#sparse modeling imaging

[skycrorg]

Hasta la fecha, se han realizado numerosas observaciones de discos protoplanetarios (o discos circunestelares) con ALMA.

[dovveri]

high fashion fashion

synopsis: you’re meeting with the top fashion designer in the country to get your measurements taken for haute couture: an exclusive, annual fashion magazine you had the luck to be chosen for

warnings: reader receiving, cunnilingus, fingering, strap-ons, swearing

w/c: 4.4k

a/n: momo part 2 here!

-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈

"miss minatozaki! the model is here to see you as requested!"

you shuffle around a little awkwardly as you stand behind the agent that had led you to the infamous fashion designer's lair. you were still a new name in the modelling industry so it came as a surprise when you booked one of the biggest fashion magazines in the country. naturally, that meant working with the best of the best, and minatozaki sana was the best of the best.

"come in!" a voice drifts out, it's high-pitched and honeyed, the kind of voice that lures people in and gets them to do whatever the speaker asks of them. you were cautious though, sana's reputation preceded her. tales of her perfectionism were not sparse, she was a difficult woman to please, and had been known to ruin careers with the shake of a head or the slight frown in her eyebrows.

the agent rushes you in, whispering about making sure you did whatever sana wanted you to do, and then taking their leave just as quick, terrified to be in the same room as the fashion designer of the century.

you wring your hands nervously, stepping forward and taking in your surroundings. it wasn't unlike any other studio you've been in. messy fabrics and half-completed outfits strewn over pages of designs and measurements, mannequins standing half-dressed and lifeless, and in the centre of it all, the mastermind of the methodical chaos you stood in, was minatozaki sana herself.

she tuts, making a note on the design she was currently working on, not having acknowledged your presence yet, so you stand there awkwardly, waiting for her to instruct you.

your eyes can't help but trace over her features while she works. it was only natural, you were a model, you learnt to have a sharp eye for the physical body, to be critical of yourself and others whether you were on the clock or not.

her face was perfect. she was wearing specs that perched neatly on a nose other models would pay for. her lips, although currently downturned in a frown as she perused her work, were set in a natural pout that accentuated her features, her eyes sharp and calculating behind the soft, round frame of her glasses. you could mistake her for the model for a big-brand eyewear company. your eyes glide down to her shoulder where her top slid down revealing pearly soft skin, and a sharp 90 degree angle, her collarbones protruding and proud. you're almost in disbelief at her beauty, how someone like her could've slipped under your radar, under everyone's radar. people knew her for the beauty she created, not the beauty she possessed.

you're so caught up in her you don't notice she's finally taken notice of you; quick, assertive eyes running over your own body, calculations and images of clothing pieces already forming in her head.

"y/n right?"

your eyes flick up to hers, blushing slightly at having been caught. you clear your throat, nodding, not trusting your voice to speak.

she puts down her pencil and steps out from the desk she was working behind, taking slow steps towards you. you were used to this, people staring at you, studying you. but under sana's gaze you felt like a baby deer again, like the first time you were scouted for your modelling agency. she circles you, humming here and there as she takes you in.

"i can see why mina chose you."

you cough awkwardly, "excuse me?"

"the editor. she handpicks the models for the annual haute couture magazine every year."

your eyes widen, she meant myoui mina. chief editor of the haute couture magazine. a limited fashion piece that only came out once a year and was revered by critics all across the country. the one you had the opportune luck to be selected for.

"r-right."

sana scoffs, "pretty face but can't speak. lucky you didn't go into acting."

you're a little taken aback at that, but you remind yourself this was characteristic of sana. this was in line with what you had heard. you would just have to grit your teeth and bear it, you could not afford to lose this opportunity.

"hmm. yes you'll do." she walks back to her work counter, heels clicking as she waves a hand dismissively.

"strip. everything. i'll take your measurements now and we can both get back to work."

you stutter, following after her, "d-don't you already have my measurements?"

she turns suddenly, raising an eyebrow as you almost crash into her. you realise she's a little shorter than you, though her presence made it seem she towered over you. "is there a problem?"

you blush, trying to create some distance between the two of you, "n-no ma'am! i just thought-"

"i like to take my own measurements. i don't trust the ones they sent me. after all..." she raises a hand, a manicured nail coming to trace your throat, from the middle of your neck to the tip of your chin. you hold your breath. "the notes didn't mention how devastatingly exquisite you are. i'll need to see if the rest of the... hardware matches that pretty face of yours." there's a dangerous glint in her eye, her lips curling up into a smirk as she watches your breath catch, then she's turning away and striding towards another work desk, leaving you tripping after yourself to follow her.

she quickly makes space on the counter, pushing aside sheets of drawings and pulling out a fresh new page devoid of any markings.

"well? are you shy or something? no one is allowed in here without my permission. we're alone darling don't worry." you can hear the teasing lilt in her voice, she doesn't need to turn away from her work for you to picture the smirk on her face.

you quickly rid yourself of your clothing, shivering a little in the air-conditioned workshop, reminding yourself that this was nothing out of the ordinary, you had been laid bare in front of beautiful women and men before, sana shouldn't be any different.

you hesitate when you reach your bra, but sana could smell your uncertainty.

"i said everything."

you gulped, undoing the clasp and sliding the straps off your shoulders, nipples hardening under the cool air of the room. you bend down to slide off your panties, stepping out of them carefully before coming back up, suddenly face to face with sana who's eyeing you with a hunger akin to the one of lioness. you turn to place your underwear with all your other clothes, but knowing sana was watching your every step lit a little fire in your lower stomach.

your toes clench on the cool tile of the workshop, you force yourself to take a breath before turning back to sana, and then letting her circle you again like her prey.

you almost jump when you feel her fingertip on your naked back, holding back sounds your mouth certainly shouldn't be making at work.

her finger slowly, slowly traces downwards, sana admires the smooth planes of your back, the sharp bones that jut out at your wingspan, the curve of your spine before pushing back out to your ass.

you don't even realise you're holding your breath until she pushes down slightly at the small of your back and you gasp.

then sana giggles. "cute."

her hand never leaves your body, she walks back around to face you, fingers tracing your arms, then your sides, squeezing teasingly at your hips.

"hmm... yes i can definitely work with this." her voice is lower, and you can't help but think she may be a little affected by you too.

she steps away again, grabbing a measuring tape, "you wouldn't mind doing a couple poses for me would you darling? i need to see which fabric would work best when you move around and sit or get into whatever other absurd positions momo might get you in when you take the photos."

you shake your head, irritated at the blush that was now definitely apparent on your cheeks. you were better than this, you took lessons on how to school your expression and bodily reactions for when you were forced into uncomfortable clothes and outfits.

sana nods towards a stool nearby, "just take a seat there, sit however's comfortable for now."

you follow her instructions almost robotically, wincing a little at the chill of the metal stool against the skin of your ass. you cross your legs, willing the arousal that was leisurely dripping out of you to stop before sana found out and fired you for being unprofessional.

she watches you wriggle around on the stool, trying to get comfortable with a smirk, treading forward when you're finally still. you try to look straight ahead, avoiding her gaze, but she cups your cheek lightly, forcing you to look up at her. she tilts your head from side to side, hums, then grabs the measuring tape and steps behind you, measuring your shoulder span.

"relax sweetheart, i can feel the tension in your muscles."

you let out a shaky breath, still refusing to speak.

"nervous?"

you shrug.

"you've done this before haven't you?"

you nod.

"are you not speaking because of the comment i made earlier? i didn't mean it y'know. it's not the first time i've rendered someone speechless before."

you gulp, unsure of the implications of her words, "r-right."

she giggles again, "almost thought i'd have to make you scream for me."

"w-what?!"

she hums, moving backwards again and ignoring your question, "lie down over there would you? on your front. if i know momo i know she loves her horizontal shots."

you shakily get up, moving to the mattress on the floor and laying down cautiously, feeling sana right on your heels.

it would be harder to hide your slick in this position, but you clenched your thighs together and did your best. the cool material of the sheets on the mattress brush across your already sensitive nipples in this state, and you fight the urge to let go and just go wild under sana's watchful gaze.

she hovers above you, noting down every twitch of your body, every arch, curve, bend. there's some rustling behind you but you keep focused on resisting your dirtier thoughts. that is until sana sits on top of your thighs.

you gasp at the feeling of her weight on top of you, right below your ass, "u-um-"

"i said to relax darling. i need to see how you'll feel when you're in this position." her excuses were getting sloppier.

"y-you do?"

"are you questioning me?"

"n-no! i'm sorry- please- um- please continue."

"good girl."

you feel your ears burning now as well, the blush having travelled across your cheeks and up. even you knew there was something other than fashion fitting going on here with that comment. but you still let her hands run over your back, even as they tease dangerously lower, down to your hips.

sana coughs, shuffling around, but her shuffling around was really her pushing her body up against your ass, essentially riding the back of your thighs. you can't help but release a choked-out moan, fingers digging into the skin of your forearms where you're resting your head, breaths coming in and out heavier.

she stops, smirking, then does it again, rocking forwards, eyes twinkling when you give her the exact same reaction, unable to control yourself.

"miss m-minatozaki-"

"just sana for you darling."

"... s-sana-"

"hmm?" she leans down, rocking forwards again, delighting in the moan you release, humming right next to your ear, her body laid almost completely on top of you.

"is this- is this still- are you still taking my measurements?"

she chuckles lowly, "what do you think?"

you whine, completely unsure what this devil of a woman wanted from you, "y-yes?"

"then why are you asking?" she giggles, finally letting you go, standing back up. "now, the couch please."

you inhale greedily, pushing yourself back up and wobbling over to the couch. your legs almost give out when you sit down, sinking into the material, and looking at anywhere but sana.

you're about to cross your legs again when she tuts, "ah ah. spread them."

your eyes widen, "b-but-!"

"but what? you already showed me a pose with your legs crossed, now i'll need to see one spread. surely you've seen it's a very classic pose? one of the outfits i'll have to design include pants and momo will definitely make you do this pose in them."

with nothing else to retort, you shyly spread your legs, the urge to cover yourself is overbearing. you wait for sana to say something, anything, prepared for your career to end here and now. you were so close to the big leagues too.

"run a hand through that pretty hair will you darling? elbow up."

you blink, doing as she says, dumbfounded as she steps closer, completely disregarding the obvious signs of lust at your core.

those hands come out again, one at your thigh, the other tracing down the tricep of the arm you have lifted above your head. with nowhere else to go, your arousal leaks outward, pussy drenched and needy as you hold your breath.

the hand that's at your thigh inches upwards, the one at your tricep downwards to cup your face again, thumb brushing over your lips that open just barely enough for her to fit her fingernail inside.

she can feel your shaky breaths on her thumb, can hear the whimper you let out when the hand at your thigh continues to trace up and down, closer and closer to your heat.

"s-sana..."

"yes darling?" her voice is husky, eyes lidded, lips open, whispering like she was sharing a secret even though no one else was around.

"i-i- i'm- i need-"

"what do you need?"

you gulp, fighting back against your better conscience, but the lust that's curling up inside your stomach wins out, "you. i need you."

she grins, "do you now?"

"yes please- sana please-"

"you're so cute when you beg darling. alright then. i'll entertain you." the hand that's at your thigh finally pushes forward, fingertips meeting drenched folds as you gasp in relief and desperation, hips pushing forward, trying to feel more of her.

"god you're so wet sweetheart. is this all for me?"

you're whimpering as she traces those practiced fingers of hers up and down your slit, just barely giving any pressure to your clit before dipping back down. "y-yes! all you all you-"

"well i have to be a good host and receive what you've given me don't i?"

she sinks down onto her knees, pulling your thighs towards her, taking off her specs and licking her lips devilishly as her eyes lock on her target.

your hands are about to move into her hair when she barks up at you, "no touching. you can touch yourself but you can't touch me."

you whine but obey, sliding your hands back up your stomach to grope at your chest needily, your nipples having been attention-starved since you took your bra off.

she grins, enjoying the view for a little before finally bringing her face closer. she blows on your puffy clit playfully, loving the way you squirm and whimper under her, before attaching her mouth to your pussy, sucking greedily.

"o-oh-!"

your hands grip your chest harder, wishing you could hold onto her head instead, but you have to settle for grinding down into her face, pushing against her grip at your hips while she eats you out, slurping loudly. the sounds are absurd, but your mind is too hazy to worry about being embarrassed anymore, not when your fingers are pinching and twisting your own nipples while you watch sana suck your clit into her mouth, her eyes locked on yours while she eats.

"g-god sana so good- so fucking good mmf- you- you- you're driving me insane god-"

sana flicks her tongue happily in response, one hand releasing your hip and coming down to play with your entrance. you clench around nothing, eager to take her in, and she obliges, pushing a finger in with your clit still in her mouth, curling it to hit the spot that only served to bring you closer to the edge.

"r-right there fuck- right there- i'm gonna- you're doing so good fuck-"

she starts pumping her finger in and out of you, the squelching sounds of your sex only become louder, an accompaniment to her suckling. you're flicking your fingers over your nipples, again and again, matching her pace, each stroke getting you closer and closer. then she adds in another finger, curling upwards, hooking into you, and you cry out, back arching, hips pushing into her face, shaking and trembling as you feel yourself fall over the edge.

sana continues to lick and nose at you while you come down, hands rubbing soothing motions into your hips and thighs. eventually, she slides back up, hand replacing yours over your chest and copping a feel for herself.

she's kissing your neck, chest, ears, all while you try and gain sense of yourself again. you turn your head with a pout, urging her to look at you. she smiles, knowing what you wanted without even asking, leaning in to kiss your pout away, your lips moving against one another as you hum at the taste of yourself on her lips,

she continues fondling your chest, rolling her fingers over nipples as you start to wriggle under her again, easily aroused.

she breaks away from your mouth with a smirk, "you're pretty when you cum."

you whine, burying your head in her neck.

"maybe i should tell mina and momo that. i think they'd get the best shots if you were mid orgasm."

"w-what?" your voice is shaky, still squiriming under her touch.

"hmm... you want another don't you? i've been working on something... special. how would you like to try it out for me?"

she doesn't wait for an answer, detaching herself from you and walking to one of her work desks. you can only watch after her, still spread open and tingly all over as she rummages through a drawer. your eyes widen when she pulls out a dildo, mind and vision suddenly clearer as she smirks, tugging out a corresponding harness and slipping the dildo into it.

then she starts to strip.

she leaves her top on, only removing her bottoms before stepping into the harness, the patchwork dildo hanging from her hips, looking strangely like it belonged on her.

she giggles when she notices you staring, doing a little spin, the fake dick swinging around ridiculously. "you like? i was going for... cutesy and demure." she plops down next to you, tapping her thighs.

you swallow nervously, pushing yourself up and straddling her.

"you can touch now."

your hands that were awkwardly swinging by your side finally come up to rest on her shoulders.

"answer the question."

"y-yeah- i- um- it's cute."

she giggles again, "that's good. need to make sure something as cute as you gets filled up with something just as cute hmm? then you can make all those cute sounds for me too."

her hands are relentless, tugging you down into her lap, brushing your hair over your shoulder, running fingers down over sides. she's always got to have her hands on you.

you huff when she teases the strap along your slit, feeling yourself dripping already. you try and catch her eye, pouting again.

she rolls her eyes, "just ask me if you want to kiss."

"can you kiss me?"

"see that was so cute! that's a good girl." then she's pulling you into her, latching onto your lips.

the makeout session that proceeds has you grinding down into her without even realising, and you take a hint of pleasure at her returning the movement, her own hips starting to rut up into yours. she sucks your bottom lip into her mouth, swiping her tongue across it before letting it go, invading your mouth still with the faint taste of yourself. when you break away to gasp for air, she moves straight to your cheek, then down to your jaw, neck, collarbones, sucking marks along her way, hands coming up to play with your chest again.

she pushes your breasts upwards so her mouth can reach skin easier, sucking and kissing, careful not to leave marks on you, knowing your body was your instrument in this line of work.

you moan when you feel her lips wrap around a nipple, the warm cavern of her mouth sucking the little nub, her tongue lapping over it with glee.

you're unabashedly rocking against her now, loving the tingle that went up your spine with every pass of the strap on your clit, her mouth still attached to your chest while you held the back of her head, keeping her against you while you moaned and whined into her.

she switches nipples, cool air hitting the wet, exposed nub. you shiver under her despite her actions only heating your body up past a temperature you didn't know was possible.

"s-sana-"

she hums around your nipple, always so focused on her work, the vibrations go straight to your core.

"need you- n-now- please-"

your nipple pops free from her mouth, "i'm not stopping you." then she's back at your chest, sucking and kissing, addicted.

you groan, looking down between you and shakily aligning your entrance with her strap. it takes a few tries and you're almost crying in frustration and sana's not helping at all, completely preoccupied with your chest, before you finally sink down, moaning low and heavy as you feel her fill you up.

"fuuck-"

sana sucks at the patch of skin on your left breast just a little harder in response.

you push yourself back up using her shoulders, then drop back down, cursing as your core tingles at the sensation.

you repeat the process, eyes locked on the way she enters and exits you, her strap coated in your essence, the squelching sounds mix with your whines and groans.

"fuck- fuck- fuck-" you start riding her, swearing each time she fills you up, setting up a rhythm that has you dizzy with need. sana finally decides to break away to watch her masterpiece bounce in front of her. fading bite marks and patches of red skin sway as she moves her hands down to your hips, pushing you down harder with each entrance, bucking her own hips up to get the strap that much deeper.

"fuck!" your hands on her shoulders tighten, feeling her everywhere inside you, around you.

"review it for me sweetheart." she husks out, "if you saw it in a magazine would you buy it?"

"y-yes- fuck- w-wait no i don't- i don't know-"

"no?"

"you don't come with it- fuck-"

she chuckles, hands moving again to grip your ass, squeezing the flesh between her fingers, "let's say i do. then what?"

"y-yes- yes yes fuck- yes i would-"

"mhmm? i want a more detailed review than that darling. i need to know how to make improvements."

"f-fuck sana- it's so- you're fucking me so- so good- it's good it's good-"

"other than good?"

"g-god you're so- it's um- fuck- it's cute and- i like the colours- a-and shit jesus christ- it fills me up just right- and i'm gonna- fuck- i can't- it's gonna make me cum-!"

"why don't i give it a helping hand then hm?"

"yes! yes- please- please- god- fuck yes-"

she pushes herself up, pulling you back down, surprising you with the amount of strength she had hidden, then she's thrusting up into you roughly.

"uh- uh- fuck- uh-" you're moans are cut up with every thrust, she's experienced, like she is in everything she does, panting with effort while her hips work, her arms pulling you down with every thrust up, you can't even keep track of where she's entering you, moving so fast it was a blur. or maybe those were the tears building up as it gets almost too much, your desperation to cum for her, to cum all over her.

"f-fuck!" you scream out, clenching down around her, hips moving of their own accord, shaking and moaning, almost blacking out from pleasure.

your breaths are heavy as you come back down, still with sana's strap lodged inside you, sweaty hands unwrapping themselves from around her neck, slumping down and resting your entire weight on the fashion designer.

sana hums, brushing through your hair and your back, letting you catch your breath.

when you finally gain enough of your bearings, you grunt as you sit up, sliding the dildo out of yourself, cringing at the mess you've made between the two of you.

sana only giggles, bringing a finger down to trace the length of the dildo and then bringing it to her own mouth, sucking it and humming around the taste.

your stomach twinges again in arousal, but you whine, too sensitive to go again, knocking your forehead against sana's shoulder as you avoid looking at her.

she lets you rest there for a while, but eventually stands up, carrying the dildo off with her to clean off. when she comes back, she has your clothes and a damp towel for you to clean yourself up with.

"i have another appointment now. feel free to stay as long as you'd like, just don't touch any of the designs. i'll send the completed outfits for you to try once they're done." she's all business again, but before you let her turn on her heel and leave, you croak out.

"w-what about you?"

"what about me?" she raises an eyebrow.

you blush, covering yourself now that you have enough shame to be embarrassed. she pays you no mind, following your eyeline and looking down at herself. then she realises what you're asking.

she laughs brightly, "no sweetheart you don't need to take care of me. but if i ever need another... trial customer... i'll be sure to ask for you." she winks, and then she's off, heels clicking in the workshop and door closing behind her.

you sink down into the couch, still processing exactly what happened. all you knew was that everyone was right to be terrified of minatozaki sana. though your fear came with a side of thrill you're sure no one else could've warned you about.

[lightningant]

Ik vind het geweldig hoe levendig en karaktervol je gezichten zijn! – en de manier waarop je je haar tekent is ook prachtig! Zou je, indien mogelijk, wat tips kunnen delen over je proces?

Dank u!

Process:

I sketch very loosely, usually using a pencil brush. Drawing quickly and lively is the priority here, but sometimes it means the drawing quality is really awful lol. I try to flip the image a few times to make sure it's not like, Wrong. Which it will be, to be clear. I hold my pen at a dramatic slant, so my faces are always distorted.

Here's a corrected face next to how I instinctively sketch it out (after flipping the image):

Bad

I wanted to say you can tell when I use 3D models to expedite this but actually they look identical because I not only correct my natural distortion but I also correct the 3D jank. Is correction my art style...?

Anyway, the rest of the piece.

I find it easier to use a thinner brush and go over the lines a few times to make it thicker than use a brush with thick line weight. This gives me more control and looks more natural.

I build up thickness on the beard with condensed hairs curling one direction and then in the other. Layering them makes it look thick and natural. (Mustache is more sparse, so it's just single curves.)

Then I pull up old colours to flat it. I usually work in only 2-3 layers, one for darks and one for lights - dark and light colours will fill differently, and splitting them like this means I can use a lasso fill faster. If there's a really detailed element, I give it its own layer for ease of lasso.

When colouring, big gloopy pen pressure is actually useful to livening up the piece. Make sure theres a light source. I always pick the one that makes the nose easier to draw. Add a second, deeper shadow in corners (like just under the chin) for some depth.

Now that he has more dimension, I can actually see there's a wee bit more to correct. What am I correcting? I don't know. It just looks wrong. I use mesh transform and the liquify tool until my brain stops hurting.

Good enough! Now for the mandatory filters.

I use mzxmmz's iikanji gradient sets (all 3), because they're very drastic and make interesting colour splits. I set them to 20%~30% opacity on a soft light correction layer.

And there he is. Crazy stalker handsome rogue Harry

As for the way I draw my hair, there's actually a quick cheat:

Draw the curls like ribbons (orange). Note how the thickness varies, like the angles of a ribbon. Add texture with little accent lines (green). Fill it out by following along the edge of the curl (purple). Repeat this with a bunch of different strands. It will end up looking very full and with a strong sense of shape.

You can establish this shape by just drawing single lines of the curl pattern/shape you want and then filling out the rest with the ribbon form, detail, and following-line.

Beautiful complex-looking organic curl pattern in minutes!

[the-kr8tor]

Mr and Mrs Smith AU: When Jane met John

Pairing: Hobie Brown x fem! Reader

Word count: 9k

Summary: Joining a spy agency? Check ✓ Hired in said agency? Check ✓ Getting a new fancy house? Check ✓ An entire armoury of weapons at your disposal? Check ✓ A new Husband? Check ✓ wait, what?

Tags: Use of Y/N sparsely, no specific physical description of the reader (except for her clothing), Hobie and R call each other by fake names (ie: John, Jane, Smith etc), spy AU, CW suggestive, CW food mentions, TW blood, CW violence, CW vomit mention, TW death.

A/N: Happy 1k! Happy reading!!!❤️

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The waiting room seems like it's designed to make you extra anxious. From the bright fluorescent lights that whir above, to the carpet that smells like a very harsh citrus soap. Add the metallic chairs that's incredibly cold under your slacks— It all makes you bounce your leg from the bundle of nerves inside your stomach. The people waiting around you don't help either, they all look like they came out of magazine covers. Hair all tied up in a perfect bun, pencil skirts that cinch their waist perfectly. Button ups that are ironed until there's no crease in sight.

You bite your lip, eyes glued on the steel door, to where your last resort is, to where your entire future depends on. Looking around the room full of models, it doesn't seem like you're applying for a security job.

Maybe you should've worn that pencil skirt that's gathering dust in your closet.

Even though you technically don't know what kind of job it is, you really need to get this one, or else. Your savings could only get you so far. An old ‘friend’ of yours recommended this ‘company’. It operates at the highest security, the risk is just as high, but the pay is higher. More than what you've ever earned in the five years you've worked anyway.

Flicking your eyes above the door, the light finally turns green from red, and a chiming sound can be heard as the door clicks open on its own. You still wonder where the applicant goes after their interview since you never saw them exit out the same door. A morbid thought passes by your mind: a gun plus a bullet to the head. The image makes you grab the rubber band on your wrist to slap it against your skin. It leaves the stinging pain for only a moment, but it's enough to throw away the vision from your brain.

An applicant enters and you look down at the piece of paper in your hand— you're next.

The number, 2715 is written in Times New Roman. You can recognize that font anywhere, for it's the same font used on newer gravestones, the same font on his— you slap the rubber band against your wrist again. This time harder than the last. The stinging stays for a minute more. Your heels tap against the carpet, the clock ticks, the fluorescent whirs, someone coughs and you want to punch them in the face— you slap the rubber band against your skin again.

Your ears perk up at the familiar chime like you've been Pavlov’d by the sound after waiting for three hours on that uncomfortable metal chair that has tiny holes that you've gotten your pinky finger stuck in on hour two.

With a deep breath, you saunter your way towards the creaking door, trying to summon all the confidence in your body. They may be watching so you do your best to not look as nervous as you feel like.

As you enter the room, the large screen in the center raises a curious brow. The light from the monitor shines a spotlight on the singular office chair right in front of it. The room is dim, save for the single light. The screen reminds you of one of those mall touch screens that shows you the map of the building. There's another door on the opposite wall, now you know where all the other candidates exit, and it's definitely not from a bullet judging from the clean floors.

With a tentative step, you cross the distance. Sitting down, the chair is a comfortable welcome from the last one you sat on.

“Am I supposed to push a button?” You roam your eyes over the circular shape up top. You surmise that it's the camera.

The calming sky blue screen flashes words,

> Hihi, welcome

“Hi?”

> Insert nail clippings

A box slides out below the screen, prompting you to take the ziplock with your nail clippings from your bag. It slides back in with a mechanic hiss once you place the plastic on the drawer, and the screen blinks to a couple of questions that you answer honestly.

> What's your ethnicity?

You don't falter. Answering it truthfully.

> Height?

You clear your throat, the lump is either from the nerves or how your voice faltered when you answered.

> Are you willing to relocate?

You wring your hands together on your lap. “Yes, absolutely. Nothing's holding me back.” Then the dreaded question pops up on the bright screen.

> Tell me about yourself

“Uh, I graduated top of my class.” You scratch the back of your neck. “MI6 agent for three–no, uh four years.” Chuckling shakily, you continue. “I got high merits…w-well until the thing— but I was on the road to promotion b-before it happened.” God, you hate interviews.

> Words that people would describe you with?

You blink, sucking in a breath. “Truthfully?” Joking, the screen doesn't appreciate your humour.

> Yes

“Oh, p-people would describe me as a… someone who has initiative. Cunning…” unfeeling— you slap the band on your wrist again. Sitting up right, you gaze at the camera like your eyes could see the person typing behind it. You guess it's a person at least. “Passed all my training with flying colours, infiltration, marksmanship, hand to hand, you name it. You tell me the job and I'll do it with no questions asked.”

> Are you okay with high risk?

“More than okay.” You answer quickly.

> With a team or alone?

“I'm alright with either, but I prefer alone.”

> Why did you get fired?

“You know why.” You say intensely, eyes boring holes into the screen. For a second you thought you flubbed it but the screen continues to flash a new question.

> Have you killed anyone?

> And why?

The question turns into what you're more accustomed to. “Yes, approximately…” you inhale sharply. “Forty three. Two unintentionally, the rest with various…weapons.” You mindlessly play with the loose thread of your blazer to get rid of the flashing images in your head. “As for why, that's confidential information.”

The robot or the person behind the screen seems to accept your vague answers for it moves on with the interview.

> Favourite food?

Your eyebrows knit at the sudden turn of question. “Uh, I have a sweet tooth, ice cream. I think. But I can't resist good popcorn.” Your tone wavers at the end.

> Have you been in love?

You laugh, but the question still flashes on screen, unchanged and unamused. Clamping up, you feel for the rubber on your wrist.

“I-I'm sorry but what is this part for?”

The screen remains the same.

“—No,” you remember that they've probably already known everything about you even before you applied. So you decide to answer vaguely, that seems to work out before. “Once, just once.”

> When was the last time you said ‘I love you?’

“A long time ago.”

> To whom?

“You know who.”

—

You're surprised that you got the job even after the disastrous interview. The suitcase is light in your tightly clasped hand. The belongings you've tossed inside are sparse, only packing the ones you only need.

The large wooden door looms in front of you, the street behind you is bustling and right across your new home is an expansive park. A park that looks like you need to pay just to get inside. The neighborhood that you're situated in can be described as exclusive, rich and very suburban. The kind of setting where parents would do anything to raise their kids in. Something you've never thought in your dangerous life to live in, more so even step foot in.

With an exhale, you unlock the door. It clicks open surprisingly, you doubted the company for a second when you pushed it in. Maybe they gave you the wrong address? Maybe something went wrong in their system and your name popped up instead of someone more worthy? Someone who's a better shot, someone who isn't as bat shit insane as you.

The long hallway greets you, the low warm light brings comfort to your rattling bones. Its carpet runner is soft beneath your sneakers, red and blue threads weaved around the thick cloth. Framed art is posted on the walls, the artist's name you recognize from some pretentious reality tv about selling mansions that you once drunkenly watched alone on a friday night.

You leave your baggage in the hallway. Opting to explore the cinnamon scented home. Its rich walls remind you of chocolate that you once got for your birthday. The furniture doesn't look like it came from Ikea, the oak is sturdy under your palm, no rough surface, no protruding nails that slashes your flesh.

You snap the rubber band on your wrist for the umpteenth time today.

There's an ornate door sitting on your right, robins and roses are carved on the wood. The biometric scanner is placed right next to the door, it’s a stark contrast to the traditional home. Flipping the cover open, you place your thumb on the smooth surface of the scanner. After a half second, the door clicks open, revealing a steel elevator. The bright light above it almost blinds you.

Your curiosity makes you enter the steel cage, roaming your eyes, you spot the buttons.

“Might as well.” You say to the emptiness of the house.

As the elevator door closes, the front door opens.

There's a lack of elevator music, perhaps that's the best since you always hated the cheery chiming of it. The second the door opens, you take a peek inside. The weird smell combination of chlorine and butter hits your nose.

“Holy shit,” you mumble in disbelief at the indoor pool and theatre. “A fucking pool under the house? And a fucking theatre screen in front? Which rich fuck decided that?” Your voice echoes, bouncing off the tiled walls of the pool.

Roaming the large room, eyes wide and strides small, you marvel at the high ceilings with the same warm tone lights hidden in the coves to soften the lights. You crouch down, letting the warm water lap at your hand.

There's a handful of sun loungers on the side, tables in between them for drinks and whatever rich people put on it. A projector hangs above the pool, an electrical hazard, you thought and an image of an entire pool party getting electrocuted lingers in your mind. You snap the rubber band against your wrist.

The popcorn machine helps distract you from the intrusive thought. Opening the machine, the popped kernels are still warm against your skin. You quickly scoop up a handful of it in your palm, the butter slicking your hand and your mouth as you eat it like how a baby deer eats grass.

You've had enough of the overly decorated basement, getting back on the elevator, you finish off your popcorn with one big bite. Still chewing, you wipe your hands on your trousers to press the shiny buttons on the elevator. The doors close as you chew loudly, eyes up on the screen showing the floors of the house, you don't notice the stranger standing outside of the opened doors.

Butter on your lips, you almost smack him on his pretty face.

“Christ!” You yelp, almost choking on a kernel.

“Close, but no.” He smirks, eyes flicking at the sheen on your lips.

Your husband, the title echoes in your popcorn filled head. His smile captures your attention, a ten megawatt grin that could power the entire posh neighborhood. His piercings glimmer in the warm light, and your eyes are glued to the ones on his eyebrows. Hazel eyes, the left one seems to be lighter than the other, watercolour eyes stare back at you, scanning your features. If you stare long enough you swear you can see patches of green and gray in those expressive eyes.

“John Smith.” He introduces himself, your husband, your partner. John doesn't raise his ringed hand for you to shake, instead he nods at you, waiting patiently for you to say your name. As if he doesn't know.

Clearing your kernel filled throat, you quickly run your tongue across your teeth (with your mouth closed of course) because you don't want to embarrass yourself further by having popcorn stuck in your teeth.

“Jane, Jane Smith.” You reach towards him to shake his hand, he raises a brow at you in turn.

“I don't do that, love, sorry.”

“Shake hands?”

“Yeah,” he looks to the left of your face, his eyebrow twitches slightly— a tell.

“Are you a germaphobe?” You ask before you could stop yourself.

“Not really, I've got issues…with intimacy.” John shrugs, the metals on his leather jacket clinks together. You think he'd rather be a model or a rock star instead of a spy with how he dresses and carries himself with confidence.

You smile knowingly, “We all do, but you don't have that issue. It's our first day of marriage and you decide to lie to your wife?” You click your tongue, eyebrow raised. “Not a very good first impression, John.”

He'll never get used to being called that basic name. ‘John’ takes your hand, it's warm, searing hot under your slippery hand. You'd thought his warmth would cook your flesh, you guess the butter on your palm would work wonders. You're starting to regret snacking. The calluses on his palm matches your own, a large scar across his palm tells you a story untold. Silver rings decorate his long fingers. There's a more simple silver bracelet on his wrist, a stark contrast to the ornate rings he sports on both hands.

He's handsome, you think, rightfully so. With his chiseled jaw that rivals any greek statue and eyes that could be mistaken for stars; he's tall too, so that's a plus. You lucked out on the fake husband department. Well, there's worse men to fake marry out there. Just judging from first impressions, you're glad he's the one you have on your side,

“How'd you know?” He asks, eyes narrowed.

“I'm very perceptive.”

“Trained?”

“Nope,” you hide your bundle of nerves with your casual tone. His hand is still clasped on your own, you don't notice it. “Just very good at reading people.”

“Did you have a stint at the BAU too?”

Too? You ignore it for now. “No,” chuckling, you finally notice the heat on your palm so you let him go. “Just…natural talent, I guess.”

“What’s under the house?” John asks, stepping aside so you could exit the elevator.

“A beating heart.” You curse yourself, fingers already reaching for the rubber band on your wrist.

To your surprise, John laughs. The sound is genuine, eyes crinkling in the corners. “I got the reference.”

“I figured.”

“I saw a black box in the office, you wanna check it out?” He points behind him with his thumb.

“Why? Do you think there's a beating heart in there too?”

“Maybe.” He plays along, walking beside you. “You never know with the company, for all we know there's a head in there.”

“Morbid.” You joke as he opens the door for you.

“Says you?” John keeps reminding himself of his real name whilst he memorizes the side of your face. He already wants to tell you his real name, not the one assigned to him by the suits behind the faceless screen he has grown familiar with. He says his name in his mind again, if he accidentally blurted it out, well, c'est la vie.

“Says me,” you shrug casually, trying to keep up with his wit and charm. You already think you're losing. You scrunch your face at the painting above the mantle. It's an art of two lovers doing the tango, if tango excludes clothes and includes intense snogging.

He chuckles right next to you, an airy laugh that has you smiling too. “A very brave choice. Not my taste, but whatever floats the company's boat. What's inside is a bit better though.” Your ‘husband’ reaches towards the frame of the painting, gently pressing down, it releases a metallic click as it reveals a secret compartment full of weapons.

You hide a snort behind your hand. The cabinet reminds you of your own. Unimpressed, you flick your eyes down at the office table, the large black box sitting on top of it is just begging to be opened.

Without a second thought, you open it. Taking out the bottle of expensive looking wine, you read the card that is tied in a neat ribbon around the neck.

“‘Good luck on your first day of marriage’” you look at the man beside you. He's incredibly close to you, his elbow grazing yours, lips slightly parted whilst he takes a peek at the wine. He smells of burgundy and leather, it calms your senses for some odd reason. “I prefer coke.” You practically shove the bottle in his hands. The glass clinks against his metal rings.

“The snorting variation or the fizzy one?” He asks, placing the bottle down on the narra table with an almost silent thud.

“The fizzy one.” You take his question at face value. He doesn't question why you don't prefer alcohol. Sitting down on the plush office chair, you open the laptop in front of you. It dings, needing a password to open it. “It needs a—”

Before you could even finish the question, he gives you a scrap of paper from the numerous envelopes inside the box. The password is printed on it with the same font as the one from the piece of paper you held a couple of weeks ago.

You type it whilst he rifles through the box. The home screen pops up, nothing too fancy or out of the ordinary. Except for the single application in the corner that's only labeled as ‘S’

Clicking it, a chat box appears.

> Hihi, follow man

John snakes up next to you, the harsh light from the laptop shines on his pensive face. You return your attention towards ‘your boss’. A picture of a young blond man pops up in the chat, there's a mole near his left eye, he sports dark eyebrows. And a look that says ‘daddy paid for my college!’

> 40.748817, -73.985428

“That's downtown I think.” John pipes up next to you, and you look at him like he just said the sky is green and the grass is blue.

> Take keys, take car. Bring car here

> 51.505554, -0.075278.

“A car?” You rhetorically ask.

“Must be a very expensive car, or an important one.” John answers back as he leans further down to take a better look at the monitor. His hand is on the back of your chair, his necklaces dangle on his neck like a pretty chandelier.

You both wait for more instructions but it doesn't come.

“Hihi isn't very talkative, huh?” Your voice echoes in the awkward silence.

“‘Hihi?’”

“Yeah, I thought I'd give it a nickname.” You think he's weirded out but with an amused laugh he pats your shoulder nonchalantly.

“Cute.” You don't know if he's referring to you, or to the nickname you dubbed your electronic boss. “I've separated our papers.” John says as you still contemplate his last comment. “Here's yours.”

“Thanks.” You scan the pile in your hands. Your own face greets you as you flip through it all.

“It has everything we need. Credit card, ID's, carry permit and a passport.”

“What's that one?” You point at the larger envelope next to John's pile. A smaller black leather envelope sits atop it.

He opens the large envelope, giving you the contents of it. “Marriage certificate. And this one…” shaking the leather envelope, whatever is inside of it clinks. Taking it out, he shows you the gold bands. “...our wedding rings.” Heat rises in your cheeks unavoidably once he says it softly. “May I?” Open palm reaching out, he beckons.

You try to remember which hand wears it. With a split second decision, you place your left hand atop his own. Carefully sliding the cold ring in your marriage finger, you stay locked in on his eyes that's concentrating like he's disarming a bomb.

John pats your hand and then inserts his own ring in his finger, mirroring yours.

“Guess we're married.” You shrug casually like your heart doesn't beat against your ribcage, like it's trying to escape its confines. “It feels kind of weird?”

“We are,” he flashes you his signature smirk. “And we'll get used to it, hm, wife?”

“Yeah, I'll adapt.” You say just barely above a whisper, hands suddenly clammy.

“That's my girl.” Throwing you a wink, he walks away from a flustered you.

Yeah, you got lucky.

—

Morning comes and you had the best sleep you've had in years. Even if you slept on an empty stomach last night, you still slept like a baby on the eight hundred thread count Egyptian cotton blanket. You stare blankly at the beige ceiling, hands roaming around the soft bed sheet like you're making a snow angel. Sleep ridden eyes roam around the expansive master bedroom to which your new husband has graciously let you take.

Speaking of ‘John’, his bedroom is just across your own. Surprisingly enough, he hasn't woken up yet based on the silence in the hallway outside, you hadn't pegged him as a late riser.

Breakfast calls for you when your stomach rumbles loudly, but you're too comfortable to even move from your spot. Something taps from your window that's facing the foot of your bed. A soft tippy tap of something hitting the glass that has you sitting up. Eyes blinking rapidly, you stare off a pigeon perched outside. Its iridescent feathers shine in the early morning sun, its beak tapping rhythmically at the window.

Sliding your hand behind you, blindly grasping at a pillow, you fling it across the room to scare off the bird. The pillow hits your mark and out flies away the annoying pigeon. With a sigh, you get off your ass to get ready for the day ahead. You don't want to be late to your first day out in the field, no use in rotting in your luxurious bed if you can't keep it after you get fired for being late.

