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What Happened When the U.S. Failed to Prosecute an Insurrectionist Ex-President

After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was to be tried for treason. Does the debacle hold lessons for the trials awaiting Donald Trump?

— By Jill Lepore | December 4, 2023

Trump Looking at a Statue of Jefferson Davis. The American Presidency is draped in a cloak of impunity. If Davis had been tried and convicted, things might have been different. Illustration by Barry Blitt

Jefferson Davis, the half-blind ex-President of the Confederate States of America, leaned on a cane as he hobbled into a federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. Only days before, a Chicago Tribune reporter, who’d met Davis on the boat ride to Richmond, had written that “his step is light and elastic.” But in court, facing trial for treason, Davis, fifty-eight, gave every appearance of being bent and broken. A reporter from Kentucky described him as “a gaunt and feeble-looking man,” wearing a soft black hat and a sober black suit, as if he were a corpse. He’d spent two years in a military prison. He wanted to be released. A good many Americans wanted him dead. “We’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour-apple tree,” they sang to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.”c

Davis knew the courthouse well. Richmond had been the capital of the Confederacy and the courthouse its headquarters. The rebel President and his cabinet had used the courtroom as a war room, covering its walls with maps. He’d used the judge’s chambers as his Presidential office. He’d last left that room on the night of April 2, 1865, while Richmond fell.

Two years later, when Davis doddered into that courtroom, many of the faces he saw were Black. Among the two hundred spectators, a quarter were Black freedmen. And then the grand jury filed in. Six of its eighteen members were Black, the first Black men to serve on a federal grand jury. Fields Cook, born a slave, was a Baptist minister. John Oliver, born free, had spent much of his life in Boston. George Lewis Seaton’s mother, Lucinda, had been enslaved at Mount Vernon. Cornelius Liggan Harris, a Black shoemaker, later recalled how, when he took his seat with the grand jury and eyed the defendant, “he looked on me and smiled.”

Not many minutes later, Davis walked out a free man, released on bail. And not too many months after that the federal government’s case against him fell apart. There’s no real consensus about why. The explanation that Davis’s lawyer Charles O’Conor liked best had to do with Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, known as the disqualification clause, which bars from federal office anyone who has ever taken an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” O’Conor argued that Section 3’s ban on holding office was a form of punishment and that to try Davis for treason would therefore amount to double jeopardy. It’s a different kind of jeopardy lately. In the aftermath of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, legal scholars, including leading conservatives, have argued that the clause disqualifies Donald Trump from running for President. Challenges calling for Trump’s name to be blocked from ballots have been filed in twenty-eight states. Eleven cases have been dismissed by courts or voluntarily withdrawn. The Supreme Court might have the final say.

The American Presidency is draped in a red-white-and-blue cloak of impunity. Trump is the first President to have been impeached twice and the first ex-President to have been criminally indicted. If he’s convicted and sentenced and—unlikeliest of all—goes to prison, he will be the first in those dishonors, too. He faces four criminal trials, for a total of ninety-one felony charges. Thirty-four of those charges concern the alleged Stormy Daniels coverup, forty address Trump’s handling of classified documents containing national-defense information, and the remainder, divided between a federal case in Washington, D.C., and a state case in Georgia, relate to his efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, including by inciting an armed insurrection to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote by a joint session of Congress. His very infamy is unprecedented.

The insurrection at the Capitol cost seven lives. The Civil War cost seven hundred thousand. And yet Jefferson Davis was never held responsible for any of those deaths. His failed conviction leaves no trail. Still, it had consequences. If Davis had been tried and convicted, the cloak of Presidential impunity would be flimsier. Leniency for Davis also bolstered the cause of white supremacy. First elected to the Senate, from Mississippi, in 1848, Davis believed in slavery, states’ rights, and secession, three ideas in one. Every state had a right to secede, Davis insisted in his farewell address to the Senate, in 1861, and Mississippi had every reason to because “the theory that all men are created free and equal” had been “made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions,” meaning slavery. Weeks later, Davis became the President of the Confederacy. His Vice-President, Alexander Stephens, said that the cornerstone of the new government “rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Trump could win his Lost Cause, too.

Davis fled Richmond seven days before Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. “I’m bound to oppose the escape of Jeff. Davis,” Abraham Lincoln reportedly told General William Tecumseh Sherman, “but if you could manage to have him slip out unbeknownst-like, I guess it wouldn’t hurt me much.” After Lincoln was shot and killed, on April 15th, his successor, Andrew Johnson, issued a proclamation charging that Lincoln’s assassination had been “incited, concerted, and procured by” Davis and offering a reward of a hundred thousand dollars for his arrest.

Union troops captured Davis in Georgia on May 10th as he attempted to sneak out of a tent while wearing his wife’s shawl. He was conveyed to a military prison in Virginia. Captain Henry Wirz, who had served as the commandant of an infamous Confederate prison in Andersonville, Georgia, where thirteen thousand Union soldiers died of starvation and exposure, was captured three days before Davis. Tried before a military commission, Wirz was found guilty and hanged.

From the start, the prosecution of the former rebel President was more complicated. “I never cease to regret that Jeff. Davis was not shot at the time of his capture,” the dauntless Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner said. Sumner wanted Davis tried, like Wirz, before a military commission. “I am anxiously looking forward to Jefferson Davis’s Trial,” the Columbia law professor Francis Lieber wrote to Sumner at the close of Wirz’s trial. But “suppose he is not found guilty; is he not, in that case, completely restored to his citizenship, and will he not sit by your side again in the Senate? And be the Democratic candidate for the next presidency? I do not joke.”

Lieber, who grew up in Prussia, had taught at South Carolina College for twenty years before moving to Columbia, in 1857. “Behold in me the symbol of civil war,” he once wrote. A son of his who fought for the Confederacy had been killed; another, who fought for the Union, had lost an arm. During the war, Lieber had prepared a set of rules of war that Lincoln issued as General Orders 100, better known as the Lieber Code. (It later formed the framework of the Geneva Convention.) Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, appointed Lieber to head the newly created Archive Office, charged with collecting Confederate records. Lieber fully expected to find evidence showing a “perfect connexion” between Davis and Lincoln’s assassination. That evidence was not forthcoming. Johnson vacillated, but by the end of 1865 he decided that he wanted Davis tried not for war crimes but for treason.

The Constitution defines treason as levying war against the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies. If Davis couldn’t be convicted of treason, the Philadelphia Inquirer remarked, “we may as well . . . expunge at once the word from our dictionaries.” Although Congress had modified the definition of treason in 1862, there remained ambiguity about what distinguished it from rebellion or insurrection. Lieber hoped that the prosecution would “stamp treason as treason,” but he was worried. “The whole Rebellion is beyond the Constitution,” he maintained. “The Constitution was not made for such a state of things.” In 1864, he quietly circulated to Congress a list of proposed constitutional amendments, including one that would end slavery, or what became the Thirteenth Amendment. (“Let us have no ‘slavery is dead,’ ” he wrote to Sumner. “It is not dead. Nothing is dead until it is killed.”) He also proposed an amendment guaranteeing equal rights regardless of race, or what became the Fourteenth Amendment. And he proposed an amendment clarifying the relationship between treason and rebellion: “It shall be a high crime directly to incite to armed resistance to the authority of the United States, or to establish or to join Societies or Combinations, secret or public, the object of which is to offer armed resistance to the authority of the United States, or to prepare for the same by collecting arms, organizing men, or otherwise.” Lieber’s Insurrection Amendment was never ratified. If it had been, Americans would live in a very different country.

