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personnage-neutre · 6 months ago

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"Tintin, quel âge as-tu ?"

Today marks 96 years of The Adventures of Tintin, and readers have spent at least the last 78 of those years asking the same question: "How old is Tintin?"

The series is infamously coy about giving a definite answer, as was its creator, but I argue in the first part of this post that 1) there was indeed a specific intended age range for Tintin and 2) it is very much possible, using evidence from many different sources including the albums themselves, Tintin magazine, other BDs of the time, and interviews with Hergé, to say exactly what that age range was. Let me be very clear: I'm specifically making an argument about how old Hergé saw him as and how old Hergé wanted him to be seen as.

The second part is less concrete; it presents how a few scholars have interpreted the ambiguity of Tintin's age, plus some of my own thoughts about it that build on their claims. That part is less trying to find an answer to the age question and more trying to explain why his age is so much in question.

This is a long post.

I. Intent

Official sources

When asked about Tintin's age in a 1960 interview for Cinq colonnes à la une, Hergé judged that "il doit rester aux environs de quinze ans" ("he must still be around 15 years old," 0:33-0:44).

In 1962, he gave a very similar response on the Canadian program Premier Plan: "Une quinzaine d'années ? Quinze ans, seize ans, je ne sais pas, moi" ("About 15? 15, 16, I don't know"). "Donc c'est l'adolescent" ("So he's a teenager"), pursues the interviewer, and Hergé answers with a firm yes.

Nearly ten years later, in 1970, he added some nuance: "What age do I give him? I don't know... 17? In my mind, he was about 14 or 15 when I created him, a Boy Scout, and he practically hasn't budged. Let's say that he's picked up three or four years in forty years... All right, let's take the average: 15 plus 4, 19." (translation mine)

In 1979, his interviewer on Apostrophes preempted him on the age question, saying that "c'est un reporter de quinze ans" ("he's a 15-year-old reporter"). Hergé agreed: "C'est ça, à peu près" ("That's right, more or less").

Today, the official Tintin website run by Moulinsart declares him to be "Seize, dix-sept ans (dix-huit tout au plus !)," that is, "16, 17 years old (18 at most!)."

Responses to reader questions in the Journal Tintin

Early in the Journal Tintin's run, between 1946 and 1954, readers who wrote in with questions had a chance to see the responses to their letters published in the magazine each week. Supposedly it would be Tintin himself who was answering - questions addressed to him would be answered in first person, which probably only increased the urge to ask about personal details. So there were naturally many questions about his age, which provoked a range of responses.

Who was actually answering the letters? It's hard to say. But seeing as the responses were being published in the official Tintin Magazine as the voice of Tintin himself, Hergé would surely have been at least consulted on questions concerning his character, especially as the team running the magazine was still very small when it was regularly publishing responses.

The most common response was to dodge the question entirely. The stock phrases were "Qu'importe mon âge ?" and "Tintin n'a pas d'âge !" ("What does my age matter?" "Tintin has no age!").

In a small number of cases they related Tintin's age to that of his readers; an 11 1/2 year old was told that Tintin can be "l'âge que tu souhaites : entre dix et vingt ans !" ("whatever age you want: between 10 and 20!", 1953), and for a couple others, where the age of the writer wasn't listed, Tintin's age is "un peu plus que le tien" ("a little older than you," 1951) or "un peu moins que le double du tien" ("a little less than twice your age," 1950). The target audience of the Journal Tintin - as it was for the Petit Vingtième, and for comics magazines of the time generally - was 8-15 year olds.

The only definite answer that appeared with regularity put Tintin's age between 15 and 20:

(TIntin nos. 19, May 8, 1947; 26, June 26, 1947; 6, February 5, 1948; 2, January 12, 1950; 9, February 27, 1947. The second and third examples also have Tintin declare that "I've travelled so much that I no longer remember where I was born," a fine example of the de-Belgicanization he underwent after the early years.)

("As I've already told several of my friends, I'm older than 15 but younger than 20." (1947) "My age? Let's say 15… or a little older." (1947) "My age? Between 15 and 20 years old." (1948) "Tintin? He has no age! Seeing him move about, he seems to be about 15." (1950) "I'm not yet 20 but I'm older than 15." (1947))

Real-life incarnations of Tintin

When the end of Soviets was celebrated with "Tintin" arriving at the Gare du Nord in Brussels, the role was played by 15-year-old Lucien Pepermans. When the event was repeated for the end of Congo, two years later, Pepermans was replaced by Henri Dendoncker, age 14. About thirty years after that, Jean-Pierre Talbot was declared Tintin's spitting image at 16 ("Same age, same silhouette, same face, same hair," reads the announcement of his casting in the Journal Tintin). He was 20 at most when Blue Oranges (released 1964) was filmed. Hergé told Numa Sadoul that he unconsciously based Tintin in Soviets on his younger brother Paul, who was 16 when it started. Additionally, Palle Huld, often cited as an inspiration for Tintin, completed a tour of the world in 44 days in 1928 at age 15 (and in plus-fours).

(Lucien Pepermans, Henri Dendoncker, Jean-Pierre Talbot, Palle Huld)

In the play Tintin et le mystère du diamant bleu (1941), which Hergé was very involved in the writing and production of, the role of Tintin was played by Mlle. Jeanne Rubens, a woman - a common theater trick for portraying young boys. He was played by a woman again in Radio Luxembourg's 1950s audio adaptations: Claude Vincent, "qui interprétait à merveille les rôles d’enfants et d’adolescents" ("who played children's and adolescents' roles wonderfully"), was the voice of Tintin. Sadly those broadcasts appear to be lost, but she can still be heard in the likely similar role of Alix.

(Shared on forum-tintinophile.com, "Tintin aux Indes, ou le mystère du diamant bleu." Certainly the only adaptation that got his height difference with the Thompsons right.)

In 1959, the Journal Tintin invited readers who thought they looked like Tintin to send in their pictures; five candidates for "Tintin's lookalike" were chosen by the magazine and presented to the readers for them to vote on. The winner was a 15-year-old, and while the ages of the other contestants aren't listed, they appear to be the same age or younger.

(Tintin nos. 25, June 24, 1959 & 31, August 5, 1959)

Comparisons with contemporary characters

Mainstream BD in the first half of the 20th century was not particularly inventive, especially as it was contending with its relative youth as a medium, a focus on the children's market, and, especially after WWII, heavy scrutiny from both religious and secular moral watchdogs. In the specific case of the Journal Tintin, Hergé's iron-fisted artistic direction in the early years led to a high level of artistic homogeneity across the magazine, while restrictions on the types of stories that could be told (from both the threat of censors and expectations about reader interests) limited variety in plots, characters, and settings.

All that is to say that a lot of what was being published alongside Tintin in the 40s and 50s looked more or less like Tintin, and even was likely directly modeled on it, which makes it useful for comparison. The protagonists of the time can be generally divided by age into children, the "15-20" range, young men, and middle-aged men. Each category is visually distinct (comics are a visual medium!) and each results in a slightly different kind of story with different character dynamics.

Here's Tintin with a couple of the teenage protagonists that appeared alongside him in his magazine:

(L'Affaire Tournesol (1956), p. 51; La Griffe Noire, Tintin no. 6, February 5, 1958; Les Deux Visages de Kid Ordinn, Tintin no. 1, January 2, 1957)

Hergé's no. 2 collaborator Jacques Martin created Alix (center, 1948), a Roman Gaul confirmed to be 16 in the original albums. Chick Bill (right, 1955), who in looks and narrative role is effectively just Tintin as a cowboy, is identified (by none other than Franquin) with the 15-20 age range. Some shared visual markers of their youth are a short and slight build, rounded shoulders, a round head, and a soft jawline. While all very independent, they are all three semi-accompanied by a much older man and a child sidekick.

Now, here are some examples of characters from the next age range up:

(L'énigmatique Monsieur Barelli, Tintin no. 44, November 2, 1950; L'ouragan de feu, Tintin (Kuifje) no. 37, September 15, 1960; Défi à Ric Hochet, Tintin (Kuifje) no. 8, February 25, 1964)

Hergé's no. 1 collaborator Bob de Moor had a humor-adventure series using the same style as Hergé, but his character, stage actor Georges Barelli (left, 1950), is a grown man. Martin's second series was required by publishers to somehow be a modern AU of Alix, but Alix's counterpart, reporter in the same way that Tintin is a reporter Guy Lefranc (center, 1952), is clearly older than him. So-called reporter, really amateur detective Ric Hochet (yes, that's his name, right, 1955) is kind of an odd case; he started out a child, then looked basically exactly like Chick Bill (they were both drawn by the same artist, Tibet), then finally settled into his final form as a young man in his mid-twenties - a 1969 album places him at age 26. All three own their own cars (admittedly a moot point for Alix and Chick), and, compared to their teenage counterparts, they're much more likely to have friends and colleagues their own age instead of being supervised by someone older.

It should be clear from these six pictures that Tintin was not drawn in a way meant to make readers think he was an adult. And besides, there's really no reason to believe that Hergé, who once declared that "my primary objective is to be legible. The rest follows," would have chosen to give his main and titular character an appearance that was somehow deceptive. I'm prepared to say with confidence that Tintin looks young because he's supposed to be seen as young.

Textual evidence

For this section, I first look at a few ways that the albums actively present Tintin as a non-adult character. However, most of what follows is about showing that what happens in the albums does not contradict the argument that Tintin is intended to be a teenager. The Adventures of Tintin may be deceptively timeless, but not only is the series nearly a century old, it also was written during a time of extremely rapid and intense social, cultural, and technological change. Consequently, I want to make sure that I'm not judging the past with the attitudes of the present; in order to put the series in its proper context, I try to identify viewpoints and conventions expressed in texts created at the same time (and, when possible, by the same author) to see if a teenaged Tintin fits in with them.

In looking over how other characters refer to him across the albums, one sees that Tintin's most distinctive feature to those around him is his youth. This is, I think, more visible in the original French, where other characters address or describe him with a whole array of words commonly used for children: jeune homme, (jeune) garçon, gamin, galopin, blanc-bec, enfant de choeur, fiston, freluquet, moussaillon, (mon) petit (used as a noun), and morveux, not to mention many, many instances of characters appending "jeune" or "petit" to another word ("reporter," for instance). In English, he's variously (a) young man, (young) boy, kid, boyo, whippersnapper, wonderboy, lad, brat, puppy, young fellow-me-lad, and cabin-boy, along with liberal use of the corresponding adjectives "young" and "little." (I've collected specific panel examples for reference in another post.)