You dress for the day and for the cool weather. Spring has come but the freezing temperature has decided to stay for a little while. With a cozy turtleneck and comfy slacks, you forgo the torturous device called ‘heels’ for a pair of trainers. Staring at yourself in the mirror, you shrug with a huff. And you snap the rubber against your skin once again.

Taking the chair off the doorknob and then unlocking the door, you exit your sanctuary. Closing your door softly, you find yourself in front of John's room. Judging from the soft snores, you notice that he’s still sleeping. You might be his fake wife but it's not your job to wake him up. So you continue down the hallway and into the kitchen to fix yourself a bowl of cereal.

Bowl in hand, you chew as you walk up to the rooftop. Unlocking it, the sun greets you with a comfortable heat, and you frown at it. You keep eating whilst you explore the space. There's a bountiful garden in the corner, raised garden beds full of fresh vegetables and fruit that is ripe for the taking. An outside dining area sits in the middle, you recognize the long table from a catalog you once read to pass the time at the dentist. You remember that it doubles as a grill and leg warmer in the winter.

“Fancy,” you murmur with your mouth full of grainy goodness. Sipping the leftover milk in the bowl, you place it on the expensive table to crouch down next to a bushel of strawberries to sniff. “Almost ripe,” you figure from the softness of the fruit.

A bird flies above you, it's shadow casting over you. With the sound of fluttering wings, the bird perches on the table, black orbs staring at you, head tilting like it's observing your presence.

“Are you the same fucking bird?” You question the pigeon. It coos at you, and then pecks at the ceramic of your discarded bowl. “Motherfucker—” standing up, you have the look of someone ready to square up with the feathered creature.

“Why are you fighting an innocent bird?” John appears with a mug of tea in his hand. You forgot to make tea.

“I wasn't fighting with it.”

“He,” your partner crosses the distance, the bird doesn't fly away from the close proximity. You raise an eyebrow at that. “might be hungry.” He gestures towards the strawberries behind you with his chin. “Think you can grab us one, lovie?” You're gonna need some time to get used to that term.

“It's not ripe.”

“I don't think he's picky.”

“It's too sour, it might upset his stomach.”

“He's a pigeon, he's used to eating shit off the pavement. I think that's fine, love.”

With an awkward nod, you pick the one that's redder than the rest. Throwing it towards John, he catches it with a practiced hand. He sits down before laying the fruit in front of the bird. You watch it unfold, the pigeon hops on the table, beak pecking at the seeds. You're intrigued at their interaction.

John sips at his drink, still in his sleep clothes. Toned arms in full display from the loose tank top he sports. Pajama pants hanging low on his hips, silk bonnet on his head. He only has one sock on his feet, you tilt your head.

“What happened to your sock?” You point at his bare foot curiously.

“Hmm?” He looks down, and he chuckles like he just realized the missing article of clothing. “Don't know, probably kicked it off while I was sleepin’”

“Oh,” you blink, “you should get ready, we might miss our target.”

He fakes salutes at you, drinking casually from his mug as you leave the rooftop. He doesn't miss how you didn't take your dish with you. Sighing, he watches the pigeon eat his fill.

—

You and John arrive at a pub. It's dim inside with only a few miserable patrons sitting sparsely at different corners of the musty establishment. They all look miserable, all having expressions from different points of the human emotion. But there's only one face you're observing— your target.

He sits alone on the bar stool, back hunched, eyes red and nursing a half filled pint of beer. Holding his face in his hand, blond hair raked in between his fingers, bomber jacket hanging loosely on his form, bags under his sagging eyes. He's the picture of someone who's on the bottom of the barrel.

John guides you with his hand hovering on your back. Not touching, at the same time still close, you are supposed to be a couple after all. You slide into a booth that has the perfect view of the target, but still out of his sight and out of earshot. The leather seat is worn down, tiny bits of it are ripped, at least it's not sticky. He orders for you, and you observe how he slyly roams his eyes towards the man, looking out for the keys.

He comes back with a plate of chips and dip. “Thought it would be weird not to order anythin’”

“Good call,” you take a chip whilst your eyes only briefly leave the target's back. “Thought you'd buy me a pint.”

“Did you want a pint? This early? Do you want to talk about it?” He half jokes as he takes a smaller chip.

“No,” you scoff, “and no. I just thought you'd order it instead of this.”

“You're not the only perceptive one in this relationship.” John looks over his shoulder to quickly do a once over at the forlorn man.

“Did you see where he's keeping it?”

“Inside his jacket, right side.”

You nod, “Is he carrying?”

“Not that I can tell.” He shrugs, licking the salt off his finger. “So, why'd you join?”

“Really? We're doing that?” You watch as the man gulps down his remaining drink and then orders a new one immediately.

“Yes, we're doin' that. Won't that make us work better together? To get to know each other a bit more?”

“Fine,” you silently huff. “No one else would take me, this is a last resort, I guess?”

“Bullshit, love, I think anyone would be happy to have you in their…agency?”

“Flattery won't get you anywhere, birdman.” A small smile appears on your lips, he beams at you. “Besides, who else is hiring for someone with the specific skill set that I have?”

He hums, while turning subtly to take a peek at the target. Returning his attention to you after seeing the blonde man still hunched in his stool, John takes another chip. “True, did you get kicked out from the last one?”

“Not really,” you stare at the crack on the wooden table. “You?”

“Not really,” he shrugs and you roll your eyes.

“You MI6?” He asks casually. “This your first time in London?”

“I'm not answering either of those questions.”

“C’mon,” he wiggles his left hand, the wedding band shines in the pub light. “Husband, remember? ‘sides, I won't tell anyone.”

You place your elbows on the table, smiling sarcastically at him. After a beat for his anticipation, you grin wider. “No.”

His shoulders fall, a chortle escaping his lips. “Cheeky.” Pointing an accusing finger at you, he quickly looks behind him, only to find the target sluggishly exiting the pub. “He's on the move.”

You both follow the drunk man like gravity is pulling you towards him. Walking the streets of busy downtown London, stranger's faces whizz past you. John has his hands casually in his pockets, yet he stays close to you, eyes flicking in the corners to check on you.

“Why don't you ask me a question? Y’know tit for tat?” He waits patiently for you to answer back, hell he'll even take a grunt at this point.

“Okay,” you surprisingly start the conversation on his behalf. “Have you killed anyone?” The passing pedestrians don't seem to notice you and the morbid subject.

Your partner snorts, nose scrunched up, eyes glued on the staggering target. “Nah. Have you?”

“I call bullshit,” you dodge a distracted woman scrolling on her phone. “Anyway, I have. I'm not exactly proud of it or flaunting it if you're thinking that I'm doing that.”

“Good, once you start flaunting it like a bloody trophy, you've lost it.”

You hum in agreement, the sound of a deep rumble in your chest as you two turn a corner. “Why do you think hihi needs us to nick the car?”

“Hihi” he chuckles, you turn to him with a serious face. “There's probably a stash of confidential information in the trunk or somethin’”

“Maybe a stash of weapons?” The man in front of you stumbles. “I don't see him as the type to harbor secret documents.”

John nods, “a highly infectious disease then?”

“Christ, we better drive carefully once we get a hold of it.” You turn to him briefly. “Maybe it's a really expensive sports car and he's all sad and mopey because he's gone broke after buying it?”

“Got a whole story now, huh?” He pushes you lightly with his leather clad shoulder, and you smile softly. “You good at pickpocketing him?” Your partner gestures with his chin, said target is walking into traffic. He seems unbothered by the oncoming vehicles. John curses under his breath.

“We should do that now before he kills himself.” You speed walk across the crossing, grabbing the drunk man before a car hits him.

Arms enveloping around his bomber jacket, swiping him away and quickly carrying him to the footpath, you save him before an suv hits you both. The car honks loudly and angrily as your target groans in your arms like he's about to hurl the contents of his stomach.

John punches the hood of the car, pointing at the driver accusingly. A distraction for you to take the keys hidden in the man's jacket.

“You almost hit my fuckin' wife, you wanker!” Your partner yells, covering the sound of jingling keys in your expert hand. He plays the part well.

Surprisingly, the target straightens up in your hold, a split second after you pocketed the car keys inside your own coat.

“Y-you,” he slurs, feet struggling to keep himself upright. “Dickhead!” Slamming his fists on the hood with a loud *thunk, he joins John who gives you a look and a shrug. The drunken yelling gets louder and the driver now exits his car with an equally angry look.

John takes this opportunity to come back to your side, hand holding your elbow, he leads you away from the screaming match as more and more people try to intervene.

“Got it?” He whispers closely to the shell of your ear, sending goosebumps to rise in your arms.

“‘course I did.” You jingle the keys inside your pocket. “I'm not an amateur.”

Playing along, he laughs, hand still holding your elbow softly. “Good job, missus.”

With an awkward chuckle, you lean away from him. “Just so you know, I'm not in this for…the romance.” You bite the inside of your cheek. “I'm not looking to date my co-worker.”

John raises his hands in mock surrender. “Fine by me. if the situation calls for us to actually act as a couple—”

“We'll act as a couple, I won't fuss if that's what you're saying.”

“Good, now let's get this bloody car.”

—

“A fucking ‘99 toyota corolla?” You stare in disbelief at the rusting metal. “At least it's one of the good models.” Kicking the wheel, you expect it to tumble over like in an old timey cartoon.

John is crouched way down to check the bottom of the car. “It's clear.” He stands up fully, cleaning his hands on his jeans. You wince at his movements. “What?”

“Nothing.” You open the driver's side, the smell of alcohol and something musty hits your nose. “Nasty.” Coughing, you air it out by opening another door.

“You know your cars?”

“A little bit.” You say with your nose pinched. Sparing him a look, he stands in the parking lot like he's still waiting for the rest of the story. “What?”

“Throw me a bone here, love.” You roll your eyes. “Why do you know so much about cars?”

“I said I know a little bit.” You place your hands on your hips like an exasperated mother whose son keeps asking weird questions about dinosaurs. “I dated a mechanic.” You say flatly.

“Really? Did you date a pickpocket too? Or do you date people so you could absorb their skills like kirby?”

“Are you jealous?” You tease him with a comment you didn't have the foresight that it would backfire.

“We are married.” He says matter-of-fact with a killer smirk and eyes glinting with mischief. “And this is technically our honeymoon so—”

“Get in the fucking car, birdman.”

—

The wheel is sticky under your hands, you have an intense urge to wash your hands or to at least grab a sanitizer. Apparently your disgust shows on your face, for John chortles next to you.

“What?” You say through gritted teeth.

“Nothin’, you just look like someone shat in your tea.”

“The wheel is sticky.”

“I have a handkerchief with me, d’you want me to?” Taking out the dark green cloth from his jean pockets, he's already twisting in his seat to wipe it clean.

“Please,” you ask softly, hands sliding down to make space for him.

Your hand never left the wheel while he cleans it for you. John's seatbelt is unclasped so he could have more movement, his face is close to your vision, warmth blanketing over you. He's so close that you can smell his cologne, it's a different one from yesterday, it's more flowery with a hint of mint. You spot a hidden mole under his ear. A tiny dot that is just begging to be poked.

Without thinking, you press softly with the pad of your finger. He yelps, flinching away instinctively. Looking at you with wide eyes and mouth agape, you're ready to be called a nasty nickname, or be cussed out with a loud voice. Instead of what you're anticipating, a laugh bellows out, a rumbly laugh that makes you smile and let out an almost silent chortle.

“I think you found my mole.” John holds the side of his neck with a grin. “You let your urges get to you, love.”

“Sorry,” you keep your eyes on the road to hide your embarrassment.

“It's fine, your hand was just cold. Ask me next time, I have a few more cute moles on me.”

“Nevermind, you ruined it.” With a roll of your eyes and a smile, you park at the coordinates. “Nice acting back there, I see an Emmy nomination for you in the future.”

“Thanks, I barely remember what I said. You sure this is the place?” John peeks at the map pulled up on your phone. “Shit, we're here.”

The entire street is suburban, large colonial houses lining the sides, tall pine trees decorate the sidewalks. There's not a lot of people walking by, save for a couple pedestrians walking their dogs, the place is devoid of people.

“What now?” You unclasp your seatbelt to twist around in your seat so you could observe the neighborhood.

“Hihi told us to bring it here, so maybe we should—?” John lets out a high pitched scream that also has you yelling in surprise, not from whatever made him shriek but from the sound that escaped him. “What the fuck!”

Leaning slightly to look at what had his knickers in a bunch, you stare blankly at a bespectacled man in a bespoke suit. The man gives you and your partner an apologetic look, he points for John to open the window.

He turns towards you with an eyebrow raised. “Should I?”

“Yeah, I think you should.”

“What if he's got a gun?” He whispers.

“We also have guns, John. I'll cover you, don't worry. Maybe this is what hihi asked us to do.”

“Easy for you to say, you're not the one opening it.” He gives you a glare before rolling the window down an inch. “Hi, mate. What can we do for you?”

“The car,” the stranger points a lengthy finger at the wheel. His voice is crackly and gravelly, like he just smoked a pack of cigarettes before he went up to the car. “You're late, but that doesn't matter. How much do I owe you, folks?”

“Uh, the usual.” You say with fake confidence.

“Good,” the lean man straightens up, “mind gettin’ out of the car then?”

“Right, sorry, bruv.” John, gives you one look before exiting the car. He's nervous and so are you.

As the doors shut, the man flexes his open palms expectantly for the keys, to which you hand off immediately. He gives you bad vibes, maybe your intuition tells you to run for the hills.

“Thank you, sweetheart. I'll wire the money to the usual account.” The nickname sends shivers down your spine.

He closes the door and starts up the car. With a splutter of the exhaust, he slowly drives away. You and John watch, standing side by side in the middle of the street in confusion.

“He was weird, right? Not to mention it was too easy.” You turn your head to look at him. “Maybe they're trying to ease us in?”

“It was all weird, not just him—” A blast coming from the car interrupts him, the sheer force of it sends you two down on the rough pavement.

Your cheeks are incredibly warm from the searing heat of the bomb. The light from it blinds the two of you.

Palms skinned, trousers slashed at the knees, your ears ring loudly like an annoying buzz from a broken microphone. Coughing loudly, smoke fills your lungs, debris is scattered around the once pristine neighborhood. There's blood on the concrete, you can't hear John calling for you, your vision is blurred by the cloud of smoke. His hand reaches for you, and your instincts tell you to run.

“Fuck!” He yells, running beside you at full speed. “What the fuck!”

“Keep running!” You yell as he turns around to check on a woozy you. “I'm fine!”

Someone behind you screams for you to stop so you and your partner run faster. Knees aching, thighs burning, you don't stick around to look who's running after you. The unmistakable click of a gun’s safety is loud in your eardrums, even if your lungs threaten to give out, you sprint right next to John as he turns a corner and into a carwash.

The smell of soap and heavy pine scented car freshener hits your bloody nose. He tugs you towards the plastic curtains and inside what you presume as the employee lounge, someone yells after you but it falls on deaf ears as you and John continue your escape.

Exiting the establishment, the metal doors open to a messy alleyway. Boxes upon boxes of trash and god knows what are littered all around. The pungent smell makes you want to hurl, or maybe that's the adrenaline having a weird effect on your stomach.

You two find reprieve for a second, huffing, trying to get oxygen back in. Hands on your aching thighs, the concrete below you slowly turns crimson as your mysterious injury drips precious blood on the messy ground.

“You're bleedin’” He says in between inhales. There's rustling of fabric next to you, and you feel the warm cloth placed on your forehead.

“No shit, Sherlock.” Waving the drenched cloth away, you scoff lightly. “Don't.”

“What am I supposed to do? Let you bleed?”

You stand up straight, blood coating your lashes as you stare at him. “I've got a better idea.” Placing your palms on the source of the pain, you let your blood coat it.

“What—?” You roughly smudge the warm ichor all over his face and shirt, the plain white of his t-shirt turns a dark pink shade with your touch. Leaning away, he gives you a slow nod of understanding. “Ease us in, huh?”

“I'm rarely wrong and this is one of the rare instances.”

“Let's hope you're right about this one.”

—

You kick the backdoor open with ferocity. It bangs loud against the wall, getting the restaurant staff's attention.

“Help please! My husband!” John's limp arm is around your shoulders, your hand gripping on to his waist to add that one detail that would convince them of your innocence. “There was a bomb!” You don't let the bystanders touch you or John whilst you quickly lumber through their dinghy bathroom. There's murmurs and chairs scraping on the tiled floors as you lock the door behind you.

The bathroom is small, tiles yellowed from the years, the stench of bleach itching your nose. The lightbulb above you whirs like it's about to burst out. He leaves your side to take off his bloodied jacket, tossing it outside from the window— his exit, you presume.

“Your phone.” He holds his empty hand out to you, when you only raise an eyebrow at him, he sighs, eyes turning soft, adrenaline melting out of his system. “Please, c’mon, love, you got me sayin’ please and shit.”

“What for?” You try desperately to wipe the blood off your face.

“To contact you, just in case you need help.”

“I can handle it.”

“I know you can, how else did you get the job then? Just let me,” his voice wavers a bit but he corrects himself with a timed clear of his smoke filled throat. “Please, Jane.”

After pausing, you take your phone out from your pocket to give it to him. He enters his number after seeing your home screen of a basic mountain range.

“There.” Giving the phone back, you expected him to give his too, but he doesn't as he's already halfway out of the window. “I'll see you at home?”

You let out a chuckle, “yeah, I'll see you at home.” He gives you one last smile as he exits the small bathroom and into the streets where numerous sirens go off from ambulances and fire trucks.

—

It was a blur the entire trip home, you bought a loose hoodie from a thrift store and then promptly discarded your blood soaked coat in the bottom of a dumpster. It was a shame though, you liked that coat, it had real wool in the lining. The uber drive was thankfully uneventful, if the driver noticed the remnants of dried blood on your skin he didn't mention it. You gave him five stars for it.

An empty house greets you, John's shoes are nowhere to be seen in the hallway, nor his jacket. You worry for a second, mind rushing through possibilities. The rubber band burns as you pull it back and release it with a harsh thwack against your skin.

The water is cool as you shower, your blood mixing in and pooling around your feet and into the drain like a macabre whirlpool. You don't let your mind wonder about the man that you turned into a street pancake. Instead, you focus on yourself in the mirror.

You stare at the gash near your hairline, the skin around it is angry, leaving a throbbing sensation. There's also a few scratches on your face, especially around your chin. Your main concern is the large gash. It doesn't look like it needs to be stitched together though, which is a good thing since you don't have the energy to even tend to the tiny scratches on your palms. Cleaning and bandaging the wound, you put on clean pajamas and head to bed.

You stop in your tracks when you see John lying face down on your bed. Still in his iron soaked clothes, save for the jacket. You glare at his boot, it's off the bed but you still grit your teeth at the thought of it grazing your bedsheets.

He senses your presence, and he lifts his head up, chin helping prop himself up. “Your bed is better than mine.” His multi coloured eyes are laced with exhaustion, dull yet there's still a spark when he looks at your annoyed gaze.

“Who are you? Goldilocks?”

“Yeah, I ate your porridge too.”

“Damn, not my porridge.” Too tired to fight him, you slither into bed next to him, an arm's length away from his equally tired body. Staring at the ceiling, you feel his eyes on you. “What's up with your eyes?”

“It's called heterochromia—”

“I know what it is, I'm asking why you're staring at me like you're about to devour me.”

“I could devour you if you want.” He says nonchalantly but with the charisma of a man who knows what he's talking about.

“Maybe next time.” You blindly pat his shoulder which ended up with you patting his cheek. He hums at your touch, a deep rumble that you felt through the mattress. “Not bad for our first day huh?” Lifting your hand away, he twists on the bed to mirror your position. Now you're both gazing at the beige ceiling like it owes you money.

You're tired but for some reason you're fighting off the sandman from sprinkling sand in your heavy eyes.

“I lied back there, I've killed before.” His voice is merely above a whisper but you heard it as loud as a trumpet blaring in your ears.

“I know, you wouldn't be here if you haven't.” You answer with empathy. “If it makes you feel better, I've been to London before. Twice, on a family trip and a decade later…on vacation.”

“Glad to know.” He taps the inside of your elbow as a thank you for trusting him. “You CIA?” He blurts out above the comfortable silence.

“God no.” You truthfully say.

“And here I thought you're an alumni of the culinary institute of America.”

For the first time in years, you let out the loudest laugh you could muster. Snort and all.

Your ‘husband’ joins in with his own rambunctious laughter, the bed shakes at the loud guffaws. The happy sound fills the room, and your heart feels like it isn't as heavy as before. It's still there, the heaviness, but it isn't as cumbersome. You now realize that you've only snapped the rubber band on your wrist a couple times today.

An annoying tapping sound interrupts you both. Simultaneously sitting up by the elbows, you two tilt your head at the intruder.

“It's that pigeon again.” You actually smile at the thought of the same bird coming back to your house like a white strand of hair that keeps growing even after you've pulled it out. “I think we should name him. Something like Terry or Flanders.” You chuckle softly.

“Jeff.”

You shake your head. “Nope, doesn't suit him, what if it's a she?”

“His name is Jeff.” John turns to look at you, eyes full of certainty.

You turn to him, blinking rapidly in realization. “He's yours. He's your bird, isn't he?”

“You are insightful.” He smiles, a soft one that fills you with endearment that you haven't felt in years. “Met him a few months ago, fed him once and now he wouldn't leave me alone. I guess he followed me here too.”

“Y’know, pigeons are really smart, kinda like crows. He probably thinks you're his daddy.”

“Does that make you Jeff's mummy?”

“I don't want to be Jeff's mom.” Said bird taps on your window again, like he senses that you're currently talking about him.

“Too bad,” he raises his marriage finger, showing you the gold band. “He's our kid, love.”

You smile, hiding it with a huff and by laying back down with a gentle thump.

“Can I tell you somethin’?” His face pops up in your vision, you nod in place. “My real name is—”

“Let me stop you right there.” You sit back up, almost hitting his head with your own at how fast you sat. “There's a reason why they gave us fake names. Whether we like it or not, It's John,” You point at him. “And Jane Smith.” You point at yourself. “Until they dismiss us, that's our names. Not whatever you were about to tell me.”

“But you know it's not our names, right?”

“Of course I do. You don't look like a John, John.”

“And you don't look like a Jane. I just…” He sighs. “Just want someone to know my real name. We almost died back there, what if we stayed a minute longer inside that car? What then? I don't want to die with someone else's name written on my grave.” His words are genuine, but it sounds like he has said these words before.

Still, you sympathize with him. You've gone undercover before, taken someone’s name instead of yours for months. Those missions were so long and tiring that you almost forgot your own name. But it was…survivable because he was with you. John has no one, and this time you have no one. No one that calls your real name, no one that can identify your body if you suddenly croak in the middle of a mission.

No one else but John and Jane Smith.

So with bated breath, you give him the go ahead. “Okay, tell me. But I can't promise that I'll call you by that name.”

“Don't want to get in trouble with hihi?”

“No,” you scoff. “I don't give a shit what that robot says. I just don't want to die with a stranger's name. So fuck it, tell me yours and I'll mine.”

He smiles the same smile that he gave you before he went out of that dinky bathroom window. The smile that reassures you, a smile that tells you everything will be alright.

“It's Hobie,” Hobie finally says. “Hobie Brown.”

“It suits you better. Thought it was Jeff.” You whisper, and you give him your real name. The same name you were born with, not the fabricated ones your former agency has given you, not the ones your new company has given you.

He whispers back your name, tongue rolling off it like honey. Then, Hobie smiles again, nodding and those heterochromatic eyes bore into you comfortably like the sun's rays kissing your skin in the summer.

“You look like one. Definitely suits you better than Jane.” You smile shyly as you lose the fight against sandman.

In Hobie's mind, he hopes that knowing your real name is enough, enough to keep you alive, enough of an incentive for him to keep you safe, since you're not just a typical Jane anymore that the company randomly selected for him, no, you're Y/N L/N, and he'll do anything to protect you better. Because maybe, just maybe, knowing your real name this early would work, and you'll outlive all the Janes that he himself has outlived.

As you fall asleep next to him, he stares at Jeff the third. In that luxurious house, within those bulletproof walls, and in your room lies a deep anger in him. An anger that keeps him sane in all those years trying to pay his debt. He needs to end the cycle, not just for him but for all the agents that are in the same shoes as him. For now he lets you sleep soundly, for now, he plots the demise of the people behind the screen.

The laptop flashes a new message from the company.

> Mission complete: 3 fails remaining

> Good job, next mission?

Support banner by @cafekitsune ❤️

A/N: thank you for reading!!! Please consider reblogging if you liked it ❤️❤️❤️

[searching4silence]

MHA COLLEGE SMAU X FEM! READER

masterlist next chapter

| cw: woc yn, fem reader

You had just landed in Tokyo, the hum of the city greeting you like an old friend. Neon signs flickered against the night sky, casting their reflections across streets glossed with rain water. Despite the familiar sights, the air tasted different after so long.

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

The taxi ride from the airport was a blur of headlights and distant chatter, the city moving too fast and yet not fast enough. Your fingers drummed lightly against the window as the campus district came into view, UA College’s silhouette standing proud against the skyline. For a moment, memories of late-night study sessions, campus festivals, and training drills resurfaced, tethering you to a version of yourself that felt worlds away.

But that was then.

Now, as the taxi pulled up in front of your apartment complex, the realization hit. You were back, and for good this time. No more modeling gigs in New York, no more late-night flights across the ocean. Tokyo was your stage again—only this time, the spotlight wasn’t just on your quirk.

Dragging your suitcase through the entrance, you stepped into the warmth of your apartment. Sparse but familiar, the space echoed with the faint hum of city life through the windows. Setting your bags aside, you collapsed onto the couch, exhaling the tension from your shoulders. Before you could sink too far into the cushions, your phone buzzed against your thigh.

The screen lit up with a name that instantly made you smile: [minaashidoo] sent you a message: OMG UR BACK

You barely had time to unlock your phone before another notification appeared.

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

You let out a sigh of content looking back at your screen one last time. Its not like you we’re gonna unpack tonight anyways. Pushing yourself off of the couch and grabbing your phone. Making your way down the hall into your beloved bedroom.

“listening party…huh,” announcing to no one in particular you looked through the sea of clothes left in your closet. The words slipped into the quiet room, met only by the faint rustle of clothes as hangers touching beneath sifting hands.

Fabric slid between your fingers—soft, sleek, rubbery—each option carrying a different vibe. A quick glance at the clock nudged you to make a decision. The chosen outfit draped across the bed as accessories clinked softly atop the dresser. Perfume lingered faintly in the air, the last spritz settling against your skin as the mirror reflected a sight you never feared to see.

Phone in hand, a quick snap captured the moment; the prelude to a night that hadn’t yet begun.

The city air clung to your skin as you stepped onto the pavement, the faint hum of distant traffic weaving through the night. Streetlights cast golden halos against the sidewalk, and the faint pulse of music echoed from somewhere down the block. Your phone vibrated in your pocket, a quick glance revealing Mina’s name flashing across the screen.

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

The notification bubble vanished as footsteps approached from the corner. Pink bubblegum hair bounced with every step, eyes sparkling with excitement as Mina rushed forward, practically throwing herself into your arms.

“Finally! I swear it’s been forever!” Her voice carried a mix of joy and mock exasperation, muffled slightly against your shoulder.

“It’s only been…what? A year?” you teased, though the warmth of her hug made it clear the time apart had been far too long.

“Yeah, well, that’s like forever in best friend years. Come on, I want you to meet the band!” Mina looped her arm through yours, tugging you down the street with all the enthusiasm of someone determined not to miss a single beat of the night.

Building lights blurred past as the venue came into view—a low hum of bass vibrating through the pavement, the faint pulse of anticipation threading through your veins.

all images used are from pinterest.

masterlist next chapter

[pureshadough]

crk reread - crispia 1-3

(long post with lots of images under the cut!)

genuinely not much to say for these first couple chapters. cookies of darkness are barely even around to cause and problems of note and most cutscenes are all of 4-5 lines so we're gonna be bouncing ahead pretty quickly here

custard III is much more fun of a character than i gave him credit for upon first read and i think almost all of that is because of how much his english performance aggravated me

i want to see this handbook

misread this as FUCKO at first. why does he even say this

even wizard's tired of how one note she is 😭 mg

>___>; ??????

i love this thang.

Oh jesus fucking christ you show up WAY earlier than i expected/remembered. this is literally crispia 2s like second cutscene. Girl how did you even get here

can we talk about how insane of a first ancient to drop on the player this is by the way

Hi wife

lily figment 🤝 healer I don't know shit from fuck

okay the fact there's an entire cutscene of the kids all going "wait what the fuck are we even doing this for again" is REALLY FUNNY

everyone's characterization is sooooo flat though jesus chriust. i know this is secondary to the player getting familiar with the gameplay loop at this point but there is like Zero attachment value to the characters who are gonna end up being the face of story mode for like years to come. would not surprise me if this is precisely why custard and chili pepper get benched for side content later

i don't remember if we ever wrap back around to this guy or not but i will be formally incorporating this into my brand new "gingerbrave has had several dozen reincarnations" theory henceforth

funniest possible way to end a conversation. queen

white lily is the natural evolution of an audhd middleschool girl who kept a collection of animal skulls and dead bugs in a shoe box

how common WERE dragons for there to be a corpse readily out in the open like this?

i literally forgot this was a character in the game.

given the thriving and Very Public existence of the likes of the hollyberry kingdom & creme republic i'm not really sure if the intended implication here is/was that society is extremely sparse and disconnected from one another post-flour war OR if this is just a case of the common kids having newly-escaped and literally just Not Knowing civilizations of such a scale still exist. given wizard's false assumption about the sugar swan i think this is a fair conclusion to make in lieu of it just being live update model-typical retconning

roflmao

the vanilla kingdom's trials & hero's gates shit is so fucking weird under the pretenses of current content. like did the pilgrims just set that shit up for fun as a means of delivering a history lesson or something. as soon as pv rolled back up after all this did they immediately clear house and just let people use the path normally XD

hey look it's half-decent chili characterization

do you think this mountain statue of the ancients was carved after they all disappeared. like pv is travelling through to the pilgrim village at some point and happens upon this iand is like Oh what in the god damn

(points) i see your heavily obscured white lily for thematic purposes. I am staring directly at it

how often do you think licorice has hit himself in the back of the head with his scythe by holding it like this

the cookies of darkness really do have this goofy ass team rocket energy to them in these early segments that i'm rather endeared to. things used to be so simple for these guys. whens the last time licorice has even shown up in a story related cutscene

what thue fuck even is this thing

Yup! Sure is early crispia! i genuinely don't have much else to say here. very funny that white lily inexplicably rolls up for all of five minutes and is like "nooo i can't go with you guys i smell :(" (BARELY EXAGGERATING) and then vanishes for another two chapters. you can really tell they don't have their footing yet but the way it plants seeds of intrigue on exactly Who the ancients Were is fun in isolation. almost makes me wish they didnt actually start us off with a dark flour war recap in the opening prologue (or at least that they worked harder to obfuscate identities in it for the time). does anyone remember the *really* old prologue version back before any of the ancients were even ready to be in the game and so all of their tap actions were different (in a way that suggested lily was planned to be a support instead of bomber)? i think about this often .

[spaceistheplaceart]

i've literally seen NOBODY talking about this but i think this guy getting beat up could be Benrey... but dam!!! he looks very different!!! so i tried to combine his old look with his potential new look and... this is what I got (creepy man... but cool...)

BONUS coloured version I didn't like much and also a HLVRAI-era benny below

Summarized ID: a drawing of benrey looking forward smirking. he's missing a tooth, has a sparse mustache, his left eye is lighter/white and there is a scar on his left eyebrow. He has a dark shadow over his eyes.

FULL ID UNDER CUT

Image One: On the left are three reference images. The top one is of the man who was being beaten up by Combine in the HL2VRAI trailer. He is laying on the ground, smirking, with a tooth missing, a black eye, and a scar on his eyebrow. He has tan skin and a buzzcut, a wide nose, and possibly heterochromia. Could also be the lighting. The image below that is the stock image of the Barney Half Life One model. The third image is of Benrey from HLVRAI, looking at the viewer head on. He has high cheekbones, smile lines, shadowy eyes and a slim face. Above him in blue text reads: "you're not supposed to be here."

The drawing next to the reference images is of Benrey, but trying to combine the reference images. The drawing was made with a pencil-like brush and is uncoloured. He is looking forward smirking. he's missing a tooth on his left side, has a sparse mustache, his left eye is lighter/white and there is a scar on his left eyebrow. He has a dark shadow over his eyes that extends from his slightly receding hairline. His hair is black. He wears a collared shirt.

The first bonus image is the same image as the first drawing but now coloured. Benrey has tan skin, lit from the right side, and is wearing a blue shirt. The shadows are more purple in tone. The second bonus image is him but looking like he did in HLVRAI: clean shaven, wearing a tie, and his helmet. No scar, no heterochromia, and no missing tooth.

END ID

[spectralpixelsredone]

Analysis of the Banzai Blasters (Epithet Erased)

The Banzai Blasters are a criminal organization in Epithet Erased, primarily operating in Sweet Jazz City. Characterized by their comedic incompetence, pyramid scheme structure, and Team Rocket-inspired aesthetic, they serve as a foil to the more serious Bliss Ocean. This analysis explores their ideology, structure, membership, goals, methods, narrative role, and thematic significance, drawing from the provided document.

Ideology and Motivation

Core Belief: The Banzai Blasters lack a unified ideological goal beyond personal gain and petty crime. Their activities revolve around small-scale heists, vandalism, and scams, driven by a desire for power, status, or profit within their pyramid scheme structure.

Motivation: The organization appeals to "teenage delinquents and disenfranchised divorcees," suggesting it preys on individuals seeking belonging or quick rewards. Members are motivated by the promise of rank advancement, which grants customization privileges and status, as seen in the "And Your Reward Is Clothes" trope.

Hypocrisy: While not explicitly ideological, their pyramid scheme model is inherently exploitative, requiring members to pay $49.99 a month (plus tax) to join as Blasters, with little regard for low-ranking members who stop paying. This reflects a lack of loyalty to their own, as higher ranks prioritize personal advancement over group cohesion.

Narrative Framing: The Banzai Blasters are portrayed as bumbling, comical villains, embodying the "Goldfish Poop Gang" trope. Their incompetence contrasts with their self-perception as "Great at Crime" (as per their image song), making them a humorous counterpoint to the more threatening Bliss Ocean.

Membership and Structure

Composition: The Banzai Blasters have a large but disorganized membership, consisting of both epithet users (e.g., Bugsy Pugsler, Arnold Markdown) and mundies (non-powered individuals). Most members are low-ranking "Blasters," depicted as faceless goons in generic uniforms with helmets, which they cannot remove until they rank up.

Key Members:

Bugsy Pugsler (Vice Principal): Epithet "Bellybutton," a random-effect power based on consuming food (e.g., spitting ice or soup-based attacks). He’s greedy, smug, and physically strong (4-star stamina) but lacks creativity and skill, making his epithet inconsistent. Voiced by Heath Morrow.

Arnold Markdown (Vice Principal): Epithet "Coupon," a support power that buffs allies or weakens enemies via coupons (e.g., "2 for 1" to replicate attacks). He’s weak in direct combat (1-star stamina) but skilled in strategy (high creativity/proficiency). Voiced by Oliver Tull.

The Banzai Jennifers (Blasters): A trio of female Blasters (Jenny, Jen, Niffer) inspired by Heathers, with color-coded motifs (Red, Green, Yellow). They’re mooks with Valley Girl accents and feminine uniform tweaks (skirts, bows). Voiced by Meg McClain, Lindsay Sheppard, and Sarah Wiedenheft.

Giovanni Potage (Former Captain): An epithet user who led a team of Blasters, known for creative but silly missions (e.g., replacing hot dogs with cattails). His leadership earned him the nickname "Boss" before he left to form his own group.

Other Notable Members: Flamethrower, Car Crash, Spike, Ben, Crusher, Dark Star (all former Blasters under Giovanni), and DC Bell (Valedictorian, details sparse).

Banzai Baron: The elusive leader, mentioned but not detailed, suggesting a distant or symbolic role.

Structure: The Banzai Blasters operate as a pyramid scheme with a convoluted rank system: Blaster, Captain, Vice Principal, Associate Justice, Valedictorian, Senpai, and Baron. Advancement allows uniform customization (e.g., Giovanni’s cape, Bugsy/Arnold’s cartoon gloves). Vice Principals work in pairs to encourage infighting, with only one eligible for promotion, fostering internal rivalry. The organization’s large presence in Sweet Jazz City is undermined by poor coordination and ineffective members.

Goals and Methods

Goals: The Banzai Blasters aim to maintain their criminal influence in Sweet Jazz City through petty crimes, such as theft (e.g., the Arsene Amulet) and vandalism. Their pursuit of the amulet suggests an interest in powerful artifacts, though their motives are likely self-serving rather than ideological.

Methods:

Zerg Rush Tactics: They rely on numbers, as seen when Bugsy and Arnold’s team dogpiles Giovanni to steal the Arsene Amulet. However, their lack of skill makes this ineffective against stronger opponents like Percy.

Petty Crime: Missions include trivial acts like stealing items for show-and-tell or sabotaging gas stations, reflecting their lack of ambition.

Pyramid Scheme: Membership requires monthly payments, with higher ranks reaping benefits while low-ranking Blasters are treated as disposable. The organization doesn’t pursue defectors unless they’re high-ranking, indicating a focus on profit over loyalty.

Epithet Use: Members like Bugsy and Arnold use epithets for combat or support, though their powers (e.g., Bellybutton’s randomness, Coupon’s conditional buffs) are often underwhelming or poorly utilized.

Outcome: The Banzai Blasters consistently fail in their major endeavors. In the "Museum Arc" and "Western Arc," they’re defeated by characters like Percy, Ramsey, and Howie Honeyglow, with Giovanni’s team defecting to form a new group. Their attempt to steal the Arsene Amulet is thwarted, and key members like Bugsy are humiliated (e.g., Zora de-aging him into a baby).

Leadership

Banzai Baron: The supposed leader, but no details are provided beyond their title, suggesting they’re either a figurehead or operate behind the scenes. Their absence contrasts with the hands-on leadership of figures like Giovanni.

Bugsy and Arnold (Vice Principals): As high-ranking members, they lead teams but are ineffective due to their egos and weak epithets. Bugsy’s arrogance and Arnold’s reliance on coupons make them vulnerable, as seen in their defeats by Giovanni, Ramsey, and Zora. Their paired structure, designed to spark infighting, highlights the organization’s dysfunctional leadership model.

Giovanni Potage (Former Captain): A charismatic leader who inspired loyalty in his team, Giovanni’s departure underscores the organization’s inability to retain talent. His creative missions, while silly, show more initiative than the typical Blaster.

Narrative Role and Themes

Role: The Banzai Blasters are recurring antagonists in Epithet Erased, appearing in the "Museum Arc" and "Western Arc." They serve as comic relief and a foil to Bliss Ocean, highlighting the latter’s competence and menace. Their incompetence makes them a non-lethal threat, easily dispatched by protagonists like Percy or Howie, but their persistence adds humor and chaos to the plot.

Themes:

Ineptitude vs. Ambition: The Blasters’ grandiose self-image (e.g., "Great at Crime") clashes with their constant failures, poking fun at overconfident villains.

Exploitation and Hierarchy: The pyramid scheme structure critiques exploitative systems, with low-ranking members treated as disposable while higher ranks hoard benefits.

Team Rocket Influence: Inspired by Team Rocket, the Blasters’ pink-haired grunts, silly antics, and disorganized crime mirror Pokémon’s comedic villains, adding a nostalgic, lighthearted tone.

Redemption and Defection: Giovanni’s arc, leaving the Blasters to form his own group, suggests potential for growth beyond the organization’s toxic structure.

Resolution: The Blasters remain active but diminished, with Giovanni’s team defecting and key members like Bugsy humiliated. Their ongoing presence suggests future comedic conflicts, but their lack of competence limits their narrative weight.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths:

Numbers: Their large membership allows for tactics like dogpiling, though this rarely succeeds.