Can Donald Trump get a fair trial? Is trying Trump the best thing for the nation? Is the possibility of acquittal worth the risk? Every trial on charges related to the insurrection gives him a stage for making the case that he won the 2020 election, any acquittal will be taken as a vindication, and his supporters will question the legitimacy of any conviction. But failure to try him is an affront not only to democracy but to decency.

In 1865, plenty of Americans wanted Davis tried without delay. A rope-maker from Illinois wrote to Johnson, volunteering to make the rope to hang him. But U.S. Attorney General James Speed, belying his name, wanted to slow things down. Americans were still mourning Lincoln and all that they had lost in the war. Speed, cautious by nature, wanted temperatures to cool. Many feared that bringing Davis to trial risked handing a rather stunning victory to the defeated Confederacy, as the legal historian Cynthia Nicoletti argued in a brilliant and exhaustively researched 2017 book, “Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis.” To a charge of treason, Davis was expected to respond that he had forfeited his American citizenship when Mississippi seceded from the United States, and you cannot commit treason against another country. According to Nicoletti, the worry that an acquittal would have established the constitutionality of secession meant that interest in prosecuting Davis simply evaporated. There are other views. In a 2019 book, “Treason on Trial: The United States v. Jefferson Davis,” Robert Icenhauer-Ramirez, a former criminal-defense attorney, wrote that the prosecution unravelled because the men involved in it had towering political ambitions and were unwilling to risk losing so prominent a case. Neither explanation covers all the facts.

One hurdle had to do with the venue. Johnson’s advisers disagreed about whether a military commission could, in peacetime, conduct a trial for treason. For the sake of both fairness and political legitimacy, it seemed safest to conduct the trial in a civilian court. That would require holding the trial where Davis had allegedly committed the crime, which meant Richmond. But what jury in the former capital of the Confederacy would possibly convict Davis of treason?

Lieber proposed a constitutional amendment to deal with this problem, too. One draft read, “Trials for Treason or Sedition shall be in the State or district in which they shall have been committed unless the administration of justice in the respective State or district shall have been impeded by the state of things caused by the commission of the criminal acts which are to be tried.” In other words, you shouldn’t have to try someone for treason in a state where you can’t possibly convict him of treason. That proposal went nowhere. A doctrine called “constructive presence,” which informed the 1807 prosecution of Aaron Burr, might have argued for holding the trial in a Northern state—the governor of Indiana, for instance, volunteered to try Davis in his state, where the Confederate Army had marauded. But Speed, exercising the greatest possible caution, resolved that the case would be tried in Richmond, partly because Salmon P. Chase, the Chief Justice of the United States, was on the U.S. circuit court in Richmond. (At the time, Supreme Court Justices rode circuit.) Chase, who had previously served Ohio as a U.S. senator and as its governor, was best known for his abolitionism (people called him “the attorney general for fugitive slaves”) and for his ambition (he was, it was said, as “ambitious as Julius Caesar”). In 1864, even while he was Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, he had sought the Republican nomination for President, after which Lincoln accepted his resignation and nominated him to the Supreme Court. Speed hoped that Chase’s presence on the bench at the Davis trial, alongside a district-court judge, would provide the proper degree of authority and solemnity. This didn’t solve the jury problem.

Then there was the question of the lawyers. Speed assigned the case to the federal district attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lucius H. Chandler, who had virtually no trial experience. Having moved to Virginia from Maine, and never having supported the Confederacy, Chandler was one of only two lawyers in Virginia who had not been disqualified from practicing in federal court in Richmond owing to disloyalty. Speed brought in the New York lawyer William Evarts to direct the prosecution. Evarts, nearly as ambitious as Chase, was happy to participate in what he called “the greatest criminal trial of the age.” But he left the legwork to Chandler.

Davis, still in military prison, arranged for his wife, Varina, to retain Charles O’Conor, the celebrated New York trial lawyer and pro-slavery Confederate sympathizer. “I have not left a stone unturned under which there crept a living thing,” O’Conor liked to say. He was among the most famous lawyers in the country; he was also despised by Black Americans. An editorial in a Black newspaper based in San Francisco declared that he was “as great a traitor as Jeff Davis.” O’Conor’s strategy for his new client was to delay a trial for as long as possible, while the national mood cooled. Luckily for O’Conor, slow-rolling is what Speed wanted, too.

Lieber was not wrong to worry that Davis could run for President. In January, 1866, Alexander Stephens, the former Vice-President of the Confederacy, was elected to the Senate. Two former Confederate senators and four former Confederate congressmen had also been sent to the Thirty-ninth Congress, which had convened the previous month for its second session. The clerk refused to call their names at roll, and they were never sworn in. But their presence made clear the need for measures keeping “from positions of public trust of, at least, a portion of those whose crimes have proved them to be enemies to the Union, and unworthy of public confidence,” as a congressional committee wrote.

A fifteen-man Joint Committee on Reconstruction began considering proposals to disqualify former Confederates from federal office and, at the same time, to guarantee the equal citizenship of freedmen. In January, 1866, the committee held hearings to inquire into the delay in prosecuting Davis, and called the Virginia judge in charge of the case, John C. Underwood. A New York-born abolitionist and Radical Republican appointed to the U.S. District Court by Lincoln in 1864, Underwood had issued a series of rulings protecting equal rights, declaring, in one case, that “all distinction of color must be abolished.” He’d also suggested that he intended to sell Davis’s Mississippi plantation to ex-slaves for a half-dollar an acre. White Virginians despised him; the feeling appears to have been mutual. The committee asked Underwood whether any jury in Virginia was likely to convict Davis of treason. “Not unless it is what is called a packed jury,” Underwood answered. The committee then summoned Robert E. Lee, who offered a similar assessment:

Question. Suppose the jury should be clearly and plainly instructed by the court that such an act of war upon the United States, on the part of Mr. Davis, or any other leading man, constituted in itself the crime of treason under the Constitution of the United States; would the jury be likely to heed that instruction, and if the facts were plainly in proof before them, convict the offender?

Answer. I do not know, sir, what they would do on that question.

Question. They do not generally suppose that it was treason against the United States, do they?

Answer. I do not think that they so consider it.

What about a Black jury? Black men were banned from jury service, with dreadful consequences. In 1865 and 1866, in five hundred trials of whites accused of killing Blacks in Texas, all-white juries found all five hundred defendants not guilty. “Are our lives, honor, and liberties to be left in the hands of men who are laboring under the most stubborn and narrow prejudice?” the editor of one Black newspaper asked. In March, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which enshrined the right to testify in criminal trials. Johnson, in a statement that the attorney Henry Stanbery helped craft, vetoed the bill, warning that it might lead to Congress declaring “who, without regard to color or race, shall have the right to sit as a juror.” Congress overrode the veto, and kept on with the work of extending rights to Black men and denying them to former Confederates. In April, the Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens added to the proposed Fourteenth Amendment a new section that would disqualify from Congress any former federal officeholders or servicemen who had taken “part in the late insurrection.” There followed much discussion of who, exactly, was to be disqualified, with one version of the amendment stating, “The President and Vice-President of the late Confederate States of America so-called . . . are declared to be forever ineligible to any office under the United States.” This, however, was not the version that Congress sent to the states for ratification, in June, which, in any case, the states of the former Confederacy refused to ratify. Congress, one North Carolinian said, wanted Southerners to “drink our own piss and eat our own dung.”

