#/Harper: *is ruthless but in a loving and supportive way*

[batcassed]

i love your reverse batgirl au!! do you mind writing more about them?

Okay so after going through the post I realized I wrote it at 2 am, so I'm going to simply rewrite it and then add more if that's okay <3

AU where Bruce adopts Barbara, Steph, Cass and Harper instead of the batboys - Batdaughters: Origins

Would like to start by saying: Damian never exists; Bruce doesn’t sleep with Talia because he's aroace in this universe no I don't make the rules he just is

Barbara Gordon is adopted by Jim Gordon after his brother and his sister in law, Barbara’s parents, die (as per canon.) When she’s six, he's killed by the Joker, who forces Barbara to watch. Bruce is too late to save Gordon and puts the blame for his death on himself, so he tries to atone by giving Barbara a home. Raising a daughter keeps him busy so he doesn’t visit Haley’s circus when it visits Gotham. Dick’s parents fall to the floor, and instead of Bruce, the Court of Owls take him in.

When Babs is 16, Bruce adopts Stephanie Brown. Steph’s father is Cluemaster but he’s put in Arkham early in her childhood. Stephanie’s mother is unable to overcome her addiction to pharmaceuticals (unlike in canon where she does overcome this) and this ends in her death. 11 year old Stephanie runs away from her social worker and ends up finding the batmobile in an alley. She hides under the car and her social worker passes by, but when Batman arrives she jumps out to avoid getting run over. He tries to take her back to foster care but she throws a brick at him and runs. Bruce decides to adopt her once he finds out her father is cluemaster, and when he takes her for waffles she agrees to ‘let him’ adopt her.

Harper Row is taken away from her alcoholic father when she’s 9 and is the only kid to actually end up with Bruce in a normal way. He’s officially a foster parent and she’s placed with him through the system. She tells Bruce that she has a brother, Cullen, who she hasn’t seen since being taken away from her father but Bruce is unable to figure out where he’d gone. Cullen was never registered in the foster care database and none of the workers that picked up Harper recalled there being another child.

When the Justice League encounters Lady Shiva a year later, she fights them and defeats Batman, but the combined forces of Wonder Woman and Superman force her capture and she’s questioned under the lasso. She tells them about her origin and that a man named David Cain had her biological daughter and was training her to be an assassin. Batman realizes that the daughter in question is still only 8, and adds her and David to his search for Cullen. He finds her being trained by David to be a ruthless killer and rescues her. He realizes that she’s mute and deadly and can’t grow up in a regular foster system so he takes her home with him.

Babs becomes Batgirl at 14, but is paralyzed at 17, a year after Steph joins the family. Then she takes the moniker oracle.

When Steph is older she doesn’t feel right taking on the batgirl name, so she becomes Robin. Steph and Bruce have a falling out when Bruce calls her reckless in the field and benches her so she distances herself from him and becomes Spoiler. She meets a kid named Tim in university who was emancipated from his parents when he was 16 and discovers that since he was a kid, he’s tried to follow batman and robin’s footsteps by fighting crime at night in a red domino and black clothes. Steph reveals that she was the Robin that Tim used to watch at night and takes him on as her partner, eventually training him to be a third Robin, one who was never trained by Batman: Red Robin.

At the same time, Harper spends years trying to find her brother, Cullen. She fights crime to find her brother without telling Bruce at first, taking on the codename Bluebird. When he finds out, Bruce takes her on as his partner, not his sidekick, which drives a wedge between her and Steph.

Cass had decided to live a normal life after having the choice taken away from her when she was young, but an attack on her school causes her to fight off a bunch of the rogue gallery to the point of near-death. She holds them off long enough for her school to evacuate and run. After she survives this, Barbara reaches out to her and tells her that if she ever wants it, the mantle of batgirl is there for her. Cass refuses it at first but takes it when she turns 15, deciding to train again, but this time to defend Gotham, and not kill. She becomes batgirl at 16.

Steph and Tim both join young justice and Babs was a part of the Teen Titans before being paralyzed.

When Bruce ‘dies’ for half a year, Cass gives the mantle of Batgirl to Steph and moves to Hong Kong to become Black Bat.

Harper moves in with Steph and befriends Tim, who believes that Bruce is alive. Nobody takes the mantle of Batman after Bruce’s ‘death.’

After he is rescued by Tim and Steph, Bruce returns to Gotham. Cass returns to be Black Bat and Steph goes back to being Spoiler, and Bruce and Steph finally reconcile.

They find out that Cullen was taken by the Court of Owls and turned into a Talon, and when they try to rescue him, they discover that a second Talon had taken a liking to him and was protecting him from the batfamily, seeing them as enemies.

So of course they take both Talons home. Bruce discovers that the second Talon is Dick Grayson and with Martian Manhunter’s help, they help them learn how to be human again.

Dick takes Cullen to live by themselves in a quiet area of Gotham, and Bruce leaves them be, knowing that they deserve to lead normal lives without continuing to be entangled in the batfamily. Only Harper visits.

At the same time, a new crime lord pops up, claiming to go by the red hood. Bruce fears another Joker situation and finds Red Hood to interrogate him and finds out that his name is Jason Todd. Jason, forced to work as a goon for two-face to earn money to support his mother, was a hostage of the Joker and beaten almost to death before Batman saved him, but he was too late to save Jason's mother. (we're ignoring the biological mother plot point here.) He wants to drive Batman to finally break his code and kill so that he’ll kill the Joker. After a fight between them that almost ends in Jason dying, Batman backs off and doesn’t turn him into the police. The Red Hood kills the Joker, but realizes that it didn't change anything. He almost turns the gun on himself but Bruce stops him. Bruce promises to leave him alone, acknowledging that Crime Alley is his territory, as long as he gives them information on a major trafficking ring in Gotham. Jason agrees and together they take the ring down.

After the Red Hood saves Cass from the collapse of a building, he and Cass strike up a tentative friendship. He becomes an anti-hero after sending the criminal underground into a civil war, ensuring the destruction of some of the larger crime families in Gotham. Then he becomes an ally of the batfamily, but still kills.

Duke's story is similar to canon except his parents are cured from the Joker Virus. He still joins the batfamily as the signal, and eventually joins the Outsiders team with Cass.

Send me asks if you want me to go into more detail with a part of this au!

[cowtale-utau]

This idea has been bounced around a couple times in various convos so I decided to go ahead and do it. Here is the CT!Skele cast, but Fem.

Undertale Sans/Flush – Somehow even more reserved, but a bit softer. She’s a little more inclined to help even if it’s inconvenient, but even less like to forgive someones transgressions.

Undertale Papyrus/Gail – The peace keeper of the bunch. She’s good at soothing tempers, or matching them as needed. She tries to do things the diplomatic way, but won’t hesitate to put her foot down. She’s even slower to anger than her male version, but burns hotter.

Underfell Sans/Tinker – She still loves her mechanical shit, but is more obvious about it. She’s always tinkering with something, and has oil on her hands. More social, but holds her cards just as close to her chest. She’ll be your best friend and you’ll know nothing of substance about her.

Underfell Papyrus/Queen – Regal and haughty, a real “Queen” type. Highly demanding and expects to be catered to and obeyed. A romantic at heart but good luck ever meeting her standards. (Be nice to her in a genuine way rather than the pandering. She’s not as high maintenance as she likes to come off.)

Underswap Sans/Sprite – Plays into her “cuteness” and uses it to her advantage. She’s manipulative and cunning, but also genuinely friendly. She won’t be needlessly mean, but she always gets her way.

Underswap Papyrus/Harper - Fairly quiet and reserved, but she exudes an air of calm. She has a relaxing presence that makes it easy to open up to her. Don’t get on her bad side, she will use that vulnerability against you.

Swapfell(Red) Sans/Lash – Bad bitch supreme. She has attitude for days and demands nothing less than the best of everything. And if you won’t give it to her, she is more than capable of taking it by force.

Swapfell(Red) Papyrus/Dingo – While people do make her nervous, she also craves attention. She wants to be liked, but is afraid she will do or say the wrong thing. She overcompensates by being either overly helpful or overly stand offish.

Horrortale Sans/Charine – Fiercely protective and more accepting of her past. She did what she had to and she won’t apologize for it. She isn’t proud of it, but she won’t hide from it. She’s forgetful, but rather than brooding over it, she tries to find the humor in it. She can improv fairly well.

Horrortale Papyrus/Sousie – Reclusive and quiet, but by no means shy or nervous. She prefers to avoid large groups of people, and is slow to trust. She’d much rather spend time in her gardens than with people, but the few she does let close find her a gentle if fierce friend.

Swapfell(Purple) Sans/Dee - A working woman with her shit together. She’s always going and doing, and making sure the house/camp is in order. She somehow juggles her job and the home in ways that no one understands. Making sure everything is in order. Sassy and blunt, but compassionate.  

Swapfell(Purple) Papyrus/Skate – The consummate “hot mess” party girl. Wild and uninhibited, and well known on the party scene, her initial impression is highly deceptive. Under the air headed facade, is an exceptionally clever manipulator.

Fellswap Gold Sans/Rain – Honestly doesn’t change all that much. Actually gets a little more over bearing but slightly less controlling. Wants her loved ones to do what makes them happy, but is constantly present and hovering.

Fellswap Gold Papyrus/Nefeli – Both softer and more ruthless than her male version. She’s a fierce protector of all those she takes in. And she tries to take in everyone. She presents a more emotionally stable front, but is under a lot of self-imposed pressure to right all the wrongs she perceives in the world.

Underlust Sans/Absinthe – Very similar to the male counterpart. The only real difference is rather than avoidance, she’s is outright ruthless when it comes to shutting down “suitors”. She can get cruel about it and has no care to bother being gentle with peoples feelings.

Underlust Papyrus/Versi – Unlike the ones who are “similar” Cali straight up doesn’t change. Her behavior when male was already highly andro, and that doesn’t change when she is female.

Dancetale Sans/Jazz – Quiet, a bit shy but actually somewhat excitable. If you can find a topic she loves, you can coax her out of her shell and she’ll ramble on for as long as you allow her. She just needs a little encouragement to know its safe for her to open up.

Dancetale Papyrus/Samba – Total cheerleader. But like, head cheerleader. A massive ego covering deep insecurities. Pushes everyone to be and do their best (sometimes a little too hard) while also maintaining that she is the undisputed best.

Outertale Sans/Pluto – She’s still bitter and angry, but more inclined to trying. She does go out and at least attempt to experience and appreciate the world for what it is. She’s a grumpy cuddler, and is better at not being a total hermit.

Outertale Papyrus/Venus – Level headed and supportive. She’s friendly and sociable, but hard working and driven. She has a quiet self confidence and is largely unbothered by things. She doesn’t have time to let things get her down. There is so much life to be lived instead!

Farmtale Sans/Parsley – Both more and less shitty than her male variant. She’s kinder to her family, not as hardened, while being even worse to “outsiders”. She toys with peoples feelings to get her way and has left a long trail of broken hearts behind her.

Farmtale Papyrus/Rosemary – Headstrong and hardworking. She’s always covered in soil. She enjoys working the fields and feels satisfied with every sprout. She’s not quite as tired as her male counterpart, being a bit better at balancing her work to rest ratio. She doesn’t feel the same need to suppress her emotions with work.

G!Sans/Aurelia – Just as wildly reckless and curious as her male alt. She’s always looking for the next thrill. She dives into things without considering the repercussions but is fully willing to deal with the consequences as well.

G!Papyrus/Viridiana – Studious, and exasperated, but overall pretty relaxed. She doesn’t see much point in getting worked up over things. Just don’t mess with her books. She’s obsessive about how they’re organized and will be very cross if you fuck with her system.

Fun Facts!

Versi is short for “versicolored” a call back to calico patterns on cats.

Rain was chosen to both keep to the weather theme and as a homonym to reign.

The G!Sisters got names the most similar because those are both actual names I very much like that fit well to the theme.

Jazz was almost named Twerk because it was amusing to me. I then spent way to long thinking about if a skeleton could even twerk given they have no ass.

Gail is the shortened form of “gaily” which has a similar meaning to lief.

Sousie is just ‘sous (chef)’ with a feminine ending added.

Charine is short for ‘saccharine’.

Dee is a pun on PHD.

Skate is short for cheapskate, a play on the fact that Flint is short for skinflint, someone who is stingy with money.

and also, TYSM @cathoodies for all your help with bouncing name ideas!

[mz-elysium]

Wow. That was a lot longer than I planned. Do we even do comic sans wip posts anymore? It it cool? Am I cool? 

Photo ID below the cut because this is already way too fucking long of a post. And this ID, bc of it, is so so long.

Photo ID: a 13 slide Comic Sans font powerpoint about an original WIP. All slides but the first are white, black text, all font being Comic Sans to follow the meme.

Slide 1: black background, white text. Titled with red shadow: The City of Fallen Angels: (2) Hitaeth. Definition below: hiraeth: homesickness or nostalgia, an earnest longing for an idealised past, or a sense of regret. Around this title are a bunch of floating descriptors about the WIP: vampires, gothic-punk, regrets vs forgiveness, dark urban fantasy, historical 2003, 4 POVs, secrets, political intrigue, slice of life, compassion vs selfishness, vampires playing Game of Thrones, grimdark and also hopepunk. A Vampire the Masquerade canon divergent original novel.

Slide 2: Worldbuilding, about the Vampire the Masquerade world. Titled: The canon sects but like a little more nuanced. Three columns of bullet points follow. 

The first is the Camarilla. 

neo-feudal lords and princes

rule most of the world

want to rule the rest of it

scheming, old elders who don’t give a shit about anyone else

will kill your family to make a point

BUT ALSO.

stable domains; due process

clan culture, history, tradition

connected to wider vampire society

play their game and you can live as a peaceful peasant (mostly)

The second column is the Anarchs.

rebellious neonates/ancillae

in their Free States, there’s opportunity for power and to live your own life

neonates can actually own land??

ALSO

literal anarchy

no real oversight or leadership

can and will be killed by another gang

“if you can hold it, you can have it”

Third column is the Sabbat

worship Caine as the First Murderer (first vampire)

take “vampire” too literally

inhuman monsters

war cult readying for Armageddon

ALSO

profoundly religious

strict code of honour

accept their inhumanity (no angst)

tight-knit family-like packs

heroes/crusaders for their ppl

Slide 3: Titled: Have a shitty map. A Google map screenshot of Central Los Angeles, with highlighted sections in different colours, clearly done in Paint by a child. Seven sections are highlighted, explained on the next slide.

Slide 4: The lands are divided by the sect who control it.

Anarchs:

Angels Wasteland: remains of the #peaceful Barony of Angels. With Salvador Garcia’s death, it’s a shitshow chaotic warzone. 

Tinseltown: Isaac Abrams, movie baron, just wants to be left alone.

East LA: ruled by loyalists of the Old Guard Anarchs, who are all dead/gone. Sabbat from further east are smelling weakness.

Downtown: technically “no baron” but also nines is baron. Typical Anarchs, shooting each other, living rough, living free. OR ARE THEY???

Camarilla:

The Valley: a praxis backed by legendary elders, who are propelled by faceless masters, using unwilling Prince Barty Vaughn as a pawn

Westside: greedy and ambitious LaCroix goes “hmm. la looks like shit. probably wanna get in on that” and calls up his contact, Therese Voerman and says “yo. u got a barony, huh? wanna be my seneschal?”

“Independent”

Silver Lake: a desperate grab by Monroe and co to build their own “utopia” … sorta like the Anarchs 60yrs ago… and look how THAT went. Monroe ate the last Old Guard Anarch.

Slide 5: Titled: Monroe’s POV, with a subtitle of The Captain. On the left, a photo of half of a man’s face in shadow. He has dark hair, pale skin, blue eyes, and a hard expression. Bullet points describe him as Matthew Monroe, Clan Ventrue, Embraced 1873, Humanity 5, age 28. On the right, a series of bullets describe his POV’s story.

this is a dude drowning in an ocean of Problems and his catchphrase is “I’ll figure it out”

he owes a life debt to the enigmatic powerful archon in the Valley (Jan Pieterzoon), who seems to respect/honour him more than most of LA.

he used to be besties with the Valley Prince (Barty Vaughn), who he can’t trust but seems? the same?

he turned his ghoul and secret love into a vampire (Hawthorne), against her wishes, and now she hates him. monroe: u kno what? that’s fair.