Epithet Synergy: Bugsy and Arnold’s powers complement each other (e.g., Coupon’s buffs enhancing Bellybutton’s attacks), showing potential when coordinated.

Cultural Presence: Their visibility in Sweet Jazz City and catchy image song give them a memorable identity despite their failures.

Weaknesses:

Incompetence: Most members, even Vice Principals, are easily defeated, with low skill and poor epithet mastery (e.g., Bugsy’s random attacks).

Disorganization: Internal rivalries and a convoluted rank system undermine their effectiveness.

Weak Epithets: Powers like Bellybutton and Coupon are situational or underwhelming, limiting their threat level.

Exploitative Structure: The pyramid scheme alienates members, leading to defections like Giovanni’s.

Notable Interactions

With Bliss Ocean: The Blasters are a foil to Bliss Ocean, lacking the latter’s focus and menace. Zora’s interaction with Bugsy (de-aging him for whining) underscores Bliss Ocean’s superiority, as even a single Bliss Ocean member outclasses a Blaster Vice Principal.

With Protagonists: Characters like Percy, Ramsey, and Howie easily defeat Blasters, highlighting their ineffectiveness. Giovanni’s leadership and eventual defection show a contrast between individual potential and the organization’s stagnation.

Past Atrocities: Despite their comedic portrayal, the Blasters are responsible for serious crimes, such as murdering Zora’s parents over gold, hinting at a darker side that’s rarely shown.

Conclusion

The Banzai Blasters are a comedic, disorganized criminal group in Epithet Erased, defined by their pyramid scheme structure, Team Rocket-inspired antics, and general incompetence. Their lack of ideological depth, reliance on weak epithets, and exploitative hierarchy make them a humorous but ineffective foil to Bliss Ocean. While they contribute to the series’ lighthearted tone, their occasional darker actions (e.g., Zora’s parents) suggest untapped potential for menace. Their persistence despite constant failures ensures they remain a source of chaotic, comedic conflict in Sweet Jazz City.

[peskellence]

Pairing: RK900/Gavin Reed

Tags: Post Pacifist Ending, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, Eventual Smut, Angst, Hurt/ Comfort

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Summary: In the aftermath of Detroit's android revolution, Nines grapples with the complexities of his newfound deviancy. As he seeks to establish his place in a newly transformed society, his resolve is put to the ultimate test when he is paired with Detective Gavin Reed-a notoriously volatile human with a well-established hatred for androids-to investigate a series of murders.

While initial impressions of his partner seem to suggest his reputation is well-deserved, the more time Nines spends with him, the more he is forced to challenge his judgments. As they form an unexpected bond, the RK900 is also pushed to examine truths about himself he would much rather seek to forget. (A Retelling of 'More Than Our Parts' from the POV of Nines.)

Warnings: Graphic Violence, Depression/Self Destructive Behaviour, Eventual Smut

Word Count: 5.5K

Tag List: @sweeteatercat @wedonthaveawhile @gho-stychan @tentoriumcerebelli @negative-citadel @faxaway @moriahadi424 @unicorn4genocide @cptjh-arts

They arrived at Cedars Motel just after 9:30 a.m. The lobby was devoid of patrons, and its squalid conditions left little ambiguity as to why. It was the sort of establishment that would appeal only to the most desperate of passers-by—or those involved in illicit activities.

The owner was evidently aware of their target clientele. A digital touch display was mounted on a nearby wall, one of the few furnishings that appeared to have been purchased within the century. A roulette wheel spun on the screen, a blur of red and black, before transitioning into an image of two scantily clad women. They were locked in a provocative embrace, winking coyly at the camera.

The fluorescent pink of the advertisement clashed with the sallow yellows and browns that otherwise dominated the room. Nines muted the visual assault with a swift feedback adjustment, then turned his attention to the reception. Even the staff were reluctant to linger, with the front desk equally abandoned as the rest of the facility.

As he scanned the vicinity for a bell or buzzer, Reed wandered toward the digital display. With the urgency of a tourist on vacation, he dragged his fingers across a rack of magazines beneath it. This seemed an unlikely spot for their witness to hide, with it equally doubtful that any evidence would have been concealed there.

In a superficial attempt to 'inspect' something, the human pulled one of the publications from the shelf and brought it to his face. The calibre of material he had selected was no surprise. 

While the cover wasn't entirely in focus from Nines' current vantage, the bare skin and scarlet lace were unmistakable.

"Our perp sure has some refined taste…" Reed punctuated the remark with a snort, flicking to the next page. "Classy digs, don't you think?"

Nines held his tongue, desperate to point out that the current behaviour hardly proved any more refined.

Then, his systems alerted him to something: an unusual detail concerning the models his partner was shamelessly gawking at. The faultless smoothness of their skin, despite minimal photo editing and subtle flares of light which traced the contours of their temples.

> ENHANCING OPTICAL UNIT MAGNIFICATION…

> SCANNING DOCUMENTATION.

> SCAN COMPLETED. 

> PUBLICATION TITLE: ELECTRIC DREAMS — ISSUE NO. 226

> HEADLINE ARTICLE: 'Your girlfriend's jaw might get tired – but ours won't! - Why Android Sex Is Still The Best.'

It was curious that Reed had felt drawn to this particular publication, given the ample range of choice. One filled to the brim with artificial bodies—flawlessly manufactured to mimic intimacy, lust and satisfaction that was inherently false. 

Yet here Reed was, completely engrossed. His fascination with a dark-haired HR400 proved particularly pronounced, their already sparse wardrobe dwindling with every swipe of his finger. This continued until he was revealed in full, legs spread, striking a shamelessly evocative pose.

The detective made a low noise, somewhere between a hiss and a whistle. His vitals spiked, barrelling wildly out of control:

> ALERT

> RAPID BIOPHYSICAL SHIFT DETECTED 

> HEART RATE ESCALATION: 75 BPM → 115 BPM — TIME ELAPSED 2.7 SECONDS

It was clear that the admiration of his partner's physique had not been an isolated oddity. Reed found a certain allure—an excitement—in the temptation of something that should have repulsed him. Whether or not he consciously recognised this remained unclear. 

What was clear, however, was the gross inappropriateness of indulging in such material whilst on duty. The RK900 sought to correct this—on the slim chance that a customer might present themselves, witnessing the uncouth display.

"I would advise that you close your mouth, Detective." 

Reed's jaw, which had dropped a disconcerting distance from the rest of his face, promptly snapped shut. He glanced up at his partner, brows raised, protesting the interjection, "Are you seriously telling me to shut up? I hardly said anything."

"I wasn't suggesting that you 'shut up,' although it would certainly be a bonus if you chose to do so—I just fear you may have to pay for that item if you continue to soak it in your drool."

Irritation veered sharply into embarrassment. A faint flush crept up his cheeks as Reed hastily set the magazine aside, all but propelled from his hands. "Great. You've got jokes now. Just what I need." 

Sarcasm thickened every word, though Nines detected the faint twitch of amusement at the corner of his mouth. Some part of him, however grudgingly, had found humour in the remark.

The enjoyment was fleeting, buried by discomfort. Reed rocked back on his heels, shoving his hands deep into his pockets as he muttered, "Let's just find the owner of this dump and get the hell out of here…"

Nines tilted his head, a hum of consideration escaping him as he filed the response for future reference. Strategic flirtation could prove beneficial going forward—seeking to redirect wandering attention, keeping his partner in line...

Experimentation would have to wait. For now, Reed was correct. They had more pressing matters to attend to, not being helped by the owner's persisting absence. 

The desk remained empty, with the staff door behind it tightly sealed. Nines doubted the flimsy plywood had muffled any part of their discussion; fledgling impatience exacerbated as it occurred just how unsavoury their current conditions were. 

Beyond the unsightly furnishings, mildew and rot crept up the aged plastered walls. Running a finger across one, the surface crumbled, falling apart like rotten pastry. 

"I agree it would be best to limit your exposure to our current surroundings. There is a dangerous concentration of fungal spores in this room; it could be hazardous to your health."

Reed clicked his tongue. It was clear that he'd wanted to say something—perhaps relating to the myriad of toxins he routinely invited into his body—but ultimately decided against it. Instead, he directed his focus towards the reception. A hand emerged from his pocket, encouraging Nines to take the lead.

The android was unsure if the intention behind this had been affability or idleness. Nevertheless, he accepted, his primary objective taking precedence on his HUD:

> LOCATE CEDARS MOTEL OWNER. 

He made his approach, studying the desk more attentively. Overturning abandoned letters and leaflets, clearing a path through the expansive debris, until the dull yellow flicker of an overheard bulb caught against something metallic. Partially obscured beneath a pile of unpaid bills, a tarnished call bell caught his attention. It was so heavily weathered that Nines was surprised it produced any sound at all when pressed. 

A shrill chime sliced through the air, utterly useless in achieving its intended purpose. There was no sign of movement, and Nines might have considered the possibility that the proprietor had expired—if it hadn't been for the vital signs detectable through the wall.

He pressed the bell again, this time with greater force, in line with a firm verbal address. The RK900 hoped this might inspire a greater incentive to respond—while simultaneously assuring that they were not debt collectors:

"Detroit Police Department."

"Whoever's hiding back there, they're deaf," Reed complained. He reeled from the unpleasant sound, hands pressed to his ears. "That thing is loud as fuck."

As though responding to the criticism, the unseen figure stirred. Biophysical mapping tracked their movement to the closed passageway. A silence descended between the partners until, at last, the soft creak of the door revealed their witness.

An elderly man emerged, ambling aimlessly toward the desk. It soon became apparent that his arrival was coincidental—he seemed completely unaware of the officers idling mere feet away.

SCANNING SUBJECT…

SCAN COMPLETE.

ANDREWS, WALTER.

BORN: 05/11/1965 // REGISTERED BUSINESS OWNER — CEDARS MOTEL LTD.

CRIMINAL RECORD: NONE.

Andrews hummed absently under his breath, eyes scanning the cluttered desk without any clear direction. He shuffled around, brow furrowed in mild confusion, until he appeared to find what he was looking for—an empty mug, half-adhered to one of the many scattered documents.

As he tilted forward, Nines detected weak feedback pulses emanating from his ears. Upon closer inspection, the source was identified as twin devices nestled beneath tufts of overgrown hair:

HEARING AID(S).

COMPONENT BATTERY LOW — FUNCTIONALITY IMPAIRED.

As spindly fingers reached for the cup, Reed cleared his throat. His fist was brought dramatically to his mouth, with his elbow pointed outward. Sunken eyes lazily tracked the motion, their ashen grey magnified by a pair of thick glasses.

Andrews responded as though the officers had materialised out of thin air. He jerked back, clutching his chest in alarm before fumbling to regain his composure. Readjusting the collar of his moth-eaten pullover, his thin lips pulled into a wiry grin. 

"Apologies for the wait, sirs." His attention flitted meekly between Nines and Reed as he offered them each a cordial nod. "I must have dozed off…Are you looking for a room? I have a King Size left—great rates."

"Detroit Police Department," Nines repeated coldly, hoping the man would hear this time. "Officer RK900, Serial Number 313 248 317 - 87, and Detective Gavin Reed."

Andrews seemed put out by the forcefulness of his tone. He blinked slowly, bleary gaze absent of comprehension. There was a twitch of movement in his mouth, calling attention to the deep-set wrinkles in the corners.

Then he hummed as though to indicate he understood the situation.

"Oh, right, of course. Are you looking for a room...officers?"

He did not, still labouring under the assumption that he and his partner were prospective customers.

The assumption was brazen, bordering on insulting, and Reed appeared equally stunned. His eyes widened, belatedly grasping the full implication of what was happening.

Nines might have teased him—suggesting that they consider the offer later, should he feel so inclined—but the required humour promptly deserted him. He leaned across the desk, inches from the perspex security visor that bordered the counter. His badge was pulled from his pocket and pressed to the barrier with an authoritative thud.

"Mr. Walter Andrews, your assessment of this situation is deeply misguided. We have no interest in a room. We are here on professional matters."

The hotelier's strained smile vanished, wiped cleanly from his face as his sallow complexion deepened. Desperately, he scrambled to mitigate the fallout of his mistake. 

"I-I'm very sorry to have caused offence! I thought perhaps you were doing a role-play and wanted me to go along with it. It happens more often than you'd—I didn't actually think you were—"

Fortunately, the android was not made to interrupt the blathering. It was unclear how much more scrutiny the man's weak constitution could bear. His partner took charge, stepping forward with a huff of exasperation.

"TMI, buddy." He joined Nines by the perspex divider, offering Andrews an out with a smooth redirection. "We want to know if anyone suspicious checked in on the night of January 13th—think you can help us with that?"

Andrews seemed relieved, swallowing a nervous breath that had lodged in his throat. He ran a hand distractedly over the unkempt stubble on his chin as he tried to recall the date in question.

"Well, most folks who check in here are a little... suspicious," he muttered, his tone shifting back to apprehension as a spike in his heart rate betrayed his unease. "Nothing illegal, mind you! Drunk businessmen, ladies of the night...that sort of thing."

> WITNESS PROFILE UPDATING…

> ANDREWS, WALTER.

> CRIMINAL RECORD: NONE. 

> MAINTAINING PREMISES FOR CRIMINAL ACTIVITY (SUSPECTED)—FURTHER INVESTIGATION REQUIRED.

"Prostitution is not permissible in Michigan, so the arrangements you have described are indeed illegal." Nines dismissed the witness summary from his HUD, optical units refocusing. "Not that it is of immediate concern. The individual we are looking for would have been alone. Do you have any check-in records that we may review?"

"Well, yes, of course, I do…but I wouldn't usually share them. Customer confidentiality and all."

It seemed convenient that Andrews was now concerned with legal technicalities. 

His thumping pulse rate continued to escalate as he made a superficial adjustment to his eyewear. "Mind telling me what this is about, officers?"

"It concerns a homicide," the RK900 informed. "This information may be critical in assisting our investigation. Your cooperation is appreciated."

"Homicide? As in murder?" The man spluttered. His hoarse tone raised several octaves, cracking unpleasantly, as he clutched at the front of his stained sweater. "I haven't heard anything about that. Is it public knowledge?"

"The story has been broadcasted on several networks."

"Was it a man? A woman? God, my niece Julie would've been out that day. She's only eighteen and such a dainty thing. It just kills me to think that something might have happened—"

The inane drivel grated against his acoustic modulators. Had the man not been so visibly frail—and the divider not present—the RK900 may have felt inclined to throttle him.

"Mr. Andrews." 

"I'm looking at a screen most days and nights. Except when checking guests in—or driving Julie home—"

That said, the flimsy plastic hardly provided any real protection. The android was confident that he'd have no issues scaling past it.

Or breaking through.

"—She helps out with the cleaning on Fridays, you see. I would think I would have heard if something like that had—" 

"It was an android." Nines interrupted, resisting his more violent inclinations in favour of raising his voice. "The records, please."

The torrent of verbal excrement halted. Andrews' attitude had shifted, the mania tapering as tension eased from his hunched shoulders. He spoke with an airy quality, almost like a sigh, as though the added context brought tremendous relief. "Oh, oh yes, that's—"

Then, trepidation returned to his eyes as they met with a disapproving glower. It seemed to dawn on him that this stance may have been ill-advised when addressing this particular officer.

"W-Well…that's a shame, isn't it?" he quickly backpedalled, his lips sputtering like a faulty motor. "I mean… It's very…"

His words trailed off, the stench of uncertainty mingling with the room's heady must. His gaze flitted desperately to Reed, silently pleading for support.

The detective ignored him, staring fixedly at the cork noticeboard above his head.

"…Sad," Andrews finished weakly. 

He then turned to busy himself, hobbling along his workstation and sifting through mountainous piles of junk. Eventually, he craned to reach something haphazardly propped on a stack of boxes—a leather-bound ledger with a bent spine, the word 'Guests' embossed in neat script on its cover.

He wiped it with the back of his loosely draped sleeve, brushing off some residual grime before sliding it beneath the plastic partition to the android.

Nines yanked it roughly towards him, prying it from the tips of outstretched fingers. He set it on the desk and started flipping through the pages. Must and dirt filled his nostrils, intensifying the further he progressed—until he halted at entries relevant to their investigation.

He analysed the check-ins, isolating those that aligned most closely with their developing timeline of events. Unsurprisingly, many of the names appeared aliases, as cross-checking local housing databases yielded few results.

Handwriting samples were equally unhelpful. Their culprit had gone to great lengths to disguise his penmanship, with none of the writing resembling the threatening messages at the crime scenes.

The RK900 leaned closer, studying every scrawl and ink blot in meticulous detail, willing them to reveal something. Given their target's penchant for riddles—and taunting law enforcement—it was almost certain he had left them a message: 

> ACCESSING SUSPECT PROFILE

> SEARCH PARAMETERS: COMMUNICATION PATTERNS. 

> ANALYSING…

> LINK(S) ESTABLISHED: MORALISTIC EXTREMISM — ASSERTION OF TRADITIONAL IDEALS — RELIGIOUS/SPIRITUAL REFERENCES. 

He placed these criteria at one end of his neural pathway as he sought to establish the next point of deduction. Assembling the scattered fragments of his reasoning into something sensical.

> KNOWN ALIASES — THOD GRAWS. 

> ASSESSING FOR HIDDEN CODES AND MEANING...

> DETERMINING POSSIBLE SYSTEMS.

> PROBABLE RESULTS:

> ANAGRAM, CAESAR CIPHER — USAGE: COMMON IN ENCODED COMMUNICATIONS.

> APPLYING SEARCH CRITERIA 1...

> GENERATING RESULTS

In the background, he was vaguely attuned to Andrews and Reed conversing, though the details escaped him. The letters shifted in multiple directions, ordered and reordered in rapid succession. They became a frenzied blur of movement as results tallied on the right-hand side of his optics:

> GHOST WARD.

> WART HOGS.

> DAGS THROW.

This continued until one in particular struck as significant—connecting seamlessly to the established criteria—and he promptly suspended the search.

> GODS WRATH. 

He stared at the phrase. The neat diagnostic typeface gnawed at his thoughts, filling him with a complex mixture of hopefulness and foreboding. 

Dismissing all superfluous data from his conscious view, he redirected his focus back to the book in front of him. Its blotched, yellowed pages were now perceived through a new lens of clarity, the threads of logic weaving together as he repeated the same deductive process.

The name practically leapt from the page, its letters joining those that swarmed like locusts in the enclaves of his mind:

> HANS STIVER.

Nines recorded a snapshot of the text, storing it with the rest of their evidence before pulling back sharply. 

"He was here."

The motion startled Reed, and it took a moment for him to process the words. As their meaning sank in, the defensive tension drained from his shoulders. 

"...You're kidding me." He lunged forward, palms slapped onto either side of the sign-in book. "This guy was seriously dense enough to use 'Thod Graws' in two different places?"

"He didn't use the same name," Nines clarified, noting the confusion knitting between the human's brows the longer he squinted at the pages. "But he may as well have done."

He then looked to Andrews, who appeared dismayed to be the renewed centre of attention. The RK dismissed this, pressing a finger to the guestbook and urging him to look. 

"Do you remember this man?"

Reluctant to argue, the hotelier leaned forward, obediently studying the page. It was a struggle, given his already impaired eyesight, exacerbated by the numerous spots of grime on the perspex. 

"Who, Hans?" he asked pensively, his mouth curled into a frown. "He was a strange one. I couldn't get two words out of him. Paid with cash and went straight to his room." 

"Do you remember what he looked like? This may be of crucial importance. I implore you to think carefully."

"It was raining that night. He came in wearing a hood and refused to pull it down…" Andrews' lips pulled inwards, although Nines was confident he'd heard some muttered beratement about 'the youth of today.' 

"I asked if he had an ID, but he said he'd left it at home—I never got a good look at his face."

Emerging optimism strained as the android encountered an impasse. He searched for a way around it, adapting his approach to draw whatever he could from the spotty witness account:

> ACCESSING CASE EVIDENCE...

Images blossomed in his peripherals, creeping forward until they formed a scrolling banner across his visual scope. He studied them closely, searching for potential identifiers that might jog Andrews' memory…

Reed was faster, gleefully seizing the opportunity to outpace him. His tone carried preemptive confidence as if he already knew the answer:

"Let me guess. He was wearing a black raincoat?" 

Andrews reeled back, his bulging eyes and gaping mouth speaking volumes about the accuracy of this assessment. "W-Well, yes, actually, I believe so—but how did you—"

"Psychic," The detective quipped before retrieving a tattered notebook from his jacket. 

Flipping through the pages, he passed through droves of illegible scrawlings and crude sketches until he landed on a blank sheet. Fishing a well-chewed pen from the ring binds, he poised to take a statement.

"Who was on the desk the following morning? Anyone who might have seen him check out?"

The initiative had been unexpected—and was not strictly unnecessary, given the RK's ability to record and transcribe audio feedback in real-time. Nonetheless, he allowed Reed to proceed, indulging in his perceived victory.

He listened along, prepared to field any gaps in the account:

"Well, I was here all day, but…" Andrews faltered, cheeks tinged with embarrassment. Slowly, he gestured to a small metal panel mounted on the far wall, a slot cut in the centre. "I have a drop box for early morning checkouts. Got to sleep sometime, you know?"

> ANDREWS DID NOT SEE THE SUSPECT LEAVE.

> RECALCULATING APPROACH…

> SUGGESTION: ESTABLISH OTHER POSSIBLE WITNESSES.

"Does anybody else work here, or is it just you?" Reed asked, surprisingly in sync with Nines' own neural processes.

"I mean, there's Julie. I did tell you about Julie, right?"

No words passed between the partners, though the android could sense a mutual disdain developing for the tangent.

"She's a lovely girl, always helping me out, going to college in September. Sharp as a tack, that one. I could ask if maybe she saw—"

Reed was the first to break. He shoved the notebook back into his pocket with a groan, mostly unused. "You know what? Never mind…"

Nines resumed the lead, reluctant to leave empty-handed after the profound feat of mental endurance that had carried them this far.

"Would you have any CCTV records from the night in question?" 

"Well, I've got the camera up there…" Andrews gestured to the corner of the room with a weak flourish that failed to inspire confidence. "But it's grainy as sin. You can't make out anything but blurs and squiggles. I'm not sure what good it'll be."

"Regardless of its quality, a copy of the footage would be appreciated." Nines straightened his back authoritatively, eager to conclude the mind-numbing exchange. "We can analyse it ourselves to determine its usefulness."

"Well, I wouldn't know how to make a copy, but I can give it a go…never got to grips with this newfangled technology. If you ask me, it just makes everything more confusing."

Nines hummed, glossing over what could have easily been taken as another insult. It seemed pointless, seeking to educate a man teetering on the brink of senile dementia. Instead, he lifted his hand, retracting the skin to expose the chassis beneath—a quiet demonstration of what, precisely, his 'newfangled technology' was capable of.

"If you could show me to the hub, I will be able to download the data myself."

"Oh, right, yes, I forgot that you—uh—" Andrews fumbled, reassessing his words before he said anything else potentially contentious. Or got himself arrested. "That androids could do that."

With a stiff nod, he opened the bolted gate beside the desk and slid it back obligingly.

"This way, please."

While he had hoped Andrews' assessment was a consequence of technological ineptitude, the man had proved frustratingly correct. Nines reviewed the security footage as they stepped onto the street but found himself unable to decipher anything but mangled contortions of pixels.

"So much for a quick in and out," Reed complained, groaning loudly. "If I had to listen to another word about 'lovely Julie,' I was going to blow my brains out."

Nines huffed at the theatrics, his amusement growing as he watched Reed recoil from the cold. His chin was buried in his jacket, nose peeking over the zipper. 

"Perhaps you were too dismissive—this Julie could have been a valuable witness."

"That seems pretty unlikely." 

"I don't know, Detective. I hear she's rather sharp."

Then Reed's irritation faltered. He leaned back, exhaling a rogue chuckle into the air, the sound carrying like smoke until it vanished. 

"Seriously, did you download a sense of humour? Because you are full of them today."

"Nothing I have said has been in jest," the RK countered. It was a selective truth, punctuated by a light shrug. "I am simply being transparent."

"Surprised you didn't rip that guy a new one the second he started spewing useless bullshit. I thought you were designed to intimidate."

> Do not be mistaken, Detective. I was highly tempted. 

He relented from vocalising this particular cognitive strand, maintaining an appropriate degree of professionalism. "I was designed to intimidate criminals, not harass civilians. Well, that, and also to—"

His voice was claimed from him.

Its absence was jarring and unceremonious as the world around them was plunged into darkness.

Nightfall had arrived without warning, and Nines was forced to scramble through it, unable to see anything ahead. Then, like the beam of a torch, a set of large, fearful eyes cut through the shadows.

“̸̾͜"N̷̲͍͒͑͌̌̕9̵͙̀̉̌́̒͝—̸̮̪̐

̵̠̈

̵̹̳͈͈̱̹̉̉̽͗̓P̴̺͈̠̬̙͌̀/̵̗̺͎͈̲͈̿͑̇̾̽͌#̷̡̛͔͍̪͓̥̄͒̚͠@̸̪̘̮͚̈́̈́s̴̿̃́̂̈͝ͅ#̸̺͚͇͈̅͑͂͊̌̏ ̷̩̠̐d̵̜̠͎̪͚̍̔́͝͠9̸̳̲̥̺̔͊̈̕ń̴͈̝͠5̶̭̥̅—̸͕̍͊̒͘”̶̔̂̿͐͝"

̴̦̅

̴̘̻́͑̓͒͘

̵̢̩̜̱͕͐̅͛ͅ>̷̡͚̄ ̵̳͉̗̈́̌̓͝E̷̽͜X̷͉͓̂ͅẸ̷̛̥͋̈́̆̽C̵̳̩̽̉̎̋̏̑U̸̩̖̐͗̕T̶̪͇̫̗̪̼͆Ë̵̻́̇̊͝

Blue.

It flooded his sightless gaze—a chaotic kaleidoscope of pixels—until it coagulated and dripped in thick, viscous lines down his hands.

The liquid slipped from his splayed fingers, pooling at his feet, dripping until each trace was gone, and the puddles faded from view.

Invisible to all who looked, but with stains that permeated his skin. Remaining there forever, visible only to him.

"...Nines…?"

A flash of light and day returned. The android reeled back, clutching his temple, blinking in the harsh winter sun.

Reed was staring at him, his hand offering some protection from the oppressive rays as it waved inches from his face.

"You're not glitching on me, are you?"

The lingering tendrils of his nightmare taunted him. Skating across his arms and legs, threatening to tighten their hold and drag him back into the void.

Then they receded, and he was safe—for now—able to press ahead.

"I am not," he lied evenly, hoping his performance indicator would not betray him. "My diagnostics indicate that I am functioning normally."

"Right," Reed spoke flatly, his tone brimming with scepticism. 

For a moment, it seemed he might relent, allowing the matter to rest. This was before he proved steadfast in his commitment to privacy invasion.

"...Are you sure? You're acting twitchy."

"If I were experiencing a fault that may inhibit this investigation, I would certainly be aware of it." 

Even with the efforts to conceal his deceit, Nines couldn't hide the spidering cracks in his facade—ones that Reed pounced on with irritating precision.

Perhaps it was juvenile to bemoan this ability, given the man's profession, but Nines couldn't bring himself to care. His priority was ending the unwelcome scrutiny as quickly as possible.

"Perhaps it is best we focus on that rather than the intricacies of my program, which I can assure are beyond your comprehension."

Reed hissed through his teeth, the sound teetering between offence and mockery. "Jesus, okay, touchy much?" 

The RK900 refused to dignify this with a response. He trusted his partner must have retained some of what had been discussed the previous day—the limitations of his program, including his scant tolerance for matters he did not wish to discuss.

Reed ultimately relented. He kicked a loose pebble across the sidewalk, scowling bitterly—a petulant child who had failed to get his way. 

"Fine. If you wanna talk business, what did you mean when you said our guy 'may as well' have used the same name? Because I checked those sign-ins, and I didn't see anything close to 'Thod Graws.'"

"Our culprit is fond of codes." Nines' attention flitted briefly to the data he had collated in the motel before returning to his partner. "His preferred method for alias generation appears to be anagrams. When reordered, Thod Graws translates to God's Wrath. This new name, Hans Stiver, has similar connotations."

Reed frowned, pausing to retrieve his forgotten notebook. With a grunt, he scrawled out the name. His brow furrowed as he bent over the page, letters scratched out and reordered, frustration simmering beneath his focus.

Minutes passed before his posture stiffened. His hunched shoulders snapped straight as a spark of realisation lit up his ruminative gaze.

"Holy shit, you're right."

The confirmation wasn't necessary. Nines had run multiple self-tests to finalise his computation. Still, a small sense of satisfaction came from having his findings validated.

"Your computer brain got anything for that gibberish from the other day?" Reed asked, lifting his eyes from the papers, genuinely curious. "The weird binary shit?"

"It wasn't binary. Had it been, I would have deciphered it instantaneously—" 

Nines fought to maintain his composure, but hints of resentment slipped through. Heat crept across his face as his core temperature steadily rose.

"Truthfully, I'm unsure of the system used. While I possess advanced deductive capabilities, code decryption is not one of my primary functions. An oversight on Cyberlife's part, perhaps."

"Yeah, I'll say. What kind of detective bot doesn't have a built-in code breaker?"

The comment tightened his jaw, far from appreciative of Reed's decision to 'kick him' while he was down.

"At any rate," Nines continued, voice levelling back to its usual neutrality, "it may take me a little longer, but I'm confident I'll crack it soon."

"We can definitely add 'religious nutjob' to the suspect profile, anyway. Hell of a lot else we've got to go on…"

The RK900 refrained from mentioning he had already done this, not wishing to jeopardise his partner's burgeoning interest. 

"I wouldn't suggest that we have nothing." 

The assurance was ineffective, the scowl etched on the man's face deepening significantly. "What are you, fucking high?"

"I am incapable of getting high. They have yet to replicate the effects of human narcotics on androids. Although I hear Thirium-based alcohol is—"

"You knew what I meant, jackass," Reed challenged coldly. "Just face it—we've got no DNA, no reliable witnesses, and no more leads. Unless that footage is of the killer holding up a signed confession, this feels like another dead end."

The android bristled, mirroring the man's sour expression, as he was faced with the looming possibility he might be correct. 

It was doubtful further analysis would draw anything salvageable from the footage. That being said, while tracing the killer's call had yielded little results, the data presented could still prove beneficial in guiding their movements. A different approach would be needed.

Nines considered the events that had predated the phone call: where their culprit may have been before checking into Cedars and whether retracing those steps could reveal anything new.

As he assessed the TSU transmission for any overlooked details, his attention shifted to the surrounding buildings. Among the drab streetscape, a shock of red drew his focus. Formed in bold lettering on a weathered storefront:

> MIKEY'S PHONES AND ELECTRONICS.

He was pulled from his analysis, the discovery sparking a new hypothesis. Their trip, it seemed, had not been wasted—having brought them to what might be their next significant lead.

"Perhaps not," he concluded, a satisfied quirk tugging his lips. "We can assume that our culprit used a burner phone when they arranged the HR400's services. He would have needed to purchase the SIM somewhere, as well as the phone itself—how convenient that a store nearby could provide him exactly what he was looking for."

As Reed followed the explanation, his gaze drifted to align with his partner's. Upon catching sight of the storefront, he received the information with far greater scepticism. 

"Detroit is a big fucking city," he said bluntly. "Our perp could've bought that SIM from anywhere. Even if we had a hunch, we'd have no way of tracing it. Thing is probably long gone." 

"Maybe so, but the log collected from the suspect's call provided more than a location—

The phone used was a 2013 Samsung S3. If it so happens that a phone of that model was purchased in that store, with a prepaid SIM included, in the days before the murder..."

"...It would seem like one hell of a tidy coincidence," Reed grunted, begrudgingly conceding the point. "Alright, tin-can, I'll bite. But if you're wrong about this, I'll fucking dismantle you."

"Duly noted." The smirk tugging his lips grew before it was suppressed. It occurred that their current opportunity ought to be seized promptly, lest it slip from their fingers.

"I suggest we act quickly. We have failed to check in with the Captain for quite some time. No doubt he'll wish to receive an update." 

[runwayrunway]

Some Short-Term Plan(e)s

So it's been a while since I've uploaded a proper post, but I just want to make it clear that things aren't silent behind the scenes. I spent the first two weeks back from Arizona dealing with something of an...acute medical impediment (thankfully now resolved), but I want to at least mention what I'm working on, a sort of roadmap of sorts. Whatever the air equivalent.

Under a cut for length. I will never beat the yapping allegations, though the 'too many bulleted lists' allegations are nearly as dire.

Here is a list of currently started reviews (as in, I have finished research and outlining and begun actually writing) in rough order of when I think you can expect to see them:

Contour Airlines

British Airways, parts 2 and 3

(the first of) three logojet liveries, the identities of which I will leave surprises

A certain freshly unveiled livery overhaul

American Airlines

Jetstar Airways

Olympic Air(ways/lines)

The miserable, tormented, long-suffering Lauda Air post draft that has just reached its second birthday and is still not finished.

That said, I think I'll probably insert some others in here, because this sequence might end up somewhat stale if left unaltered. None of these liveries are being discussed because they'd stick out to a random person (except the logojets) and several very strongly resemble each other. My queue system has always been somewhat loose where it exists at all - if something catches my eye or I get a particularly compelling request other stuff may well slot in here.

In fact, I'll leave this open: if you see anything that catches your eye on the request list, let me know, and feel free to add to said list. There are so many airlines out there that I'm frequently overcome by decision paralysis, so requests can actually help hugely. (I've been considering also making public my personal shortlist so people can let me know if there's anything on there they want to see. ...let me know if you want to see that.)

Beyond that, in the time I've been spending languishing on the border between life and death and/or working and/or attending classes the world has continued to move and change. Liveries have been debuted, events have occurred, and I have more to say on certain topics. So expect to see revisits for:

jetBlue 2023

Riyadh Air

Alaska Airlines

BermudAir (not a livery update...just an update)

I also hope to do 'revisits' in a different sense, by expanding Project Runway Runway past just the one entry. Potential subjects for this are:

JAL

Hawaiian Airlines

Discover Airlines

Finnair

FedEx Express

SriLankan Airlines

Copa Airlines (a Frankensteinian undertaking, this one)

Riyadh Air here also

Let me know if there's any of these in particular you'd like to see. I will say, though, that these are the one thing I'm unlikely to ever take open requests for. These are all using aspects already found in their liveries, altered and rearranged but fundamentally building on what's there, so I'm only interested in doing them when I can see a clear path forward already. Otherwise that's just designing a new livery from the ground up. I'm a critic, not a designer, so I won't be doing that.

These do, however, require quite a lot of time and effort and I generally have to learn a handful of new skills each time I attempt to make the images required actually happen, so these will be sparse. (On a related note, if anyone has access to some sort of repository of royalty-free CSP-compatible transparent vectors of various models of airliner that they'd give me access to, I would greatly appreciate it, because I did have to trace an entire Dash 8 by hand last time.)

So that's the core material, but I do also put other things on this blog from time to time, so there's some of that on the way too. The following is in the works, and I'm excited for it:

More airframe features! I love talking about history's weirdest and most charming airplanes.

A series of 'bestiary' posts outlining common features of archetypes that I often reference (both established ones like Eurowhite and my own personal taxonomies like the Deltalike), essentially approaching them as groups rather than individuals.

A very long historically-oriented post that has nothing to do with liveries, actually, and covers a segment of commercial aviation that isn't airlines, but I think it's quite interesting and I'm very proud of how it's shaping up.

But enough about posts. There's more to blogging than posts. I am very slowly attempting to give this blog an actual visual identity and cleaning up its appearance and function, so I can stop insulting airlines' branding while my own is rock bottom. This process includes but will probably not be limited to:

Fixing the desktop theme to not be insanely crunchy and awful and horrible and bad seriously what was I even doing

Designing an actual logo for myself (I love the grinningbird icon, but that could be any aviation blog.)

Fixing the currently broken navigation page

Filling in the glossary properly

Ideally, creating a mirror for long/"main series" posts off tumblr, for reasons such as navigation (tumblr will stop 'counting' tags on posts for even on-blog browsing at a certain point), accessibility to people without a tumblr account, and just plain preservation in the case of a failure on tumblr's end - I have most content saved to my own computer, obviously, but better safe than sorry when it comes to these things. I am currently leaning towards either Wordpress, which I more or less know how to use, or attempting to wrangle together something using Neocities, which I...well, I know how to google tutorials.

Somewhat related to this - not only am I just one person, I am just one person with the incorrect skillset for this. I can at best tweak existing HTML and perform very rudimentary actions in image editors, limited to things like removing a monocolor background or splicing an image onto another - everything else I've ever done is googled as I actually do it. If any followers are proficient in coding and/or photo editing and are willing to help with bits and bobs, that would be huge for me. Absolutely no pressure, however. I currently am not in a position to pay someone for their skills, and I do not like asking people to work for free. (...that said, I would be very eager to find someone who could help me edit a video for one specific post.)

All of this - from the main posts to the web design (or lack thereof) - takes quite a bit of time. I'm just one person, one person who deals with both serious chronic illness and the whims of episodic mood disorder. I am also a student and make most of my money freelancing - plus, I write other things, too, and I've been actively working on a fiction project for years that I hope to publish serially in the not-too-distant future.

That is all to say, my old bimonthly rate is definitely not sustainable. We will probably be looking at one post per month, with months skipped, in terms of actual reviews. (Other stuff just gets shoved in wherever, I don't care about defining a schedule for it.) This is torturous for me - I have literally hundreds of liveries I would very much like to talk about, and I do want to intersperse the longer posts I've become used to writing with content that doesn't require me to go through research, outlines, and multiple drafts in order to expedite this, but the fact of the matter is that I want to write every post at once and instead most of them will be in the agonizing future, or never. I hope I can at least return to something resembling a steady output. But please bear with me as I attempt to bear with myself. I hope it'll be worth the wait.

[butchhamlet]

hey man im back have you posted your thesis raw and sloppy yet

for you my friend... it is on the house... click at your peril...

“Her Infinite Variety”: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in Science Fiction

Senior Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for a Major in the Humanities

April 18th, 2025

CHAPTER 1: A CERTAIN QUEEN (INTRODUCTION)

Four hundred fifty pages into Emery Robin’s Cleopatran space opera The Stars Undying, the assassins of Caesar come calling. Gracia, the main character and Robin’s Cleopatra equivalent, is visiting space Rome on political business; now she greets Cátia Lançan, who plays the role of the assassin Cassius in a plot modeled after the historical Julius Caesar’s stabbing. Cátia reveals that she has discovered Gracia’s true purpose: to help the Caesar figure, Ceirran, attain immortality by building him a supercomputer the size and shape of a pearl, meant to contain his memories and mind after his death. Gracia bluffs: it is an ordinary pearl; she has never seen it; she is unimpressed. In response, Cátia drops the supercomputer into her glass of wine to watch it erupt. Gracia, who expected to be extorted, realizes she has misjudged the situation: Cátia has come to her fresh from Ceirran’s murder.

Any reader may well be rocked by this scene. Nevertheless, a reader familiar with Cleopatra’s mythos might pick up the additional tail of cultural legend: that of the pearl. It is one of the few stories about the Egyptian queen that Shakespeare, in perhaps the most influential depiction of Cleopatra, completely ignores: Pliny’s Natural History claims that Cleopatra once dissolved a massive pearl earring in wine, then served it as an aphrodisiac to Mark Antony.

Pliny’s story is false—garden-variety, non-computerized pearls do not dissolve in wine—but it encapsulates the aspects of the queen’s legend that preoccupied the Romans and continue to preoccupy modernity: Cleopatra’s voracious sexual appetite and her “exotic” “Eastern” luxury. Only a grotesquely wealthy woman would be so careless with her jewels, and only a grotesquely lustful woman would go to such great lengths to seduce a man. Robin’s rendition turns the tale on its head. The pearl exists because of Gracia’s devotion to Ceirran—qualified by their differing political goals, but still present; it is a gift with no expectation of a sexual reward. And it is Cátia, not Gracia, who destroys it. Cleopatra’s luxurious carelessness becomes Gracia’s frightened vulnerability. The scene does not encourage the reader to gawk at or lust over Gracia but to sympathize with her: the audience, too, has finally learned of the death we expected; we, too, feel both grief and, at last, a release of tension. And, if we know enough history to understand the reference, we feel perhaps a sense of excitement—at our own ability to grasp the intellectual wink; at the book’s cleverness in adapting one of Cleopatra’s most iconic stories. This is a moment of high drama and intensely visual prose. “Rust erupts” with violent immediacy across the computerized pearl, “brown and scarlet and dark as a kiss on someone’s neck,” and the image of the queen with her wine glass, vivid and poised right before her next move, lives on.