As @professorcalculusstanaccount has pointed out, there's no question of Tintin being called up for the draft as Haddock is in Black Gold; that album also contains the only example of Tintin's competency being questioned because of his age, on page 7: "So you're the new radio officer... You look a bit young to me..." (There's one similar remark, in America, after Tintin is injured in a car accident on page 6: "The poor kid..." "He looks so young...") Him not being called to war is particularly striking because Belgium historically required young men to do compulsory military service at age 18 or 19, after which they would be enrolled in the reserve army (p. 274). Thanks to a hard-to-translate joke in the original French for Emerald (below), we know that military service exists in Tintin's world and that the Thompsons have done theirs; Hergé did his at age 19, and then was called up from the reserves in 1939, interrupting the magazine publication of, precisely, Black Gold. Given his longtime anti-war stance and the peace sign sticker he wears in Picaros, though, one can easily imagine Tintin becoming a conscientious objector after it was legalized in 1964 - but by 1964, most of the series was already over.

(Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, p. 37)

He also doesn't dress like an adult: the plus-fours look very childish after the 1930s, as @illegally-blind-and-deaf pointed out. He also never wears a proper hat, only a flat cap in a few early adventures, and from Temple on (that is, after 1948) he runs around in his shirt and sweater with no tie or jacket. Some of that can be put down to the importance Hergé placed on his characters being maximally recognizable, but it certainly doesn't make Tintin look any older - look at a few of Hergé's crowd scenes and compare how the background characters are dressed.

Next, he doesn't seem to ever need to shave. In fact, in the original French for Black Island, Tintin remarks that the bad guys have gotten away "à mon nez et à ma barbe," an expression equivalent in English to "right under my nose" but literally "at my nose and at my beard," to which Snowy incredulously responds "Your beard? What beard?"

(L'Île Noire, p. 29)

It's true that nearly everyone who meets Tintin, including his adult friends, addresses him respectfully with the formal pronoun "vous" instead of with the informal "tu," as you typically would for someone much younger than you. However, Pierre Assouline attributes this to a dislike of over-familiarity on Hergé's part, citing him as saying that "Le tutoiement est la fausse monnaie de l'amitié" ("Using 'tu' is the counterfeit money of friendship").

(There are a few moments where Haddock slips and uses tu with Tintin, but I won't go into them here. Suffice to say that the majority of them are indeed moments where he's treating Tintin more as a child.)

Much has been made of Tintin's nonchalance about drinking alcohol as proof of adulthood, but evidence from other BDs indicates that this perception is a result of a shift away from historically looser attitudes towards drinking. Early comics for children frequently carried moralizing messages, but there's no marked moralizing present around youths drinking like there is around them smoking.

Compare, for example, the difference in tone between these two Quick & Flupke pages, where the kids are sternly warned off from tobacco...

(Originally published in Le Petit Vingtième nos. 4, January 28, 1932 & 43, October 24, 1935)

...Versus this gag, where Flupke's own relatives getting him drunk on New Year's over his protests is played entirely for humor.

(Le Petit Vingtième no. 1, January 3, 1935. "Tu es un homme et tu dois boire!")

There was even a follow-up comic at the same time the year after, in which Flupke imagines the alcohol he'll be plied with on January 1st and attempts to move to the North Pole to avoid it.

If a kid as young as Flupke is being given alcohol, then Tintin really doesn't have to be much older to be drinking as well. In fact, one might even note an echo between Flupke's reluctance to drink here and Tintin's in Picaros, when he's pressured to take a swig of whisky by Arumbaya custom (p. 34). On the other hand, since Quick and Flupke are so young, the ban on smoking is stronger for them. Tintin is old enough to occasionally be offered a cigarette, but still young enough that he always must refuse: Hergé was adamant that Tintin remain a good model because of the children who identified with him, while Haddock smoking his pipe, for example, never raised the same issue.

Beyond that, for a non-Hergé example and a later one (from 1960), here's child tennis prodigy Jari, hero of an eponymous strip in the Journal Tintin. He's just bicycled from Belgium to the Netherlands and wants a refreshment, so he goes to a drink stand and orders a beer - and no one bats an eye. Similarly, the only alcohol that Tintin orders casually, in a cafe or pub, is beer (Golden Claws p. 2, Black Island p. 41).

(Jari et le Plan Z, Tintin (Kuifje) no. 40, October 6, 1960)

At the same time, this relaxed attitude has limits. Tintin won't share a friendly drink with Haddock, for example when returning to Marlinspike after an excursion (though Haddock pours two glasses anyway in Affair (p. 3)). Calculus scolds Haddock severely when he thinks that Haddock has given Tintin champagne at breakfast in Tibet (p. 4: "Vous avez bien tort de lui faire boire du champagne de grand matin, à ce garçon !…"). Later in that same album, Haddock drunkenly warns Tintin against alcohol, telling him it's "very bad for young people like you!" (p. 38).

Next, while Tintin is undeniably capable of driving a car, there's actually no indication outside of the earliest stories that he can legally drive. (A quick Google search also tells me that Belgium has historically been notoriously lax on road safety.) At no point after the first four albums - that is, after Hergé became interested in telling a story that makes logical sense, a development typically placed at Blue Lotus - does Tintin drive a car that was acquired legally, not commandeered or outright stolen. (In Soviets and Congo he buys a car; in Cigars he drives the two Rajaijah victims to the asylum, though I doubt anyone was worried about him getting pulled over in the jungle.) On the few occasions where there isn't an emergency, it's always Haddock who drives; see for example Crystal Balls or the few pages of Thérmozéro. When Tintin finally gets a vehicle of his own, in Picaros, it's... a motorbike, which one can get a license for at a younger age than for a car. And in Alph-Art, where the motorbike plays a much larger role, Haddock still drives Tintin into town (p. 25) - and then gets left in the car while Tintin investigates!

Hergé also apparently didn't think flying a plane was particularly difficult. In Jo et Zette, one of his other series, Hergé has little Jo be able to fly his father's "Stratonef" and even land it from a glide, despite only ever hearing his father talk about how to fly it. Over the course of the two-part story (Le Testament de M. Pump and Destination New-York), Jo manages multiple successful flights - more than Tintin ever does! - despite unambiguously being a child.

(Destination New-York, p. 41)

And as with the cars, every plane Tintin ever flies is stolen, so whether he has a legal license or not really doesn't matter.

The same goes for his guns. In all but the first albums and Ear where, surprised in his flat, he really does pull a revolver out of nowhere, Tintin's guns are explicitly either given to him or taken from a disarmed enemy. The series doesn't make a point of him owning and carrying his own gun - just the opposite. And while it seems to us now that Tintin has a lot of firearm use for a children's comic, proficiency with guns was honestly a genre expectation for all adventure heroes of the time (just don't put a gun on your cover). For example, Chang, who from his introduction on acts like a second Tintin, wields a pistol at the end of Lotus and is even implied to be the one who makes the shot that breaks Didi's sword despite appearing even younger than Tintin. (See also the previous section of this post; Chick Bill is carrying a gun in the picture I included.) What's more, the gunplay in Tintin is actually a step down from its predecessor Totor, where Hergé's titular Boy Scout kills a man with a rifle shot to the face.

In short, Tintin is able to do a lot of things he shouldn't legally be able to do by simply not doing them legally.

The fact that Tintin lives alone isn't necessarily a mark of maturity either. It's hardly uncommon for a young adventure protagonist to be unusually unsupervised; it's effectively a demand of the genre. Hergé learned why that is from experience when he created Jo et Zette for the editor of the French, ultra-Catholic children's magazine Coeurs Vaillants, who had raised concerns about how unrealistic Tintin was. In Hergé's own (translated) words:

(From Entretiens avec Hergé, reproduced & translated in The Comics Journal no. 250, p. 191)

Parents are a nuisance, one that Hergé was only too happy to dispense with in Tintin's case. And besides, Tintin isn't completely alone forever; with the introduction of the Marlinspike "family," not to mention Marlinspike Hall itself, during the war, he at least ends up with a home and some adult supervision, however dubious it may be at times.

As for his schooling, according to a report on the Belgian education system from 1932, education was only compulsory there (not to mention free) from ages 6 to 14. That same report records that in 1928, the number of students in the higher level of secondary education - corresponding to high school in American terms - was only 1% of the number of students enrolled in compulsory primary school. Even adjusting for the fact that primary education enrolls children for twice as long, the percentage is still a paltry 2.6%. And then the number of students in university that same year was only about three-quarters of the number of students in secondary education.

What that means is that at the time when Tintin was getting started, only very, very few people stayed in school beyond age 14. Hergé himself was one of those few, but to many of his readers in the early years, the idea that Tintin was already working at age 14 or 15 would have been not just reasonable but recognizable - especially as he has no apparent family to support him. (Not that Tintin isn't knowledgeable: judging from the number of books in his apartment, we can presume that he's quite the autodidact.) Of course public education was broadened after WWII, but by then the character was already firmly established.

As for how Tintin is already a reporter, well, Hergé freely admitted that he gave him the job just because that's what he thought was cool at the time. "Of course it was a pretext," he said on British radio in 1977. (The announcer for that interview describes Tintin as "a 16-year-old Belgian boy with a strange lick of hair, a pair of plus-fours, and a terrier." In it Hergé, questioned about the outsize success of his series, responds that for him "he [Tintin] keeps to be a little boy. Only that.") The tone of the series would be very different if Tintin were just an office clerk or a paperboy, after all - and besides, all but the youngest readers of Le Petit Vingtième would have understood that it's not a real newspaper, just a little children's magazine, so the idea of it having its own official reporter was not to be taken fully seriously.

It's important to remember that our current cultural idea of the teenager as a separate, unique stage between childhood and adulthood was largely a post-WWII American innovation - in fact, the word "teenager" only entered popular use in the 1940s. By contrast, fully half of the Adventures of Tintin (up to the first 2/3 of Crystal Balls) were written either before or during WWII. Hergé himself, born in 1907, began submitting illustrations to a magazine (Le Boy-Scout) at 14, was hired at the Vingtième Siècle at 18, created Totor and did his military service, reaching the rank of sergeant, at 19, and before turning 22 had been given full responsibility for creating and running the Petit Vingtième, gotten engaged to his first wife, Germaine Kieckens, and created Tintin. Being young looked different then.

To close this section I'll also note that, as far as I can tell, positioning Tintin as a teenager never seemed to pose much of a problem to anyone reading the series while it was actively running. Anecdotally, nearly every published source I've read takes for granted that he's an adolescent, and an exception like writer of multiple books on Tintin Renaud Nattiez saying on the air in 2016 that he thinks Tintin is at least 22 (~03:30-03:50) seems to be a uniquely 21st-century development.

TL;DR: Everything I can find indicates that Tintin was always intended to be around 15, and never older than 20, years old.