Silver Lake is held together with duct tape. monroe’s right hand (Ashley Swan) is a nightmare and untrustworthy. his people try to kill each other.

he’s got a lot of unresolved trauma/grief/abuse/anger and vampires sort of have “The Beast”, a spirit that haunts them with evil

and oh yeah, LA is about to explode

Slide 6: Titled: Monroe’s supporting characters. Four characters, each of them have a photo, a title, and brief run-on description.

First, a photo of a very pale man with purple eyes and a lock of ice blonde hair. Ashley Swan, the Thorn, Clan Toreador. Monstrously cruel, sarcastic, hedonistic, aggressive, sadistic, can’t be trusted, doesn’t wear shirts. Bisexual transman.

Second, a photo of a dour woman with dark hair. Audrey Hawthorne, the Lovechilde, Clan Ventrue. Blinded by the Embrace, furious, frustrated, grieving, snarky, over accomplished, creative, passionate.

Third, a man in a black suit looking over a ballroom with a crystal chandelier. Jan Pieterzoon, the Kingmaker, Clan Ventrue. 300 year old, archon, elder, sire is Camarilla big-shot, dignified, mysterious, chessmaster, honourable, elite.

Fourth, a man in a dress shirt, sleeve rolled up, hand extended with a cigarette and bloody palm. Barty Vaughn, the Valley Prince, Clan Ventrue. Former Anarch, Prince of San Francisco, now reluctant Prince of LA. Smokes like a chimney, lives to fuck Tremere and have fun.

Slide 7: Titled: Zari’s POV, with a subtitle of The Black Rose. On the left, a photo of a beaming dark-skinned Black woman with bouncy coily black hair. Bullet points describe her as Zari Adeyemi-Swan, Clan Toreador, Embraced 1973, Humanity 6, age 27. On the right, a series of bullets describe her POV’s story.

life sucks, it’s cruel, and there’s no point thinking on the past, even when the past comes to haunt you

she fled her foster sire and once-lover (Ashley Swan) for his cruelty to others, but now he offers maybe?genuine? amends.

thirty years ago, she left her human children. her daughter (Aisha Adeyemi) has been Embraced and brings bad news

her main way of #coping is working and distracting herself. she throws herself to infiltrate the Westside Camarilla court (Sebastian LaCroix), against all good advice.

soon after she arrives, she finds herself having a secret admirer (Mercurio), who reminds her how precious it is to be loved, held, and cared for — but they need to overcome their own instincts to accept what they could have

The Voerman sisters are in the thick of it all, making perfect cautionary allies and, if she can overcome her preconceptions, friends.

and oh yeah, LA is about to explode

Slide 8: Titled: Zari’s supporting characters. Four characters, each of them have a photo, a title, and brief run-on description.

First, a photo of a white man wearing mirrored sunglasses in front of orange-pink neon. It casts his face and smile eerily. Ashley Swan, the Foster Sire, Clan Toreador, monstrously cruel, charismatic, loyal, thorough, too clever, pleasurable. Bi transman.

Second, a photo of a white man in a suit, adjusting his cuffs. Sebastian LaCroix, the Westside Prince, Clan Ventrue, opportunistic benefactor, greedy, ambitious, petulant, ruthless, degrading.

Third, a white man in a paisley shirt, gold necklaces, putting a hand to a tattooed and exposed chest. Mercurio, the Admirer, LaCroix’s Ghoul, resourceful, sweet, empathetic, capable, romantic, salt of the earth, former Mafia hitman.

Fourth, a white woman in a black suit with delicate gold jewelry. The Voermans, the Mirrored Sisters, Clan Malkavian; one is brutal, calculating, patient, reckless, the other is seductive, fun-loving, innovative, insightful.

Slide 9: Titled: Charlie’s POV, with a subtitle of The Moonchilde. In small text, a line says “a.k.a. Me processing grief over my mother #coping. On the left, a photo of a sad-faced white woman with freckles, black eyeliner, and frizzy brown curls. Bullet points describe her as Charlie Bradley, Clan Malkavian, Embraced 2003, Humanity 8, age 20, lesbian. On the right, a series of bullets describe her POV’s story.

life is getting back to normal? well, “new normal”

as a new adult, she has a good ol’ fashioned “start of life” crisis: who am I? where do I fit in? complicated by her mother’s death a year ago. what sort of woman am I? how does this figure into my attraction to women?

maybe. maybe. maybe monroe is cold and distant and ruling a vampire kingdom, but he wants to look after me. maybe i should let him.

also, hey, you (Jesse Harper) get it. and you’re hurting. let me help, let me be your soft place to land. wow, okay, this is kissing.

she didn’t mean to ruin her sire’s (Rhys Wilson) life. but, she did. she killed his mentor. SHHH! secret! she feel bad. maybe friends? uh, okay, weirdo. maybe D&D.

she’s learning to deal with feeding on scumbags and giving what people got coming to them. and the Cobweb, supernatural psychosis

WHY ARE VAMPIRES LIKE THIS? WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? FFS

and oh yeah, LA is about to explode

Slide 10: Titled: Charlie’s supporting characters. Three characters, each of them have a photo, a title, and brief run-on description.

First, a white man in the middle of screaming, his head swaying back and forth so it looks like he has three heads. Rhys Wilson, the Sire, Clan Malkavian, weirdo, prime D&D fanatic and DM, just wants friends, and vengeance, pulls pranks to teach lessons. Gay.

Second, a very strong white woman with her arms crossed, a tattoo on one, and a t-shirt that is obscured but clearly says “The future is female”. Jesse Harper, the Darkness, Clan Lasombra, former vampire hunter, reluctant vampire, brooding, mysterious, sullen, black trench coat, buff as fuck, brave. Lesbian.

Third, a pair of clasped hands, male over female. Monroe, the Stepsire, Clan Ventrue, fucking old, inhuman, kills too easily, sincere, honourable, intense, gives good advice but really should shut his mouth hole.

Slide 11: Titled: Jack’s POV, with a subtitle of The Lone Wolf. On the left, a photo of a sad-faced strong Chinese man with a shaggy and tufted mullet. Bullet points describe him as Jack Shen, Clan Gangrel, Embraced 1955, Humanity 7, age 25, gay. On the right, a series of bullets describe his POV’s story.

why does he always end up alone? people leave, people die, people drift and change, but the good times were worth it

he’s always had a rocky relationship with his lover (Ryuko Saito), but now the dumbass has found a cult promising power.

he hasn’t lost him. he hasn’t. him and ryu just take time apart sometimes. but it’s been a long fucking while. and jack isn’t sure who he is alone anymore. a new human friend (Dustin Cohen), working at his animal hospital gives new life.

his former best friend (Damsel) has dove deep into Downtown and managing as Nines’ lieutenant, bringing him more and more dirty work to clean up

monroe relies on him to reign in the chaos of vampires trying to live without killing each other.

and oh yeah, LA is about to explode

Slide 12: Titled: Jack’s supporting characters. Three characters, each of them have a photo, a title, and brief run-on description.

First, a young white woman with dyed fire-engine red hair and an Iron Maiden t-shirt. Damsel, the Lieutenant, Clan Brujah, naive, brash, physical, loyal, loud-mouthed, smart.

Second, a skinny man in an ill-fitting Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Ryuko Saito, the Orphan, Mage, power-hungry, desperate, proud, ruthless, loving, isolated, crushingly lonely, gremlin, old and chronic pain, hides and “treats” it with magic.

Third, a white hand extending a hummingbird to fly free. Dustin Cohen, the Receptionist, Human, understanding, the best of Good Dudes, empathetic, kinda lame outsider

Slide 13: Titled: also. A moodboard on the right side includes two weeping stone angels, one at sunset, one in darkness between a tarnished and broken silver crown; a gas station in LA as seen through a rainy car window; grim-looking downtown city buildings; and a sidewalk curb with neon lights reflecting off a puddle and a plastic bag of takeout garbage strewn across.

On the left, bullet points follow.

about 100 million other characters. I legit have a spreadsheet

Everyone is capable of evil

Sins of the sire (father)

Never too late to start being a good person

Takes place  about 6 months before Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines

At least one more novel in the works

Subheading, 22/55 chapters written. Gonna start posting September 28.

End ID.

[bigdreamsandwildthings]

Review: A Heart So Fierce and Broken (Brigid Kemmerer, Cursebreakers #2)

Rating: ★★★★★/5

"I can hardly think with his fingers tracing a line down the side of my face. 'Ah, yes, the most dangerous person at the party is always the girl sitting alone with a book.' He doesn't smile. 'You underestimate yourself. Your sister seems determined to be as ruthless as possible - to impress your mother, I am sure. And while ruthlessness may have its place, I believe your brand of strength would garner greater loyalty. That is what makes you dangerous. Not because you would ride in with a blade and take control, but because you could quietly sit in this chair, in the dark, with your book' - the corner of his mouth turns up - 'and you could determine the best way to achieve what needs to be done.'" I am an absolute sucker for this series. These angsty characters who are so fully fleshed out that they feel real and their ridiculously moving emotions and their personalities that just make me want to find them and hug them and never let them go. This second book was just as good as the first, if not better, because of the surprising twists it takes. The curse is broken, and Emberfall is once again ruled only by Prince Rhen, with Harper of Disi by his side. Grey has vanished, hidden away working as a stablehand in a small town, trying to hide what he knows is true: he has magic running in his veins. Meanwhile, Lia Mara, daughter of Karis Luran, knows she is no princess; her sister is heir, not her, and she lacks her mother's effortless brutality. When events begin to happen that are out of both Grey's and Lia Mara's control, Grey finds himself back with Rhen, along with Harper, Jacob, and Noah, and he must confront who he is and what he can do, and decide how far he is willing to go to protect his country - and the gentle girl who may be stealing his heart. Where the first book had some level of predictability, given the fact that it's a retelling, I found that this second book had none. Somehow, this world is simple enough to fall back into without any kind of lag or feeling left behind, but at the same time, the politics and the magic and the relationships are all so complex and wonderful that they left me constantly wondering what would develop next. And I was so not let down, by any aspect of this book. Again, the love story between Rhen and Harper in Curse is so swoony and epic, but there was always a part of me (a substantial part) that felt that connection between Harper and Grey and wanted both of them to be happy so badly. Grey is an absolute favourite, character-wise, in any book I've read recently; he's cunning, yet he just cares so goddamn much that he becomes so conflicted and he needs several million hugs and a soft blanket with a cup of tea. And he needs to share it with Lia Mara, who is equally, bitingly smart, eager to learn, and compassionate, without letting that dull her edge, despite what she may think. The combination of them together took my breath away at multiple points here. Grey can be so quietly charming, and Lia Mara, so wonderfully relatable and intense, and my god, I just. I adore them. And the supporting cast! The development on Jake's part, and the addition of Iisak! GOD. I HAVE SO MANY FEELS JUST THINKING ABOUT THEM ALL. I WANT TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD WITH THESE BBS SO I CAN PROTECT THEM AT ALL COSTS RIGHT GODDAMN NOW. I don't want to spoil too much of the story for those who have yet to read book one, but this one deals with the aftermath of the breaking of the curse, and the dynamics that come into play are so unexpected. Everything here paints Rhen in a different light, and I wondered if I'd become more sympathetic to Karis Luran, but that certainly did not happen either. This world is filled with villains, but it's also filled with unexpected kindnesses and alliances, and that's what pushed it to the top of my faves list. I love it when a book surprises me. This one wasn't full of those gasp-worthy moments, deaths or triumphs or failures or anything like that. Instead, it's the quiet moments that bring such emotion here that absolutely blew me away. The scene with the deer in the forest? Chills. The scene at the party in Syhl Shallow when Grey gives Lia Mara his jacket? Motherfucking goosebumps. The scene with Tycho when he promises to keep Grey's secret and it brings them so much closer together? Kill me. Knife through the heart. There are so many of those here, and those relationships are what do it for me. This series has quickly become one of my favourites, up there with ACOTAR. This second book is just so good, I know I'll be thinking about it all the way until the next one is released.

[sam-not-samantha]

The Blackwoods & the Rheiders

“A train wreck dynasty of cash stacks and funny farms.”

#sltask02

 [Photos embedded, but not all characters have a faceclaim.]

The Blackwoods (Immediate)

Andrew Blackwood | Father | June 21, 1969-April 30, 2017         “Paycheck giver. Businessman. Quiet and kind, yet so apathetic.” Eliza Blackwood (née Rheider) | Mother | October 28, 1971-April 30, 2017         “Whiny bitch. Passive-aggressive. Judgmental. Tasteless. Fucking DEAD.” Samantha “Sam” Blackwood | Self | February 5, 1995         “Best fucking person you’ll ever meet.”

The Extended (And not-so-distant)

Jodi Rheider | Maternal aunt | July 1, 1975         “Anti-vaxer. Vegan. Cunt. Used to get cocktails with Kris Jenner.” Jenna Rheider | Maternal cousin | April 14, 1994         “Brainless twit. And a narc; ratted me out for doing coke only for her mom to do the rest.” Connor Rheider | Maternal cousin | November 2, 1999         “Quirky. Genius. Loves drones. Probably in charge of WikiLeaks.”

Luke Rheider | Maternal uncle | May 4, 1966         “Pretentious. Thinks old money is anything over a year. Football fan. Moron.” Charli Diamond | Maternal aunt-in-law | October 31, 1982         “Second wife. Thinks Luke’s gonna die soon, but she deserves gold. Refused the name.” Bastien Rheider | Maternal cousin | January 28, 1988         “One of the two actually cool people in this family. Sarcastic. Sick. Sweet.” Evie Rheider | Maternal first cousin, once removed | September 12, 2008         “Started sweet, is now fully demonic.”

Paul Blackwood | Paternal uncle | October 6, 1965         “Loudly republican. Loudly terrible. Horrible suits. Still calls me ‘Squirt’.” Charlotte Blackwood (née Gilfrey) | Paternal aunt-in-law | May 10, 1967        “If Ann Coulter was slightly younger and somehow slightly worse.” Kim Blackwood | Paternal cousin | August 1, 1987         “Couture PotteryBarn expert. Insufferable. Screechy. Trend-chaser.” George White | Cousin-in-law-to-be | November 7, 1980         “The manifestation of Kim’s daddy issues. Wedding date is permanently TBD.” Lisa Blackwood | Paternal cousin | April 9, 1989         “Mini-Eliza. Clothing terrorist. Should’ve been aborted.” Salvatore Stracci | Cousin-in-law-to-be | October 22, 1976        “Tall, Italian and scary. Also in a state of perpetual engagement and dissatisfaction.” Alessandro Blackwood | Paternal first cousin, once removed | May 31, 2010         “Had to hold him at a party once. He spat on me.”

Michael Blackwood | Patnernal uncle | May 1, 1967         “I legitimately don’t know if he and Paul are different people.” Natalie Blackwood (née Gainsbourg) | Paternal aunt-in-law | July 1, 1968        “Quiet, but clearly judgmental. Alopecia. Clings to Michael desperately.” Heather Blackwood | Paternal cousin | March 14, 1990         “The only sane woman. Editor at Harper’s Bazaar with Natalie. Goddess. Soul sister.”

Matthew Blackwood | Paternal uncle | Stillborn August 8, 1970

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Dances– The Blackwoods | A Personal Essay (Written pre-parental death).

It was a dance.

It always was, no matter what. No, there was never any music. No stage. No choreography. But conversations with my mother were always an intricate samba on a tightrope.

It could begin at any moment, about anything. Simple small talk about where I went for brunch yesterday morning could turn into a bitchfest about my weight– as if being 110 was something to be ashamed of. The mere presence of an unopened, monthly bank statement could turn into a lecture about financial responsibility– as if she wasn’t surrounded by new, shiny things and maxed out AMEX cards. And, far more recently, a quick, innocent glance at the alcohol cabinet would have me sat down with some professional life coach while she watched, a vodkatini in hand.

Eliza Blackwood (born Eliza Rheider in 1971) was a bitch. An absolute bitch. A wretched, spoiled, high-strung, narcissistic, classist, borderline-anorexic, Valium-addicted, Shalimar-drenched, Kris Jenner-wannabe bitch. She was lucky she came from money, because if she wasn’t, I don’t think she’d be alive right now. I mean, I’m lucky, too, but I’m grateful for what I have.

Her parents were corporate assholes– her dad worked for Goldman Sachs, and his wife was a vapid, shrill, useless little brat not unlike her daughter. And, of course, that unloveable little bitch went and married someone who could satisfy her financial needs and not embarrass the family name– Andrew Blackwood, a New York politician from a family of Wall Street types (Some of whom also worked at Goldman Sachs, which is how the two met). On paper, they were a match made in heaven. A wealthy politician and his obnoxious jetsetter wife.