Cleopatra VII has spent a long time living on. As a historical figure, her narrative is sparse. Unlike one of her famous lovers (Julius Caesar’s account of his Gallic military campaign stretches eight books), she has left little in the way of source material: nothing written in her own hand; a scattering of coins that may or may not display her face. Nevertheless, since her death in 30 BC, she has been a cigarette, a cartoon, a costume, an operatic role, a seductress, a witch, a lover, a tragedy. In the 2020s AD, she has also become something unexpected: a science fiction protagonist.

NEW HEAVEN, NEW EARTH: CLEOPATRA GOES TO SPACE

Science fiction and William Shakespeare are well-acquainted. In Shakespeare and Science Fiction, Sarah Annes Brown catalogs the Bard’s frequent appearance as a character in time travel and alternate history stories, as well as the presence of his work in fantasy and science-fictional settings (as prohibited literature in dystopian settings, for example, or as proof that even alien cultures find his work universal). Science fiction writers seem determined to prove that Shakespeare was not of an age; he was truly for all time, and all of space, as well.

Brown pays substantially less attention to the repurposing of Shakespeare’s plots and premises—despite the fact that, as I intend to suggest, it is more than possible to read his work as proto-science-fiction. Even when Brown and other academics frame the plays through a genre fiction lens, certain plays draw more attention than others. The most frequently reimagined are the Tempest, one of the first first-contact stories; Hamlet, where concerns about the self and identity lend themselves to issues posthuman identity like artificial intelligence; and Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both texts in which speculative elements (witches, fairies) already drive the story. Brown notes that “the tragedies are invoked more regularly than the histories or comedies.” This is one of the only mentions of the histories. The only Roman play she examines in depth is Coriolanus, in the chapter in dystopia. Antony and Cleopatra receives no mention.

This exclusion seems intuitive. Shakespeare’s histories are, after all, historical. Even the least historically-accurate pop culture Cleopatras are identified by familiarly “Egyptian” symbols: her pharaonic crown and headdress, her elaborate eye makeup, the backdrop of wealth amid the desert, the snake at her breast. Cleopatra’s life was circumscribed by her status as a woman in an Eastern client kingdom of Rome. While she was far from the first ruthlessly powerful Egyptian woman—in Cleopatra’s own family, “various Cleopatras, Berenices, and Arsinoes poisoned husbands [and] murdered brothers”—the world remembers this Cleopatra because of the Romans (especially Shakespeare’s Romans). Her figure loomed monstrous and seductive in the Roman psyche; her rule impacted the fall of the Republic, and even after her death, she slithered her way into the propagandistic art of Horace and Vergil, always a symbol of the Eastern “other.”

In his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said illuminates the so-called East and West as constructs. “Neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability;” rather, “each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.” He does not claim that there is “no corresponding reality” at all to the Western idea of the “East”—of course the region exists, and of course people live there. Rather, Said sets out that the “Orient” is defined and produced by a Western “intellectual authority,” which partitions particular regions and cultures as “Eastern,” then controls academic and cultural representations of this region, filtering each through the lens of the outside “Westerner” or “Occident.” The divide has less to do with geography than the need for a dichotomy: one cannot have an “us” without a “them.” By constructing the “East,” the “West” is able to contrast itself against the Eastern Other, and thus to define itself. The so-called Orient is a region to exploit, but it is also a measuring stick by which to solidify Occidental identity.

Cleopatra, too, is a construction, in history and literature and legend. In the text of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, her “infinite variety” is a product of her almost compulsive theatricality and self-fashioning, from the moment she arrives to meet Antony in a virtuosic display of visual spectacle. On a metatextual level, she is constructed by the Roman propaganda that preserved her in historical amber, by the English author putting words in her mouth, and by a Western audience that still voraciously consumes her image. Cleopatra has often been crafted as metonymy for the entire “East,” “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.” Like the East, she is the figure—sinuous, seductive, feminine and dark—against which Romans can define themselves as rigid, logical, and masculine; her scapegoating is not only convenient but necessary in the ongoing process of consolidating identity through the other. It is, to some degree, the role she fills in Shakespeare’s play as well, standing in opposition to Octavian and Rome—though Shakespeare complicates and interrogates this binary throughout, demonstrating that the divide between “East” and “West” is reiterated constantly because it is not self-evident or stable.

If Cleopatra is, then, a figure grounded in time (the end of the Roman republic) and place (the “East,” constructed as it may be), how can she fit into science fiction, the genre of the future? But science fiction is not set in the future by necessity. In an influential 1979 essay, Darko Suvin identified the genre as defined by “the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition…” and “an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.” The “empirical environment” is the world familiar to the writer (and, presumably, to the reader). To Suvin, science fiction is defined by two conditions: first, that it takes place in a world somehow distinct from this empirical world, and second, that it approaches the strange laws of this new world with scientific rigor.

That is, on the surface, science fiction is defined by an unreal element in the world—a “strange newness” that Suvin calls the “novum” of the text (for example, artificial intelligence, aliens, or the flux capacitor). On a deeper level, however, Suvin argues that science fiction is defined by its ability to reintroduce the reader to a freshly defamiliarized world, similar but uncannily divergent. It holds up, as it were, the mirror to the author’s world:

The aliens—utopians, monsters, or simply differing strangers—are a mirror to man just as the differing country is a mirror for his world. But the mirror is not only a reflecting one, it is also a transforming one, virgin womb and alchemical dynamo: the mirror is a crucible. […] This genre has always been wedded to a hope of finding in the unknown the ideal environment, tribe, state, intelligence, or other aspect of the Supreme Good (or to a fear of and revulsion from its contrary).

Just as the West constructs the East in order to define itself, writers construct science fictional worlds to create an Other by which they can define their own environment. And, Suvin notes, science fiction does not only define, but also redefines, criticizes, and reimagines the world: science fiction is “a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action, and—most important—a mapping of possible alternatives.” As the great science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” That is, even science fiction about the future is really about the present. Creating a new world requires a break with the tradition—or an exaggeration of the tradition—of the empirical world. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, for example, takes place in a society where humans have no sexual dimorphism, and thus a society where gender has ceased to exist in any meaningful capacity. The questions this choice invokes—What are the differences between man and woman? How does a lack of gender roles problematize human interaction? Are exclusive binaries even possible to uphold?—are questions easily applied to the reader’s empirical world as well. Le Guin’s constructed world refracts light back at the “real” world, provoking questions with an obliqueness more subtle than a thought experiment. Science fiction is just that: fiction. But the kernels of truth at the core of each nonexistent world allows the reader to look sideways at their own.

Thus, science fiction is perhaps the exact genre in which Cleopatra belongs: a mirrorball genre of constant reflection and infinite variety, a genre playing the eternal Other just as Cleopatra has for centuries. In the two specific science-fictional retellings I will examine, this generic estrangement lends itself to sympathetic depictions of Cleopatra, running against centuries of stories of the vamping, seductive evil queen. In a science fictional world, where the very rules of reality are Other, it is easier to explore what “Other” really means. In a science fictional world, in fact, with the laws of gender and location bent, Cleopatra might not be Other at all. Is Cleopatra exotic in science fiction, or is she right at home?

NOR CUSTOM STALE HER: RETELLINGS & ADAPTATION THEORY

This thesis sets out to analyze two science-fictional “retellings” of Cleopatra’s story. So what defines a retelling? Much of the history of literature is made up of adaptations and re-examinations of the same plots. In the very first paragraph of A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon names Shakespeare and Aeschylus as “canonical” authors who “retold familiar stories in new forms.” The process of adaptation is an old and continuous art, practiced by the same authors whose works supply fodder for adaptation now.

Nevertheless, a more specific definition must exist: every work is inspired and influenced by the stories that came before, so the word “retelling” demands more specificity. This thesis draws from Hutcheon’s structure, which includes only those texts with an “overt and defining relationship to prior texts, usually revealingly called ‘sources.’” Adaptations are “inherently ‘palimpsestuous’ works, haunted at all times by their adapted texts;” Barthes called them a “stereophony of echoes, citations, references.” While no text ever really stands alone, adaptations usually explicitly flaunt this relationship to a “parent.” Beneath the surface layer—the words of the new text—lie infinite layers of background reading. Even ordinary turns of phrase are layered with extra weight. The main character Hermione’s declaration, on the final page of E. K. Johnston’s Exit, Pursued By a Bear, that she refuses to live as “a frozen example, a statued monument” of misfortune, may register to any reader as a pretty line. But only those familiar with The Winter’s Tale, Johnston’s “parent” text, will recognize the allusion to Shakespeare’s Queen Hermione’s fate. A potential reading emerges in which the line deliberately repudiates Shakespeare’s ending, opening a new realm of analysis on the relationship between parent and child texts.

Hutcheon defines an adaptation, briefly, as three things: “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works,” “a creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging,” and “an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work.” “An adaptation,” she adds, “is a derivation that is not derivative;” rather, while an adaptation trumpets its relation to prior texts, it also deliberately warps those prior texts and continues (or diverges from) cultural conversations about the parent text(s).

Working in the strain of Hutcheon, I would like to narrow the parameters even further. Hutcheon counts as adaptation “not just films and stage productions, but also musical arrangements… song covers… visual art… comic book versions… poems put to music and remakes of films, and video games and interactive art.” She includes a great many creative forms, but she also excludes a great many. First of all, sampling does not an adaptation make: brief references that “recontextualize only short fragments” are not enough to qualify a work as an adaptation. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” for instance, references Antony and Cleopatra (with a host of other works), but a few lines of allusion to Cleopatra’s “burnished throne” are clearly not equivalent to a novel-length reworking of Shakespeare’s narrative. Hutcheon also excludes sequels and prequels, adhering to Marjorie Garber’s observation that these works are spurred by “never wanting a story to end,” while adaptations are spurred by a “desire [for] the repetition as much as the change.” On a similar note, I exclude fanfiction from my definition of a retelling. Most fanfiction disseminated in “fandom” spaces requires a prerequisite knowledge of the setting, characters, and plot of its parent text. I am concerned, however, with works sufficiently independent that audiences do not have to be aware of the parent text, the type of work that Julie Sanders identifies as a “wholesale rethinking of the terms of the original” (rather than, for example, an adaptation that only changes a work’s time period or location). In both of the books I will examine at length, the characters representing Antony and Cleopatra exist in new worlds, but they also have new names and backstories, reminiscent as those names and backstories may be of the parts Shakespeare penned. These works thus stand in contrast to, for example, Linda Bamber’s “Cleopatra and Antony.” Bamber’s work—half essay, half prose adaptation—is a cleverly voicey piece of reception, but it is scaffolded top-to-bottom by the original Shakespeare play: it cannot “stand on its own,” because Bamber assumes readers are familiar with Shakespeare’s plot, structure, and characters.

Like Hutcheon, I am not interested in “fidelity criticism,” that is, in judging an adaptation by how “accurately” it adheres to the details of its parent text. Hutcheon proposes a better way to criticize adaptations: “not in terms of infidelity to a prior text, but in terms of a lack of the creativity and skill to make the text one’s own and thus autonomous.” This is where my interest lies—not in how faithfully my selected authors can trace every contour of Shakespeare’s play, but, rather, in what they change about Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and what those changes reveal about Cleopatra as a character. This perspective moves away from fidelity criticism’s “implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text,” rather than to reexamine, critique, or expand. If an artist cannot diverge from the original work, there is no reason to take interest in the adaptation over the preexisting parent text. Put simply: if I wanted to reexperience Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, I would read the play again.

So what interests audiences in adaptations? Hutcheon cites the appeal of “repetition with variation… the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise.” Audiences like familiarity, even when they seek novelty. The most popular works tend to challenge their audiences a little bit, but not too much, which also makes adaptations relatively “financially safe” because fans of the parent text already exist as targets for marketing. This financial security is especially important in expensive and exclusive media such as theater, and may explain “the recent phenomenon of films being ‘musicalized’ for the stage.”

But it would be a vast oversimplification to claim that adaptation is only driven by profit. Most stories endure in ever-changing forms because people enjoy them and because they continue to resonate. The Shakespeare plays most famously reworked and adapted are also broadly considered Shakespeare’s “best” (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and the Tempest, to name a few); far fewer novels promise to retell Timon of Athens. But the quality of Shakespeare’s work still cannot explain just how many Shakespearean adaptations there are. A wealth of literature exists for the reworking; why are so many recent retellings drawn from Shakespeare’s plays?

“To appeal to a global market or even a very particular one,” Hutcheon muses, an adaptor “may have to alter the cultural, regional, or historical specifics of the text being adapted.” When it comes to Shakespeare, however, far less alteration is necessary: Shakespeare’s work is already considered familiar. While few can name all thirty-something plays, the average science fiction reader likely read one or two in school. A Shakespearean retelling, then, can get away with very little cultural alteration, because readers will bring a basic level of background knowledge to the table.

Readers will also, often, bring a basic level of respect for the premise. Despite debates about decentering Shakespeare, or at least removing him from his academic pedestal, the Bard remains a beacon of intellectualism. A Shakespearean retelling borrows this cultural capital and thus carries some stamp of intellectual validity. And intellectual validity confers a vital degree of respectability, which is crucial when many scholars and reviewers alike consider adaptations “culturally inferior,” denigrations and even “desecrations” of the stories they adapt. As Hutcheon observes:

It does seem to be more or less acceptable to adapt Romeo and Juliet into a respected high art form, like an opera or a ballet, but not to make it into a movie, especially an updated one like Baz Luhrmann’s (1996) William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. If an adaptation is perceived as “lowering” a story (according to some imagined hierarchy of medium or genre), response is likely to be negative.

Never mind that Shakespeare was not actually “high culture” in his day: he wrote for attendees of public theater, hardly a highly-esteemed institution. And, as Hutcheon points out, “Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner were both deeply involved in the financial aspects of their operatic adaptations [of Shakespeare], yet we tend to reserve our negatively judgmental rhetoric for popular culture, as if it is more tainted with capitalism than is high art.”

Hutcheon discusses this idea of adaptational “desecration” primarily in reference to film adaptations of books, as television carries a stink of assumed intellectual inferiority. Nevertheless, this suspicion of pop culture adaptation can extend to novels, and in particular to genre fiction. While science fiction and fantasy have received some critical attention, this attention is often limited to older literature, already culturally influential (for example, Asimov, Bradbury, or Tolkien). Contemporary literary criticism remains hindered by a general cultural idea of which books are “important,” that is, realist and literary, versus which books are “fun,” that is, commercial. Genre fiction—not only science fiction and fantasy, but romance and horror as well—falls into the latter category.

Both novels explored in this thesis are firmly in the science fiction genre, and, while details in each book reward a reader familiar with Antony and Cleopatra, neither book requires intimate knowledge of Shakespeare as a prerequisite. Nevertheless, both texts’ translation of Cleopatra into a new world continues the enduring cultural conversation around Cleopatra as an embodiment of otherness—whatever “otherness” in science fiction means. Emery Robin’s The Stars Undying was published November 2022 by Orbit, an imprint of Hachette; Chloe Gong’s Immortal Longings was published July 2023 by Saga Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. That is, both books were published within the last three years by major publishing houses. Both books are explicitly marketed as new twists on the Cleopatra story; both are also explicitly marketed as science fiction. What were the odds, I thought, that one calendar year might see two sci-fi Cleopatra novels? Why would multiple people even think of putting Cleopatra into science fiction?

These questions provided the impetus for this project. Nevertheless, while they share a parent text and a genre, the novels are very distinct. At the simplest level, they are not even the same kind of science fiction. The Stars Undying is a space opera of epic proportions, in which Robin transfers the cultural and physical distance between Shakespeare’s Egypt and Rome to a more dramatic distance between separate planets. The same political tension exists: Szayet (Robin’s Egypt) is a client state in the thrall of the empire of Ceiao (Robin’s Rome). In this world, however, Szayet is a prospect for Ceian conquest because of its technological wealth, not its agricultural surplus. Immortal Longings, on the other hand, is not a space opera but an alternate history novel, grounded in a nation inspired by Hong Kong’s Walled City of Kowloon. Here, the multinational politics of Shakespeare’s play take a backseat to themes of fluidity and vacillation: Gong’s primary novum is a gene that allows most characters to “jump” between bodies as easily as Cleopatra shifts between moods.

On a deeper level, too, the two novels vary widely in style and theme. The Cleopatra figure of The Stars Undying, Altagracia (called Gracia), is the struggling new queen of a planet highly vulnerable to extractive conquest. While the novel attends to Cleopatra’s legendary love stories (with Mark Antony, but also with Julius Caesar), Gracia’s story is at heart a slow, complex political drama, deeply interested in the narratives people create to justify or combat imperialism. Emery Robin is a self-described “sometime student of propaganda;” The Stars Undying draws less from Shakespeare’s plot than from his musings on mythmaking and history. Indeed, the novel is not marketed as a specifically Shakespearean retelling. Its blurb notes only that it “draws inspiration from Roman and Egyptian empires—and the lives and loves of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar.” Nevertheless, I include it as a Shakespearean reception text, both because Shakespeare’s Cleopatra remains the defining pop-cultural image of the character and because Robin includes a number of direct references to Shakespeare’s work (not only Antony and Cleopatra, but also Julius Caesar).

Immortal Longings, by contrast, is marketed as unambiguously “inspired by Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.” Chloe Gong is already well-known for Shakespearean reception. Her debut novel reimagined Romeo and Juliet in historical Shanghai; it also made her one of the youngest writers to hit the New York Times bestseller list. Her subsequent work has followed the pattern, placing increasingly obscure Shakespeare plays in historical and fantastical new settings, usually with an emphasis on action and romance. Immortal Longings’s adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra centers around the play’s passionate and disastrous central romance, allowing the political implications to fall to the wayside. Gong’s Antony and Cleopatra, Anton Makusa and Calla Tuoleimi, are embroiled in a tournament battle to the death orchestrated by their city’s tyrant king. Shakespeare’s legendary lovers, should their romance fail, stand to lose their national power, but the stakes of Gong’s central romance are more personal: only one can win the death games. Calla’s survival and her feelings for Anton stand in direct opposition; the book hinges not on mythmaking but on the potentially-lethal attraction between the protagonists.

These novels approach Antony and Cleopatra from entirely different angles. For the most part, then, I do not intend to compare them directly. Rather, this thesis explores how each text responds to the most salient qualities of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra: first her unique position as a gendered and ethnic/political Other, then her connection (in the text and metatextually) to theater, which some scholars claim she embodies in herself. How each book employs science fiction to take up, twist, contradict, or ignore Shakespeare’s characterization of Cleopatra serves as an extended case study, not only for Cleopatra as a character but also for the use of science fiction to converse with and transform the canon.

CHAPTER 2: THIS VISIBLE SHAPE

Both Emery Robin’s The Stars Undying and Chloe Gong’s Immortal Longings are set in science fictional worlds without structural misogyny, homophobia, or racism. In the outer space setting of The Stars Undying, same-gender relationships are legally and culturally indistinct from heterosexual relationships—Robin’s Caesar’s marriage to a man is entirely normative, particularly in being political rather than erotic. On the planet of Ceiao, Robin’s Rome, citizens of all genders are expected to perform mandatory military service, and on Szayet, Robin’s Egypt, the fact that both of the king’s potential heirs are women is so meaningless as to go unremarked upon. In Immortal Longings, most citizens of the cities of San-Er can jump between bodies, making gender divisions irrelevant. Bodies aren’t static, so neither are sexed trait, and while a character may identify with any gender they like, this has no bearing on which bodies they are able to seize or why they choose to do so.

This gendered looseness may seem odd. The long tradition of writing about Cleopatra, in history books or on the stage, has defined her intensely by her gender, casting her over and over as the seductress, the other woman, the exotic witch bending Caesar and then Antony to her will. Even in sympathetic portrayals, she is not only woman but foreign woman, exotic woman, dark woman; Chaucer, for example, cannot represent her as a “good woman” without specifying that she is a good wife, and much ink has been spilled about whether she redeems herself by truly loving Antony. This is the tradition Shakespeare’s play inherits: writing Cleopatra without facing down gender is impossible. How, then, can a Cleopatra character exist in a world without misogyny?

LET ROME IN TIBER MELT: ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA’S INSTABILITY

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is a play intensely concerned with binaries. On the crudest, most simplified level, the thematic poles of the play center on Rome and Egypt. Rome purportedly represents masculinity, rigidity, war, politics, public identity, all figured through Octavius Caesar; Egypt purportedly represents femininity, fluidity, love, sex, private life—all embodied, of course, by Cleopatra. The Romans thus construct their national identity against Cleopatra’s opposition, an early example of Said’s observation that the “West” produces the “East” to demarcate Western identity via contrast. Yet Shakespeare troubles this easy dichotomy. Over the course of the play, any attempt to maintain this perfect polarity breaks down, revealing that the concept of the “Other” is constructed and precarious rather than natural. The play’s binaries are always on the verge of dissolution, because the world of Antony and Cleopatra is “a world in flux,” defined by “mobility and mutability.”

The play’s structure conveys this unsteadiness with a destabilizing array of brief and shifting scenes. Maynard Mack highlights the frequency with which “one time, place, mood, or person gives way before another.” For one of Shakespeare’s longest plays, Antony and Cleopatra does not have many long, focused scenes. The play is a mad march of entrances, exits, scene shifts, and character appearances or disappearances, including endless messengers materializing with news from abroad. The Folger Shakespeare edition of Julius Caesar, the play most topically close to Antony and Cleopatra, is composed of eighteen scenes, half of which are shorter than 100 lines long. King Lear, a play of similar length to Antony and Cleopatra and likely written in the same year, has twenty-six scenes, twelve of which are shorter than 100 lines—a similar ratio as that in Julius Caesar. Antony and Cleopatra has forty-one scenes. Of these forty-one, thirty are shorter than 100 lines. There are a few setpieces—namely, the party aboard Pompey’s ship in the second act and Cleopatra’s grandly-staged suicide at the end—but most scenes do not linger long. This formal instability echoes the locational instability of the scenes themselves. The play lurches from Alexandria to Rome, then back to Alexandria, then to Pompey’s exile, back to Rome, then back to Alexandria again, all before the second act is finished.

Mack finds a constant shifting in the poetry, as well, the language lyrically rife with “allusions to the ebbing and flowing of the tides; the rising and setting… of stars, moons, and suns; [and] the immense reversals of feelings in the lovers and in Enobarbus.” In the same way, the prose shifts between the tragic mode and the comic mode: it is never clear, at any given point, if the audience will get the titular lovers in a moment of heroic tragedy or petty squabbling. It is hard to square Antony’s grandiose declaration that he could “let Rome in Tiber melt” for Cleopatra’s sake with Cleopatra’s sardonic “Can Fulvia die?” two scenes later. The play bundles together serious war scenes with comedy and slapstick: the same Cleopatra who chases a messenger in circles to beat him will later raise an army against Rome, and the political parley on Pompey’s boat teeters between violence and drunken laughter. Even the tension of Antony’s suicide attempt is punctured—more effectively than his body—by his confused, “How, not dead?,” a line difficult to deliver without provoking a laugh. The audience is not only forced to oscillate between the play’s physical poles, the cities of Alexandria and Rome; there is a constant emotional and tonal oscillation at play as well.

The nexus of this oscillation, however, is not the audience but Antony. It is Antony who travels constantly: physically between Egypt and Rome and politically between his alliance with Octavian and his love affair with Cleopatra. Antony is the character who most embodies the gap between grandiosity and insufficiency; Antony drives the play’s greatest emotional shifts, as he swings from swearing his undying love for Cleopatra to swearing, quite seriously, to murder her for betraying him in battle. At the start of the play, he wants nothing more than to leave Cleopatra and return to Rome; within an act, married to Octavia, he will confess his desire to return to Cleopatra. He resents his first wife, Fulvia, until she dies and, abruptly, he misses her. Even his Roman identity shifts: he has himself “publicly enthroned” in Egypt, Shakespeare’s allusion to the real-life Donations of Alexandria, in which Antony and Cleopatra distributed Roman lands to their children in a mostly-theatrical show of union. Octavian sees this as a clear declaration of allegiance—Antony has sided with Egypt over Rome, declaring his children “the kings of kings.” Yet an act later, Antony declares that his suicide makes him “a Roman by a Roman vanquished,” clinging to his last vestiges of Romanness, even as he dies in his Egyptian lover’s arms at the end of a military campaign against Rome. If the Egyptian-Roman binary holds at all, Antony has no stable place in it.

Indeed, Antony has no stable self at all. He “cannot hold [his] visible shape.” Over the course of the play, multiple characters declare that he is losing his grip on his manhood. This is a claim with massive stakes, because it implicates Cleopatra. If Octavian and Rome represent masculinity, Cleopatra and Egypt femininity, then Antony’s attraction to the latter threatens the solidity of his masculinity. In turn, the potential fluidity of his gender threatens his broader identity: in a Roman worldview, for the consummate soldier, a loss of manhood is equivalent to a loss of personhood. At the start of the play, everyone agrees that he “has been the soldier par excellence,” even his enemies. Sextus Pompey, however hurt he may be about Antony occupying his dead father’s house, still declares that “his soldiership / Is twice” that of the other triumvirate members. Octavian, his greatest rival, waxes practically poetic about his military prowess, claiming that he endured hardships “so like a soldier that [his] cheek / So much as lanked not” after the battle of Modena.

This Antony, however—the Antony whose eyes “o’er the files and musters of the war / Have glowed like plated Mars,” whose “captain’s heart… in the scuffles of great fights hath burst the buckles on his breast”—exists only in others’ words, and only in past tense. What the audience does see is Antony’s emasculation, ostensibly at Cleopatra’s hands. In the very first lines of the play, Antony’s servant Philo grouses that his master’s heart “is become the bellows and the fan / To cool a gypsy’s lust.” A moment later, Cleopatra enters, “with Eunuchs fanning her.” “Metaphorically, through the image of the fan,” Laura Levine observes, “the play begins by comparing Antony to a eunuch.” Shortly after, when Antony tries to leave Alexandria, his subservience to Cleopatra is on full display. He opens with an apology and allows her to interrupt him multiple times. When he does rise to anger, Cleopatra mocks him for a poor performance of “perfect honor,” sarcastically calling him “Herculean” (Antony’s family claimed descendence from Hercules, and Antony in particular wore the connection proudly), then implies that he is only acting as an angry man: “becom[ing] / The carriage of his chafe,” though he could “do better yet.” Antony’s anger, which might have once been construed as masculine, is twisted against him. He seems to expose himself as only performing dominance, not achieving it.

The emasculation intensifies. Cleopatra dresses Antony in her “tires and mantles”—not only a cross-dressing, but one he has no agency to enact, as by this point Cleopatra has “drunk him to his bed” and, with blatantly phallic flair, stolen his sword for herself. In the fourth act, the god Hercules departs from Antony’s camp, stripping him firmly of his relation to the manliest man in Greco-Roman myth. After a slew of catastrophic military decisions, Antony flees battle following Cleopatra’s deserting train, sending his army into disarray; he then claims that he has “kissed away kingdoms and provinces” and that Cleopatra has made his “sword… weak by [his] affection.” Sword is here metonymy for maleness and soldiership alike, and shortly afterward, Antony loses both. After his failed suicide attempt, one of his underlings quite literally steals his sword away, delivering it up to Octavian, his rival. “Our leader’s led,” his soldiers moan, “and we are women’s men.”

Antony is keenly aware of his dissolution. He spends the latter half of the play desperately trying to recover his eroding masculinity, making a cascade of ineffective choices along the way. Levine catalogues his attempts at displacement: first declaring that the land itself “bids [him] tread no more upon’t,” then slinging accusations of effeminacy at Octavian, then furiously ordering the whipping of Thidias until Thidias’s father “repent[s] / Thou wast not made his daughter.” But he is unable to project his plight onto others: it is not Octavian or Thidias whose masculinity is seeping away, and his attempts at displacement cannot save him from the sense that he has “fled [him]self.” Even his death is imbued with emasculation. Antony and Cleopatra compare themselves, and are compared by scholars in turn, to Aeneas and Dido: the brave Roman warrior tempted by the exotic, seductive foreign queen, a romance both passionate and doomed. But the parallel only holds so far: it is not Cleopatra who dies like Dido. Cleopatra’s suicide is far more controlled, far more theatrical. It is Antony who, like Vergil’s Dido, falls on his sword but fails to die immediately; it is Antony who takes his last breaths struggling to rise, held in the arms of a loved one with his city spread out beneath him.

Ultimately, Antony cannot adhere to any binary the play puts forth. His death is simultaneously a heroic manly suicide and a reflection of Dido’s grief; he calls himself a “Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished,” but he dies in the arms, and the kingdom, of the woman he calls Egypt. His constant inconstancy reveals that the simple Rome/Egypt dichotomy cannot contain, describe, or express the play’s overflowing fluidity: the binaries are insufficient. This insufficiency, and the problem of human fluidity, passes as inheritance to Robin and Gong, both of whom explore the constructed “Other” in their novelizations. But in science fictional worlds, with looser or entirely different social categories, what is an “Other” at all?

SERPENT OF OLD NILE: IMPERIAL GENDER IN THE STARS UNDYING

Certainly the “other” in The Stars Undying is not defined by race or gender, because Robin’s Cleopatra, Gracia, exists in a world where race and gender are no longer core identities or positions in structures of power. Man and woman still exist as categories, but these categories are far looser and exert less defining force over a person’s life. One’s gender expression is, for the most part, a quality as unremarkable as their hair color or musical taste. Nevertheless, Gracia’s femininity is eventually wielded against her by theatrical artists in Ceiao, the empire under which Gracia operates. Even if gender is not inherently hierarchical, then, it remains available as a potential weapon. The Ceian theater’s construction of a femme fatale stereotype, meant to define first Gracia’s sister and then Gracia herself as an immoral seductress, proves that gender in this world can be shaped into a mechanism of political attack and control. That is, Robin’s Cleopatra does not escape gendered stereotyping—but she experiences a different kind of misogyny, as an extension of imperial power.

Gracia’s gender expression, and the Ceian theater’s response to it, is best understood in comparison with Robin’s Antony, Captain Ana “Anita” Decretan. In their blurb for the book, queer romance writer Casey McQuiston writes that Robin has “dare[d] to ask, what if Mark Antony was the hottest butch girl in space?” The decision to rewrite Mark Antony as a butch girl is, perhaps, not intuitive. Shakespeare’s Antony is chasing a masculinity that is expected of him, that he once performed well, and that he cannot perform anymore. The loss of this masculinity is a loss of manhood, particularly Roman manhood, and thus a loss of self. By contrast, butch women’s performances of masculinity run counter to societal expectation; furthermore, butch masculinity does not necessarily constitute manhood. Thus this blurb serves as an entry point to Anita’s gender: What work is a butch Mark Antony doing in this text? Indeed, what does “butch” even mean in a world without strict gender roles?

The paperback edition of The Stars Undying opens with a dramatis personae written as a found document: a cast list from the book’s in-universe theater consortium. The cast list describes Anita as “a Ceian [space Roman] officer” and “Ceirran’s [Julius Caesar’s] right hand.” The fictional director notes that “we were strongly, strongly advised to ensure that this actor is handsome.” Because the dramatis personae precedes the novel’s first chapter, this is a reader’s first impression of Anita, an impression that emphasizes her military status and her handsomeness. The latter descriptor is freighted with gendered implications, in the reader’s empirical world if not in the world of the text—“handsome” is applied to women infrequently enough to prick ears. Nevertheless, Gracia [Cleopatra] will later call Anita’s handsomeness “plain and very ordinary,” a description that emphasizes the naturalness of her masculinity. There is nothing strange about commenting on Anita’s good looks with language reserved for the masculine; her handsomeness is so ordinary that it would be strange not to.

Anita’s first appearance in the text itself sees her “sprawled” in her chair, as Ceirran, Robin’s Caesar equivalent, describes her as “a quick draw and a vicious brute in battle.” That is, Robin immediately foregrounds both Anita’s military viciousness and her carefree willingness to take up space. For contemporary readers, neither is a particularly “feminine” quality. Nor are Anita’s other qualities: she sits with her boots up; she drinks with her squadron; she swears frequently and vulgarly; she is always the first to advocate violence. She brags about her sexual conquests of other women—in which she always takes the pursuing role, as when she recounts climbing down through a lover’s roof. Her enemies harp on her “degeneracy,” citing her hedonism and carelessness. In every way she fits the model of the womanizing, carousing soldier. And soldiership is not solely her job, a mere part of the fabric of her character; she is constantly associated with war. In her second line of dialogue, she declares an intention to capture her enemy “like conquerors,” clearly reveling in the violent and domineering associations. Gracia compares her directly to “a couple of first-class warships,” and judges her “not significantly less dangerous.” Soon after, Anita calls herself Gracia’s “knife hand,” promising to kill on her orders: “Only say the word and it’s done.” As happily as Anita takes on the role of conqueror, she will just as gladly slip into the role of a weapon, more tool than person and much more deadly. The first time Gracia sees her, she notes that Anita looks “in all aspects [like] an officer from a propaganda holo.” Anita is not merely a soldier: she is the consummate soldier, competent enough to perform as an educational model. She is most alive in wartime; she is willing to conquer, but also eager to serve as someone else’s blade.

Of course, violence and vulgarity do not inherently disqualify one from femininity, nor are hedonism and sexuality inherently masculine traits. Butchness is a complex identity constructed over decades in lesbian subcultures; there is no DSM-style itemized list of requirements, and if there were, manspreading in a chair likely wouldn’t make the cut. Furthermore, in the world of the characters, Anita’s soldiership says very little about her gender expression: there is no indication that the world of the The Stars Undying enforces the institutional misogyny or homophobia that would stigmatize Anita in the reader’s world. Every citizen in Ceiao, Robin’s Rome, must serve in the military for a mandated period, regardless of their gender. And the word “butch” itself only appears in the blurb—Robin never calls Anita butch within the text itself. Without the sharply divided gender roles of the empirical world, it stands to reason that the world of The Stars Undying understands gender very differently.

The concept of a butch emerges in the empirical world from a specific historical and cultural context; to stand out as gender-nonconforming, a person must live in a world that expects conformation to a defined role. The characters of The Stars Undying use plenty of language familiar to contemporary readers, but “butch” is not one of them—the blurb follows the logic of the empirical world, but not the world of the text.

Nevertheless, the reader of The Stars Undying lives in the empirical world, where the novel still upsets the expected by placing a woman in the role of the macho soldier-libertine. Anita’s gendered positionality becomes most intelligible in comparison to other major female characters, because not every woman in The Stars Undying occupies this role. For example, Anita’s sister Flavia is equally sharp and competent, but explicitly more feminine. Her note in the dramatis personae is sparse: she is Anita’s sister and an “alarming woman” with “fabulous gowns:” that is, of the little said about her, her (conventionally feminine) outfits are important enough to make the cut. Correspondingly, her first appearance in the text emphasizes her “elaborate braids” and “smooth hostess smile,” foregrounding her carefully-polished appearance and her adopted social role: where Anita is a soldier, Flavia is a socialite. In opposition to Anita’s sprawling debauchery, Flavia excels at “effusiveness and studied charm” and moves with “delicate” attention to her skirts. When Gracia compares them, she notes Flavia’s “real, striking beauty,” an expectedly feminine word in contrast to Anita’s “handsome.” Gracia, too, wears only skirts and dresses; Gracia, too, is carefully made-up, delicate in her speech, and about as suited to the battlefield as Flavia, who spent her mandatory military service doing desk duty. Both Gracia and Flavia are formidable in their own rights—indeed, both of them use their charisma and persuasive skills to incite others to join their cause—but neither shares Anita’s particular machismo. That is, the lack of misogyny in Robin’s world does not mean all women are like Anita. The reader is meant to understand this woman as masculine.

The clearest establishing moment of this masculinity comes from her portrayal in the theater—the play-within-a-book midway through the text, in which Gracia, Ceirran, and Anita attend a Ceian street show about the three of them. The show is, of course, thoroughly propagandistic, setting up Ceiao as a virtuous conquering country and Szayet as a land of tricks and wiles. The troupe puts forth idealized versions of these real-life characters: Ceirran is played by an “enormous” actor waxing poetic about glory and love, while Gracia and her sister, as foreign royals, are ineffective and scantily-dressed. The Anita character looks quite like Anita—dressed in a “blue cloak” and “a very bad wig of straight dark hair”—except that this character is played by a man.

A reader conditioned to imagine patriarchal worlds might assume this, too, is propaganda: perhaps Anita’s gender is a shameful subject in Ceiao, requiring theatrical revision. But nothing in Anita’s response to the show indicates this is true. Ceirran and Gracia are both displeased by their portrayals—Ceirran because his actor is bald; Gracia because her actress is nearly naked and cannot remember her lines. Anita, however, takes no issue at all; her only comment is that her actor is “almost good-looking enough for the part.” She says this not in displeasure, but “thoughtfully,” as if she truly means that the representation would be fitting if the actor’s attractiveness were tweaked. Significantly, she is the only person in the trio whose gender is swapped on-stage. That she is also the only one more entertained than embarrassed by her portrayal emphasizes her comfort in her own masculinity.

Shakespeare’s Antony has no such comfort, or stability, in his gender. But a gender-nonconforming Antony is not as strange a choice as it may initially seem. Shakespeare’s Antony does vacillate between the binary poles of gender. If Cleopatra is all of womanhood, infinite variety in one body, and Octavian is rigid, masculine Rome, then Antony lies in the in-between. In Shakespeare’s text, this intermediate gender positioning is not straightforwardly positive. Though scholars like Laura Levine have written persuasively about the play as a defense of theater, most characters inside the play have nothing but mockery for Antony’s failing manhood. Robin, however, employs this non-binary space as a source of power rather than inadequacy. Unlike Antony, Anita is not failing manhood, nor is she vacillating between poles. Instead, she combines masculinity and femininity with seemingly no effort at all. Midway through the book, Gracia encounters her at a nightclub. Anita wears the knee-high sandals of a Hollywood gladiator, proper Mark Antony costuming, but she also wears “a little pleated cotton skirt barely covering her thighs, and a bright pink feathered coat of such enormity that it was impossible to tell if she was wearing a shirt underneath.” The skirt, the pink coat, and the glitter on her face are splashes of femininity, but this femininity is elective, not gender failure. This is Anita’s most gender-ambiguous moment, and Robin chooses this moment to write Gracia’s observation of Anita’s “comfort in her own body,” the ease and ecstasy of her movement as she grinds on another woman, head “flung back in pleasure.” Here Gracia’s attraction shines through most strongly; in this moment, Anita is the most desirable she has been yet, the most handsome.

Thus, while Shakespeare shows us a man stuck between genders, unable to hold his shape and denigrated for it, Robin (a trans-nonbinary author himself) offers a securely masculine woman, retaining Antony’s gender duality but transforming it from weakness into strength. Anita can hold her shape just fine—she is extremely comfortable in her skin, and even characters who dislike her are drawn in by her attractiveness. One might argue that Robin’s text is empowering for gender-nonconforming readers, reclaiming Antony’s gender failures with the “hottest butch girl in space.”

This is the most obvious reading. It is also too simple. For, in the militant society of Ceiao, Anita expresses masculinity primarily through military action. The hierarchical nature of the military—Anita serves as a captain under Ceirran—means she also exhibits her masculinity specifically through submission. The descriptions of Anita as warships, as knife hand, as propaganda holo, all position her as a tool of war, not a general: she is the weapon animated by a higher-up’s will. More than once, the narrating characters compare her to an animal—a poetic dehumanization, not entirely negative (Gracia describes her as such in their desperately passionate sex scene), but a dehumanization nonetheless. Most notably, Ceirran describes her with “her head cocked like a dog that had scented prey,” a skewering comparison: Anita’s is the obedient dog sort of manliness, the yes-sir sort of manliness. When she and Gracia verbally clash, Gracia tells her to sleep on the floor “if [she] can’t sleep anywhere else.” Gracia is lashing out by leveraging power—but her royal power only extends so far as the Ceian military lets it; Anita, as an arm of that military, might well ignore or override her. Nevertheless, Gracia realizes later “that she had obeyed [the] order, after all:” Anita is quite willing to show her dedication by sleeping on the floor like a dog.