II. Interpretation

Finally, it's important to not overstate Hergé's commitment to realism. At the end of the day, Tintin can do whatever the story needs him to be able to do, because he's the protagonist of a very straightforward adventure serial. He's always been aspirational, even for Hergé himself: "Tintin is me the way I'd like to be: heroic, flawless." And yet Tintin, victim of its own success, has always been held to a higher standard of realism than its fellow comics, not to mention a higher level of scrutiny in general. Even if, as I've tried to demonstrate, Tintin's feats aren't entirely out of the range of possibility (or at least the norm for comics characters) for his time period, I'm not arguing that he's supposed to be a perfectly accurate representation of the average boy of any point in the mid-20th century. I also don't deny that he typically does act like an adult. So the guiding question here is: How can this dual nature of Tintin's - his adolescent status and adult aspects - be interpreted?

Jean-Marie Apostolidès writes that as "il unifie dans sa personne deux aspects opposés de l’existence, l’enfance et l’âge adulte" ("he brings together in his person two opposing aspects of existence, childhood and adulthood"), Tintin represents "un mythe réconciliatoire" ("a reconciliatory myth") of which the "fonction implicite est de ressouder entre deux générations une confiance brisée" ("implicit function is to mend a broken trust between two generations"). He names this type of child-adult character the "surenfant" ("superchild"), and argues that it is specific to the 20th century and the cultural shock of WWI.

For Pol Vandromme, who wrote the first book of analysis on Tintin (or on any BD), Tintin is simply a perfected version of the teenage boy, one that other teenage boys can aspire to. First, he cites as conventional wisdom that Tintin is around 15, and concludes that "c'est dans tous les cas un adolescent" ("in any case he's a teenager"). While Vandromme accepts that Tintin is presented as a teenager, he also points out that Tintin doesn't represent the experience of being a teenager; Tintin "ne présente [...] que les apparences de l'adolescence" ("only displays the appearance of adolescence") because he's so self-assured and stable, traits antithetical to "l'époque de la métamorphose" ("the time of metamorphosis") that is adolescence.

And yet "il [Tintin] demure malgré tout suffisamment proche pour que les garçons se disent qu'ils auront un jour la chance de lui ressembler, d'imiter son style de vie. [...] Ce que Tintin propose à ces garçons de quinze ans, c'est la figure achevée de leur âge. Il les venge de leurs insuffisances" ("he [Tintin] remains all the same close [i.e. similar] enough that these boys tell themselves that one day they'll have the chance to be like him, to imitate his way of life. [...] What Tintin offers to these 15-year-old boys is the perfected version of their age [group]. He makes up for their shortcomings"). Consequently, having put themselves in Tintin's place, these boys "ont l'illusion d'être déjà de la tribu des jeunes gens qui ont découvert dans leur sac de voyage les clefs qui ouvrent les portes de la fable du monde" ("have the illusion of already being part of the clan of young people who have discovered in their travel bag the keys that open the doors of the world's fable"). In plainer language, being able to identify with Tintin as an apparent peer lets teens imagine themselves as being more capable and powerful than their age allows in reality, an attractive illusion.

I'll add that the static quality of Tintin as a character that Vandromme identifies is dictated by the form of the series. When presented with a teenage protagonist in a work, the novelistic expectation is that what follows will be some kind of bildungsroman, where the events of the story will push the protagonist to change and mature into adulthood. However, I believe that it's a mistake to approach The Adventures of Tintin as a novel when it is fundamentally a serial - even late in his career, when he didn't need to do prepublication anymore, Hergé's approach to plot was still oriented around the page-a-week format. Serial characters, as a rule, change very little. Tintin gets compared to Sherlock Holmes more than once in the series, and it's also true on a meta level: Holmes has a few minor moments of character development, but he largely remains exactly the same over the course of Conan Doyle's stories, which were likewise published in a magazine. In a true serial, the status quo is god, because the main aim of the serial is to perpetuate itself - theoretically forever. And so Watson always finds a reason to return to Baker Street, and Tintin never gets old enough to think of settling down and getting a real job.

Like Holmes, Tintin does change and grow somewhat as a character over the course of the series, but also like Holmes, that growth is not a planned arc with an endpoint, as you would expect in a novel. Instead, it's just a result of Hergé himself maturing and changing. In his contribution to L'archipel Tintin, Benoît Peeters notes that "Grande est la tentation, pour beaucoup, de lire la série comme une totalité, un monument où tout signifierait" ("The temptation is great, for many, to read the series as a totality, a monument where everything has meaning"). And yet he declares that "si accomplies soient-elles... Les Aventures de Tintin se sont élaborées en l'absence de tout grand dessein" ("however polished they may be... The Adventures of Tintin were created in the absence of any grand design"), citing the testimonies of both Hergé and those who knew him at the beginning of the series. Hergé never really had a plan for Tintin as a character; he really did just put him in situations over and over again for a little more than fifty years. However, now that the series is only read in album format and serial publishing is less common, the "temptation" Peeters describes is even stronger. This mismatch in narrative expectations may be part of why modern readers might struggle to view Tintin as a teenaged character.

There's one more element to Tintin's strangeness: the world of the series was built around Tintin himself to facilitate his adventures. Vandromme recalls the fact, so obvious that it's easily forgetten, that "Tintin étant ce qu'il est et ne pouvant être un autre, infléchit l'intrigue d'une certaine manière. [...] Remplacez Tintin par le père Fenouillard et il vous faudra modifier l'album de fond en comble. Dans un roman les personnages déterminent les événements avant d'être déterminés par eux" (Tintin, being who he is and unable to be anyone else, influences the story in a certain way. [...] Replace Tintin with the father of the Fenouillards [character from a 19th-century comic about the misadventures of a French family abroad, n.b.] and you'll have to change the album from top to bottom. In a novel, the characters define the events before the events define them"). This point is especially relevant to Tintin given that the series' beginning was, to put it mildly, haphazard. Starting from Soviets, where Tintin is alone with his dog in a bizarre world where he can sneeze down a sewer grate, cut down a tree with a pocketknife, or fistfight a bear - whatever it takes to keep the plot moving - set a precedent for the character: that Tintin, and nobody else, will always triumph over whatever enemy or obstacle he is faced with.

Because it's founded on Tintin himself, there are no real adults in the Adventures, and in fact there can't be any. Preserving Tintin's Soviets-era boy hero status as the world of the series became steadily larger and more realistic created a kind of 'competency warp' where Tintin, along with his young "doubles," Chang and Zorrino, is effectively always the most capable, the master of the situation, while those closest to him who are much older (the Thompsons, Haddock, Calculus...) tend to act rather childishly. I think it's telling that the 1946 introduction of Blake & Mortimer is often hailed in terms like these: that "pour la première fois, les héros n'étaient pas des enfants, mais des adultes responsables dont la psychologie était en parfaite harmonie avec leurs fonctions" ("for the first time, the heroes were not children, but responsible adults whose psychology was in perfect harmony with their roles," emphasis mine). All the major adult characters in Tintin had been introduced at that point, but apparently none of them qualified as "responsible" or properly suited for their positions.

Apostolidès similarly notes a deforming effect: "Tintin est un adolescent qui, sans jamais entrer dans l’âge adulte, rajeunit le monde en se confrontant à lui. Au lieu que le personnage se soumette passivement au monde adulte, s’intègre dans une histoire, vieillisse et meure, c’est l’univers extérieur qui se fige dans le temps au contact du héros" ("Tintin is an adolescent who, without ever entering adulthood, makes the world younger by confronting it. Instead of the character submitting himself passively to the adult world, fitting in to a history, getting older and dying, it's the outside world that freezes in time at the hero's touch"). Not only does Tintin resist adulthood himself, he also protects others from its effects.

There are characters who escape the warp, but they must stay on the very edges of Tintin's orbit. One example is the efficient and no-nonsense Mr. Baxter from the Moon books. He has a real job: he's director of the atomic center, and every time we see him he's actually doing it. He also remains disengaged from the antics of the Marlinspike crew, often exasperated and confused by them. They don't belong in his serious space program, and he doesn't belong in their funny adventure series - hence the clash. Another (and very different) example is Jolyon Wagg. I wish I could remember where I read it, but I once saw it pointed out that Tintin and Wagg almost completely ignore each other; their only direct interaction in the whole series is saying hello to each other exactly once (Emerald p. 17). The unidentified author's point was that Wagg inhabits a world so intensely banal, so different from Tintin's - one with community organizations, salesman jobs, an old mother, an Uncle Anatole, a wife and (a lot of) children - that the two can't even come into contact. Wagg may be almost preternaturally obnoxious, but he's also a genuinely ordinary man in a way that the major characters really aren't.

Tintin must remain the sole and main driver of action, because if he isn't, the series would have to change fundamentally. That means no other character can threaten his role by being more competent and responsible than him - and so the adults become ridiculous and/or irrelevant, and Chang and Zorrino are only allowed to act for one album each. And yet Hergé created Tintin as a teenager, and suggested that a Tintin who progressed past teenagerhood would also grow out of adventure: "Il est difficile, pour un personnage comme ça, à le faire vieillir. Parce que s'il vieillit, il va avoir vingt ans, il va avoir vingt-deux ans, il va rencontrer une jolie fille, il va se marier, il va avoir des enfants..." ("It's hard to make a character like that get older. Because if he gets older, he'll be 20, he'll be 22, he'll meet a pretty girl, he'll get married, he'll have children..."). Tintin passing into adulthood, 'real' adulthood, symbolized here by settling down and starting a family, would make the series just as unsustainable as demoting him to a more technically age-appropriate role would; both sides of the tension between Tintin's youth and his maturity are required to make him a proper adventure hero for children.

And so he remained, as he remains today, the world's most competent teenager.

#tintin #hergé #journal tintin #le petit vingtième #resources #also featuring:#jean-pierre talbot #quick et flupke #jo et zette #alix #chick bill #monsieur barelli #lefranc #ric hochet #jari

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keeksandgigz · 21 days ago

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poison in the water

chapter 1 of the shadow of the carrion

pairing: post outbreak! joel miller x reader

carrion: noun A dead body; a corpse or carcass. or Anything vile or corrupt.

summary: September 23, 2013- after a fight with your mom, you come across the strange sight of a twitching man, and that same night, all hell breaks loose. four years later, you begin your journey west with your mother and sister. after an ambush by a pack of hunters, you're saved by the least likely person to want to save you.

content: 18+ mdni always!! this is game joel, canon- compliant violence, pre- canon, hunter!joel & tommy, swearing, a lot of exposition for this chapter, a whole bucketload of angst and my usual penchant for drawn on descriptions [3.5k words]

the carrion masterlist | the carrion playlist

divider by @saradika-graphics

For as long as you could remember, you’d found death everywhere you went. In your tender ages— the garbles of fur, feathers, and blood. Birds, raccoons, possums, cats, marred creatures on the asphalt that you couldn’t seem to peel your eyes off of on the way and back to school. Their organs spilled on the hot pavement, fur swaying with the wind of the passing cars. You’d look at them, with intrigue, disgust, pity, waiting for the animal to become another unidentifiable dark shadow on the road within the span of a week, its meat and bones absorbed by the unforgiving earth.