Lieber grew resigned to a foul outcome. “The trial of Jeff. Davis will be a terrible thing,” he thought. “Volumes—a library—of the most infernal treason will be brought to light,” but “Davis will not be found guilty, and we shall stand there completely beaten.” Frederick Douglass blamed Johnson, predicting, as a newspaper reported, that “Davis would never be punished, simply because Mr. Johnson had determined to have him tried in the one way that he could not be tried, and had determined not to have him tried in the only way he could be tried.” And, even if he were tried, any verdict would be appealed to the Supreme Court, which, in the aftermath of the Dred Scott decision, could hardly be said to have enjoyed unqualified confidence. Harper’s Weekly asked, “Does anybody mean seriously to assert that the right of this Government to exist is a question for a court to decide?” Will Americans trust the Supreme Court to decide a question of such moment in 2024?

Donald Trump has made much of the fact that three of the four prosecutors who are heading criminal prosecutions against him are Black: Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia; Letitia James, the attorney general of New York; and Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan. Trump has labelled the three prosecutors “racist,” calls Bragg an “animal” and James “Peekaboo,” and insists that the charges against him are both politically and racially motivated. Sometimes it feels as if the century and a half separating the trial of Jefferson Davis from the trials of Donald Trump were as nothing.

In March, 1867, again overriding Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, which called for the occupation of the former Confederacy by the U.S. Army and stipulated that no state could reënter the Union without first ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment. Congress also endorsed jury service for Black men. In Texas, when the military governor announced that Black men would be allowed on juries, some judges refused to hold court. In Virginia, Underwood impanelled Black jurors for Davis’s trial. Many Northerners approved. “The trial of Jefferson Davis, for leading the Rebellion in behalf of Slavery, should be before a jury made up in part of freedmen, if only for the historic justice, not to say the dramatic beauty and harmony, of such a denouement,” the New York Tribune wrote. But Southern newspapers expressed disgust at the “African quota of the Grand Jury,” describing the men, swearing an oath on the Bible, as having “smacked their lips over the sacred volume when permitted to get at it.” And an editorial that ran in both the North and the South asked, “If Davis is to stand before a nigger jury, what becomes of the notion that a man is to be tried by a jury of his peers?”

When a new trial date came—June 5, 1866—Davis wasn’t there; he was in military prison. Lucius Chandler stayed home sick. Chief Justice Chase spent the day in his library in Washington, where he wrote a letter to his daughter. Outside his window, he could hear a newsboy crying, “ ‘Dai-l-y Chron-i-cle!, full account of ’ something I don’t understand what and ‘trial of Jeff Davis!’ ” O’Conor, knowing that Chase wouldn’t be there, didn’t bother to show up, either. Chase maintained that he could not possibly attend a civilian court in Virginia, because the state was still under military rule. Chase planned to run for President in 1868, and he wanted no part in the trial of Jefferson Davis. He had his eye on the election.

Underwood rescheduled the trial for October. But the Chief Justice had no intention of showing up in October, either. Meanwhile, any momentum there ever was to prosecute Davis withered as congressional Republicans pursued Reconstruction, a plan that involved treating the former Confederacy as a conquered nation. If a trial were held and Davis argued that he could not have committed treason because, after Mississippi seceded, he was no longer a U.S. citizen, the government would have to argue that he had always been a U.S. citizen. But if he had been a U.S. citizen during the war, then the Confederacy had not been a foreign belligerent, and the U.S. could not justify its occupation of the region as a “conquered province.” Under these circumstances, Radical Republicans became some of Davis’s most ardent defenders. Gerrit Smith, a fiery abolitionist, helped post bail, and that fiercest of congressional radicals, Thaddeus Stevens, secretly offered to represent Davis.

Over the summer, Speed resigned: he supported the Fourteenth Amendment; Johnson opposed it. In Speed’s place, Johnson appointed Stanbery, who’d written the President’s veto of the Civil Rights Act. When Chandler travelled to Washington to confer with Evarts and Stanbery, the new Attorney General explained that he not only wouldn’t lead the prosecution but also wouldn’t attend the trial. The three men decided not to object to O’Conor’s request that Davis be released on bail. And so it was that on May 13, 1867, Jefferson Davis walked into the federal courthouse in Richmond, eyed the grand jury, and smiled. (Grand jurors operate in secrecy and would not normally appear at such a hearing, but Underwood had seemingly insisted on the presence of the mixed-race jury, to serve, as he said, as “ocular evidence that the age of caste and class cruelty is departed, and a new era of justice and equality, breaking through the clouds of persecution and prejudice, is now dawning.”) When the prosecution said that it was not prepared for trial, Underwood agreed to release Davis on bail. “The business is finished,” O’Conor wrote to his wife. “Mr. Davis will never be called up to appear for trial.”

A new trial date was set, for November 25th. No one expected the prosecution to be ready. Two years after Davis’s arrest, Chandler had still not conducted any investigation, or prepared a superseding indictment. Underwood told Speed that he believed Chandler was a Confederate sympathizer who was making money by selling pardons. But it may well be that the prospect of Black men on the jury led the government to abandon the prosecution, fearful that Black men issuing a verdict that condemned a white man to death would inflame the country beyond any possibility of repair. O’Conor at one point assured Varina Davis, “Chandler professes the kindest disposition and says he will try to get a White jury. But this is impossible. Underwood is a devoted courtier at the feet of Sambo and there is no appeal from his decisions.” The trial jury, O’Conor warned, “will be composed of 8 or 9 negroes and 3 or 4 of the meanest whites who can be found in Richmond.” He wrote to Varina, “I find it impossible to believe that we are destined to play parts in a farce so contemptible as a trial before Underwood and a set of recently emancipated Negroes, but it is equally impossible to assert with confidence that the thing will not happen.”

The thing did not happen. On the day the trial was to begin, a crowd assembled in Richmond to wait for the train from Washington. “The colored population seemed to take a deep interest in the proceedings, and were on hand en masse,” a correspondent for the New York Times reported. The train pulled up. “Has Mr. Chase come?” people cried. He had not. At the courthouse, Underwood announced that the court was adjourned. It’s one of the sorriest moments of the whole sorry story. A newspaper reported that there had been a crowd outside the courthouse, “consisting chiefly of blacks,” but upon hearing the announcement the crowd “quietly dispersed.” No justice, only peace. And peace is not enough.

Then as now, what one half of the country thought best for the country the other half thought worst. In February, 1868, the House impeached Johnson, having investigated him for, among other things, intentionally derailing the Davis prosecution. Lieber favored impeachment, not least for the precedent that it would establish. “As to history, it will be a wonderful thing to have the ruler over a large country removed for the first time without revolution,” he wrote. The same hesitancy that derailed the Davis prosecution derailed the Johnson impeachment: so grave a thing, to try a king. In any event, the Johnson impeachment trial grossly interfered with the Davis treason trial. At the Senate impeachment trial, Chase presided, as Chief Justice, and Evarts led Johnson’s defense, joined by Stanbery (who had resigned his position as Attorney General), which led to yet more postponements.

There was one last gasp. With Chandler’s term as district attorney expiring in June, Evarts recruited the Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana to join the prosecution. Dana worked hard to prepare for trial. In a Richmond hotel, he and Evarts readied a new, fourteen-count indictment, based on the testimony of multiple witnesses, including Robert E. Lee, who had testified against Davis before a new grand jury. (Evarts wrote a parody of Chandler’s earlier, cursory indictment: “I have arrived at the fact that J.D. used to wear a Confederate uniform on great occasions, and have a witness who can prove it, in the person of a colored waiter who came to me last evening.”) But Dana reluctantly concluded that the trial should not proceed. What seemed more urgent was to disqualify Davis from ever again holding public office; sending him back to prison, or, God knows, hanging him, could have been almost as bad for the country as acquitting him. Dana drafted a letter of resignation on both lawyers’ behalf, and sent it to Evarts, who pocketed it, unsure what to do.