Even in the street theater scene, the most distilled and one-dimensional depiction of Anita, her character’s first lines declare that he is “bid to follow faithful to [Ceirran’s] will” before anything else. Later, when Gracia wants to hurt Anita, she aims directly at Anita’s subservience to Ceirran: “He’s left you behind again,” she says, “he always leaves you behind,” because Anita’s best faithful-dog heeling is never quite enough. Indeed, when Anita displeases Ceirran, she responds by begging him to kill her. His refusal, in which he treats her as just another soldier he can’t “afford to lose,” affects her like “a physical blow.” Her worth in her own perception is synonymous with her usefulness to her commander; both viewpoint characters (who are also her social superiors) use her loyalty to cut her to the core.

Robin’s characterization reworks and challenges a common trope in lesbian art and poetry, the comparison of butches to medieval knights. This association usually emphasizes the chivalry and honor of female masculinity, pushing back against homophobic stereotypes of butches as threatening and predatory. But to be a knight is definitionally to be in service to another, a type of masculinity only achieved by constant deference to a lady or king. Historically, knighthood also definitionally requires the knight to perform violence on behalf of the (usually Christian) state. Robin’s portrayal of Anita emphasizes her attractiveness and competence, but also lays bare the associations of butchness with violent servitude. Anita’s masculinity exists inextricably in service of the Ceian empire, an empire whose very “antithesis” is peace. Near constantly, from her very first words on the page (“Let me at her”), she begs Ceirran to let her commit violence on his behalf. When Ceirran says he “cannot run an empire on [his] own,” Anita adds, “Yet,” “very cheerfully.” She goes so far as to tell him, straightforwardly, that when he wants to invade Ceiao and seize his own nation, she’ll “be there by morning,” unquestioning and unhesitating. She is truly the consummate propaganda holo, the perfect soldier, her masculinity intertwined inherently with her total dedication to the empire.

What happens, however, when a character’s gender expression does not function to grease the gears of empire? Gracia, Robin’s Cleopatra figure and the femme to Anita’s butch, finds herself in this position. Where Anita’s gender expression serves the state, Gracia crafts her self-expression (gendered and otherwise) to highlight her status as a royal—that is, a political player not necessarily allied to the Ceian empire. As a result, her enemies begin to use her femininity against her, not because femininity is inherently suspect in the world of the text but because gender can be wielded as a weapon.

Robin establishes that Gracia is feminine at least in empirical terms, in the same way that Anita is masculine. Of Anita, Ceirran, and Gracia, Gracia is the one Robin describes as beautiful, the one who never goes into battle herself, the only one to hold a gendered title like queen. Her outfits are closer to Flavia’s than Anita’s: it has been “a long time since [she] had worn trousers,” and Ceirran registers that her eyes look differently “without the kohl,” suggesting it has been a long time since she went bare-faced as well. In the Ceian theater, Gracia’s sister, Arcelia, gets the brunt of the effeminization in the Ceian theater—portrayed in “an extremely tight red dress, very bright red lipstick, and enormous false eyelashes,” a caricature of a seductress and the first indication that, as I will explore, gender can be weaponized. Nevertheless, this effeminization does not match Gracia’s own memories: Gracia is the traditionally feminine twin, Arcelia the one who spends their childhood stomping around with treasure-divers and gamblers. Gracia, instead, is all diplomacy and glittering clothes. She adopts a performance of femininity just as Anita adopts a performance of masculinity. In Anita’s case, this performance is part and parcel with her soldiership. In Gracia’s case, it is an aspect of her status as royalty. She is the more respectable twin, in part, because she rejects Arcelia’s “rough-and-tumble” lifestyle to focus on her studies. She dresses herself in pants only when she wants to mingle with the lower classes unseen. Her gender expression and her claim to the throne go hand-in-hand, a defensive performance of polish.

This polish is a defensive strategy: Gracia holds the losing ground in Ceiao, where most respond to her as Ceirran’s lover, not a political player in her own right. Her defensiveness is not, however, a product of institutional misogyny; there is none in the world of The Stars Undying, and Gracia does not quite face the same pressure to perform flawless womanhood that many real female rulers and politicians have. Nor is it a product of racism, because there is no indication that racism exists in this world, either. None of the characters is described in terms of race, only nationality and planet. Gracia notes that Ceirran is “much darker” than she is, but even as she sizes him up strategically, she assigns no political meaning to this fact. Robin’s treatment of race thus diverges from Shakespeare’s play, which emphasizes Cleopatra’s darkness and implicitly links it to her sexual desires. While Gracia is certainly brown—her identical twin sister has “a warmth to her brown skin, so that when the sun from the ocean caught it, it flushed with gold”—her “race” and others’ are never discussed, only physical appearances and, separately, markers of nationality like language and clothing. The concept of racial identity in the reader’s empirical world, shaped by transatlantic slavery and white supremacy, does not exist in this distant galaxy. Thus, unlike Cleopatra, Gracia is not inherently “other” because of her gender (Cleopatra as seductive witch) or her race (Cleopatra as emphatically dark foreigner), let alone because of both simultaneously.

Still, Gracia is a foreigner in Ceiao nevertheless: she comes from an entirely different planet, her otherness signified primarily by her religious background and planet of origin. In Shakespeare’s play, Alexandria and Rome seem culturally worlds apart—but as the play progresses, the binary between the two cities begins to collapse. In transferring Cleopatra’s story to a space opera setting, Robin intensifies this divide: Szayet (Egypt) and Ceiao (Rome) are quite literally different worlds, whose divide cannot be crossed without a spaceship.

As an adaptational choice, this intensification deepens Egyptian/Roman in Antony and Cleopatra that Robin deconstructs in regards to gender. Simultaneously, however, this allows Robin’s text to sympathize far more overtly with Cleopatra than Shakespeare’s text does. The Stars Undying opens in Szayet, Robin’s version of Shakespeare’s Egypt. Shakespeare’s play, however, was written for an audience already familiar with a particular (patriarchal and nationalist) story of Roman history and values, an audience primed to read Egypt as the loose, luxurious antithesis to Roman manhood. But working in science fiction means Robin is not beholden to preexisting cultural images of Rome and Egypt, and The Stars Undying’s world does not necessarily adhere to historical fact. As a result, the first location to which the reader acclimates is Szayet, where the first half of the book is set. When Gracia lands on Ceian soil in the twenty-fifth chapter, the new city is strange and unfamiliar to her, but it is also strange and unfamiliar to the reader. Unlike Shakespeare’s play, a theatrical work meant to be observed, Robin’s text is limited to the first-person perspectives of Gracia and Ceirran. The former gets both more page time and the first chapter in Ceiao, which the reader must see through her eyes after nearly three hundred pages acclimating to her world. One might argue that Ceirran experiences the same—he lands on Szayet for the first time at the outset of the book—but Ceirran is a conqueror who constantly hops between planets, remaining on Ceiao for only a few months at a time. Gracia, however, has left her own planet only once, as a child. She is an othered figure to the people of Ceiao, who do not speak her language and disdain her religious practices. The construction of the book, however, invites the audience to receive the Ceians themselves as the real “others,” the culture with which the reader is least familiar. Unlike in Shakespeare’s play, the reader is meant to identify with the first-person voice of the outsider, as Robin centers Gracia’s struggle to hold her own in the heart of a foreign empire.

Ceiao is not only a different planet; it is also a conquering nation with power over Szayet. Szayet is a largely marine planet, rich with the sunken treasure of past civilizations—mirroring ancient Egypt’s agricultural fertility and immense wealth. Like ancient Egypt, it is also defenseless. Even as she strikes up a romantic relationship with Ceirran, Gracia is constantly aware that his city could seize and destroy hers. She is the vulnerable party from the subordinate “client” nation. While the Ceians have “a significant fondness for Szayet’s things,” filling their homes with plundered Szayet trinkets (whose provenance they do not care to know), most of the city takes no interest in Szayeti culture beyond using it as decoration. Indeed, the first time Gracia meets Anita, the latter mocks her nation’s languages, jabbing that “Sintian [a language spoken alongside Szayeti] was very amusing in school” as she deliberately mangles Gracia’s father’s titles. Even the city’s most famous intellectual refuses to drink any wine but Ceian. He defaults to his native language when speaking to Gracia; when she claims (falsely) that she only speaks Szayeti, his confusion and alarm suggests that her language has no intellectual or cultural worth. And though Gracia’s position of Oracle is the most important religious office on her planet, she is almost forced to give up her oracular supercomputer when she enters the anti-theist Ceiao. Indeed, she is exempted from this treatment only because of Ceirran’s affection for her, while the other Szayeti people in the city are forced to conceal or abandon their religion. The relationship between Szayet and Ceiao is straightforwardly imperial: the empire wishes to consume Szayeti goods and to gawk at Gracia’s quaint eccentricities, but ultimately Szayet is only good for resource extraction.

This power imbalance unlocks the reasoning behind the portrayal of Gracia and her sister in the Ceian theater. The street troupe presents the sisters as simultaneously feeble and formidable, seductive and pathetic. The troupe does not, however, cast Gracia as a heartless and hungry seductress. Instead, the character forced into this trope is Arcelia—whose army, notably, Ceirran has just defeated in battle. Gracia’s actress is scantily dressed, but the emphasis lands on her weakness and smallness, not her dark womanly power.

In The Stars Undying’s dramatis personae, however, the game has changed. Importantly, the dramatis personae is set up to postdate the plot of the novel: it is a cast list for a play called “the Tragedy of Matheus Ceirran.” Presumably, this play chronicles Ceirran’s murder, as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar chronicles Caesar’s—but Ceirran’s murder comes at the tail end of Robin’s text. When Ceirran is killed, Gracia flees the city, and her planet becomes embroiled from afar in the resulting Ceian civil war. Now that Gracia has gone from Ceirran’s lover to a potential enemy of Ceiao, the troupe’s dramatic treatment of her shifts. The director’s note in her dramatis personae entry declares:

We are looking for SEDUCTION! GLAMOUR! WILES! The right actress should be like a snake in lipstick, and more lipstick = better. Sintian, but costumed to represent the ancient, mysterious, frightening rituals of the Szayeti people, etc. We will discuss details closer to dress rehearsal. (On wiles—I hope it is obvious that on no account should the actress come off as more intelligent than Commander Ceirran and co. Let’s be reasonable here.)

Here is the familiar Cleopatra, the lascivious enemy of Rome, cunning enough to put up a fight but, of course, still “reasonably” inferior. The actress who plays Gracia in the original street play, before Ceirran’s death, does “plaster herself over [the Ceirran actor’s] chest,” but any seductive power is tempered by her inability to remember her lines. Her headdress and white face paint indicate her exoticism, but the headdress is cardboard, and the effect is overall far from “ancient, mysterious, [and] frightening.” The new presentation of Gracia, however, is motivated by xenophobia more than misogyny: Gracia is forced into the trope of the debauched femme fatale only after breaking off her alliance with Ceiao, fully establishing herself as a foreigner and a potential enemy. Rather than expressing preexisting gendered power structures, the Ceian theater here invents, or at least redefines, gender as a trait that can be weaponized in propaganda. In Robin’s world, womanhood and femininity are not inherently disempowered positions, but Ceian propagandists can construct gendered stereotypes in order to use gender as a mechanism of political control. Gracia’s gender expression has not changed, but as her relationship to the Ceian empire shifts, so does the way her gender is received, interpreted, and ultimately made intelligible as threatening foreignness.

This is the truth about gender in The Stars Undying: it is always framed through and limited by one’s relationship to empire. Anita’s and Gracia’s respective genders matter far less than their social positioning as loyal Ceian soldier—a propaganda piece—and foreign Szayeti threat—a snake in lipstick. Arcelia and Gracia are each hyper-feminized and demonized not because they are women, but because they are threats to Ceiao who must be identified and mocked as such. The gendered dimension of this exoticism is a side effect, just one part of the Ceian attempt to define and thus contain a culture perceived as “mysterious” and strange, to deny Szayet as a political rival and redefine it as a mere source of resource extraction. Conversely, Anita’s masculinity is valid and acceptable because she expresses it through submission to her betters, through the furthering of imperial power. Women in Ceiao, after all, are pressed into mandatory military service the same as anyone else. In a futuristic outer-space setting where gender roles and homophobia no longer exist, one’s gender can be anything—so long as it can be absorbed by the imperial machine. But a Cleopatra figure, a foreign outsider whose power and very presence threatens the empire’s stability, must be defined and made legible from the outside so that she may be conquered.

SHAPED LIKE ITSELF: UNREMARKABLE GENDER IN IMMORTAL LONGINGS

Like Robin’s, Chloe Gong’s Cleopatra exists in a world where racial and gendered categories are far looser and less socially consequential. In the world of Immortal Longings, in fact, embodied categories are transient: body-jumping allows Gong’s characters to slip in and out of bodies as if accessorizing with clothing. This novum may seem engineered to interrogate the racial and gendered dynamics of Shakespeare’s play, but ultimately, the science fictional and adaptational aspects of the text never connect. Unlike The Stars Undying, where Robin is conscious of how the empirical world’s concepts of gender might frame the characters, Immortal Longings entirely disregards these categories as thematic tools. Race and gender make no difference in this text—for Gong’s characters or for the reader.

Chloe Gong’s Immortal Longings centers twin cities, San and Er, languishing in poverty under a tyrannical king. Every year, the king hosts a gladiatorial death match, in which competitors picked from a lottery strive to kill or disqualify their opponents, using the entirety of the twin cities as their arena. Complicating this endeavor is the book’s primary novum: a large percentage of the population gains the ability at puberty to jump from body to body, possessing others’ bodies with their own qi (soul or life essence). Even citizens outside of the gladiatorial games make frequent use of this ability, and few people “pay [attention] to faces in a city where faces are always changing.”

Antony and Cleopatra is already intensely concerned with race, gender, power, and selfhood. While Robin relegates gender and race to the background, Gong foregrounds the embodiment of race, gender, and class by complicating embodiment itself. Physical characteristics become more or less detached from social positioning, as anyone can step into any postpubescent body, regardless of the culture, identity, or upbringing of the body’s original qi. This in turn introduces questions of selfhood: does one’s “true” self lie in the body they occupy or the qi that transports them? Is a Cleopatra or an Antony defined by their subjective experience, or the way they appear (altered through performance or body-borrowing) to other people?

The book’s paratext trumpets the book’s association with Shakespeare: the epigraph quotes the play directly:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety. Other women cloy

The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry

Where most she satisfies. For vilest things

Become themselves in her, that the holy priests

Bless her when she is riggish.

The book opens, then, by foregrounding Cleopatra as a character with a thousand faces, always in flux. So the introduction of Gong’s Cleopatra, Calla Tuoleimi, comes as a surprise: Calla is the only major character who does not body-jump. Particularly in the games, this is “not just dangerous” but “unheard of. No one would enroll with such a disadvantage—no one except Calla Tuoleimi, apparently.” Nevertheless, Calla shrugs off the disadvantage. She has no interest in the dualism espoused by the other characters, who locate their sense of self in their qi: in Calla’s mind, “This is her body. It belongs to her. It is her more than any collective identity.”

In Shakespeare’s play, Cleopatra is notable because she is always changing. Her constant performance makes her irresistible even to her detractors; more, it functions as self-defense, allowing her to maintain power because she is so fascinating. One might expect a body-jumping Cleopatra to shift bodies ceaselessly, making her variety truly infinite. Yet the world of Immortal Longings is a world where jumping is commonplace. Changing one’s body is closer to changing an outfit than creating a new identity. Calla’s refusal to body-jump achieves the same function as Cleopatra’s variety: it makes her captivating in her strangeness. Her attachment to her body is socially unexpected, even disruptive. Instead of adapting to match every situation, Calla is straightforward and blunt. She makes others adapt to her—and they do, her competitors scrambling to get out of her way and Anton quick to offer allyship. Gong’s reversal of her own epigraph, however unexpected, thus produces a figure as unique as Shakespeare’s queen.

At least in this arena. In others, however, Calla makes a strange Cleopatra, even when one analyzes her traits as deliberate reversals of expectation. Gong goes to great lengths to make Calla sympathetic: Calla is the main character, more so than Anton. The book’s blurb frames the central conflict from her lens: “Calla must decide what she’s playing for—her lover or her kingdom.” She drives the plot, entangling Anton in her quest to destroy the tyrant king. While Gong has emphasized the book’s focus on toxic romance, she has not marketed Calla as a main character meant to be loathed, stating instead that while “none of [the characters] are good people… none of them are entirely wrong, either; they all believe that they are doing the right thing.” Gong, it would seem, wants Calla to appear both morally conflicted and sympathetic, a character willing to kill to stand against injustice. Immortal Longings, like The Stars Undying, is thus ultimately sympathetic toward its Cleopatra.

However, Calla is only a sympathetic Cleopatra insofar as Gong distances her from the qualities that made Shakespeare’s Cleopatra threatening. First and most importantly, she is no longer a foreigner. Immortal Longings’ San-Er is a science fictional location, but it is modeled after twentieth-century China, coded Chinese in the same way that, for example, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire resembles medieval Britain. Every character is presumably fictionally Chinese; in this world, whiteness is emphatically not the default. Little detail is given about characters’ cultures or backgrounds, but it is clear that Calla and August (Gong’s Octavius Caesar) are cousins, part of the same royal family, their birth bodies related by blood. Here the Rome-Egypt dichotomy collapses. Technically, San and Er are two cities functioning as one, each ruled by one branch of the royal family; in practice, however, the tyrant king Kasa rules both, and the only palpable difference between the cities is that Er has dirtier slums. Shakespeare’s Rome and Egypt may be alike in unexpected ways, but the exotic existence of Egypt is nevertheless critical to the play’s exploration of duality, art, and luxury. In Immortal Longings, there is no Egypt—or, if Gong’s intent is to flip the script by staging a world where the “East” is the norm, then everywhere is Egypt. Either way, Gong’s stand-ins for Cleopatra and Octavian no longer represent opposite, contrasting nations. One might argue that Calla is an enemy from within, that her “otherness” comes from her desire to destroy the monarchy—but Calla is not interested in destroying the monarchy as a structure, only King Kasa. She easily acquiesces to August’s plan to put himself on the throne after she kills the king; she and August remain two branches of one dynastic power.

Perhaps, then, Calla is “foreign” because of the reveal, two-thirds of the way through the book, that she is not the “original” princess Calla. Instead, her qi is that of a poor rural village girl who body-jumped into the princess years ago, overpowering the original Calla’s qi and assuming her identity. It is thus possible to argue that Calla and August are not “actually” related, because Calla is an imposter in August’s cousin’s skin. Nevertheless, Calla makes it clear in the text that she considers herself a complete whole, not a qi borrowing a body: her body is hers. Functionally, she is the princess. And, critically, every other character receives her as such. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is hated and feared by Rome because she is blatantly Other, extravagantly flaunting her “Eastern” luxury. Calla, by contrast, assimilates easily into the culture of the palace and of San-Er. She moves through lush palatial settings and grimy underground slums alike; she is not, as Cleopatra is, conspicuously from elsewhere. Thus, her enemies cannot tar her as an exotic witch or seductress, nor as an international enemy plotting the end of San-Er. The text never seizes on her lack of Otherness as a point of conflict or an asset to her plans. The ever-present Otherness in the original play is simply lopped away.

Of course, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is not threatening solely as a foreigner, but as a foreign woman. Here Calla achieves some depth: she is the nonbinary figure, not her Antony. Though Calla “enjoys femininity and how it looks on her,” a line that frames femininity as an accessory rather than a critical aspect of selfhood, she does not “[align] one specific way.” She is “a woman in the same way that the sky is blue,” that is, “woman” is the “easiest identifier” for something “nebulous [and] inexact.” Many critics have read Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as the archetypal woman, mysterious and sexual and cunning. Calla’s apathy about her gender suggests that Immortal Longings will explore that nebulous inexactness, perhaps examining the ways in which Cleopatra’s gendered positionalities, and the concept of womanhood in itself, are too complex to reduce to “masculine Rome versus feminine Egypt.”

As it turns out, Immortal Longings is profoundly uninterested in Calla’s gender. After Calla describes herself as “a woman in the same way the sky is blue,” discussion of her identity never arises again. Calla is always effortlessly beautiful and effortlessly feminine, even in battle. In her partnership with Anton—first as allies in the games, then as lovers—she always takes the feminine role to his masculinity, such as when she poses as a courtesan so the pair might conceal themselves in a brothel. The dynamic is similar to that in The Stars Undying: even in a world with looser gender roles, even in queer or nontraditional relationships, femininity seems an essential component of a recognizable Cleopatra.

The lack of focus on Calla’s gender is not in itself is not a bad thing. Nevertheless, it reflects a larger pattern: Immortal Longings adapts only the surface level of the play Gong claims to retell. Calla’s gender may be allegedly nebulous and multifaceted, but she is always feminine by default, with no further exploration. Is femininity something Calla chooses strategically, as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra performs hyperfemininity upon her barge to entrance her rivals and flaunt her riches? Does Calla’s gender presentation make her vulnerable to accusations that she is a wiley seductress or preoccupied with lust, charges leveled against Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as well as the historical queen? One can only wonder, as Immortal Longings reveals nothing; Calla’s femininity seems to spring from her effortlessly and naturally, because Gong would have it so.

Nor does Calla use her beauty and charm to win her way. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is labeled a seductress as misogynist detraction, but one does not have to be a misogynist to allow that she is persuasive: she is a diplomat, reliant on charm and strategy to maintain her throne. While Antony is lauded for his (former) battle prowess, Cleopatra’s powers are not physical but political and interpersonal. She is so charismatic and attractive that even Enobarbus, who has no love for the queen, admits “vilest things / Become themselves in her.” Calla, however, relies almost entirely on her physical lethality and skill with a sword: she stands out among the games’ contestants because her swordplay is “professional” and “fast,” and Anton is certain he can recognize her in battle because “there [is] no one [else] moving with her precision.” Calla’s scheming cousin August, who once watched a younger Calla murder her parents, tells her he thought her “bloodlust would fade with time,” but Calla “is only more unhinged now,” bluntly threatening to “gut” him where he sits. This is not a momentary slippage of control, like Cleopatra’s attack on her servant, but Calla’s general modus operandi. The narrative tells us flatly that she “hardly plans in advance,” but “establishes one concrete end goal, then rams through whatever barriers stand between herself and the result.” The historical Cleopatra took hold of a precariously-positioned kingdom before the age of twenty-five, then kept Egypt out of Roman hands for years, partially through her relationships—manipulative or genuine—with Caesar and Antony in turn. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra demonstrates her adept planning skills quite decisively in Act V, where she pulls off a regal and literally-showstopping suicide even as a captive under constant surveillance. Calla Tuoleimi, by contrast, is a battering ram in lipstick. She is neither diplomatic nor strategic nor politically savvy; indeed, Anton observes that her plans for social change are “unrealistic,” that killing the king without dismantling the systems of power in San-Er means “merely swapping one mortal man for another.” Gong makes no effort to prove his perception wrong in the broader narrative. Instead Calla spends her page time killing her competitors brutally, then feeling conflicted about it. “She could do nothing on a throne,” Immortal Longings declares, “but she can do everything with a sword in her hand.” At the very least, she has Cleopatra bangs.

Granted, by removing Cleopatra’s supernatural charm and poise, Gong does avoid reinforcing the image of Cleopatra as an oversexed, manipulative destroyer of men. She also avoids interacting with this aspect of Cleopatra’s myth at all. The result is the transformation of an extravagant and cunning dramatic character into a walking sword with little personality. Without the book’s framing—the epigraph and blurb—or the Shakespeare quotes Gong scatters wantonly into her prose, it would be difficult to recognize Calla as a Cleopatra figure at all.

Of course, this Cleopatra does have an Antony. But Anton’s relation to his analogue is even weaker than Calla’s, his character on the whole shallower. An ex-noble living in exile, Anton has been deprived of his body by the palace. He lives by jumping continuously between others’ bodies and briefly assuming their identities:

Anton Makusa is picky when it comes to the bodies he occupies, and his narcissism takes first priority. He’ll gravitate toward the masculine ones, same as the body he was born into, but he’s not fussed if that isn’t an option. What matters most is that they look good. Under the terms of his exile, his birth body was taken by the palace. The least he can do now is find worthy replacements.

At first blush, this choice seems to literalize the struggle of Shakespeare’s Antony as a man trapped between two poles, unable to maintain a visible (or invisible) shape. If Robin’s Antony is dually-gendered, Gong’s is un-sexed: Anton is literally not embodied. He is literally fluid, in ways that go beyond gender: no physical form exists to solidify him. Like Shakespeare’s Antony, Anton cannot maintain a stable identity, but he has lost his shape in a much more dramatic way than his predecessor. Presumably, then, Anton’s attempt to perform and thus legitimize his identity is even more dramatic than Antony’s. Anton has no control over any aspect of his identity or selfhood; he lacks even the skin in which he was born. Ostensibly, his manliness is the last thing to which he can cling: choosing to occupy mainly masculine bodies is a final attempt to carve out a sense of self and control over his self-presentation. Nevertheless, this fix is only temporary. Because Anton cannot remain in the same body for long without arousing suspicion, he must jump constantly, meaning his struggle for self-definition must be reenacted over and over again, much as Antony struggles endlessly to assert manhood. There is no finish line: the masculine self must be constantly reasserted.

I write “ostensibly” because this analysis is all conjecture. On paper, Anton Makusa experiences very little grief about the fact that he “cannot hold [his] shape.” Of course, an Antony figure does not have to be insecure about his gender or selfhood to function as a recognizable Antony: as witnessed, Emery Robin’s Anita is quite secure in her gender-nonconformity, and quite desirable for it. But Anton does not revel in his fluidity, either. In fact, he barely thinks about it. Even in the above excerpt, the text notes that his preference for masculine bodies is not intense enough to make him “fussed” about his situation. According to Immortal Longings’ blurb, Anton’s driving motivation is the desire to rescue his beloved paramour Otta from a coma with the money he wins in the gladiatorial games, but, in truth, he barely thinks about Otta, either. Most of Anton’s page time is devoted to cliched flirty banter and a preoccupation with Calla—not because she is especially charming or mysterious, but because the plot requires an Antony to want a Cleopatra. Though Anton has been violently degendered by the loss of his body, Gong seems to take little interest in his experience of identity; primarily, Anton exists as Calla’s bad boy battle partner. Here is another version of infinite variety—a character without physical consistency, with a limitless amount of possible forms—that fails to impact the story at all.

Warlike instead of diplomatic, constant in a world of inconstancy, Calla is a Cleopatra defined by reversal, her lover an Antony defined by exile rather than glory. At its beginning, Immortal Longings thus seems set to turn the play inside-out. Yet the thematic threads Gong introduces early in the book are laid aside in favor of battle scenes and endlessly-reiterated information about the setting. Ultimately, the themes and concerns of Antony and Cleopatra are only set dressing, aesthetic trappings without substance.

Even so, this lack of substance is revealing. If Robin’s main character is recognizable as Cleopatra where Gong’s is not, some essential facet of Cleopatra-ness must hang in the balance. Viewed together, these two characters suggest that Cleopatras are usually feminine, but also that femininity is not enough to define a Cleopatra. Robin’s Gracia is closer to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra than Gong’s Calla for two primary reasons so far: because she is a foreigner fighting an uphill battle against a neighbor with intimidating military power, and because she is a skilled diplomat with a sharply political approach to her problems.

Of course, her positioning in the social order is not the only critical aspect of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Her status as a powerful Egyptian woman is important, but so is her status as the embodiment of theater, a self-consciously performative character introduced to the stage in an often-antitheatrical era. To understand Cleopatra’s adaptation in these novels, then, one must also examine the movement from one medium to another.

CHAPTER 3: THE ACTOR MAY PLEAD PARDON

All of Shakespeare’s oeuvre is on some level concerned with the medium of theater, the opportunities and drawbacks it offers. Antony and Cleopatra, however, is a text particularly obsessed with the very concept of performance and its effects—on audience and performer alike. Robin’s and Gong’s adaptations are both novelizations of this play; these two authors are not only placing Shakespeare into science fiction, but also into a format without actors, sets, costumes, or effects. Many questions invoked by theater, however—like the issue of what makes something “real”  and how much power performance has to represent or create truth—are also evoked by science fiction. Where Robin and Gong lack Shakespeare’s theatrical medium, then, they do have the traditional tools of science fiction to trouble the “real.” Robin uses these tools, and the qualities unique to the novel form, to retain and translate Antony and Cleopatra’s interest in the construction of narratives and legends. By contrast, Gong fails to align Immortal Longings’ generic and formal qualities with the book’s themes, hindering the text’s ability to provoke destabilizing questions.

Many academics have read Cleopatra as an embodiment of theater itself—for good and for ill. As Laura Levine observes, Enobarbus’s declaration that she “makes hungry / Where she most satisfies;” she draws Antony back to her over and over, as theater was believed to incite audiences to return again and again. No one tires of her, because Cleopatra is the woman “whom everything becomes,” shifting mercurially between moods to evoke a response from Antony. When her mutability does not suffice, she explicitly provokes him into “excellent dissembling,” then chides him for playing his part poorly, for all the world like an exacting director. Like a director, she puts men in women’s clothing and steals away their manhood. Her penultimate performance—convincing Antony she has committed suicide—is “a scene… so destructive it drives its audience to kill himself,” echoing the logic of antitheatrical tracts declaring theater an active hazard to its witnesses.

Her theatricality, however, is not the same as falseness. Even Cleopatra’s faked suicide, her most dishonest performance, is ultimately—like her other histrionic fainting “deaths” throughout the play—a rehearsal for her final show, her real suicide, a performance that sets the terms of the narrative of her life and memory. She “conceives of reality itself as a scenario waiting to be improvised and shaped,” that is, she conceives of reality as something that can be shaped by the script she decides to set. Cleopatra’s seductive and terrifying power is not the power to misrepresent herself or the world—it is the power to change herself and the world, by representing what she means to make real.

Indeed, representation is all an audience has of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Many academics have noted the lack of interiority Shakespeare offers his title characters, who are never staged in a private moment together. They make their grandest declarations of love in front of crowds of attendants; they do not soliloquize; the play occludes “the motives of the protagonists at the most critical points in the action.” Not only does Cleopatra never speak directly to the audience, but she is actually never alone on stage, which means that even within the text she always represents herself to someone else’s gaze. Unlike other characters famous for their ability to perform—Hamlet and his antic disposition, for example, or Iago and his complex web of lies—Cleopatra offers no glimpse of a sheltered inside self. Scholars may struggle to set a clear boundary between Hamlet’s interior and his exterior (there is no critical consensus on the degree to which his madness is natural, rather than feigned). But Cleopatra does not even have an interior to begin with—at least, not one that the audience can see. What the audience sees is all exterior: what she does, what she performs.

This representative performance is not limited to theatrical performance, even if Cleopatra is a figure in a play. I am also drawing on Judith Butler’s use of the concept of “performative acts,” in the sense of a “speech act:” a piece of speech that in itself performs what it describes (the classic example being “I promise,” which itself enacts the promise). Butler departs from the common view that gender is “expressive” of a deep essential truth, buried in a person like a gemstone, predating the “acts, postures, and gestures by which it is dramatized and known.” Rather, they view these acts, postures, and gestures as “performative” in that they “constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal;” there is no inner truth; the emperor has no clothes, or perhaps the emperor is only clothes. People create gender through performative acts, not just once but repeatedly and continually. The meaning associated with these acts—the idea that a certain gesture or outfit is masculine or feminine—is not inherently attached to the act; rather, meanings have been inscribed onto these acts through complex processes of culture and history. To access the cultural idea of “manhood” or “womanhood,” one must perform certain acts. “Gender reality,” in Butler’s world, is thus “real only to the extent that it is performed.” Interiority as an “essence” is a “fabrication.”

If representation creates reality, then Antony and Cleopatra is a very Butlerian play. Within the play’s world, this model of performative acts applies not only to gender—though the play is certainly obsessed with the performance and reiteration of masculinity—but to identity as a whole. As Levine argues, Octavius Caesar reacts with hostility to “Cleopatra’s presentation of herself as a goddess” because he recognizes that “the power to stage oneself” is also the power to create oneself. Similarly, Antony’s scramble to prove his manhood is fueled by the same understanding: when he stops adequately performing manhood, he loses his access to it, through the potent symbol of his stolen sword. This is a play where theater’s power is not just to hold “the mirror up to nature,” to imitate the real, but to create the thing it reflects: “representation itself is not merely a matter of presenting… a copy of what already ‘is.’” Cleopatra’s idea that the world can be scripted and directed is correct: “if things fail to exist apart from their own theatricalizations, then what is enacted is simply more ‘real’ than what is not, theatricality simply the constitutive condition of existence itself.” The end of the play sees Cleopatra victorious. Octavian’s desire to stage her as a prisoner in a triumph, played by a squeaking boy, is overpowered by the show of her suicide, in which she combines the parts of noble queen, nurturing mother, bereaved wife, honorable Roman suicide, and mortal apotheosized. She dies, but she dies the ultimate actor and director of herself.

But what, then, is Cleopatra’s “self,” if she can perform as anything? How can one define a self at all? Beneath the basic anxieties of Shakespeare’s antitheatrical contemporaries, like the fear that wearing women’s clothes might cause a man to degenerate into a woman, lie deeper gaping chasms of doubt. If a man can become a woman, then what does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? If a boy on stage can embody a woman, if a poor actor can embody a queen, however briefly, then what is a “real” queen or woman? For that matter, what does it mean to “become” something else? And, if it’s possible for the self and the role to merge inextricably, what separates the “real” self from the adopted, performed self? What are the qualifications for something being real, anyway?

These questions are begged by Cleopatra’s self-creation. They are also questions begged frequently by science fiction. In fact, Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as the genre of estrangement suggests that begging these questions is the purpose of science fiction—not merely to hold the mirror up to the “empirical environment” of author and reader, but to call the empirical environment into question. The “novum” of each text (its unreal element) is meant to trouble what the reader takes for granted as natural and immutable. Exploring a world in which the human mind could be preserved after death, or in which consciousness is not always fixed in one body, provokes questions about which aspects of the mind and consciousness a reader has taken for granted as natural and immutable. Robin and Gong, then, are working in a long tradition concerned with the same questions as Shakespeare’s play.

But the novelist has different tools. Theater is what Robert Stam describes as a “multitrack medium,” with more than one “track” by which to express itself. Stam focuses on film, not drama, but his “tracks” are easily applied to theater: “phonetic sound, music, noises, and written materials” also exist on stage, and Stam’s fifth filmic track, “moving photographic image,” in theater takes the form of sets, costumes, and living actors. The words of the text are still critical, but these other dimensions exist simultaneously, layered over and under the verbal. Directors must make choices novelists do not have to consider: exactly what each character will look like, for example, as determined by which actor embodies them.

The presence of an actor itself invokes many of the aforementioned questions, because the presence of an actor is a reminder that there is some difference between the idea of a character and the physical body enacting that idea. An actor who plays Cleopatra is not actually the long-dead queen; similarly, the play’s set is not actually ancient Egypt. More so than film, where editing and special effects can smooth over this verisimilitude, theater makes this incongruity visible. Even a play less obsessed with theater-as-reality than Antony and Cleopatra has to navigate a double reality, the reality of the actors and stage lying beneath the story the actors and set signify. An audience can suspend disbelief to imagine, for example, that the person playing Cleopatra has actually died, but at some point the play will end and the actor will stand up again, the theatrical space revealed as only a room. Theatrical art cannot escape this double vision, only navigate and mediate between its layers.

Novelists, on the other hand, only have words. Stam observes that this limitation creates a “subordination to linear consecution”—while film and drama can express visuals and sounds all at once, a novelist must describe one thing at once. Nevertheless, Stam does not consider this a flaw in the written word. This “linear consecution” lends the novelist control over a reader’s attention and access to information: a reader can only know what the prose tells them, in the order it tells them. In adapting Shakespeare’s play to prose, Robin and Gong have more authority than Shakespeare did over how their Cleopatra figures are received. Theater is limited by the biases of the audience, who may react to unintentional details about an actor’s appearance or voice. But novelists—though their audiences, too, are biased—have far more exacting control over what information reaches their audiences at all.

Yet there is a cost: without a theater, how can a novelist create a theatrical Cleopatra? How can prose recreate her dramatics—her emotional vicissitudes, her grand self-display—without recourse to visual spectacle or an actor’s ability to imbue feeling into a text? The force of Cleopatra’s “infinite variety” must be achieved through words alone—and yet she herself “beggar[s] all description.”

Of course, it is worth noting that Shakespeare’s resorts to costumes, sets, and actors were limited as well: early modern drama had very little in the way of set pieces, and Shakespeare’s original Cleopatra would have been played by a boy actor in castoffs. Indeed, one of Cleopatra’s most extravagantly theatrical scenes comes to the audience only through hearsay. Her appearance on the River Cydnus, fanned by Cupids and wafting perfume, is what Marjorie Garber calls an “un-scene:” “unseen by the spectators in the theater except in the mind’s eye,” because it is not staged but described in lavish detail. This very lack of staging gives the scene its power: because it exists only in the mind, it presents a Cleopatra who is definitionally unreal, allowing her to attain a grandeur that a staging could never live up to. She is not a stumbling boy actor but a “paradox of nature and a work of art,” and she is made so, like a character in a novel, by words alone.

So perhaps literal visual spectacle is not necessary to convey Cleopatra’s drama; the imaginary visual spectacle created verbally is enough. Notably, however, Cleopatra’s River Cydnus appearance is narrated by Enobarbus, one of Antony’s Roman fellows. Her spectacle is framed through an outsider; she remains all exterior, her intentions for the performance left for the guessing. Shakespeare thus aligns Cleopatra’s in-text and meta-textual audiences, both of whom find her performances so captivating at least in part because she remains a mystery.

Robin’s and Gong’s novels, however, are each partially from the narrative point of view of their respective Cleopatras. This allows the novelists an easy way to create what Linda Hutcheon calls the “res cogitans, the space of the mind,” which conveys a character’s “psychic reality.” In Shakespearean theater, the res cogitans takes shape in soliloquy—but Cleopatra has no soliloquies. Both novelists, through their chosen medium, offer the reader a direct line to their Cleopatra’s thoughts, but what—and how—does Cleopatra think? If her appeal depends in part on her unpredictable mutability, can Cleopatra remain alluring in prose, with her mystery diminished and no actor lending life to her words?

A PLACE I’ TH’ STORY: NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE STARS UNDYING

Robin’s Cleopatra certainly can. Gracia, Robin’s Cleopatra, achieves the original Cleopatra’s fascinating magnetism and “infinite variety” through her role as an unreliable narrator in a biased frame narrative. Furthermore, the text’s broader questions about selfhood and legend are expressed through the science fiction novum of the Pearl of the Dead, which allows Robin, like Shakespeare, to invent a world where storytelling is reality-making.

Like Cleopatra, Gracia cannot be pinned down. From the outset, she is difficult to read. The other point of view character, Ceirran, though he is her lover and the two are quite intimate, remarks frequently on her inscrutability—an inscrutability she creates through her constant (en)acting of royal beauty. Even after the two sleep together, Ceirran catches Gracia adjusting her behavior to play to his desires and expectations: “After only a few seconds of my observation the faint line between her eyebrows disappeared, and she tilted her chin a little, and the soft curve of her jaw caught the light.” “It’s a lovely picture,” Ceirran tells Gracia, because he recognizes that she is constructing a picture, the same way he recognizes the “curious distance to how she looked at [him].” Later, he observes that he understands “barely half of what passed through her mind;” that that he cannot tell when she is lying; that her moments of vulnerability are so rare and fleeting as to startle him. Gracia, too, is conscious of the distance between them. “I might have said yes, if [yes] had been the truth,” she thinks when Ceirran asks her a tender personal question. She knows he speaks with “neither suspicion nor rancor,” and yet the might lingers. Even the counterfactual, if all else had been true, would not ensure Gracia’s honesty. And even her attraction to Ceirran is part performance: the touch of her tongue to her lips as she flirts with him is only “almost more nervousness than show.”