But, fortunately for me, even though I hadn’t been born quite yet, Andrew was a good, caring man. While Eliza was (and still is) ruthless, selfish and absolutely disgustingly horrible, Andrew had a heart. He cared about people. And things. Which was why he went into politics. He wanted to make a change. While his family was a bunch of wealthy Republicans, he was entirely Democratic, a fact that nearly alienated from them entirely (if only it had actually managed to keep his family out of my life) which is why I’m still in awe that he wound up with a pathetic Paris Hilton knockoff. A politician with a heart of gold wound up with a blue blood twat who measures her love in karats.

But back to her dances.

I’m not entirely sure where they come from. I mean, no matter how much you analyze someone and their family and upbringing and everything, you can’t pin point their personality traits and their behaviors. That said, I think I have a fair amount of clues as to where Eliza’s horrid personality came from.

While her relationship with her mother is mostly concealed to me, their lifestyle was no secret. Eliza always went on about how well she lived as a kid, how luxurious her house was, how high the thread count in the sheets of her crib was, and how she washed her face with caviar or something. But how she got along with her mother was never fully described. I’ve seen hints here and there– a glare across a table at a gala or whispers on the phone. But I don’t know too much. As far as I know, Eliza’s mother– Mrs. Karen Rheider– didn’t even bother to raise any of her three children. I wouldn’t have been surprised had they all been raised by a nanny while Karen went went on living as a trophy wife. But I assume that the two of them, when they did interact, got along the same way Eliza and I do– and that would make it safe to assume Eliza picked up her bitchy words, malicious intentions and passive-aggressive, condescending demeanor from her mother. The family bitchiness is hereditary.

Passive-aggressiveness is definitely a running trait in my family. I see it to an extent on my dad’s side– his brothers and him bicker endlessly, and they seem to show some slight disapproval for his opposing political stance, as if world views are trivial dinner conversation. But it pales in comparison to the Rheider family’s guilt. Aside from me, and my mother, I see it in the rest of the family.

My aunt Jodi, mother of two, is another disgusting person. Like Jenny McCarthy, she refused to vaccinate her kids because she believed it would make them autistic. Her son, Connor, has caught the flu every single year since he was six. The three (including her daughter Jenna) currently reside together at a nudist resort, where the kids were homeschooled… because they lack their immunizations. But that’s kind of besides the point– any time Jodi decides to dress up and sneak out into the world of normalcy, she misses no opportunity to make slick comments that everyone else in the family is living incorrectly. Thankfully, everyone else has mastered the art of clapback.

Eliza’s brother, Luke, and his wife, Charli (a full 16 years younger than him) are an obnoxiously pretentious couple who are all too proud of their FormDecor relationship and all too ashamed of everyone else’s. Luke has a son, Bastien, who he had with his first wife, that’s only 6 years younger than Charli. However, Bastien’s one of the few people on my mother’s side of the family that I actually enjoy. We share similar morals, and gratefulness for what we’ve been given, and spend every single family function together ripping the family apart. It’s a shame they never hear us.

Even the family elders have the same disapproving, condescending disdain for everything that my mom displays. But they’re far too silent around me to reveal anything noteworthy. The most words I’ve ever heard from my great grandmother Dorothy Cross (my mother’s mother’s mother), was scolding Jodi for her nudist colony being racially integrated, so it’s safe to say not much good was going to come from that generation. Fortunately, most of them are dead– Dorothy passed in 2011 (though her husband is still living off of a diamond-encrusted life support machine), and Eliza’s father’s parent’s are both long gone. Three out of Andrew’s four parents are deceased, his mother’s mother Clarissa Pullock (or something like that) is still alive, though I’ve never met her and probably never will– our first interaction will probably be at her funeral where I’m forced to pretend to mourn.

While Eliza’s family is dominated by a vile matriarchy, Andrew’s family has been dominated by powerful men with miniature dicks who made the Blackwood name known very much for investment banking until bank holding companies began to reign supreme, after which the family figured they would be better off in electoral politics. Andrew’s grandfather, Adam Blackwood, worked up a networth of slightly over $1 billion, and while his successors haven’t exactly been slacking, I don’t think any of them are ever going to do as well as him (but at the end of the day, if Andrew decided to have a bonfire using $100 bills as kindling, we’d recover before the fire even went out). Adam had two sons– Matthew and Bernard, and both received their jobs at Wall Street after him in a clear sign of nepotism. Bernard married a real estate agent named Elaine or Elle or something like that and had a million kids– most of which were boys. I don’t know much about them, and I don’t really care to. Matthew married some Janet something and had four kids– Paul (1965), Michael (1967), Andrew (1969), and Matthew Jr. (stillborn in 1970).

Unfortunately for this generation of men, who, unsurprisingly, continued the trend of nepotism and began work at the same place as their ancestors (save for Andrew who stayed in school, exploring his interests), none of them were able to produce any boys to continue the line. Paul was the first to reproduce– shooting out Kim and Lisa in 1987 and 1989, and as soon as the Kardashian sisters came around, they tried their hardest to be them but soon settled with just being their very close friends (and it’s safe to say I can’t stand any of them). Michael had Heather in 1990, and somehow, amidst a family of putrid, selfish monsters, she wound up a tasteful and snarky angel of hope. Like Bastien, we spend our family events together, an unholy trio of stylish black sheep.

And then finally, February 5, 1995, I came around. Eliza and Andrew had been married for about three years, and finally had me. Adam was still alive at the time and was praying for a great grandson– only to be disappointed for the fourth time. Almost as a sign of flippancy towards him, they named me Sam (well, Samantha, but I’ve grown accustomed to Sam and refuse to be called by my full first name unless I’m being charged with something). My mother made my middle name Elizabeth– because she hoped that I would follow in her footsteps. She once said naming me after her was “the biggest mistake” she ever made, which I don’t think is entirely unfair because taking after her is the last thing I ever want to do. And I’ve spent the last twenty-one years learning all of this.

People always say that blood is thicker than water, or whatever. That we’re supposed to stick with our families (over friends, or, well, anything). There’s been some mindset that family comes before all, that you honor your last name above anything and everything. I don’t believe that for one second. As if who happened to bang should determine everything about you. I despise almost all of that. And I won’t claim any of the ones that I don’t like for one second. I’ll take a tango any day. Fuck blood. And fuck the Blackwoods.

[antoine-roquentin]

In the heart of the US Capitol there’s a small men’s room with an uplifting Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt quotation above the door. Making use of the facilities there after lunch in the nearby House dining room about a year ago, I found myself standing next to Trent Lott. Once a mighty power in the building as Senate Republican leader, he had been forced to resign his post following some imprudently affectionate references to his fellow Republican senator, arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. Now he was visiting the Capitol as a lucratively employed lobbyist.

The bathroom in which we stood, Lott remarked affably, once served a higher purpose. History had been made there. “When I first came to Washington as a junior staffer in 1968,” he explained, “this was the private hideaway office of Bill Colmer, chairman of the House Rules Committee.” Colmer, a long-serving Mississippi Democrat and Lott’s boss, was an influential figure. The committee he ruled controlled whether bills lived or died, the latter being the customary fate of proposed civil-rights legislation that reached his desk. “On Thursday nights,” Lott continued, “he and members of the leadership from both sides of the House would meet here to smoke cigars, drink cheap bourbon, play gin rummy, and discuss business. There was a chemistry, they understood each other. It was a magical thing.” He sighed wistfully at the memory of a more harmonious age, in which our elders and betters could arrange the nation’s affairs behind closed doors.

I don’t know that Joe Biden, currently leading the polls for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, ever frequented that particular restroom, in either its bygone or contemporary manifestation, but it could serve as a fitting shrine to all that he stands for. Biden has long served as high priest of the doctrine that our legislative problems derive merely from superficial disagreements, rather than fundamental differences over matters of principle. “I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart,” he declared in the Rose Garden in 2015, renouncing a much-anticipated White House run. “It’s mean-spirited. It’s petty. And it’s gone on for much too long. I don’t believe, like some do, that it’s naïve to talk to Republicans. I don’t think we should look on Republicans as our enemies.”

Given his success in early polling, it would seem that this message resonates with many voters, at least when they are talking to pollsters. After all, according to orthodox wisdom, there is no more commendable virtue in American political custom and practice than bipartisanship. Politicians on the stump fervently assure voters that they will strive with every sinew to “work across the aisle” to deliver “commonsense solutions,” and those who express the sentiment eloquently can expect widespread approval. Barack Obama famously launched himself toward the White House with his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention proclaiming that there is “not a liberal America and a conservative America,” only a “United States of America.”

By tapping into these popular tropes—“The system is broken,” “Why can’t Congress just get along?”—the practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident reality: that the system is under sustained assault by an ideology bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a greed-driven oligarchy. It was bipartisan accord, after all, that brought us the permanent war economy, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of black people, 1990s welfare “reform,” Wall Street deregulation and the consequent $16 trillion in bank bailouts, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other atrocities too numerous to mention. If the system is indeed broken, it is because interested parties are doing their best to break it.

Rather than admit this, Biden has long found it more profitable to assert that political divisions can be settled by men endowed with statesmanlike vision and goodwill—in other words, men such as himself. His frequent eulogies for public figures have tended to play heavily on this theme. Thus his memorial speech for Republican standard-bearer John McCain dwelled predictably on the cross-party nature of their relationship, beginning with his opening: “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a Democrat, and I loved John McCain.” Continuing in that vein, he related how he and McCain had once been chided by their respective party leaderships for spending so much time in each other’s company on the Senate floor, and referred fondly to the days when senators Teddy Kennedy and James Eastland, the latter a die-hard racist and ruthless suppressor of civil-rights bills, would “fight like hell on civil rights and then go have lunch together, down in the Senate dining room.”

Clearly, there is merit in the ability to craft compromise between opposing viewpoints in order to produce an effective result. John Ritch, formerly a US ambassador and top aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, worked closely with Biden for two decades, and has nothing but praise for his negotiating skills. “I’ve never seen anyone better at presiding over a group of politicians who represent conflicting egos and interests and using a combination of conciliation, humor, and muscle to cajole them into an agreed way forward,” Ritch told me recently. “Joe Biden has learned the skills to get things done in Washington. And I’ve seen him apply it equally with foreign leaders.”

The value of compromise, however, depends on what result is produced, and who benefits thereby. ­McCain’s record had at least a few commendable features, such as his opposition to torture (though never, of course, war). But it is hard to find much admirable in the character of a tireless defender of institutional racism like Strom Thurmond. Hence, Trent Lott’s words of praise—regretting that the old racist had lost when he ran as a Dixiecrat in the 1948 presidential election—had been deemed terminally unacceptable.

It fell to Biden to highlight some redeeming qualities when called on, inevitably, to deliver Thurmond’s eulogy following the latter’s death in 2003 at the age of one hundred. Biden reminisced with affection about the unlikely friendship between the deceased and himself. Despite having arrived at the Senate at age twenty-nine “emboldened, angered, and outraged about the treatment of African Americans in this country,” he said, he nevertheless found common cause on important issues with the late senator from South Carolina, who had been wont to describe civil-rights activists as “red pawns and publicity seekers.”

One such issue, as Branko Marcetic has pitilessly chronicled in Jacobin, was a shared opposition to federally mandated busing in the effort to integrate schools, an opposition Biden predicted would be ultimately adopted by liberal holdouts. “The black community justifiably is jittery,” Biden admitted to the Washington Post in 1975 with regard to his position. “I’ve made it—if not respectable—I’ve made it reasonable for longstanding liberals to begin to raise the questions I’ve been the first to raise in the liberal community here on the [Senate] floor.”

Biden was responding to criticism of legislation he had introduced that effectively barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from compelling communities to bus pupils using federal funds. This amendment was meant to be an alternative to a more extreme proposal put forward by a friend of Biden’s, hall-of-fame racist Jesse Helms (Biden had initially supported Helms’s version). Nevertheless, the Washington Post described Biden’s amendment as “denying the possibility for equal educational opportunities to minority youngsters trapped in ill-equipped inner-city schools.” Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, then the sole African-American senator, called Biden’s measure “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.”

By the 1980s, Biden had begun to see political gold in the harsh antidrug legislation that had been pioneered by drug warriors such as Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, and would ultimately lead to the age of mass incarceration for black Americans. One of his Senate staffers at the time recalls him remarking, “Whenever people hear the words ‘drugs’ and ‘crime,’ I want them to think ‘Joe Biden.’” Insisting on anonymity, this former staffer recollected how Biden’s team “had to think up excuses for new hearings on drugs and crime every week—any connection, no matter how remote. He wanted cops at every public meeting—you’d have thought he was running for chief of police.”

The ensuing legislation might also have brought to voters’ minds the name of the venerable Thurmond, Biden’s partner in this effort. Together, the pair sponsored the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other repressive measures, abolished parole for federal prisoners and cut the amount of time by which sentences could be reduced for good behavior. The bipartisan duo also joined hands to cheerlead the passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and its 1988 follow-on, which cumulatively introduced mandatory sentences for drug possession. Biden later took pride in reminding audiences that “through the leadership of Senator Thurmond, and myself, and others,” Congress had passed a law mandating a five-year sentence, with no parole, for anyone caught with a piece of crack cocaine “no bigger than [a] quarter.” That is, they created the infamous disparity in penalties between those caught with powder cocaine (white people) and those carrying crack (black people). Biden also unblushingly cited his and Thurmond’s leading role in enacting laws allowing for the execution of drug dealers convicted of homicide, and expanding the practice of civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement’s plunder of property belonging to people suspected of crimes, even if they are neither charged nor convicted.

Despite pleas from the ­NAACP and the ­ACLU, the 1990s brought no relief from Biden’s crime crusade. He vied with the first Bush Administration to introduce ever more draconian laws, including one proposing to expand the number of offenses for which the death penalty would be permitted to fifty-one. Bill Clinton quickly became a reliable ally upon his 1992 election, and Biden encouraged him to “maintain crime as a Democratic initiative” with suitably tough legislation. The ensuing 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, passed with enthusiastic administration pressure, would consign millions of black Americans to a life behind bars.

In subsequent years, as his crime legislation, particularly on mandatory sentences, attracted efforts at reform, Biden began expressing a certain remorse. “I am part of the problem that I have been trying to solve since then, because I think the disparity [between crack and powder cocaine sentences] is way out of line,” he declared at a Senate hearing in 2008. However, there is little indication that his words were matched by actions, especially after he moved to the vice presidency the following year. The executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, Eric Sterling, who worked on the original legislation in the House as a congressional counsel, told me, “During the eight years he was vice president, I never saw him take a leadership role in the area of drug policy, never saw him get out in front on the issue like he did on same-sex marriage, for example. Biden could have taken a stronger line [with Obama] privately or publicly, and he did not.”

While many black Americans will neither forgive nor forget how they, along with relatives and friends, were accorded the lifetime stigma of a felony conviction, many other Americans are only now beginning to count the costs of these viciously repressive initiatives. As a result, criminal justice reform has emerged as a popular issue across the political spectrum, including among conservatives eager to burnish otherwise illiberal credentials. Ironically, this has led, in theory, to a modest unraveling of a portion of Biden’s bipartisan crime-fighting legacy.

Last December, as Donald Trump’s erratic regime was falling into increasing disarray, the political-media class briefly united in celebration of an exercise in bipartisanship: the First Step Act. Billed as a long overdue overhaul of the criminal justice system, the legislation received rapturous reviews for its display of cross-party cooperation, headlined by Jared Kushner’s partnership with liberal talk-show host Van Jones. In truth, this was a very modest first step. It offered the possibility of release to some 2,600 federal inmates, whose relief from excessive sentences would require the goodwill of both prosecutors and police, as well as forbidding some especially barbaric practices in federal prisons, such as the shackling of pregnant inmates. Overall, it amounted to little more than a textbook exercise in aisle bridging, a triumph of form over substance.

In the near term, it’s unlikely that there will be further bipartisan attempts to chip away at Biden’s legislative legacy, a legacy that includes an inconsistent (to put it mildly) record on abortion rights. Roe v. Wade “went too far,” he told an interviewer in 1974. “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” For some years his votes were consistent with that view. He supported the notorious Hyde Amendment prohibiting any and all federal funding for abortions, and fathered the “Biden Amendment” that banned the use of US foreign aid for abortion research.

