#(two people who are meant to destroy each other but end up reshaping each other through their interactions and - SPOILERS -

[agentravensong]

my parents asked if i wanted to go with them to see the new napolean movie this afternoon. i was not interested (espec after looking at the length and average ecritic scores) so i stayed home and finally got around to reading this is how you lose the time war instead. 1000% the correct decision, holy shit

[missingmywing]

@strangefellows made a direct attack against me so alas, take my wips. XIV has taken over my life and I’ve created a sprawling verse of the butterfly effects and accidental Ascian untempering and recruiting so that’s what most of these are lol, though none of them are published yet.

You once again get an essay length response because it’s me.

Rules: Share the first lines of ten of your most recent fanfics and tag ten people. If you have written fewer than ten, don't be shy and share anyway.

It was time. There was an underlying buzz of energy amongst the Shadows within the Palace, and Arsène and Izanagi leaned against one of the upper walls on the outside of the fortress, looking out over the forest around them as the other ultimates of their arcana ensured everything was organized.

-First paragraph of chapter 4 of Shadows Within. It’s finally infiltration time! Which means that Arsene and Izanagi are Plotting.

2. Etheria didn’t know what compelled her. She should have known better.

Hadn’t the shard of Themis - of Elidibus - in the tower told her?

“The reality you wish to save - the reality to which you must return - exists as a result of the Final Days. You cannot reshape the past to undo the tragedies of the present. Cannot unmake the sorrow and suffering fated to come.”

She’d thought he’d meant that the events were unchangeable. That the past was set in stone, and she wouldn’t be able to affect it. But wasn’t G’raha the direct contradiction to that idea?

First section of Two Steps Back, one of my time travel fics in which my main WoL messes up in Elpis and creates a split timeline bc she panics and destroys Kairos. The Convocation quickly gets involved and oh look, now she has two timelines’ Final Days to avert. Azem is delighted at her involvement though, so there’s that.

3. As she slammed face-first into the ground, Etheria took several moments to comprehend what had just happened.

Cierread, a Sharlayan scholar studying the mechanics of time, had recruited her to help him investigate a dungeon that supposedly had tomes created by a former scholar who had been studying the subject as well. It had been a relatively routine run, they’d collected the tomes without undue issue, only to find them locked by magicks.

She’d ended up calling the other Scions for aid after the rest of the Sharlayan library had failed them - well, she’d mostly called on G‘raha and Y’shtola, as well as Themis and Heph, but the others had ended up there either by circumstance or curiosity - but when they had managed to force the first of the tomes open-

First section of Antics of Chronology, my second time travel fic that’s… well it’s supposed to be a much more humorous take on time travel shenanigans but it’s rapidly turning serious as per usual, so we’ll see. Basically I take the post-EW Scions and yeet them back to ARR, and they have to deal with the consequences and figure out what to do now. Etheria looks up from landing and sees Ifrit and goes “oh no”. (And just as a fun tidbit, Cierread is my versions Source shard of Nabriales and he did come back with the rest of them, so that’s going to be a fun interaction when he shows up with Moenbryda XD)

4. She awoke slowly, dry heat shifting uncomfortably around her in what should have been a cooling breeze, but wasn’t. It-

What was going on? She’d been… been…

… at her computer?

Yeah, she’d been at her computer, on vc with her FC, waiting for the new update for the 6.1 patch to finish downloading, and then they’d all hit play together and… and…

White.

Hear… feel… think…

The adventure continues.

What…?

First section of Fantasy’s Dawn. Aka Log Horizon, but it’s FFXIV and everyone wakes up in their avatar at the beginning of 1.0 (for legacy players) or ARR (for non-legacies) with each WoL having their own self-contained MSQ that adjusts to their own actions - except our main six heroes who somehow share an MSQ instance. Everyone is left scrambling trying to figure out how the metaphysics even works, and how much control they actually have over the world and story. (A lot, it turns out, to the horror and amusement of many.)

5. It wasn’t that Etheria didn’t trust Urianger’s judgement, or his expertise in aetherology, but she still maintained that they should have done fire directly after water, before moving on to earth and then wind, and then lighting. He’d gone into a lecture about aetheric flow and why activating directly opposing elements together could potentially do more harm than good, either canceling each other out or clashing and causing rebounds.

And she understood that - she did - but that was mere speculation and it now left them with their conundrum of lightning priming the area for life, but nothing actually growing.

Windburn, part of my exploration of how Eden goes in my main verse, this is the lead-in to the Ifrit-Garuda fight and my WoL’s terror at fighting not one, but both of them because she has very very bad memories of them both.

6. It had been quiet since the appearance of Mitron, none of them quite sure how to handle the situation. Hephaistos especially had been quiet - that stiff stoicism and clipped logic that spoke to a guilt he refused to admit to, something that she and Thancred had talked about following the events in Eden earlier.

They were all returned to Ahm Areng, for the moment, with Mitron still unconscious from her battle with him. It had been… different from her other fights with the Ascians. There was no precise calculation, no higher goal, no intent for the world at large.

He’d been frantic, focused solely upon Gaia, and his thought process had been disjointed and difficult to follow.

Paradise Forfeit, skipping to the halfway/end point of the Eden raids, which went slightly different from canon thanks to Lahabrea being untempered and Etheria more aware of the situation in general, so Gaia gets shielded and doesn’t lose her memories. Mitron his ass kicked a bit sooner too, and dragged out of Eden to be stabilized. It’s an exploration of Artemis letting Gaia go and finding his own stability, in the lead up to 5.3 (bc I place my Eden raids together in the span between 5.0 and 5.3 for streamlining reasons in this verse).

7. They knew. They all knew - had known from the moment they’d heard him speak at the gate.

But none of them could even begin to guess the details. How G’raha was here, how the Crystal Tower was here - it made no sense. The Crystal Tower was still standing tall and cold next to Silvertear Lake back home - closed, sealed, with G’raha most certainly still inside.

The theory they felt held the most weight, currently, was one Aella and Yiskah had formulated based on the Exarch’s words - that he was from a time removed from their own. Likely some years in the future, and he had been summoned to this world along with the tower and awoken upon arrival - thus making his earlier claim that he’d summoned the tower from a random point in time technically not an absolute lie - not that they would let him get away with that once they eventually confronted him about this.

Orchestrations, my SHB case study of Etheria’s relationship with the Exarch and Urianger and their plots. G’raha can’t get away with shit with my WoLs, sorry G’raha. Aella and Yiskah are archons who helped him with his own thesis and he with theirs, and S’ohlis has been pining since the CT raids. Etheria can sense aether, and Vale and Rosalia are a mercenary and pirate, they can recognize voices and tell when someone’s lying.

8. Etheria wasn’t entirely sure what to expect as she led the way up the stairs of the Crystal Tower, into the Ocular where the other three stopped. Themis in particular appeared wary of entering the Umbilicus - not that she could blame him. The version of him that was the piece of his soul she and the Exarch had sealed within the Tower was… Elidibus. While he had still retained some of his memories and mentality of his time as an Ascian, the majority of it had remained with the piece of his soul they’d pulled away; while the memories of his life before the summoning of Zodiark that he had reclaimed from his brief fall into the lifestream before Hades and Etheria had pulled him back as the him of here and now.

None of them were sure how the piece of Elidibus in the tower would react, or how their souls would react together.

Unto Elpis, as the name says it’s the lead-in to the jump back to Elpis in EW for Etheria in my main verse. Not much to say, other than poor Themis is in for a rough bit of adjusting to getting all the rest of his memories of the post-sundering back at once.

9. Azem had to admit, they weren’t… entirely sure how they were going to approach Lahabrea. Not that they were at all adverse, but they wouldn’t have gathered the boldness, the audacity, without Hyth’s prodding. The man was stern and focused on his work above all else, and certainly not the type to fool around. Especially with Azem, who was undoubtedly the greatest headache for him more often than not.

Styx knew that he didn’t hate them, or even truly dislike them, for all that he was often the first to criticize their methods and actions. But that didn’t change the fact that they were in opposition more often than not and that he would likely respond scathingly to a “distraction from their duties”.

Then again, perhaps it was simply a matter of constraints to work around.

The Lahabrea chapter of I Próklisi, a fic with the premise of Hyth going “Hey Azem, bet you can’t seduce the whole convocation” and Azem going “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED”. It’s a silly ridiculous premise that’s supposed to be generally lighthearted, but is… okay honestly it’s mostly a character study in Convocation dynamics, general lore, and character headcanons wrapped up in a thin veneer of smut. For example, I got less than a quarter into this chapter and was trying to plan ahead and just stopped to stare at Lahabrea and go “oh you have so much trauma from Athena don’t you” so. I can’t even say these are “plot what plot” because while there’s no real overarching plot, each chapter is definitely going to have a character based subplot.

10. Would that the rest of the Convocation was as easy to approach as Mitron and Loghrif, Azem thought ruefully to themself as they considered who to approach next.

There was always Nabriales, of course. They and Aion had casually tumbled into bed - well they usually didn’t make it into a bed; offices or debate rooms or far flung corners of the star were far more common - together several times. If they asked if he was up for it, chances were low he’d be uninterested.

That was kind of defeating the point of the challenge, though - it wasn’t supposed to be easy.

(The fact that Hyth had strongly implied that he’d managed it made them very curious about the stories there.)

The Fandaniel chapter of I Próklisi, though Azem doesn’t decide on him in the opening paragraphs. So far it’s just Azem worrying if he’s adjusting to Amaurot and the Convocation seat okay, inviting themself over for dinner, and then going to check with his lover (Asclepius, the ancient of my other WoL Yiskah) to make sure their overtures wouldn’t be overstepping bounds. I’m 2k words in and haven’t even gotten to the dinner, it’s just talking about boundaries and comfort levels so far. If that gives you any indication of what this fic is. XD

Uhhh who to tag.... @mirintala, @up-sideand-down, @boomchickfanfiction, and recent writing you feel like sharing?

[cloveroctobers]

•ALLEGRA BIANCHI•

IG info/bio: @/theeallegrabianchi | 303k followers| Entrepreneur | bad bitches go to therapy thxz 🦭👄

(24) 26 years old

From Swansea, Wales

Ofc she knows who Catherine Zeta-Jones is...her mother literally resembles her and remembers people coming up to her mom countless times asking for a pic growing up, and Allegra hated taking pics for these imbeciles...mainly because the attention wasn’t on her

has a dysfunctional family...

her mother is critical of almost everything she does but at least she paying attention?

and feels her father is neglectful and only seems to be heard when she’s in his face

all they know how to do is scream at each other instead of talking calmly to one another

her mother is of Venezuelan heritage

And Her father is of Italian heritage

her father’s side of the family resides in calabria italy

he named her after his high school gf that passed away due to his irresponsible drunk driving on their senior prom night

Her parents do not have the healthiest of relationships due to her father constantly cheating on her mother in the past...leading to verbal and physical fights

also has a kid or two outside of their marriage because of his unfaithfulness and allegra learned to hate them because of the hurt her mother showcased

In the beginning she was only around them because her father enforced it, that she needed to know her family “blood is all you got in the end.” He would always say but that was bs

Would take her, her half sibs, and her full sibs on day trips/weekend trips in his suburban

Has three full older brothers and one full younger sister

Because of this, Allegra did not have a clear view of what love was supposed to be and felt that anger in a relationship is supposed to be somewhat of the norm?

Many times she wished at night in her bed with a pillow over her head that her parents would just file for a divorce already when their fights would get bad to the point things would get broken and her mother would h*t her father (once with a metal bat) and throw him out of the house

Has had the cops called on their household before and cps definitely has/had a file on them

Has been in family therapy before and is currently in therapy mainly for herself because of the trauma & how it’s messed with her spirit as a person

Loves? Cares for her parents from afar but will never understand their relationship and why they’re still together to this day

Can go months without speaking to any of her family members and be completely fine with that

Had her younger sis, Nerina put her PRIVATE shit on blast via internet after love island aired and completely cut her off since she is “a clout chaser and money hungry bitch who can’t take care of own her child cause she opened her legs to a meth head who loves prison” OOP

she only has a decent relationship with one of her brothers who’s two years older than her, Vito. They seem to be the closest out of the sibs and he’s the only one she bothers to speak to from time to time

She’s a “cocktail entrepreneur” so I’m guessing she has her own business where she specializes in her own cocktail drinks? Working in some upscale rooftop/penthouse bar where she successfully makes profits from her signature drinks or has a brand that focuses mainly on cocktails

It took years for her business to take off and hasn’t been easy, not one bit. At times it felt like everyone wanted to see her fail and she has openly spoken about her struggles as not only a entrepreneur but as a woman in this business where no one wanted to take a chance on her

That just lit the fire that’s already inside of her

Aries sun + Leo moon + Scorpio rising? (Personality vs how you react to things emotionally vs you’re outside shell for those who don’t follow this too much. I’m not too in depth about it but I do find it interesting!)

Or should she be reversed as a Leo sun with a Aries moon? Aries are direct, fiery, one step ahead of others, impulsive, and know how to take charge. Leo’s are dramatic, loves attention, passionate, loyal, warm, and have a need to express their passions, and scorpios are intense, secretive, mysterious, and work strategically

anyways, I feel like she’s definitely improved as a person over the span of two years? Or at least I hope she has cause everyone goes thru changes

And she was frustrating in s1 so I just know she had some deeper issues going on so I really think therapy is helping her ass I wish it would help me lmao

Being cheated on honestly made her feel like her mother, weak in her mind she was with this dude for awhile—3 years and he just up and thought it was okay to cheat on her? With his personal trainer?! Yet he didn’t gain any muscle mass?! The ultimate disrespect!!! but one thing she knew? She wasn’t going to stick around like her mom did

But she was bitter about it foresure. She ultimately wanted to corner the girl for messing with HER man but part of her knew she wasn’t the only one to blame. However that didn’t stop her for cussing her out via voicemail a couple of times while intoxicated

Allegra always strived for love cause she’s never really seen it before or felt it

Sure she’s had many boyfriends before?And their names didn’t matter not only because she didn’t remember them? But she never felt the spark with them in the first place?

Maybe she wasn’t meant for love so she kinda put on this bitchy front and always been that way with some shitty friends she had around her until she recently cut them off a year ago

has gotten herself into trouble as a kid: trespassing, and destroying public property, smoking in the girls bathroom, physical altercations, cutting class, being assigned community service, etc... all with these friends she’s had for years!

Before she met her problematic friends in secondary, when she was in her pre-teen stage she was involved in the handbell team and in the Color guard but hates to admit it even tho her parents have pics all over the flat

went away to uni for a semester and wanted to join a sorority but the hazing was extreme to the point she was sent to the hospital then accepted? Which led to more trauma in her life so she dropped out

A few years later she decided on online courses and moved out of her parents flat as soon as she could with the $ she saved up and did not leave in the house since it was not safe to smh

Therapy was really helping sis, she felt a lot better and was working on her deep rooted issues mainly the anger and hurt and never really realized how it revolves around her life. She was super thankful for her therapist and reshaping herself

Many didn’t buy it but she knew she couldn’t give that much of a fuck? She couldn’t. In order to grow you got to learn that you have to involve for yourself and not others

She didn’t like the person she saw watching the show back but when she came back to the reunion a part of her hoped people saw some sort of change in her—even if it’s only been a few months since the show then

Sometimes she’ll slip back into old habits, wanting and doing so by snapping on people and blacking out by getting intoxicated and knowing that healing is a process and valuing yourself is the exact same

has a toy poodle that she loves deeply

doesn’t have many outside friends after cutting off the ones that were toxic

is pro-ab*rtion and had one herself which was aired out by her sister online

has a cozy flat that has a lot of brick exposure inside, a navy sofa which is her favorite piece in her house, and a view to die for!! which erases the fact that her apartment is “cozy” which she uses to replace the fact that it’s much smaller than what she originally wanted. She dreams big ya know!!!

currently has a crush on her art teacher who resembles Adam Rodriguez

but also feels like liking your teacher/instructor is a bit weird? Even tho they’re both grown

yes she is taking art classes now outside of work to find something that’ll bring her peace and these pass months they have until COVID hit where classes had to be cancelled yet she was contacted to continue online but she felt her art was truly shit but he says art is subjective

She feels like there’s a connection there? But at the same time isn’t looking for another relationship until she fully works on herself first! That took awhile for her to accept after she fell into some relations with a few ppl after the show

from there she realized that she might like girls too? And got a little annoyed that it took her this long to figure out especially with the way she felt around MC and cherry

doesn’t like to admit this but her fav holiday is Christmas? Even tho the theme is majorly corny to her but it actually makes her happy?

Feels like that was the only time her family showed love towards each other, and even tho they didn’t come from much, they always followed thru with their traditions

and she misses them a little bit around this time and might be the first one to call them even if the calls are short lived and kinda awkward at first

Loves making gingerbread houses and cookies

i feel like she now embraces her forearm hair but still gets everything else lasered

Miss Allegra has inches okay?! But I definitely feel like now in 2020 she’s chopping that shit off into a pixie cut and when she posts on the gram her hair is usually always damp when she shows it off

some comments — jake: lovely! Jen: babe, ur beautiful! Erikah: 😍 Tim: how hot! You’ve got the whole resident evil thing goin for yous

“Did he just call me a virus?”

And she might get a like from mason that’ll make her feel some type of way

We all have to go thru some growth you know so do you girl!

You can’t tell me she doesn’t play stabscotch!

Used to be obsessed with social media way before going on love island but lately doesn’t mind disappearing for months at a time? You have to cleanse yourself from that shit

idk i see her being mostly cool with jen or erikah and will hang out with them from time to time? Maybe they experienced some growth too, shit I sure hope so

still feels something for mason??? But at the same time maybe it was mainly superficial since mason wasn’t fucking with her like that, not 100% but at the same time gets frustrated that he still doesn’t see where she’s coming from and it’s been 2 years???

She loves hard if given the chance and then feels like shit when it doesn’t work out cause it feels like she wasted a fuck load of time

she no longer follows him because she feels like it’s better for her spirit or whatever and she doesn’t need to see him with someone else

the only guy that she really interacts with is Tim, yet tim is cool with everybody!

Otherwise there’s no real connection with her and anybody else? She wants to keep love island separate from herself now because she’s not exactly the same as she was two years ago? And hopes someday people will get that

Probably watches those auction shows on the telly late at night when she can’t sleep, hoping and can afford some of those things one days

I feel like she has chronic migraines too?

Once had a significant other buy her Allegra-D in all seriousness for her birthday because it reminded them of her & thought it would help her headaches 🤨

Loves the snow, but hates cleaning it off her car! S/O to those HOA fees, bless it cause leggy’s deff bussed her ass once before breaking her collarbone and sued like a mf!!!