By the time Chase and Underwood finally held court together in Richmond, in December, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified, and Chase had discreetly suggested to the defense a new line of reasoning: that Davis could no longer be prosecuted for treason because, having been disqualified for office upon the amendment’s ratification (“It needs no legislation on the part of Congress to give it effect,” the defense said), he had already been punished. O’Conor gleefully offered up this argument, suggested to him by the Chief Justice himself. Dana, who knew the argument to be nonsense, countered that the Constitution is not a criminal code and that being disqualified from office is not a penalty. Chase agreed with O’Conor; Underwood agreed with Dana. The case would have gone to the Supreme Court. But, on Christmas Day, Johnson pardoned “every person who directly or indirectly participated in the late insurrection or rebellion,” and, not long after that, the prosecution entered a nolle prosequi. The end.

It has been nearly three years since the Capitol attack. In November, a district-court judge in Colorado found that Trump did indeed engage in insurrection against the United States, but the judge refused to order the removal of Trump’s name from the state’s primary ballot. Will the Supreme Court find that the Fourteenth Amendment disqualifies Trump? Will any jury in New York, Florida, Georgia, or Washington, D.C., convict him of a crime? He could be acquitted. Or he could be convicted, win the Presidency, and pardon himself. Whatever the outcome, it will be contested by half the country, and there will be a cost, which won’t be borne equally.

Amnesty is a kind of charity. It is not usually given with malice toward none. “More than six years having elapsed since the last hostile gun was fired between the armies then arrayed against each other,” Ulysses S. Grant told Congress in 1871, “it may well be considered whether it is not now time that the disabilities imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment should be removed.” Over the objections of the first Black members of Congress, Congress voted for a general amnesty. In the Senate, Charles Sumner tried to attach civil-rights provisions to the bill, on the ground that both measures involved the removal of disabilities and the guarantee of rights. “Now that it is proposed that we should be generous to those who were engaged in the rebellion,” Sumner said, “I insist upon justice to the colored race everywhere throughout this land.” Or, as the Black congressman Joseph Rainey said of ex-Confederates, “We are willing to accord them their enfranchisement, and here today give our votes that they may be amnestied,” but “there is another class of citizens in this country who have certain dear rights and immunities which they would like you, sirs, to remember and respect.” The amnesty bill passed, without civil-rights guarantees. A civil-rights bill did pass in 1875; eight years later, the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional.

Salmon Chase ran for President in 1868 and 1872 and lost. Lieber died in 1872, Chase and Underwood in 1873, Sumner in 1874. In 1876, Lucius Chandler put stones in his pockets and drowned himself. Jefferson Davis died of a cold in 1889, at the age of eighty-one. He was buried in New Orleans; his remains were later moved to Richmond. In 2020, Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down an eight-foot-tall statue of him that had been made by Edward Valentine and erected on Richmond’s Monument Avenue in 1907. The fifteen-hundred-pound statue—defaced, toppled, and streaked with paint—is currently on display in a room at Richmond’s Valentine museum, whose founding president was the sculptor himself. In 2021, a group calling itself White Lies Matter stole a stone chair dedicated to Davis from a cemetery in Selma, and held it for ransom. Harper’s reported this fall, “A New Orleans tattoo shop owner was cleared of charges in a ransom plot to turn the Jefferson Davis memorial chair into a toilet.”

Aside from that single day in Richmond in May of 1867, Davis never appeared in a courtroom to defend himself against the charge of treason. But, for the Presidential trial that never happened, twenty-four men had been assembled for a jury pool. Twelve of them were Black. So momentous was the occasion that the twenty-four men sat for a photograph: twelve white men and twelve Black men posed, cheek by jowl, hands on one another’s shoulders, the picture of a promise. Joseph Cox was a blacksmith who, like his fellow-juror Lewis Lindsey, served as a delegate to Virginia’s 1867 constitutional convention. At the event, where delegates elected Underwood to preside over the proceedings, Lindsey proposed a disqualification clause, which would bar former supporters of the Confederacy from holding office. John B. Miller, born free, worked as a barber; he was later elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. Albert Royal Brooks, born into slavery in 1817, had bought the freedom of his wife, Lucy Goode, their three youngest children, “and the future increase of the females”—his own unborn, nor yet conceived, children and grandchildren—for eight hundred dollars. Lucy Goode Brooks had a cameo made: a silhouette of her husband taken from that photograph of him as a juror called to determine whether Jefferson Davis had committed treason against the United States. She wore it as a brooch for the rest of her life. ♦

— Jill Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a Professor of History and Law at Harvard. She is the host of the Five-Part Podcast Series “Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket” on BBC Radio 4.

#Jill Lepore #Civil War | Jefferson Davis | The President of the Confederacy #Donald J. Trump #Insurrectionist Ex-President #The New Yorker

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grasspokemoncarer · 1 year

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Of Pokemons and Plants - Cuscuta

One of our Tangela had troubles socializing with his peers. He has the odd coloration of a yellow-orange tint. It took the little guy a while to make Pokemon friends, and although he is now doing better, this situation puzzled us a moment. And then it hit us : He looked like he had Cuscuta !

So. I will make a post about it, and how to treat a Grass Pokemon from that plant.

Cuscuta, aka Dodder weed or Amarbel, is a parastic plant. They are mostly made of yellow, orange or red stems, with leaves so small they look more like scales. I say They because technically, it isn't one plant. Cuscutas in a genus of a hundred to 170 plants. Sometimes it is called the Plant Vampire...

If most pokemons aren't going to suffer from it, some Grass Type being really close to plants could risk an infection. Cuscutas will root themselves to their plant host and wrap their tendrilic stems around the host. They can spread this way to the neaeby plants and sometimes cover entire fields, and that's how a grass pokemon in that field risk the infection.

Of course the first thing to prevent it is prevent ANY Cuscuta in your garden. It isn't like the symbiotic parasitism of Paras and Parasect for example, the plants and grass pokemon do not need it to live in return. If you see yellow/ orange stems, pull it off firmly and make sure you took the roots with it.

If your pokemon is infected however, pulling will be extremelly painful to them. I reccomend heating the area around the roots first, with warm water or hair dryer for example. The Heat will make it loose its grip, soften your pokemon's tissue, and then you can press to pop it off like a zit. Then you finish pulling it away, and treat the wound normally or go to a vet for it.

Now. To circle back to Tangela. Tangela's vines are WAY thicker than most cuscutas. Even if you get a yellow one you can notice the difference easily. And i can assure you, a yellow or orange Tangela is just as lovely and friendly as any other, nothing to be afraid of. Now he has shown to be inoffensive, the other Tangelas are very nice to him.

#pokemon irl #pokemonrp #pokemonirl #pokemon & plants #pkmn unreality

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sekhisadventures · 1 year

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Experiments with Darkness

Pandaria, Year 30 AFW, A Few Weeks After the Destruction of the Divine Bell

Near the Heart of Fear in the Dread Wastes

Dissonantia growled as she gazed out across the field before her. Below her the mantid scurried about, each of them half-mad with terror thanks to the Sha of Fear and what it did to their Empress. While both the corrupted Mantid queen and the Sha itself had been defeated, its touch was still felt by the survivors. Fear infested their every thought, terror drove them to blindly attack any foes they found… and paranoia ensured that all they encountered were assumed to be foes.