As the 1980s wore on, however, and Biden’s presidential ambitions started to swell, he began to cast fewer antiabortion votes (with some exceptions), and led the potent opposition to Judge Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Then came Clarence Thomas. Even before Anita Hill reluctantly surfaced with her convincing recollections of unpleasant encounters with the porn-obsessed judge, Biden was fumbling his momentous responsibility of directing the hearings. As Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson report in Strange Justice, their book about the Thomas nomination battle, Biden’s questions were “sometimes so long and convoluted that Thomas would forget what the question was.” Biden prided himself on his legal scholarship, Mayer and Abramson suggest, and thus his questions were often designed “to show off [his] legal acumen rather than to elicit answers.”

More damningly, Biden not only allowed fellow committee members to mount a sustained barrage of vicious attacks on Hill: he wrapped up the hearings without calling at least two potential witnesses who could have convincingly corroborated Hill’s testimony and, by extension, indicated that the nominee had perjured himself on a sustained basis throughout the hearings. As Mayer and Abramson write, “Hill’s reputation was not foremost among the committee’s worries. The Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, appear to have been far more concerned with their own reputations,” and feared a Republican-stoked public backlash if they aired more details of Thomas’s sexual proclivities. Hill was therefore thrown to the wolves, and America was saddled with a Supreme Court justice of limited legal qualifications and extreme right-wing views (which he had taken pains to deny while under oath).

Fifteen years later, Biden would repeat this exercise in hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, yet another grim product of the Republican judicial-selection machinery. True to form, in his opening round of questions, Biden droned on for the better part of half an hour, allowing Alito barely five minutes to explain his views. As the torrent of verbiage washed over the hearing room, fellow Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy could only glower at Biden in impotent frustration.

Biden’s record on race and women did him little damage with the voters of Delaware, who regularly returned him to the Senate with comfortable margins. On race, at least, Biden affected to believe that Delawareans’ views might be closer to those of his old buddy Thurmond than those of the “Northeast liberal” he sometimes claimed to be. “You don’t know my state,” he told Fox as he geared up for his first attempt on the White House in 2006. “My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything [but] a Northeast liberal state.” Months later, in front of a largely Republican audience in South Carolina, he joked that the only reason Delaware had fought with the North in the Civil War was “because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”

Whether or not most Delawareans are proud of their slaveholding history, there are some causes that they, or at least the dominant power brokers in the state, hold especially dear. Foremost among them is Delaware’s status as a freewheeling tax haven. State laws have made Delaware the domicile of choice for corporations, especially banks, and it competes for business with more notorious entrepôts such as the Cayman Islands. Over half of all US public companies are legally headquartered there.

“It’s a corporate whore state, of course,” the anonymous former Biden staffer remarked to me offhandedly in a recent conversation. He stressed that in “a small state with thirty-five thousand bank employees, apart from all the lawyers and others from the financial industry,” Biden was never going to stray too far from the industry’s priorities. We were discussing bankruptcy, an issue that has highlighted Biden’s fealty to the banks. Unsurprisingly, Biden was long a willing foot soldier in the campaign to emasculate laws allowing debtors relief from loans they cannot repay. As far back as 1978, he helped negotiate a deal rolling back bankruptcy protections for graduates with federal student loans, and in 1984 worked to do the same for borrowers with loans for vocational schools. Even when the ostensible objective lay elsewhere, such as drug-related crime, Biden did not forget his banker friends. Thus the 1990 Crime Control Act, with Biden as chief sponsor, further limited debtors’ ability to take advantage of bankruptcy protections.

These initiatives, however, were only precursors to the finance lobby’s magnum opus: the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. This carefully crafted flail of the poor made it almost impossible for borrowers to get traditional “clean slate” Chapter 7 bankruptcy, under which debt forgiveness enables people to rebuild their lives and businesses. Instead, the law subjected them to the far harsher provisions of Chapter 13, effectively turning borrowers into indentured servants of institutions like the credit card companies headquartered in Delaware. It made its way onto the statute books after a lopsided 74–25 vote (bipartisanship!), with Biden, naturally, voting in favor.

It was, in fact, the second version of the bill. An earlier iteration had passed Congress in 2000 with Biden’s support, but President Clinton refused to sign it at the urging of the first lady, who had been briefed on its iniquities by Elizabeth Warren. A Harvard Law School professor at the time, Warren witheringly summarized Biden’s advocacy of the earlier bill in a 2002 paper:

His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat.

Furthermore, she added tartly, “This important part of Senator Biden’s legislative work also appears to be missing from his Web site and publicity releases.” No doubt coincidentally, the credit card giant MBNA was Biden’s largest contributor for much of his Senate career, while also employing his son Hunter as an executive and, later, as a well-remunerated consultant.

It should go without saying, then, that Biden was among the ninety senators on one of the fatal (to the rest of us) legislative gifts presented to Wall Street back in the Clinton era: the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999. The act repealed the hallowed Depression-era Glass–Steagall legislation that severed investment banking from commercial banking, thereby permitting the combined operations to gamble with depositors’ money, and ultimately ushering in the 2008 crash. “The worst vote I ever cast in my entire time in the United States Senate,” admitted Biden in December 2016, as he prepared to leave office. Seventeen years too late, he explained that the act had “allowed banks with deposits to take on risky investments, putting the whole system at risk.”

In the meantime, of course, he had been vice president of the United States for eight years, and thus in a position to address the consequences of his (and his fellow senators’) actions by using his power to press for criminal investigations. His longtime faithful aide, Ted Kaufman, in fact, had taken over his Senate seat and was urging such probes. Yet there is not the slightest sign that Biden used his influence to encourage pursuit of the financial fraudsters. As he opined in a 2018 talk at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.” Characteristically, he described gross inequalities in wealth mainly as a threat to bipartisanship: “This gap is yawning, and it’s having the effect of pulling us apart. You see the politics of it.”

Biden’s rightward bipartisan inclinations are not the only source of his alleged appeal. In an imitation of Hillary Clinton’s tactics in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Biden has advertised himself as the candidate of “experience.” Indeed, in his self-estimation he is the “most qualified person in the country to be president.” It’s a claim mainly rooted in foreign policy, a field where, theoretically, partisan politics are deposited at the water’s edge and Biden’s negotiating talents and expertise are seen to their best advantage.

He boasts the same potent acquaintances with world leaders that helped earn Clinton a similar “most qualified” label on her failed presidential job application and, like her, has been a reliable hawk, not least when occupying the high-profile chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. An ardent proponent of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, an ill-conceived initiative that has served as an enduring provocation of Russian hostility toward the West, Biden voted enthusiastically to authorize Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, was a major proponent of Clinton’s war in Kosovo, and pushed for military intervention in Sudan.

Presumably in deference to this record, Obama entrusted his vice president with a number of foreign policy tasks over the years, beginning with “quarterbacking,” as Biden put it, US relations with Iraq. “Joe will do Iraq,” the president told his foreign policy team a few weeks after being sworn in. “He knows it, he knows the players.” It proved to be an unfortunate choice, at least for Iraqis. In 2006, the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, had selected Nouri al-Maliki, a relatively obscure Shiite politician, to be the country’s prime minister. “Are you serious?” exclaimed a startled Maliki when Khalilzad informed him of the decision. But Maliki proved to be a determinedly sectarian ruler, persecuting the Sunni tribes that had switched sides to aid US forces during the so-called surge of 2007–08. In addition, he sparked widespread allegations of corruption. According to the Iraqi Commission of Integrity set up after his departure, as much as $500 billion was siphoned off from government coffers during Maliki’s eight years in power.

In the 2010 parliamentary elections, one of Maliki’s rivals, boasting a nonsectarian base of support, won the most seats, though not a majority. According to present and former Iraqi officials, Biden’s emissaries pressed hard to assemble a coalition that would reinstall Maliki as prime minister. “It was clear they were not interested in anyone else,” one Iraqi diplomat told me. “Biden himself was very scrappy—he wouldn’t listen to argument.” The consequences were, in the official’s words, “disastrous.” In keeping with the general corruption of his regime, Maliki allowed the country’s security forces to deteriorate. Command of an army division could be purchased for $2 million, whereupon the buyer might recoup his investment with exactions from the civilian population. Therefore, when the Islamic State erupted out of Syria and moved against major Iraqi cities, there were no effective defenses. With Islamic State fighters an hour’s drive from Baghdad, the United States belatedly rushed to push Maliki aside and install a more competent leader, the Shiite politician and former government minister Haider al-Abadi. (Biden’s camp disputed the Iraqi official’s assertion that the United States pressed for Maliki in 2010. “We had no brief for any individual,” said Tony Blinken, who served as Biden’s national security adviser at the time.)

Biden devotes considerable space to this episode in Promise Me, Dad, his political and personal memoir documenting the year in which his son Beau slowly succumbed to cancer. But although we learn much about Biden’s relationship with Abadi, and the key role he played in getting vital help to the beleaguered Iraqi regime, there is little indication of his past with Maliki aside from a glancing reference to “stubbornly sectarian policies.”

Promise Me, Dad also covers Biden’s involvement in the other countries allotted to him by President Obama: Ukraine, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Anyone seeking insight from the book into the recent history of these regions, or of actual US policy and actions there, should look elsewhere. He has little to say, for example, about the well-chronicled involvement of US officials in the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, still less on whether he himself was involved. He records his strenuous efforts to funnel ­IMF loans to the country following anti-­corruption measures introduced by the government without noting that much of the IMF money was almost immediately stolen and spirited out of Ukraine by an oligarch close to the government. Nor, for that matter, do we learn anything about his son Hunter’s involvement in that nation’s business affairs via his position on the board of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by a former Ukrainian ecology minister accused by the UK government of stealing at least $23 million of Ukrainian taxpayers’ money.

Biden’s recollections of his involvement in Central American affairs are no more forthright, and no more insightful. There is no mention of the 2009 coup in Honduras, endorsed and supported by the United States, that displaced the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, nor of that country’s subsequent descent into the rule of a corrupt oligarchy accused of ties to drug traffickers. He has nothing but warm words for Juan Orlando Hernández, the current president, who financed his 2013 election campaign with $90 million stolen from the Honduran health service and more recently defied his country’s constitution by running for a second term. Instead, we read much about Biden’s shepherding of the Hernández regime, along with its Central American neighbors El Salvador and Guatemala, into the Alliance for Prosperity, an agreement in which the signatories pledged to improve education, health care, women’s rights, justice systems, etc., in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid. In the words of Professor Dana Frank of UC Santa Cruz, the alliance “supports the very economic sectors that are actively destroying the Honduran economy and environment, like mega-dams, mining, tourism, and African palms,” reducing most of the population to poverty and spurring them to seek something better north of the border. The net result has been a tide of refugees fleeing north, most famously exemplified by the “caravan” used by Donald Trump to galvanize support prior to November’s congressional elections.

Biden’s claims of experience on the world stage, therefore, cannot be denied. True, the experience has been routinely disastrous for those on the receiving end, but on the other hand, that is a common fate for those subjected, under any administration, to the operations of our foreign policy apparatus.

Given Biden’s all too evident shortcomings in the fields of domestic and foreign policy, defenders inevitably retreat to the “electability” argument, which contends that he is the only Democrat on the horizon capable of beating Trump—a view that Biden, naturally, endorses. Specifically, this notion rests on the belief that Biden has unequaled appeal among the white working-class voters that many Democrats are eager to court.

To be fair, Biden has earned high ratings from the AFL-CIO thanks to his support for matters such as union organizing rights and a higher minimum wage. On the other hand, he also supported NAFTA in 1994 and permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000, two votes that sounded the death knell for America’s manufacturing economy. Regardless of how justified his pro-labor reputation may be, however, it’s far from clear that the working class holds Biden in any special regard—his two presidential races imploded before any blue-collar workers had a chance to vote for him.

It is this fact that makes the electability argument so puzzling. Biden’s initial bid for the prize in 1988 famously blew up when rivals unkindly publicized his plagiarism of a stump speech given by Neil Kinnock, a British Labour Party politician. (In Britain, Kinnock was known as “the Welsh Windbag,” which may have encouraged the logorrheic Biden to feel a kinship.) Biden partisans pointed out that he had cited Kinnock on previous occasions, though he didn’t always remember to do so. Either way, it was a bizarre snafu. It also emerged that Biden had been incorporating chunks of speeches from both Bobby and Jack Kennedy along with Hubert Humphrey in his remarks without attribution (although reportedly some of this was the work of speechwriter Pat Caddell).

Another gaffe helped upend Biden’s second White House bid, in 2007, when he referred to Barack Obama in patronizing terms as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” The campaign cratered at the very first hurdle, the Iowa caucuses, where Biden came in fifth, with less than 1 percent of the votes. “It was humiliating,” recalled the ex-staffer. (The “gaffes” seem to take physical form on occasion. “He has a bit of a Me Too problem,” a leading female Democratic activist and fund-raiser told me, referring to his overly tactile approach to interacting with women. “We never had a talk when he wasn’t stroking my back.” He has already faced heckling on the topic, and videos of this behavior during the course of public events and photo ops have been widely circulated.)

Further to the issue of Biden’s assurances that he is the man to beat Trump is the awkward fact that, as the former staffer told me, “he lacks the discipline to build the nuts and bolts of a modern presidential campaign.” Biden “hated having to take orders from [David] Axelrod and the other Obama people as a vice-presidential candidate in 2008. Campaign aides used to say to him, ‘I’ve got three words for you: Air Force Two.’” My informant stressed that Biden “sucks at fund-raising. He never had to try very hard in Delaware. Staff would do it for him.” Certainly, Biden’s current campaign funds would appear to confirm this contention. His PAC, American Possibilities, had raised only two and a half million dollars by the end of 2018, a surprisingly insignificant amount for a veteran senator and two-term vice president. Furthermore, although the PAC’s stated purpose is to “support candidates who believe in American possibilities,” less than a quarter of the money had found its way to Democratic candidates in time for the November midterms, encouraging speculation that Biden is not really that serious about the essential brass tacks of a presidential campaign—which would include building a strong base of support among Democratic officeholders.

Other organizations in the Biden universe behave similarly, expending much of their income on staff salaries and little on their ostensible function. According to an exhaustive New York Times investigation, salaries accounted for 45 percent of spending by the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children in 2016 and 2017. Similarly, three quarters of the money the Biden Cancer Initiative spent in 2017 went toward salaries and other compensation, including over half a million dollars for its president, Greg Simon, formerly the executive director of Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Task Force during the Obama Administration. Outside the inner circle of senior aides, there does not appear to be an extended Biden network among political professionals standing ready to raise money and perform other tasks necessary to a White House bid, in the way that Hillary Clinton had a network across the political world composed of people who had worked for her and her husband. “Biden doesn’t have that,” his former staffer told me, “because he’s indifferent to staff.” It’s a sentiment that’s been expressed to me by many in the election industry, including a veteran Democratic campaign strategist. “Everyone else is getting everything set up to go once the trigger is pulled,” this individual told me recently. “I myself have firm offers from the [Kamala] Harris and [Cory] Booker campaigns. The Biden people talked to me too, but they could only say, ‘If we run, we’d love to bring you into the fold.’”

At the start of the new year, Biden must have been living in the best of all possible worlds. As he engaged in well-publicized ruminations on whether or not to run, he was enjoying a high profile, with commensurate benefits of sizable book sales and hundred-thousand-dollar speaking engagements. Even more importantly, Biden found himself relevant again. “You’re either on the way up,” he likes to say, “or you’re on the way down,” which is why the temptation to reject the lessons of his two hopelessly bungled White House campaigns has been so overwhelming. Regardless of the current election cycle’s endgame, though, it’s safe to assume that his undimmed ego will never permit any reflection on whether voters who have been eagerly voting for change will ever really settle for Uncle Joe, champion of yesterday’s sordid compromises.

[brattywriters-anonymous]

Spectacle III.2

Inspired by our favorite hip hop couple, Offset and Cardi.

I was arguing with my best friend about what he did on her rolling loud set. I’m just gonna write this with Erik x OC (Black! OC);

@chaneajoyyy @theunsweetenedtruth

Erik is a rapper as OC is a rising star. They recently married and his indiscretions have been publicly known via social media, Erik makes multiple attempts to make up for it.

June, 2018:

Erik Stevens, Stage Name: E. Kill. 31 years old. Married to Raelynn Stevens (Maiden, Johnson) They share one child, a 4 month-old Named Kire (Pronouced KYE-REE) Stephens.

Raelynn Stevens, Stage Name: Rae. 29 years old. Married to Erik Stevens. She and Erik share a daughter, 4 month-old Kire Stevens.

December 17, 2017

“I’m Dr. King. Great to finally meet you Raelynn and Erik. I’d like both of you to understand that therapy will either bring you closer together, or it will help you conclude that you’re not meant to be together. Either way, I am here to simply mediate. So where do you wanna start?”