And then, like a dark curse that seemed to haunt you, it hit your family next. It prepotently infiltrated itself in the ties you had with your grandmother— your last living, anyway, the only one you’d ever known— as her Memphis home engulfed itself in flames, and took her with it. There was no body to see, this time. No bones, or blood to fixate over. Just a gray urn looming over you on the mantle of your family home.

You’d feel her speak to you at times, absentmindedly, behind the background static of the TV, calling your name, slithering in your ears. And you’d turn, of course you did, recognizing your grandmother’s creaky voice, and when you’d told your mother, she’d laugh and brush it off. You’d always been just a kid. A kid with a vivid imagination.

That same galloping imagination had gotten you a full ride scholarship to a prestigious writing program, and it was so close you could almost reach out and it. Your first taste of freedom from your family. Your overbearing mother, the woman who was always supposed to be in your corner, seemed to be on the opposite end of it, with her biting words ready to lash at you. Engulfed by the cowardice of your father, who never seemed to be able to stand up for you against the green-eyed monster that lived inside of your mother, and just stoically stood in a corner. A stifling environment where you most often felt made of glass, ever since your sister was born, if not for the underhanded critiques, without a single kind word ever directed towards you.

Your classes were supposed to start the following week, and all your suitcases were laid neatly next to your door, like a golden ticket to freedom, and your mother couldn’t hold back from being especially venomous to you during that week. So you left, just to clear your mind for a bit. You couldn’t believe those were your last days with your family, and your mother had decided to spend them screaming at you. It was supposed to be a short walk around the neighborhood, just to cool down, just to let your mother’s We’ll all be so much happier once you’re gone bounce around the walls of your mind, warbling her words in repetition, just to let it lose its stinging meaning. A noise interrupted you– a man.

The unnatural movement of his body, his heaving, irregular breaths. His hands and neck twitched with a clicking sound, almost as if it were involuntary. Poor man. Pity almost compelled you to reach out, but then he slowly turned, and the words “are you okay?” died in your throat. The man’s eyes were void, mindlessly looking at the ground as his body bent unnaturally to throw up on the concrete. He hadn’t noticed you, it was a good enough time to head back without attracting his attention, but what gripped yours was the maroon stain on the man’s mouth. Dripping down on the floor along with his bile– blood? Only then you noticed another body, limply laying on the grass, the body of a woman, whose unnatural position allowed you to see the blood oozing from the bite marks on her neck, like the skin had been lacerated. You felt yourself grow sick, hiding behind a wall of vines as you tried to sneak away from the scene in a nearby alley, after which you ran home until your lungs burned, and your eyes were misty with tears. Your own bile on your front lawn, confused and terrified as your chest heaved with difficulty.

“Hope you’re ready to come inside and apologize” you distantly heard your mother’s stern tone from the front door, but there was something gripping you, right by the throat, that compelled you to stay on the grass. Your mother would not have believed you.

That night you went to sleep without eating, then, the same shadow of death that had followed you since you were little, engulfed your whole life.

You were woken up by the sound of alarms, and your mother shaking you awake. Her alarmed tone still haunts you, she called you honey, something she hadn’t done since you were sixteen. We’ve got to go, hurry, honey. Even after everything, that sentence echoed and warbled itself in your nightmares as you were rushed out of bed and out of your home. That’s all you remember doing that night: running.

***

You’d lost your father within the initial pandemonium of the outbreak– ten days after, to be exact. You and your family snuck into a nearby wine cellar, next to a house on the hills. Scavenging food with your father, not straying too far from your hiding place– those things hadn’t cleared out of the city just yet. Your father had managed to find a radio that stayed on at all hours of the day, covering the helpless cries of those twitching bodies outside. Had a couple close calls, as one of them managed to venture out to the hills. You’d heard his sobs as he regretfully threw up, lamented a garbled I don’t want to do this, followed by an unnatural snarl as his bile slithered down the cracks of the wooden beams of the roof. You’d trembled in fear in the opposite corner, held by your mother’s arms, as she hugged your sister, unmoving, wondering if by an insane stroke of misfortune that thing could have been able to open the heavy doors to the cellar.

Then, one day your father went off to gather, by himself, and a gunshot in the distance of the sparse forest up ahead was all you needed to hear to know what had happened.

No limbs flailing in the dark of night as he ran away from a possible horde, no heroic death. Just the hollow boom of his small revolver, and a head full of questions that haunted you for weeks and months, as you waited for the area to clear, and you’d found what was left of his skeleton in the forest where you’d used to go with him to scavenge. Picking up what was left of his skull, you clearly saw the fissure in the muddied bone, right on top of his head. You’d found his revolver right next to his bones, which he briefly taught you how to shoot in those ten days you’d been with him, carefully placing the safe and tucking it into your backpack. Your father had always been a coward, anyway.

Within the span of four years, your resources waned, food became scarce, and the wine cellar became too small a place for your mother and sister, as the former drank away her grief. With each of her heavy sobs, you lived in fear of those ‘infected,’ that was what they had called them over the radio, hearing her from a distance, and having to watch her heaving body get torn apart by a pack of them. Your sister was still young, she couldn’t possibly have been able to contribute, so the responsibility fell on your shoulders.

So you left Memphis in the Summer of 2017, the only home you’d ever known, to venture East. Your mother had heard about a rebel group, the Fireflies, looking for a cure. It’s been years since they grouped, they sure ‘s hell got a cure by now, your mother muttered as she packed her bag and swaddled your sister, who was four and could barely walk, on her aching back. You took turns carrying her, hearing pained hisses behind you by the hour. You’d try to keep to the forests, as the infected had not traveled there, yet, and as long as you stayed outside the city, things had been relatively safe.

Regardless, your father’s revolver burned against your back, forcing itself to be felt, as a testimony of the duty you had to your family, to keep them alive, despite the cowardice he’d ended his own life with— without explanation.

When the forests began to become sparser and sparser, you’d had no choice but to venture into the cities. You’d reached Cincinnati without so much as a scratch, just debilitating back pains from carrying your sister, and an insatiable hunger for rest. You’d heard that most of the QZ’s had fallen in the hands of the Fireflies, the closest being Pittsburgh, which, according to the fading map you kept in your back pocket, was going to be another day’s travel. For the first time in a while you felt optimistic about your plan working, you’d almost gotten your mother and sister so close to safety, so close to living a decently peaceful life.

If only it hadn’t been for the bullet that perforated your mother’s back and lodged itself in your sister’s stomach.

***

Joel hated the summer. How sticky his clothes felt against his skin, how every sunbeam on his aging skin felt like Sarah again. It reminded him of pools, soccer games, and a lazy beer on his porch as the sun went down– things that had been gone for a long time.

He found respite in the shade of the abandoned building he’d set up camp at with his crew. He exhaustingly got up from his dingy makeshift cot with a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead, he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in almost half a decade. There was a soft breeze treading through the skeletal desolation of what used to be downtown, providing relief from the damp fabric on his back. It was the third or fourth city in the span of five months. Five months of traveling up and down the Midwest– hunter group after hunter group, riding with the same shameful, guilt-ridden monkey on his aching back, while Tommy talked his ear off about quitting all this senseless killing.

“Just a few months more, then we’ll quit. We’ll kick these assholes to the curb and start goin’ East. We’ll go somewhere nice.” Joel said, exactly five months before.

And yet, there he was. Killing more people for a few scraps of extra clothes and food. He couldn’t. Not when he knew leaving meant certain death, and, had they made it out, even sparser meals than what he’d gotten used to.

On a lucky day, where clueless tourists would trek through the ruined remains of what once was the QZ, he was able to rack up enough provisions to keep him and Tommy afloat for a couple weeks. Yet, big groups were sparse, and the greed of his fellow hunters was as devastating as their violence. Gathered around the cadavers like starving vultures, picking apart their backpacks, tearing clothes and shoes off of the still-warm bodies, laughing maniacally at their senseless violence. He hated the sadistical nature of it all.

He’d woken up because of gunshots that morning, which always left him hopeful for some good loot to bring back to Tommy. Only it wasn’t like that this time.

Tommy was already there, wordlessly standing on the curb, staring at the scene ahead. A girl. The side of her head and arms streaked with blood as she held the body of an older woman in her arms, and upon closer inspection there was also a little girl swaddled to her chest. That made Joel’s stomach churn a bit, as he stared at the last girl standing. She was surrounded by his whole crew, laughing and taunting her. Out of his good ear he’d managed to hear the word mom muttered just once. Her eyes went wide, as she stared ahead, taking stock of what animal could have possibly done that to an innocent mother and her little girl. Monsters like him, that’s who. His crew liked to do that— leave the last person standing, look at them cry, keep them alive for a few days to truly let them metabolize that there was no way out of it. Except, many of them tried to put up a fight, brandishing whatever small guns they’d carried with them– they had no chance. But the girl, after the initial shock, just stared straight ahead, holding on to her mother’s body, frozen.

Joel wasn’t a merciful guy, not when the world ripped out his right from his hands, but the way you’d stared straight ahead like a deer in headlights painfully reminded him of how he’d felt the night Sarah died. He often wondered, in the dead of night, as much as he’d hated dwelling on it, where he would’ve ended up had she lived. The two of them and Tommy would’ve escaped to some quiet, small town– one of those that had been completely evacuated the first two weeks after the outbreak– and lived off the land. He enjoyed burying his grief in the bullets and blades he used to harm others, as much as he hated to admit it– he had to keep Tommy alive, after all.

Joel wasn’t a merciful guy, not by a long shot, but something about the way you looked so utterly paralyzed, holding your own mother, made his chest tighten the slightest bit.

“Get Miller to finish the job” one of the men barked, amused. Joel rolled his eyes as the rest of the crew diverted their gazes to him and his brother, and your gaze turned ever so slightly to their direction. He could see your eyes now– two fissures pleading for what could have been two things: to let you survive or to let you join your family. The more he looked at you, the more his throat closed in on itself, so he stepped forward.

“Not you, your pussy brother!” another man laughed, and the rest followed. He could see Tommy blanch under the thunderous laughs of his crew. He couldn’t have done it.

“He won’t do it,” Joel started, trying to buy himself some time. “He’s sweet on girls, aren’t you, Tommy?” he snickered, disgusted at himself for even uttering those words, as he pushed his brother aside, heading to your paralyzed figure.

“He’s gonna do it. Y’know why?” the man who proposed the idea croaked with a slice of a smile. Joel knew why. “Because we’ll kill you both if he doesn’t” the man snickered. He saw your body rise and fall in a quick gasp. You also knew that there was no way out of this.

