside down, and the truth of it is? It was all his fault.

I was too young and blind to see, I should’ve known. I should’ve known the world was wide enough for all of them and me.

Close on Farkle’s teary eyes, before a slow fade to black. Then, the sounds of a bustling airport float in as we transition to a new location…

INT. AIRPORT - DAY

Close on a smartphone, open to the AAAC but from the moderator side rather than follower as we’re accustomed to seeing it. A thumb navigates to settings, going to the delete button. When Instagram prompts if the user is sure about deleting the account, they hesitate.

Easing out, it is finally revealed who the true operator of the AAAC was – Chai Fresco. In spite of her successfully evading getting caught, she doesn’t look thrilled with all of the chaos that unfolded in its wake.

As her boarding section is called for her flight to Europe, she acts quickly and confirms the delete. Poof! It’s as if the page was never there… even if all the damage it caused still remains.

Chai grabs her things, heading towards the flight that will take her away from all of the aftermath. Not looking back.

INT. AAA - HALLWAY - DAY

Empty hallways. Quiet building. Summer has begun, and the impending confrontations are put on hold for a few weeks. The hallways feel eerie, not populated with students and dancing and music as they should be…

Eric: What the hell happens next?

INT. AAA - ERIC’S OFFICE - DAY

Eric is seated behind his desk, Jack in the usual student occupied chair across from him. They’re both stunned speechless, still attempting to wrap their minds around what the hell unfolded in the last three days of classes. Eric confirms that the confessions page has been terminated for good, so at least there’s that.

Jack: Mister Livingston was right.

Eric frowns, prompting Jack to continue. It’s clear that this has taken a toll on Jack. He doesn’t look all that well, and his voice is ragged as he tries to compose his thoughts. He laments that Wyatt was correct about him – he is incompetent, and he couldn’t stop this from imploding in on itself. More than that, he’s the failure. He failed their students, from beginning to end.

Eric tries to refute this notion, but Jack isn’t willing to hear it. And in some ways, they did fail, there’s no sugarcoating that. They tried to protect their students, and it didn’t work. Everyone got hurt, somehow.

Most pointedly, Jack continues, Wyatt was right when he said there is a serious culture problem at AAA. Too much competition, too cutthroat. They have to change it, and it’s going to take both of them working together to fix it from the ground up.

Jack looks to Eric, a far cry from the resolute and polished principal we met at the beginning of the season. He lets out an exhale, locking eyes with his most stubborn yet most impassioned faculty member.

Jack: Will you help me?

Eric holds his gaze, obviously contemplating. Then he holds out his hand, waiting for Jack to shake on it. If they’re going to rebuild, then it’s going to take both of them indeed.

Jack hesitates, then links his hand with his.

END OF SEASON.

#S1 #112 #episodes

[filmtrash]

i'd watched cmbyn a year ago and had been obsessed with it for more than a half a year, but then rl happened i stepped back and though my love for the movie and the book remained,I calmed down a bit. I haven't seen the movie for sever months,neither i was involved in cmbyn fandom. Today watched it and was suddenly freaked out by the whole concept of age difference and in the movie it catches the eye even more.1/2

i've never thought i'd say that. i was the one who always defended cmbyn against its haters and pedo accusers who condemned the age gap. So now i'm really freaked out about the age difference and the whole thing. it makes so anxious and uncomfortable. i son't like what i feel but i can't shake it off. 2/2

i know this has been sitting my ask box for a week or so now, sorry anon, i wasn’t not answering because i wanted to ignore it, i just didn’t really know how to. i still don’t think this is the right answer and i’ll probably have a lot of people giving me shit but i wanted to get back to you. 

here’s the thing, the ONLY thing i would change about CMBYN is the age difference. it’s never quite sat right with me either. i know making oliver any younger would mean where he was in life would be factually incorrect, but i feel like everything would be a lot more acceptable if elio was at least 18. although the age of consent was 17 then and there, so it’s arguable if that would even make a difference. 

i don’t want to say i defend it, because i feel as though people give the age gap a free pass because of it being a homosexual relationship. i even admit myself, when i see a difference in age in a heterosexual relationship, it’s a lot more obvious to me and it makes me uncomfortable.

again, not defending it, but i think for me i know timothée and armie are literally best friends in real life, where the age difference obviously doesn’t matter, and where their chemistry is translated on screen it’s just something i don’t really consider. i think that’s the biggest factor for me. HOWEVER, admittedly i didn’t even think about the age gap until it was pointed out to me. to be honest, i was so swept up in it all that age, gender, race etc. all completely went over my head. all i could think about was the raw, powerful feeling of love i felt emanating throughout that movie and book. and by then, i already felt like i knew the characters far too well and personally to judge the age difference you know? which is probably wrong, but like i said, literally nothing else mattered apart from that was elio and this is oliver and there is so much love. 

i know there is a very very very strong case of even if you give consent, it’s still not okay if you’re a minor. i totally agree with that. seventeen is an age where you can be easily influenced, although seventeen year olds don’t like to admit it, but like i said, through feeling as if i know elio’s character through and through, and watching/reading CMBYN so many times, you can see that elio is literally controlling the whole thing. MUCH MUCH more than oliver is. oliver basically gives him near to nothing, perhaps only the shoulder rub, and elio is the one desperately chasing. elio is the one that initiates the first kiss, and oliver pretty much still has his walls up until after they sleep together (cut to oliver’s sad face when elio shrugs him off). the way it is presented is that oliver would have come and gone without giving elio more than a high-five if that’s what elio wanted. and of course, you have oliver asking at every critical point if it’s ok and what elio wants. 

i also feel like if elio was 24 and and oliver was 31 then there wouldn’t be an issue, it’s just because elio is at this influential, pivotal age where he’s finding himself. another thing that makes me feel more at ease about it is the fact that twenty years on elio still loves him, and oliver still loves elio, and therefore elio wasn’t tricked into the relationship and he wasn’t taken advantage of because elio loved oliver when he was 17 and he loved him when he was 37. 

also, for me, CMBYN is much more than just the relationship. it’s all the characters, who each brought something valuable to my life. it’s the scenery and the setting, that makes me feel comforted, warm and safe. it’s the music, that is now the soundtrack to the most pivotal time of MY life. it’s the fact that it taught me everything i know about love, whether that be through elio and oliver or not. i know you say you stepped back from it, and you calmed down, and i did the same too, but now it’s just like an old friend that’s never not going to be a part of my life. that’s why i got the tattoo. im not living and breathing it, i don’t consume it any way i can for  24 hours a day like i used to, but it’s always with me.

it upsets me that the age gap is there, and that a lot of people are blinded by it and rightly so, because CMBYN has so much more to offer than that. i totally respect your opinion and to some extent i agree, but i think because of all the aforementioned factors, along with it being set in a different time where things were different, i’m able to in this case, understand it. 

i hope this helped in some way. thank you for your question.