Since her hours are hardly consistent since she’s mainly her own boss, she’ll have late nights/early mornings when she returns home and has to shift days where she cleans the flat but when she cleans??? It’s best everyone stays tf out of her way

And don’t try to help her cause you’re doing it wrong 10/10 of the time, she loves cleaning and has dropped mad money on those super expensive vacuums

Only knows how to make what’s relative to her culture: arepas, penne alla vodka, and cawl but otherwise than that? She’d rather clean then spend hours in a kitchen cooking unless she’s making cocktails ofc!

also loves shopping for clothes but shoes are her fav things to shop for

Deff has a steamer over a iron for her clothes

Keeps eucalyptus and lavender oil in her purse at all times

posts mainly on her stories and made a deal with her supporters that she’ll go live once a month since she feels like she owes them that? Since she’s not as active anymore but she really doesn’t owe anybody shit but out of the newfound kindness of her heart...she does

Believes she got Covid before they all decided to do a shut down/lockdown of restaurants, bars, etc.. and her suspicions were proven correct after she decided to get tested

her anthem? Kali Uchis — Dead to me (acoustic version)

[lifeofroos]

Part 61: You know that headcanon that Nico knows the leaders of other underworlds? Ye...

In short: Nico gets therapy from Dionysus. In this chapter, Hades takes his son to Helheim, for a learning experience. The rest is on AO3 and on FanFiction.net! Also in Tumblr tags like Dionysus, Nico di Angelo, fanfic etc. 

This might be crazy: Chapter 61: I wouldn’t drink that if I were you

‘I don’t know if Dionysus would allow this.’

Dad gave me a look. ‘I am your parent and I allow it.’

‘Fair enough.’ Also, I really wanted to come.

We were in a part of the palace I hadn’t been to often. ‘You might notice this place feels particularly gloomy,’ my dad explained. ‘This is because it keeps people away.’

‘Very well designed. Yet, may I ask, what kind of place are we going to that it needs that kind of protection?’

‘To Hel.’

‘Oh. Fun.’

‘I mean Helheim.’ I nodded, with my eyebrows raised. ‘I felt like you should see how they rule there. I thought, maybe it’s interesting, that you could learn something from it…’

‘So basically take-your-child-to-work-day?’

‘That’s a thing?’

‘I heard of it.’

Hades shrugged. ‘Hm. We’re here.’ He pointed at a small, black door om our left.

‘This leads to Helheim?’

Hades twisted the knob a few times. ‘It does if I set the knob in the correct setting. Otherwise it’d lead to Duat, or to Christian Hell, or another underworld.’

‘Ah.’ Cool, actually.

Hades opened the door and got through. I followed. 

There was yet another dark, cold hallway behind the door, yet this one seemed to be even colder and slightly less dark. Luckily, it wasn’t very long. 

Helheim at the same time looked a lot like Hades and not at all. It was gloomy and dark, but instead of sand, willows and affodils there were ice, rocks and pinetrees.

My dad grabbed my shoulder. ‘Don’t stray. Don’t talk to random people. Remember that they are here because they died a dishonourable death.’

‘I thought some of them died of old age…’

‘Shh! That doesn’t matter!’

‘Okay, Okay!’

‘Behave.’

I shut my mouth. We walked down a white path, which led to quite a magnificent palace. ‘She should be in here,’ Hades explained. ‘Don’t worry about Hella. She isn’t scarier than Persephone.’

I stiffled a laugh while we walked inside. 

We were guided into a throne room by a ghost (Not by a skeleton, like in Hades). The throne room was both huge and beautiful. Or, well, throne room. Instead of a throne there was a couch. A woman wearing a big victorian gown and a mask over half her face was draped over it. 

She got up when she saw us. ‘Hades... Who's this?’

‘Nico. He’s my son.’

‘And you brought him along because?’

‘I wanted him to see how Helheim is run.’

Hella shrugged. ‘Okay. As long as he doesn’t destroy anything.’ She pushed her gown straight.

‘Why did you call on me?’ Dad inquired. 

Hell pushed a few curls out of her face. ‘Hellheims’ infrastructure needs to be renewed.’

My father blinked. ‘You want my help with infrastructure?’

‘In recent years, Haides has gotten a wonderful new infrastructure. If you don’t mind, could you enlighten me on how that happened?’

‘That way. A talented architect, eh, recently died. I had him reshape the infrastructure from before, to hold back the traffic jams that used to stop the flow of recently deceased coming in...’

I zoned out and took a good look around room. It was built in a style that held the middle between baroque and Scandinavian. Just like in the Greek Underworld, there were doors running to different parts of the castle. Through little windows you could see where they went. I narrowed my eyes and tried to peak through one. 

‘Hadesson!’

With a start, I turned around, ‘Wha… I mean, yes, your majesty?’

She studied me for a second. ‘Could you go get us something to drink? There is a cooler in the back behind the door you were trying to peak through.’ She pointed a gloved hand at it (I could see her bony wrist sticking out from under the glove). 

I made eye-contact with my dad for a second. He nodded, which I took as a sign that it was probably safe enough to do as she asked. 

I nodded, turned around and walked through the door.

As soon as it fell close behind me I was ambushed by a spirit, who grabbed my ankle. I jumped and he let go of my leg, at which point he was shoved away by another spirit. 

I kept on walking, ready to fight whatever else would come at me. I saw only a few ghosts around me, but it felt like I was wading through a sea filled with them. 

There was a cooler in a small kitchenette at the end of the hallway, but it certainly did not have water in it. Instead, it held a stinking brown-blackish liquid. I got three paper cups from the stack behind it. I filled two and thought for a second, before deciding I was good. 

‘Ghhh...’ A random soul popped up next to me. They slowly stroked my leg. I almost lost all of the fluid in the cups.

‘Eh...’

‘Gggguhh...’ they pointed at the cooler. 

‘You want some?’ I handed them one of the cups without knowing if that was a good idea. ‘Guhhh...’ They downed the whole thing, deeply bowed for me and left. I waited for a few seconds. It didn’t seem like anything happened.

I filled another cup and walked back to the throneroom. Dad and Hella were still talking to each other, Hella on her couch, Dad on a chair a few feet away. 

‘Hadesson,’ Hel announced, while I handed them both a cup, ‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’ 

‘Your father and I have discussed the basics of the infrastructure exchange,’ she told me, as if it was supposed to mean something to me. 

‘That is good to hear.’

She looked at me for a few seconds, before turning to Hades. ‘I think we should stop here. Talk to this kid first, then we’ll see.’ 

Hades nodded. I wondered what was going on, but I didn’t ask. I could do that in a second or so.

They both drank their cups empty, after which dad and I left. I bowed to Hel, who bowed her head back to me. 

My dad put his hand on my shoulder when we got back. ‘What she meant is that she thinks you should do the small runs, to see if everything is going alright with the infrastructure there. She doesn’t like it if other gods come into her domain.’

‘She, and you, want me to… be a messenger sometimes, basically?’

‘It would be handy. She prefers it and our underworld is already a mess. Yet, I only want you to do it if you feel better. It shouldn’t be an extra burden.’

I began to snicker. ‘I think it might be funny to see what the gods are up to sometimes.’

He shrugged. ‘I will see what happens. It would be the best if it was you, for Hell at least, but I am not sure if I want it.’

‘I’ll hear it. I don’t think it can be that bad.’

‘Hm.’

‘I reckon Daedelus will be going to Helheim now?’

‘Yes. I think he’ll sees it as a challenge.’

I nodded. ‘True.’

Hades sighed. ‘Perhaps you should be going back to camp now. You should eat and drink.’

‘Eh, yes.’ I hadn’t done that in a bit. ‘Okay then, see you next time!’

‘Only now realise how hungry you are?’

‘Yes, actually.’ I gave him a hug before I ran down the corridor. For one because I was hungry, but also because I had a lot to think about. 

A/N: tfw you are writing and there is this giant mosquito monster on your wall

Also it is hot in the Netherlands it shouldn’t be 27 degrees in this country my north-European body can’t handle that

[goldenkamuyhunting]

I've noticed a kindness/tolerance afforded to children even by adults who've committed horrendous acts. (like Tsurumi & Sakamoto/O-gin's child) Hostility towards children is an oft used shorthand for the depths to which one might sink, so it's refreshing to see it avoided. I think a lot of the subterfuge surrounding Asirpa can be traced back to an unwillingness to use cruelty against a child like they might with an adult. Parental relations/expectations seem to be a very important theme.

Hum…

…actually the question ‘children’ for how I see it is pretty complicate.

In media hostility towards children more than just shorthand for the depths to which one might sink, the trope of ‘would hurt a child’ has been used way too much as ‘Moral Event Horizon’ to prove a particular character to be irredeemably evil to the point it cheapened it but well, it still made it pretty effective.

And here it’s the problem and why you don’t see people hurting children often in Golden Kamuy.

Because Noda doesn’t want to depict characters who can be waved off as irredeemably evil, he wants to depict them as complex human beings and he takes pain to describe how they moved from normal people to monsters. They weren’t ‘born evil’ they just became ‘monsters’ due to circumstances and this is meaningful in that intriguing study of how trauma can reshape a person that GK is.

So it’s not so much that ‘they’re kind to children’, it’s more often that they need to be shown as such to force us to accept they aren’t just monster.

Basically Noda is subverting the trope so that we’ve to say ‘Oh but that character hadn’t sunk to the rock bottom of depravity yet’. It’s a narrative expedient more than a character trait.

And in truth Noda is quite a master at using it to shape and reshape our view of the characters.

Think at Tanigaki.

When he appears he threatens Asirpa… then he even use her as a human shield… quite a terrible person isn’t he? But then he’s friend and caring with Osoma and Huci and even take care of Cikapasi… isn’t he such a sweety?

And Ienaga? She tortured and murdered so many people and even wanted to eat Asirpa and kept on trying to eat Kantarou… but she died protecting Inkarmat and her unborn CHILD, so she can’t be that bad.

And then, as you mentioned, we’ve Sakamoto and O-gin, complete monsters who loved their kid so they can’t be that bad either, can they?

And so on and on.

And in truth it’s just a trope and if we’re careful and read in between the lines Noda knows as well and knows that real humans aren’t defined by merely crossing a moral horizon.

I’m sure Tsurumi loved his child and would have handled her with care. And he had no reasons to harm Sakamoto and O-gin’s child so he was nice with him too. But I’m also sure if pushed he wouldn’t hesitate to kill a child or have it killed, he made it clear when he threatened to destroy Ariko’s whole family, when he planned to trap Asirpa in a basement for all the time he needed, even years.

And what about Tsukishima who’s so sweet with Sakamoto’s baby in his arms and yet not only was capable to kidnap Koito but, with his chase to Tanigaki, not only might have caused Inkarmat an abortion or wounded her, killing her baby?

Sakamoto and O-gin loved their kid… but would they have spared someone else’s kid?

Probably not but it doesn’t matter. When those two monsters die, we’re left with the knowledge they loved each other and THEIR KID. While this doesn’t wash away all they’ve done (most of which we didn’t saw so we don’t have a clear image in our mind) the fact they were loving parents psychologically stop many readers from waving them off as just monsters. They could love.

And that’s exactly what Noda wanted, a world of people, a world where there’s no black and white but many shapes of grey.

So for me it’s not really refreshing children aren’t harmed as it’s a mere consequence, what is refreshing is that characters aren’t meant to be black and white but that they’re depicted as humans. Terrible humans, humans who make mistakes, or generally good humans who sometimes screw up, or humans who due to trauma were turned into monsters. But humans, like you and me and with whom we can sympathize.

So this ends up giving Asirpa a VERY STRONG plot armor to the point she doesn’t even get hurt when attacked by a bear and really, I think the only time she got scratched was when she had a whole forest fall over her and Sugimoto.

Otherwise even before, when people weren’t aware she had a code or didn’t care she had it, she never got hurt. She couldn’t.

So well, of course if we analyze this from a Watsonian, in-universe perspective we’re dealing with people who, most of the time, care for children, who wouldn’t hurt them. But from a Doylist point of view we’re merely dealing with an author who wants to make sure his characters won’t be seen as merely evil villains.

You hit a nail when you say ‘parental relations/expectations seem to be a very important theme’ because they are. Noda works a lot on them and on how they shape a human.

In a way you might read his story also as an analysis of society and how it can harm humans.

From Hanazawa who, due to society’s pressure discharges Ogata and, due to his rank, put Yuusaku in the flag bearer position, to Wilk, who fears for the future and therefore wants Asirpa to forge a better future for Ainu, to Ueji’s father who basically broke him with his expectations, to Boutarou and Sugimoto, who lost their beloved family and were ostracized by society due to their sickness, to Tsukishima whose father his ostracized by the islanders who believes him to be a murderer and use this against Tsukishima as well.

We’ve parents of every sort, many of them trying to be good, few of them succeeding because back then there were beliefs about how to handle children that were actually not good.

And in the end we’ve plenty of children, children who often had grown up and became adults, yet carry inside themselves the harm their parents did to them, or their expectation or the loss of them, or the hope to surpass them and become better parents.

Think at Shinpei and Chiyoko or at Tanigaki and Inkarmat, couples who had/are about to have a child and are hoping they’ll be good parents.

In a way it’s a progression from the oldest generations, represented by Hijikata and Huci, to the new ones up till Asirpa and Cikapasi with Enonoka and Osoma with that unnamed Ainu kid.

And maybe it’s just me but this is part of what makes GK a story I love.

Thanks for your ask!

[yuki-carey]

@ssongpyeon This is part 2 of answering your ask! I would reblog my first post but when I do so it removes it from the tags... So yeah...

So. I said I'd give my heavier headcanons. So warning, this could be triggering to some people, because Beyblade is extremely damn dark, and this is only darker. (Triggers in the tags.) They’re headcanons about the show because the manga is another pair of hands.

-I headcanon that Doji is his uncle (his mother's brother), actually. I think Reiji's parents were very busy because they are rich, but not the kind to just sit on their wealth and accumulate more wealth, unlike most ultra-rich people, they actually work, but they have a terrible work/life balance so they often ended up neglecting their child(ren), barely hiring nannies to take care of him (them). Doji, on the other hand, was jealous of his older sister getting most of the money and power (even though he still received plenty of money himself), and that, along with the fact he's an awful person, was what decided him to create the Dark Nebula to get more power. Except at first he didn't know L-Drago existed, so he spent years and years coming up with different schemes and plans to take control. Ryuga became part of his schemes after some time, but their 'collaboration' was still relatively recent. Reiji on the other hand has been a part of this very early on, ever since Doji offered to "take care of him" (when he was ‪around 7-9‬ years-old?), and his parents agreed because they thought it was still better for him to be raised by his uncle than by strangers. (I mean, his mom was dubious at first because she knew her brother, but she assumed he was trying to apologize for their tense relationship.)

Obviously, this was all very wrong.

Doji, indeed, had just cooked up a plan that was a bit more likely to succeed than the others, and he needed a pawn for it to work. Someone naive, someone who would trust him blindly, someone he could bend and break and reshape as he wished. And who better suited for that role than a child who knew nothing of the real world?

Especially a child who already knew about Beyblade, and to whom he wouldn’t have to teach EVERYTHING about how to play. (Even if Doji didn’t yet know about the dark power at the time, he had still noticed how incredible beys could be, and he was able to tell that something could be done with that.)

Indeed, thanks to his connection with his bey, (and also because he would spent a lot of time training on his own, since he didn’t really have anything else to do,) Reiji was already quite a good blader (well, not THAT good but like... Acceptable for a child. And Doji didn’t really have any other choice anyway, so he couldn’t be picky.)

So Doji took him under his wing, and tried to use him without him noticing. After all, why would a child have doubted him?

... Except Doji is the most suspicious person ever, and that Reiji already didn't trust people much, because it seemed very weird to him that someone he didn't know would just take him in and be nice. (I can only imagine that during his childhood, kids hated him because his parents were rich so they assumed he could have anything he wanted, and that if he refused to share, it was because he was mean. It wasn't.)

So anyway Reiji didn't trust Doji, to the point where it made Doji's entire plan fail. Also because it wasn't a solid plan (I mean, have you seen Doji's ideas? Seriously? The man can't think for more than two seconds to save his life. Anyone whose plan is ‘step 1. conquer the world! Step 2. ???‘ can’t think for more than two seconds to save their life.)

The whole failure meant Doji had to find a new plan. And as previously stated, Doji is bad at thinking up ideas.

So Doji kept scheming, but also trying to understand what to do with his nephew (he couldn’t pretend he couldn’t stand him as an excuse to give him back to his parents, since he might have needed him again later on). He also felt that he actually had to gain his trust, otherwise he wouldn’t manage to do anything.

And to do this, he would have to do something. To create Reiji Mizuchi, out of this lonely, quiet, useless kid.

So he staged the kidnapping.

/!\ Alright so I warned there would be some triggering stuff in there. THIS IS IT NOW. If you wish to proceed, it’s at your own risk. /!\

So my headcanon is that Doji... Got random goons to kidnap Reiji, lock him up in one of his mansions for a few months (which would later on become one of the Dark Nebula’s headquarters, where Reiji was obviously not allowed)... And to torture him by putting electrodes on his head and giving him shocks, as they forced him to listen to the same words being said over and over again each time he was shocked —positive words, encouraging words, determined words... In one word... Friendship. Everything about friendship.

Want to make sure someone will never, ever have any friends, who could interfere with your plans and actually save the person you’re manipulating? Make the very concept of friendship hurt them like Hell.

And that’s what Doji did. And that’s why during his battle against Kenta, when Kenta starts talking about winning for his friends, Reiji... Loses it. Starts clutching his head, saying “it hurts, it hurts! It really hurts!!” Why would he be faking this? He is actually hurt. My headcanon (theory?????) is that his mind now associates the words/ideas with being shocked, which is horribly painful, and that this is what makes him freak out, and start going crazy (crazier than he was at least). To disprove this theory, you may say that he wasn’t hurt because of Kenta’s words, but because Kenta was about to beat him. To which I say no. Because otherwise, he would have similarly freaked out during his fight against Gingka. And he didn’t. He was extremely scared, but not hurt. He didn’t, as Doji put it, “have to use his true power”. (Sorry if my retranscription of what they said in the episodes is approximative, I’m relying on my memory and while I basically know the French version by heart, I don’t know the English one as well.)

Soooooo there you have it. But that’s not over. After the torture, when Doji deemed he was “ready”, he showed up at the mansion with three or four other goons disguised as cops who “arrested” the “bad guys” in front of Reiji’s eyes. In other words, Doji pretended that someone else had kidnapped him, but that he had been looking for him the whole time and that now he had finally found him, everything would be okay.