In Dissonantia’s case, it was correct. The worgen witch stood there in robes of deep crimson, gazing down at the mantid below. She looked much like any other female worgen would, her body covered with jet black fur, though her eyes glowed the deep baleful green of felfire which told anyone who knew the meaning of it that she was a warlock. That caused some issues for her back in Stormwind to say the least…

Next to her, as always, stood the muscular form of her Wrathguard, Az’arad, his axe at the ready as he awaited his Mistress’ command to unleash carnage upon the insectoid beings.

“Aye… I can bloody smell it on ‘em Azzy.” she smirked. “Hellscream ‘ad the right bleedin’ idea. The Sha are a source o’ power sure enough, ‘n I intend ta use it.”

The worgen narrowed her eyes to mere green slits. “Their souls is corrupted aye, but that corruption is feckin’ powerful shite.”

Dissonantia had been experimenting since she’d left Gilneas behind. Quzgup’s secret of soul consumption kept her alive yes, it halted her aging as long as she had souls to consume… but it didn’t reverse it. She had been in her eighties when she’d met him, and if she left her worgen form all the frailties of her aged human body returned with a vengeance.

Needless to say, she never left her worgen form.

This had caused issues when she’d first arrived in Stormwind. A fearful populace had viewed her with suspicion, but then they’d all heard stories of what sorts of creatures haunted the woods near Darkshire to the south. It wasn’t just the remnants of the Scourge there. The howls in the dark weren’t always wolves…

Dissonantia, however, had found she enjoyed that. In her youth she’d used beauty to seduce and control people, ensnaring men as easily as an angler might hook a fish. Time had ruined that for her, but she discovered that she rather liked being feared. Those who were afraid of her would stand aside, would do as she told them, or would simply be too terrified to fight back.

Perhaps that’s why she came here, to the Dread Wastes, for this experiment. She could have sought out the victims of the Sha of Hatred, or the Sha of Doubt, or the Sha of Despair even… but fear.

She chuckled. Nelen still struggled with controlling his worgen side, always at risk of losing it in the middle of a fight, forgetting his spells, and just attacking a foe with fang and claw. Dissonantia never had that issue. The populace viewed her as a monster? Well after years and years of being seen as nothing but a doddering old crone living in the middle of Blackwald Forest she was realizing that she rather liked being seen as a monster… so a monster she’d be.

She grinned, “Roight. Azzy, wait fer one of ‘em ta wander from th’ group… then wez gonna try out me new idea.” she sneered.

The Wrathguard hefted his axe and grinned, showing his fangs. He had found his partnership with Dissonantia had been everything the worgen had promised that day in the Blasted Lands. Carnage and slaughter, with only the barest of conditions that they restrict their attacks to whoever had the ire of the Alliance at the time. All he cared for was the carnage, the bloodshed, and the occasional good opponent to test his axe against, and with Dissonantia he had that aplenty!

Together, they descended the mountainside... ready to claim what Dissonantia had come for.

Several minutes later, a mantid drone paused in his work with the vats of kypari sap as he heard a strange sound... a clattering noise.

"Hsskkkskks?" it chittered, looking towards the noise, “Who is >k-krik< there?” it hissed, narrowing it’s eyes as it raised a blade formed of kyparite, scurrying over. It’s normally orange body was monochrome now, swirling with whorls of black and white, a sign of it’s corruption by the Sha. “We >k-krik< hear you interloper!” it snapped.

“Do yez now?” chuckled Dissonantia’s voice. “Scared are yez? Terror grippin’ yez heart?” she asked, her voice echoing strangely as the mantid’s head looked to the left and the right. It couldn’t tell where her voice was coming from.

The insect’s eyes widened as it took one step forward, then another, and another, it’s blade ready. It felt chilled through, its mind racing as it imagined all the horrible outcomes that could come from this. It had to act, it had to strike, it had to kill the enemy before they could kill it!

“Aye, yez is scared… I can smell it boyo… worgen can smell fear, ‘n yez stink of it…” she chuckled.

“W-we do not fear you lesser being!” it insisted.

“Oh? Well howzabout me mate Azzy?” she grinned as the mantid froze, hearing the sudden thunder of footsteps charging towards it! It raised it’s sword just in time as Az’arad’s axe came around, landing with a shrill cry as the blade’s shards rained down around it.

The mantid cried out, covering it’s head with it’s hands as it scurried backwards on the ground. “NO! NO! HELP US! SOMEONE HELP US!” it screamed, the sha’s corruption overwhelming him! All was fear, all was terror, and now it had a very real reason to be afraid! Someone really WAS out to get him!

“Oh there’s no helpin’ yez now!” cackled Dissonantia as the shadows parted to reveal the worgen warlock. She raised her claws as pure blackness swirled between her fingers. “I ain’t one ta be eatin’ bugs, but yez got the seasonin’ I need!” she laughed, and the mantid cried out one last time as a bolt of darkness connected with it’s chest.

A moment later it fell to the ground dead, and Dissonantia looked at the soul shard she’d ripped out of it. It wasn’t the normal violet, rather it showed the same swirling black and white of the sha corruption. Whatever the Sha of Fear had done to it, it had gone all the way to the creature’s soul. “Perfect, just wut I thought.” she nodded, “Azzy! We’re leavin’ before they find us! C’mon!” she snapped, gesturing with her claws as she invoked the demon circle she’d set up atop the ridge, the two of them vanishing in a swirl of felfire.

A Secluded Spot in the Towlong Steppes, About Four Hours Later.

Dissonantia urged her mount to land near the coast. A gryphon, not her choice… but she didn’t have better at the moment so it would have to do. The lion-eagle hybrid did not care for it’s rider, but it was trained enough so that it resisted the urge to buck her off. Warlocks ran into that problem with most non-demonic mounts as some more novice ones found out, if they were lucky, BEFORE they got too high.

She snapped her fingers as Az’arad appeared near her in a burst of felfire, the demon summoned back from the Nether. She didn’t like having to send him back, but the gryphon was only big enough for one and she didn’t have a proper sanctum yet. A small hidden place in one of the lower rent districts of Stormwind… but that would hardly do. She’d work on that, sooner or later she’d have an opportunity to fix this.

For now however… she took the mantid’s soul shard out of her pouch, looking it over. “Hrm… roight… this is a risk ‘n no mistake… but I can’t bleedin’ stay an ol’ biddy forever.” she nodded, taking a breath. “Be ready Azzy, I dunno what this’ll do, yez may need ta kill some o’ them sha blobbo things.” she nodded, then put the soul shard to her muzzle, and pulled on it as if drawing smoke out of a pipe stem.

There was a faint chattering wail as the soul of the captive mantid deformed and was drawn up through the shard and into Dissonantia’s body, the worgen pulling him into the furnace of fel energies that was within her. Fuel for the felfire that kept her from aging.

She looked at the shard as it cracked and crumbled to dust once empty, then looked confused. “Huh… well bugger it didn’t feel any diff…” she began, then suddenly her body spasmed. “GUH!” she bent double, clutching at her stomach as Az’arad watched, the demon narrowing it’s eyes.

“B-bugger me it feels like I just ate a chunk o’ Icecrown Glacier!” she gasped, shuddering. “Cold… can’t… need ta focus…” she shook all over, a chilling sensation washing through her as she stumbled forward, bracing herself against a nearby tree… then looking up at it, and seeing eyes.