E and Rae looked at each other, hesitant to speak. Dr. King giggles, “It’s normal to feel nervous at your first session. Let’s just start at the beginning. When did you two fall in love?”

April 7, 2015

Paramount Recording Studios

“Hey deej, can you run that back for me?”

The bass heavy beat played back

Yeah, Rarri swervin’ lane to lane

Name not Erika, I keep the Kane

Be careful speakin on my name

Me & Kill’s bitches ain’t the same

I’ll change the nigga whole life

On one knee not thinkin’ twice

Lay it on em real nice

Hella bad, I’m sorta like his vice

Deej, Rae’s in house producer stopped the beat as Erik walked in. They were working on Rae’s second mixtape and her collaboration with E. Kill was the last song she had to finish before submitting it.

“Well, about time you joined us E. I was beginning to think I was gonna have to find someone else to do the track with.” he scoffed and side eyed his co star, “Girl please, they can’t kill it like me!” She shot him the same side eye, knowing that his statement was a double entendre, “Deej, excuse us for a moment please?” She rose out of her swivel seat, “I need a 10 anyway. I gotta call my girl and let her know I’ma be late, again!” “I’m sorry girl, tell Nonnie I’m sorry!” She waved Rae off making her exit.

“Why are you late?” Erik looked up as if he was in deep thought, “If I recall correctly, I went out on a date with a lovely woman. You may know her, Raelynn? Yeah. She finally let me wine and dine her fine ass after three months of begging and pleading!” He tugged at Rae’s sweat strings until she closed their distance by the switchboard before he continued, “And after one too many glasses of Rose, Raelynn and I went back to my place and made love all..night..long.” Rae laughed at Erik’s silly rendition of humping his last three words. “She wore me out. I woke up about a hour ago.” Rae finally rested her arms on his chest, “Oh so I wear that ass out, huh?” “That, you do. Damn girl, what am I gon do witchu?” They rested their foreheads together, “I’m sure you’ll think of a thing or two.. or a few.”

Erik tilted Rae’s chin up and kissed her, slowly yet with intent. He reached in her pocket, “Call Deej. Tell her she can go home. I know she missin’ her wifey and I need some time with mine.” “Wait, but I’m not your wi--” “Shh. You don’t know what you are to me. I told you I love you last night. I meant that shit.” They stared at each other for a few minutes, for Rae memories shot through her body of the night before. How all of the rumors she heard about E being a rough and ruthless lover in bed fell through when he laid her down gently and stroked her body delicately, covering every inch of her body in kisses before doing so. His voice echoed in his brain, “I love you Rae.”

“Deej, hey. Take the night off. Yeah, we got it. We may even finish both of our verses tonight. I got the studio time, don’t worry about it. Thanks for the beat though. Yeah, come back tomorrow so we can mix and master it. Alright. Bye.”

They spent the first half on that night making love all over the studio. Tagging each area with their bodies, they fucked up all of the levels on the switchboard, they smeared the glass in the recording booth, they finally finished on the couch and love seat where he said it again, “I love you Rae” her storm washed over her hearing him say it exactly how he did the night before, “I love you too E!” He grinned at her, “I told you last night baby, call me N’jadaka.” Her body was still going into refractory when she asked,  “I thought your name was Erik?” He wiped the sweat off her brow, “It is. For people who don’t know me.” She held his body tightly and close, “Okay Rae bae, we been going for two hours! We gotta finish this song. When we get done, we can go again.”

Dr. King stared at the couple, talking hand in hand, “Wow. You two had a whirlwind kind of love. It happened sort of fast!” Rae nodded her head, holding her belly with her free hand, “Without that, we wouldn’t have her so, I don’t care how fast it happened.” Erik kissed her forehead, “Me either.” Dr King wrote in her pad, slightly grinning, “I think there’s some hope for you two..”

June, 2018

This is TMZ news, the show with the latest in celebrity news.

Just five months after reconciling, E. Kill was caught cheating.. once again. Text messages surfaced after a rap beef between two women, Kyleene and Jae Doe went south. One of Jae’s friends outed Kyleene and claimed that Ky and her now former friend Xena tried to set up a threesome with E. Kill. After Ky denied the allegations, Xena came forward and leaked screenshots of messages between E. Kill and her, as well as messages between her and Ky, trying to confirm dates for the meet up. Although Xena never confirmed if they met up or not, it’s clear that E was trying to set that up.

Just a couple of hours ago, Rae went on her live and set the record straight for her fans:

“Hey faves, how ya’ll doing out there? First and foremost I’d like to thank all of you for supporting me and my music.  (Pauses) I’m sorry if you all hear Kire in the background, she’s a baby so..you know she’s gonna be cooing and whatnot. Anyway, as all of you know, my relationship has been in the public eye for about 6 months now. I’ve played everything about it real close to the chest since we got together because I thought it was the only thing I should keep to myself. For the past 6 months, N-Erik and I have been trying to reconcile our marriage for the sake of Kire and the love our relationship was built on. But now, I just think it’s time for us to go our separate ways. My husband and I love each other so much and we’re family, always and forever, but I think this separation and ultimate divorce is what’s right for us. I just ask for the fans who love us, continue loving us, continue supporting us in our future endevors. Love ya’ll! Bye.”

After Rae’s statement she finally posted adorable 4 month old Kire Genevieve Stevens

The employees awed at Kire’s cute little face, “She looks like a baby doll! Aww! E and Rae did that! E may not be sh*t, but they did that!” Raquel Harper clutched her heart, marveling at the baby. Harvey Levin smiled at the screen displaying her picture, “She is adorable. Which leads the question to E, with a hardworking and fine young woman at home like Rae and an adorable baby to go home to, why go back to your old ways that almost lost you your wife, again? I don’t get it!” Van Lathan stood up from his desk, “I hope he gets Rae back man..” “You think he can, Van?” Van scratched his head, “I don’t know Harvey but if he can, I say he goes for it. He made a beautiful family I hope he doesn’t let Rae go because every guy’s gonna try to scoop that up. I’m team love and he really loves her.”

“Once again, our well wishes are with the Stevens’ family in this difficult time.”

July, 2018

New Orleans

Essence Music Festival

Rae was set to co-headline the Saturday night set at the Dome with Mary J. Blige, this was her first major headline at any music festival. The only time her and N’jadaka spoke was when he’d facetime, and that was barely speaking, she’d only say hello to make sure he was connected before panning the phone to Kire’s face to babble to her father. It had been like that for over a month. Rae was halfway through her set before her DJ stopped, she looked around, “DJ, What the fuck?” Next thing she knew, E came out with a huge bouquet of flowers and a Mic. 

Rae was fuming, and she couldn’t hide the look on her face. She was shaking her head before he could even get to her. By the time he did get to her, he looked confused, covering the mic, “Baby, I’m sorry! Just hear me out!” Rae responded, “No! I have a show to do! What are you doing?” “You not talking to me! What else was I supposed to do?” She folded her arms, completely mortified at his public display. He got on the mic, “Rae, I love you baby. I’m sorry!” He hands her the flowers she was still not on the mic, “How did you even get up here?” Shawna walked on stage and retrieved the flowers, “Shawna..” “I’m sorry love, he was desperate.”

--

Rae finished her set in a blast of applause, “Thank you NOLA! I LOVE YOU!” She rushed to her green room where her entire team met her with congratulations. When Erik entered the room, it went completely silent, “Ya’ll go out and enjoy Mary! Ya’ll are off for the rest of the weekend!” Her make up, hair and wardrobe team cheered as they exited the room. Leaving Rae with Erik and Kire. Erik remained at the door until the last person walked out. He locked the door behind them.

“Rae, I’m sorry baby.” “You’re sorry for what? Getting caught?” Erik strutted over to her vanity, “I’m sorry for entertaining them, for embarrassing you and betraying you again.” “N’jadaka, we were supposed to be working on us. What the fuck! Is this my fault? Is it because I’ve been working since I got cleared after the baby?” “No baby please don’t go thinking this is your fault. It’s all me. This industry is tempting as fuck bae. I’m turning down bitches from left to right. Kyleene slipped through the cracks, claiming she wanted to do a collaboration. I mean, maybe she really did.. I don’t know. We really didn’t talk much. Her friend got my number through her and told me that Ky wanted a threesome.. I didn’t go through with it but I shouldn’t have entertained it.” Rae held her index finger up to his face, “That’s the most honest thing you’ve said in a month-- You shouldn’t have. You’re supposed to be my husband. What happened to talking through our shit like we learned at the beginning of our relationship? Like we re learned in therapy?” He opened his mouth to speak, yet Rae continued.

“What happened to us maintaining our family front, for Kire.. For us?” “Rae I can count on my hand how many times I’ve seen you in the past four months since your six week check up after having Kire. Five. I get it baby, we’re artists. We have to work to get paid. We’ve both been busy since then. We both lost sight of that. I can take my accountability for it. I am here trying to salvage our relationship.” “No, you’re here because you wanted people to feel sorry for you.” “Rae that’s bullshit!” “NO, N’jadaka that’s real shit!” Their bickering match was interrupted by Kire crying at their outburst. Rae pushed Erik out of her way to pick up their child, “We’re not about to yell in front of my child--” “Our child, Rae.” Kire reached for her daddy, he grabbed her. “You right though. We’re not. But that’s BS, you know it. I went up on stage to publicly apologize because my shit came out publically.” Rae still marveled at Erik and Kire’s blooming relationship. She rubbed his face as he was poking his daughter’s belly tickling her, “N’jadaka, you wanna know why I really forgave you the last time?” “Why?” Rae puckered her lips to the side, “Because, you came to me. You didn’t respond to anyone asking you every question under the sun about what I was gonna do or even about when I beat your ass.” They both chuckled at the memory of her destroying half of their old home.

“Even that bad time of our relationship, our friendship. It was just us. What you did out there, was for you. You were seeking validation from me, after betraying my trust, again. Thinking that some flowers and another apology was gonna win me back. It’s not. Like I told you and Dr. King, I’m not tolerating disrespect. You’ve disrespected me yet again. I don’t know if I can recover from that. I damn sure don’t know if you’ll do it again.” “Baby, I’ll never dishonor you or Kire ever again. I swear. I’ll retire if I need to.” Rae giggled at the suggestion, “Nigga, you’ll still be E. Killapussy to these hoes. Retired or not. Them bitches don’t even know what the whole Kill is in your name.” “Nobody does baby, only you.” She rolled her eyes, “Yeah yeah. Whatever.” “Babe, let’s take some time off. Let’s just enjoy each other as a family.” Erik’s puppy dog eyes were just irresistible, “That’s a start, Stevens.” They spent the remainder of the concert in the green room cuddling and coddling with Kire more cordial than they’ve been since before Kire arrived.

-- 

I DO NOT OWN THE RIGHTS TO BLACK PANTHER/MCU NOR THEIR CHARACTERS BEING USED IN MY FICS!

ALSO, I DO NOT OWN THE RIGHTS TO THE BABY PICTURE! I USED IT STRICTLY FOR REFERENCE PURPOSES! 

[dylanobrienisbatman]

Echo Positivity Week!

Day 3: Fave Relationship!

My favourite Echo relationship is........ 

SPACE SISTERS!!! 

I love her relationship with Spacekru as a whole, but spacekru sisters just makes me so emotional i can’t even deal. This relationship is probably my favourite group relationship on the entire show. It has 4 of my favourite characters, and a found family/sister bond is probably one of my favourite ‘tropes’ ever, so its basically just a big ole love fest for me. 

Each pairing with Echo really has different reasons for why I like it, but the group of them as a whole is really awesome. I wrote a fic for this specifically because I really wanted to explore how i imagined their relationships would evolve. 

Echo and Raven I feel like started out rocky, and their relationship didn’t really get started until some type of out right confrontation. I don’t think Raven would have ever seen Echo as a threat up there, but I can’t imagine she didn’t hold a little animosity about Mt Weather (both the abandonment in s2 and the explosion in s3), so i think they needed to sort of have it out a little. But once they really came together, that bond is unbreakable. I feel like they’d see so much strength and power in each other, and respect each other for so many different reasons. I think Echo really sees Raven as a leader, and understands her brilliance, like we see in season 5. 

The relief when they see each other, are reunited, is palpable, and the immediate comment from Echo about how she’s sure Raven figured out the shock collars shows this deep bond and trust between them. We see them go through a rocky patch during the Zeke situation, but even in that they understood each other, and were able to move past it, because even when they dont like what the other one is doing, they are still a family. This relationship is awesome and i want more of it in season 6. 

Echo and Harper didn’t have a single scene where they exchanged dialogue, as far as I can remember, but I have head cannoned from the beginning that Harper was the first person to reach out to Echo. Echo was the one who shared her oxygen with Harper when they were racing against the clock, and I don’t think Harper would be one to forget something like that. 

I think the biggest reason I think that is because of their shared history with being on the brink of suicide. I think having someone like Harper, so kind, so warm, so positive, who had also been in that place, really helped Echo understand her own feelings and see a way out. I also love the idea that Harper was her first friend because Echo was probably completely terrified, and sure that she was going to be alone up there, and someone had to have been the first to reach out, and try to bring her into the fold, and Harper is such a warm presence that it just makes sense. I think Echo really valued having Harper in her life, and there was a great deal of love between them. 

Echo and Emori was a relationship I was stoked about from basically the second season 4 ended, because there are so many different ways it could go. How long would it take Emori to trust Echo? How much time would it take for Echo to move past her prejudice? Would they bond even stronger because of their shared identity as Grounders, or would they be set apart because Emori was rejected by Echo’s culture? So many questions that a few flashbacks really could have answered, but alas. We are left to head canon. I feel like it probably took Echo a while, not to get past her prejudice outright necessarily, but to feel comfortable around Emori, because her culture would have taught her that Emori was someone to fear and revile. I think she would have gotten past it much faster than Emori got past her unease, though. I think it would have taken an outright act of some kind of blatant acceptance (like touching her hand) for Emori to see that Echo had changed, because Emori would have rightly been skeptical that Echo was only pretending to keep herself safe. But I think once they got past that moment, and once they were past that monumental hump, they would be really close. 

Echo and Emori share so many traits. Cunning tricksters, smart as a whip, kind, warm, ruthless, unyielding, supportive, the list goes on and on, and I think once they became friends, it would be the fast track to that sister bond. We see the one scene in season 5 where Emori sits down, puts her badass arm on Echo’s shoulder, and comforts her about Bellamy, knowing intrinsically what Echo was thinking about and offering the support she needed. They lean on each other, they support each other, and I like to think in space they really shared that common bond of sort of missing earth, because they had always been so tied too it. I like to think they became very close. 

I feel like these three relationships, and the group relationship, had a huge affect on Echo and her growth, because it’s so different than any other relationship in her life, and female friendships are SO strong. Her relationship with Bellamy is so important, and I’m sure her relationships with Murphy and Monty were also extremely close and strong, but friendships between women are just this whole other game, and I just love so much that she is able to have that with these girls. I am going to be so sad to watch her mourn her lost sister this coming season, but I know the bond she has with her other two sisters will help her get through it.

[sometimesrosy]

one member of spacekru who’s most likely to die in s6? and why

Geez. We just lost Harper and Monty, we gotta kill another one?

Sigh.

Okay.

Bellamy is safe. Just. he is.

Raven is safer. They killed Monty, they can’t kill their other tech. That DID make Raven safer. 

Murphy is safe-ish I think. Although I can’t tell until I get his storyline. I’m not sure he’s done with his character development.

Emori is…. idk. She’s support. They need her but she’s extra. And the characters added later are never safe. All of them are at risk. But I see no narrative purpose for her death, which I can’t say for Echo.

Echo. Echo is my pick if one of them HAS to go. WHY? Because she’s been a narrative tool for a LOT of stories that have been resolved. Bellamy learning to forgive himself. Bellamy learning to accept love. The grounder conflict. A parallel of the CL betrayal. A parallel of Clarke being just as ruthless as the enemy. And NOW we have the love triangle in which, for the long term narrative, Bellamy will NOT choose her. That’s a LOT of stories that are done. When Lincoln’s use as a narrative tool ended, so did the character. They’re secondary characters, not main characters, and while we might LEARN about them, the story does NOT tell their stories. They SUPPORT the main characters. This is how you tell a story. 

HOWEVER, that we have been told that we will be getting some of Echo’s backstory means I worry that means they are going to help us understand her, so that her loss hurts more.

HOWEVER, again, she may not DIE. 