Joel produced a gun from the back of his ratty jeans and placed it in Tommy’s hand. “Be ready” he muttered, hoping his brother understood the hint, and pushing him closer to you.

You could feel the terrifying anticipation crawling up your bloodied arms still holding your mother’s chilling body.

Please kill me. I’ve got nothing to lose.

The man named Tommy tentatively steps towards you. You can see it in his eyes, he doesn’t want to do it. Your eyes are veiled and misted with tears, tears that you won’t let fall. Not in front of these men.

Don’t kill me just yet– I’ve gotta go East, for my Mama.

Your bones truly feel like ice.

Why can’t I move? Stand up.

Tommy is in front of you, and his arm is pointing the gun at you.

You’ve got a gun. Shoot ‘em.

He’s so close you can see down the barrel, you can see his finger hug the trigger. The last thing you see before you close your eyes is your murderer’s eyes full of tears, then the gun goes off.

But it’s not at you.

***

There’s a deafening silence for a moment. Then another gunshot, then another, then the crowd of men surrounding you grows rowdy and restless. The man who was with Tommy lifts you up, and your legs feel like there’s a million ants crawling under the soiled flesh of your skin.

“You got a gun?” the man yells through the shots. All you do is nod, everything is too loud. “Can you shoot?” Another nod, then he turns around to deliver two head shots. You count three more men standing. “Grab your shit, we gotta run” he commands, and your legs move faster than your brain does.

“They got a truck out back!” Tommy yells, turning around to shoot at the leg of one of your attackers. You hear the bone crack, and for some reason it deafens you.

There’s a strange feeling clouding your mind. It wants you to stop, it wants you to sit down, it wants you to be taken by the men chasing you, to be shot, to join your mother and sister whose limp bodies were becoming to grow smaller the further you ran. What would they have done with them?

“Faster!” you heard one of the two men yell, but everything felt muffled, even the gunshots and screams of the crowd of the three hunters trailing behind you. “‘S close, right behind here” one of them gruffed, as your lungs burned with exertion and the abysmal portions of food you’ve had for the past few months.

“C’mon girl, up” Tommy’s brother said, grabbing your back with his arm to toss you across his body. There was a blindness to what was going on, like your brain was stuck to a few minutes before everyone else’s. That despite the yells and screams of your chasers and the gunshots, everything seemed to be happening from a distance, to everyone else, but not to you. Only when you reached a rickety brown truck you’d realized the man was carrying you– he had to have seen you struggle, and Joel knew the empty stare in your eyes all too well. He hauled you in without many ceremonies as Tommy climbed into the driver’s seat, and he hopped in right next to you with a string of go, go, go, furiously hitting the back of the passenger seat. There was a thick sheen of sweat on the man’s scarred temple as everything moved in slow motion. The rumble of the truck’s motor right under your body, the stray gunshots from the massacre’s survivors.

“Won’t be long ‘til the others reach us, hurry up, Tommy” the man urged, as the car finally went into motion, and for a second you fell back into your body.

“‘M goin’ as fast as I can, Joel” Tommy retorted, his tone just as alarmed as his brother’s. It had been a while since you’d been in a car, you observed, staring at the dilapidated buildings blurring outside the window.

Once you were out of the city, Joel scooted himself in the middle, and climbed over the console to sit in the passenger seat.

“What’s your name?” he asked, in a stern tone, which, regardless, seemed to be much gentler than how he’d yelled at you to get a move on an hour earlier, but it seemed that as hard as you tried, your mouth couldn’t produce a sound. It physically burned your throat to force it.

His eyebrows contorted in concern, for a brief moment, then, like lightning, his expression hardened. That was the man you’d seen when the hunters killed your mom and sister.

“Joel, leave her alone” Tommy interjected, and you were briefly grateful for his meddling– you didn’t want to talk to anyone. How was it that you were able to get out of what had happened alive, yet your mom and your sister’s bodies laid cold on the dirty concrete in a random city. They wouldn’t have received a proper burial, like your dad. There was no family for you to go back to. Nowhere to go but wherever that damn truck took you. Would they have burned the bodies? What would Joel and Tommy have wanted with you? You saw yourself tossed on the side of the highway, wandering aimlessly, until a pack of infected would have come and ripped you apart. That was the ending you deserved, for being alive instead of a four year old girl.

Your lip began to tremble, and your throat closed up for good, and in the midst of your silenced sobs you heard a muffled She can fuckin’ stay quiet the whole ride. See if I care. This need to save every wounded bird that comes your way is gonna get you killed, Tommy.

See if I care.

If only somebody would have cared.

thanks for reading! feedback, comments & reblogs are so appreciated <3

#joel miller fanfiction #joel miller #joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #game joel #the last of us fic #the last of us #tlou #tommy miller #{my writing}#joel miller series #joel miller smut #joel miller fluff #joel miller angst #joel tlou

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animalsalvationassociation · 3 months ago

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The Spectator . . .

The Spectator as he was dutifully named, is an illustrious character amongst the community. Not only does he appear to have his claws in every syndicate, main stream gang, and every Black Market trade in the world, but he also seems to know a little too much about how things function within the A.S.A.'s inner workings.

Now the people, or civilians, don't know this. The UN and the A.S.A. have worked very hard to make sure that his name doesn't mingle within the main stream media. For good measure too as that would expose him as an international threat, and that's the opposite of what anyone wants.

He is the main villain of this story.

What do we know?

He hides in plain sight, whoever this man is, he's very good at blending in. Getting in and out of government facilities without anyone noticing. Traveling all across the world without a single blinking an eye, that is until it's too late and his work has already been finished.

Although, his work in the real world isn't as prominent as his work in the virtual world. Whether he himself is a tech genius or someone in his control, they know the ins and out of any system that's ever existed within modern technology. You know the expression, "I know this like the back of my hand?" well you could say he lives by that saying.

Now no one has ever actually seen his face, but they have heard his voice. A very enhanced and frankly hard to decode version that is. The Spectator has shown on more than one occasion that he's easily capable of taking hold of whatever situation comes his way. And even more capable of making it harder for everyone else to do their jobs. Especially the Octonauts.

Why do I bring them up? Well more recently, although we know he loves to toy with the other branches of the A.S.A. (cough cough, Safari Solutions, cough cough), the Octonauts have far advanced their efforts in helping the environment than the others.

They've created massive machines fit to do the simplest of tasks in the shortest amount of time. Not only have they created these machines, these "gups", but they have also advanced to building an entire artificial reef that, if we're being honest, could rival a city.

Adding to that they have now created their own program (The Octo-Agents), connecting people all around the world to help in the event of natural disasters, injured/sick Wilds, or any claimed "emergency" that deems itself worthy of their attention.

[ Wilds - Creatures who are "less evolved" than the modern image, or have chosen to live outside of the bounds of modern societies. ]

Now that might be a problem for a man who's seems so keen on keeping up a certain image, preferring the upper hand. A man who likes his figurines to be arranged in a certain order on his shelf. A man who doesn't care for people who undo what he's already sought out to create . . .

A man who . . . doesn't mind getting his hands dirty.

Affiliations:

We know he has his claws in the pool, but we don't know how far they reach. His influence has only been affecting the world for over a decade while others only recently have begun to show signs of loyalty.

The most prominent organizations would be . . .

The Black Ice Clan, run and directed by a man named Black Tack. A ever looming organization that's taken hold of the Northern Hemisphere, specifically within the Atlantic Ocean. Their methods are chilling to say the least. No one knows exactly how they've kept control for so long, but that's not to say anyone is eager to dethrone them either. [ Danger Level: 10 ]

The Jersey Gang, a rather up and coming group that has more recently taken hold of the lower swells of Zootopia, although their origins lie in Latin America and Japan. Not as prominent or notable as others who had their time in the sun, but they've proven useful in recent events. They are directed by a man by the name of Capone Redsurge. [ Danger Level: 8 ]

That just leaves. . .

The Order of the Light . . .

Somehow this organization is even more illusive than its competitors. No one is sure what it is or who runs it. But one thing is for sure, it may very well be the most dangerous group in the world.

[ Danger Level: 11 ]

Others:

It's not always clear which allies the Spectator chooses, and it's even harder to know if they even know him at all. In the past there have been claims, some gangs even worship his name although they've never actually come into contact with him. But there are some notable names that the A.S.A. likes to keep an eye on . . .

Professor Julias Copper . . . Investor & Chairman of the A.S.A.

Status: Supervised

Old Colleague of Professor Kelp, Known to be less reliable on the A.S.A.'s behalf.

[ Danger Level: 5 ]

Mr. King . . . Organizer, Promoter, & the Main Investor of the Rimba Grand Prix (RGP)

Status: Supervised

Currently under supervision by the IBD or International Bureau of Defense — Being Investigated for the death of Mr. Riq Harimau

[ Danger Level: 5 ]

Roxy Raider . . . International Thief

Status: Missing

Currently under the charge of Larceny, Embezzlement, Extortion, and a slew of other fraudulent activities.

(Previous) Partnership with the Crimson Paw — Status: No longer speaking . . .

Enemy of C.L.A.D.E.

[ Danger Level: 8 ]

The Crimson Paw . . . International Thief

Status: Reformed

(No longer in league with The Spectator)

Legal Name: Diane Foxington — Govenor of Los Angeles, California

Affiliated with the up and coming, " Bad Guys " — Relationship Unclear

[ Danger Level: 8 ]

Dr. Octavius Brine . . . Geneticist, Experimental Scientist, International Menace

Status: In Hiding

Legal Name: David the Octopus (Dave)

Enemies with North Wind

[ Danger Level: 9 ]

Dawn Bellwether . . . Former Mayor of Zootopia & Cause of the Nightcrawler Outbreak

Status: Imprisoned

"Prey" Activist . . . Being Charged for Attempted Murder and the Transportation/Mistreatment of Nightcrawler Toxins

[ Danger Le͉͎̱̗͖͙̼͍ͪͪ̽̑͊́͢v̷̩̣̗̩͇̦̠͈̥̻̗̣͚̺̎͂̀́̏̀̕e̒ͦ̇̈҉͙͓̳ͩ̃͛̊̒̄͞҉̖͚̪͙l̤̯̞͖ͦ̈ͬ̀: ̹̗͉̹̣̦̤̤̦͗̾̀̐5̙͙̙̘͕͉̹ͩ͂̽ͧͨ ]

⋘ 𝙎𝙮𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙢 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜 ⋙

⋘ 𝑳𝒐𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑫𝒂𝒕𝒂 ⋙

⚠ 𝑬𝒓𝒓𝒐𝒓 ⚠

⋘ ↻ 𝑹𝒆𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒉 ↻ ⋙

⋘ 𝙎𝙮𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙢 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜 ⋙

⋘ 𝑳𝒐𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑫𝒂𝒕𝒂 ⋙

Jasper & Garnétte . . . Heads of the Opaline Emporium & Parlor

Status: Unknown

Two brothers with a deep understanding of the higher markets.