She snarled and stumbled back, looking around. Eyes, everywhere eyes, and mouths. Fanged ones like a great snarling wolf, insectoid ones full of strange mandibles and other parts, circular ones covered in sharp teeth like a lamprey, and she could feel something being torn out of her!

“SHITE! AZZY! SMASH ‘EM! TAKE THAT BLOODY AXE ‘N USE IT YE GREAT LUMP!” she roared, lashing out with a blast of felfire at one of the gaping maws, leaving a crater where it was!

Az’arad pulled his axe free, snarling as he looked around, but he didn’t know what Dissonantia was talking about! Smash WHAT?! To Az’arad, the area they were in looked perfectly normal…

Dissonantia however was shaking all over, something was being leeched away from her, something fundamental to her being… she snarled, shaking her head frantically. “Oh like feckin’ fel… I DUNNO WHAT THE FECK YOU ARE BUT YEZ NOT GETTIN’ ME THAT EASY!” she growled, and within her the fel energies flared. Her body erupted in green fire, and the shadowy energies of the sha were blasted away from her in an instant! Dissonantia roared in fury and slammed her hands out, bolts of felfire shooting out into the monstrous images she saw infront of her until, finally, she collapsed in a circle of scorched ground, gasping for breath.

She felt… different, stronger, but… “B-bugger… that was no bleedin’ cake that was…” she growled, struggling to her feet as she looked at Az’arad. “Yez wanna tell me what the FECK yez was doin’ standin’ around while all those bloody things wuz…” she barked, then stopped when she saw the demon’s expression.

It was a rare thing for a Wrathguard to look shocked, but Az’arad’s expression could only be described as such.

“… wot? Somefin on me face?” she snorted in annoyance.

Az’arad nodded, then pointed to his forehead, then her’s.

Dissonantia blinked, then fished a mirror out of her bag, holding it infront of her. She didn’t really care to make herself presentable, but mirrors were useful for a lot of tricks and Quzgup had taught her a few interesting ones.

She almost dropped it when she saw what it reflected.

“Bleedin’ fel…” she muttered, reaching up and feeling over her forehead… and what now grew from it.

Two horns protruded from her forehead, curling back over her skull. The eruption of fel magic she’d used to banish… whatever THAT had been… had transformed her body!

“Ah bugger me…” she muttered, feeling over her new body parts. “That… how the feck…” she muttered, “Oh fer… that bloody dwarf is gonna be a right arse about this.” she growled. She wished she could just lure Dareley away somewhere and gut him, but he and Shalandrae were already suspicious of her just because she was a warlock. Someday she’d risk it, but not today. “I need ta talk ta Quzgup…” she frowned, digging her hearthstone out of her pouch and pulling her hood up over her head.

Some hours later, a small one room apartment in Stormwind City.

It was a pokey little hideaway, a single person bed against one wall, the windows very firmly covered and latched. A pot hanging over a fireplace for cooking, a table for eating, nothing more. Dissonantia wasn't a fool, a would be thief wouldn't be finding anything she didn't want them to find save for a dagger in their throat, but she wanted something more than this. Even her meager cottage in the Blackwald had been better than this.

Quzgup hissed as the imp looked at Dissonantia’s horns, his face showing an incredulous expression. While the imp wasn't powerful like Az'arad was, he was cunning and knew much of the nature of reality and fel magic. It was Quzgup who taught Dissonantia the secret to extending her lifespan after all.

“Wicked worgen ate soul corrupted by the Sha of Pandaria?” he asked, “… Sha are creatures of void.” he nodded, “The power of void ate away at what makes wicked worgen mortal… and the power of fel took it’s place.” he chittered.

Dissonantia raised her eyebrow at the imp as she sat infront of a small wooden table in the apartment, the imp standing atop the table. “Yez mean if I keep eaten’ them I might stop bein’ mortal? Doesn’t sound too bad at all…” she mused.

“Hsssss… no. Wicked worgen risk too much.” warned the imp. “Void dangerous, even moreso than fel. Too much, take all wicked worgen has, leaves nothing but husk in shape of worgen.”

Dissonantia snorted, “Bugger… aye that sounds like too big a bleedin’ risk. Thought I might’ve finally found it there…” she sighed, looking up at the ceiling, “Ah buggerit… somethin’ will come ta Azeroth eventually. Just gotta keep lookin’.”

Quzgup nodded, it knew the way that Dissonantia could get what she truly wanted. Immortality and her youth back… but there was no point in telling her yet. She would never believe that such a power would come from there of all places. That life itself could come from death in the most literal of senses.

But that was a tale for another day.

#warcraft fanfiction #warcraft roleplay #mists of pandaria #adventures in azeroth

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writer59january13 · 1 year

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Back to you Billy, for ways I whiled away herding ennui

Ah...a flood of memories wash over

this anointed Goatama Boo Da,

whose respected G.O.A.T status

among generic green acres,

which swathed across Highland Manor

analogous to petty coat junction

showcasing, jumpstarting and donning

a bright towering bewitched kid

barren regal deportment

proudly trumpeting himself as Maga hatted apprentice

being mentored courtesy this ole buck,

where attendant goatherd didst ha

intimate diddly squat, hence never did expect me

(an adept harried style swiftly tailored

windswept teary eyed pundit)

sentimentally woke evincing young whipper snapper

metamorphosed into chargé d'affaires

exceeding wildest expectations

to apply goatee

to dab moistened eyes ma

lament tab lee recalling blissfully innocent

kickstarter libidinal oomph pa.

As a kid, this now middle aged old goat

silently bends back disbudding head

as if noggin didst float;

bleats, and thence

blinks back tears to emote,

asper remembrance of things past,

when me papa and late mama didst dote

via gently grooming my tattered raggedy coat

whereat patches of missing fur reveals bloat

head distended abdomen

no longer evinces picture

of mine prime head butting days

when unchecked chutzpah, daring do,

and exploratory forays

found this then runt

strayed far from the madding crowd

upon verdant fresh fields I didst graze

and sought out secluded cool shelter

from hot, humid summer haze,

where abundant bucking bronco energy

resorted, succumbed and tugged via natural

sluggish inertia and predilection to laze,

and oft times dreamt being trapped

within some M. C. Escher maze

given up for lost or...,when

n'er a reply from plaintive bleats,

whence upon awakening

bestowed ablutions to Billy Gotti goat,

(Latin Name Capra aegagrus hircus)

unstinting praise

groggy state elapsed with pleasant waft

of cooler August air

cloven hoofs confidently, gingerly,

and jerkily strode to espy clear

panoramic view when 'ere

afar off in the distance,

an indistinguishable glare to view scenic

quintessential picture dis interfere

foretold a recognized

landmark comprising around

perimeter defined areas

hosting happy hustings

(no...not hustling) ground

encompassing accrued memories

to date within storied mound

caching predominantly pleasant

bouts of playtime, when siblings pound

for Avoirdupois pound

raced each other observed

by Mister Sun at his coterie of sound

clouded pillowy cerulean

celestial garden, which

helped get tension unwound.

Now while doddering, hobbling,

and limping with bum leg

(Battle of the bucks him

Boar skirmish) in old dote age,

which declining physical well being

restricts shenanigans akin to limiting an artist prohibited

to paint with the color beige

to an ever shrinking unseen cage

soon...t'will be sent out to pasture,

whence concluding stage

of existence paid with demise

collected by grim reaper,

who only accepts deceased

as sole (soul surviving) standard wage.