All of this to both earn Reiji’s trust, make sure that he would not make any friends (who could have proved to Reiji that Doji was evil), and even give him a good reason to make Reiji stay put (his excuse for basically locking him up in his bedroom being “so it’s easier to protect you”).

It was also a way to encourage him to become a better blader, “so you can protect yourself”.

So that’s what Doji did, keep Reiji alone in his bedroom, slowly becoming crazier and even more brainwashed as everything he had access to was controlled by Doji, everything he was told was said by Doji, everything he could watch on TV (to analyze other bladers’ moves and both learn from their techniques, and learn to hate them since unlike him, they never had to suffer) was recorded and put there by Doji...

And that’s how Doji created the perfect little monster, the perfect little puppet.

Later on, when he learned about the dark power, and learned the Hagane family was the one in charge of protecting it, all Doji had to do was to tell Reiji that hey, after years of searching for the one behind your terrible-horrible-awful tragedy, we finally found him, and his name is Ryo Hagane.

Which makes Reiji want revenge upon him. And what better revenge, whispers Doji after he realizes that Ryo was less of a threat than he thought and Gingka is the one to watch out for, than completely destroying Ryo’s most precious possession? No, not his bey, though it would kill two birds with one stone... But his darling, darling son. Annihilated, right in front of his eyes, as he watches helplessly. He pretends to be dead, that traitor, but we know it’s not true. He is merely hiding, hiding from his sins, so his crimes will remain unpunished. But he made a mistake. He didn’t realize that you — the one he broke, the one he hurt, the one he tortured without an ounce of pity — would be better than them all. Would not be weak. Would be powerful enough to avenge yourself. So go, my child.

Avenge yourself.

—> Okay so I... Went a bit off-course... But you get the idea. There you go. That’s... My main theory about Reiji’s past.

So yeah, I definitely agree with you about Reiji actually being the key element of at least one of Doji's ideas. Which made him, yes, Doji’s plan B should plan A (using Ryuga to get L-drago's power) fail.

-Though, I mean, I do have another theory. It’s a bit less comprehensive, but I think it’s interesting nonetheless.

It once again mostly focuses on Kenta and Reiji’s fight in episode 44 because that scene of Reiji freaking the hell out lives in my head rent-free. And it doesn’t just live in my head rent-free (I mean, all of Reiji’s scenes live in my head rent-free, it’s nothing special). But this one... This one has a fucking castle in my head, with twelve swimming pools and three parks. This one has underwear made of gold and a crown made of cheese. Hot digitty dang darnit.

It’s about Reiji’s snake eyes.

See, usually, his snake eyes are like this. You probably already know it.

HOWEVER, when he starts screaming about being in pain, as you may have noticed, his snake eyes become like THIS.

It’s not a mistake, as they stay like that the whole scene, starting when he starts hurting and ending only when Gingka interrupts the fight. It’s on PURPOSE.

So we have two options. Either you are a normal person, so you say “oh, this is symbolic”.

Either you are a completely deranged madman, and you go “well OBVIOUSLY it means Reiji’s snake eyes are devices given to him by Doji, and that have been made to electrocute him so he’ll go on a rampage whenever they are activated because he doesn’t understand where the pain is coming from and mistakenly assumes it’s caused by his opponent, when really it’s just Doji pressing a button”. And, since during Gingka and Reiji’s fight, Doji wasn’t there because he was fighting Ryo... It makes sense that he couldn’t have harmed Reiji.

Okay. I don’t actually believe this theory/headcanon. Or rather I don’t really like it because I prefer my other one. (Not that I actually believe in any of my headcanons, I just think they’re neat.) But the snake eyes are looking at me and the explanation ‘it’s symbolism’ only half satisfies me.

Alright... So that was it for my theories... The rest of my headcanons are more ‘tame’... And just, logical... It’s just what happens after Battle Bladers.

-he’s still kind of scared of Gingka (he’s very prone to nightmares) but it’s getting better

-obviously most of his nightmares are rather about the Dark Nebula...

-he also doesn’t like televisions for obvious reasons.

-he still likes Beyblade because he likes his bey, but he doesn’t actually fight anymore, at least for a while. But he may start again in the future.

-sometimes in my “after Battle Bladers” AUs I headcanon that someone who was outraged by his treatment of Hyoma and Kenta destroys his bey, while he is busy going through the trauma of having just lost, and a bit of dissociation as he realizes that 1) if we go with my first headcanon/theory, he sees he could not avenge himself; but most of all 2) he is not the strongest so he is actually vulnerable and can be hurt at any moment. (This being represented by him turning to stone.) The trauma is obviously even worse when he sees his bey is destroyed. (Okay this is sad so uh... Let’s say it makes him realize destroying beys is awful, no matter the reason... So Gingka and his friends forgive him... And Madoka fixes his bey... Yeah LET’S GO WITH THAT.)

-the person he hates the most is Doji (don’t we all)

-ever since he understood Doji lied to him for about half of his life, he has trust issues... It slowly gets better as he meets kinder people, but it’s still something he has to fight.

[toku-explained]

The Invincible Swordsman

Phoenix Swordmsman and Book of Ruin: I've seen nothing about the timeline placement of this, but I've seen known sign of the Knight Forms, but Kento is here and so are the Wonder Combos, so safest bet seems to be right before Jaou Dragon happened. Bacht, wielder of Mumeiken Kyomu and the Eternal Phoenix Wonder Ride Book was sealed in a book in ages last, but is unsealed and creates portals to destroy the world. Seems to have Megiddo working with him but none of the regular villain's are involved. Bacht, Kamen Rider Falchion, apparently aims to reduce the world to nothing, Sword of Logos opposes him. The Brave Dragon joins with two others, the Love Dragon (White) and the Pride Dragon (Black) to for the Emotional Dragon Wonder Ride Book, and Saber uses Emotional Dragon to defeat Falchion. End scene is a brief teaser of our hooded man.

REALxTIME: So we have S, our lead villain, announcing he will end the world with bomb in 60 minutes and remake the world in his image, he has a large cult of followers, apparently he created the bomb using the Thousand Jacker. Among the followers are the 4 generals Bell, Moore, Lugo and Buga. Each of them, as well as the other followers, using either a Slash Abaddoriser or a Shot Abaddoriser, along with a Crowding Hopper Key become Kamen Rider Abaddon, the 4 generals having some small variation from the other followers. Aruto attempts to fight S, Kamen Rider Eden, using Zero-Two but is defeated and winds up in another world, S uses the Zero-Two Progress Key in the Thousand Jacker to create the Hell Rising Hopper Progrise Key, Izu later retrieves the Zero-Two Key and Zero-Two Driver. The Abaddon's are spreading a red gas that sends people to the other world, we get that scene of Jin, Horobi, Amatsu, Yua and Fuwa all fighting together. Aruto learns the woman he's met, Akane, knows S, and returns, attempting to fight Eden again using Metal Cluster Hooper. Apparently most of the enemies are AI controlled nanomachine constructs controlled by a few individuals using ZAIA Spec, these were meant to medical nanomachines but changed after some stuff with Ark towards the end of the series, Nanomachines make up the red mist. Horobi finds and confronts As, who has supplied Eden with the Hiden and others tech he needed, she otherwise isn't present. Is tries to find Aruto using Zea and manages to awaken to original Is somehow and they merge. Eden intends to use the Hell Rising Hopper Key to end the world, Aruto manages to take it off him, can't shut it down and is forced to use it to transform into Hell Rising Hopper. He is in a rage state and defeats S and tries to kill him but Zero-Two stops him, revealing themself as Is, Aruto calms down. Akane was S' wife, she died but her consciousness survived in the nanomachine AI, S wanted to make a world where he could be with her forever, placing his mind in a Humagear. Bell, after learning the real goal, takes the Eden Driver and Eden Key by force and becomes Kamen Rider Lucifer. Then we get Aruto as Zero-One and Is as Zero-Two facing Lucifer together, S shuts down this nanomachine system returning everyone to normal while Lucifer is defeated.

And that's Zero-One, at least until 01hers MetsubouJinrai.net comes out. But with what else was announced this week I wouldn't have counted on it being the end even if that hadn't been announced.

Z: It's important to remember with this first scene that Yuki Mai isn't actually a villain. There have definitely been examples of defence force members who count as villain's, the guy from Ginga S, or the ones from Ultraseven 1999 come to mind, but she is purely acting on the information she has, information that has been given to her by the actual villain, who we know was a trusted figure if authority. Hebikura finally reveals to the rest of STORAGE his identity as Juggler, but a younger Juggler would have just killed her and the 1st SAAG soldiers. As Destrudos rampages in LA, STORAGE prepares their mission, Haruki will pilot King Joe STORAGE Custom, while Hebikura uses Windom. He warns everyone to escape if they have to, GAFJ will almost certainly attack them. Wait Juggler what do you mean you can't grow big on your own anymore? You did last time we saw you before this, what's changed? King Joe and Windom give it their all, but they're outclassed by Destrudos, and when it looks like it's over Bako comes in with Sevengar to assist, the two manage to hold Destrudos long enough for King Joe to blow it open and attempt to pull Yoko out. So like this arm wrestling obviously is happening, but it isn't real or something, it pulls Yoko out of Celebro's control, and Celebro vanishes, leaving the Belial Medal in Yoko's hands. As she's ejected Haruki saves her by being able once more to use Delta Rise Claw, accepting he may die because of the strain, as Z warned. Beliarok returns to fight this new opponent. Destrudos regenerates the D4 cannon and fires, Beliarok absorbing the whole attack and thanks Haruki for the amusement, before destroying D4 and shattering, the feedback reverting Z to his Original State. With the encouragement of STORAGE he stands up, and with a tough battle defeats Destrudos with a Zestium Ray against the D4 Ray. Seems Haruki made it, but Z collapsed leaving. Hebikura catches up to Celebro and is going to kill it when Yuka and Kaburagi turn up and capture it, he leaves them to it. Haruki decides to go with Z to help people out in the universe. Beliarok, having reformed in space, decides to join them.

The Absolute Conspiracy: Moving to right around 1974, almost immediately after the end of Ultraman Taro, while continuing the Second Chapter we now focus on Ultraman Tregear in his Early Style (Existing VA), and some of this content was already relayed to us in the shirt story about Tregear that came out around when the Taiga movie was meant to. Tregear is working as a scientist at the Science Research Bureau under the Institute Director, Hikari (Still Origina VA), where he is working to develop a familiar item to borrow power from various life forms. Tregear looks down on himself for failing to make it into the Inter Galactic Defence Force, but Hikari encourages him to take pride in what he can do. He is reunited with Taro (New VA for his younger self), fresh from his time on earth. The showing here is abridged, but Taro is able to assist with finishing the device, and it is named the Taiga Spark. Some time later Hikari goes missing, and, in a new detail, Tregear goes to planet Arb to find him, where he is depressed after his failure to save Arb from Bogarl, and swears vengeance, for the first time becoming Hunter Knight Tsurugi, he attacks Tregear to stop him from getting in the way if pursuing revenge, leaving Tregear shocked even Hikari could not resist the darkness, and he hears Tartarus' voice. He discusses this with Taro, feeling resigned, and while Taro promises to protect him Tregear for the first time seems resentful of Taro, not just in awe. The pair go to Planet Deastar, where Taro seeks Tregear's help to investigate a strange energy. Suddenly Night Fang appears, brought by Tartarus, while it fights Taro it makes Tregear experience an illusion, where Hikari/Tsurugi draws him to the darkness, which he fears, but when Taro's illusion promises protection he rejects that too, then Tartarus offers him the chance to live as he desires, to fear nothing, and shows him his future, both his absorption of Grimdo and the conclusion of the fight with Taro in the beginning of Taiga, where despite everything Taro begged him to return. Taro uses Ultra Dynamite to destroy Night Fang, saying they'll always stand for the Light, but as Tregear leaves he rejects the idea of Light and Dark, Taro desperately calls after him.

Saber: Saber sees scenes that look like the past rush past him as he follows Caliber, while back at the battle the Megiddo claim only the one who obtains the truth will survive. Caliber tells Saber, and the Megiddo tell the others, that at the end of the gate is the Contents page of the original book, the only page that still remains, with it they would be able to find the other pages and remake the original book and reshape the world in their image. The Swordsmen intend to destroy the remaining pillars, which would prevent Saber returning. As Saber fight Caliber brings up the possibility of the world having already been changed from its original shape, before causing Saber to lose both swords and Touma vanishes into Kurayami's darkness. Mei encourages Rintaro to act, certain Touma will come back, while Touma, briefly despairing, is encouraged by Kento's spirit and manages to return to the swords and face Kamijo once more. Blades starts destroying pillars, while Kamijo explains 15 years ago. Hayato had been his best friend, until the day he betrayed them, when Kamijo confronted him he revealed Luna was a way to connect both worlds. Saber and Caliber fought, Caliber claiming this was to save the world. Luna was lost as Touma saw, and we see the last thing Touma remembered, with Brave Dragon flying into Touma's hand seemingly if it's own accord. When Hayato, enraged, yelled that this was the only way to save the world, Kamijo was forced to cut him down, but concluded the ones responsible for Hayato's corruptions were Sword of Logos, and so he decided to bear their sins even if he had to ally with the Megiddo. He believes obtaining the universal truth will allow him to identify the true enemy within Sword of Logos. Touma won't accept this, given all the people Caliber has sacrificed. As Blades continues destroying pillars, Saber uses Dragon Arthur, Crimson Dragon and Dragonic Knight. There's a Dragonback duel, ending in a Rider Kick struggle, which Saber wins, then uses a finish with both swords to defeat Kamijo, Kurayami, Jaaku Dragon and Jaou Dragon all fall. Kamijo accepts his loss, but beseeches Touma to find who betrayed Sword of Logos, saying he might be able to find Luna. Before he can say more he is stabbed through be Desast, who takes his own book back. Kamijo's last words are to beseech Touma to take Kurayami to help his quest, but suddenly both it and the books vanish. He returns just as the gate closes, greeted by everyone. And here's a reminder of Shindai Reika, going to tell us why you kidnapped Sophia any time soon?

Kenshin Retsuden: And finally for this series we have an episode of Blades, listed as Chapter 15.5. In the aftermath of everything Rintaro is depressed over Kento's death. Mei tries to cheer him up with eclairs and tries at the lottery, but even those won't excite him. We learn from flashback his lottery win was how he got the camera, and how he explained about how Sword of Logos as his family was instilled in him by his master. Rintaro feels weak, a failure, remembering his first fight with Zooous and how he felt, with Mei trying to calm him down after the fight, in the present she reminds him he saved her from Zooous, and protected Kento from Caliber, because he refused to give up. She tells him how Kento had said he wished he was as strong as Rintaro, and shows him Kento had used the camera to make sure there was a photo of himself for Rintaro. Rintaro has tears over the picture of his family, and finds his resolve.

Kiramager: Naturally the Crystalian holiday of Crystals is just a pastiche of Christmas, but the behaviour induced by Crunchula's rap causes the team to seriously hurt the Mashin, but the Mashin are also affected by the curse. Fire does make a point that they might still genuinely feel that way. The whole rap battle is just hilarious, I do like Yodonna's outfit choice. An all mecha roll call is a rare treat, last on I remember was Go-Onger, which also had an all Robo roll call. All the mecha getting a bit of spotlight like this is pretty common around this time of year, I remember Shinkenger doing it. Something is up with Yodonna.

[labyrinth-of-shadows]

” There is hell, and there is another place below hell.”  Name: Joseph  Nicknames: Báthory, Commander Species: Shadow Dimension: Elwon realm, Earth  Birthday: December 25, 1798  Age: Unknown ( physically around 30-35 ) Height: 6'8" (203.5 cm)  Skin colour: Fair Hair colour: Dark brown Eye colour: Light sky blue  Sexuality: Bisexual/ Biromantic  Alliance: Commander Báthory  Occupation | Title | Roles: Formerly Hunter, Commander ( now ) Skills | Abilities | Magic : Immortality, elemental magic, omnikinesis, umbrakinesis, dream walkers, teleportation, self resurrection, regeneration, has a very good sense of smell.

Personality:

Commander Báthory is a stubborn person with a perpetual frown but highly intelligent, arrogant, very charming, potentially sinister, and he always thinking one step ahead.Joseph is a complicated character, he’s always been hard to read.

 He’s hard to grasp, understand and intensely private, only a select few people are allowed into his inner circle.He has an acute love of fine arts, literature, and music.

 He is depicted as a man of taste and details, and a nearly-obsessive perfectionist.He believes in fate.Joseph is slightly calm, quiet and observant man, showcasing his wit and ruthlessness to anyone who threatens him or those who are in his inner circle. 

He is widely respected among his local community and is seen as a dangerous foe by his enemies. He’s a face to be dominant by, or to fight: never a face to patronize or pity.

 Joseph has a way of dominating a situation of place, with his immense power and knowledge.

 He is a determined, He gets what he wants and nothing can not stop him.

Physical Appearance: 

Joseph is very attractive and charming, tall, with athletic build body type. He has fair skin, dark brown hair, and light sky blue eyes, the eyes that seemed to flash glitter.

 He is always clean shaven and very well dressed at all times. Joseph’s style is eccentrically bold and yet, crisply elegant and understated at the same time. One look at him and you know that everything he wears is chosen with an eye for detail.

Background: 

Parents: 

Joseph was born on Dec 25, 1798, to Sir. Arcturus Báthory and Lady. Eleanor Vanderbooms whom both were shadows.He had two siblings ( Jolene and Joel they were twins.) and he was the eldest son. Joseph’s father was flamboyantly insane and ambitious. He looked like some not so mad doctor from gothic fiction who’d performed too many experiments on himself. He was emotionless , megalomaniac and sadistic , showing emotions only when it benefits him.

His mother, Lady Vanderboom had an extreme and complicated personality. She was stubborn person with a perpetual frown and rarely seen to smile.Joseph’s parents were the main leader of Death-bringers society. 

They moved back to Earth from Elwon Realm because they believed that the Earth is their main home and it is where they suppose to live. They started a political movement meant to takeover the Elwon Realm and also the Earth rule the world like how it was centuries ago when shadows and other magical creatures were the dominant creatures.

 In reality, however, Arcturus only wanted to install himself as the leader of peculiardom and reshape the world in his image, with his followers being nothing more than cannon fodder. His actions caused many deaths and it destroyed his family.

Early life:

After an accident, his parents perish in a fire that destroys their entire house, The Báthory siblings became orphans at a young age, After their parents died, their family was separated. As Joseph’s relationship with his siblings deteriorated after the fire accident, the three of them were placed into different academies. However Joseph ended up living in an academy (The Castle Báthory) that belongs to his Grandparents *on his father’s side*.)