So Robin’s Cleopatra is as unpredictable as Shakespeare’s. Yet mere words still do not reproduce the living, breathing, glimmering stage presence of a fascinating performer. This effect is achieved through the novel’s frame narrative: it steadily becomes clear that the two point of view characters are not only narrating, but telling their stories in first person to a specific audience. The reader has not only a direct line to Gracia’s subjective experience, but a direct line to Gracia’s subjective experience as she chooses to shape it. Cleopatra has Enobarbus to describe her on the River Cydnus, but Gracia is her own Enobarbus, crafting her own image for her audience. And she manipulates this editorial power, unabashedly. More than once, she confesses she has obscured major information from the reader. The first act of the novel follows Gracia’s civil war, waged against her sister, whose religious claim to the throne Gracia denies. She introduces the war as if she had no choice in the matter: Gracia’s citizens knew she was the rightful queen, and Gracia was more or less forced to raise arms to fulfill their wishes. The story proceeds upon this information for a hundred pages; then, abruptly, Gracia announces in her narration, “I lied about the war,” revealing that she deliberately provoked unrest in the city and organized her own coup. Her civil war and her innocent facade are both carefully orchestrated; she steers events rather than reacting helplessly. “I am a liar, of course,” she notes in her first chapter, and proceeds to prove it.

Gracia has no illusions about her preoccupation with her public image or her deftness at refining it. She achieves an alliance with the Ceians by threatening to make herself a martyr, “a display that no one watching her will soon forget,” emphasizing her understanding of the power of public display. Her narrative neatly elides inconvenient moments in her personal history. Gracia skips parts of her story; she doubles back and corrects her omissions; she elides her own uncomfortable emotions with a simple, “I don’t think I’m going to tell you about that right now.” She is keeping secrets, that is, but she is also teasing the tantalizing moment where she might reveal those secrets. The greatest elision looms over most of the novel. When Gracia assumes her throne, she also becomes the priestess to her planet’s god, whose soul is stored inside a computer chip. Upon emerging from this chip to meet her, this god declares that he “might have known” she would take the throne. Rather than depict the rest of their conversation, Robin-through-Gracia skips forward to the end of the scene. Almost two hundred fifty pages of mystery pass before Gracia confesses the secret her god knew at once: that she lied about being his chosen queen; that her sister was the one chosen all along, making her civil war tantamount to blasphemy.

Here is Gracia’s infinite variety: over and over, she reveals another lie woven into the thread of her story. The unreliability of her narration is how “she makes hungry:” the lies provoke a desire for the truth. The Stars Undying cannot be read while distracted: the reader must struggle to differentiate propaganda from the “true” story, bearing in mind not only the complicated science fictional politics, but also the narrator’s habitual dishonesty. Her inscrutability requires full focus, the exact sort of focus Cleopatra commands on the stage.

Even with her greatest—not her final—secret revealed, Gracia’s motivations are difficult to ascertain. She never admits why she chose to blaspheme her way to the throne; her reasoning must be assembled from her statements about loving the people of Szayet or distrusting her twin sister’s governance. That twin, Arcelia, tells her that “trying to be your sister is like trying to be sister to [a black hole]. There’s nothing inside,” only a ruthless willingness to embody whatever story she intends to tell. The reader, too, begins to wonder if there is a genuine woman beneath the propaganda.

It is not a particularly sympathetic question, but it is a fascinating one. Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Gracia may not be a paragon of virtue, but she is nevertheless more interesting in the “vilest things [that] become her” than the Romans (Ceians) in all their rigid straight lines. As Emma Smith says, bluntly, “We would rather be in the scenes with Cleopatra than in those with Caesar,” who is less “dramatically engaging.” Smith means Octavius Caesar, not the Caesar Ceirran represents, but the same pattern holds true in The Stars Undying. Ceirran, too, is a biased narrator, but only because of his lack of self-awareness about his authoritarian leanings. Gracia is much less oblivious of her own dishonesty, which means she is much more deliberate about the way she organizes her story, which means her chapters carry a dramatic flair Ceirran’s do not.

Both narrators tell their own stories, but Ceirran is recording for no one in particular, recounting his life for posterity. Gracia’s audience is decidedly more personal. The final chapters reveal that she has been telling her story, all along, to Anita. “Give me my robe,” Gracia tells her maidservant. “Put on my crown. I am going to tell her a story.” While the words directly invoke Cleopatra’s death scene, at this point in The Stars Undying, Gracia is not preparing for her death. She is preparing to approach Anita in full regalia on an extravagant spaceship, at the height of her royal power—that is, this is Gracia’s equivalent of Cleopatra’s River Cydnus moment. The story she intends to tell Anita is her own narrative, both a defense of her slippery political dishonesty and a charm campaign. Robin’s choice to place the reveal here emphasizes that the book itself is an extension of the River Cydnus display: it is not only the spaceship that constitutes Gracia’s most alluring and daring performance, but also the story she has shaped word by word.

Cleopatra’s infinite variety is thus preserved by Robin’s frame narrative and choice of point of view. Grounding the story in Gracia’s head equalizes the epistemological power dynamic of the original work. In Shakespeare’s play, Cleopatra is almost always framed through the eyes of Romans—particularly Enobarbus, who constantly attacks her distracting, allegedly effeminizing effect on Antony. His perspective is one that venerates Roman manhood, and his dislike for Cleopatra is thus inextricable from her un-Romanness. The play’s other Roman characters discuss her with a mixture of awe and disdain. Only in the final act does Cleopatra command the audience on her own terms, and even then, her desire to write her own legend with her death conflicts with Octavius’s desire to write her a different script. In The Stars Undying, however, Gracia has far more power to present herself on her own terms, without a veil of exotification. (While Ceirran narrates every other chapter, his are generally shorter, and after his death, Gracia’s is the sole voice.) By letting their Cleopatra speak for herself, rather than presenting her through a Roman lens, Robin breaks from depictions of Cleopatra that judge her through orientalist and misogynistic frames.

What Robin preserves is Shakespeare’s fascination with fate, legend, and hearsay. The Stars Undying is intimately concerned with the power of storytelling—particularly dishonest storytelling. The very first paragraphs of the book foreground the tension between myth and historical truth, between self-fashioning narratives and material reality:

In the first year of the Thirty-Third Dynasty, when He came to the planet where I was born and made of it a wasteland for glory’s sake, my ten-times-great-grandfather’s king and lover, Alekso Undying, built on the ruins of the gods who had lived before him Alectelo, the City of Endless Pearl, the Bride of Szayet, the Star of the Swordbelt Arm, the Ever-Living God’s Empty Grave.

He caught fever and filled that grave, ten months later. You can’t believe in names.

This invocation and immediate deflation of legend sets the stage for the rest of the novel, wherein both main characters are extremely aware that story and history are not synonymous. The story of Alekso Undying also sets the stage for The Stars Undying’s primary novum: the Pearl of the Dead. Created by Gracia’s “ten-times-great-grandfather,” lover of the conqueror-turned-god Alekso (a character modeled after the historical Alexander the Great), the “pearl” is actually a supercomputer housing the downloaded contents of Alekso’s mind and memories. When connected to the brain of a living person—the Oracle of Szayet, who wears the Pearl at their ear at all times—this supercomputer offers advice and admonishment through a projection of Alekso.

To the people of Szayet, who consider him a god, this projection is Alekso’s immortal soul. To the unreligious Ceians, it is merely a complex superintelligence. Gracia and Ceirran both spend the novel haunted by the implied question: “whether, should [a computer program] be an identical replica of a human mind, that mind can be said to remain alive and well.” It is not a mere philosophical exercise. Threatened by Ceiao’s military power, the one unique resource Gracia can offer Ceirran is Szayet’s technology. Driven by a combination of political duress and personal tenderness toward him, she offers to make Ceirran a Pearl for his own mind, provided that she can serve as his Oracle and wear his Pearl after his death. If the supercomputer is a mere imitation of a mind, this would give Gracia a great deal of political power in Ceirran’s wake. If, however, the replicated mind really is “alive and well,” if Alekso Undying lives on, then Gracia is offering Ceirran immortality—an unending retelling of his story built directly from his memories.

Robin deploys this invented technology to literalize a question already present in the Shakespeare play: what it means for a person to become a myth. Both viewpoint characters are obsessed with the legacies they will leave behind, but they are also aware that the image of them that lives on may not be objectively “true,” and both are eager to put forth “an excitingly justifiable narrative” of their actions. The philosophical debate around the Pearl only highlights what Gracia already knows, as Cleopatra did before her: that all narratives are subjective, so truth may not be “anywhere to be found” in memory—neither the collective memory of a culture nor the emotional memory of an individual.

Marjorie Garber situates Shakespeare’s Antony as somewhere between a “failed hero or successful myth.” In doing so, she exposes another of the play’s many dichotomies: history and legend. A man who “fails” in his mortal life might still live on in romantic legend—for example, on the stage. While Octavius Caesar wins history, Garber asserts, in that he materially defeats Antony and Cleopatra and seizes imperial power, the lovers win the narrative with the sheer force of their paradoxes and excesses: “His glory is history, [but] their story is legend.”

Robin, less explicitly, asserts something similar: the story that endures, however false, however consciously crafted, is always more important than the truth. The novel never offers a definitive answer about the Pearl. Ultimately, it does not matter if the Alekso projected into Gracia’s brain is the “real” Alekso: he is the only Alekso to whom she has access. The long-dead man whose mind provided the code is out of reach. Gracia’s Alekso has his “memories” and “the intelligence to animate them;” when Gracia asks if he is “anything more than that,” he answers, “Are you?” Every person, after all, builds themself from their memories, just as their posthumous legacy is built by others’ memories of them. Even if the projected Alekso is not the “real” Alekso’s soul, he is still the guiding advice-giving hand of the Oracle, and thus for all functional purposes he “is” Gracia’s god.

Gracia’s confrontation with Alekso is one of the few scenes where Robin lays bare the tension between fact and myth. The other is Ceirran’s death scene—or, rather, the lack of it, because the scene is a gap in the narrative. Like Garber’s “unscene,” this event happens off-stage, transmitted only through hearsay and secondary report. Ceirran is a clear Caesar analogue, which means the narrative builds inexorably to his assassination, with a dramatic irony the audience would be hard-pressed to ignore. Robin is so bold as to reference Shakespeare’s famous “Et tu, Brute?,” when Ceirran asks Jonata Barran—Robin’s Brutus—if the council (taking place of the Roman senate) will forgive him for his lateness. “And you, too, Jonata?” he says, and if at this point the direction of the plot is not clear, nothing else can be done.

Yet Ceirran’s last scene ends there, as he enters the council meeting. The violence of his death is elided entirely. Rather, Robin relies on the reader’s understanding of the extratextual story of Caesar’s assassination to put together the pieces, as only the tumultuous aftermath of Ceirran’s death is described in any detail. Ceirran’s death is a lacuna. Outside imagination must fill in the gap—not only the imagination of the reader, but of the other characters within the plot, who variously claim that Ceirran, “had he lived… would have erased all debt… would have killed Jonata Barran with his bare hands… would have been a tyrant to the Ceian people… would have been the savior of the Ceian people.” Thus, though Ceirran’s own transference into a Pearl is never completed, he nevertheless attains his own kind of immortality. When only his memory remains, he becomes a fractal figure, his reputation shaped by stories and rumors more than any objective list of facts. This is the moment he achieves godhood, or something close to it: the moment he becomes more myth than man. It is very similar to Cleopatra’s achievement at the end of Antony and Cleopatra.

Here is the true triumph of Gracia’s narration: she must be the character who helms a story about mythmaking, because no figure is made of myth quite so much as Cleopatra. Ceirran’s death scene is an empty space, a tantalizing lack of detail inviting theorizing and supposition. The same is true of Cleopatra’s life. Historians have one (disputed) record of her handwriting and no record of her thoughts. The concrete facts about her life are few and far between, and rather drab next to the glittering array of myths about her wealth, her beauty, her sex life, her seductive powers, her cruelty, her tragedy. The historical Cleopatra is compelling not in spite of but because of her mystery, just as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is interesting not in spite of but because of her inscrutability. By introducing the Pearl of the Dead as a literalization of preservation through memory, Robin employs the tools of science fiction to create a world where creating a mythos can directly create reality, where placing a dead man in the role of a god can actually lend him immortality through technology. And by placing the story squarely in Gracia’s hands—decisively so, after Ceirran’s death ends his point of view—Robin emphasizes that Gracia is the pinnacle of self-mythologizing. If she is really, as her sister claims, a black hole, a vacuum, then she is a vacuum people leap to fill with their stories, none so well as Gracia herself.

“There is something greater than a lie,” she declares near the end of the novel, “wider and wilder… and which holds men in its current… the Sintians might have called it greatness, and the Ceians glory. The Szayeti might have called it divinity.” If to lie, to craft a story, is to become divine, then Gracia’s act of self-narrativization is not only her equivalent of a display on the River Cydnus. It is also her apotheosis.

EXCELLENT DISSEMBLING: DECEPTIVE THEATER IN IMMORTAL LONGINGS

Like Shakespeare’s play, Immortal Longings asks whether identity is something you are or something you do. At times, Chloe Gong seems to follow a Butler-type view of identity, where the “self” is not a secret internal truth but created through the performance of culturally meaningful acts. At other times, however, the text presents these performance acts—and all attempts to narrativize reality—as fundamentally dishonest, working to obscure a secret internal truth that does exist. Rather than offer a coherent answer, Immortal Longings vacillates unproductively between these potential understandings of identity, ultimately failing to commit to a theme or to resolve its own internal contradictions.

Initially, the Butlerian idea of identity seems at odds with Gong’s worldbuilding. The novum of Immortal Longings is that most people in San-Er have a gene that allows them to transfer their qi from one body to another. Almost every character in Immortal Longings frequently body-jumps via this ability. In traditional Chinese medicinal practices, qi loosely describes the “vital energy that is held to animate the body internally.” In Gong’s universe, this is the part of the person that can detach from the physical body: the mind, memories, and subjective consciousness. The only physical freight carried with qi is a person’s eye color, which also transfers to the newly occupied body. Otherwise, body and qi are entirely separable. While some characters seem attached to their “original” bodies, this is simply personal preference. Identity clearly resides in the qi; Anton is entirely bereft of his birth body, but narration and Calla alike call him Anton, no matter whose skin he arrives in. In this world, then, the type of question scholars might ask about Hamlet or Iago—whether they have a “true” self behind their actions—seems moot. That self is the qi. The answer is obviously yes.

This is not to say Immortal Longings is uninterested in theater and truth. Gong constructs San-Er as a city of performance, in a simpler sense than Butler’s: the city is obsessed with manufactured entertainment, particularly the death games that drive the plot. The second paragraph of the book settles its focus on the city’s coliseum, which is so central—spatially and culturally—that the royal palace “was built into” it, “the north side of the elevated palace enmeshed with the coliseum’s south wall.” This emphasis on the palace and coliseum “[closing] the gap[s]” in one another decisively pairs the tyranny of the royal family with the physical space of the coliseum and what it represents—itself a gory kind of theater, a place where royal power narrativizes material violence for the enjoyment of spectators.

Like Shakespeare’s audiences, this spectating requires a suspension of disbelief. The people of San-Er “pretend that everything is just a show, forgetting that the players entering the coliseum are readying to tear each other apart.” Through Calla, Gong makes the point explicit:

These games are entertainment, whether on the television set at home or in the stands of the arena. Never mind eighty-seven of their fellow civilians being murdered by the end of it. Murder by sword or by the throne’s refusal to save its most vulnerable from starvation… what’s the difference? San-Er has so many fucking people that one life is as common as a cockroach, fit to be squashed and disregarded without remorse.

Critically, this form of theater is a distraction with political ends. The apathy and bloodlust of the people of San-Er do not actually make life “common as a cockroach,” nor does the act of pretending turn the real violence into stage magic. And treating the contestants in the death games as characters, with no identity beyond their status as contestants, does not create but destroys, flattening and obscuring the contestants’ complexity. As the games rage, the populace invent their own “narrative” (Gong’s word) for Anton and Calla’s alliance, deciding they are “lovers, each of whom registered for the games because of depleting funds, not knowing the other had done the same.” Calla and Anton acknowledge this story offers palatable cover for their alliance, which is in truth more rebellious in nature. Still, the value of that cover lies in the fact that it is “what the games are. Entertainment. A distraction.” Similarly, when she and Anton disguise themselves as courtesans to escape a dangerous fight, there is no indication that the disguise is constitutive like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra: while Calla-as-courtesan “looks very different from the player… glimpsed in the lobby,” she only temporarily conceals her status as a player, returning swiftly to the contestant’s role in a burst of violence. The narratives invented in Immortal Longings are closer to Hamlet’s antic disposition than Cleopatra’s self-definition: useful insofar as they provide a mask to hide behind. Unlike Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Calla is not directing the world; she is misdirecting.

More, the text suggests that this misdirection is inherently dishonest. While the narrative of Anton and Calla as star-crossed lovers arises from the games’ spectators, most stories about the games are disseminated from the palace, top-down. While Anton claims to be “shocked that the games can be manipulated so thoroughly,” Calla takes for granted that her contacts in the government will help her, because she knows the games are always manipulated. The work of the throne is “feeding the civilians” simple, toothless stories to keep the city complacent. On television, the king is “airbrushed” and “serene,” an effect achieved through “digital alterations” from the palace’s “communication rooms.” Calla’s knowledge that this is a strategic choice—the digital editing hides the king’s precise location—goes hand-in-hand with her “derision” for the king and his obfuscation. Though she later sarcastically prays to her television “and the gods inside,” it’s clear that Calla does not actually believe the king, like a god, is creating or defining truth. She disdains and resents him because she knows his performance is a lie—because she has access to the hidden truth he chooses to conceal.

This is a novel, then, where truth is stable, just as qi is. Unlike in The Stars Undying, where the dominant cultural narrative becomes functionally true, the most popular and repeated narratives in Immortal Longings are demonstrably false. At best, attempts to rescript the world are tantamount to misinformation. At worst, the very act of acting is villainous. The text’s primary constructor of narratives is not its Cleopatra; it is King Kasa, a paranoid authoritarian ruler who appears in a few scattered scenes to order random acts of violence. His eager use of the games to distract from (and extend) his abuse of power tells the reader very clearly how to feel about political theater.

If this narrative-construction-as-disguise is a form of deception, then the book’s antidote must be Calla, the one stable point in a city of shifting bodies, whose refusal to transfer her qi makes her a social oddity. In a world of body-jumping, Calla’s fascinating spectacle resides in her (anti-Butlerian) belief that her body not only “belongs to her,” but “is her more than any other collective identity.” Through use of genre tropes, Gong turns Shakespeare’s parent play on its head: the novum of Immortal Longings makes mutability normal, so Calla stands out for refusing fluidity, provoking the reader to wonder if the body really is integral to one’s identity.

Yet the text is less clear about what Calla’s stability means for its overarching views of identity and storytelling. Indeed, it is not even clear how Calla views the two. Her rejection of others’ mind-body dualism, coupled with her clear loathing for King Kasa’s propagandistic storycraft, seems to imply that she rejects the idea that performance might create rather than conceal. Nevertheless, her narration offers no coherent indication of her worldview. Indeed, it often contradicts itself. Calla muses that “most others in San-Er refuse to think of their body as their own,” preferring to consider only their qi “wholly theirs,” but she believes that “her whole body is the very narrative of her existence,” each of her scars a record of events from her past. This makes sense—it places the existence of objective facts, like the fact that Calla has trained for combat, before her self-narrative, which is contingent on and determined by those objective facts. Yet one line prior, Calla wonders, “What are memories if not stories told repeatedly to oneself?” Suddenly her worldview seems far closer to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra’s—reality is determined, at least in part, by the way a person narrativizes it, not by the cold truth about what occurred. Maybe Calla’s viewpoint on the matter actually falls somewhere between binary poles, but if so, neither she nor Gong seems interested in mediating the contradiction.

It is a contradiction that may seem minor, at least in the details. A few clumsy sentences do not necessarily make an ideologically confused text. But even in the most emotionally fraught scenes, Immortal Longings continues to vacillate between opposing views of identity and selfhood. In the last third of the book, Calla confesses her secret to Anton: she is not the “real” princess, but a rural village girl’s qi occupying the princess’s body.

When Calla protests that she does not truly know Anton—who has to jump between others’ bodies to survive, as his own body is state property—Anton reassures her that she does: “I am Anton Makusa. It doesn’t matter what body I’m in.” Indeed, though he expresses vague desires to have his body back, that desire seems motivated primarily by convenience: first and foremost, he just wants a body he doesn’t have to share. His worldview falls in line with the reigning opinion of characters within the text: the most important aspect of a person’s identity is their qi, regardless of the body housing it. Calla retorts that “by this logic, I am nothing. No one. I don’t even have a name,” because she does not remember her life before occupying the princess’s body. Both seem in agreement that identity depends on memories and uninterrupted consciousness. Calla may act as the princess, just as Anton may disguise himself with someone else’s body, but neither of them become the person they perform as, because they retain their original qi, memories included. By this model, Calla’s occupation of the princess is fundamentally dishonest. Regardless of what she says or does, she is not Calla Tuoleimi.

Yet Anton’s response introduces another potential understanding of identity:

“You are Calla Tuoleimi. If you choose to be.”

“Don’t you—” Calla cuts off, huffing. “I stole her.”

“You have been her for fifteen years. She is more you than anyone else. … Forget your name and adopt the title instead.”

This model is more performance-based: Calla is the princess because she spent fifteen years playing the part of the princess. Ergo, acting as another person—at least for an extended period of time—is the same as being that person. As Shakespeare’s Cleopatra would have it, being and doing are synonymous. This model of the self is far less self-contained and far less stable. Implicitly, a person’s identity is not independent from their actions, meaning that identity can change with those actions.

In this case, identity is not actually dependent on a consistent internal experience, just as Butler’s theory of gendered acts opposes the idea of an essential immutable gender. To be is to do, so performing as someone else is not a lie but a self-constituting truth. The implications for Anton’s selfhood are worrying—when he conceals his identity, does “Anton” cease to be?—but this model gives Calla almost total control over her selfhood. If the interior “self” is irrelevant, if the only identity that matters—or even exists—is the identity a person displays, then the most effective way to define oneself is through an impressive display. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is the most dramatic person on the stage, so she is also the most real; she portrays herself as larger-than-life and so becomes almost godly. Likewise, Calla has spent fifteen years becoming the princess. She may not wear her original body, but she does have a more stable identity than any other character in the text, because she has spent fifteen years playing the same part. She is, in all functional ways, Princess Calla.

Or is she? Immediately after Anton tells her to adopt the princess’s position, she asks:

“Would you know me in another body?”

“In any body,” Anton promises, “you would still be the same terrifying princess.”

This line is presumably romantic: Anton would know Calla anywhere, which proves there is a Calla to know, not a “nothing.” It also immediately punctures his affirmation of Calla’s self-creation. If Calla would be “terrifying” in any body, then her ability to intimidate is not a trait she has chosen to cultivate and display, but an immutable fact. She expends no effort to be frightening; she simply is, with animal instinct. Furthermore, Anton’s words imply that Calla’s status as princess is fixed, regardless of whose body she occupies. This fixedness directly contradicts Anton’s urging that Calla “adopt” the role fully: she cannot adopt the status of “terrifying princess” if she always was. He frames Calla’s position as essential, rather than the result of a deliberate choice she made to occupy and imitate a stranger, actively, every day for fifteen years. This framing strips Calla of all of her autonomy. If the self is inherent and always recognizable, it cannot be created; it only is.

Like Calla’s musings on memory, this scene presents two simultaneous and paradoxical Callas: a Calla whose traits are essential (she is inherently royal and powerful; there is a definable truth to her memories and to her qualities), and a Calla who chose to construct herself (her memories are the stories she tells herself; she is the princess by making herself the princess). Sometimes Immortal Longings suggests that static and inherent truths exist. Anton would know Calla anywhere because she has a fixed Calla-ness; the palace’s attempts to create narratives about the death games are dishonest and despicable propaganda. The power of theater lies in its ability to conceal these self-evident truths. But sometimes Immortal Longings suggests, like The Stars Undying does, that theater creates its own truth: a person is who they pretend to be.

MAKE DEFECT PERFECTION: NOVELIZING THE STAGE

Up to this point, I have analyzed the novels as texts independent of one another, connected only to their mutual parent. Comparing all three texts, however, offers the broadest look at how theater functions in Cleopatra narratives. Particularly, the question of medium must take center stage (or, as it were, center page): what work is medium doing in these texts?

As mentioned, Antony and Cleopatra is, of all Shakespeare’s plays, one of the most self-consciously concerned with the uses of theater. It is also one of the most emphatically a play—which is to say, it is not merely a story told in the shape of a play, but a play exploring what it means to be a play. In its unwieldy length, in its countless cast members, in its oddly-paced swinging from scene to scene and locale to locale, in all its chaotic vacillating overflow, Antony and Cleopatra pushes the medium of theater to its limit. This experimentation is a major risk: testing what can work on stage means accepting the possibility that it won’t work on stage, the possibility that scholars might spend centuries debating whether the play is a an artistic failure. Rather than try to mitigate the risks of experimenting, however, Shakespeare explicitly draws attention to the play’s status as something constructed rather than “real,” to the machinations behind the scene. The prime example is Cleopatra’s prediction that, if taken prisoner, she will “see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’the posture of a whore.” As Phyllis Rackin points out, this moment is “daring to the point of recklessness,” because in the seventeenth century Cleopatra would have been played by a boy actor:

The treatment Cleopatra anticipates at the hands of the Roman comedians is perilously close to the treatment she in fact received in Shakespeare's theater, where the word boy had an immediate and obvious application to the actor who spoke it. Insisting upon the disparity between dramatic spectacle and reality, implying the inadequacy of the very performance in which it appears, the speech threatens for the moment the audience's acceptance of the dramatic illusion. And the moment when the threat occurs is the beginning of Cleopatra's suicide scene—her and her creator's last chance to establish the tragic worth of the protagonists and their action.

This is the climax of the story, the crux where Cleopatra either performs her way to immortality or, like Antony in the previous act, embarrassingly bungles suicide. If the play is to succeed as anything but a farce, the audience needs to take her seriously. Yet rather than trying to preserve spectators’ suspension of disbelief, Shakespeare dares a mocking implicit reminder of the double reality of theater, metatheatrically highlighting the gap between the character represented and the actor doing the representation. Antony and Cleopatra does not only test the bounds of theater; it also pokes winking fun at its own flaws, the places where the medium stretches so far that it begins to fray.

Without actors, Robin and Gong cannot replicate this moment exactly. But Robin is also pushing his chosen medium and daring divisive choices. The most obvious is the aforementioned bias of their narrators, but the unreliable narration is not the only risk. Robin also makes the deliberate choice to write in first person despite the presence of multiple point of view characters. Multi-POV novels are usually (though not always) told in third person, to prioritize clarity about which perspective frames each scene. The Stars Undying’s use of first person emphasizes the conflicting perspectives and distinct voices of its two narrators, as well as offering a level of intimacy (and, potentially, deception) that limited third person might not achieve. Even so, Robin runs the very real risk of confusing the reader entirely about who is at the helm, which character thought or said or did what.

Still, first-person novels are hardly rare. Robin’s more dramatic interference in the novelistic format is his inclusion of paratextual matter. The paperback edition of The Stars Undying is bookmarked by a dramatis personae before the story and a glossary in the end matter. Both serve an obvious informational purpose, respectively cataloging the many characters and the unfamiliar science fiction terms. But these documents are not merely neutral exposition. Both are written from the perspectives of other characters within the world of the novel—that is, perspectives that are not Gracia’s or Ceirran’s, truths that might directly conflict with the narratives constructed by Robin’s Cleopatra.

The dramatis personae is particularly risky because it directly invokes theater. The dramatis personae as a concept comes from a performance context: it lists the characters whose roles need filling. Its appearance in a novel emphasizes that The Stars Undying is mimicking certain aspects of stagecraft, which in turn is something of a wink at the novel’s status as an adaptation. But reminding the reader of the parent text is a bold choice, because The Stars Undying is adapting something that is already theater. If Robin is trying to write a play, he has picked the wrong format. In the dramatic realm, without sets, actors, or effects, The Stars Undying cannot compete.

Yet the theatrical world within The Stars Undying cannot compete with the novel’s main story. The dramatis personae adds another voice to the novel’s polyphonic set of narrations, just like the theater scene within the text: theater acts as a vehicle for popular critique. The play that Gracia, Anita, and Ceirran see about themselves does not match either narrator’s representation of events. Rather, the play-within-a-novel offers the Ceian populace’s version of the story—a woefully flattened one, reducing the depth and allure of Gracia’s narrative voice and turning her into a one-note foreign figurehead. The dramatis personae extends this work: the description of Gracia, as described in the prior chapter of this thesis, resorts to lazy stereotypes that bear no resemblance to the story Gracia tells about herself. By placing this dramatis personae before the book begins, Robin offers a counternarrative about Gracia before Gracia ever gets the chance to speak for herself. Simultaneously, he suggests that the theatrical world cannot compete when it comes to this story—Gracia’s story requires a novelist’s hand negotiating between many competing voices.

That is precisely Robin’s task: to expose the gaps between various characters’ representation of the “truth.” The glossary does similar work, even if it is less directly contradictory to Gracia’s story. Titled “Some Useful Notes on the Galaxy,” it declares itself the perspective of “the Library of Alectelo… written under the realm of Arcelia Caviro Diomata, Oracle of Szayet.” This is not neutral information. It offers the specific viewpoint of a scholar on Szayet, under a particular and controversial ruler, a point driven home by its worshipful description of the “true and living King… who dwells in the Pearl” and its scathing description of Ceian landmarks as “heathen cultural quirks.” Beneath this bias lies yet another layer of subjectivity. The glossary is attributed to “Mariana Benigna Capsuna, First Archivist of the Library of Alectelo, with minor assistance from Sofia Boryszaya, Third Junior Underlibrarian.” Yet the glossary is littered with editing notes—specifically, the editing notes Capsuna has scribbled on definitions Boryszaya penned. The document may be presented as Capsuna’s work, but implicitly, this is itself an obfuscation: the junior librarian has done the bulk of the work, but the credit goes to her superior.

Both dramatis personae and glossary thus use the friction between media to invoke the same tension as Shakespeare’s play: if representation creates truth, whose representation is prioritized? If the most convincing story becomes functionally “true,” whose stories or perspectives are elided or exploited? Will the truth about Cleopatra be defined by her own self-created legend, or by Octavius Caesar’s attempts to counterstage her as a pathetic captive? Will Gracia be remembered the way she presents and constructs herself, as the cunning protector of her planet and culture, or as the manipulative seductress monstered by unsubtle popular theater?

Both formal choices, then, are clearly doing thematic work. The double first-person narration and the inclusion of the paratext forces the reader to navigate a host of contradictory narratives, calling attention to the inherent constructedness of all narratives, and Robin refuses the simplicity of claiming any of these narratives as the right one. The form of The Stars Undying continues and complements the book’s content, just as Shakespeare’s bold theatrical choices work in concert with Antony and Cleopatra’s thematic concerns. Nevertheless, like Shakespeare’s, Robin’s formal innovations come with drawbacks, as the novel’s ambiguity might easily frustrate or confuse the reader. Robin does little to mitigate this risk. The novel does not hold the reader’s hand; the chapters are labeled by narrator, but there is no timeline of events or unbiased source of narrative information. Like Antony and Cleopatra, The Stars Undying not only pushes the bounds of its medium; it also flaunts and revels in the resulting tension. Robin relies on the tools of the novelist rather than the playwright, but he is doing literary work very similar to Shakespeare’s.

Immortal Longings is not. For one thing, it displays very few formal innovations. Like The Stars Undying, the novel is told through multiple limited points of view. Unlike The Stars Undying, it is told in third person, likely because Immortal Longings cycles through a greater number of narrating characters who might otherwise blend together. Employing multiple third person limited perspectives is not in itself a poor choice, but Gong attempts nothing unusual or experimental. Despite the vast array of point-of-view characters (some of whom only appear once to deliver exposition), the style, voice, and tone of the prose never change. Each narrative voice sounds identical, whether the viewpoint character in question grew up on the streets of San-Er or inside the palace. The narrative voice is not omniscient, so it sticks to the information held by one character at a time, but none of this information is ever biased or misleading; there is no indication that the reader should weigh any of these perspectives as more reliable or less biased than another. Gong’s formal choices do not complement the content. Immortal Longings defaults to the obvious: it is a novel told the way novels are usually told.

Even outside the realm of point of view, Gong takes few risks. Immortal Longings has fissures just as Shakespeare’s play does, but without the same pleasure in flaunting its internal tensions. The reveal of Calla’s secret, as discussed, presents a contradiction: is Calla the role that she plays, or would she be the same person in any body? If theater in the world of San-Er is always dishonest, then pretending to be a princess is not enough: she cannot be Calla Tuoleimi. Perhaps this contradiction is meant to go unresolved—Shakespeare didn’t end Antony and Cleopatra with a final explicit ruling on the Roman worldview versus the Egyptian; Octavius may have the last word, but Cleopatra leaves the strongest impression. But Immortal Longings’s drastic departure from Shakespeare is that it does not even acknowledge the places where it frays. Immediately after Anton declares that he would know Calla “in any body,” the text’s focus returns to the games and to the central romance. Calla shares her plan to kill the king. Then she asks Anton, with no small amount of jealousy, if he still loves his childhood sweetheart. This sequence is the novel in microcosm: it exposes its fissures, but rather than linger, it flinches away, redirecting to the flashy drama of blood and sex. Nothing in its form as a novel does the work of Antony and Cleopatra.

In fact, nothing in its genre does the work of Antony and Cleopatra, either. The novum of The Stars Undying, the Pearl of the Dead, is both plot device and thematic tool, provoking questions about selfhood and immortality. But the body-jumping of Immortal Longings only muddles the book’s statements about selfhood. Its primary function in the text is as a plot shortcut: body-jumping allows Anton to get around the city, and Calla’s refusal to jump raises tension by putting her in danger. Rather than use the text’s novum to explore character, world, or philosophy, Gong deploys it only at the shallowest level. The great irony is that this lack of formal engagement actually does mimic one aspect of the book’s content: like the authoritarian government, Immortal Longings uses its violent action scenes as a disguise. By emphasizing the gore, by detailing every slash of Calla’s swords, by ignoring worldbuilding inconsistencies to linger on Anton and Calla’s tortured romance, Gong misdirects rather than directing, concealing the fact that the novel refuses to commit to any strategy or theme.

To be clear, Immortal Longings is not flawed for failing to precisely imitate Antony and Cleopatra’s depiction of theater and performance. Similarly, The Stars Undying is not well-crafted on the basis of taking a similar stance to the play’s, that theater can create reality and “truth” is not objective. Fidelity to the parent text is never wholly possible, and many adaptations seek to critique or contradict the themes of their sources. Rather, Immortal Longings suffers because it fails to make use of the advantages and opportunities of its genre and medium. The Stars Undying is bold in its translation of the play to a science fiction novel. It works because Robin is deliberate about adapting story and form, which is to say, deliberate about which aspects of novel-writing and genre fiction cohere with the preexisting plot of the play. Conversely, Gong does not seem to consider the process of turning a play into a novel, instead retelling by default: taking the plot, the characters, and the easiest narrative route. This lack of consideration hobbles the novel’s themes as well as its form. Immortal Longings remains limited to the most familiar concepts of what a novel might be, but it also remains limited to the most familiar concepts of what a world might be. Gong cannot seem to envision a society, for example, where bodies are fluid but binarily gendered categories still exist, or where people might not take the “self” for granted as discrete and unchanging. Immortal Longings may have a science fiction novum, but its society resembles the empirical world unconvincingly disguised.

This is problematic, to say the least, because the point of science fiction is to defamiliarize that empirical world. If, as Suvin writes, science fiction’s task is to invoke questions about aspects of the world taken for granted, to present the reader with a brave new world that threatens their own self-understanding, then Antony and Cleopatra is much better science fiction than Immortal Longings. The play may not contain a tool equivalent to the modern concept of the novum, but Shakespeare uses the structural qualities of drama to do the work of the genre more effectively than the novel marketed within that genre. Cleopatra, after all, is the famous estranger, the eternal Other destabilizing the worldviews of Antony and the theatrical audience.

But this does not mean the theatrical medium is inherently better science fiction. Cleopatra may be theater embodied, but Emery Robin has demonstrated that Cleopatra can destabilize and unsettle in a novel as well. The Stars Undying shows that Cleopatra’s defamiliarizing work can transfer across media if, like Shakespeare, the adaptor emphasizes and experiments with their chosen form. Immortal Longings shows what happens if the adaptor doesn’t: the text loses its ability to sustain questions about the nature of reality and the power of theatrical representation.

In turn, this comparison shows that it is not Shakespeare’s status as a playwright that makes Cleopatra so successfully fascinating. The enduring quality of Cleopatra is that her story calls into question what her audiences take for granted—the stability of gender, the primacy of Roman civilization, the concept of an indivisible interior self, the rigid rules of genre and medium. From this angle, the question of why an artist would put Cleopatra into sci-fi begins to sound very silly. Cleopatra is already doing the same literary work as the genre. Antony and Cleopatra is already science fiction, before any adaptations at all.

CONCLUSION: ALL THE NUMBER OF THE STARS

It seems that all things become Cleopatra after all, not only the vilest. Her variety is truly infinite; even two novels of the same genre and era have produced wildly different translations of her character. Gracia and Calla diverge in major ways not only from each other, but from Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, too, even as some characteristics tie all three fictional women together.

Both Robin and Gong, for example, have written distinctly feminine Cleopatra figures like Shakespeare’s—sometimes deliberately, her gender expression one of her many tools for producing fascination (such as Calla’s choice to retain the same body and gendered appearance), and sometimes because she has been forced into the role of the seductress (as Gracia is in the Dramatis Personae of The Stars Undying). Notably, both Gracia’s and Calla’s relationships to gender are communicated (at least partially) in relation and contrast to their respective Antony figures. Calla may not feel particularly attached to womanhood, but she adopts the stereotypically “womanlike” role in her erotic scenes with Anton; similarly, Gracia plays the femme to Anita’s butch, even if both words are insufficient in a world without harsh gender norms. Even in a queer relationship, then, Cleopatra is still markedly feminine. Nevertheless, the fact that a Cleopatra character can exist in a queer relationship at all speaks to a commonality between the two novels: neither text uncritically reproduces the narrative of Cleopatra as a seductress or wicked sorceress, weakening men with her dark charms. When this accusation is slung at Gracia, it clearly comes from an unsympathetic foreign public, one of many voices in the novel instead of a defining truth about her. Calla, meanwhile, is never called a seductress at all. Even when she briefly adopts the disguise of a brothel worker, her ability to sell the role is less a detriment to her morals than it is a demonstration she can think on her feet.

This urge to resist misogynist historical narratives is part of a larger pattern: both Robin and Gong seem unambiguously pro-Cleopatra. That is to say, each author places their Cleopatra figure squarely in the protagonist role, not in spite of her questionable morals and her ability to disrupt society but because of these qualities. The misogyny, xenophobia, and Orientalism that color perspectives of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra all still exist, but perspectives have shifted—and so, to some degree, have the identities of people who write on Cleopatra, as opportunities slowly broaden for marginalized authors. In Roman ink, Cleopatra is the villain, but in novels penned by queer authors, women, and people of color, her status as the eternal other makes her more underdog than antagonist.

Of course, in science fictional worlds, the concept of the “other” rarely manifests in the same way. The worlds of The Stars Undying and Immortal Longings figure gender more loosely and race very little at all. Gracia is a national outsider with a strange culture, but unlike Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, “with Phoebus’s amorous pinches black,” her physical appearance is irrelevant—she is “exotic” for her religion, not her appearance, and Ceirran is darker-skinned than she is. Even so, Gracia is threatening to dominant societal expectations; her introduction into the Ceian world is destabilizing and dangerous to the status quo. Similarly, Calla’s mere existence undermines social norms in San-Er: first in that she refuses to jump; second in that she has transgressed her original social class (by taking over the original princess’s body) and uses her new position to (literally) attack the monarchy. A Cleopatra character, then, does not have to be specifically Egyptian or specifically subject to misogynist judgment. But she must somehow run counter to expectations, on a scale beyond her performatively unpredictable moods. Here mere presence must subvert or disrupt some fundamental pillar of societal belief, something taken previously for granted (Ceian atheism; the necessity of body-jumping). This is what makes her the perfect science fiction character: she and the genre both distort the world, and in doing so enable questions about otherness, reality, the self, and what the future could—or ought to—be.