One of her stated themes, by JR, although we haven’t really SEEN it really come out yet, is of BELONGING. Who is her family? Where does she belong? If Bellamy chooses Clarke, then this will come up. If Octavia still rejects her. It will come up. If Raven becomes friends with Clarke again, it will come up. 

Here’s a way I could see it connecting to the two suns planet story:

The “peaceful” society that Russell leads is only peaceful because it subjugates other people. Other humans or aliens or both. When they discover this around mid-late-season, it is very possible that Echo’s backstory will relate. HOW? They are from different planets!!

Because ECHO was a child soldier. She was taken as a child and raised to be an assassin by Nia (like Ontari was raised to be a tool/heda.) Okay. So lets go back to the question of belonging. If she doesn’t believe that love or 6 years is enough to make her BELONG to spacekru, then who ARE her people? 

IF we see slavery/subjugation be an issue on planet two suns, then I see a connection with Echo’s story. She will feel she belongs with THE OTHER SLAVES. 

Okay well. Okay. Well. Now you’re getting into a theory I have on where the story could go which is TOTALLY speculation and me putting together themes and other storylines. Okay so. My spec is that in order to SAVE the new planet, Clarke and Bellamy will actually have to KILL that “peaceful” society, and their OWN chances of living a better life, or giving their people a new planet. A little bit like what happened with MW, but not in desperation this time. This time they make the choice CONSCIOUSLY to end these people, so that OTHER people may live. 

And that means they have to LEAVE (I have a spec that they will turn that ELigius 4 around and head back to earth for another 75 years of cyro sleep which would get them back to earth 200 years after it was destroyed, which was the ORIGINAL Ark estimation of when the earth would be livable again,) and I speculate that instead of “dying” Echo would stay behind, because she’s chosen her new people, and it’s the subjugated people of planet two suns. 

Well listen. It’s a story. It’s a theory. It could happen. 

[falafel14]

S4 Meta: A Different Kind of Monty Appreciation Post

So a lot of fans have been talking about Monty being the MVP of the season and wishing Monty was more appreciated. I may be the only one who wishes Monty's flaws in S4 were being recognized too. And not because I'm a Monty hater by any means, but because Monty's flaws make him a more complex character. In my Cold Child Thawing essay, I discussed that - despite fandom's perception of Monty as this precious cupcake - Monty is actually one of the most ruthless of the delinquents. I'm seeing a lot of anger directed towards Jasper and Harper for upsetting Monty in 4x9, but not much criticism of Monty's lack of empathy and his disdainful judgements towards his suicidal loved ones. I can't criticize Monty too harshly either. I don't think it's entirely his fault. Monty strikes me as one of those High IQ Low EQ types who can solve all manner of technical problems but is useless when it comes to dealing with emotional problems. It has to be said that despite Monty's many heroic accomplishments in S4, he has neglected his personal relationships. And now it’s come home to roost.   

"Clarke thinks you're expendable"

Like Clarke, Monty has always been a diehard Team Survive member and can in no way comprehend anyone not sharing his ‘survival at any cost’ mentality. So with this aspect of Monty in mind, let me put this on the table - I think Monty was pissed off about being excluded from Clarke’s list. To be fair, Monty should be pissed. I'M pissed at Monty not being on the list. Everyone is. While Monty later says that he might've agreed with Clarke's decision, I don't believe him. If you re-watch the scene where Jasper discovers the list, Monty is defending Clarke and insisting that she "has her reasons!", etc, right up until the moment he's told he's not on it. This isn't the only thing that gets Monty appalled enough to make the list public. Harper being left off and Jasper being shock-lashed and locked up also contributed to his decision. But I don't believe that Monty was opposed to Clarke playing God and deceiving the Arkadian population like Jasper was. I think Monty understood Clarke's secrecy and control over her list as necessary survival protocol. Monty defying Clarke over that list was personal. I'd also say that Monty's actions through the rest of S4 go to show how much Monty took being left off Clarke's list personally. Yes, Monty is the MVP of the season but that is largely because Monty’s been hankering after the role of MVP ever since Clarke deemed him expendable. Monty thought he'd already done enough to be worthy of the A Team (IMO, he had). So Monty finding out that he has not been ranked as one of the top 100 most valuable members of the Arkadian camp has made him even determined to prove his worth.

"Someone's moving up in the world..."

Monty proving his usefulness in S4 has ranged from tirelessly contributing to field missions (if he's not in an episode he's off in the rover somewhere), to individual feats of heroism (surrendering himself to Ice Nation to warn them about the Riley situation) and exhibiting his intelligence (solving the bunker key). None of this is out of character for Monty. He has been a useful team player in past seasons too. But in S4 I feel he’s more proactive and assertive where he used to be subservient. Take Monty's involvement in stopping the Ark mob killing Illian. Monty compares the situation to the delinquent mob hanging Murphy but in that situation Monty had been a passive bystander. More recently Monty set a mob of Grounder slaves on the Ice Nation guard who'd killed his dad. Why does Monty, who has previously been passive or even supportive of mob justice, now object to the mob executing Illian? In my view, it's because mob rule in Arkadia would mean that Kane and Jaha have lost control. If there is no hierarchy then what is budding MVP Monty supposed to aspire to?

Monty has been working to make himself invaluable to the camp leaders and Harper teasingly notes that Monty is "moving up" when he’s asked to join the leaders on the Polis mission. Monty’s striving for status not only puts him in a stronger position to be chosen for survival if options become available again. I think Monty also wants to be in a position to save Harper and Jasper who were also deemed expendable as per Clarke's list. Monty spends S4 largely ignoring Harper and Jasper's symptoms of serious depression because he's mistakenly convinced that finding a sanctuary will be one simple cure all to their emotional breakdowns. When Monty succeeds in being the hero and the two people he cares for most don't instantly recover, he doesn't get it. He is angry at them for being suicidal even though the red flags were there all along and Monty had disregarded them. Jasper and Harper instinctively recognize each other’s despair while Monty is blind to it. Blind to them.   

"Are you judging me, Monty?"

When Jasper addresses his DNR party crowd he tells them they're free to leave and there will be no negative judgements on those who change their mind. As much as Jasper may be nihilistic, the delinquents are not getting this kind of choice or respect from Team Survive. Monty is a prime example of this. Monty judges Bellamy for abandoning the survival cause for just one night of fun. The DNR party is being called a suicide cult, but Team Survive are just as religious about their ideology, frowning on those who lose the faith. Monty's judgement of Harper is even worse, calling a suicidal person a coward being one of the most emotionally tone deaf things you can do. Harper and Jasper have both braved enough dangers during their time on earth. They are both broken Gryffindors who have fought for their own lives and their friends. What they’re questioning now is whether this fight is worth it when life comes in endless cycles of pain. If Monty had got them both to come to Polis they’d have been greeted by another bloody war. However, the decision over whether to leave the DNR group to their choice is still a very difficult issue. In the real world, you would certainly not let drunk traumatized children lock themselves in a room to die. Monty wants Jaha to take them by force. He argues that they are “wasted”, not mentally competent enough to make a sane decision. It is Bellamy, not Monty, who defends the DNR group’s free will. Monty’s not entirely wrong, but he fails to show empathy for Jasper and Harper the way Bellamy empathizes with them.

Ultimately I think Monty has made the best decision he could have under the circumstances. It would’ve been wrong to force those kids to go to Polis but it also felt wrong to abandon them. Jasper and Harper are Monty’s people and what were all his survival efforts for if he’s left alone? This is the problem that Monty has to solve now and emotional problems are not his strength. But at least he has the right approach now. Like Jasper said “If you think you have the best idea then you have to convince people” not take away their free will. So if Monty wants to convince those kids that it’s worth trying to survive then the first thing he needs to do is try to understand them. Not look at them as cowards or crazies. If Monty can do that he really will be the MVP.

[clexababes13]

Lexa : clarke you literally fell from the sky and straight down to earth

Clarke : im bisexual. Ohhh. I'll go down on you.

Lexa : what?

Clarke : whaaaaatt....... noth-Nothing

I said absolutely nothing.....

Lexa : your go don t on me?.... is that another SkaiKru saying?

*sky people are so writes with their words*

Clarke : uuhhh.... yeah. Ohhh... yeah.

Lexa : What does it mean?

Clarke : well.... it mean ur beautiful, like nature,..... And I always look at you... earth..... from the lonely very lonely ark..... And that... that your worth going down on.

.. I mean too... Even of it could kill me... Because our heda---- I mean we didn't know of the plant is ever survival...... yeah.... so..... yeah....

Lexa : so you think I'm beautiful.... And that you admire me often.... And that youd be willing to go down on me even if it could cost you your life....?

Clarke : nooo-- I mean yessss. Yeah yesss.

Lexa : u was wrong about you clarke.

Your heart shows no weakness. And that u thought you were straight... I was wrong about that too..... for the first time in decades I'm wrong.....

Clarke : it's ok to be wrong at times. Lexa.

I'm here if it you need to talk and stuff..

Lexa : ok good. Because I can never tell the difference between 'conversation' and 'sex'... mind explaining it to me?

Clarke : yeah, sure, anything for you.

Lexa : great, follow me. We should do this somewhere more private.

Clarke : wait...why do we need to discuss this in your bedroo-?......ohhhhhhh.

Lexa : you said you find me beautiful. Even with all these cloths on..... imagine me without them.

Clarke: I have... I mean.....

Lexa : mmmm..... no wonder you look at me alot..... dont worry clarke. I do the same to you.

Clarke : what did you just say?

Lexa : it doesn't matter what I say... what matters is what you said.... And you said that your go down on me. And I asked you to explain it to me and you agree.... So are we gonna go on with it or are we gonna talk?

Clarke : talk... exactly.... talking is a conversation.

Lexa : ok . Now explain to me what sex is. I'm not good with listening so we might have to act it out. But while at it you can talk......

Clarke : your joking... right?

Lexa : doesn't look like I'm joking. It looks like I'm waiting.

Clarke : well.... ummm..... I don't think that is necessary.

Lexa : ur being unfair.

Clarke : how?....

Lexa : you explain one part and left out the 2nd. So I'll never reall understand the doffernce between converstion and sex.

Clarke :...... I-

Lexa : But you explained it to finn.... soon Nyilah will ask you about it and explain it to her... how come you don't explain it to me?

Clarke : because....

Lexa : because what Clarke?

Clarke : I don't wanna take advantage and lose you.... I thought I loved finn.... And everyone think I love niylah... I mean she's great and supportive but.. you. Lexa... your Differnt.

Lexa : so.... sex isnt just about..... it also means love....?

Clarke : yeah.. I guess.....

Lexa : i heared you say

'I like head-a too....I'd wanna make sweet sweet love to you'

The other day after I said 'ai lik Heda'

Clarke : whaaaat..... I didn't say that.

Lexa : no matter how good you are at making people believe you.... I could always tell when your lying. And right now you are.

Clarke : that's part of love.... too

Lexa : what... knowing someone without having to ask?

Clarke : yes... And their eyes says everything you need to know even when their words doenst for in

Lexa : that's full of non-scense

Clarke : explain.

Lexa : love will always be weakness. Clarke. I would know that.....

Clarke : love is strength. Trust me.

Lexa : yeah. No

Clarke: *backs lexa to a table*

Clarke : see... I pushed you without physically touching you...

Lexa : that's not love.... And you didn't touch me at all.

Clarke : I touched you emotionally. It's stringer then anything.

Lexa : ok. Fine.... But it's still not love

Clarke : ok. Fine..... then look in my eyes and tell me you don t love me. I'll go away.

Lexa : ... you said you'll go down... not away...

Clarke : say you don't love me and I'll go away.

Lexa : and if I said I love you?

Clarke:..... *smirke* then I'll go down

Lexa :...... Clarke Griffin, known as Skai Prisa, Legendary Wanheda, Mountain Slayer. Leader of SkaiKru. The first Red and Night blood, I love you.....

Clarke : lex-

Lexa : but I want to change and do this the proper way.....

Clarke : ......

Lexa : before you could go down. I'd like to go down on my knees. One asking you for your hand in marriage. The other is for bowing to the only prison who have ever made me feel me. As in lexa. Not the cimmander, the nother killer or heda or monster or ruthless. Or emotionless or someone who doesn't care-

Clarke : lexa... your not...

Lexa : Clarke. Will you marry me?.........

I will treat your need as my own. And your people as my people. Make then our people.......

Clarke : are you always good with your words. Like this? Why do is so hot in here.... are you hot?..... I mean.... of course you are..... uhhhh-

Lexa : clarke....?

Clarke : yeah.... sorry. Yes. Ohh. Yassss. Is love to marry you. Here let me help you off the floor and give you the biggest hug!

Lexa : thank you Clarke... you've changed and done more then enough. It would take me a life time to repay you.

Clarke : goos. Because we have a whole life time. Even after death can't rip us apart.

Lexa : I agree..... also..... yes it's hot in here. Because your here. And your the reason why global warming exist.

Clarke: or it could just be all your candles.

Lexa : what..... nooooo...... my answer makes more sense....

Clarke: you don't need this much candl-

Lexa : don't you dare say it.....

Clarke: fine..... you'd have to......

Lexa : *kisses Clarke*

Clarke: wow.....how did you know I was gonna say that....

Lexa : I read your emotions.... through your eyes and body language.... I didn't know i could speak very well.

Clarke : ok. You've been hanging around raven and Octavia way too much....

Lexa :.... oh. I almost forgot...... hey clarke..

Clarke: yes...?

Lexa : guess what....

Clarke : what...?

Lexa : the day I go down on you..... that's the day the whole world freak out and ship us even more.

Clarke : ship us....? ......

Lexa : why... you know OUR relationship.....

Clarke : yeah. I know... But I mean.... how did you even know what that meant?!

Lexa : oh. Monty. Jasper. Harper and more sky people told me about it. And raven and octal came up with 'Clexa

Clarke : your close with everyone? Arnt they supposed to be terrified of you??!

And clexa... actually... now I've said it myself.... it actually sounds good.

Lexa : well. I think their nice to me because they are terrified.

Clarke : *giggles*

Lexa : *heart eyes*

[kadobeclothing]

Crippled in a car crash, in constant agony and addicted to painkillers — Kerry was suicidal…until he met Max the spaniel – The Sun