In the meantime, Joseph found it difficult to connect with his classmates, siblings and the other people around him, he was living life as a lonely orphan. However, while he was in the academy, he trained by his uncle as a very well and skilled hunter.After Joseph leaved the Castle Báthory( the academy) he joined the Commission to fight against the Hollows and Death-bringers. He did this because he wanted to proved that he is completely different from his parents and his siblings and he was always disagreed with his family's belief.

Some time after leaving Castle Báthory, Joseph journeyed to all over the world, which is where he first began his career as a hunter.

Joseph never had a good relationship with his siblings and they did not share a close relationship with each others but years later after leaving the academy, he tried and searched for his siblings but he never found them again or at least it is what he says!

Joseph spends his life being a hunter, traveling to different places. However after he decided to quite his job because of some personal reasons he got arrested in the order of new high commander of Elwon Realm. They accused Joseph of being a betrayal to Elwon Realm society, being connected to the death-bringers and being a danger to their society!

 Of course all of this was nothing more than lies! After they captured Joseph, he was sent to Abyss. However he rescued from the Abyss.

In the meantime during the time after he released, Joseph served in different Wars ( Wars among magical creatures and hollows in different dimensions.) With the rank of Sergeant Major and was decorated for bravery. He became a commander and his actions at saved thousands of allied lives, for which he received medals of honour. 

[fursasaida]

Care to share your thoughts on what reality is and what makes life life?

I’m thinking a lot about consequences and loss after the events of the last few days, so it seems like the right time to come back to this. The first time I tried to answer it was overly explanatory: I was trying to walk you through every idea I’ve read and internalized that brought me to the perspective I have. I think that’s probably more trouble than it’s worth (for you the reader, not just for me), so I’ll just provide the names of some texts at the end for anyone who’s interested.

The short version is this. What does it mean for something to happen? Why do things exist the way they are and not other ways? How are these existing things related to each other? My understanding is that things come to exist through happenings, and that these happenings can only be defined by having some sort of consequence. That is, a mark must be made, or something must be divided from something else, or transformed, etc. An apple becomes part of my body because I eat it, and we can know that I ate it because my stomach is fuller and the apple is smaller. In turn, the event that produced these tangible marks defines my relationship with the apple; this includes not only the eating but my ideas about apples as food and the processes by which the apple becomes available to me (that is, how the apple is produced). I think a lot about Cole about 2/3 of the way through 12 Monkeys, when he starts to accept the premise that maybe he’s insane (rather than that he’s a time traveler) because moving between different points in time has destroyed his sense of sequence, causality, and consequence. It’s not just that time as we currently imagine it is linear and orderly (time is actually much more complex than this). It’s that if events have no consequences–if they make no marks, if they can’t be understood to affect anything–then they are not parseable as events.

This does not translate into clockwork determinism, though, where everything is inevitable because it’s all just endless chains of cause and effect. The past is fundamentally inaccessible (in exactly the same way that the future is). All we have is memory and material traces of the past, which exist in the present. We constantly reproduce and remake the past on the basis of these traces and memories, now, in the present. Therefore the past can be changed. But it cannot be erased or undone, because the very things we have to work with–our means of changing the past–are the marks and traces and memories that show that there ever was a past at all.

If I put this on a metaphorical level I think it’s pretty easy to understand. We change our minds about what traces of the past mean all the time. Take a monument, like say an obelisk. When it was built it meant something very specific to the religious-political elites who made it in Ancient Egypt, and to its audience; obelisks were, among other things, tools of communication. Over time, obelisks became ruins and mysterious monuments bearing unreadable marks. Later, as Europe became fascinated by Ancient Egypt, obelisks became symbols of wealth and power, used to imply continuity between French and British Empires and the Ancient Egyptian empire. When an obelisk was placed at the center of the Place de la Concorde in Paris, it was because it was seen as an apolitical symbol in the context of French political strife (though this of course ignored that the French colonization of Egypt was…..political). Meanwhile the study of heiroglyphics proceeds such that obelisks become, instead of tools of contemporary communication, part of that category called archaeological evidence. And meanwhile Egyptian politics and nationhood develop to the point that obelisks become part of the category of objects called “heritage.” The object remains the same, though it weathers and it travels; the actions that produced it as itself endure, literally as marks in stone. Its meaning changes over time and with context as different narratives and ideologies reshape it for their own purposes. The history of these reshapings can be traced as what we call “historiography,” or the writing of history; that is, history has a history of its own.

The point I want to make very clear is that the “remaking of the past” is not only symbolic or ideological. It’s not just about interpreting things differently; it is more than historiography. No one can make it so that the obelisk was never carved. But what the obelisk is, not only what it means, does change. Normally I would get into quantum physics here (the quantum eraser experiment and quantum discord), but I’m trying to keep it simple, so just consider it noted that this phenomenon appears even at the molecular level. You can decide in the present whether the light you measured (i.e., used to make marks) in the past was composed of particles or was a wave. But when you make that decision, the marks from your last decision do not go away. The past has a past. The traces of that meta-past cannot be undone even when you change what the past is.

If the past could be erased or undone, this would mean that, say, toppling a monument means it was never put up–that that event didn’t happen. It is tempting and easy here to retreat to the metaphorical/historiographic level and say, well, in a way that’s what toppling it is doing; it’s announcing the end of somebody’s power, trying to erase that power in the landscape. But making people ignorant of the past is not the same as undoing it, because whatever happened in the past–by virtue of the fact that it happened at all–had material consequences that are not reversible. The toppled monument may become covered in soil and overgrown, but it was still carved out of rock and nothing undoes that. The stone does not magically reappear as part of the rock it came from. That people forget does not make it something that never happened. Instead it becomes the mark of a past version of the past. Whether we remember that past version doesn’t change the fact that it happened; it just means we have remade the past in the present. If you’re familiar with Walter Benjamin’s notion of debris and the Angel of History, my version of it would be that we are surrounded by all the traces of all past pasts; indeed, part of what makes it possible to remake the past is the fact that these traces endure to coexist with us in the present, and not all of them fit together.

This matters to my feelings about what reality is and what makes life life because, as I said early on, if you could undo the marks of the past–and of the past’s past–then there would be no events. There would quite possibly be no things at all. To move this to an ethical register, to live a life in which you always have a do-over button is, for me, impossible to imagine. It requires that the other people around you be essentially simulations (assuming they, too, have do-over buttons, and therefore are proceeding through their own playground universes), or else be puppets to your whims. It means you will never be responsible for anything or to anyone; it means always being able to declare “I didn’t mean it” and have that make everything okay because no one else will ever know what you did–because you didn’t do it. The minds, feelings, and pain of others need not ever be real to you, only your desire to avoid being made to feel bad by their reactions, which you need not even understand; you can just redo stuff by trial and error until you get “changes” you want to “save,” and move on. It is a life of being sorry only to get caught, so to speak. You need never make any mark on the world you don’t intend or like, which is–I mean like, materially–just literally not what existing is. I exist because of the other things and beings that constitute me and that I help constitute in turn. If I can pick and choose, if I can curate what all of those marks and relationships look like–well, for one thing, I’d never have time to do anything else (perhaps I don’t wish to disturb these carpet fibers in this particular way), but also I am simply not operating in the domain of what existence is? I think Russian Doll illustrates this pretty well. Nadia and Alan do live this kind of do-over existence, but the universe doesn’t just accept it. Even after reboots, their actions have consequences, entropy proceeds, things start to decohere.

That life is hard because there are no do-overs is true. It’s not that I have no sympathy for this fact; trust me, I feel it acutely all the time. Nothing I’m saying here is intended to come across like “grow up and join the real world, snowflake!” But without this fact there is also no life, because nothing happens; there are no meaningful relationships or responsibilities. It might be pleasant to be able to return back to your last save and redo things better, but it would also mean living in a world where nothing is real. Responsibility is many things. Two of them are a) the ability to respond to others, and b) the ability to allow others to respond. Even a puppetmaster must contend with the fact that their puppets sometimes break; they have to look after them. But this shouldn’t be seen as only restrictive, a burden to be borne. The forms of responsibility enabled by the indelible past are also what allow us to remake it–to respond differently. We are only here because we inherit the past, and in that sense we owe it a debt; but we have also received from it the gift of being here at all.

References!

At Multiverse Impasse, a New Theory of Scale

Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”

Laurent Olivier, The Dark Abyss of Time (review/summary here)

Gastón Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (which you can hear something about on this podcast)

On 12 Monkeys:

“12 Monkeys Is the Apocalypse Film We Need Right Now”

The film Looper, if you haven’t seen it, is itself a comment on 12 Monkeys and extends its ideas in the direction of responsibility.

Karen Barad, “Temporality, Materiality, Justice To-Come” and Meeting the Universe Halfway (you can find a pdf if you google)

(It was hard to find anything both readable and open-access on this, but if you’re really interested, get into quantum discord and quantum illumination)

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International

Derek McCormack, “Remotely Sensing Affective Afterlives”

[thelabyrinthofshadows-archived]

Joseph Sebastian Báthory

“There is hell, and there is another place below hell.”

Name: Joseph

Nicknames: Báthory, Commander

Species: Shadow

Dimension: Elwon realm, Earth

Birthday: December 25, 1798

Age: Unknown ( physically around 30-35 )

Height: 6'8" (203.5 cm)

Skin colour: Fair

Hair colour: Dark brown

Eye colour: Light sky blue

Sexual: Bisexual/ Biromantic

Alliance: Commander Báthory, Mystery man with a red right hand

Occupation | Title | Roles: Formerly Hunter, Commander ( now )

Skills | Abilities | Magic : Immortality, elemental magic, omnikinesis, umbrakinesis, dream walkers, teleportation, self resurrection, regeneration, has a very good sense of smell.

Personality:

Commander Báthory is a stubborn person with a perpetual frown but highly intelligent, arrogant, very charming, potentially sinister, and he always thinking one step ahead.

Joseph is a complicated character, he’s always been hard to read. He’s hard to grasp, understand and intensely private, only a select few people are allowed into his inner circle.

He has an acute love of fine arts, literature, and music. He is depicted as a man of taste and details, and a nearly-obsessive perfectionist.

He believes in fate.

Joseph is slightly calm, quiet and observant man, showcasing his wit and ruthlessness to anyone who threatens him or those who are in his inner circle. He is widely respected among his local community and is seen as a dangerous foe by his enemies. He’s a face to be dominant by, or to fight: never a face to patronize or pity. Joseph has a way of dominating a situation of place, with his immense power and knowledge. He is a determined, He gets what he wants and nothing can not stop him.

Physical Appearance:

Joseph is very attractive and charming, tall, with athletic build body type. He has fair skin, dark brown hair, and light sky blue eyes, the eyes that seemed to flash glitter. He is always clean shaven and very well dressed at all times. Joseph’s style is eccentrically bold and yet, crisply elegant and understated at the same time. One look at him and you know that everything he wears is chosen with an eye for detail.

Background:

Parents:

Joseph was born on Dec 25, 1798, to Sir. Arcturus Báthory and Lady. Eleanor Vanderbooms whom both were shadows.

He had two siblings ( Jolene and Joel they were twins.) and he was the eldest son.

Joseph’s father was flamboyantly insane and ambitious. He looked like some not so mad doctor from gothic fiction who’d performed too many experiments on himself. He was emotionless , megalomaniac and sadistic , showing emotions only when it benefits him.

His mother, Lady Vanderboom had an extreme and complicated personality. She was stubborn person with a perpetual frown and rarely seen to smile.

Joseph’s parents were the main leader of Death-bringers society. They moved back to Earth from Elwon Realm because they believed that the Earth is their main home and it is where they suppose to live. They started a political movement meant to takeover the Elwon Realm and also the Earth rule the world like how it was centuries ago when shadows and other magical creatures were the dominant creatures. In reality, however, Arcturus only wanted to install himself as the leader of peculiardom and reshape the world in his image, with his followers being nothing more than cannon fodder. His actions caused many deaths and it destroyed his family.

Early life:

After an accident, his parents perish in a fire that destroys their entire house, The Báthory siblings became orphans at a young age, After their parents died, their family was separated. As Joseph’s relationship with his siblings deteriorated after the fire accident, the three of them were placed into different academies. However Joseph ended up living in an academy (The Castle Báthory) that belongs to his Grandparents *on his father’s side*.)

In the meantime, Joseph found it difficult to connect with his classmates, siblings and the other people around him, he was living life as a lonely orphan. However, while he was in the academy, he trained by his uncle as a very well and skilled hunter.

After Joseph leaved the Castle Báthory( the academy) he joined the Commission to fight against the Hollows and Death-bringers. He did this because he wanted to proved that he is completely different from his parents and his siblings and he was always disagreed with his family's belief.

Some time after leaving Castle Báthory, Joseph journeyed to all over the world, which is where he first began his career as a hunter.

Joseph never had a good relationship with his siblings and they did not share a close relationship with each others but years later after leaving the academy, he tried and searched for his siblings but he never found them again or at least it is what he says!

Joseph spends his life being a hunter, traveling to different places. However after he decided to quite his job because of some personal reasons he got arrested in the order of new high commander of Elwon Realm. They accused Joseph of being a betrayal to Elwon Realm society, being connected to the death-bringers and being a danger to their society! Of course all of this was nothing more than lies! After they captured Joseph, he was sent to Abyss. However he rescued from the Abyss!

In the meantime during the time after he released, Joseph served in different Wars ( Wars among magical creatures and hollows in different dimensions.) With the rank of Sergeant Major and was decorated for bravery. He became a commander and his actions at saved thousands of allied lives, for which he received medals of honour.

[bountyofbeads]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/sugar-slave-trade-slavery.html

The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the 'white gold' that fueled slavery, writes Khalil Gibran Muhammad. "It was the introduction of sugar slavery in the New World that changed everything."

The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery.

By Khalil Gibran Muhammad |Published August 14, 2019 | New York Times "1619 Project" | Posted August 24, 2019 9:58 AM ET |

Domino Sugar’s Chalmette Refinery in Arabi, La., sits on the edge of the mighty Mississippi River, about five miles east by way of the river’s bend from the French Quarter, and less than a mile down from the Lower Ninth Ward, where Hurricane Katrina and the failed levees destroyed so many black lives. It is North America’s largest sugar refinery, making nearly two billion pounds of sugar and sugar products annually. Those ubiquitous four-pound yellow paper bags emblazoned with the company logo are produced here at a rate of 120 bags a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week during operating season.

The United States makes about nine million tons of sugar annually, ranking it sixth in global production. The United States sugar industry receives as much as $4 billion in annual subsidies in the form of price supports, guaranteed crop loans, tariffs and regulated imports of foreign sugar, which by some estimates is about half the price per pound of domestic sugar. Louisiana’s sugar-cane industry is by itself worth $3 billion, generating an estimated 16,400 jobs.

A vast majority of that domestic sugar stays in this country, with an additional two to three million tons imported each year. Americans consume as much as 77.1 pounds of sugar and related sweeteners per person per year, according to United States Department of Agriculture data. That’s nearly twice the limit the department recommends, based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

Sugar has been linked in the United States to diabetes, obesity and cancer. If it is killing all of us, it is killing black people faster. Over the last 30 years, the rate of Americans who are obese or overweight grew 27 percent among all adults, to 71 percent from 56 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control, with African-Americans overrepresented in the national figures. During the same period, diabetes rates overall nearly tripled. Among black non-Hispanic women, they are nearly double those of white non-Hispanic women, and one and a half times higher for black men than white men.

None of this — the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic might and outsize impact on the American diet and health — was in any way foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it weren’t for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work.

For thousands of years, cane was a heavy and unwieldy crop that had to be cut by hand and immediately ground to release the juice inside, lest it spoil within a day or two. Even before harvest time, rows had to be dug, stalks planted and plentiful wood chopped as fuel for boiling the liquid and reducing it to crystals and molasses. From the earliest traces of cane domestication on the Pacific island of New Guinea 10,000 years ago to its island-hopping advance to ancient India in 350 B.C., sugar was locally consumed and very labor-intensive. It remained little more than an exotic spice, medicinal glaze or sweetener for elite palates.

It was the introduction of sugar slavery in the New World that changed everything. “The true Age of Sugar had begun — and it was doing more to reshape the world than any ruler, empire or war had ever done,” Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos write in their 2010 book, “Sugar Changed the World.” Over the four centuries that followed Columbus’s arrival, on the mainlands of Central and South America in Mexico, Guyana and Brazil as well as on the sugar islands of the West Indies — Cuba, Barbados and Jamaica, among others — countless indigenous lives were destroyed and nearly 11 million Africans were enslaved, just counting those who survived the Middle Passage.

“White gold” drove trade in goods and people, fueled the wealth of European nations and, for the British in particular, shored up the financing of their North American colonies. “There was direct trade among the colonies and between the colonies and Europe, but much of the Atlantic trade was triangular: enslaved people from Africa; sugar from the West Indies and Brazil; money and manufactures from Europe,” writes the Harvard historian Walter Johnson in his 1999 book, “Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market.” “People were traded along the bottom of the triangle; profits would stick at the top.”

Before French Jesuit priests planted the first cane stalk near Baronne Street in New Orleans in 1751, sugar was already a huge moneymaker in British New York. By the 1720s, one of every two ships in the city’s port was either arriving from or heading to the Caribbean, importing sugar and enslaved people and exporting flour, meat and shipbuilding supplies. The trade was so lucrative that Wall Street’s most impressive buildings were Trinity Church at one end, facing the Hudson River, and the five-story sugar warehouses on the other, close to the East River and near the busy slave market. New York’s enslaved population reached 20 percent, prompting the New York General Assembly in 1730 to issue a consolidated slave code, making it “unlawful for above three slaves” to meet on their own, and authorizing “each town” to employ “a common whipper for their slaves.”

In 1795, Étienne de Boré, a New Orleans sugar planter, granulated the first sugar crystals in the Louisiana Territory. With the advent of sugar processing locally, sugar plantations exploded up and down both banks of the Mississippi River. All of this was possible because of the abundantly rich alluvial soil, combined with the technical mastery of seasoned French and Spanish planters from around the cane-growing basin of the Gulf and the Caribbean — and because of the toil of thousands of enslaved people. More French planters and their enslaved expert sugar workers poured into Louisiana as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines led a successful revolution to secure Haiti’s independence from France.

Within five decades, Louisiana planters were producing a quarter of the world’s cane-sugar supply. During her antebellum reign, Queen Sugar bested King Cotton locally, making Louisiana the second-richest state in per capita wealth. According to the historian Richard Follett, the state ranked third in banking capital behind New York and Massachusetts in 1840. The value of enslaved people alone represented tens of millions of dollars in capital that financed investments, loans and businesses. Much of that investment funneled back into the sugar mills, the “most industrialized sector of Southern agriculture,” Follett writes in his 2005 book, “Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World 1820-1860.” No other agricultural region came close to the amount of capital investment in farming by the eve of the Civil War. In 1853, Representative Miles Taylor of Louisiana bragged that his state’s success was “without parallel in the United States, or indeed in the world in any branch of industry.”