Heirs to the Johar Family, a cabal rooted heavily in both São Paulo, Brazil & Mumbai, India.

Wanted for First Degree Murder, Arson, and Larceny — Known to deal in Black Market Trades in high end gemstones.

No Further Information Available

[ Danger Level: 10 ]

p0nd_5k473r . . . Master Hacker & Dark Web Specialist

Status: Unknown

Tech Specialist — Cause Unknown

Legal Name: Stacy Rana Phrynee

[ Danger Level: 8 ]

Smokes . . . Leader of the Backyard Bruisers

Status: Unknown

High Ranking Gangster

No Further Information Available

Legal Name: Mateo Crudele

[ Danger Level: 9 ]

The Mad Hatter Trio . . . Master Thieves, Hackers,

Status: Unknown

Legal Names: Sean McCauley, Casey Hackney, Mallory Hughes

Sean (Hatter) — Methods Unclear, Currently identified as the leader of the group.

Casey (March Hare) — Loose Cannon, Dangerous to work with, Unpredictable, Weapons

Mallory (Dormouse) — Careful & Precise, Calculated Assailant, Hacker

No Further Information Available

[ Danger Lev̷̩̣̗̩͇̦̠͈̥̻̗̣͚̺̎͂̀́̏̀̕e̒ͦ̇̈҉͙͓̳ͩ̃͛̊̒̄͞҉̖͚̪͙l̤̯̞͖ͦ̈ͬ̀: ̱̘̦̏̄ͧ͂͆͘͞1͕͇̱̙͈̂̾̿̈͒ͅ0̧̢̱̯̺͓̜̳̗̗ͨ͐̔͆]

⋘ 𝙎𝙮𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙢 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜 ⋙

⋘ 𝑳𝒐𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑫𝒂𝒕𝒂 ⋙

. . .

Hello.

Y.N.

⋘ 𝙎𝙮𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙢 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜 ⋙ ⚠ 𝑬𝒓𝒓𝒐𝒓 ⚠ ⋘ 𝑺𝒊𝒈𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑳𝒐𝒔𝒕 ⋙

[ See " The Villains of the A.S.A. " for Reference ]

[ Official Crossover List ]

(Redesigns Coming Soon)

#octonauts #octonauts story #octonauts above and beyond #octonauts the asa #octonauts oc #octonauts villains #y/n #octonauts y/n #y/n art #octosona #octonauts the spectator #octonauts the order of the light #villain headcanons #villain oc #villains #villain league #octonauts fanart

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ashleymilesphil · 5 months ago

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What This Means for Queer Refugees🏳️‍🌈

Hey everyone, I need to talk about something critical for LGBTQ+ refugees like me who rely on the UN and the U.S. for survival and resettlement.

According to this report, Trump is planning to withdraw the U.S. from the UN Human Rights Council and extend the funding ban on UNRWA, the agency that supports Palestinian refugees but also plays a role in humanitarian aid across regions. This is alarming because the U.S. has been a major player in UN resettlement programs including UNHCR, which many LGBTQ+ refugees depend on to escape violence, persecution, and statelessness.

For many of us, the UN resettlement programs are our last hope for safety. If funding is cut and U.S. influence weakens in these agencies, more of us will be left stranded in dangerous camps and hostile environments. Queer refugees already face extreme discrimination, starvation, violence, and lack of medical care. Without international support, survival becomes even harder.

We cannot stay silent. The global queer community and allies must stand against policies that harm refugees and strip away their pathways to safety. Please share this post, raise awareness, and support refugee-led advocacy efforts.

Solidarity can save lives. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️✊🏽

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withered--s0uls · 5 months ago

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Woke up to my cousin sending me this petition;

The tldr is that this petition is a request for the responsible authorities to look over a very extremely right wing party and hopefully ban them.

Even if you are not German, I'd appreciate you reblogging this to help it reach more people. I know the media's eyes are very focused on the USA for a dangerous and terrible government atm - and for good reason mind you! - But with the elections in Germany being next month & the AfD currently being the runner up party (we typically have 2 run the country together unless one gets absolute majority) to a conservative Christian party, Germany's future doesn't look too hot either.

A lot of the AfD program is DANGEROUSLY similar to the shit Trump is doing in the US. Including but not limited to:

Banning abortions unless it's rape or medical concerns (I know teen girls who had several pregnancy scares. This is BAD.)

Cooperating with Russia for business reasons, which in turn has a lot of their program take away accomidations from Ukrainian refugees

Wanting to kick Ukraine out of the EU & UN

Wanting Germany to leave the EU & stop using the Euro (returning to Deutsche Mark instead)

Removing SEVERAL rights for refugees & people with migration background

Cancel environment friendly energy projects & bring back deactivated reactors

And more!

So I would highly appreciate if people could share this so it reaches more German Citizens who can sign🙏

THANK YOU!

This is also a reminder to any Germans seeing this to PLEASE read the programs of parties, look at the surveys for estimated outcomes, and help us push another party into 2nd place.

All other parties claim to not want to cooperate with the AfD, but I'm not taking the risk. Furthermore when I ranted to my father about it, he pointed out that a huge factor in the Nazi party winning was a repetitive re-vote because nobody wanted to cooperate with them, until they eventually got the absolute majority. Multiple generations are in agreement that the AfD is essentially a Neo-Nazi party - Please don't let history repeat itself.

#german politics #bundestagswahl #bundestagswahl 2025 #fuck afd #afd ist keine Alternative #Petitionen #Politik #eu politics #politics #Import #please reblog #please vote #PSA

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thenuclearmallard · 5 months ago

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Number in letters

Small indigenous peoples are offered to preserve their speech

January 21, 2025

All methods of preserving and reviving endangered languages used so far in Russia have not yielded results, stated participants of a forum dedicated to this problem in Krasnoyarsk. In their opinion, only the preservation of traditional forms of residence and management provides a guarantee for the continued existence of such languages. However, forum participants from among government representatives, the expert community and the indigenous peoples themselves agreed that the digital environment of indigenous peoples can help solve the problem.

In the middle of the last century, traditional farming guaranteed the preservation of native languages for the inhabitants of the indigenous northern peoples

Photo: Gorshkov V. / Photo archive of the magazine "Ogonyok" / Kommersant

The scope of use of the languages of indigenous minorities (IMN) of the North, Siberia and the Far East is gradually narrowing, which threatens their continued existence. This was discussed at the strategic session "Creating a digital environment for native languages through the prism of technology and creative industries", which opened in Krasnoyarsk on January 21. It was organized by the Regional Association of Indigenous Minorities of the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

The list of indigenous minorities of the North, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation includes 40 ethnic groups. The largest of them are the Nenets, Evenks, Khanty, Evens, Chukchi and Mansi. Eight such peoples live in Krasnoyarsk Krai. The total number of indigenous minorities of Russia is 262.6 thousand people. The UN General Assembly proclaimed 2022-2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.

"It is very unfortunate that we have to acknowledge the threatening language situation among almost all the indigenous minorities of the North. Thus, among the modern Evenks, only a few families have survived in which their native language is passed on to their children, and these are mostly those families that continue to preserve their traditional way of life," complained the leader of the Evenk Association of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) Aleksandr Varlamov. In his opinion, the education system, which involves teaching children of indigenous minorities in boarding schools, does not ensure the continuity of language knowledge and traditional forms of economic management. "In the current state of affairs, it is quite expected that in the course of decades we will lose not only our native language, but also the last reindeer herders and hunters - the true guardians of ethnocultural traditions," he made a sad forecast.

A similar point of view was expressed by the professor of the Siberian Federal University, the famous historian and ethnographer Viktor Krivonogov.

“Having studied more than 30 peoples of Siberia, the Far East and foreign countries, I have not encountered a single fact where any people has preserved or revived their language,” he summed up the results of his 50 years of research work.

The scientist noted that this happened despite the implementation of numerous laws, programs and the “heroic work of teachers.”

According to the results of surveys conducted during scientific expeditions, the Soyots in the Republic of Buryatia have completely lost their fluency in their native language. Among the Tofalars in the Irkutsk Region and the Kets in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, this figure is less than 10%. Among the Krasnoyarsk Nganasans and Nenets, it is no more than 15%. Although, back in 1993-1994, almost 40% of the representatives of this people spoke Nganasan fluently. At the same time, according to Mr. Krivonogov, even among the Evenks of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, who can study their native language in middle and high school, the number of those who speak it fluently is decreasing. There are no such people left at all under the age of 19, and about 1% of those aged 19-29.

"The language is actually preserved only in the environment where traditional farming is practiced... If a child comes to school at the age of seven with his native Russian language, not knowing a single word in the Evenki language, can this language become his native language again? Of course not," Viktor Krivonogov named the reason for the loss of the native language. According to his data, at present only 5% of the representatives of the indigenous minorities of the Krasnoyarsk Territory continue to roam the tundra. Among the Tundra Nenets, the proportion of those fluent in their native language reaches almost 100%.

“Due to various objective reasons, the young generation of indigenous peoples of the North is breaking away from the centuries-old occupations of their ancestors, losing their mother tongue, their customs and traditions,” confirmed Victoria Polikarenok, head of the Evenki nomadic kindergarten “Chipkan”.

The creation of a digital environment for indigenous languages can help solve the language problem, believes Grigory Dyukarev, Commissioner for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Krasnoyarsk Krai. In particular, he suggested that the session participants initiate the introduction of programs for training "teachers of native language and computer science" in universities, as well as include in the program advanced training for teachers of native languages and the use of digital technologies.

Sardana Sivtseva from the Arctic Capital company named the Ayana platform as an example of creating a digital environment. It is an offline version of an electronic translator of the Evenki language for nomadic schools and places with unstable mobile communications. "The project has found a continuation in Altai, Krasnoyarsk Krai, and other regions. We initially planned that after the Evenki language, other languages would follow," she said, calling on specialists to create electronic explanatory dictionaries of the languages of the indigenous minorities. During the session, a machine translator of the Mansi language, the Evenki language portal "Evengus" and a number of other projects were also presented.

"We will try this new method as well. Maybe it will work if the previous ones did not lead to significant changes," Viktor Krivonogov expressed hope, adding that the result of applying digitalization in this area will become clear "in about ten years."

Valery Lavsky

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dostoyevsky-official · 5 months ago

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Coralie Fargeat, director

His films opened gates towards imagination. Towards an endless mental space where each could project its own inner world. We could wander in his films. Go back to them again and again. They were thick with secrets, with the unexplained. They were full of the unnecessary.

That was so essential. It requires a lot of strength: the deliberate act of creating worlds with no boundaries. To create paths where our mind can follow its own way. Carpets. Back yards. Heavy rooms. Roads. A whole unseen world was infusing behind each of those spaces. They were becoming open spaces for our imagination. I loved his work for that.