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viviennevivisection · 1 year

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Session 27 - “The Cost of Starting Anew” - 1/29/23

-Corsica plane shifting is like the worst thing that could possibly be happening :|

O: “Fighting fire with fire is dangerous.” (On Naomi having DE and DL)

-Oran doesn’t know what’s in store…

O: “If I were a betting individual, anything you can do to steel yourself against intrusions of the mind. There is a certain benefit to wildfires — they tend to force regrowth.” (Oran on preparing for whatever the hell is going on)

C: “Oran, do you believe in all this?”

O: “Believe is a complicated word. I do ‘believe’ because I’ve seen.”

C: “Do you have faith in it?”

O: “No.”

C: “Why do you stay?”

O: “There are others that deserve a chance at freedom.”

O to N: “You are capable of facing what’s ahead. And know that whatever happens next, I’m happy.”

-DN is slightly visible, a little more coherent

DN: “[I showed you The Grove] so you would join me…to free them so they can be like us.”

-Naomi is the one who drew DN to HER? Not the other way around…

-Searching Oran’s office — VE looking for books. Naomi and Cass looking for anything suspiciously left out (as if for us to find)

-There are a lot of Druidic texts

-We don’t … know many druids … what has happened to the natural world? Who is protecting it? Something’s certainly weird!

-Based on this, Oran most likely has a Druidic background (makes sense as a genasi)

-Some of the texts are in primordial

-Binding entities to plants? Old Druidic rituals

-Dodder corp took the name from the plant (not the other way around)

-Dodder plants themselves are invasive, parasitic, but they have pretty flowers

-VE read this in a plant field guide, which they took with them

-Naomi knows about Oran’s secret desk compartment — finds a diary. Written in a personal code/cipher

-He also has dossiers on everyone

-Eugene Sutter? Cyrus, Whitmer…. Felix Ellison (?), Teresa Collie (a librarian at AC??? VE recognized this name??), other names, etc.

-The Cyrus File has evidence on every single criminal activity he’s ever done, mostly relating to unlawful procurement of wares for the Sanctum

-Whitmer file — she does blackmail! You’re usually born in Corsica, but some people are “poached.” Purveyors of public education (?) but learned to gatekeeper because sometimes….information and knowledge are bad! Whitmer is a groomer (academically). She seems to often choose TC people. Some bribery here and there (feed your brain to the tree and we’ll get you a job)

-Cass was recruited to go to a school? This pattern of poaching/recruitment seems familiar…

-TC+Corsica seem to work together out of necessity but also seem to be adversaries at the same time

-DN + N pinky promise !!!

N: “We’re friends, right?”

DN: “Friends forever.”

-Divinity sparked!

-There were/are multiple rumors about Miles (the gardener) — potentially a member of the Coralogia? He cannot or does not speak (ever). Not even telepathically like the other freaky little freaks. He just vibes? He’s one of the only adults still functioning, though….

-It’s more of a topiary style garden — with some basic flowers. Clean, white aesthetic

-Everything feels intentional, the city is a sigil etc etc

-Heading into The Sanctum 🤪

-Passing some of the collections…it feels more like a museum than a library

-Powerful, evil books

-VE notice a wall of preservation jars, some body parts….a jar full of pointed teeth

-Vampires were all killed and if not expelled to the Wild Lands centuries ago — the followers of Coranimas spearheaded this effort. The fangs themselves are The Man sized, not VE sized

-Naomi is looking for info on aasimar

-She finds a book full of pressed feathers. Each feather has a name and dates of birth and death. Each feather is golden. There is a blank page waiting for Naomi.

-None of them made it past the age of 30.

-Naomi took the book

-Trying to break the glass and get the teeth

-We have the fang jar, trying to put one in the chalice. However, instead of being absorbed (like normal), it withered and turned black and remained in the cup

-NO TC related items in the collection — are they banned from the collection or do the Coralogia simply not care about their shit?

-There was a feeling of bitterness from Vytris with the receipt of the fang

-VE casted warding bond on Naomi

-There are commonalities between The Sanctum, Rose Castle, The Mines…we have to descend into the earth a lot

-We went down the scary spiral staircase

-The Sanctum itself is very minimalist

-The Coralogia are here (masked, of course) — Whitmer is not masked

-Hive mind voice…

HM: “Welcome. Are you ready to get the answers you’ve been craving?”

N: “I think I already have.”

-They are casting…something! They are…changing the reflecting pool’s use

-Conjuration magic

-The surface of the pool is still, like glass

-They have (allegedly) been told not to harm us

-We are holding hands and entering the pool

-The feeling is disorienting, tumbling through time and space

-We are in The Grove - the trees here seem to be healthier, show new growth. They get ickier looking the closer we get to the Cor

W: “You wanted answers and The Cor has decided to give you answers. This is extremely rare. We have been instructed to stay here. You may approach the center of The Grove.”

-The paranoid feeling of being watched intensifies

-VE has been feared (disadvantage on INT saves) — relying on animal instincts

-A presence has access to our mind in this place — we feel extremely seen

-Younger people are farther away from The Cor (healthier), older as close and spookier

-Naomi is touching a random tree

-There is a green glow from under the tree

-We hear a LOUD telepathic voice comprised of many voices

The Cor: “Welcome. Please Enter.”

-There is a node here

-There is a giant, disgusting red brain here with plant-like tentacles

N: “The system you’ve set up seems stupid.”

TC: “I’d have to agree with you there.”

N: “So why would I let you continue to fuck around?”

-Hundreds of years of knowledge

N: “Then you give it back. And we start from scratch.”

TC: “If I’m gone…you wish to start anew with a fresh mind?”

N: “It’s better to try something that may actually work instead of whatever selfish endeavor you have here.”

TC: “I think we lack the ability to be selfish, as we are all one, or, maybe we are the pinnacle of selfishness because of that.”

TC: “The ascension is for all of us — to regain what we lost those years ago. We made a mistake that we have paid generations for.”

-They can’t tell us who they made the deal with — something as strong as a god

-The Cor cannot move

-Extreme logic from the Cor, very realistic (?)

-A creature that has only been theorized — an elder brain. A creature formed from the minds of many — through the consumption of those minds. It is…evil…but there seems to be an extra clause here that…it needs something more. It seems sad, stuck in a fucked up cycle

-It wants movement, freedom, revenge, knowledge…to make a difference

TC: “As you’ve said we’ve tried many times to find a way out of what we have wrought for ourselves. I’d like to try. Naomi — is that what you call yourself now…”

Cass: “You’ve got all the knowledge in the world and you can’t see what’s right in front of you?”

N: “That sounds like you’re not very creative. And not willing to die for it. Like you expect me to.”

-The Cor is losing patience

-They are digging around in Cass and VE’s minds

(Pictured: The Cor digging around in VE’s mind and finding a full recreation of Rose Castle.)

-They are trying to tempt VE with info on the Old Gods and her past, Cass with her “newfound power” and its source

TC: “You liked the pretty lies once. Gave you purpose — a light in the dark.”

Cass: “What did you start as? Didja make a deal?”

-We see an image of three or four individuals — the ones present as the birth of The Cor

-Prior to the deal, they were the protectors of Corcillium, there was a physical manifestation of the God that they were contemplating revealing

-They wanted (demanded) access to the full knowledge of the universe, Corcillium refused

-The entity that struck the deal is fully redacted from the vision

-It was…a bad deal

-The Cor has grown more powerful AND hungry over time

TC: “Who are [the gods] to decide for us?”

C: “Isn’t that what faith is all about? What makes you think you know better than the gods?”

TC: “What makes you think you’ll leave here alive?”

C: “Faith.”