The enslaved population soared, quadrupling over a 20-year period to 125,000 souls in the mid-19th century. New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. The number of enslaved labor crews doubled on sugar plantations. And in every sugar parish, black people outnumbered whites. These were some of the most skilled laborers, doing some of the most dangerous agricultural and industrial work in the United States.

In the mill, alongside adults, children toiled like factory workers with assembly-line precision and discipline under the constant threat of boiling hot kettles, open furnaces and grinding rollers. “All along the endless carrier are ranged slave children, whose business it is to place the cane upon it, when it is conveyed through the shed into the main building,” wrote Solomon Northup in “Twelve Years a Slave,” his 1853 memoir of being kidnapped and forced into slavery on Louisiana plantations.

To achieve the highest efficiency, as in the round-the-clock Domino refinery today, sugar houses operated night and day. “On cane plantations in sugar time, there is no distinction as to the days of the week,” Northup wrote. Fatigue might mean losing an arm to the grinding rollers or being flayed for failing to keep up. Resistance was often met with sadistic cruelty.

A formerly enslaved black woman named Mrs. Webb described a torture chamber used by her owner, Valsin Marmillion. “One of his cruelties was to place a disobedient slave, standing in a box, in which there were nails placed in such a manner that the poor creature was unable to move,” she told a W.P.A. interviewer in 1940. “He was powerless even to chase the flies, or sometimes ants crawling on some parts of his body.”

Louisiana led the nation in destroying the lives of black people in the name of economic efficiency. The historian Michael Tadman found that Louisiana sugar parishes had a pattern of “deaths exceeding births.” Backbreaking labor and “inadequate net nutrition meant that slaves working on sugar plantations were, compared with other working-age slaves in the United States, far less able to resist the common and life-threatening diseases of dirt and poverty,” wrote Tadman in a 2000 study published in the American Historical Review. Life expectancy was less like that on a cotton plantation and closer to that of a Jamaican cane field, where the most overworked and abused could drop dead after seven years.

Most of these stories of brutality, torture and premature death have never been told in classroom textbooks or historical museums. They have been refined and whitewashed in the mills and factories of Southern folklore: the romantic South, the Lost Cause, the popular “moonlight and magnolias” plantation tours so important to Louisiana’s agritourism today.

When I arrived at the Whitney Plantation Museum on a hot day in June, I mentioned to Ashley Rogers, 36, the museum’s executive director, that I had passed the Nelson Coleman Correctional Center about 15 miles back along the way. “You passed a dump and a prison on your way to a plantation,” she said. “These are not coincidences.”

The Whitney, which opened five years ago as the only sugar-slavery museum in the nation, rests squarely in a geography of human detritus. The museum tells of the everyday struggles and resistance of black people who didn’t lose their dignity even when they lost everything else. It sits on the west bank of the Mississippi at the northern edge of the St. John the Baptist Parish, home to dozens of once-thriving sugar plantations; Marmillion’s plantation and torture box were just a few miles down from Whitney.

The museum also sits across the river from the site of the German Coast uprising in 1811, one of the largest revolts of enslaved people in United States history. As many as 500 sugar rebels joined a liberation army heading toward New Orleans, only to be cut down by federal troops and local militia; no record of their actual plans survives. About a hundred were killed in battle or executed later, many with their heads severed and placed on pikes throughout the region. Based on historians’ estimates, the execution tally was nearly twice as high as the number in Nat Turner’s more famous 1831 rebellion. The revolt has been virtually redacted from the historical record. But not at Whitney. And yet tourists, Rogers said, sometimes admit to her, a white woman, that they are warned by hotel concierges and tour operators that Whitney is the one misrepresenting the past. “You are meant to empathize with the owners as their guests,” Rogers told me in her office. In Louisiana’s plantation tourism, she said, “the currency has been the distortion of the past.”

The landscape bears witness and corroborates Whitney’s version of history. Although the Coleman jail opened in 2001 and is named for an African-American sheriff’s deputy who died in the line of duty, Rogers connects it to a longer history of coerced labor, land theft and racial control after slavery. Sugar cane grows on farms all around the jail, but at the nearby Louisiana State Penitentiary, or Angola, prisoners grow it. Angola is the largest maximum-security prison by land mass in the nation. It opened in its current location in 1901 and took the name of one of the plantations that had occupied the land. Even today, incarcerated men harvest Angola’s cane, which is turned into syrup and sold on-site.

From slavery to freedom, many black Louisianans found that the crushing work of sugar cane remained mostly the same. Even with Reconstruction delivering civil rights for the first time, white planters continued to dominate landownership. Freedmen and freedwomen had little choice but to live in somebody’s old slave quarters. As new wage earners, they negotiated the best terms they could, signed labor contracts for up to a year and moved frequently from one plantation to another in search of a life whose daily rhythms beat differently than before. And yet, even compared with sharecropping on cotton plantations, Rogers said, “sugar plantations did a better job preserving racial hierarchy.” As a rule, the historian John C. Rodrigue writes, “plantation labor overshadowed black people’s lives in the sugar region until well into the 20th century.”

Sometimes black cane workers resisted collectively by striking during planting and harvesting time — threatening to ruin the crop. Wages and working conditions occasionally improved. But other times workers met swift and violent reprisals. After a major labor insurgency in 1887, led by the Knights of Labor, a national union, at least 30 black people — some estimated hundreds — were killed in their homes and on the streets of Thibodaux, La. “I think this will settle the question of who is to rule, the nigger or the white man, for the next 50 years,” a local white planter’s widow, Mary Pugh, wrote, rejoicing, to her son.

Many African-Americans aspired to own or rent their own sugar-cane farms in the late 19th century, but faced deliberate efforts to limit black farm and land owning. The historian Rebecca Scott found that although “black farmers were occasionally able to buy plots of cane land from bankrupt estates, or otherwise establish themselves as suppliers, the trend was for planters to seek to establish relations with white tenants or sharecroppers who could provide cane for the mill.”

By World War II, many black people began to move not simply from one plantation to another, but from a cane field to a car factory in the North. By then, harvesting machines had begun to take over some, but not all, of the work. With fewer and fewer black workers in the industry, and after efforts in the late 1800s to recruit Chinese, Italian, Irish and German immigrant workers had already failed, labor recruiters in Louisiana and Florida sought workers in other states.

In 1942, the Department of Justice began a major investigation into the recruiting practices of one of the largest sugar producers in the nation, the United States Sugar Corporation, a South Florida company. Black men unfamiliar with the brutal nature of the work were promised seasonal sugar jobs at high wages, only to be forced into debt peonage, immediately accruing the cost of their transportation, lodging and equipment — all for $1.80 a day. One man testified that the conditions were so bad, “It wasn’t no freedom; it was worse than the pen.” Federal investigators agreed. When workers tried to escape, the F.B.I. found, they were captured on the highway or “shot at while trying to hitch rides on the sugar trains.” The company was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tampa for “carrying out a conspiracy to commit slavery,” wrote Alec Wilkinson, in his 1989 book, “Big Sugar: Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida.” (The indictment was ultimately quashed on procedural grounds.) A congressional investigation in the 1980s found that sugar companies had systematically tried to exploit seasonal West Indian workers to maintain absolute control over them with the constant threat of immediately sending them back to where they came from.

At the Whitney plantation, which operated continuously from 1752 to 1975, its museum staff of 12 is nearly all African-American women. A third of them have immediate relatives who either worked there or were born there in the 1960s and ’70s. These black women show tourists the same slave cabins and the same cane fields their own relatives knew all too well.

Farm laborers, mill workers and refinery employees make up the 16,400 jobs of Louisiana’s sugar-cane industry. But it is the owners of the 11 mills and 391 commercial farms who have the most influence and greatest share of the wealth. And the number of black sugar-cane farmers in Louisiana is most likely in the single digits, based on estimates from people who work in the industry. They are the exceedingly rare exceptions to a system designed to codify black loss.

And yet two of these black farmers, Charles Guidry and Eddie Lewis III, have been featured in a number of prominent news items and marketing materials out of proportion to their representation and economic footprint in the industry. Lewis and Guidry have appeared in separate online videos. The American Sugar Cane League has highlighted the same pair separately in its online newsletter, Sugar News.

Lewis has no illusions about why the marketing focuses on him, he told me; sugar cane is a lucrative business, and to keep it that way, the industry has to work with the government. “You need a few minorities in there, because these mills survive off having minorities involved with the mill to get these huge government loans,” he said. A former financial adviser at Morgan Stanley, Lewis, 36, chose to leave a successful career in finance to take his rightful place as a fifth-generation farmer. “My family was farming in the late 1800s” near the same land, he says, that his enslaved ancestors once worked. Much of the 3,000 acres he now farms comes from relationships with white landowners his father, Eddie Lewis Jr., and his grandfather before him, built and maintained.

Lewis is the minority adviser for the federal Farm Service Agency (F.S.A.) in St. Martin and Lafayette Parish, and also participates in lobbying federal legislators. He says he does it because the stakes are so high. If things don’t change, Lewis told me, “I’m probably one of two or three that’s going to be farming in the next 10 to 15 years. They’re trying to basically extinct us.” As control of the industry consolidates in fewer and fewer hands, Lewis believes black sugar-cane farmers will no longer exist, part of a long-term trend nationally, where the total proportion of all African-American farmers has plummeted since the early 1900s, to less than 2 percent from more than 14 percent, with 90 percent of black farmers’ land lost amid decades of racist actions by government agencies, banks and real estate developers.

“There’s still a few good white men around here,” Lewis told me. “It’s not to say it’s all bad. But this is definitely a community where you still have to say, ‘Yes sir,’ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and accept ‘boy’ and different things like that.”

One of the biggest players in that community is M.A. Patout and Son, the largest sugar-cane mill company in Louisiana. Founded in 1825, Patout has been known to boast that it is “the oldest complete family-owned and operated manufacturer of raw sugar in the United States.” It owns three of the 11 remaining sugar-cane mills in Louisiana, processing roughly a third of the cane in the state.

The company is being sued by a former fourth-generation black farmer. As first reported in The Guardian, Wenceslaus Provost Jr. claims the company breached a harvesting contract in an effort to deliberately sabotage his business. Provost, who goes by the first name June, and his wife, Angie, who is also a farmer, lost their home to foreclosure in 2018, after defaulting on F.S.A.-guaranteed crop loans. June Provost has also filed a federal lawsuit against First Guaranty Bank and a bank senior vice president for claims related to lending discrimination, as well as for mail and wire fraud in reporting false information to federal loan officials. The suit names a whistle-blower, a federal loan officer, who, in April 2015, “informed Mr. Provost that he had been systematically discriminated against by First Guaranty Bank,” the lawsuit reads.

(In court filings, M.A. Patout and Son denied that it breached the contract. Representatives for the company did not respond to requests for comment. In court filings, First Guaranty Bank and the senior vice president also denied Provost’s claims. Their representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)

Lewis is himself a litigant in a separate petition against white landowners. He claims they “unilaterally, arbitrarily and without just cause terminated” a seven-year-old agreement to operate his sugar-cane farm on their land, causing him to lose the value of the crop still growing there. Lewis is seeking damages of more than $200,000, based on an independent appraisal he obtained, court records show. The landowners did not respond to requests for comment.

But the new lessee, Ryan Doré, a white farmer, did confirm with me that he is now leasing the land and has offered to pay Lewis what a county agent assessed as the crop’s worth, about $50,000. Doré does not dispute the amount of Lewis’s sugar cane on the 86.16 acres. What he disputes is Lewis’s ability to make the same crop as profitable as he would. Doré, who credits M.A. Patout and Son for getting him started in sugar-cane farming, also told me he is farming some of the land June Provost had farmed.

Lewis and the Provosts say they believe Doré is using his position as an elected F.S.A. committee member to gain an unfair advantage over black farmers with white landowners. “He’s privileged with a lot of information,” Lewis said.

Doré denied he is abusing his F.S.A. position and countered that “the Lewis boy” is trying to “make this a black-white deal.” Doré insisted that “both those guys simply lost their acreage for one reason and one reason only: They are horrible farmers.”

It’s impossible to listen to the stories that Lewis and the Provosts tell and not hear echoes of the policies and practices that have been used since Reconstruction to maintain the racial caste system that sugar slavery helped create. The crop, land and farm theft that they claim harks back to the New Deal era, when Southern F.S.A. committees denied black farmers government funding.

“June and I hope to create a dent in these oppressive tactics for future generations,” Angie Provost told me on the same day this spring that a congressional subcommittee held hearings on reparations. “To this day we are harassed, retaliated against and denied the true DNA of our past.”

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a Suzanne Young Murray professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and author of “The Condemnation of Blackness.” Tiya Miles is a professor in the history department at Harvard and the author, most recently, of “The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits.”

THE ENSLAVED PECAN PIONEER

By Tiya Miles | Published August 14, 2019 | New York Times "1619 Project" | Posted August 24, 2019 10:30AM ET |

Pecans are the nut of choice when it comes to satisfying America’s sweet tooth, with the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season being the pecan’s most popular time, when the nut graces the rich pie named for it. Southerners claim the pecan along with the cornbread and collard greens that distinguish the regional table, and the South looms large in our imaginations as this nut’s mother country.

The presence of pecan pralines in every Southern gift shop from South Carolina to Texas, and our view of the nut as regional fare, masks a crucial chapter in the story of the pecan: It was an enslaved man who made the wide cultivation of this nut possible.

Pecan trees are native to the middle southwestern region of the Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico. While the trees can live for a hundred years or more, they do not produce nuts in the first years of life, and the kinds of nuts they produce are wildly variable in size, shape, flavor and ease of shell removal. Indigenous people worked around this variability, harvesting the nuts for hundreds and probably thousands of years, camping near the groves in season, trading the nuts in a network that stretched across the continent, and lending the food the name we have come to know it by: paccan.

Once white Southerners became fans of the nut, they set about trying to standardize its fruit by engineering the perfect pecan tree. Planters tried to cultivate pecan trees for a commercial market beginning at least as early as the 1820s, when a well-known planter from South Carolina named Abner Landrum published detailed descriptions of his attempt in the American Farmer periodical. In the mid-1840s, a planter in Louisiana sent cuttings of a much-prized pecan tree over to his neighbor J.T. Roman, the owner of Oak Alley Plantation. Roman did what many enslavers were accustomed to in that period: He turned the impossible work over to an enslaved person with vast capabilities, a man whose name we know only as Antoine. Antoine undertook the delicate task of grafting the pecan cuttings onto the limbs of different tree species on the plantation grounds. Many specimens thrived, and Antoine fashioned still more trees, selecting for nuts with favorable qualities. It was Antoine who successfully created what would become the country’s first commercially viable pecan varietal.

Decades later, a new owner of Oak Alley, Hubert Bonzano, exhibited nuts from Antoine’s trees at the Centennial Exposition of 1876, the World’s Fair held in Philadelphia and a major showcase for American innovation. As the horticulturalist Lenny Wells has recorded, the exhibited nuts received a commendation from the Yale botanist William H. Brewer, who praised them for their “remarkably large size, tenderness of shell and very special excellence.” Coined “the Centennial,” Antoine’s pecan varietal was then seized upon for commercial production (other varieties have since become the standard).

Was Antoine aware of his creation’s triumph? No one knows. As the historian James McWilliams writes in “The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut” (2013): “History leaves no record as to the former slave gardener’s location — or whether he was even alive — when the nuts from the tree he grafted were praised by the nation’s leading agricultural experts.” The tree never bore the name of the man who had handcrafted it and developed a full-scale orchard on the Oak Alley Plantation before he slipped into the shadow of history.

[thescrybe]

Xerath, The Magus Ascendant

Xerath is an Ascended Magus of ancient Shurima, a being of arcane energy writhing in the broken shards of a magical sarcophagus. For millennia, he was trapped beneath the desert sands, but the rise of Shurima freed him from his ancient prison. Driven insane with power, he now seeks to take what he believes is rightfully his and replace the upstart civilizations of the world with one fashioned in his image.

The boy who would eventually be called Xerath was born a nameless slave in Shurima thousands of years ago. He was the son of captured scholars, with only the prospect of endless servitude ahead. His mother taught him letters and numbers, while his father told him tales from history in the hopes that such skills might allow him a better life. The boy vowed he would not end up bent-backed and whipped like every other slave.

When the boy’s father was crippled during the excavations for the foundations of a monument to the Emperor’s favorite horse, he was left to die at the site of the accident. Fearing her son would suffer a similar fate, the boy’s mother begged an esteemed tomb architect to take him on as an apprentice. Though at first reluctant, the architect was impressed with the boy’s eye for detail and innate understanding of mathematics and language, and accepted. The boy never saw his mother again.

He was a swift learner and his master dispatched him on errands to the Great Library of Nasus to retrieve specific texts and plans on an almost daily basis. On one trip, the boy met Azir, the least-favored son of the emperor. Azir was struggling to read a difficult passage in an ancient text, and, despite knowing that to talk to royalty was to invite death, the boy paused to help the young prince with its complex grammar. In that moment, a tentative friendship was established, and over the coming months that friendship only grew stronger.

Though slaves were forbidden names, Azir gave one to the boy. He named him Xerath, which means ‘one who shares,’ though that name was only ever spoken between the two boys. Azir saw to it that Xerath was appointed to his household’s slaves, and made him his personal attendant. Their shared love of knowledge saw them devour texts from the library and become as close as brothers. Xerath was Azir’s constant companion, learning all he could from this new proximity to culture, power and knowledge, finally daring to dream that Azir might one day free him.

On the annual tour of the emperor’s dominion, assassins struck the royal caravan as it spent the night at a well-known oasis. Xerath saved Azir from an assassin’s blade, but Azir’s brothers were all slain, leaving the young prince a heartbeat away from Shurima’s throne. As a slave, Xerath could expect no reward for his deed, but Azir promised that one day they would be as brothers.

In the wake of the assassination attempt, Shurima endured years of horror and fear of the emperor’s retribution. Xerath knew enough of history and the workings of the Shuriman court to understand that Azir’s life hung by the slenderest of threads. That he was heir to the throne meant nothing, for the emperor hated Azir for living while his more beloved sons had died. Of more immediate danger, the emperor’s wife was still young enough to bear other children, and thus far she had borne many healthy sons. The odds were good that she would produce another male heir for her husband, and as soon as she did, Azir’s life was forfeit.