Paul Schrader, director

David couldn’t get Blue Velvet made. Dino De Laurentiis told David he’d pay me to rewrite the script and David gave it to me. It was one of the best scripts I’d ever read. I told Dino there was no way I could improve it. David thanked me and Dino financed the film. The rest is film history. The only thing to add is this: smoking kills.

Stephen Woolley, programmer and producer

When I finally caught up with Eraserheead, I was so mesmerised and besotted with its beautiful design, disturbing imagery and surreal humour that I programmed it for two months exclusively at the Scala cinema in London. It was one of the most important films I had ever seen and still is.

He came for the opening. But, looking at the programme, he appeared suddenly alarmed (his expressions usually vacillated between open-faced exuberance and intense curiosity). I asked what was wrong. He apologetically explained in what can only be described as a Jimmy Stewart drawl that there was a mistake: it said the film was playing during the day. He went on to explain: nobody watched it in daylight; it was a midnight movie; it would flop at 3pm.

Ironically, Lynch liked to describe Eraserhead as his Philadelphia Story – not the charming romcom with Stewart, Hepburn and Grant, but a tale inspired by his time living in the most violent and crime-ridden neighbourhoods in the city. He had lived all over the US, after being born in Montana, but kept that adorable, sing-song midwest accent throughout his life.

I told him there was no mistake – and happily David was wrong. Eraserhead is a transgressive and pleasurable enigma, existing alongside movies like Tod Browning’s Freaks, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and Jodorowsky’s El Topo – as a masterpiece of grotesquery as beauty – like a Francis Bacon painting or a Louise Bourgeois sculpture.

Peter Strickland, director

I first saw Eraserhead at the Scala cinema on Saturday 10 February 1990 and to say it was an influence is an understatement. It pointed to an aesthetic pathway hitherto hidden from view, and most tellingly, as with many altering experiences, it revealed something within me that was probably always latent, but required unveiling.

At one point I fell asleep. But my dream state was porous enough to allow in fragments from the film, such as the Lady in the Radiator song, which made the whole experience even more indelible.

For all the genuinely repellent scenes in Eraserhead, the film’s ignition is in its confoundingly wayward tonality and how Lynch saw and heard the world. It was the first time I considered sound as something expressive rather than illustrative and considered film as something impressionistic rather than representative. The film functioned as an environment more than anything. I kidded myself that I could live in that inner world, though my only concession to that was in purchasing the film’s poster from a shop in Reading called But Is it Art?.

Carol Morley, director

It’s hard to believe Lynch has gone, but incredible to contemplate all that he did, and just how his avant garde art bravely made it out into the big wide world and continues to thrive. His film-making turned everything upside down and inside out and he did it with such originality it was breathtaking. He didn’t analyse. He felt, he had dreams and he tried to catch something in the air. In the book Lynch on Lynch, he said: “There are things that cinema can do that are very difficult to talk about.” He understood the mystery and magic like nobody else.

The best thing in the world for him was to have an idea. And he inspired me to stay true to my own ideas even when navigating the tricky and sometimes suffocating parts of film-making that are essentially commerce above art. Over the years I’ve watched and read interviews with him, and once spent a morning in bed reading his insights into life and creativity in his alternative self-help book, Catching the Big Fish. I’d begun the day never wanting to get up again and certainly never wanting to make a film again, but he returned my desire to do both. And through this, he taught me to hang on to the personal, to always return to the beginning of a process – to remember what you fell in love with when you had the initial thoughts and to never let go of that feeling and to keep going deep.

Lynch dreamed up his films – literally. The ending of Blue Velvet came to him in a dream. He inspired me to connect with my unconscious, to pay it respect. I loved how he explored the unmentionables in life, shone light into darkness, created monsters and outsiders, how he reconciled opposites such as the innocence and horror of small-town America, how he looked at “the weird on top” (as Laura Dern’s character in Wild at Heart says) and then took us underground.

The original Blue Velvet trailer says: “It will open your eyes to a world you’ve never seen before.” That pretty much sums up all of Lynch’s oeuvre. There’s a familiarity, but then again … I was around when Twin Peaks aired on TV in 1990 and my friends and I couldn’t stop talking about it. We began to see things differently. Life became Lynchian. I swear he altered the structure of our brains.

His work has always been a great challenge for the mind, but it’s the emotion in his films that has kept me returning for clues. As inventive as he was with performance, image, sound and music, nothing he did was embellishment for the sake of style, everything Lynch did was in service to the story. And It’s clear how much he loved his actors, how he gave them a safe and freeing space to do the very delicate and personal work actors have to do.

Alice Lowe, director

Many remember the first time they encountered Lynch’s indelible images, heard his sound and music for the first time. To me, he’s just always been there. And that’s when a cultural loss feels hard: when you’ve not met someone, but their work feels personal to you, part of your psyche.

But what’s strange is how many feel that way. The strangeness and intimacy of his work is counterintuitive to its popularity, its sheer power to force its way into culture collectively. His work spoke its own language, but a language that was strangely universal. In a time when the very nature of film as an individual’s perspective and the human auteurship of art is in question, it feels seismic to have lost him.

He reminded us that genius can be coupled with kindness and humanity. To me his greatest collaboration was with his audience. The generosity to allow people to project their own interpretation upon his work, forging powerful bonds with it.

For me it is the power of colour within his work; the soul-shifting nature of the sound design; his unforgettable characters: Bob crawling over the sofa, Diane Ladd covering herself with lipstick, Nicolas Cage’s sweetness in Wild at Heart, the log lady, the lady in the radiator, The Elephant Man choosing to die. He deftly mixed tones – nigh impossible. Humour and darkness and horror and sadness and wonder. All human experience contained.

He was the best magician. His spell was to dispel accusations of elitism or pretension with the sheer primality of his incantations. It is happening again. You may not be able to explain it, but deep down, you understand it. Universal. He showed us monsters without being a monster. And his showmanship was filled with empathy.

I’m going try to find something in the wreckage of this loss: a promise to be creative, to trust in art, in humanity, that there is a collectivity to our experience, and it’s worth sharing it. I hope his family are comforted by the love pouring out for this wonderful human.

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distracteddaintydemon · 19 days ago

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What's currently happening to Sunless (Ariel's game) is abso-fuckin-lutely improbable.

Not that things happening to him generally in the plot are probabilistically reasonable in any way; but it was lampshaded in the best possible way; this boy is Fated, he's both blessed beyond reason and cursed beyond reason, probability looked his way once and decided it has an urgent business elsewhere; and even after he stopped being Fated, many of the improbable things happening to Sunless was explainable as consequences of things that happened when he was Fated still.

Now however, he entered an entirely new arc where he really SHOULDN'T have it THIS easy. He's heavily nerfed. He's facing enemies more powerful than ever. It shouldn't go this easy for him.

(I mean, I know that Doylist explanation is that he WILL get that particular boon no matter what and also if he dies his un-resurrectable companion dies and this level of additional guilt would mess up the themes and so on. But. Let's look at Watsonian reasoning at the moment)

All of this can be explained, if we assume that all of his current opponents were handpicked to be defeatable particularly by Sunless.

Which makes sense, because ultimately, they all were indeed handpicked by Weaver at some point.

But also doesn't make sense, because, while Weaver was Demon of Fate, Sunless is currently not touching strings of Fate at all, as he literally physically represents the hole tore apart in the tapestry of Fate; his presence might be at best deduced from unexplainable lack thereof; he should be undetectable and uncontrollable.

In order to bridge all this mess, I'm choosing to believe that current arc is proof of ultimate mastery on Weaver's part: that Weaver actually managed to provide controllable environment yielding the expected result through the uncontrollable and undetectable medium.

A sorcerous equivalent of writing (engineering) a pre-programmed aleatory concerto on a theremin and a colony of squirrels.

#shadow slave #sunless #sunless shadow slave #weaver shadow slave #i could be ranting that current arc is just badly written but why should I be choosing having less fun

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reasonsforhope · 2 years ago

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"Marginal improvements to agricultural soils around the world would store enough carbon to keep the world within 1.5C of global heating, new research suggests.

Farming techniques that improve long-term fertility and yields can also help to store more carbon in soils but are often ignored in favor of intensive techniques using large amounts of artificial fertilizer, much of it wasted, that can increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Using better farming techniques to store 1 percent more carbon in about half of the world’s agricultural soils would be enough to absorb about 31 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year, according to new data. That amount is not far off the 32 gigaton gap between current planned emissions reduction globally per year and the amount of carbon that must be cut by 2030 to stay within 1.5C.

The estimates were carried out by Jacqueline McGlade, the former chief scientist at the UN environment program and former executive director of the European Environment Agency. She found that storing more carbon in the top 30 centimeters of agricultural soils would be feasible in many regions where soils are currently degraded.

McGlade now leads a commercial organization that sells soil data to farmers. Downforce Technologies uses publicly available global data, satellite images, and lidar to assess in detail how much carbon is stored in soils, which can now be done down to the level of individual fields.

“Outside the farming sector, people do not understand how important soils are to the climate,” said McGlade. “Changing farming could make soils carbon negative, making them absorb carbon, and reducing the cost of farming.”

She said farmers could face a short-term cost while they changed their methods, away from the overuse of artificial fertilizer, but after a transition period of two to three years their yields would improve and their soils would be much healthier...

Arable farmers could sequester more carbon within their soils by changing their crop rotation, planting cover crops such as clover, or using direct drilling, which allows crops to be planted without the need for ploughing. Livestock farmers could improve their soils by growing more native grasses.

Hedgerows also help to sequester carbon in the soil, because they have large underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi and microbes that can extend meters into the field. Farmers have spent decades removing hedgerows to make intensive farming easier, but restoring them, and maintaining existing hedgerows, would improve biodiversity, reduce the erosion of topsoil, and help to stop harmful agricultural runoff, which is a key polluter of rivers."

-via The Grist, July 8, 2023

#agriculture #sustainable agriculture #sustainability #carbon emissions #carbon sequestration #livestock #farming #regenerative farming #native plants #ecosystems #global warming #climate change #good news #hope

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drdemonprince · 1 year ago

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Hi! I remember you talking about doing shadow work (in a reply to an ask, I think); do you have any advice on how to start? Especially for someone who who has a really hard time with consistency/habits? Thanks!

For me it is not an intentional practice separate from my regular life, it is an orientation toward my own most negative thoughts/impulses/reactions. I do not believe that any thought is harmful or morally wrong to have, and so when I experience a thought that is violent, cruel, bitter, pathetic, prejudicial, short-tempered, jealous, whatever else, I accept it, and study it with curiosity rather than self-condemnation.

I notice patterns over time in what I am particularly un-evolved and unenlightened about. What hang ups do I have? What weird bullshit respectability politics or traditional gender norms do I still apply to myself or to others? Who do I fuckin hate and why?