WHEN Kerry Irving looks lovingly into his dog Max’s eyes it’s easy to believe him when he says the devoted springer spaniel saved his life. Once a high-powered manager with a multi-million-pound budget, he had hit rock bottom after a 2006 road accident left him with crippling spinal injuries that ended his career. 13 After a terrible car crash Kerry Irving could not see a future — he found himself crippled, in constant pain, practically house-bound and addicted to prescription painkillersCredit: North News and PicturesIn constant pain, practically house-bound and addicted to prescription painkillers, he could see no future. It looked like the end of his social life and his hobby of cycling up to 600 miles a month around his home in Keswick, in the Lake District, where he lived with his wife Angela. Kerry, 55, recalled: “I was isolated, dependent on heavy drugs and I felt a burden on my wife. “The nerve damage meant I could only shuffle along. I started thinking I didn’t want to be here. Every day and night I would think about ending it all. I knew exactly how I’d do it.” 13 Kerry pictured before his accidentCredit: North News and PicturesThen, in August 2009, Angela persuaded him to go to the corner shop for some milk, simply to get him out of the house. Kerry said: “I didn’t think I could do it but she made me go. I got to the corner of our road and saw Max’s nose sticking through the railing of a gate. “I stopped to say hello because I’d had spaniels when I was younger. He looked at me and straight away there was a connection. “Stuck in a yard, it was as if he was saying, ‘My life’s pretty rubbish and yours doesn’t look much better’. 13 Kerry first encountered Max the dog after his wife Angela persuaded him to go to the corner shop for some milk to get him out of the houseCredit: North News and Pictures“For me, it was a tiny glimmer of what life could become again.” After that, Kerry would offer to pop out every day, just so he could see Max. Then, after a couple of weeks, he asked the dog’s owner if he could take him for a walk. He said: “It was the best thing that has happened to me, after getting married.” Kerry, who has now written a book, Max The Miracle Dog, said: “We went 60 feet up the road to a sandstone wall and I was exhausted. 13 Kerry made the walk to the corner shop and stopped to say hello to Max because he had spaniels when he was youngerCredit: North News and Pictures“When you have an ailment that people can’t see, but you’re shuffling away and physically gasping, you feel so self-conscious. “But with Max, it didn’t matter. We could stop and it was just a man having a rest with his dog.” From then on, Max provided Kerry with the motivation to go further and further. One of his first goals was to get to Derwentwater lake. He said: “It’s six minutes’ walk from my house but it took us an hour and a half because I’d shuffle then stop, shuffle then stop. 13 When Max looked at Kerry there was a connection straight awayCredit: North News and Pictures“I couldn’t have done it on my own because I would have panicked about how I would get back. But I wanted Max to get there because I remembered how much my old spaniels loved water.” Still in immense pain, Kerry had found a reason to live — as well as a good listener. He said: “I could tell him how bad I felt my life was. As anyone who has had a dog knows, they are very good listeners and it’s often easier to talk to them than to people.” The arrangement also suited Max’s owner, who was a carer for her father and couldn’t exercise the dog as much as she would have liked. Kerry — who has since got two more dogs, Paddy, three, and Harry, one — said: “It was about reprogramming my brain. Being with Max took me from thinking, 13 Still in immense pain Kerry had found a reason to live — as well as a good listener in MaxCredit: North News and Pictures‘I’m in pain, I can’t do anything’ to ‘I can get out and do things again’.” Such was his transformation, Kerry has since retrained as a locksmith. He said: “I liked working out puzzles and thought it would let me work to my own schedule, allowing myself time off to recover when I needed it. The second thought was I could get a van and Max could come with me.” To publicise his new business, Kerry made Max “Head of Security” and posted picturesque photos of him in the Lake District. 13 Kerry retrained as a locksmith and made Max ‘Head of Security’ posting picturesque photos of him in the Lake DistrictCredit: North News and PicturesLife was becoming good again — but there was just one cloud. Kerry said: “Every day it broke my heart to give Max back. People would say, ‘Why don’t you just get your own dog?’ And I’d say, ‘But then it wouldn’t be Max’. There is only one Max. He was my lifesaver.” In 2012 fate stepped in again. Max’s owner was moving away and asked Kerry if he would like to adopt him. Not long afterwards, despite the fact that he had only just mastered walking uphill, the pair climbed all 4,400ft of Ben Nevis, in the Scottish Highlands. It took six hours to go up and down the UK’s highest peak — and it took Kerry three months to recover from the exertion. 13 Max’s owner asked Kerry if he would like to adopt the dog as he was moving awayCredit: InstagramHe said: “It damn near killed us. I was a fool really but I thought, ‘Go for the biggest, why not?’ If I’d been alone, I might have been tempted to pretend I’d got to the top, but I couldn’t let Max down. “It was the best feeling to get to the top. I was the highest person in the UK, with Max at my side.” Kerry now manages his pain with nothing stronger than the odd paracetamol. He said: “I was on prescription pills for ten years after the accident. 13 Kerry mastered walking uphill and climbed all 4,400ft of Ben Nevis in the Scottish Highlands with MaxCredit: Instagram“I would get anxious about when I would be able to take another one. By the end I was on the strongest medication the doctors could give. “Sometimes I would take 12 a day and it didn’t touch the pain at all. The doctor said it would take two years to come off them, by reducing the strength gradually every month. “I thought I knew better and stopped taking them. Four hours later, Angela begged me to take one because I was sat in a corner, shaking and sweating. “I can understand how people do stupid things on drugs, like burglaries, because it’s the need for the next dose. I was addicted.” Kerry took his last pill 18 months after he vowed to come off them. 13 Kerry proudly holds the book he authored: Max The Miracle DogCredit: North News and PicturesHe said: “I struggle when it’s cold, wet and damp. If I go walking with my camera bag slung on my shoulder then I’ll feel it the next day. “But I wouldn’t change anything. I’ve had a second chance at life. I was in a career that was cut-throat and ruthless. “Going through what I have, I realise it’s not about money or a fancy car, it’s about time and health. “You don’t need that much to get by and from helping others by talking to them and sharing Max with them, I’ve become a lot richer.” 13 Angela and Kerry took Max to a garden party for community champions at Buckingham Palace last yearCredit: North News and PicturesHe and Max’s story has delighted people all over the world. Max’s Facebook page, Max Out In The Lake District, features pictures of all three of Kerry’s dogs. It has more than 100,000 followers and led to an award from Keswick Tourism. Last year, on the ITV programme Britain’s Top 100 Dogs, Kerry revealed what he had been through and how Max had helped him. Now a mental health campaigner, he said: “Suddenly people were coming up to me and shaking my hand. Or they’d stop their car and tell me, ‘I’m glad you’re still here’. 13 Max received a pat from the Duchess of Cambridge while Kerry met Prince William, Duke of CambridgeCredit: Avalon.red. All rights reserved.“Within 24 hours of the programme being aired I had 10,000 messages. So many people told me they had experienced something similar to me, or that they’d lost a loved one, and my dogs brought them some joy. I realised this could be a vessel for something bigger.” Kerry has organised several charity walks with his dogs and has raised more than £130,000 for good causes. Max and Paddy have received a commendation from the animal charity PDSA for bringing comfort and support to thousands of people. LatestFLYMAYBEFlyBe planes ‘grounded and passengers turned away at airports’ amid collapse fearsLatestBUG CRISISSony & Nike shut UK site as cases hit 87 and health boss says ‘epidemic likely’VIRUS SPREADCoronavirus UK tracker – where have cases been confirmed?WHAT THE CLUCKSupermarket shoppers left ‘feeling sick’ after finding GREEN chickenOFF YOUR BOXCommuters don plastic bags, boxes & gas masks as coronavirus fears grip LondonMACHETE MANIACSMachete gang try to smash their way into home as little girl cowers inside Max has trained as a therapy dog, and even attended a garden party for community champions at Buckingham Palace last year and received a pat from the Duchess of Cambridge — who he has also met in Keswick. Kerry said: “There’s something special about Max, everyone who meets him says so. It’s something in the way he looks at you. “He’s the most loyal, loving friend. He looked into my soul and fixed me.” 13 Max The Miracle Dog is on sale (Harper Element, £12.99)Credit: North News and PicturesDog lost at beach found swimming half a MILE offshore two days later 

Source link

source https://www.kadobeclothing.store/crippled-in-a-car-crash-in-constant-agony-and-addicted-to-painkillers-kerry-was-suicidaluntil-he-met-max-the-spaniel-the-sun/

[algaecoma]

Jasper and Emori Part. 1

They never met, not even in passing, but I think they’re one of those opposite ends of a spectrum meeting in the middle friendships that are genuinely good for both people.

See: Murphy’s self-hatred meets Emori’s self-love. Bellamy’s ruthlessness meets Clarke’s compassion. Bellamy’s ruthlessness meets Echo’s practicality. Octavia’s anger meets Lincoln’s calm. Jasper’s bravery meets Monty’s caution.

Jasper’s death genuinely devastated me. If I hadn’t fallen in love with Murphy and Raven and Emori, I may well have walked away. Then season 5 redeemed Bellamy, the one character I had genuine hatred for. And with that redemption I was able to start to pick the characters apart and work out that I didn’t hate or love any of them. I had mixed feelings and that’s what I love about the show. The characterisation. (Float the worldbuilding.)

Even the villains I could understand their motives.

But I still don’t think killing Jasper was a good choice. (I think Clarke should have died instead and no, it’s not because I think she turned evil in season 5, it’s that I think she’d reached the end of her character arc and the writers decided the only solution was to start her on Bellamy’s.)

Jasper on the Ring.

Now that’s an au I want way more of.

Started writing it myself then stopped when I realised I was 80,000 words in and had barely touched upon the topic. Mainly because I wanted to talk about all the others on the Ring too.

But this is about just Jasper and Emori.

I found them talking. I was using dice rolls to decide which character interaction I’d write next, because they were all too interesting to choose between.

So, I looked for them. Jasper was in a bad place at the time, Murphy had been the one to pull him out of his initial response of refusing to respond, then Harper and Monty had kept him going, but there was a problem with Raven about not wanting to share her workspace with a chemist and Jasper not wanting to help Monty with anything that might keep them alive, only the stuff that would keep them happy and Harper took Monty’s side and -

Yeah, whole thing. 80,000 words of thing.

Bellamy said something dumb and Jasper gave up on them all. Whole group.

And he was there, staring at the button he could press to float them all, and I rolled the dice to see who talked him down and I got Emori.

And my first thought was to roll again. It took two Emoris in a row for me to even try it.

And it went amazingly. Like I’m talking Raven and Murphy in the dropship season 2 amazing.

Neither of them talked over each other, just presented their point of view and let the other present theirs. It wasn’t an argument or even support, just two people who were questioning their beliefs hearing the alternative and thinking they can compromise.

She sits next to him and offers him her canteen.

He’s thirsty. Which makes sense. It just seems wrong. His body is still telling him to live.

He takes the water.

She doesn’t say anything and he thinks he’s grateful for that. Just a little.

“They had chocolate cake,” he says. He doubts she knows what chocolate is.

She doesn’t ask.

“I don’t know if it was from the stores or if they grew their own cocoa. I didn’t want to know. Because that would be admitting that they needed to think about resources. That they weren’t magic. That just because they had more than us, we weren’t safe. That there’s no such thing.

“I wanted the adults to come and tell me it was just a nightmare. That there never had been any danger and there never would be. But the adults were lying.

“Not just in Mount Weather. Everywhere. They tell you not to worry. That nothing will hurt you if they’re there. That monsters aren’t real.

“They don’t tell you that you’ll love the monsters. That the monsters are just adults trying to protect their children from other monsters. Or to protect themselves. I wouldn’t hate a panther that killed a rabbit to feed its cubs or itself.

“I only hate Clarke because … because it was my rabbit. And I can’t accept that. I can’t accept that if it wasn’t for Maya, I’d be in Monty’s place. I want to be better than that. I need to be better than that or I’m just another monster that another monster kills before it kills it. And monsters deserve to die.”

Jasper’s thumb brushes over the button and Emori says, “We’re all someone’s monster.” She pulls off her glove and offers Jasper her mutated hand. “This is a kill order. Octavia was born with one too. You were given one when you crossed the wrong river. It means they’re scared of us. That they think others need saving from us.

“We decide if they’re right or not. If we’re truly the monster they fear. Fight or don’t fight. But if you’re the rabbit, just hope you’ve got a monster to look after you. If you’re a monster, you stop being the rabbit. All the rabbit can do is run and fuck and hope it makes enough little rabbit babies that some of them can make more little rabbit babies before they die. The monster can fight back.

“No one has the right to decide if you deserve to live or die. Not even you. You can’t weigh your future actions. All you can do is make them. Killing us won’t change the past. You kill the monster to save the rabbits, but there are so so few rabbits and I’d like to save this one.”

So, um, my favourite Emori quote I wrote? Like, I have others that I like a lot, but that one is right up there with Raven’s “I don’t choose pain, I choose to live” as stuff that’s helped me keep going.

“No one has the right to decide if you deserve to live or die. Not even you. You can’t weigh your future actions. All you can do is make them.”

I liked it so much I had Jasper quote it later, to Bellamy.

He helped her too, but that’s why I’m making it a two parter.

[lewepstein]

The War on Empathy

In Harper Lee’s iconic novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch counsels his daughter Scout on the values of compassion and forgiveness.  He says to her, “You never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.”  His words are at the heart of the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,”  the central tenet of most religions and the basis of our civil society.

Compassion is the quality that moves us to treat others kindly.  It is closely connected to empathy, that uniquely human ability to imagine what it would be like to stand in the shoes of others - to understand their plight and feel their pain.  It is the force within that impels us to treat family, friends, colleagues and even strangers in the manner that we would want to be treated ourselves.  It is also the quality most under assault during the tenure of Trump.

As a therapist, I see empathy as rooted in our earliest relationships - in the ways that we learned to love our caregivers and to internalize the values that they taught us by their words and deeds.  To love thy neighbor as thyself pre-supposes an open-heartedness that extends to the rest of humanity, a quality that also allows us to be kind and respectful toward our fellow citizens.  It doesn’t mean that we will never have conflicts or be called upon to make tough decisions about policies and people.  It does mean that whether in the corporate boardroom or the oval office we are aware of the impact that our actions have on the lives of others.

On the other side of the compassion and empathy spectrum there is pathological narcissism.  In this disordered personality the self is the province of grandiose, exaggerated preoccupation.  There is a grasping for unlimited success, power and “ specialness,” and especially admiration.  And there is a sense of entitlement so great, that there should be automatic compliance with one’s expectations.

The behavior of the pathologically narcissistic individual is often exploitative of others.  He will take advantage of others to achieve his ends.  At the core there is a lack of empathy, an unwillingness to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others.  The narcissist is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him.  He shows arrogant and haughty behaviors and attitudes and he will often experience criticism as an emotional injury.

It has probably become obvious by now that the  psychological profile I have just laid out is that of our current president.  What should still come as a shock is that the words in the last two paragraphs describing this pathology come directly from the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association.  They are the criteria used for diagnosing an individual with a “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”  Any five of the characteristics listed would qualify an individual for such a diagnosis.  Donald Trump exhibits all nine.

Our president’s narcissistically driven lack of empathy has been highlighted in his recent comments to the family of an army sergeant who died in an ambush in Niger, in the line of duty.  Instead of offering comforting words, Trump is reported to have said, “Well I guess he knew what he was signing up for.”  But anyone who has followed Trump’s rise as a media personality has witnessed this type of callous disregard for human pain and suffering in the dramas enacted on “The Apprentice.”

Naomi Klein, social activist and author, in her call to action, “No Is Not Enough,” describes how The Apprentice delivered Trump’s “brand” as well as his  central sales pitch:      

 Trump  was saying to viewers that by unleashing your most selfish and ruthless side, you are creating jobs and fueling growth.  Don’t be nice, be a killer.  In later seasons, the underlying cruelty of the show grew even more sadistic.  The winning team lived in a luxurious mansion - drinking champagne in inflatable pool lounges, zipping off in limos to meet celebrities.  The losing team was deported to tents in the backyard nicknamed “Trump Trailer Park.”  The tent-dwellers, whom Trump gleefully deemed the “have-nots,” didn’t have electricity, ate off paper plates and slept to the sounds of howling dogs.  They would peek through a gap in the hedge to see what decadent wonders the “haves” were enjoying.

Trump took the ever-widening income and equality gap and turned it into a spectator sport.  In essence, the message was step over the losers and become a winner like him.

Historians looking back at this era may forever speculate about what combination of fear, outrage, prejudice and  alienation allowed people to vote for an emotionally disturbed man in such numbers - to mistake grandiosity for caring and cruelty for authenticity.  But the war on empathy did not begin with Donald Trump.  He is simply the latest politician to do battle against the forces of unity, compassion and love.

Demagogues and right-wing politicians always mobilize their followers against a scapegoat, usually a marginalized and powerless group such as immigrants or an ethnic minority that is easy to demonize.  The end result of this type of rhetoric can be lynchings, policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide.  Instead of promoting  empathy, an image is projected onto the group that fosters fear, envy and hatred.

Trump’s characterization of Mexicans immigrants as rapists and murderers is just the latest manifestation of this cynical tactic.  Reagan’s damning portrayal of African- American women as “Welfare Queens” who were ripping off the system or George H.W. Bush’s profiling of formerly incarcerated black men as “Willie Hortons,” who would be freed by liberals to kill again also played into the racial stereotype of African-Americans as marginal citizens and  criminals to be hated and feared.  Mitt Romney’s statement during a fundraiser, secretly caught on someone’s cell phone about the “makers and the takers,” revealed his underlying contempt for those in our society who owned little and were less fortunate and less ruthless than he had been.

Many of the party bosses of the modern Democratic party are no less cynical than their Republican counterparts.  While wrapping themselves in the mantle of empathy and compassion and portraying themselves as the representatives of the disenfranchised - African- Americans, the LBGTQ community, women and Latinos - their actual policy positions when in power belie their soaring rhetoric.  Working people have learned in the last fifty years that most Democrats are a tepid ally at best and will almost always abandon their interests in favor of the party’s wealthier, urban, corporate elites.

There was a reason beyond racism and sexism why Trump had such an appeal to rural and small town, white, working class Americans.  After generations of neglect and policy positions that ignored the needs of small town and rural working class whites, it was difficult for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats to make the argument that they felt their pain or had their backs.