Though Azir was a scholar at heart, Xerath persuaded him that to survive, he must also learn to fight. This Azir did, and in return the young heir elevated Xerath, insisting he continue his education. Both youths excelled, and Xerath proved to be an exceptionally gifted pupil, one who took to the pursuit of knowledge with gusto. Xerath became Azir’s confidant and right hand man, a position unheard of for a mere slave. This position gave him great - and some said, undue - influence over the young prince, who came to rely on Xerath’s judgement more each day.

Xerath bent his every effort into seeking out knowledge wherever he could find it, no matter the cost, no matter its source. He unlocked long-sealed libraries, delved into forgotten vaults and consulted with mystics entombed deep beneath the sands; all to further his knowledge and ambition, both of which grew with unchecked rapidity. Whenever the whispers around court that spoke of his delving into unsavory places grew too loud to ignore, he would find cunning means to silence them. That Azir never mentioned these whispers was, to Xerath, tacit approval of how he was keeping his emperor safe.

Years passed, and Xerath took ever darker steps to keep the emperor’s wife from carrying a child to term, using his nascent magical abilities to corrupt every infant in the womb. Without rivals to the throne, Azir would be safe. When rumors of a curse arose, Xerath ensured they were never spoken again, and oft-times those who had voiced such suspicions vanished without trace. By now, Xerath’s desire to escape his roots as a slave had become a burning ambition to achieve power of his own, though he justified every murderous act by telling himself he was doing it to keep his friend alive.

Despite Xerath’s best efforts to thwart the queen’s midwives, a new prince of Shurima was brought into the world, but on the night of his birth, Xerath used his growing magical powers to summon the elemental spirits of the deep desert and craft a terrible storm. Xerath brought bolt after bolt of lightning down upon the queen’s chambers, reducing it to burning rubble and killing the queen and her newborn son. The emperor rushed to his queen’s chambers, only to be confronted by Xerath, his hands ablaze with arcane power. The emperor’s guards attacked, but Xerath burned them and the emperor to cindered skeletons. Xerath ensured that the mages of a conquered territory were blamed for these deaths, and Azir’s first act upon taking the throne was to lead a brutal campaign of retribution against its people.

Azir was crowned emperor of Shurima with Xerath at his side, the boy who had once been a nameless slave. Xerath had long dreamed of this moment, and expected Azir to end slavery in Shurima before finally naming him brother. Azir did none of these things, continuing to expand his empire’s borders and deflecting Xerath’s overtures regarding the end of slavery. To Xerath, this was further proof of Shurima’s moral bankruptcy, and he raged at Azir’s breaking of his promise. Azir’s face was thunderous as he reminded Xerath that he was a slave and should remember his place. Something once noble died in Xerath that day, but he bowed in supplication, outwardly accepting Azir’s decision. As Azir continued his campaigns of conquest, Xerath remained at his side, but his every action was carefully designed to increase his influence over a realm he now planned to take for himself. To steal an empire was no small thing, and Xerath knew he needed more power.

The famous legend of Renekton’s Ascension revealed that a mortal did not have to be chosen by the Sun Priests, that anyone could rise up. So Xerath plotted to steal the power of Ascension. No slave could ever stand upon the sun disc, so Xerath fed the Emperor’s vanity, inflating his ego and filling his head with impossible visions of a world-spanning empire. But such a dream would only be possible if Azir could Ascend as the greatest heroes of Shurima had before. In time Xerath’s perseverance paid off, and Azir announced he would undertake the Ascension ritual, that he had earned the right to stand alongside Nasus and Renekton as an Ascended being. The Sun Priests protested, but such was Azir’s hubris that he ordered them to comply on pain of torture and death.

The Day of Ascension arrived and Azir marched toward the Dais of Ascension with Xerath at his side. Nasus and Renekton were absent from the day’s events, for Xerath had arranged a distraction for them by weakening the seal on a magical sarcophagus containing a beast of living fire. When that creature finally broke its bindings, Renekton and Nasus were the only warriors capable of defeating it. Thus Xerath had stripped Azir of the only two beings who might save him from what was to come.

Azir stood beneath the sun disc and in the final moment before the priests began the ritual, events took a turn Xerath had not anticipated. The emperor turned to Xerath and told him that he was now a free man. He and all Shurima’s slaves were now released from their bonds of servitude. He embraced Xerath before naming him his eternal brother. Xerath was stunned. He had been given everything he desired, but the success of his plans hinged upon Azir’s death and nothing was going to dissuade him from acting. Too many pieces were in motion and Xerath had already sacrificed too much to turn back now – no matter how much that part of him wanted to. The emperor’s words pierced the bitterness enclosing Xerath’s heart but came decades too late. Unaware of his peril, Azir turned as the priests began the ritual and brought down the awesome power of the sun.

With a roar of anger and grief combined, Xerath blasted Azir from his place on the dais, watching through tears as his former friend burned to ash. Xerath took Azir’s place and the light of the sun filled him, reshaping his flesh into that of an Ascended being. But the power of the ritual was not his to take, and the consequences of his betrayal of Azir were devastating. The unbound power of the sun all but destroyed Shurima, sundering its temples and bringing ruination upon the city. Azir’s people were consumed in a terrifying conflagration as the desert rose up to claim the city. The sun disc fell and an empire built by generations of emperors was undone in a single day.

Even as the city burned, Xerath held the sun priests in the grip of his magic, preventing them from ending the ritual. The energies filling him were immense, alloying with his dark sorcery to create a being of incredible power. As he drew ever more of the sun’s power into his body, his mortal flesh was consumed and remade as a glowing vortex of arcane power.

With Xerath’s treachery revealed, Renekton and Nasus rushed to the epicenter of the magical storm destroying the city. They bore with them the magical sarcophagus that had imprisoned the spirit of eternal fire. The Ascended brothers fought their way to the Dais of Ascension just as Xerath fell from the deadly radiance engulfing the city. Before the newly-Ascended Magus could react, they hurled his crackling body within the sarcophagus and sealed it once more with blessed chains and powerful sigils of binding.

But it was not enough. Xerath’s power had been great as a mortal, and that power - combined with the gift of Ascension - made him all but invincible. He shattered the sarcophagus, though its shards and chains remained bound to him. Renekton and Nasus hurled themselves at Xerath, but such was his newfound strength that he fought them both to a standstill. The battle raged throughout the collapsing city, destroying what had not already sunk beneath the sands. The brothers were able to drag Xerath toward the Tomb of Emperors, the greatest mausoleum of Shurima, a vault whose locks and wards were impossible to break and which answered only to the blood of emperors. Renekton wrestled Xerath within and called upon Nasus to seal the vault behind them. Nasus did so with heavy heart, knowing it was the only way to prevent Xerath’s escape. Renekton and Xerath fell into eternal darkness, and there they remained, locked in an endless battle as the once-great civilization of Shurima collapsed.

Uncounted centuries passed and, in time, even Renekton’s mighty strength waned, leaving him vulnerable to Xerath’s influence. With poisoned lies and illusions, Xerath twisted Renekton’s mind, filling him with misplaced bitterness toward Nasus, the faithless brother who had - in Xerath’s fictive narrative - abandoned him so long ago.

When the Tomb of Emperors was finally discovered beneath the desert and broken open by Sivir and Cassiopeia, both Xerath and Renekton were freed in an explosion of sand and rubble. Sensing his brother still lived, Renekton charged from the ruins, his distorted mind leaving him little better than a savage beast. After an age lost to legend, Shurima was reborn, and as it rose majestically from the desert, Xerath felt another soul return to life beneath the sand, one he had thought long dead. Azir was also newly resurrected as one of the Ascended, and Xerath knew there could be no peace for either of them while the other yet lived.

Xerath sought the heart of the desert to regain his strength and understand how the world had changed in the millennia since his imprisonment. His stolen power grew with every passing moment, and he beheld a world ripe for conquest, a world brimming with mortals ready to worship at the feet of a new and terrible god.

Yet for all his newfound power, however far he has come from that nameless slave boy, a part of Xerath knows he is still in chains.

[marawis]

Pokémon Villain-Champion Switch Scenarios

There were some sort of prompts in a thread that go like this:

Switching the champion and the villain in most generations can lead to some interesting stories.

Cyrus is similar to nanu as a champion, gets his thrills out of battle Cynthia wants to see the world burn for shit and giggles and wants giratina specifically

Actually in the case of XY Sycamore swapping with Lysandre would be more compelling

So of course I had to let my mind go wild on the concepts and think of some scenarios for Hoenn, Sinnoh and Kalos (with some liberties taken, mostly for Sinnoh). I kinda feel bad about leaving them on an anonymous board so I may as well share them here just for memory’s sake. 

They all began to get longer with each gen, so this is a very long post. Sorry if I have some spelling errors. I still hope you all like it. (Check out an Alola scenario here)

Hoenn

While going through the first gyms you hear word from some NPCs saying the League is having issues because the Champion seems to have left.

At first everything is played kinda straight, with Maxie and Archie looking as bad guys that are also opposing each other, while Steven is a cool guy who likes rocks and helps us fight them.

The more you advance in the story things start to get suspicious.

Turns out Steven is actually a really corrupt businessman alongside his father, and they are trying to wake up Groudon and Kyogre for their own ends.

Archie and Maxie were trying to stop Devon's advances to protect the sea and land respectively, but they acted as enemies because their interests and egos made them disagree even though they had the same endgoal.

By the climax they already solve their differences and work together with you to stop the legendaries.

You save the world and finally go to finish your Pokémon challenge, since it seems the Champion issue has been solved and they have returned.

Wait "they"?

Surprise surprise double battle for the Championship against Archie and Maxie.

Sinnoh

You first meet Cyrus in Lake Verity, he acts kinda creepy still but his monologue is about wanting to understand how the universe works.

You start your Pokémon journey and meet Cynthia, who talks to you about all these cool mythos of Sinnoh and the legendaries tied to them.

You keep encountering Cyrus and interacting with him. He seems to want to be left alone but still talks to you about legends and myths too, and how he wants to investigate about them.

Cynthia follows you closely and starts to feed you misinformation about what Cyrus is on about, he is quite the antisocial guy so it's easy to make him look like he could be a lunatic cult leader after all.

Turns out she has been doing the same with Looker, the Interpol guy sent to investigate some criminal activity in the region. 

You two then leave to check what Cyrus is doing, and letting Cynthia act freely.

Let's be honest, Cyrus' labs look like what a mad scientist would have, and seems his machines are indeed working with portals and experiments on the fabric of time and space.

You confront Cyrus on the matter, but turns out he wasn't trying to destroy the world or anything, he was trying to save it.

Wait what?

Cyrus is actually the Sinnoh Champion, and while doing usual walks on the region (since it seems Champions like to do that) he noticed there were some anomalies going around in the region, with time and space flowing in weird ways. He was leading an investigation to try to solve the issue and if possible track the origin of it.

You remember all the stuff Cynthia talked with you and realize she has been lying to you.

Saturn informs us that weird lectures have showed up in the Spear Pillar.

You all rush there.

There is Cynthia in control of Palkia and Dialga.

She then reveals her plans to us. She wants to use the Time and Space pokémon not to try to reshape the universe, but to summon Giratina.

Giratina indeed shows up, but before Cynthia can do anything they all get into the Distortion World.

There you search for Cynthia, who took some advantage to try and fight the Antimatter pokémon.

You find her before she manages tho.

You interrogate her again on her motives.

She tells you that after studying so much about the myths and legends, she realized something.

Palkia and Dialga aren't really such a big deal. Giratina is far more interesting.

She wanted to summon Giratina to capture it and THEN use it to get to the actual big deal: Arceus.

Cyrus calls nonsense. Maybe Giratina had some basis to exist (and indeed it does), but Arceus is just a fairytale that people made up to avoid thinking about where the world comes from.

Cynthia is adamant on her believes tho, and begins a rant about how Arceus is indeed real.

You all still don't understand why exactly she wants Arceus, if she isn't interested in making changes to the world.

Cynthia laughs at you.

"Because if I capture the Creator, then I will be the strongest trainer in all the world!"

All of this just for some stupid trainer title?

Cynthia rants again while throwing more backstory to us.

She and Cyrus had a battle similar to the one Hau and the MC had in USUM, one to decide who would become the Champion. And Cyrus won.

Cynthia didn't take defeat quite well. Her reputation as a strong trainer was tarnished. Her social status and villas in every region were lost. All because this weirdo "got lucky"!

Cyrus apologizes.

"Hu?"

Cyrus had no idea the title meant so much for her. Sure, he wanted the title, but it was just because it was a promise he did to "an old friend" back on his early childhood. If he had known the Championship meant way more to her, he would have surrendered.

Cynthia thinks he is looking at her as so inferior she needs his pity, and gets even angrier.

A pokémon battle for the fate of the worlds starts!

You defeat Cynthia.

Cynthia doesn't understand. She just can't understand. Losing to Cyrus on a Champion battle was one thing, but you haven't even finished the Gyms, how could you defeat her?!

Now with all her pokémon fainted and no revives to spare, she can't even try to fight Giratina.

"Fine! Whatever! May all as well rot in this place! No way none of us gets out now!"

You spot Giratina nearby.

Cyrus thinks you may have a chance against it, if your battle against Cynthia just now was proof enough of the strong bonds you can make with pokémon. Sure Giratina will see both that and your strenght as a trainer.

You go and fight Giratina and win. This is a lineal plot now so you have to capture it and it gets added to your party.

Cynthia can't fucking believe it.

She finally loses her marbles and tries to take away from you the pokéball Giratina is on. After all she did all the hard work to find it, what business you have with it except being a kid with a pokédex?

Cyrus has to intervene and pushes her away from you.

Cynthia takes a bad step because of it and Distortion World dynamics screw her up, making her fall to an uncertain fate.

There is no time to waste though, so you use Giratina to get back to your own world.

Cyrus gives a small speech about spirit and emotions, and how they lead to Cynthia's demise.

"They are quite frightening, and can be ugly sometimes. But I guess without those ugly emotions, we wouldn't be able to experience the beautiful ones. That must be what means to be human after all."

You part ways, with Cyrus wishing you luck on your challenge and saying he waits for you at the League.

You go and have the Champion battle against him.

You win, and he says he is proud of your progress.

He almost tells you he is happy to have met you, but stops himself before he can say it all out loud. He isn't quite ready for that stuff, not yet.

Hall of Fame and credits roll.

Kalos (well this one is actually a bit different)

You start your journey just fine. Meet with this cool young professor who wants you to help him study Mega Evolution.

You then meet Lysandre, who after seeing your pokédex realizes you are working with his good friend Sycamore. He is also helping him on his research. He gives you a cool Holo Caster update to stay in touch and so you can send Mega Evolution data to them.

The encounter with Lysandre and Diantha in the Café Soleil still happens, but is a more amicable chat about how a movie star can get roles in different niches if she just ages normally instead of remaining "young" forever, and how that is beautiful in it's own way. First clue that Lysandre isn't batshit insane here.

Lysandre tells you his lineage's story and the Ultimate Weapon on his café, but instead of using it as a "THEY ARE FILTH" monologue he uses it as a moral about current events.

The Ultimate Weapon "cleaned" the region from the "undesirable" back then, but he thinks that is a coward path.

He wants to believe Kalos is beautiful, but the truth is, it isn't.

The glamorous Kalos we know is because the region is making it's best to hide away the poor and homeless people and pokémon from tourists and visitors, just to preserve this fake image of Kalos being all nice.

Lysandre doesn't agree with this, and wants to help everyone so there is only happiness and real beauty in Kalos. 

Well that was motivational and sad, but you have no time for this, you have to go around collecting some stones!

You go around getting your Key Stone and Mega Stones just as normal.

With the updated Holo Caster you send every piece of data you get everytime you Mega Evolve your pokémon, and Sycamore is happy. If you don't use too much Mega Evolution -or at all- Sycamore at first tries to encourage you to use it, but later starts to get annoyed by your lack of cooperation.

Eitherway, Sycamore is doing progress with his research with or without your help, and he shares some stuff with you.

He sometimes calls to just tell you about his own standards on beauty tho. It is all Holo Caster and chill until he slips some bigoted small remarks, like how creepy it was that some kid on rags approached a woman near a café. Stuff like that that may not be anything but still triggers some red lights.

On your way on Route 15 Lysandre calls you, and asks you to meet him in the Lost Hotel up north.

There he tells you he is a bit worried about Sycamore. He is noticing him acting strange ever since he began to make actual progress with his research on Mega Evolution. He has noticed some weird movements on his businesses too ever since.

You tell him about what you have noticed on his calls too, and Lysandre for a moment begins to connect some dots, but dismisses them almost immediately. No way his friend would be capable of such things, he says.

You continue your travels to Anistar City, when a Holo Caster call reached every single trainer in the region.

The figure on the Holo Caster can't be seen due to some noise in the signal, but the message is quite clear: The Ultimate Weapon will be revived and used to erase from existence all those pariahs that ruin Kalos' beautiful image.

Immediately after that call ends, Lysandre calls you. Looks like someone took over his Labs and he asks you to come help him since there are too many grunts guarding the place and he can't fight everyone in there while trying to get back in.

You manage to get in, and there you find Sycamore. 

Sycamore notices Lysandre isn't as shocked as he thought he would be. Lysandre admits that he did know what was going one after talking with you at the Lost Hotel, but he didn't want to believe it. He didn't want to believe his dear friend was using him and a bunch of kids for such an ugly goal.

Sycamore is actually hurt by those words. 

He reminds Lysandre of what he would always talk about, about how ugly Kalos actually is because of all that people who can't contribute anything to society.

He saw his dear friend suffering over this, and he wished he could help him somehow.

His research on Mega Evolution was totally scientific at the start, but then he started to notice some links it had to the Ultimate Weapon.

It all made sense after all. It was fate™, you could even say.

Mega Evolution was the product of the remnants of the Ultimate Weapon, which is why it is only found in Kalos. What a beautiful region Kalos is indeed. And yet, not every pokémon was able to reach such a state.

If Sycamore can get his hands on the Ultimate Weapon, he can both liberate even more energy to make every single species reach Mega Evolution, all while killing all the unproductive people that are the source of his friend's suffering.

This isn't what Lysandre wanted at all, and he is mad that Sycamore would think such an idea, knowing his hatred for the Ultimate Weapon and what it did to his ancestors.

Sycamore of course believes everything will be worth it in the end, and he will find a way to forgive him.

But for now the chat must end. He already got what he was looking for in the labs, and now he had to leave to his real destination: Geosenge Town.

The professor calls on two masked guys to make up time for him to leave.

You defeat these guys who look similar to Dexio and Sina (totally not them, right?), and Lysandre wonders what could Sycamore be looking for in his lab.

He then remembers about the suspicious movements he found some days ago, and goes to check out.

You find AZ in the usual place as in XY. Seems Sycamore was paying way too much attention to Lysandre's ocassional history lessons, and was searching for the immortal king too. AZ tells us Sycamore already took the key for the Ultimate Weapon, and asks you to stop him.