Of course, two novels can’t offer a single definitive statement on (or summary of) all adaptations of Cleopatra. The specific patterns common between these books (for example, her femininity, or the tendency of modern authors to sympathize with her position) do not necessarily generalize beyond these texts. What these texts can offer is a reminder that science fiction (and “genre” fiction as a whole) is vastly underutilized in analytic contexts. Shakespeare clearly understood the interrogative power of estrangement that Suvin analyzed, the power of the presence of the Other to break down and reshape the audience’s understanding of the world. As I concluded in the third chapter, Antony and Cleopatra is not only reckless on a craft level but also deliberately destabilizing, in a fashion that allows a reading of the play as proto-sci-fi. This reading isn’t limited to one play, either. The same thematic questions and technical experimentation occur in many of Shakespeare’s plays, and not only the ones with recognizable “genre” elements like magic and fairies.

I do not mean to ignore the critical attention some “genre” texts have received. But science fiction taken seriously tends to be science fiction that has entered the “canon,” older and more presumably respectable texts, “serious” work. More recent science fiction has not reached these heights. The two novels I’ve explored have received almost no academic analysis—partially because they are very new, but also because most genre fiction is shunted into the realm of pop culture and pulpy entertainment. Linda Hutcheon’s observation that adaptation is viewed as damage to a text isn’t limited to film adaptation. It also extends to adaptations of work by writers like Shakespeare, now considered elite, “canonical” high culture, and blatantly introduce generic tropes. This is viewed as mass entertainment, mostly good for a laugh or a scoff. No one responds to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for instance, as a work of criticism, just a dumb joke played on a stodgy old book.

Yet The Stars Undying and Immortal Longings probe the same questions as the original play, regardless of whether either book is “high culture.” More, these retellings introduce new lenses from which to view the original play. Framing Antony and Cleopatra as a science fiction text might change the way one reads or even stages the play. Thus, even if inspiration only chronologically moves one way, intertextuality flows in both directions: rather than doing “damage,” these adaptations retroactively add to the original text from whence they sprang. 

Furthermore, the idea that adaptation into genre fiction demeans Shakespeare’s “high art” falls flat: in his day, Shakespeare was very much “pop culture.” The Bard’s work is respectable now, but in early modern England, theater was scornful and scandalous, viewed as potentially able to erode audiences’ intelligence and morals (not unlike the way genre fiction, especially mass-market and romance novels, are discussed now). Adapting Shakespeare into these genres is something of a return—if not to the precise context of his era, then at least to the idea that a text might appeal to the masses while also delving into complex and enduring themes and questions. Even attempting to adapt Shakespeare into science fiction, then, ever-so-slightly pushes back against the elitist presentation of Shakespeare as an untouchable paragon of literature. I hope that this thesis does the same, by extending serious scholarly analysis beyond the bounds of fiction usually considered serious, educational, and important.

Of course, this thesis is a very small foray into the field of genre-fiction adaptations (and of genre fiction analysis at all). My analysis has remained primarily based in close-reading, but there are a number of lenses through which to explore further. One dimension neglected in this thesis is the relationship between retellings and contemporary publishing. Literary adaptation is far from new, but modern adaptations exist in the context of an increasingly monopolized publishing industry, as well as the new power of social media to popularize books on a consumer-to-consumer level. In particular, modern retellings, as observed by Jeremy Rosen, are often directed at “identity groups that are reconceived as target publics.” That is, publishers can market to feminists with retellings helmed by female characters, especially those initially on the margins of the parent text. Similarly, retellings in which characters of color or LGBT characters are given center-stage—whether these characters belonged to those groups in the original text or, like Robin’s Anita, they have been transformed—can be marketed to readers of color and LGBT readers. Indeed, a prominent blurb for The Stars Undying sang the praises of casting Mark Antony as “the hottest butch girl in space,” just as marketing for Gong’s work tends to emphasize her adaptations’ integration of Chinese culture and history. And both novels considered in this thesis are arguably feminist projects, responding to a long history of villanized depictions of Cleopatra by centering her as sympathetic.

I am passionately in favor of increased diversity in publishing, which particularly impacts the reading habits of young children of color and the opportunities available for minority authors. Nevertheless, the publishing industry is hardly run by activists. Rosen takes the bleak view that diverse retellings actually “preserve the cultural centrality of the canon” by broadening canonical texts’ appeal. Women, people of color, and LGBT people are not aimed against the canon but absorbed into it. This allows publishers to “accrue economic and social capital” at every turn, profiting from readers attracted by canonical flair and readers attracted by diversity, reaping the reward of “both the timeless value of the classics and ostensibly oppositional political energies.” Are publishers equally receptive to novels by marginalized authors that do not reshape “classic” texts, or are these authors allowed into the system only if they pay their dues to the white male canon? Is it radical to apply a queer or Chinese or feminist lens to texts that often uphold oppressive hegemonies? Then again, is it fair to expect LGBT authors, or authors of color, to avoid drawing on these familiar cultural touchstones? Are diverse retellings acts of reclamation or assimilation?

There is no single uncomplicated answer to these questions, and I can’t even begin to provide answers. Still, I would like to introduce the question of what the practice of “minor character elaboration,” particularly in its recent and increasingly inclusive iteration, means for Shakespeare reception specifically. For one thing, Shakespeare’s body of work (more so than some other canonical writers’) already frequently examines what we now call queerness, race, disability, gender, and mental illness. If a modern author writes an explicitly lesbian Countess Olivia, or a hemiplegic version of Richard III, is this author imposing modern categories forcibly onto characters written in the past, or expressing something already implied beneath the text? The question feels especially pertinent to Shakespeare because his plays exist as scripts, with no definitive “version” and a long variegated production history. Many other “canonical” authors have been adapted, but unlike, for instance, Jane Eyre (famously retold in Wide Sargasso Sea), a work like Antony and Cleopatra calls for actors. Do the same questions begged by “minor character elaboration” appear in theater, with the advent of “colorblind” and “color-conscious” casting? Is it radical for a Black woman to play Cleopatra, or does this concede victory to the exotification of the written role by making a Black woman ventriloquize the seductive queen?

Finally, following the theater thread, I would like to pose the question of exactly how far intertextuality can stretch both ways. I have claimed that modern retellings written long after Shakespeare’s death can still transform their parent plays, because they allow readers to view the parent text through a new lens. These particular transformations came in part through a move from theater to novelization. Just how far can these novels influence the play in retrospect? Is it possible to move transformatively back to the stage again? One might stage an explicitly Black Cleopatra, or a Chinese Cleopatra, or a butch Mark Antony whose love affair with Cleopatra is a love affair between women. Is it also possible to stage an explicitly science-fictional Cleopatra? What would it look like to try? How might a production engage with science fiction tropes on the stage, and how might these tropes help draw attention to the interrogative and disruptive aspects of the playscript itself? How might audience understandings of the play and of Cleopatra change? Would this science-fictional Antony and Cleopatra become a new text entirely, or would it merely fit into the long cultural history of Cleopatra-as-lightning-rod, a character always taking the shape of the questions that preoccupy the era of her audience?

There are no easy answers to these questions, either. The best one can say with certainty is that many avenues remain open for exploration—not only in the literary world, but in the theater. Shakespearean adaptations will continue to evolve, as they always have, with the ages, reflecting contemporary tensions, values, and fears. What will the Cleopatras of the future look like, in all of their infinite permutations and varieties?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“5 Minutes With ... Chloe Gong .” YouTube, August 30, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTU385c5AP4.

Adelman, Janet. The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Adler, Dahlia, ed. That Way Madness Lies: Fifteen of Shakespeare’s Most Notable Works Reimagined. New York, NY: Flatiron Books, 2022.

Bamber, Linda. “Cleopatra and Antony.” Harvard Review, no. 44 (2013): 82–116. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43491632.

Brown, Sarah Annes. Shakespeare and Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021.

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Legend of Cleopatra.” In The Legend of Good Women, n.d. http://public-library.uk/ebooks/41/3.pdf.

Drake, Julia. The Last True Poets of the Sea. New York, NY: Hyperion, 2019.

Egan, Elisabeth. “Meet Chloe Gong, One of the Year’s Youngest Best-Selling Authors.” The New York Times: Inside the Best-Seller List, December 3, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/books/review/chloe-gong-these-violent-delights.html.

Fitz, L. T. “Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 28, no. 3 (1977): 297–316. https://doi.org/10.2307/2869080.

Flannery, Mary Ellen. “Why We Need Diverse Books.” NEA, October 26, 2020. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/why-we-need-diverse-books.

Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 2004.

Green, Mitchell. “Speech Acts.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, September 24, 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/.

Gong, Chloe. Immortal Longings. New York, NY: Saga Press, 2023.

Hockensmith, Steve. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. New York, NY: Random House Publisher Services, 2011.

Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.

“Immortal Longings.” Chloe Gong, July 26, 2024. https://thechloegong.com/il/.

Johnston, E. K. Exit, Pursued By A Bear. New York, NY: Dutton Books, 2016.

Kahn, Coppélia. Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women. London: Taylor and Francis, 1997.

Karim-Cooper, Farah. The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race. London, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2023.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York, New York: Ace Books, 2010.

Levine, Laura. “Strange Flesh.” Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 44–72.

Lew, Mike. Teenage Dick. New York, NY: Dramatists Play Service, Inc, 2019.

Liu, Em X. The Death I Gave Him. Oxford, UK: Solaris Books, 2023.

Mack, Maynard. “Antony and Cleopatra: The Stillness and the Dance.” Shakespeare's Art: Seven Essays. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1973. 79–113.

“Play Lengths.” PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource. Accessed March 20, 2025. https://www.playshakespeare.com/study/play-lengths.

“Qi Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster. Accessed March 20, 2025. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/qi.

Rackin, Phyllis. “Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry.” PMLA 87 (1972): 201–12.

Robin, Emery. The Stars Undying. London, UK: Orbit Books, 2022.

Rosen, Jeremy. “An Insatiable Market for Minor Characters: Genre in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace.” New Literary History 46, no. 1 (2015): 143–63. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24542662.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 25th Anniversary ed. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1994.

Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006.

Sayet, Madeline. “Interrogating the Shakespeare System.” HowlRound Theatre Commons, August 31, 2020. https://howlround.com/interrogating-shakespeare-system.

Schiff, Stacy. Cleopatra: A Life. Philadelphia, Pa: Free Library of Philadelphia, 2010.

Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Smiley, Jane. A Thousand Acres. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

Smith, Emma. This is Shakespeare: How to Read the World’s Greatest Playwright. London UK: Penguin Books, 2020.

Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaption, 2000.

Suvin, Darko. “Estrangement and Cognition.” Strange Horizons, November 24, 2014. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/estrangement-and-cognition/. Originally published: Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1979.

Tan, Berny. “A Visual Guide to References in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).” Berny Tan. Accessed March 13, 2025. https://bernytan.com/art/a-visual-guide-to-references-in-ts-eliots-the-waste-land-1922.

“The Stars Undying.” Hachette Book Group. Accessed March 13, 2025. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/emery-robin/the-stars-undying/9780316391399/.

Ward, David. Shakespeare and opera: Verdi, Rossini, and other composers inspired by the plays. Accessed March 13, 2025. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/shakespeare-opera-verdi-rossini/.

White, Abigail. “What Are the ‘Big Five’ Publishing Houses?” BookScouter Blog, February 26, 2025. https://bookscouter.com/blog/big-five-publishing-houses/.

[rjthirsty]

A Housewarming Gift

Words: 1400

Tags: Solo Male Play, Sex Toy, Sexual Fantasy, Gay, Modern AU

A/N: A commission for @scummy-writes. Thank you so much for letting me write this. I had such a good time building it up and letting Gil be a freak.

Gilbert’s dual-colored eyes swept around Roderic’s room, running over the small space that was sparsely decorated and largely absent of any personal effects. His roommate was a very tidy man. The bedroom was practically immaculate, not a single item left out, Roderic had even folded hospital corners on his perfectly made bed. Gil had to laugh to himself about how neat and lifeless the room was, how sterile it was, how unassuming, especially since he had peeked inside with the hopes of finding out something more interesting about his quiet, secretive new roommate.

The door had been left open.

It wasn’t like Gilbert had forced his way in, and he was the leasee on the apartment’s contract, so technically the room also belonged to him, even if Roderic was subleasing by verbal agreement only. Really, that was his first mistake, Gil thought. No paper trail, documentation, or clauses stating privacy was granted to Roderic of any sort. Perhaps there was an unspoken understanding in most places that a person’s personal area would be left alone, but if the door was opened… Doesn’t that mean Gil was invited inside?

Slowly, Gilbert strolled around the room. There wasn’t much to look at in clear view, so a bit of snooping was in order. He peeked inside drawers, finding nothing of interest. He checked the closet, it was filled with the usual items you’d expect. How boring, Gil thought to himself. As a last ditch effort he dropped to the floor to peer under the bed, a grin growing as spied a nondescript shoebox. His curiosity was rewarded once he fished the box out and laid his eyes on what was inside.

Roderic was a pervert.

It stood to reason a man his age might have some sort of sex toy, especially someone like Roderic who rarely spoke and kept to himself - how would he even manage to find someone to fuck? But the way Roderic hid it away like it was a shameful secret had Gil grinning, wondering just how he might broach the subject casually.

‘Hey, I saw your fleshlight. Good model. How do you like it?’ - Thinking about Roderic squirming at the question, or better yet blushing and bashful– aah, it really hit his favorite kinks. He wanted to see Roderic squirm. He wanted to see him blush. In all honesty, he found Roderic attractive and wouldn’t mind sharing this ‘shameful’ secret with him.

His fingers ran over the toy, playing with the entrance– just to test the feeling and how lifelike it was, at least that’s what Gil told himself. But as he pushed into the hole, he considered what it would look like as Roderic pushed into it. Was he average, girthy, long? A thrill ran through him at the image of Roderic frustrated and fucking himself exhausted in the room next to his, using this toy. Gilbert pushed a second finger inside the silicone mold meant to mimic a variety of holes.

Like Roderic’s room, the toy was cleaned and cared for well. The box did contain specialized cleaner and lubricant. It was no surprise that Roderic was particular about his secret with the way he wiped himself from every surface of his bedroom.

Gil’s eyes flashed to the clock on the nightstand, his dark desire whispering that he had time to indulge before Roderic was meant to return home. Back to the toy his gaze moved. It was very wrong and completely inappropriate, but it would save him from having to bully Roderic into an awkward conversation. All he had to do was…

Gilbert moved to Roderic’s bed, messing the neatly tucked blankets up as he fell onto it. In one hand he held the fleshlight, the other the lube that was inside the box. He knew he shouldn’t be doing this. He knew it was wrong. But that’s what made it more exciting. That’s what made it feel like the right idea. Who did Roderic think about when he was fucking himself? Was it someone in particular or was it just a way to get some relief from his tension?

He shimmied his pants down, pulling his boxers along with them. Scooping his semi-hard cock into his hand, he stroked himself as he continued to allow Roderic to command his imagination. What if Roderic was into men? What if it was him that Roderic thought about? Getting hard from naughty thoughts about Gil to the point he had to retreat into his private bedroom to fuck this thing. He was so quiet with it. Did he cover his own mouth, or did he fuck into the bed with his face in a pillow.

He’d like to see Roderic’s face pressed into a pillow if only to fight the noise he’d be making as Gil fucked him.

Gilbert squeezed the lube into the toy, using a finger to coat all sides of the orifice. What was left on his finger, he smeared onto his stiff cock below the glans, there would be enough on insertion for the head of his dick, less so for the rest of it. Lining himself up with the only hole the toy had, Gil closed his eyes as he fantasized about Roderic. His pert lips sucking his cock between them - Gil brought the fleshlight onto himself.

It was almost perfect in the way it sucked him in, just as Roderic would. Wet, warm, so tight. Taking all of him in at once, all the way to the hilt, he’d linger in his throat, purposely forcing a gag from him. Ah, the tears that would spring to his eyes. He had such dark red eyes that smoldered when he looked at him. Hands in his hair, he’d fuck Roderic’s mouth. He stroked himself, hips rocking as he pumped the toy slowly up and down his shaft.

He wanted to see those teary eyes. He wanted to see himself buried between those pretty lips. He wanted to have Roderic happily choking on his cock, sucking with enthusiasm. He wanted more. More than just that. He wanted to fist Roderic’s hair while sinking into his ass. Fuck. The noises he could make Roderic moan. The sound of sex lewdly filling the air, as he pulled Roderic’s hair to keep him from biting the pillow to muffle the groans he would pound out of him.

The way he’d pull out right before he came to have his cum squirt onto Roderic’s backside as he ground between his ass cheeks. He wanted to see that clear fluid dripping down him. Running down his crack to call his cock back into his tight hole. He wanted Roderic begging for more. Begging to be filled with Gil’s seed.

Gil’s chest heaved, his breathing ragged. He bucked his hips into his own hand wrapped firmly around the toy. It squelched from the lube and his thrusting. Roderic pushed back into him as Gil pumped the fleshlight down his cock.

He could take Roderic’s dick in his hand while he bent over him. He could stroke it out of rhythm with himself, or he could pump in time so it felt like they were both fucking someone at the same time. He could toy his fingers on his glans or frenulum, maybe twist at the wrist to work in a way that stimulates more than simply stroking.

Roderics cum would be hot and sticky. Spilling between Gil’s fingers as his ass clenched around his cock. Trying to both thrust into Gil’s hand and simultaneously push against Gilbert’s hips to have him fuck him deeper.

“Hngh– ah. Haah. Haaah.” Gilbert moaned as his climax throbbed through him. His cock buried fully in Roderic’s toy, it spilled his seed as deep as he could go. He gasped, taking slow, deep breaths as he tried to get his breathing under control, his heart pounding irregularly.

After taking a few minutes to calm himself, Gil pulled his cock free from the sticky, used mess he had made of Roderic’s toy. A grin touched his lips as he set it back into the box along with the lube, leaving it open in display on Roderic’s bed. It would be pretty clear when his roommate came home what had taken place, and if it wasn’t… Well, he’d just have to leave him another gift.

He couldn’t wait to see how Roderic would look accepting it.

[mariacallous]

Lorna Simpson found the meteorite on eBay. “It was for a great price,” she told me, declining to give the exact figure, though she later admitted that it had cost about six thousand dollars. The seller was “some guy upstate” who’d never listed anything comparable and provided no proof of its celestial provenance. But when it was finally delivered—to her airy studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where I’d come to see her on a February afternoon—magnets clung to its dimpled surface. “I’ve got this idea—it’s meteorites! ” she mimed telling her gallery, Hauser & Wirth, affecting the voice of an exuberant naïf. Simpson knit her eyebrows: “They were, like, ‘O.K.’ ” She began screen-printing photos of meteorites onto fibreglass panels, then painted over them in silvery hues. Last November, she exhibited the results in a show called “Earth & Sky,” placing the meteorite itself in a corner of the gallery.

Simpson is contemporary art’s astronomer of the archives, always searching for the dark matter that “documentary” images conceal. This most recent suite was inspired by a photo of a meteorite in an antique geology textbook, whose caption described its near-collision with an unnamed sharecropper in nineteen-twenties Mississippi. His strange destiny—chosen by the heavens, erased by Jim Crow—obsessed her. Now a work from the series has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and will feature in its retrospective of Simpson’s paintings later this month.

“I look for an image that’s already crazy, and then just do a little bit more,” she said over pastries, handing me a Jet pinup calendar from 1972. Like Mitt Romney, Simpson keeps binders full of women. Some of her paintings begin as digital collages sourced from vintage Black magazines; this calendar’s smiling, topless cover model had accessorized her lingerie with a bandolier of bullets, as though in preparation for the revolution.

We were seated on a couch surrounded by old books and mineral specimens, an island of clutter and coziness in a sparse, white-columned expanse. Paintings leaned against the wall to one side. On the other, beneath a wide window with a view of the Manhattan skyline, a collaging table was heaped with paper scraps. Miss Black America, in a fur stole, advertised sparkling wine; near a clipping of an African sculpture, wig models beamed. With scissors and glue, any one of these might become a sky goddess or a chimera, acquiring that aura of mysterious privacy which has been Simpson’s trademark since the nineteen-eighties, when she broke out with a series of photo-texts depicting Black women whose faces never appear.

They were clean, placeless silver-gelatin-print portraits, taken from behind or from the neck down, or substituting isolated body parts for absent figures. Their fragmentary captions undercut reflexive assumptions; in the words of the artist and writer Coco Fusco, they “came to stand for a generation’s mode of looking and questioning photographic representation.” Perhaps the most celebrated is “Waterbearer” (1986). A young woman in a sleeveless white dress, her back turned to the camera, empties a silver pitcher with one hand and a plastic jug with the other. “She saw him disappear by the river, they asked her to tell what happened, only to discount her memory,” the caption reads. The image has become an icon of Black feminist self-reclamation. Refusing to accede the viewer’s curiosity while inviting speculation, it is also emblematic of Simpson’s singular slyness, which sets her apart from the contemporary efflorescence of Black portraiture that her work helped to inspire. “People are comforted by a rendering of a figure,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that. It satisfies a particular kind of desire around presence. For me? I like to complicate.”

Simpson is a slender, dark-skinned woman with angular cheekbones and heavy-lidded eyes, frequently narrowed in contemplation or amusement. She has a halo of springy black curls, touched with gray at the roots, worn in a bun at the studio. Glamorous yet chicly casual, she was dressed in silky sage trousers embroidered with dragons and indigo-stained Uggs. She speaks unhurriedly in a delicate, sweetly thickened voice, as if she’s just swallowed a spoonful of honey. But her hearty laugh drops into a lower register—as when she confessed to accidentally skipping an appearance at a commencement ceremony headlined by Michelle Obama, which she forgot about amid a divorce-related ordeal. Her right arm is inked with sinuous tattoos from Tahiti, where she vacationed after the separation; one constant of her practice is a readiness to move on.

“I try to be very open, as though someone else is coming to me with an idea and I have suggestions,” she told me, describing the sleight of mind that she uses to go beyond what “Lorna Simpson” would or wouldn’t do. Her themes have remained consistent—memory and its erosion, photographic artifice, and the construction of identity by linguistic and visual codes. But she’s explored them across a formidable range of media: video, screen printing, installation, collage, found photography, and, more recently, painting, which she took up in 2014.

She showed me a few of her newer works: women’s faces and Arctic landscapes, executed in a palette of pearls and cool blues. An enormous lapis-lazuli glacier was streaked with columns of newsprint. Beside it leaned a portrait that stitched together disparate models from Ebony magazine.

I asked about a piece, at least eight feet in height, that was facing a wall. Simpson swivelled it around with ease—her favored surface, fibreglass, is lighter than wood or linen and takes screen-printed images without warping. “It’s my masterpiece, which I’m not ready to reveal!” she said, raising a hand to her brow. “No, it needs to be covered over with gesso.”

Painting was, initially, humbling. The discipline intimidated her in art school, and even more so when she returned to it as a mature artist. A few early experiments started “weeping” at an exhibition, because some of her water-based inks wouldn’t cure on fibreglass. Yet Simpson shed no tears. She’s turned painting into a summation of her practice, creating monumental compositions that counterpose individuals with the frames imposed by nature, culture, and the cosmos. “There’s a circling back,” she said of the medium. “It’s also collage, it’s also silk screening. It’s a combination of all of these other things that I’ve done.”

Simpson hadn’t painted for a month when I visited. She’d been busy with preparations for the retrospective, and with checking on her house in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, where her daughter, Zora—an actor, model, and editor at the art magazine November—lives full time. (“She drives me everywhere,” Simpson told me. “I don’t know where anything is.”) She said that I might be able to watch once she returned to the easel, though it could easily become “a total nightmare.” For now, the sun was going down, and there was still time for a drink before dinner. Simpson tossed her things into a bag and made for the exit, pausing to glance at the meteorite caption, which she’d blown up and hung on the wall. She had restored the name of the once nameless sharecropper, Ed Bush, who “did not at any time see the stone until it hit the ground.”

“I feel very provincial about New York,” Simpson told me. She’d spent most of her life within a mile of where we were standing—an isle of sidewalk under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway where the bustle of the Navy Yard gives way to Fort Greene. She has lived in the neighborhood since 1988, when a gift of twenty thousand dollars from her grandmother allowed her to buy a Federal-style rowhouse that predated the Civil War. It took Simpson five years to restore it. “Everyone would say I was crazy, because I was living on the top floor and I had to tear out the staircase,” she recalled. “But I had a ladder.”

The home was just a few blocks from Lafayette Gardens, a public-housing development on Classon Avenue where Simpson was raised. It later became notorious for gun violence, but in her childhood it was filled with hopeful young families. “The projects were new,” she said. “I would take the elevator and go see friends on different floors.” She coveted the Puerto Rican girls’ First Communion dresses. Her own father, Elian—known as Chico—was a Cuban-born social worker; her mother, Eleanor, was from Chicago and worked as a hospital secretary. Simpson was their only child.

A family friend, Jacqueline McMickens, described Simpson’s parents as a vivacious, fashionable couple with sizable Afros who collected art prints, argued ceaselessly about Black politics, and threw memorable house parties. “We treated the kids like they were adults, which was probably to our detriment,” McMickens said. Her son Charles, who attended a small private elementary school with Simpson, recalled the freedom they felt in middle-class Black Brooklyn, where neighbors knew one another and celebrations often spilled onto the streets: “Nobody called the police.”

Chico and Eleanor immersed Simpson in the arts from a young age. “They weren’t going to pay for babysitters, so they just took me to everything,” she said. “I saw the first theatrical performance of ‘Hair,’ and they were naked. I was horrified!” Her talent was obvious from elementary school, when she traded tissue-box coupons for a Polaroid camera and constructed a model city out of spools. She also danced, joining a Lincoln Center youth program affiliated with Alvin Ailey, in a routine involving gold body paint and wigs. “Even at ten or eleven, it was, like, ‘This is so Vegas,’ ” she said. But something was off: “I realized that I wasn’t a performer, because I wanted to see what was happening onstage so bad.”

In 1968, when Simpson was eight years old, the family moved to Hollis, Queens. “It was like going to the country,” she said. “People had back yards and grew flowers.” When she got into the High School of Art and Design, in midtown, the commute was two hours each way. She turned the distance into a social advantage. “I had friends who lived in Co-op City in the Bronx, the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side,” she told me. “The subway was our friend.”

At Olea, a Mediterranean restaurant near the Clinton-Washington G stop, Simpson fortified herself with a glass of rosé. “You asked about my childhood,” she explained. As a teen-ager, she often stayed out, partly to avoid her father’s violent outbursts—a memory she blocked out for so long that it fell to old schoolmates to fill in the gaps. “Your friends are the ones that remind you of who you are and what you’ve experienced,” she told me. “The psyche can only take so much.”

At seventeen, Simpson moved to Harlem and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, where she meant to study painting before she was seduced by the darkroom. Considering a career in photojournalism, she took out extra loans to travel. Once, she drove a “teeny, tiny Fiat Cinquecento” with a boyfriend to the edge of the Sahara, where a scorpion sighting ruined an overnight stay with local nomads. “They were, like, ‘Oh, that’s no big deal,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘All you have to do if you’re stung is suck out the venom and pee on it.’ ” (She slept in the car.)

A summer internship at the Studio Museum in Harlem proved more inspiring. There, in 1980, Simpson met the conceptual artist David Hammons, whose ephemeral approach to art-making expanded her horizons. (She remembers him nailing bottle caps to telephone poles.) “New York became a sort of adult playground for me,” she said, describing nights out to hear poetry and see avant-garde performances. “It was so much more of an education than my education.” A frequent companion was Kellie Jones, a fellow-intern and now an art historian at Columbia. “We enjoyed thrifting together,” Jones told me—clothes, ceramics, mid-century-modern furniture. “Lorna was top-notch.”

They became lifelong friends. Jones often visited Simpson in California, where she’d been persuaded to enroll in U.C. San Diego’s M.F.A. program by the artist and photographer Carrie Mae Weems. Simpson and Weems shared a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony. “We’d come home from class, have a glass of wine, and brainstorm about all the knuckleheads,” Weems reminisced. The two took dance classes and made cross-border trips to Tijuana for coffee and flowers. “We looked out for one another, and we were almost the only Black women in our department,” Weems said. “The question that shook us and shaped us was, what was the meaning of representation?”

“Representation” had to do not only with identity but also with the formal relationship between life and art. U.C.S.D.’s faculty included many poets and performance artists of the nineteen-sixties vanguard, not least Allan Kaprow, whose zany public “happenings” revealed the constructed nature of social reality. Weems, like them, went on to use her body in her work. But Simpson felt alienated by the retired radicals—a cliquish, overwhelmingly white group—and their antics. “I was too introverted for all that,” Simpson said. “But I was interested in the performative aspect of work.”

Her thesis, a multi-panel piece called “Gestures and Reenactments,” explored the performance of race in everyday life. It shows a muscular Black man in a white T-shirt assuming six different postures. (He was a member of the water-polo team whose California physique threatened to short-circuit Simpson’s conceptualism: “As a New Yorker, I was, like, ‘There are humans that look like this?’ ”) The captions imply a vulnerability that complicated the stereotypes of Black masculinity: “Sometimes Sam stands likes his mother,” one reads; another alludes to the fear of being confronted by police. The result is a kind of anti-portrait, one that does not so much portray an individual as ask the viewer: Who do you think you’re looking at?

“I was so done with California, I didn’t even take pictures,” Simpson said of the work’s exhibition in an unused storefront. She was eager to return to New York. There, she’d already met artists like Hammons and Ana Mendieta, and, in 1986, she had her first solo show at Just Above Midtown, a gallery for Black contemporary art, featuring a series of photo-texts on folding screens. The city’s art scene was still largely segregated, and still suspicious of photography. Yet that was beginning to change. “They’d already had five years of Cindy Shermans and Barbara Krugers,” Jones told me. “But we were the women in these pieces,” she went on. “That was the exciting part.”

In an age of sensationalized Black hypervisibility, Simpson coolly dissected the assumptions embedded in both language and looking. A dark-skinned woman in white, reclining between the phrases “YOU’RE FINE” and “YOU’RE HIRED,” could evoke a catcall, an odalisque, or a clinical inspection. Another paired hair-braiding instructions with a triptych showing a woman’s neck from behind, her coiffure from above, and the inside of an African mask. The works suggested the rigors of taxonomy and anatomy, only to reveal that such systems fail to capture the lives they claim to classify.

Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum, encountered Simpson’s photo-texts in the Village Voice as a student at Smith College. “She was mining not just the written language,” Golden said, “but the spoken language”—drawing on folklore, news reporting, and Black vernacular idioms that went beyond the explorations of her white conceptualist peers. Jones introduced the two soon after Golden graduated. A few years later, as a young curator at the Whitney, Golden helped usher Simpson’s work into the mainstream—and later became her close friend and Zora’s godmother.

“Lorna makes place,” Golden said, comparing the opportunities that Simpson has created for a generation of Black women artists to the many gatherings she’s hosted. Golden recalled a New Year’s party that Simpson threw with the curator Okwui Enwezor in 2017. It was meant to be a small dinner party, but after a blizzard the guest list swelled to more than a hundred. Golden described guests clambering over snowbanks to make it inside, where they danced through the night and feasted on lobster, turkey, and crown rack of lamb. Simpson had come a long way, but in spirit, Golden insisted, the party wasn’t so different from those she’d once thrown at the unfinished brownstone: “Even in the days that we were climbing that ladder, Lorna made a space that we could all be in. And, yes, Lorna is renovating again.”

A few weeks later, I accompanied Simpson to the opening of a Jack Whitten retrospective at MOMA. The museum was thronged. In the lobby, a jazz band played; upstairs, an art-world Who’s Who took in Whitten’s mosaiclike abstract paintings. Golden held court in a corner; Jones walked up and gave Simpson a squeeze around her waist. A young curator named Thomas Jean Lax—who had recently mounted a show about Just Above Midtown—took her warmly by the hand, asking when her Met retrospective would open.

“May 19th?” Simpson replied.

Lax brightened: “Grace Jones’s birthday, Malcolm X’s birthday, and Ho Chi Minh’s. That’s good energy.”

Simpson twirled her index finger and did a little dance. “I’m glad I left the house,” she said. “And who wants to leave the house these days? Not I.”

She sidestepped a cluster of familiar faces and continued through the exhibition. Simpson marvelled at the disciplined breathing Whitten must have required to make such straight lines across one orange canvas, which reminded her of atmospheric heat waves. (He’d gone over it with a rake-like tool called the Developer, often comparing his process to photography.) Nearby was a painting that evoked a silhouetted head and shoulders: “Black Monolith II: Homage to Ralph Ellison the Invisible Man.” Whitten was deeply engaged in the struggle for Black liberation, but some leaders of the Black Arts Movement had little patience for artists who dithered around with shapes, colors, and concepts when they should have been representing Black lives.

It’s a false choice—abstraction versus representation, aesthetics versus politics—that Simpson knows all too well. By 1990, she had emerged as an art-world star, with a show at MoMA and a prime spot at the Venice Biennale, where my colleague Hilton Als, then writing for the Village Voice, favorably contrasted Simpson’s photo-texts with the L.E.D. texts of Jenny Holzer, who was representing the United States. “What the faceless woman with her back turned is doing in these pieces,” he wrote, “is finally turning her back in order to address herself.”

Few others crossed the color line to consider Simpson in such company. She was routinely identified with her models; a Newsday profile characterized her work as being about “what a tangled and terrifying thing it is to be a black woman.” Simpson was interested in race. Yet her focus was not self-expression but systems of meaning. “Wigs II,” a photo wall depicting dozens of hairpieces—blond bobs, Afros, and everything in between—contains no bodies at all. Other works were nearly Dadaist in their freewheeling associative play. But, as late as 2009, the Met omitted Simpson from a survey of the so-called Pictures Generation, which included Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, James Casebere—then Simpson’s husband—and not a single Black artist. She felt too little affinity with the group to care much. More lastingly troublesome is the general blindness to anything but race in her work. “Why can I not assume some universality around having a Black character?” she asked. “Everyone wants a mirror of themselves.”

Midway through the Whitten exhibition, Simpson’s progress was all but arrested by a carrousel of friends and fans. One was Glenn Ligon, dressed in brown corduroy—a Black conceptual artist of Simpson’s generation, who credited her with clearing a path for his own wily text-based work. Another was Rashid Johnson. Simpson seemed particularly excited to see the photographer Dawoud Bey, who’s spent a half century chronicling life on the streets of Black communities, mostly through dead-on portraits. They’d been classmates at S.V.A., and in 1992 Bey took a striking Polaroid of Simpson, her right eye glinting amid the shadows cast by her shoulder-length mane. Recently, though, he’s turned to photographs of forested scenes—and a professor and curator who knew the pair seemed skeptical.

“You threw me with the landscapes,” the curator teased Bey. “Trees! ” Artists, he went on—clearly trolling—ought to stay in their disciplines, if only to simplify syllabi. Simpson, who’d been side-eying the exchange, theatrically folded her arms. “You gotta get a grip, man,” she said. “Art is a lifelong activity. People make choices. You get to switch it up!” Everyone laughed. “I always tell people what I think. That’s why I get in trouble all the time,” the curator said, boasting that Whitten had once ejected him from his studio. Once he’d gone, Simpson turned to me and rolled her eyes: “Can’t you see why?” The vehemence reflected her own quest to outrun legibility, which propelled her beyond photo-text and into other orbits.

Six hands pulled a squeegee down the length of a table, pressing ink through a mesh screen onto a fibreglass board. Simpson gripped the tool from the left, shimmying backward in her teal Nikes. Her longtime printmaker, Luther Davis, knee-walked on the tabletop to steady its middle, while a colleague in blue gloves held the far end. When they reached the edge, they carefully lifted the frame. “Ta-da!” Simpson declared. “One swipe.”

A young assistant in a Lakers jersey blow-dried the composition: a dancer atop a platform, surrounded by ladders, with a cigar in her mouth and astronomical charts draped across her jauntily posed figure. It was a reproduction of a collage from a series called “Sky Pinups,” partially inspired by Zora’s gift of a book called “The Disordered Cosmos,” by the physicist and Black feminist writer Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. A construction tower behind the figure was from an article in Ebony, Simpson told me; the face belonged to the dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, and the starry raiment had been clipped from a nineteenth-century engraving. A pocket of air had left a white splotch—Davis fretted, but Simpson didn’t. “I’ll paint in the dots!” she told him, before turning to me with an explanation: “The aberrations become starting points I can play with.”

The printshop was at Powerhouse Arts, a Brooklyn nonprofit in a converted subway power station. A half-moon window looked out on the Gowanus Canal and the identical luxury condos rising around its stinking waters. Davis, who runs the shop, has worked with Simpson since the mid-nineties, when she began silk-screening cityscapes onto felt panels. Felt, he noted, was less forgiving than fibreglass: the ultraviolet dryer used to cure the ink would sometimes singe the felt’s edges. “They would curl up in the light and smell like burning lambs,” he told me.

Simpson had grown bored with framing photographs, and the familiarity of her enigmatic figures threatened to blunt their unsettling effect. In her new cityscapes, which she pieced together in sections, she left people out entirely. But the felt’s furred obscurity conjured novel mysteries. “The more you get up close to the images, the more they fall apart,” Simpson said.

They were seamy in both form and content. For a series called “Public Sex,” Simpson blew up photos of places like parks, alleyways, an office building, and a museum gallery to wall size, captioning them with riddling erotic narratives that alluded to the city’s underground life. “I once almost went to a dungeon on Fourteenth Street,” Simpson told me, but she backed out at the last minute. More often, she went dancing in the meatpacking district, and hung out at Florent, an all-night diner in the neighborhood. Her depopulated tableaux also served as an elegy for the friends she’d lost to AIDS, and for the lives and losses that photographs of cities, like photographs of people, can’t quite contain.

As Davis power-washed de Lavallade off the reusable screen, Simpson settled into an armchair and reached into her formidable black canvas tote. “You wanna see?” she asked, pulling out a slim package. Inside were five wallet-size photos, probably from the nineteen-thirties or forties, of a Black man in a three-piece suit trying out various expressions. They were destined for one of her “photo booth” works: large, cloudlike arrays of found snapshots, drawings, and magazine clippings, each housed in a tiny custom frame. It’s as if the viewer were being asked to sort memory—nebulous, secondhand—into reality and invention. Simpson considered letting me watch her browse eBay: “Maybe you’ll make me lucky.”

Her art took an archival turn around the millennium, coinciding with the deaths of her parents, her marriage to Casebere, and the birth of Zora. The felt and photo-text works gave way to films and installations built from repurposed images and reënacted memories. “If you need to find something—something obscure, something that you can’t imagine—Lorna Simpson is who you call,” Golden told me. Once, Simpson offered to restore a photo album that Golden had inherited, in terrible condition, from her Jamaican grandmother. “She gave me back a museum-archive treasury,” Golden said.

Simpson, whose parents told her little about their backgrounds, has long been drawn to the memories of others. One of her most beguiling photo-booth works, “1957–2009,” began with a single snapshot: a Black woman, stylishly dressed, leaning against a mid-century car. Simpson liked it so much that she amassed nearly a hundred other photos of the same woman, sometimes along with a man. The pair appear in a series of flamboyant poses: noodling on a piano; smoking solemnly in front of art works; curtsying mid-phone call in a risqué nightdress.

Simpson came to see these photos not as candid moments but as the record of an elaborate performance—Cindy Sherman before Cindy Sherman. Defying her usual ban on appearing in her work, she decided to become the duo’s double, reënacting their “crazy narrative” shot for shot. “It took an entire summer,” she recalled, partly because she was so camera-shy. She bought wigs and costumes, and enlisted Zora—then still a child—to help set up outdoor scenes near the house she shared with Casebere in upstate New York. The resulting work includes both the original portraits and Simpson’s rendition.