Which of these things can I just kind of shrug at and accept as a feature of my programming and which ones do I see seriously holding back my life? That's probably the hardest part of shadow work for me. I'm very aware of a lot of my flaws and the things i'm irrationally emotionally reactive to and defensive about, but I get attached to my way of seeing things. It can be scary to become more open-minded and uncertain and less spiky. And some things just aren't easy to change even if I want them to. Part of shadow work means allowing oneself to be in an unfinished state.

Another part of it for me is accepting with a dark kind of gratitude that the world would be a pretty terrible place if everyone was like me. There is so much about humanity that I do not understand. I could never be a surgeon. I could never be a good parent. I could never be a social worker. There is so much I am so bad at. Maybe this is the Narcissism and Lack of Empathy talking, but I've had to really humble myself. I used to think I was so much more rational and less of a waster of time and resources than most people around me. Now I realize I have run on self-denial and repressed emotionality for a very long time and demanded that life have some Purpose when it doesn't. So a lot of my shadow work has been acknowledging my ultimate smallness and feebleness and just general uselessness -- i have a lot to be grateful to other people for doing, but also life has no purpose that needs to be fulfilled so i can just exist and suck for every single second that i'm alive if that's what i'm gonna do.

radical acceptance shit is definitely mixed in there, and some DBT kinda strategies. I've finally arrived at a place where I can love my dissatisfaction as a core part of me and accept that life is not meant to be happy and comfortable. we always keep moving, changing our environments to make them a little better, chasing after new passions and then getting disillusioned with them, falling in and out of love, getting lost. we're always lost. we're always making mistakes and being dumb as humans. that's like what we are. silly little freaks that make up lots of pretend games for fun but then get swept up in believing them too much. i kind of feel at peace now with the fact that i'll always be messy and impulsive and have weird beliefs and will change constantly and look back on my past with a cringe reaction every four or five years. i dont expect myself to ever arrive, because what the hell would that look like?? being satisfied and happy sure sounds a lot like being dead.

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thefreakandthehair · 2 years ago

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@eddiemonth prompt, oct 10th: College | Loser Denial - Heyrocco | Determined a/n: steddie, college au, really just fluffy getting together. un-betaed because I’m challenging myself to write these in under an hour. read on ao3 | link to masterpost on ao3

They say that the most basic human need is to feel a sense of belonging, to feel welcomed. Eddie’s yet to find that acceptance at Ivy Tech Community College in Fort Wayne, about 25 miles southeast of his hometown. He’d hoped that getting away from Hawkins and joining a program for automotive technology would give him a good shot at meeting some like-minded people but so far, it’s been nothing short of a bust.

Not only is he yet to touch a car because he’s had to focus on meaningless general education classes first, he’s made one friend. One single friend in the form of a lab partner, and he’s not actually sure if they’re even friends so much as they are two people forced into talking on a regular basis. But Eddie counts it, because it’s all he’s got for now.

Without his high school reputation and the safety of a familiar environment, college is an ominous beast with sharp teeth. Each day feels like stepping into a pasture with no shepherd, but he’s determined not to fail. Three attempts at graduating high school is enough failure for a lifetime. So yes, he counts his lab partner.

Besides, if they aren’t really friends yet, Eddie would like to be. Steve’s a good dude— not quite his normal type in company, sure, but he’s studying to become a nurse, he’s smart in a quick-witted non-traditional sort of way, and Eddie can’t imagine anyone being on the receiving end of that smile and not going a little wobbly in the knees.

Alright, so maybe Eddie wants a little more than friendship but he’s only greedy when the end goal seems possible. And determined as Eddie may be, he can’t imagine that he’s Steve type. Some days are harder than others though, like the days when they’re crammed next to each other in the library at tiny tables, or the days when they hang back in the lab to work through their latest experiment.

Today though? Today is downright painful.

Today, he’s in Steve’s fucking apartment. Steve’s tiny, off-campus apartment that he shares with someone named Robin who Eddie can only assume is his girlfriend. There are pictures of the two of them all over the place, distracting Eddie from the lab report they’re supposed to be working on. Words jump off the page in front of him as he sits cross legged on the floor with his back against the couch Steve’s sitting on. It doesn’t help that Steve’s sitting so close, his foot occasionally grazing Eddie’s side, his thigh close enough for Eddie to rest his head against.

Twice now, Steve’s leaned down over Eddie’s shoulders to get a closer look at the data chart, turning to face him close enough that their noses nearly touch. Eddie’s just about stopped breathing both times because his hair tickles Eddie’s ear and he smells so good.

Molecular weight. Boiling point. Propanol.

He tries his damndest to focus on his section, opting to take on the procedures and data analysis while Steve works on the lengthy conclusion section, but he just—

He can’t. Maybe he can’t be friends with Steve after all. Not when he’s sitting in his apartment, surrounded by happy pictures of Steve with his girlfriend, feeling his disappointment grow stronger and stronger. Through his haze, he barely recognizes Steve asking him a question.

“Hello? Eddie? Earth to Eddie Munson?” Steve nudges him gently in the shoulder with his knee. “We have to rank the order that the pure substances traveled through the column from fastest to slowest, and you’ve got the data.”

Eddie shakes his head, trying his best to hide his disappointment that Steve can’t be a friend because of his own stupid crush and that Steve can’t be more because well, he’s clearly spoken for and why wouldn’t he be? Who wouldn’t just fall ass over ankles for Steve?

Apparently, he already has.

“Uh, hey man, you good? Seriously, you’re kinda freaking me out.” Steve drops his papers on the coffee table and slides off the couch to kneel in front of Eddie. He reaches out and gently tips his chin up, probably checking for some kind of medical issue.

Stupid nursing program, Eddie thinks. But he just looks up, lets himself be guided by Steve soft, practiced hand and makes eye contact. Hazel, he thinks. I’ve never been close enough to notice that.

But he still hasn’t spoken and can see that Steve is truly starting to panic so he swallows and finds his tongue again.

“I’m fine, I’m good, promise. Just uh, just lost in thought. That’s a thing that I do a lot, you’ve seen my notebooks,” he tries to laugh it off but Steve doesn’t drop his hand. He simply slides it to the side, resting carefully on Eddie’s cheek. Eddie’s sure that Steve can feel it growing warmer beneath his touch.

“What about?” Steve asks, inquisitive. Eddie must be going insane because he swears he sees Steve’s eyes flicker between his gaze and his lips.

Eddie smiles, mostly fake but there’s something about Steve’s touch that does give him a reason to.

“Didn’t know you had a girlfriend, that’s all. Got a little lost looking at all the pictures, she seems awesome.”

Not that he’s thought too deeply about how Steve would react, but hysterical laughter wouldn’t have been one of them if he had. But that’s what he sees: Steve falling to the side, his face turning red, his hand slipping from Eddie’s cheek to his chest, and his elbow leaning on the coffee table as his entire body shakes with laughter.

What the fuck is going on here? Eddie wonders.

“That’s—” Steve tries to speak but takes several tries to get audible words out. “God, she knew that was gonna happen, I owe Robin $20.”

Eddie sits, stuck in place, his eyes wide and brows knitted tightly above his nose. “Robin? What was gonna happen? $20?”

“Oh my God, Eddie, I’m— no. Robin is the girl in these pictures, and she’s my best friend. She bet me $20 that the pictures were gonna throw you off and I thought I’d been obvious enough by now that you wouldn’t go down that route. But no, we’re definitely not dating. I’m uh, I’m not exactly her type.” Steve grins and slowly sits back upright, this time cross-legged to mirror Eddie’s position, their knees touching this time.

“How the fuck could you not be someone’s type?” Eddie lets slip, his mouth moving faster than his brain. No surprise there.

Before he can take it back, Steve just quirks one eyebrow up. “Well, unless I wake tomorrow a woman… not gonna happen. Did you miss that picture?”

Eddie follows Steve’s finger that’s pointing to the largest picture hung on the wall, one of them at a Pride event. Robin sits on Steve’s shoulders, wearing a flag of varying shades of reds, oranges, and purples like a cape around her neck. Steve’s smiling from ear to ear, otherwise dressed as he does every day save for the pink, purple, and blue stripes painted on his cheek.

It’s the largest picture in the room, and somehow, Eddie’s missed it completely.

“So yeah, not really her type. Is that why you’ve been so quiet? And completely ignoring all of my attempts to make a move?”

“A move? On what?” Eddie asks, incredulous.

Steve shrugs and leans forward, resting his palms on Eddie’s knees. “You, dumbass. Why else would we study here instead of the library?”

“Gonna level with you here, I didn’t even think about it. I figured you were just tired of me almost getting us kicked out for being too loud or something! That was not obvious, Steve.” Eddie’s heart pounds in his chest, hope clawing its way through a graveyard of isolation.

Steve just huffs a small laugh through his nose and bites his lower lip. “Let me be clearer, then. I like you. And maybe we can see if we’ve got as much chemistry as propanol and… whatever the fuck else was on that list, I don’t remember.”

It’s Eddie’s turn to laugh, wild and free as he throws his head back against the couch. When he looks back at Steve, his laughter lulls to a soft smile. “Jesus Christ, that was so bad and I can’t believe it’s about to work on me.”

“Yeah?” Steve grins, leaning closer, almost closing the distance.

Eddie nods, breathless. “Yeah.”

Terrible chemistry puns and pick up lines aside, kissing Steve does feel like a chemical reaction, one that deserves its own lab report.

His lips are soft, a little chapped to match Eddie’s, but he moves with intention and care, two things Eddie isn’t familiar with. He’s kissed before but not like this, not like his partner is trying to pour affection into him with every movement. Over time, he’ll grow to learn that that’s just how Steve is, all-in on everything he finds worth his time and energy.

Their lab report goes forgotten in favor of learning more about one another until Robin comes home hours later, thankfully after they’ve washed up and settled in on the couch in a much less precarious position.

“Aw, man,” she bemoans, dropping her bag next to the door with a loud thud. “I really thought the pictures were gonna cockblock you.”

Eddie elbows Steve in the side. “Pay up, Stevie. Be a man of your word. I don’t date men with poor integrity.”

“You two are gonna be the worse fucking tag team, goddamn it,” he mutters under his breath as he lifts his hips up to fish around for his wallet, tossing a $20 on the coffee table. “I don’t think it should count because it was fine once I explained!”

Robin grins, walking over to the couch and grabbing the bill off the table before making herself comfortable in the free corner next to Eddie.

“Eddie, I’ve heard a lot about you and I think we’re gonna be really good friends.”

He finds himself sandwiched between Steve and Robin for the rest of the night, comfortable and welcomed, as though he’s belonged there the whole time. The evening doesn’t end with Eddie making a friend out of Steve, but how can he complain when he finds so much more?

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