You all leave to Geosenge Town.

You go down the base where everything where everything is already in motion.

Sycamore is a more practical man, he doesn't waste time with buttons.

Lysandre tries to reason with him. The weapon takes energy from a Legendary pokémon, yes, but for the scale Sycamore wants, it also takes away the life energy of pokémon near the place. Part of his plan could backfire on him if he keeps going.

"Well I think we can live without Bunnelby and Diggersby"

Lysandre challenges him to a fight to distract him, so you can go to where the Legendary is and hopefully stop the weapon.

You go and catch your Legendary, only for Sycamore to show up immediately after.

He doesn't need a Dr. Octopus outfit, he is a more practical man and can beat the shit out of champion level trainers by himself, being a professor and all.

The pokémon battle for the destiny of the world starts!

You win the battle. But that doesn't really mean you have stopped him, does it?

Lysandre shows up, still beaten up from the fight, and still tries to talk Sycamore out of this. It isn't too late to stop this nonsense. He will forgive him. Just leave the Ultimate Weapon alone and let's work together to make a beautiful world where nobody needs to be sacrificed.

Sycamore for a moment thinks about the offer, but realizes there isn't any future left for him after all what he has done. Lysandre and the protagonist may forgive him, but the world surely won't.

"You have a minute"

He activates the Ultimate Weapon. It doesn't really have much energy left, but is enough to destroy the whole place.

You have to take Lysandre out by force, since he didn't want to leave without Sycamore.

You manage to get out, but Geosenge Town is a mess.

Lucky thing everyone managed to evacuate those box houses and make it to safety.

Lysandre doesn't say anything. He doesn't even move from his place. It has been too much to process for just one day.

Oh yeah you get a parade. Yay!

Without a professor, things are quite messy in the whole region, but please don't let that stop you from continuing your pokémon adventure.

You defeat the E4 and make it to the Champion's room.

It is empty.

But there is a note for you.

It asks you to go to Lysandre Café.

You go there and meet Lysandre.

He asks you to forgive him, but he didn't really feel like going to the League after all what happened.

He gives you a long talk about his friendship with Sycamore. How they both met when they were younger and studying. Sycamore would become the regional Pokémon Professor while he would go and invent gadgets at his own company to help improve the life of humans and pokémon.

If he was told at that time what would have happened a few days ago, he wouldn't believe it. In fact, he still can't.

This is all a bad dream and he will wake up at any moment, with papers all around him and Sycamore mocking him for not getting proper sleep.

But he knows very well that's not the case.

It can't be helped. What's done is done and there is no going back.

But you don't want to keep listening to the sorrows of a sad man, do you? You are here for your final challenge.

You have your battle for the Championship and win.

After getting an extravagant parade for saving the region, this is quite an unceremonious event. Not that it bothers you tho. There is some beauty on keeping things simple.

You still get registered in the Hall of Fame, and Lysandre asks you to hold the Champion title with respect.

Credits roll.

Honorary mention to Johto, which was just the idea of Lance being like his manga counterpart and Giovanni taking the 3 years timeskip to become a researcher and the champion too.

Thanks for reading!

[multiverseforger]

In the very beginning of existence, there was only The Source and from it, the positive Anti-Crisis Energy were born and pulled together by an Unseen Hand.[2] It was throughout the void of the Greater Omniverse that The Source sent The Hands, a group of super-celestial beings using the Anti-Crisis Energy to birth Multiverses. With the creation of their Multiverse, each member of the Hands would pass on and allow their energies to return to The Source.[2] However the rogue among them refused her fate and wanted a vicious reality meant to live forever in a self-renewing loop of crisis and rebirth.[3] The name of that rogue super-celestial was Perpetua.

20 Billion Years Ago

She created the first iteration of the Multiverse using the negative Crisis Energies and created her three sons Mar Novu, Alpheus and Mobius, as its first inhabitants.

Once created, Perpetua explained to them that her Multiverse comprises of three main realms made out of the three basic forms of matter- dark matter, positive matter and antimatter, and created them to monitor these realms. She assigned Alpheus to the dark matter realm beneath creation where he would build the myriad universes of creation. Mar Novu was assigned to the positive matter realm, where he would guard the many universes that rose out of the dark from cosmic crises. Mobius was assigned to the antimatter realm where he would prevent the light of creation to breach the Greater Omniverse.

Curious, Mar Novu asked Perpetua what her purpose in this Multiverse was, as her role as creator had already been fulfilled. She told him that she would remain to make sure that all of her children lived.[4]

15 Billion Years Ago

Perpetua called upon Mar Novu to show him her greatest creation. Perpetua had searched the endless worlds of the Multiverse looking for the perfect creation, but could not find it. Disappointed in what saw, Perpetua bound the Martians with the Humans, creating the Apex Predators; perfect killing machines that would live and fight until the end of time. Upon seeing what his mother had created, Mar Novu told her that he found a cosmic judgement coming for them because of her actions and that she was well aware of that and wished to fight back. Perpetua then tried to share her point of view in vain, leading her to order her Apexes to attack Novu, forcing him to flee.[4]

Two hundred thousand years later, Mar Novu told his brothers what he had seen and they agreed that her kinds, the Hands needed to be alerted of her doings. They were interrupted by Perpetua who witnessed their betrayals and sent her Apex Predators to attack her sons.



The fall of Perpetua and her Great Army

The Hands's response was to send the Cosmic Raptor to stop Perpetua's plan. Unable to defeat the Cosmic Raptor, Perpetua, her Apex Predators and the totality of her power were taken to the Source Wall and imprisoned in it. The Hands recreated Perpetua's Multiverse, allowing the Multiverse to evolve without intrusion. Perpetua was trapped and forced to watch it all.

After the recreation of the Multiverse, the story of Perpetua was hidden by Krona and the other Maltusians who gathered all evidence.[5] She witnessed the tampering of Krona, preventing her Multiverse to set in a stable form.

She was forced to watch her Multiverse grow more and more unstable. She knew its final fate: it would die, and she would die with it. As the only thing that would break her prison was an action that would crack the very foundation of reality, Perpetua began to whisper in the mind of her son, the Anti-Monitor, instigating him to cause the first Crisis. After the Anti-Monitor's defeat, a crack formed on the wall, allowing Perpetua to whisper out, through the Multiverse, into the ears of those powerful enough to cause Crises over the years.[2]

Source Wall Breaking

After the invasion of the Dark Multiverse by her last scion, Barbatos and the Batman Who Laughs, the Source Wall was finally broken and Perpetua was freed from her prison, the Totality which landed on Earth-0 after the wall breaking.[6] Her corporeal form was restored by Lex Luthor with almost six parts of her dark powers unlocked.[1]

Year of the Villain

At some point, she awoke and remade Lex Luthor into an Apex Predator as her second in command after the latter faked his own death.

Doom Rising

While the Justice League divided into two them, one for the Totality's shards which were across time and the other for recruiting Mobius, Perpetua and Lex were heading to the Promethean Galaxy with the intent to recruit her son Mobius. Meanwhile, Hypertime was within the grasp of Perpetua, allowing the Legion of Doom, who were in different timelines, to affect them as they see fit without erasing their present.[7]

Arrived in the Promethean Galaxy, she was confronted by Mobius and his brothers alongside the Justice League. During the fight, the three brothers merged together to form the Ultra-Monitor, strong enough to fight their mother.[8] At the end of the battle, Starman and his analog from the past and future were going to open a portal to bring the rest of the Justice League who gathered the shards of the Totality across the past and the future. However, due to the fact that the psychic energy shifted toward doom and Hawkgirl's vendetta against Lex Luthor who previously absorbed J'onn J'onzz within himself, the portal closed before the rest of the league could join the battle and Perpetua was restored to all her might.

She then granted the Anti-Life Equation to Mobius who betrayed his brothers.[9] Perpetua then crush Starman on her fist and and exclaimed that she have the entire Multiverse to remade.[9]

Perpetua came to Earth 19, noticing that this world has doom in its core but its people still chose justice thus, she destroyed this universe. She then returned to the Promethean Galaxy explaining her plan to Lex and Mobius and remade every human who believes in doom into Apex Predators.

At some point, the Legion of Doom returned to claim their rewards from Perpetua. Her response was to turn Brainiac into her throne and the other members as conduits of power for Lex now wielding the The Seven Forces of the Universe.[10] Later, she came to Earth 44, asking its people on whether they choose to join or oppose her. Among all people of this Earth, Dr Will Tornado was the only one answering, telling her that whatever god she is, his machines have more divinity in their metal hearts than her.

Perpetua replied that these words have no place in her new design and started considering to destroy Earth 44 but was interrupted by a call from a helpless Mobius. Perpetua then tell Dr Will Tornado that she know a parfect place for his Earth and throw it toward her sons who were recently freed from their brother thanks to John Stewart's intervention but they managed to flee before the impact thanks to Alpheus' sacrifice.

Much later, Perpetua came to Earth-0 to confront the Justice League who had defeated Lex Luthor and gathered Hawkgirl, John Stewart and J'onn J'onzz. During the confrontation, J'onn managed to reach out the minds of all the people of the planet, trying to convince them to break free of Perpetua's lies which shifted the psychic balance toward justice, strings of energy started to wrap up Perpetua.

However, just as the victory was near for the league, the balance shifted for doom again, breaking free of her bonds, Perpetua explained that she allowed the psychic connection J'onn had with Earth's people to happen because she wanted them to see their people rejecting them since she was the creator of the Multiverse and also explained that she left a piece of the Totality across time for Vandal Savage who will recruit the Luthors to found a way to unlock her powers as she planned. She then obliterated the Justice League however without her knowing, the league were saved by the Quintessence.[11]

Hell Arisen

After the fall of the Justice League at Perpetua's hands, the Multiverse was at her and Lex Luthor mercy. When the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3 came to Perpetua, requesting more power, Perpetua's response was to turn their people into Apex Predator and killing Johnny Quick after his disagreement to join her.

After the meeting Perpetua had with the Crime Syndicate, she send Lex Luthor to Earth-0 in order to eradicate the dark energy incursion caused by the The Batman Who Laughs. Much later Lex came to Perpetua with the defeated Batman Who Laughs. However, The Batman Who Laughs used his superior knowledge to convince Perpetua to choose him over Lex as her second in charge. Perpetua then depowered Lex for his insolence and send him back to Earth but not before Lex learns that the glorious vision of the future he has had was an hoax made by Perpetua in order to manipulate him.[12]

Dark Nights: Death Metal

Perpetua was confronted by the Justice League at an unspecified date. She wielded all the Crisis Energy as the league were harnessing Doctor Manhattan's energy, consisting of all the Anti-Crisis Energy.[3] As their battle raged, Perpetua taunted Diana, telling her that if she won using the positive energies, every history including those forgotten due to Crisis would matter, many people would be dead. Scared by this truth, Diana hesitated long enough for Perpetua to regoup call on The Batman Who Laughs.[13] The fight ended on a massive blow that burned the sun and has exhausted both energies.[3]

The Batman Who Laughs helped her to regain strength using the Dark Multiverse, whose three worlds of unending Crises made it a hub of the negative energies that would keep powering Perpetua through multiple antennas around the Multiverse. Having gained enough power to destroy the rest of the Multiverse, Perpetua took over reality and proceeded to reshape it as how she wanted, while rewarding Laughs with Earth-0, reshaping the world for him.

She destroyed Earth-22 as well as most of the universes that doesn't match her dark ideology, reducing the Multiverse from fifty two universe to only eight. Later, Perpetua came to The Batman Who Laughs, telling him that only six universe remains. Untrusting him, she also warns him about if he usurp her, her kind, the Hands would come, seeing what's been done in the Multiverse and they will destroy it all.[14]

Perpetua would later destroy the House of Heroes and would sent her Dark Multiverse's minions on the Justice Incarnate and the Green Lantern Corps who were trying to destroy all the antennas in order to cut her off from her source of power.[2] Thanks to Owlman who had trapped each tower with a detonator, they managed to destroy every tower and leave the areas despite this, Perpetua was still powerful enough to destroy the remaining universes though her unlimited source of power was cut.[2]

After the rise of the The Batman Who Laughs, now known as the Darkest Knight, who tricked the Trinity in order to redirect all remaining Crisis Energy from three worlds of never ending Crisis to him instead of Wally West, Perpetua battled the Darkest Knight head-on, with all of the remnants of reality collapsing in the chaos around their duel.[15]

Despite being cut off from their primary power sources thanks to the machinations of the remaining heroes, both powerful beings continued to war against each other.[14] Growing exhausted and weaker as the remaining Crisis Energy was redirected to the Darkest Knight, Perpetua offers a partnership with the him, arguing that it's only her that keeps her kind from coming to the Multiverse and wiping it out. But the Darkest Knight is hoping for just such an outcome in order destroy them himself. With Perpetua all but spent, the Darkest Knight reveals his last trick, using his powers, the Darkest Knight pulls together the remaining parts of the Source Wall that had once contained her. Despite her pleas, the Darkest Knight seals her within the remnants of the wall and destroys them, ultimately ending Perpetua's life.[16]

As the final battle between the Forge of Worlds-empowered Wonder Woman and the Darkest Knight raged, they fall back through time, to the beginning of the universe itself. They saw the Hand of Creation sparking the Big Bang which the One who Laughs has recognized as Perpetua'

[bigyack-com]

PG&E Has a Survival Plan, and Newsom Has Plan B: A Takeover

Ferocious wildfires have inflicted several years of death and destruction on California. But they have also presented the state with an opportunity to radically overhaul the company prominently implicated in the fires, Pacific Gas & Electric.The most powerful proponent of far-reaching changes, Gov. Gavin Newsom, is threatening a state takeover if the giant utility fails to reshape itself to his liking. With a key deadline approaching in PG&E’s bankruptcy case, the question is whether he is prepared to follow through — and what consequences could follow.The state is technically on the sidelines in the San Francisco bankruptcy proceeding where PG&E is pressing forward with its own restructuring plan. The company achieved a breakthrough recently in uniting shareholders and creditors behind the plan, which it says would satisfy the claims of wildfire victims as well.But PG&E has to emerge from bankruptcy by June 30 — on terms acceptable to the governor — in order to take part in a new $20 billion state fund designed to shield large utilities from large wildfire claims. Without that protection, PG&E’s restructuring plan would fall apart and its viability would be in question.To Mr. Newsom, the company’s plan does not do enough to ensure its financial stability, its operational competence or its corporate integrity. “What I don’t want is a utility that comes out of bankruptcy limping,” he said recently.It is not clear whether he actually wants to take over PG&E — a long-troubled company that could take years to fix — and make it a ward of the state. His threats could be a negotiating tactic, and the company has moved a little closer to his objectives.Mr. Newsom said his administration had been conferring daily with PG&E to resolve issues including the governor’s authority in shaping the company’s board and measures to guarantee long-term financial stability. At the same time, he and allies have taken steps that suggest they are serious about a takeover.The Democratic governor and about a dozen lawmakers have been meeting regularly to plot strategy. And state officials have worked to assure labor unions — a critical political bloc — that a takeover would not jeopardize jobs and benefits.“We have not just rhetorically discussed a break-the-glass scenario, a Plan B, but we have laid out in detailed terms what that would look like, and we’re working with legislative leaders to advance it in real time,” Mr. Newsom said last week.On Monday, State Senator Scott Wiener, a Bay Area Democrat, announced legislation to enable the state to take control of PG&E, which provides electricity and gas service to about 16 million people in the northern and central parts of California.Over a five-year period, the measure would allow the state to revoke PG&E’s franchise agreement, stripping the power company of its utility customers and its core revenue source; to direct a state Power Authority to buy the utility’s electric and gas assets with money that ratepayers would repay over several decades; and to create a seven-member board appointed by local governments in each district.“I personally believe PG&E has forfeited the privilege to operate as an investor-owned utility,” Mr. Wiener said. “This is a company that is unraveling.”Exactly how such a solution would play out is unclear. Mr. Wiener’s bill, for example, would allow municipalities to break off pieces of PG&E to form their own utilities. Mr. Newsom has spoken of keeping the company whole.Putting PG&E under the ownership of the state or its customers would lower its borrowing costs and free up money now spent on stock dividends, according to supporters of such plans. But a takeover would be costly, and it could face legal challenges from the company’s shareholders.A long battle could in turn delay payments to wildfire victims, many of whom have been waiting more than two years for compensation. And politicians would risk voters’ wrath over management decisions — like the pre-emptive blackouts of millions of customers carried out last year in the name of fire prevention.“I don’t think taking over PG&E without a plan is necessarily a good idea,” said Bruce Cain, a political-science professor at Stanford University. “It’s a thankless job for a politician to take this over. Most politicians run away.”PG&E sought bankruptcy protection a year ago — its second Chapter 11 filing in two decades — with $30 billion in liabilities related to wildfires ignited by the utility’s poorly maintained electrical system. One of the blazes, the Camp Fire, killed 85 people in 2018 and destroyed the town of Paradise.Local 1245 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents 12,000 PG&E employees, said this week that it opposed a state takeover. The union has cited complex legal, political and operational challenges, including the development and maintenance of a safe electric grid at a time when climate change has heightened wildfire hazards.“It’s not an optimal solution for anybody,” said Tom Dalzell, the union’s business manager. “You’re assuming a lot of exposure, and there’s going to be fires.”It is also not clear that the public would support such a drastic move. In a recent survey for The Los Angeles Times by the Berkeley IGS Poll at the University of California, just 17 percent of voters said they favored a state takeover of PG&E, while an additional 20 percent supported nonprofit city and county cooperatives.“Certainly the governor can exert his power to effect changes at PG&E,” said Mark DiCamillo, who oversees the polling organization. “A state takeover, that’s a stretch that would be a huge change in public policy. It’s pretty much a long shot.”The latest version of PG&E’s own proposal includes a shake-up of its board and a safety plan to help prevent wildfires caused by its electrical equipment, both meant to address Mr. Newsom’s concerns.The utility has reached settlement agreements that include a $13.5 billion fund for wildfire victims, $1 billion to compensate local governments for wildfire expenses and a deal with bondholders, approved Tuesday by the federal bankruptcy judge, Dennis Montali.PG&E’s proposal has inspired a growing sense of confidence among investors, prompting the company’s stock price to surge to around $17 from a 12-month low of $3.55.The shares are soaring in part because investors have placed their faith in a regulatory framework that allows utilities to raise rates so that they can earn a set profit margin each year. Over the past decade, PG&E has fallen short of its authorized profit, known as return on equity. PG&E’s supporters say that the last decade was an aberration, marred by disasters and poor management, and that new executives, an overhauled board and an improved safety performance will enable the company to earn its authorized return.But some question whether the financial strategy is sound.“The numbers do not add up, unless the money that ratepayers pay increases,” said Loretta Lynch, a former president of the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates PG&E and other shareholder-owned utilities.“There’s no way for PG&E to pay off all of the people without raising rates,” she added. “The shareholders aren’t taking a haircut. That’s why Wall Street is excited about this deal, because they don’t have to pay for it.”PG&E said its reorganization plan met the state requirement that the effect on ratepayers be “neutral on average.”The financial performance of PG&E will also affect wildfire victims. Under the bankruptcy plan, half their payment would come in PG&E shares. If the company struggles, the shares could fall in value, reducing the amount the victims ultimately receive. (The shares could rally, however, and give the victims a windfall.)And PG&E’s plan would leave the company with more debt than it had before it filed for bankruptcy protection, in theory making it more vulnerable to financial stress.To address that risk, PG&E could sell more stock and take on less debt as part of its reorganization, an approach favored under a rival plan that no longer has backers in the bankruptcy proceeding.PG&E is proposing that its parent company, PG&E Corporation, issue billions of dollars in debt. The cost of this borrowing would have to be paid with earnings from Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the entity that provides customers with gas and power, in theory leaving it with less money to improve its network.PG&E is also seeking to use a tax windfall from its wildfire-related losses to back $7 billion in new debt, an offering known as securitization bonds. A share of rate revenue is designated for taxes — payments the company will be spared for some time — and PG&E wants to use that revenue to finance the bonds. Mr. Newsom has criticized these financial moves, saying they could impair the company’s ability to raise additional money for safety improvements.Energy policy has been a political crucible for California in the past — most notably in the crisis that followed the bungled deregulation of the state’s electricity market two decades ago, unleashing events that ended in the recall of Gov. Gray Davis in 2003.Michael Sweet, who has known Mr. Newsom for decades, feels the current governor is up to the challenge. Mr. Sweet, a San Francisco lawyer whose firm represents a few creditors in PG&E’s bankruptcy, said that on Mr. Newsom’s watch, the utility might finally face a reckoning.“If PG&E and Wall Street are not giving his concern a significant amount of credence, they’re underestimating him,” Mr. Sweet said, citing Mr. Newsom’s forceful advocacy for legalizing marijuana and gay marriage early in his political career. “He’s not afraid to go out on a limb.” Read the full article

[archiveofprolbems]

The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur by William Deresiewicz

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it?