It was a new and more impish kind of refusal—flaunting faces and poses while keeping the source material’s mystery intact. Around the same time, Simpson started painting small watercolor portraits, a respite from the logistical demands of film. Then, in 2010, she found a box of Ebony magazines that had belonged to her grandmother. She was riveted by the models’ stylized expressions—young women, posed within an inch of their lives, hawking jewelry, cosmetics, and hair-care products. She was drawn to the before-and-after shots, in which women were transformed into fierce “huntresses” or beaming “corn row cuties.”

Simpson began making collages, clipping out the women and giving them watercolor perms in “unnatural” shades such as lime green and violet. “It was a relief to not have to make sense,” she told me. Like the German Surrealist Hannah Höch, whose own collages she’d long admired, Simpson aimed for simplicity and strangeness. In one series, crystals replace hairdos. A pensive woman contemplates a lavender column of spodumene; another dreams up an unruly Afro of azurite malachite. It’s as if their inner lives had erupted, breaking through the glossy surface of bourgeois fantasy.

One especially arresting collage shows a pair of mascaraed eyes glaring from the shaft entrances of a graphite mine—the refusal to meet a gaze from without recast as a penetrating stare from within.

Simpson’s collages nearly always use found images, but she made an exception for Rihanna, who invited her to shoot her cover of Essence, in 2020. “There was a separate security detail for the jewelry,” James Wang, who works at the studio, recalled. Rihanna kept them waiting for seven hours. During the shoot, which went late into the night, Rihanna hovered behind Simpson and Wang, oohing and ahing as they edited in Photoshop. In the final image, the singer stares out from beneath a hairpiece made of sodium-chloride crystals—a heap of transparent cubes that echoes her diamond collar and suggests, perhaps, that she might be a bit salty.

The high-profile commission coincided with a broader resurgence of interest in Black portraiture. Many younger artists—some following Simpson’s lead—were probing the conventions of representation and remixing archival material in speculative ways. Most were painters, and Simpson, albeit somewhat unconsciously, joined them. In 2014, she began working on Claybord panels, sometimes starting with a silk-screened image, sometimes painting freehand. “She was very resistant to calling them paintings,” her studio director, Jennifer Hsu, said. Intensely private, Simpson often sneaked into her studio on weekends, when no one else was around.

Then, one day, her friend Okwui Enwezor visited. After seeing the new work, he invited her to exhibit in his edition of the Venice Biennale. He singled out “Three Figures,” based on a news photograph of civil-rights protesters being hosed by police. Simpson had broken the image across several panels and ringed it with runny black ink; he encouraged her to go even bigger, envisioning a series of monumental history paintings.

Simpson moved from wood and Claybord to fibreglass, which allowed her to scale up, and from hand-painted figures to screen-printed images layered with pigment. “It’s an overlay,” she said of her paint use. “I can obliterate parts or revert, make this part or the mid-tones a different kind of darkness.” Her series “Special Characters” enlarges and fuses the faces of different models making similar expressions, highlighting their subtle asymmetries—what might, at first glance, read as a lazy eye or a lopsided hair style—by framing them with contrasting squares.

“She leaves relics of the screen-printing process visible through these organic veils of ink and acrylic,” Lauren Rosati, the curator of the Met exhibition, told me. “You are always aware—even if the source may not be apparent—that images have been embedded in a surface.”

Time’s alteration of photographs and their associations is set in parallel with natural cycles. Around 2016, a poem about the Black polar explorer Matthew Henson by her friend Robin Coste Lewis—another maverick of the archives—helped inspire a series of paintings about the Arctic, which flood its frozen landscapes with electric blues. In these seemingly inhuman terrains, the figure coyly persists: a woman’s profile appears along the sheer side of a craggy peak; another’s eye peeks out from a crevasse.

Is Simpson carving out a space for Blackness in a realm long claimed by white explorers? Or is she critiquing what Toni Morrison once described as the conflation of Blackness and femininity with wilderness and its terrors? What do bullet holes, from an Ebony spread on gun violence, have to do with the polka dots on a model’s dress? The layering of contexts becomes as politically charged as their absence was in the photo-text works. Yet the lush, sensuous surface of the paintings shifts the focus inward.

Perhaps turning one’s back on the world, for Simpson, is no longer about exposing its assumptions but about opening a space for imaginative play. Asked about a recent glacier painting, she simply said, “I just enjoyed making that painting. It was really cool.”

I never did get to watch Simpson paint. The Friday I came to her studio for that purpose, she said that she’d been struggling, then whisked us off in her Volvo XC90 to an early dinner in Fort Greene. There was, as usual, no parking. A trio of middle-aged white pedestrians were saving a spot in front of an elementary school—not far from a house that was characterized, in a nineties profile of Simpson, as so dodgy that “the cabbie hesitates to discharge his fare.” Simpson accepted their apologies with a smile, rolled up the window, then exclaimed behind the wheel, “This ain’t the suburbs.”

Eventually, she dropped me off at a corner to scout a table. I stopped by four restaurants before I found one. There are downsides to growing up with the neighborhood, and the beloved haunts, the affordable brownstones, and the bushy-tailed young artists are—like David Hammons’s bottle caps—fugitive, alas, as the years.

Several days later, Simpson texted me snapshots of two new paintings—a glacier and a figure in a bikini wearing a costume tiger’s head. She’d used the acrylics sparingly: to tint the water blue, the fur orange, to cover the woman’s skin with stars. Whole swathes were left unpainted. Did she mean to keep going? I asked. Simpson replied with a string of emojis: “😳😂😂 they are finished,” and I winced at the faux pas. But, then, images in Simpson’s work rarely declare themselves finished. They flicker into view, like something falling through the atmosphere, briefly lit. 

[cafeleningrad]

The shadow presence of adults an family in Utena

Currently I try to clear up some convoluted ideas about childhood innocence to agency through social indoctrination depicted in Utena.

Obviously the most present indoctrination happens by Akio's hands, and his extension the form of the panoptic, omnipresent, ever-acting system of Ohtori academy. But I did catch myself by the mistake to assume every child/teenage character in Utena is solely influenced by Akio. In fact sometimes adults do appear sparsely throughout the show, and it's always relevant. Like the guidance counselor as signal for the reinforcement of social rules, or Tokiko contrasting Akio. The characters enter the school already with knowledge of fairy tale structure (Wakaba's mother telling her tales of the Onion prince), Miki disdains his sister on sexist premises way before he's manipulated into dueling, Nanami already used violence on others to secure Touga's attention before she entered school. It can be argued that the world outside the school ground, the city we see in the background is an extension of Ohotori too. Thinking then how parents already primed their children already when they arrive at Ohtori, and how important the death of Utena's parents is to her, I do think the families of the characters are much more relevant to than the visual narrative of obscuring their faces lets on. ...or: I found a niche, and now I have wild theories. (This is definitely a very speculative post, my mind went on a slippery slope of theories.) Content warning for discussions and mentions of: Child abuse, death, manipulation, grooming, sexism in general.

I. Why do we barely see the face of so many adults? (If I claim that they're relevant?) First, Utena is, among many other themes, a story about maturing and leaving behind a lot of rules and ideals that hold people back from becoming a person. Most characters are aged from early to late teens. Highly relevant to the themes of Utena, this is a period of self discovery, detachment from previously installed beliefs, and discovering the possibilities of the the world. Although the latter points are halted by Ohotori and Akio. In that way it makes sense that the characters think more about themselves as independent with parents more on the sidelines. Further, only very few characters realize fully that they're part of a cyclical system, and are unknowingly but actively hindered to come to that realization. In that sense, it's not far off that they would blend out elements they themselves not consider relevant. Meaning, they wouldn't realize how formative their previous family life is to them but they get a new, aspirational role model of another adult.

Second, Ohtori as place with it's own logic runs by Akio's narrative. He's the one who chooses important characters, sets up important rituals with Anthy's help, and manipulates them to take on a certain journey - if they want to take it or not. For Akio it is vital that he imposes himself as the most present most visible adult in the life of Ohtori students. (Note: Either himself or Ohtori as systematic extension of his.) He wants to be the aspiration so everyone emulates the rules and behaviors he wants people to emulate. The only other adult with more screentime, clear personality, and visible face is Tokiko who is many ways Akio's counterpart. Although she,sadly, never interacts with any students at Ohtori during her visit. Side note: Akio often avoids being seen the direct instigator of events. Either Ohtori staff, social rules, and social life reinforce his ruling, her he manipulated others so much they act by his playbook. It also leaves his image untarnished. Touga is Akio's proxy on campus. Groomed to imitate Akio, Touga taunts others, especially men to imitate the idealized image of manhood. Close to graduation age, already using a lot of signifiers of grown up masculinity such as promiscuity, using a motocycle (but with a helmet) as approximation to a car, Touga is the entry level to emulation although Akio has the last word on how a person should finally act. II. Other visible adults a) Campus staff The only few adults with a face are campus staff. Namely the guidance counselor, her male colleague, and the music teacher. The former two exist to enforce Campus rules on the students. Either responsibilities for school prestige, or the dresscode. (The music teacher is a bit of an outlier at he's more of a point to Miki's and Kozue's contrast, Miki being allowed innocence whereas Kozue is not receiving any protection, but I would note that he abuses his position of trust for attempts to abuse Miki.) In every case it's save to say that they're all roped into Akio's direction.

b) Chida Tokiko Boy, I love Tokiko. In her short presence she carries the entire weight of the meaning of the Black Rose arc. She's also in juxtaposition to Akio. Also, she pretty. Alright, first who is Tokiko? Tokiko was Chida Mamiya's big sister who lead an entire research project at Ohtori Academy to save her little brother's life. She came in with abstract ideals to simply keep things in a never ending stage (stressed by her disliking to see flowers wilt) which Nemuro rightfully calls out as perpetual motions machine. In spite of her best interests, her project was hijacked and used by Akio to install a duel occasion for 100 male duelists. Her project ended in tragedy. Mamiya died anyway, over his anger Nemuro killed 100 students. Directly or indirectly, Tokiko being roped in with Akio's ideals did lead to high count of human loss, and her ideals failing anyway. Unlike Akio, Tokiko left Ohtori though. She visibly is marked by the events, has regrets, and misses her brother. On the occasion to visit his grave, she does return to Ohtori. However, with all regrets and sadness, Tokiko faced the tragedy and moved on. By seeing Nemuro, now Mikage, Tokiko comes to absolute certainty that eternity means a lack of progress for everyone. Given the fact that Tokiko could face a great deal of loss and tragedy, partly by her responsibility but still decides to leave and not to stay Ohtori, she is very much in contrast to Akio. Akio can't face his loss of ideal and "innocence". In fact he never reflects upon himself but artificially hinders everyone on campus to progress as people. Nemuro even gets punished by having his memories conversed to heterosexual interest towards Tokiko, in order to fit into Ohtori's narrative. Tokiko who has gained maturity, and accepted her loss is the kind of adult Akio should be but can't be because he clings on childish ideas which in practice keep everyone locked in misery. If the students ever interacted with a different example of an adult, they might not find a fancy role model but one which is far wiser than Akio. It's sad that the only alternative to adulthood never gets to interact with any of the students (even though that's kinda the point). The one who would have needed to speak to her the most to deconstruct is self-delusion and accept loss, doesn't recognize her anymore. Side note: Mikage is the student interacting with most adults. In the past it was Tokiko. In the present there're adults around him due to his academic importance, officials who ask for academic support, or his secretary. But notably we never see their faces, only hear their voices. All these faceless adults speak negatively about him, and ignoring the fact that in spite of his intellectual brilliance, and introverted nature, he's still very much a teenager who does have the inner life of a teenager. Considering that Mikage can't move on from his state of teenagehood, I speculate that Mikage doesn't pay attention to the age group, state even?, he can't become. Mikage doesn't even recognize Tokiko anymore. III. Relevant family lives So I mentioned in the introduction how the parents already send their children to school with preconceptions of social rules and dynamic. Some characters like Juri don't mention parents but siblings. I do think they're also relevant in the way the characters are able to understand affection. Families are not the only but still a highly relevant structure within children pick up on life philosophies, social rules, and especially expressions of affection.

a) Utena's dead parents I'd seen some speculations going around who Utena's parents might be but I don't think parentage is relevant. Thematically Utena is about liberation of harmful systems as well as modes of thinking. In Penguindrum, Ikuhara explores how certain families can shape us in much deeper manner. In Utena systematic imprints are much more abstract. That sounds a bit contradictory, so let me rephrase it: It doesn't matter who exactly Utena's parents are, however the fact that they're dead is highly relevant to her. The manga does reference Utena growing up at an aunt but more or less Utena is orphaned at an young age. This leads her to have idealized ideas of family, leaving her with a lack of experience to judge boundaries. By example, Utena might not like Touga but she misreads his acts of heroism, akin to her prince-ideals, as affection of an older brother. Or she's not weirded out by Akio accelerating their relationship from "friend of my little sister" to "you are like family". In general, Utena's lack of familial experience leaves her with a lack of knowledge what different forms of affection look like. Granted, Utena is 14 years old, and not the most senstive person still I noticed how often Utena is unable to formulate her exact feelings towards others. The friendship with Wakaba because in Utena's clear cut mindset girls who are close are friends (as Ohtori doesn't an offer another model how women could be close to each other) even though Wakaba having an earnest crush on Utena isn't unlikely. Apart from the fact that Ohtori is a forcibly hetero normative place, Utena is extremely confused by her feelings for Akio and Touga, but also for Anthy. She's getting manipulated to play act romance with these two men. But she also can't read others very well. At first she doesn't realize the animosity between the Karou twins, she doesn't take Nanami's outright rage towards her seriously until Nanami's duell goes overboard, she misreads the "friendship" between Juri and Shiori. Utena's only guidance in life is the prince ideal. For one it is the closest Utena has a model for agency but also as model for being loved and admired. Utena is entirely on her own to evaluate relationships.

b) The Kaoru divorce The Karou twins are in my eyes an easing introduction in themes of misogynistic treatment, and perversion of male-female dynamics leading to incest, but they're also the youngest in the cast. (Except Tsuwabuki, of course.) First we assume that their estrangement stems from Miki slutshaming Kozue, which is definitely at play but their estranged familial connection has another source. We only learn very late about the Karou parents getting separated, leaving their children behind. Both children are lost, symbolized by building up a birdbox for abandoned bird babies. Their family is falling apart. They need each other more than ever but have so much difficulty communicating with each other. Ohtori as a place reinforces the idea of a girls scoial inferiority, everyhting a girl does is getting evaluated and judged, it drives the wedge between Miki and Kozue even further. However, the twins learnt a gendered perspective by their parents. In the flashback of the the piano recital, Miki's allowed to rest and stay away from the recital. Kozue was unwell, crying, anxious, desperate to not play but her wellbeing is disregarded. During their parents separation the cause is father Kaoru leaving his family for another woman on his own beheast. The twins don't blame their own mother but approach their father differently. Both are angry at the adults in their life, Miki even states that his life is dictated by adults. Kozue absolutely disregards their father's letter. But Miki, praised for his maturity, states way too understanding phrases to his father on the phone. Miki also projects on idolized Anthy on his soon-to-be-stepmother. Who wouldn't leave everything behind for the ideal woman, in Miki's logic? Miki can only be this "mature" (actually, asked to not cause an authority figure any trouble) by trying to rationalize why he shouldn't be angry at his father.

c) Juri's nameless sister Even later than the Kaoru twin's family situation, we learn only in the final episode about Juri having a sister. In Juri's story, the sister almost drowned but a boy tries to save her, only to drown himself. For all heroism, Juri forgot his name. Later in Adolescence we learn that Juri was actually the one drowning, and Touga drowned for her sake. That might leave the existence of Juri's sister in a speculative realm. If we were to take it seriously, I would have some theories what the existence of a sister would mean to Juri. A sister is a very close relative. In this proximity Touga's death would still be close enough to Juri's experience but not close enough to herself. It's highly speculative if this falsification of memory is artificially altered by Akio to have Touga walking around not be suspicious, or, which I consider more likely, it's Juri's response to distance herself from the guilt for Touga's death. It wasn't her fault he died but she was the motivation behind his passing. Forgetting his name, having another person between herself and Touga could distance Juri from the tragedy. With Utena I noted, how Utena with the lack of any previous close conenction is unable to recognize, even less so name the nature of relationships she has. If Juri's sister exist that would mean that Juri is familiar with a close relationship to another woman which is not her mother. In that sense, she would know how a familial closeness feels like, and not name it by the next best thing. Therefore, she's able, unlike Utena, to recognize exactly that her affection for Shiori is of romantic nature. d) Does Saionji have a family? The text mentions nothing of that sort, everything else would be pure speculation. From Saionji's memories his biggest issue in childhood was the growing distance to Touga, and the worries about the little girl in the coffin (oh boy, did Ohtori lead you down the wrong path...) otherwise nothing else of note. For one reason or another, Saionji can't go anywhere after getting expelled. Why he can't return to a home is up for speculation. His parents kicked him out? He's too ashamed? He has no parents? Any guess is as good as mine. But considering that Saionji mentions no formative character in his life, no parents no siblings, I am led to believe that the lack of reference is for Saionji, like Utena a cause for him to have trouble to keep his distance from proximity being baited to him. Since his only relationship in his past seems to have been Touga, the only reference of connection is friendship. What once might have been healthy is an idea Touga taunts and uses against Saionji.

e) Did you hear about the Kiryuu's? Oh boy, this house is a nest of snakes. It's only in Adolescence we get a full picture of all the abuse that went down in this household but the impressions we get in the show are already horrific enough.

We learn that Touga and Nanami, related by blood siblings, got adopted into the family. Nanami is too young to remember, however that feeling that subconcious knowledge of not fititng right in seems to linger in the back of Nanami's mind: Nanami is in constant fear of ostracization, she projects all that of performing to peak social performance, by looks, by reinforcing social status by putting up schemes to sabotage others or literally beat others into submission, dressing in praised brand fashion, and making very clear that she's in no way like that shunned weirdo Anthy. She could never be that weird, laying eggs is totally normal, right?! In the instance Nanami does remember her parents, she remembers being shamed for being inadequate, especially by being genuinely herself gifting a kitten to Touga. She's also constantly alone, except for Touga. In an environment where Nanami is demanded to always correspond to the norm, facing scrutiny, letting her grow up isolated, it makes a lot of sense why Nanami would attach herself to the only person showing her kindness, her older brother. Nanami's only model of reference to to and being loved is a sibling dynamic, hence her fixation on Touga. It also means, Nanami wouldn't know any other model of affection except for this one, actually. Paired with her constant need to be the heart of the masses to proove total adaptation, Nanami can't let anyone get close to her because of her singular outstanding status, and she wouldn't also know how. Any concern of Utena about her, Tsuwabuki expressing in child-typical honesty that he wants to be close to her, are either met with anger or used for her own gain (something she probably picked up from Touga, too).

Touga's place in the family is the most brutal. He was sold by his birth parents for the explicit purpose to be abused. The fact that we do see see the adoptive's father's face in Adolescence leads me to theorize about Touga having a too clear, unshakable memory from his childhood trauma. (Sidenote: Hair in relation to emotional state is sometimes brought up with characters, long flowing hair standing for a person being free of restraint. In memories about Touga by people who idealize him, namely other boys like Miki, Tsuwabuki, and especially homeboy Saionji, touga has long hair. But Nanami who has less cheerful childhood memories remembers her brother with short hair. In his own memories Touga remembers himself having shoulder length hair because his adoptive father demanded him growing longer hair. Nanami and Touga's way less idealized recollections are much closer to the truth.) Touga's childhood was entirely shattered, and severed so many genuine bonds of those who loved him. It's very difficult to not not feel sympathy for Touga even at his worst sabotaging his relationships because at a very young age, what should've been the safest relationship, a caring family, has been utterly destroyed for him. To say, him being disillusioned and distrusting of proclamations of honesty is comprehensible. (Since this post branched off on thoughts I had on gaining agency within a indoctrinating system, Tougs acting fully concious whereas also blind towards his motivations is a point I can't help talking about again and again.) Touga is a very central figure in luring in other students into the idea of princehood, while also getting lost in it, so understanding why he adheres to a system that promises power of everyone else is highly relevant understanding why the system is so successful at perpetuating itself in it's own confines.

In conclusion: For both siblings, their parents were a big source of trauma. If not the formative trauma to prime the kids ideally for Ohtori's pathway into doom. Nanami is so afraid of being other-ed that she would do anything to be part of the crowd. On the flipside by fully adapting to it she's deeply afraid to question conventions, highlighted by the Cowbell of Happiness. Touga is so scared and angry for having been used, he would always try to control others so none can control him, he sees no way out of his misery.

f) Throwawaylines in the Himemiya household - non-relevant observation Probably not too relevant to the actual dynamic between Anthy and Akio, but there's this one line Anthy drops and never picks up again. it does drive me slightly insane. Anthy mentions that Akio does remind her of their father. Nothing conclusive of their obscure family life but I have speculated before how Dios died for an ideal externally imposed on him. This is not a relevant point at all, it's not even a point. But I wanted to bring that up because having no better reference for an alternative way would explain a lot with Anthy and Akio.

g) The Ohtori family So far we did have two terrible fathers, why not go with a terrible mother then? Alright, in the case of the Kiryuus', the mother is implied to be part of Nanami's trauma, Kanae's engagement is arranged by both parents. Only Mrs. Ohotori is the only present parent in the sense we see a vague figure, and a cut-off face. For a supposefdly prestigeous school the family supposedly run, it's also clear how under their name, terrible social practice part of the life at the school. They themselves arrange a marriage for their daughter right after their graduation. And Mrs. Ohtori sleep's with her daughter's fiancée. I feel inclined to not protect Mrs. Ohtori to get involved with Akio. Akio chooses his victims to be in many ways weaker than him. He chooses underage girls, namely neither Anthy not Utena have a family or any other social safety net. And Kanae's parents obviously wholeheartedly agree of her engagement with Akio, so Kanae can't voice doubts. (Or she's told to project on Anthy instead...) Further, Akio adopts his fiancée's last name as an indicator that marrying Kanae is him rising in social status, not her. His fancy apartment, the big telescope, all belongs to the Ohtori's. Akio's seduction is only sexual, he can't exploit Mrs. Ohtori on the base of less experience and power like the did to the girls he usually abuses. No big point here but to highlight how corrupted the adults running the central institution are.

Sort of a conclusion: Probably I spend more times and thoughts on this than needed. But I did spend a lot of time thinking about Tokiko and Kaoru twin's motives of leaving childhood and differing personhood by gender, sending me in onto further thoughts how the presence and also the lack of adults in the life of many students is relevant for understanding their motivation. Why would they have certain outlooks on relationships? Some parentages and familial are more nebulous, less relevant than others, too, although for some characters like Touga, the twins, or Utena, the relationship to their families mark the starting point of their journey.

[changelingsandothernonsense]

hey, sorry for popping in randomly, but i like your art a lot. When i first saw wips of it, i am going to be honest, I thought you were drawing over ultra-realistic 3D models LOL, and then I saw the finished result and i was absolutely amazed. It's genuinely mesmerising how you can do that. would you be kind enough to share some tips, especially about portraying body hair? it simply never looks right in my style, so i'm desperate for any advice at the moment

Hi there! I actually use a modernised form of painting techniques done by a lot of classically trained artists. I've just transferred a lot of those techniques to a digital format (a lot of traditional mediums cause sensory issues, particularly oil paint). I always work from a couple of references and always suggest using them. Below is what my workspace typically looks like. I'll have my main reference and a few extras set to the side while I work.

I colour match by using the colour picker as opposed to having a set palette of tones and I tend to edit colour in my references to match what I'm seeing in my head. Having said that, I'm still starting with a midtone whenever I begin rendering.

A huge thing that helps me figure out the placement of tonal plains is having my line art as an overlay. This is set to multiply and I turn it on and off as needed. This also helps hugely with body hair. In the above image, I've detailed in the line art where it's thickest. I use a very thin brush (I only use three brushes, one for flats, one for painting and one for blending.) and lightly flick strokes in the darkest tone that I plan to use for their hair. These strokes are done at random on a separate layer from that of the main skin layer and are done at random but generally speaking all point in the same direction. Body hair has different densities depending on the location. I tend to apply a little more pressure in these areas to give that effect as opposed to making the size of my brush larger. I can always go back in and add more as I go. With lighter hair colours (such as Erra on the left) I'll add highlights where needed in a mid-tone. Darker hair usually doesn't require it unless I'm using harsher lighting. Make sure you vary your strokes, lighter where you want the hair to be more sparse, and more pressure as it gets coarser. I sometimes find myself redoing sections until I'm happy with it. Don't be afraid to take a few goes.

Hope that helps somewhat. :)

[plasticfangtastic]

Can We be Lonely together? Epilogue

a Homelander x Stalker! Reader fanfic

This is a GN reader reader fic

Author's note: too self indulgent not to write an epilogue, thanks for reading and am looking forward to making more fics for this fandom, this is Bi Homelander content if y'all read this as fem or non male reader. prev. chapters in my blog under the my fic tag or can we be lonely together? tag will be making a masterlist fairly soon tho.

R18+ mild smut, exhibitionism kink, gore, murder, dub con, dirty talk, surprise butchlander, butcher x reader, 3-way?, amoral protagonist, unreality.

Epilogue

Breeze sang in the ample halls bringing whispers from the balearic sea, a top the mountain overseeing endless azure, greens and neighborhood roofs the world seemed so far away to him.

So many absent walls in this villa, the house was airy and open, blurring the idea of inside and outside with is design.

Cream coloured linen danced against the wind to the seas secret songs, the sun leaving no corner in the shadows, sandy granite warm under the sun, evergreens could be seen from all windows, cascades of green coloured the view, and a pair of cats slept in a guest room.

There was not a sight disturbed by ugly grey buildings, just mountains and sea– left him feeling as Zeus on the top of mount Olympus, inside the airy home only the dull sound of oak ceiling fans pushing the breeze disturbed the halls.

No longer did the steps of strangers disturbed the dull accismus of this temple by the hill, camera crews left most of the home untouched, it had been a busy and exhausting week for Homelander.

Walls had been sparsely decorated, remnants of a past life clung on smooth oatmeal walls and indigo blue wood beecher paneling accentuating one living room of three-- paintings he had grown attached to and the occasional marble statue laid around, but now there were photos of a man one could hardly recognize.

With each new image, time had eroded wounds off his face, there was a glimmer on his features that had never resided there.

Garden pots had been shuffled around for the perfect frame, now he would've had to move them much to his annoyance.

It was the most anticipated interview of the decade, it had gone smoothly, Oprah had been delightful, manly tears had been shed and hair raising stories were shared, she had found him approachable above all.

After a year of silence the whole world was kept on edge awaiting for his return.

The trial hadn’t even televised but they were plenty of updates by the hour circling around-- more than sufficient. Now he had a full schedule, he was to be in the cover of GQ magazine, had some big podcasts lined up for an appearance, and Vogue to model for… it would be so strange to do without his suit.

Homelander sat with his legs dipping into one of his infinity pools, his loosely fitted honeycomb shirt draped around his shoulders like a poor’s man cape, his hair had grown a tad longer, salty seas had turned his flaxen locks almost wavy and a dark thick stubble began adorning his face.

His tablet resting behind him buzzing with a new email, the wrinkles around his eyes sank as he squinted from the blinding wet mirror, distracting enough that your step barely registered.

“You looked quite handsome in the suit this morning…” You spoke gently– I think the people are gonna love your new look… between the tan and the beard you look… sumptuous.” 

“I should’ve shaved. They’ll think I look like a complete slob! I bet they’ll say I let myself go.”

You joined him by the pool as the hot Mediterranean sun stood above you, pulling his head closer to yours for a flurry of butterfly kisses.

“You look stunning, mi sol. Either way… lunch is ready… Ryan called and said him and Jaythaniel’s family just made it to Disneyland, don’t forget to pick him up tonite.” You said softly squeezing his thigh–  he said he’ll call after lunch.” 

He nodded absentmindedly.

“You don’t think Theodore is going to wake up?”

Worry clung to his tongue, his ears picking up the soft lull of his son’s snoring, Blender making biscuits on his sides but the child slept deeply, you could tell he had entered deep REM stage, you shook your head much to John’s relief.

“I can’t believe we are doing this… you spoil us too much.” He kissed your ear before lifting himself and dropping into the pool.

The sun sparkled harshly against the glass tiles, the sky more blue from below, your sinuous reflection watching him until he emerged, the tired breeze doing very little to dry him, you followed him giddy as his wet footprints led you to the wine cellar.

 It had been an expensive endeavor to have all of this installed… several 3x3 plastic acrylic panels of 32 mm thickness, a high tech locking mechanism plus humidity and temperature control systems had to be installed independently of a good enough contractor who could reinforce the flooring with a steel mesh and coat the cement flooring with resin just to make it impossible for their friends to dig, there had been many logistical nightmares from finding the right contractors to finding a spot for it, it was easy to sell the strange boxes as a sex thing– blaming having super-abled kids increasingly longer list of powers that made it hard for dear ol’ daddy to get off… especially when the word ‘soundproofing’ had been mentioned, or his super strengths which led to some nasty laughs and a bit of murder later down the track, the last thing that mattered had been costs.

No amount of sound ever escaped the wine cellar, the zinc plates coating the walls prevented Ryan and himself from seeing in or out, Theodore was young enough to listen to instructions, if not it was your turn to discipline the toddler.

Opening that door was always a surprise, bringing him almost as much joy as that first christmas day as a complete family.

As they took the stairs he could smell mullet wine and lebkuchen– the tension in his muscles still fresh as he entered a home that had only existed in childish fantasies, awkwardness that never seemed the fade as the strangers hounded him with questions, but he had had you, Ryan and now Theodore for much needed emotional support, it had been almost perfect as it had been intense, it had been strange to hear all these stories of a woman he had murdered, who had only suffered, it was stranger how her only sister had not blame him for the nature of his birth, still grateful that he had found her even if it took forty years, grateful that something more than a pristine corpse was left behind.

Her body refusing to decay inside that pine box.

The cellar door beeps, and cogs turn inside the heavy metal door, fluorescent lights sung awake by the entrance, bringing much needed light to the dark sub-basement, only the three small lights inside the boxes lighten the area for most of the day.

A woman shuddered, flinching as more light hit her eyes, hiding beneath the bolted desk, you walked past Homelander carrying today's menu, there was something enjoyable about the challenge of creating an ever changing menu that was nutritionally balance, delicious and required no cutlery. The disheveled woman approached eagerly at the floating box, awaiting for you to place her meal, intentionally keeping her starved, this had been his decision for this particular guest-- to see if she would go mad. Due to the lack of windows she had no concept of time after all while the lights were on a timer, they were programmed to be irregular enough to cause confusion. To visit at random intervals and feed her whenever he remembered.

Homelander and John wanted to watch her scoof down her meal, to see her choke and tear up as she filled her cheeks and swallowed greedily– but their attention was reserved for guest number two.

“If I knew I had you getting all wet and bothered for daddy, I would’ve worn something nicer” His voice dry, barely lifting his head from the bed.

Homelander helps himself to the mini bar cracking open some pale ale for the world’s largest paper cup, humming a tune as he prepped today's round of meds while you set his meal.

“Got you pale ale… unless you’d like some peach bellinis?” 

Homelander opened the cabinets, rows of neatly organized sex toys, booze and cleaning supplies were displayed– sex toys solely for decor, you both had committed to the bit, much of these had never been used nor did he want to, you had no need for vibrators when his hands did the job so perfectly. He took out a cattle prod, then pressed a code unto a small hidden panel making sure the guest couldn’t peek.

The inner latches came apart, the door hissed open.

There was no need to consider escaping, it was futile, the door upstairs was thicker than the glass, and no amount of yelling got anybody’s attention-- but he didn’t try killing himself either, for the last time he’d tried he had been here in no time, he had a chip monitoring his vitals at all times, and the camera on top of his room watched over him.

You also helped in that department.

Homelander entered first, you placed the food on the floor for Homelander to give Butcher his back.

Almost encouraging him to jump him.

“Would it kill you to wear pants?”

Homelander chuckled as he turned around with Butcher’s meal, wearing nothing but his wet shirt clinging to him tighter than his suit ever did, and black briefs.

“Would it kill you to agree to my offer?”

“Not going to play house with you, stupid cunt.”

Butcher didn’t argue with the meal, taking the food off his hand and sitting by the bolted table, the chair also bolted which made for an awkward fit.

“You got three months left William… these meds might get you one more… it's already been weeks… you want to spend the rest of your days here watching her starve to death or you want to be with Ryan? He wishes to see you. Be there for him… you just have to be with us.”

Butcher bared his teeth, mutterign curses under his breath as he gave him his back.

You entered the room taking the cattle prod  tucked under his arm, Butcher ate ignoring him, throwing the tray towards his face, forever amused as to how he never bothered to dodge it, John rolling his eyes as the plastic dropped around him.

“I’m being generous after what you did to Dolores… that was… well… you lived up to your name.” 

“Said I’ll get even.” 

He had made Dolores into the antithesis of her craft, it had stung, to witness her unrecognizable being-- a DNA test confirming its identity. Close casket was the only choice.

Homelander watched him eat as you prepared yourself, undressing in the corner, fresh bruises adorning your thighs, handprints where he had held you solidly against his mouth.

Closing the door behind, locking Homelander and Butcher inside one box, giddy he jumped into the thin futon.

“Here I thought we were having the world’s most disappointing threesome… all thirteen seconds of it.”

He took a sip of the ale, it was utterly delicious but he wouldn’t let Homelander hear it from his mouth, this his only joy while stuck in this box. He turned to you watching as you opened the door on guest number 1, then back at Homelander already squeezing himself, a wet suther escaped his lips as your nude frame approached her, Butcher buried his brow.

You had ignored her for weeks, fed her irregularly while feeding Butcher on schedule. She survived on saltines and peanut butter, only receiving proper meals on the occasion but never did either of you touched her, or spoke to her.

She squealed as the tip hit her breast, too weak to do more than just scream, he had been so distracted by Homelander he hadn’t noticed the crowbar by the entrance… he could’ve sworn it was his own.

“Families should always have a mommy and a daddy… grandpa and grandma… cousins… but I don’t have any uncles… nor does Ryan have uncles… ahhh” he tugged harder hand fondling the dripping tip of his hardened member– just like that pumpkin.”

His skin crawled at the sight of the awoken thick member as he pulled it out his tight underwear, with a wet snap.

He turned to you, watching her face split red as you smacked her face with the cattle prod, she clutched at her cheek, blood spilling from the sides of her fingers, a distressed mess tried escaping you. You grinned as you felt Homelander excitement, his chest flushed as you gave a parry of messy heavy swings, she cried and as she covered her face you shocked her hands off until your eyes met, turning limp while Butcher’s heart accelerated, craning her neck, she opened her mouth leaving it frozen mid-air as you took to the crowbar.

“Pick a number of teeth … or Pusher will take the whole jaw” he whispered as he laid long languid strokes on his cock, rubbing his thumb on the glistening tip– or you can say yes”

A curved tip pressed right behind her upper chompers.

“One…?” You muttered– that’s not going to excite you right, mi sol?” 

Homelander pouted, slowing down his hand, focusing on the base with short lived pumps.

“Break her jaw– let’s see how long she’ll last before she starves to death… she might dehydrate first, no?” He scoots patting the empty spot on the bed encouraging Butcher to join him— make it clean babe.”

You take the tip out her mouth and get in position to tap her jaw.

“We’ll visit in a week… hope you last my dear William.”

Butcher stood up, still with enough energy in him to fight, he might be dulled by the meds, exhaustion and his captor's cruel tactic.

“Kill her you wanker just bring some fucking fabreeze.”

You grinned mockingly, breaking more than her jaw, her body thud and her voice returned smashing her skull repeatedly caving into a pancake. Homelander groaned, edging himself as your vicious attacks drew your victim closer and closer to death, legs moving on their own, pressing his forehead against the wall, the sight of your bloody torso didn’t just titillate him, he craved the sight, knowing the glass stood between you two, knowing how far away you were and just how untouchable you were was better than any x-rated video, your ragged panting, the sweet sweat falling from the tip of your chin, blood specs bejeweled your body, was too much.

You had become more than he had ever imagined, you pressed your behind against the bloodied wall as you caught your breath.

Butcher could only try to ignore your sick kinks.

Homelander will bring as many innocent people he could and make him take part of their scenes, he whined as you got out the cage, walking painfully slow towards his– ignoring him in favor of the minibar, his hand stopped with a sneer, turning to see that Butcher had skulled down the last of his ale.

“You know he’s being nice asking you… I could just make you say yes…”

Butcher looked back at the mass, almost flinching as the woman was back on her feet, her face a torn mess but there she was still eating the last morsels of the chunky yiros with her torn jaws, for every bit of garlic sauce that dripped down her hands there was an equal amount of chunky blood spilling unto the ground.

Deepthroating the yiros more than eating it.

Her face just hanging by red ribbons, one eye swollen and bulging while the other just hung out of her socket, clumps of broken scalp swinging with the weight of her once straight hair, now dirty and matted.

She turned to see him sensing she had been watched and her face had no bruises.

He looked back at Homelander then back at the corpse now immobile, rotting, fluids escaping its bloated body, gangrenous pus seeping thru its sunken eyes while the skin darkened and dried, now his nose picked up on the revulsion, he looked at his drink and figure out that there was no drug in him– Homelander was back in his bed, his cock tucked in and not a sight that he had moved once, his toothy grin more real than the full cup fizzing in his hand, your breath warming Butcher’s ear.

Months, weeks, days, hours… he had no clue how long he actually been here, this was an illusion… some of it… tragically you two were disgustingly real.

“You want to break me into compliance?”

The white glow of your eyes not as menacing as Homelander's lasers, he took a short sip of his beer letting it dry his tongue, feeling the warm building in his stomach.

Hot fingers creep from around his hips, exploring the softened torso, he is still strong and firm under the weakened body, the illness making it hard to maintain his shape, hot water dampened his shirt, nails bruising trails as he trapped him, pressed tight against the leaner man, craning his neck to place his chin on the older man’s shoulder– no doubt floating to do so.

Before he could protest further, before he could do more than curse under his breath and wriggle, your teeth met the underside of his chin.

Intertwining your hands with his free one, no doubt he could snap your wrist but a little red light shone next to his head, telling it wouldn't be a good idea.

Homelander closed his iron grip around Butcher’s neck, leaving him gasping, feeling his pipe collapse slightly.

Your tongue licked his neck, your touch more gentle, more tender but to his shock Homelander only purred, you both stared at each other lovingly, Butcher’s neck nothing but a barrier between you two, you climbed to meet his lips, while your loved was manhandling Butcher lower so Homelander could give you wet, loud and messy kisses.

Arching him much to his displeasure, the beer spilling down his arm.

Squeezing harder on his neck, Homelander eyes are coloured a pretty dark pink, he grunts pressing Butcher into him, begging for friction.

You two kissed the older man missing his lips, feeling him shudder, kissing the blanket of goosebumps all over his body.

You loved him more than anything.

You would make him happy in all the ways that your body could.

And sometimes things are easier to do when he just communicated them, usually that would involve murder but now it was this.

Butcher had no idea what he had to say yes to. what exactly you two wanted out of him, and he had yet to spot the hidden vial of V in the cabinet.

John giggled as Butcher's hateful glare tried to burn him.

“Is okay… you’ll be the one fucking me…” he needily purrs– right, pumpkin?”

“Just let all that hatred out… make him cry…” you whispered into Butcher’s ear– make him your bitch.”

It had been his own mind that picture the blonde’s cock, that had been his own worst nightmare, but as he felt those needy kisses– be it the beer on an empty stomach, your powers or the tumor pressing on the smart sections of his brain he chortle at the thought, straining his neck to see the desperate flush on the blonde, his grip loosening, allowing him to turn just enough.

This could also be a part of this illusion.

“You just wanted to be daddy’s cute little slut?” he spat– my cum dump?”

Homelander let out the most obscene moan from within the depths of his core, you felt the heat rising from your own loins as you heard him.

Butcher tugged at your scalp, yanking you away from him.

“Both of you are such weird needy bitches… is okay… I’ll make you both into my good little whores.”

Breathy moans, both men eager to see this new game of yours play out, you would make him happy, please him, take care of all his needs… it was easier when you also felt just a tenth of that spark the first time you met William.

Unlike the last ones before these brother’s you would never grow out of love… you had so much to give after all… and he had so much to give you still.

What a bad thing you two were.