Even greater than the undercurrent of racism, xenophobia and classism in the current war on empathy is the backlash against the gains that women have made since the modern feminist movement began in the 1960s.  It is not insignificant that empathy and compassion are traits that distinctly fall on the feminine side of our traditional  gender roles.  Terry Real, the author of numerous books on patriarchy and gender stated the following in a recent article:  

So here’s a sobering thought: suppose Trump was elected not despite his offensive, misogynous behaviors but, at least in part because of them….What we are witnessing is a reassertion of masculinity’s most difficult and harmful traits,aggression, narcissism, sexual assaultiveness, grandiosity and contempt.  Real quotes the 2016 Presidential Gender Watch Report which summarizes several surveys this way: “Trump supporters are much more likely than Clinton voters to say that men and women should ‘stick to the roles for which they are naturally suited,’ that society has become too soft and feminine, and that society seems to ‘punish’ men just for acting like men.’”  Real goes onto say,” I want men to hold fast to those elements that are good and right about the traditional male role - courage, loyalty, competence - but men also deserve to have access to emotion, particularly the vulnerable emotions that connect us to one another.”

On the feminine side of the empathy quagmire, it is crucial for women to finally get it that it is not their job to protect men from their disowned fragility. I have read a number of quotes from  women who voted for Trump in which they excused his boasts about pussy-grabbing and other assaultive behaviors by rationalizing that “he’s really a good, caring man underneath.”  This to me is the same misplaced empathy that I have witnessed  in my office by wives who have brainwashed themselves into believing that their abusive husbands really loved them, when the evidence they were presenting should have convinced them to get out of that relationship immediately.

Right- wing pundits and media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have also fanned the flames of a resurgent patriarchy by characterizing  women fighting for their rights as “feminazis,” once again demonizing  a vulnerable group and promoting hatred in place of the understanding and compassion that should be our guiding light.

In our nation’s history, empathy has not always been under attack as it is today.  The fact that the economic crisis of the 1930s had a title: “The Great Depression,”  provided a bulwark against the perception that poverty was a personal failure.  There was no moral condemnation when a family was left homeless or a breadwinner was selling apples on the street because he had lost his job - no Trump Trailer Park as a dumping place where the “haves” could direct their derision toward the shamed “have-nots.”  As with the World War that arose in the following decade, there was some shared understanding that we were all in this together - at least if you weren’t dark-skinned or a Japanese American - and that making sacrifices for one’s fellow citizens was a virtue to be extolled.

If the political leaders who we elect represent some aspect of who we are as a people then we should probably label Donald Trump our “Narcissist in Chief.”  His singularly selfish ethic of “looking out for number one” to the exclusion of compassionately looking out for others is the hallmark of his leadership.  It also reflects back to what is deeply flawed about our society.

What was once something called the “common good”-  appointments and funding that empowered government departments like the Environmental Protective Agency to safeguard our drinking water from toxic and carcinogenic substances has been sold off  to the highest corporate bidder.  But there is also a large segment of our working class population that is unwilling to give up what they see as their right to purchase and sell weapons of mass  destruction - in essence their adult toys called assault weapons - even at the cost of the on-going slaughter of school children and other fellow citizens.  The leader sets the standard by placing his personal economic needs and self-aggrandizing political image ahead of the common good, and this, in turn, validates and promotes a culture of narcissism and self-indulgence in the society at large.

In the long view of history regimes come and go and societies periodically regress into the dark ages of nationalism and authoritarian rule.  But no empire, nation or leader has been able to withstand the forces of progress for long.  Disenfranchised social classes will continue to struggle to bring about a more equitable redistribution of our planet’s wealth and fossil fuels will inevitably be replaced by cleaner forms of energy - hopefully before we create more environmental disasters.  

What is less clear to me is the answer to the question: What will be the outcome of the war on empathy?   Will the forces of  patriarchy, racism, and narrow self-interest continue to degrade our relationships with one another?   Will the reflexively fear-based parts of us continue to be exploited by leaders so that we as a society periodically lose our moral center?  If so, we will continue to elevate leaders who are shallow, opportunistic reflections of our narcissistic selves.     

We continually need to relearn the lesson that a society is only as advanced as the political and social consciousness of its citizens.  It would be difficult for any student of history to deny that the “Realpolitics” of the last hundred years based on our many “isms” - communism, state capitalism, rule by plutocrats or by patriarchal religious heads has only produced more repressive, authoritarian regimes and human suffering.

If there is a next American or world revolution it will only bring about lasting change when those promoting the war on empathy have been drowned out by a vast chorus of people who are uncompromising in their shared values of empathy and compassion.  The “new man” and “new woman” will need to have evolved in ways that will allow them to create the new society. This new, vocal majority will never allow itself to be divided by fears and prejudices about the so called “others” because they will have evolved to the point of understanding that the so called “others” are simply manifestations of themselves in another era or context.  When this type of change occurs, and the global mind reaches some kind of critical mass, a fierce and compassionate humanism will replace the era of narcissism.  Only then will we be ready to create the type of world in which we would all want to live.

[jenmedsbookreviews]

I won’t lie. As I write this post I am at the end of a mammoth post prep session in which I have prepared a rather small (not) 15 posts. Yes you read that correctly. 15 posts!!! Not all are original content. There is one re-post and some are quick cut and paste jobs for reviews from Mandie, but I still have to prep all the links, pictures etc, check spelling and basically stay awake. not easy given the fact that I am absolutely shattered.

Manchester and Edinburgh with work this week which allowed me to listen to a cracking audio book, but all this mucking around of y work schedule really plays havoc with my sleep patterns (when I eventually do sleep) and unsettles the dog, meaning I get treated to a middle of the night barking session which is always nice. Not. Really starting to feel my age this week.

After all of the excitement of last week I’ve very little of interest to tell you this week. I am still on a bit of a high from the whole best book blogs thing last week to be fair, at least I’m hoping that explains the light-headedness ;). This week has been mostly about work and reading though, which isn’t all bad as I’ve been needing a little down time to recharge the old batteries.

Book post wise I only got the one delivery this week but it was a very welcome one. Bad Sister by the lovely Sam Carrington courtesy of Avon Books. I loved Saving Sophie so I’m really looking forward to reading this one as I’m on the blog tour in a couple of weeks.

Oh. One bit of bookish news – I made 500 direct followers/subscribers on the blog. A big thanks to everyone who does follow and also to everyone who puts up with my record number of twonkish tweets while following me on Twitter. Your support is very much appreciated.

Book purchase wise, I was doing so well. And then I prepped Karen Cole’s book love post and ended up back on Amazon buying one of her recommendations … and a few others. I blame book love. It was nothing to do with me…

So, I ended up purchasing Kill Me Twice by Simon Booker, The Binding Song by Elodie Harper, Heroic Justice and Deadly Encounter by Mel Comley, The Language of Secrets by Ausma Zehanat Khan and Christmas at the Falling Down Guest House by Lilly Bartlett. On audible I purchased The Binding Song and Without Trace by Simon Booker.

Netgalley wise I may have picked up a few titles. Just a few. The Wicked Cometh by Laura Carlin, Class Murder by Leigh Russell, Silent Victim by Caroline Mitchell and The Deaths of December by Susi Holliday.

Reading wise I didn’t quite manage all I wanted to this week do I treat that as a fail. I managed three of my planned four books, but snuck in an audiobook on the side.

Books I have read

Now We Are Dead by Stuart MacBride

She can’t prove he did it. But she might die trying…

From the Sunday Times No.1 bestselling author of the Logan McRae series, comes a standalone spinoff featuring DS Roberta Steel.

Revenge is a dangerous thing…

Detective Chief Inspector Roberta Steel got caught fitting up Jack Wallace – that’s why they demoted her and quashed his sentence. Now he’s back on the streets and women are being attacked again. Wallace has to be responsible, but if Detective Sergeant Steel goes anywhere near him, his lawyers will get her thrown off the force for good.

The Powers That Be won’t listen to her, not after what happened last time. According to them, she’s got more than enough ongoing cases to keep her busy. Perhaps she could try solving a few instead of harassing an innocent man?

Steel knows Wallace is guilty. And the longer he gets away with it, the more women will suffer. The question is: how much is she willing to sacrifice to stop him?

Crikey. How in God’s name am I supposed to review this? One word. Brilliant. No. Actually. Two words. Bloody brilliant. I love the humour that flows through this book, no less that you would expect from Roberta Steele and her potty mouth. I really don’t know where to begin with a review but I’m going to have to figure it out as I’ve got to review for First Monday Crime. While I’m figuring that out, you can be pre-ordering the book right here.

…

Murder Game by Caroline Mitchell

A serial killer is playing a terrifying game of life or death with his victims. After he captures them, a countdown begins. He marks the time by sending clues to the whereabouts of the women he has taken in three disturbing images: alive, tortured, dead. 

In a race against the clock, East London Detective Ruby Preston must play the twisted killer’s terrifying murder game and decipher the clues before more women die… 

But this isn’t the first time the police have seen such a sickening crime. The notorious Lonely Hearts Killer, Mason Gatley, was put behind bars ten years ago for murdering six women in exactly the same chilling way. Desperate for more information, Ruby persuades her boyfriend, Nathan Crosby, to use his criminal connections to set up a dangerous meeting. Because to catch this killer, she needs to think like one… 

But the closer Ruby grows to the dark and charming Mason Gatley, the more worried her team become. Is Mason really helping her catch the killer? Or is he lining Ruby up to be his next victim?

Fans of Angela Marsons, Rachel Abbott and Peter James will be hooked by this dark and utterly disturbing thriller, packed with twists until the final page. 

Oh my life. What a cracking read – quite probably the best one in the series. Sad to see the end of the Ruby Preston series but what a way to bow out, tracking down a ruthless serial killer who is murdering adulterers. It is down to Ruby to convince the killers mentor and muse, Mason Gatley to help her before it is too late. The book is released on 31st October, but you can preorder it right here.

…

Absolution by P.A. Davies

When the Militia entered the peaceful village of Nyanyar Ngun, South Sudan in 1992 – amidst the backdrop of a bitter civil war – it wasn’t in peace.

Soldiers of the SFL committed untold atrocities in that small farming village, before finally razing it to the ground. From a line of terrified children, boys were chosen to become recruits of the Militia, whilst girls were taken for selling within a market of odious buyers. Those who weren’t selected were either left to perish or murdered where they stood.

In a field of high maize next to the village, sixteen-year old Jada lay hidden and afraid, witnessing the merciless slaughter of his parents and the capture of his sister Kiden; powerless to stop it, too frightened to try.

But now – tortured by grief, consumed with shame and driven by guilt – Jada must embark on a long & arduous journey to rescue his sister from a sinister world and earn his absolution…or die trying!

A rather intriguing tale, this follows young Sudanese boy, Jada, as he tries to track down his sister, a victim of trafficking as a result of the war in Sudan. Blending two of the most heinous wars in modern history, this book will take you from war-torn Germany, to the Sudan to good old Great Britain in a tale which highlights the real atrocities of war. You can order a copy fo the book here.

…

The Binding Song by Elodie Harper

A chilling debut for fans of Mo Hayder and Sharon Bolton, THE BINDING SONG takes you on a trip to Halvergate Prison. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to leave… ‘Splendidly unsettling’ John Connolly Dr Janet Palmer is the new lead psychologist at HMP Halvergate in a remote, bleak area of Norfolk. At first, she was excited by the promotion. Then she starts to see how many secrets are hiding behind the high walls.

A string of inmates have committed suicide, leaving no reasons why, and her predecessor has disappeared – along with his notes. The staff are hostile, the threat of violence is ever-present, and there are rumours of an eyeless woman stalking the corridors, punishing the inmates for their sins.

Janet is determined to find out what is really going on. But the longer she stays and the deeper she digs, the more uncertain she feels.

Halvergate is haunted by something. But it may be a terror worse than ghosts…

Oh my life. I picked this up on a whim as I am going to hear the author on a panel at First Monday Crime in a couple of weeks. I am so glad that I did. What a chilling and atmospheric book. And such a compelling and engrossing read. I loved it. Do yourself a favour and go take a look. My review will be posted next week but don’t wait. You can order the book here.

…

Busy old week on the blog with a mixture of book love and reviews. You can find all the recaps here.

BlogTour: Fox Hunter by Zoe Sharp

London Noir by Ann Girdharry

#BookLove: Joanne Robertson

#BlogTour: The Second Son by Andy Blackman

BlogBlitz: Christmas At Hope Cottage by Lily Graham

BlogBlitz: The Girl From the Sugar Plantation by Sharon Maas

CoverReveal: @Lisalregan @bookouture

BookLove: Meggy Roussel

The Perplexing Theft Of The Jewel In The Crown by Vaseem Khan

The week ahead is pretty full on too. I have #booklove from Karen Cole on Tuesday and reviews for Elodie Harper, Vaseem Khan and Lilly Bartlett scattered throughout the week. Blog tour wise I’ll be taking part in tours for Dead Lands by Lloyd Otis and Absolution by P.A. Davies on Wednesday, A Cost Candlelit Christmas by Tilly Tennant on Thursday and The Lost Child by Patricia Gibney on Friday. Do make sure to stop by.

Have a fabulously bookish week all. I have a trip to Southampton to look forward to and a wonderful bookish get together over the weekend too, as well as lots of lovely reading.

See you all next week

Jen

  Rewind, recap: Weekly update w/e 22/10/17 I won't lie. As I write this post I am at the end of a mammoth post prep session in which I have prepared a rather small (not) 15 posts.

[esprit-de-corps-magazine]

ON TARGET: Afghanistan: Where Did We Go Wrong?

By Scott Taylor

There were news stories out of Afghanistan last week detailing how the U.S. is expanding and entrenching the so-called ‘Green Zone’ in the centre of Kabul. 

An ambitious two-year construction project will bring together currently isolated outlying facilities into one massive protected zone. In addition to U.S. military and diplomatic posts, the ‘new and improved’ Green Zone will now house all embassies and most of the international non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

This full-scale investment in building an even stronger set of fortifications reveals that, while the U.S. obviously intends to remain in Afghanistan for decades to come, it no longer has any false hope that it will eventually win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. 

The corrupt and demoralized Afghan Security Forces have proven woefully inept at containing the Taliban and other active insurgent groups which now include Daesh (aka ISIS).

Canada cut its losses back in 2014 when it ended a 12-year military commitment to the mission in Afghanistan. However, that mission came at a considerable cost, with 158 soldiers killed, another 2,000 wounded or injured physically, and an estimated 4,000 suffering the unseen mental wounds known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 

Worse still is the fact that Canada’s withdrawal from the mission did not stop the suffering for many of our veterans. An estimated 130 soldiers have taken their own lives since returning from that war.

To their credit, last Thursday the Department of National Defence in conjunction with Veterans Affairs Canada announced a joint strategy to better track the mental health of veterans after they leave the military. While care and comfort for our suffering soldiers is a positive step, an even bigger gesture to demonstrate that veterans’ lives matter would be to start investigating just how we could have gotten Afghanistan so wrong for all that time?

When Canada jumped on the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force bandwagon in 2002, the plotline was that we would commit a 600-man battle group until the Afghan Security Forces were self-sufficient and Afghanistan staged national elections in 2004. In 2002 we were told that the hated Taliban had been deposed, Afghan women were liberated from their burqas, and the U.S. was bringing democracy to a fun-loving bunch of thankful Afghans. Who would not want to be part of that success story? 

Even once it became a shooting war in earnest and Canadian soldiers found themselves targeted and killed by fanatical insurgents, the media dropped the ball by taking on the role of unquestioning cheerleader instead of diligently reporting the truth. 

The regime of President Hamid Karzai was elected by an illiterate population that is ignorant of what democracy even means. However, it was glaringly apparent that this regime was composed of the same ruthless warlords who had driven suffering Afghans to support the Taliban. It was for this corrupt cabal – the most corrupt in the world — that Canadian soldiers fought and died. 

To keep Canadians on side with the war effort, Prime Minister Stephen Harper claimed that to question the mission was to question our soldiers. Others, like former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan Chris Alexander, repeatedly claimed that we were one schoolhouse away from success, and he chastised the media for focussing on the negative. 

When Canada concluded its military commitment in early 2014, the apologists and tub-thumpers claimed that it was “too soon” to reflect on whether Canada’s expenditure of blood and gold was worth it. They still held out hope that Chris Alexander’s final schoolhouse would finally turn the tide in the war. 

Now, almost four years later, the U.S. is digging deeper bunkers instead of schools.

Last year Britain established the Iraq Inquiry under the direction of Sir John Chilcot. The results tabled last July savagely criticized UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for his decision to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. While Blair shrugged off the findings, the Chilcot report nonetheless mauled his reputation and shone some light into heretofore very dark corners. 

Canada should do the same sort of official examination of how we ended up sending our soldiers into a war they could not win; and one in which they should never have had to fight. Holding our politicians, diplomats and senior military accountable for the fiasco might go a long way to reassuring our soldiers that it won’t happen again.