Pronounce the word artist, to conjure up the image of a solitary genius. A sacred aura still attaches to the word, a sense of one in contact with the numinous. “He’s an artist,” we’ll say in tones of reverence about an actor or musician or director. “A true artist,” we’ll solemnly proclaim our favorite singer or photographer, meaning someone who appears to dwell upon a higher plane. Vision, inspiration, mysterious gifts as from above: such are some of the associations that continue to adorn the word.

Yet the notion of the artist as a solitary genius—so potent a cultural force, so determinative, still, of the way we think of creativity in general—is decades out of date. So out of date, in fact, that the model that replaced it is itself already out of date. A new paradigm is emerging, and has been since about the turn of the millennium, one that’s in the process of reshaping what artists are: how they work, train, trade, collaborate, think of themselves and are thought of—even what art is—just as the solitary-genius model did two centuries ago. The new paradigm may finally destroy the very notion of “art” as such—that sacred spiritual substance—which the older one created.

Before we thought of artists as geniuses, we thought of them as artisans. The words, by no coincidence, are virtually the same. Art itself derives from a root that means to “join” or “fit together”—that is, to make or craft, a sense that survives in phrases like the art of cooking and words like artful, in the sense of “crafty.” We may think of Bach as a genius, but he thought of himself as an artisan, a maker. Shakespeare wasn’t an artist, he was a poet, a denotation that is rooted in another word for make. He was also a playwright, a term worth pausing over. A playwright isn’t someone who writes plays; he is someone who fashions them, like a wheelwright or shipwright.

A whole constellation of ideas and practices accompanied this conception. Artists served apprenticeships, like other craftsmen, to learn the customary methods (hence the attributions one sees in museums: “workshop of Bellini” or “studio of Rembrandt”). Creativity was prized, but credibility and value derived, above all, from tradition. In a world still governed by a fairly rigid social structure, artists were grouped with the other artisans, somewhere in the middle or lower middle, below the merchants, let alone the aristocracy. Individual practitioners could come to be esteemed—think of the Dutch masters—but they were, precisely, masters, as in master craftsmen. The distinction between art and craft, in short, was weak at best. Indeed, the very concept of art as it was later understood—of Art—did not exist.

All of this began to change in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the period associated with Romanticism: the age of Rousseau, Goethe, Blake, and Beethoven, the age that taught itself to value not only individualism and originality but also rebellion and youth. Now it was desirable and even glamorous to break the rules and overthrow tradition—to reject society and blaze your own path. The age of revolution, it was also the age of secularization. As traditional belief became discredited, at least among the educated class, the arts emerged as the basis of a new creed, the place where people turned to put themselves in touch with higher truths.

Art rose to its zenith of spiritual prestige, and the artist rose along with it. The artisan became the genius: solitary, like a holy man; inspired, like a prophet; in touch with the unseen, his consciousness bulging into the future. “The priest departs,” said Whitman, “the divine literatus comes.” Art disentangled itself from craft; the term fine arts, “those which appeal to the mind and the imagination,” was first recorded in 1767.

“Art” became a unitary concept, incorporating music, theater, and literature as well as the visual arts, but also, in a sense, distinct from each, a kind of higher essence available for philosophical speculation and cultural veneration. “Art for art’s sake,” the aestheticist slogan, dates from the early 19th century. So does Gesamtkunstwerk, the dream or ideal, so precious to Wagner, of the “total work of art.” By the modernist moment, a century later, the age of Picasso, Joyce, and Stravinsky, the artist stood at the pinnacle of status, too, a cultural aristocrat with whom the old aristocrats—or at any rate the most advanced among them—wanted nothing more than to associate.

It is hardly any wonder that the image of the artist as a solitary genius—so noble, so enviable, so pleasant an object of aspiration and projection—has kept its hold on the collective imagination. Yet it was already obsolescent more than half a century ago. After World War II in particular, and in America especially, art, like all religions as they age, became institutionalized. We were the new superpower; we wanted to be a cultural superpower as well. We founded museums, opera houses, ballet companies, all in unprecedented numbers: the so-called culture boom. Arts councils, funding bodies, educational programs, residencies, magazines, awards—an entire bureaucratic apparatus.

As art was institutionalized, so, inevitably, was the artist. The genius became the professional. Now you didn’t go off to Paris and hole up in a garret to produce your masterpiece, your Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or Ulysses, and wait for the world to catch up with you. Like a doctor or lawyer, you went to graduate school—M.F.A. programs were also proliferating—and then tried to find a position. That often meant a job, typically at a college or university—writers in English departments, painters in art schools (higher ed was also booming)—but it sometimes simply meant an affiliation, as with an orchestra or theater troupe. Saul Bellow went to Paris in 1948, where he began The Adventures of Augie March, but he went on a Guggenheim grant, and he came from an assistant professorship.

The training was professional, and so was the work it produced. Expertise—or, in the mantra of the graduate programs, “technique”—not inspiration or tradition, became the currency of aesthetic authority. The artist-as-genius could sometimes pretend that his work was tossed off in a sacred frenzy, but no self-respecting artist-as-professional could afford to do likewise. They had to be seen to be working, and working hard (the badge of professional virtue), and it helped if they could explain to laypeople—deans, donors, journalists—what it was that they were doing.

The artist’s progress, in the postwar model, was also professional. You didn’t burst from obscurity to celebrity with a single astonishing work. You slowly climbed the ranks. You accumulated credentials. You amassed a résumé. You sat on the boards and committees, collected your prizes and fellowships. It was safer than the solitary-genius thing, but it was also a lot less exciting, and it is no surprise that artists were much less apt to be regarded now as sages or priests, much more likely to be seen as just another set of knowledge workers. Spiritual aristocracy was sacrificed for solid socioeconomic upper-middle-class-ness.

Artisan, genius, professional: underlying all these models is the market. In blunter terms, they’re all about the way that you get paid. If the artisanal paradigm predates the emergence of modern capitalism—the age of the artisan was the age of the patron, with the artist as, essentially, a sort of feudal dependent—the paradigms of genius and professional were stages in the effort to adjust to it.

In the former case, the object was to avoid the market and its sullying entanglements, or at least to appear to do so. Spirit stands opposed to flesh, to filthy lucre. Selling was selling out. Artists, like their churchly forebears, were meant to be unworldly. Some, like Picasso and Rilke, had patrons, but under very different terms than did the artisans, since the privilege was weighted in the artist’s favor now, leaving many fewer strings attached. Some, like Proust and Elizabeth Bishop, had money to begin with. And some, like Joyce and van Gogh, did the most prestigious thing and starved—which also often meant sponging, extracting gifts or “loans” from family or friends that amounted to a kind of sacerdotal tax, equivalent to the tithes exacted by priests or alms relied upon by monks.

Professionalism represents a compromise formation, midway between the sacred and the secular. A profession is not a vocation, in the older sense of a “calling,” but it also isn’t just a job; something of the priestly clings to it. Against the values of the market, the artist, like other professionals, maintained a countervailing set of standards and ideals—beauty, rigor, truth—inherited from the previous paradigm. Institutions served to mediate the difference, to cushion artists, ideologically, economically, and psychologically, from the full force of the marketplace.

Some artists did enter the market, of course, especially those who worked in the “low” or “popular” forms. But even they had mediating figures—publishing companies, movie studios, record labels; agents, managers, publicists, editors, producers—who served to shield creators from the market’s logic. Corporations functioned as a screen; someone else, at least, was paid to think about the numbers. Publishers or labels also sometimes played an actively benevolent role: funding the rest of the list with a few big hits, floating promising beginners while their talent had a chance to blossom, even subsidizing the entire enterprise, as James Laughlin did for years at New Directions.

There were overlaps, of course, between the different paradigms—long transitions, mixed and marginal cases, anticipations and survivals. The professional model remains the predominant one. But we have entered, unmistakably, a new transition, and it is marked by the final triumph of the market and its values, the removal of the last vestiges of protection and mediation. In the arts, as throughout the middle class, the professional is giving way to the entrepreneur, or, more precisely, the “entrepreneur”: the “self-employed” (that sneaky oxymoron), the entrepreneurial self.

The institutions that have undergirded the existing system are contracting or disintegrating. Professors are becoming adjuncts. Employees are becoming independent contractors (or unpaid interns). Everyone is in a budget squeeze: downsizing, outsourcing, merging, or collapsing. Now we’re all supposed to be our own boss, our own business: our own agent; our own label; our own marketing, production, and accounting departments. Entrepreneurialism is being sold to us as an opportunity. It is, by and large, a necessity. Everybody understands by now that nobody can count on a job.

Still, it also is an opportunity. The push of institutional disintegration has coincided with the pull of new technology. The emerging culture of creative entrepreneurship predates the Web—its roots go back to the 1960s—but the Web has brought it an unprecedented salience. The Internet enables you to promote, sell, and deliver directly to the user, and to do so in ways that allow you to compete with corporations and institutions, which previously had a virtual monopoly on marketing and distribution. You can reach potential customers at a speed and on a scale that would have been unthinkable when pretty much the only means were word of mouth, the alternative press, and stapling handbills to telephone poles.

Everybody gets this: every writer, artist, and musician with a Web site (that is, every writer, artist, and musician). Bands hawk their CDs online. Documentarians take to Kickstarter to raise money for their projects. The comedian Louis CK, selling unprotected downloads of his stand-up show, has tested a nascent distribution model. “Just get your name out there,” creative types are told. There seems to be a lot of building going on: you’re supposed to build your brand, your network, your social-media presence. Creative entrepreneurship is spawning its own institutional structure—online marketplaces, self-publishing platforms, nonprofit incubators, collaborative spaces—but the fundamental relationship remains creator-to-customer, with creators handling or superintending every aspect of the transaction.

So what will all this mean for artists and for art? For training, for practice, for the shape of the artistic career, for the nature of the artistic community, for the way that artists see themselves and are seen by the public, for the standards by which art is judged and the terms by which it is defined? These are new questions, open questions, questions no one is equipped as yet to answer. But it’s not too early to offer a few preliminary observations.

Creative entrepreneurship, to start with what is most apparent, is far more interactive, at least in terms of how we understand the word today, than the model of the artist-as-genius, turning his back on the world, and even than the model of the artist as professional, operating within a relatively small and stable set of relationships. The operative concept today is the network, along with the verb that goes with it, networking. A Gen‑X graphic-artist friend has told me that the young designers she meets are no longer interested in putting in their 10,000 hours. One reason may be that they recognize that 10,000 hours is less important now than 10,000 contacts.

A network, I should note, is not the same as what used to be known as a circle—or, to use a term important to the modernists, a coterie. The truth is that the geniuses weren’t really quite as solitary as advertised. They also often came together—think of the Bloomsbury Group—in situations of intense, sustained creative ferment. With the coterie or circle as a social form, from its conversations and incitements, came the movement as an intellectual product: impressionism, imagism, futurism.

But the network is a far more diffuse phenomenon, and the connections that it typically entails are far less robust. A few days here, a project there, a correspondence over e‑mail. A contact is not a collaborator. Coleridge, for Wordsworth, was not a contact; he was a partner, a comrade, a second self. It is hard to imagine that kind of relationship, cultivated over countless uninterrupted encounters, developing in the age of the network. What kinds of relationships will develop, and what they will give rise to, remains to be seen.

No longer interested in putting in their 10,000 hours: under all three of the old models, an artist was someone who did one thing—who trained intensively in one discipline, one tradition, one set of tools, and who worked to develop one artistic identity. You were a writer, or a painter, or a choreographer. It is hard to think of very many figures who achieved distinction in more than one genre—fiction and poetry, say—let alone in more than one art. Few even attempted the latter (Gertrude Stein admonished Picasso for trying to write poems), and almost never with any success.

But one of the most conspicuous things about today’s young creators is their tendency to construct a multiplicity of artistic identities. You’re a musician anda photographer and a poet; a storyteller and a dancer and a designer—a multiplatform artist, in the term one sometimes sees. Which means that you haven’t got time for your 10,000 hours in any of your chosen media. But technique or expertise is not the point. The point is versatility. Like any good business, you try to diversify.

What we see in the new paradigm—in both the artist’s external relationships and her internal creative capacity—is what we see throughout the culture: the displacement of depth by breadth. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? No doubt some of both, in a ratio that’s yet to be revealed. What seems more clear is that the new paradigm is going to reshape the way that artists are trained. One recently established M.F.A. program in Portland, Oregon, is conducted under the rubric of “applied craft and design.” Students, drawn from a range of disciplines, study entrepreneurship as well as creative practice. Making, the program recognizes, is now intertwined with selling, and artists need to train in both—a fact reflected in the proliferation of dual M.B.A./M.F.A. programs.

The new paradigm is also likely to alter the shape of the ensuing career. Just as everyone, we’re told, will have five or six jobs, in five or six fields, during the course of their working life, so will the career of the multiplatform, entrepreneurial artist be more vagrant and less cumulative than under the previous models. No climactic masterwork of deep maturity, no King Lear or Faust, but rather many shifting interests and directions as the winds of market forces blow you here or there.

Works of art, more centrally and nakedly than ever before, are becoming commodities, consumer goods. Jeff Bezos, as a patron, is a very different beast than James Laughlin. Now it’s every man for himself, every tub on its own bottom. Now it’s not an audience you think of addressing; it’s a customer base. Now you’re only as good as your last sales quarter.

It’s hard to believe that the new arrangement will not favor work that’s safer: more familiar, formulaic, user-friendly, eager to please—more like entertainment, less like art. Artists will inevitably spend a lot more time looking over their shoulder, trying to figure out what the customer wants rather than what they themselves are seeking to say. The nature of aesthetic judgment will itself be reconfigured. “No more gatekeepers,” goes the slogan of the Internet apostles. Everyone’s opinion, as expressed in Amazon reviews and suchlike, carries equal weight—the democratization of taste.

Judgment rested with the patron, in the age of the artisan. In the age of the professional, it rested with the critic, a professionalized aesthete or intellectual. In the age of the genius, which was also the age of avant-gardes, of tremendous experimental energy across the arts, it largely rested with artists themselves. “Every great and original writer,” Wordsworth said, “must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.”

But now we have come to the age of the customer, who perforce is always right. Or as a certain legendary entertainer is supposed to have put it, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Another word for gatekeepers is experts. Lord knows they have their problems, beginning with arrogance, but there is one thing you can say for them: they’re not quite so easily fooled. When the Modern Library asked its editorial board to select the 100 best novels of the 20th century, the top choice was Ulysses. In a companion poll of readers, it was Atlas Shrugged. We recognize, when it comes to food (the new summit of cultural esteem), that taste must be developed by a long exposure, aided by the guidance of practitioners and critics. About the arts we own to no such modesties. Prizes belong to the age of professionals. All we’ll need to measure merit soon is the best-seller list.

The democratization of taste, abetted by the Web, coincides with the democratization of creativity. The makers have the means to sell, but everybody has the means to make. And everybody’s using them. Everybody seems to fancy himself a writer, a musician, a visual artist. Apple figured this out a long time ago: that the best way to sell us its expensive tools is to convince us that we all have something unique and urgent to express.

“Producerism,” we can call this, by analogy with consumerism. What we’re now persuaded to consume, most conspicuously, are the means to create. And the democratization of taste ensures that no one has the right (or inclination) to tell us when our work is bad. A universal grade inflation now obtains: we’re all swapping A-minuses all the time, or, in the language of Facebook, “likes.”

It is often said today that the most-successful businesses are those that create experiences rather than products, or create experiences (environments, relationships) around their products. So we might also say that under producerism, in the age of creative entrepreneurship, producing becomes an experience, even the experience. It becomes a lifestyle, something that is packaged as an experience—and an experience, what’s more, after the contemporary fashion: networked, curated, publicized, fetishized, tweeted, catered, and anything but solitary, anything but private.

Among the most notable things about those Web sites that creators now all feel compelled to have is that they tend to present not only the work, not only the creator (which is interesting enough as a cultural fact), but also the creator’s life or lifestyle or process. The customer is being sold, or at least sold on or sold through, a vicarious experience of production.

Creator: I’m not sure that artist even makes sense as a term anymore, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it giving way before the former, with its more generic meaning and its connection to that contemporary holy word, creative. Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Powers of Two, last summer’s modish book on creativity, puts Lennon and McCartney with Jobs and Wozniak. A recent cover of this very magazine touted “Case Studies in Eureka Moments,” a list that started with Hemingway and ended with Taco Bell.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ is the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-the-creative-entrepreneur/383497/