-They want to proceed with the ascension (lol)

-Static shocks, scary shit

-An INT save — N+C succeed and VE FAILS

-They take 21 points of psychic damage and are stunned for A MINUTE and then proceed to roll a Nat 1 on initiative

-Naomi seems to be on a first name basis with MORTENIA?

-She reached out to her and this seemingly produced a very salacious voice memo

INITIATIVE ORDER

Lair Actions

The Cor

Cass & Watts

Naomi

-VE are psychically linked to The Cor

-How do we start over?

-Naomi read thoughts

-Break the container. There would be an outpouring but…something else might happen

-Nothing is created or destroyed

-Some knowledge will inevitably be lost

-VE spent most of the battle fully Stun locked and taking half of Naomi’s damage — tried to combat this by scream singing in their head

-Naomi has established a thought reading link

-Cass set the whole place on fire

-The Cor can heal itself :/

-Oran is a homie (Naomi reached out to him within the Cor and freed him from control and he fought alongside us)

-VE did the same thing for Adrien and he literally came back to life!

-The Cor DOES know the Old Ones — was impressed we knew them and was…a little scared

-DN casting blight to execute The Cor

-The knowledge is about to be scattered, there is a chance to save some, but there is risk involved

-NAT 20 FROM NAOMI LET’S GO

-The mind layers are turning to dust

-The brain is melting into goop (on brand)

-Naomi is radiating a golden light, her eyes are golden light

-A FLOOD of knowledge

-Vitalia…Mortenia…Saetus…there’s nothing except the names

-Focus on Saetus. “Do we have a deal?” A famine, Woodvalian accent….

-Nature is healing around Naomi

-“Why isn’t it beautiful?” —> It is now.

-Naomi has taken the last vestiges of knowledge and the rest has returned to where it belongs

-She also now has gorgeous, black raven wings and can fully fly!!

-She descended from the sky and healed and embraced everyone

-DN is also still here, seems more chill and also more powerful

-Naomi is able to return Corsica to the material plane

-On our return, the Aurora Borealis is visible

-This pings the Angie blood bond

-A slight shift, but looking at the Aurora Borealis through her eyes. She’s near?

-There is Something Bad

-VE found an orange flower and pressed into the field guide they took from Oran

-The media is here!!

-Cass is calling Dr. Cunt

-Naomi pressed a flower into her page in the Golden Angel Book and also gave one to Viv

-A seeding birthed from Naomi’s hand and placed in the Grove, growing upon The Node

-We went back through the pool to return to the Sanctum and deal with…whatever is going on back in Corsica

#dnd #campaign diary

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blender-crack-lk · 2 years

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marta-bee · 2 years

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i just saw your comment on the One Thing you don't like about the PJ movies, and I was wondering... what's wrong with Denethor?

(For context: I know the books inside and out, but I haven't watched the movies, so you can expect me to know everything in Tolkien but this is also an honest question. I'm scared. What did they do to Denethor??)

What an interesting vantage-point! Usually I see people only familiar with the movies asking how the book is different, but I don't think I've ever discussed him with someone only familiar with the books. Not that there's anything wrong with not knowing the book version, but this is new.

You may want to go to the bathroom, or pour yourself a drink, because we're going to be here for a while. Deep breath. :-)

Let's start with the family drama.

Denethor is a really bad father to Boromir and Faramir, Faramir especially. He flat-out tells Faramir he'd wished he had died instead of Boromir, which is a very twisted reading of the parallel book conversation (where Faramir asks if Denethor wishes Boromir's and Faramir's roles had been reversed). Denethor comes across as uncaring and even cruel.

But more than that, because they really did away with the lord's council other than Denethor and Faramir, the strategy debates leading up to the Battle of Pelennor Fields get reduced to a father-son squabble. When Denethor asks who will ride out to defend the Rammas Echor [though in the movies it's Osgiliath], he's not saying it to a group of commanders. Faramir's the only person there to hear him, so it comes out as very passive-aggressive. That means Faramir's decision to lead the charge isn't so much a commander doing his lord's doing as a son trying to prove his worth to his father. The revelation Faramir let Frodo and Sam go doesn't come across as a treasonous decision or an earnest disagreement on how best to handle it, but a son betraying his father. It all felt so pitifully small to me, and lacking the gravitas and thematic weight of the book exchanges. I don't doubt Jackson thought it was more relatable but for me it really hollowed out Denethor's character. It also made him manipulative, and that's even before you get into the whole Pyre sequence.

Second: as a ruler, he's really ineffectual.

There's no Beregond and Bergil, no well-organized evacuation, no him wearing armor under his clothes and working diligently to the point he barely sleeps, no rebuilding of the Wall or bringing in troops from Dol Amroth and all the rest to boost the city's defenses. Minas Tirith is much more ready to defend itself in the books than (say) the Rohirrim at Helm's Deep, and Denethor's great failure is he's so focused on Gondor's defenses it's committed him to too narrow a view of the war. But he's a remarkably good ruler on those narrow terms. In the movies he's just a doddering old fool and Gondor is not only unprepared, it's not actively preparing for war until Gandalf kicks people into action.

Part of that comes down to every movie having to limit its plot points and the details it gives. And I suspect PJ wanted to show why Gondor needed a king, why Aragorn was so important. But in the process he completely failed to show why Gondor was worthy of Aragorn; I remember thinking at the time that if it was me I'd rather have ruled over Rohan. And Denethor himself is just a humiliating shell of a man, let alone of a ruler. There's one famous scene set in the Court of the White Tree where he's raving about how Mordor has come upon them and they're all doomed and Gandalf just... conks him in the head with his staff. There are guards standing on duty, but they completely fail to react to his histrionics but also Gandalf's assault on him. And it's just pitiful.

That scene's actually a recasting of another book scene, the one where Denethor releases Pippin from his service and says they should all go find their death in whatever way seems best to them. But it happens much earlier in the movies, and without any explanation for why Denethor is SO given in to despair. Which leads me to my third reason why Jackson did our steward so wrong.

The movies also take away a really central explanation for Denethor's despair: the palantir. They do have palantiri, but really only the Isengard one recovered by Gandalf and Pippin. If Denethor had one it's never mentioned. Why Denethor used it is also never mentioned, so he doesn't come across as a man who'd fought valiantly but in the process exposed himself to "truth" too heavy to bear up under. It also doesn't explain why he's so sure they were all going to die, and why Faramir was as good as dead. He's just unraveling and comes across as weak and a poor ruler, never mind person.

That's frustrating enough in the scenes leading up to the siege, but you can only imagine what it does to the Pyre episode. More than a decade later, just thinking about that whole sequence just hurts. So I find I don't want to dwell on the details, but I do need to talk about one thing: shorn of any context for why he's so certain Gondor is about to fall, his move to immolate Faramir takes on a much more controlling --even abusive-- tone. There's an element of that in the books, but without any real grounding of why he thinks their destruction is so certain, it just seems like he doesn't want anyone taking control of Faramir away from him.

(He's also denied his stately end: instead of barring the doors and the tomb of the Stewards collapsing upon him, he turns into a fireball and runs all the way back to the Citadel and jumps off the stone outcropping. To say Jackson was showing his Harryhausen influences would be an understatement. :-) )

I try to remind myself that while Denethor may well be my Blorbo, he's actually a fairly minor character in the context of the larger story, and a lot of this may come down to where Jackson needed to center his storytelling. I can appreciate that. But a lot of it was just unnecessary, and robbed him of this high tragedy that made me so love the book character. I wept at the inevitability of book-Denethor's fall; with movie-Denethor, I just groaned.

#tolkien #lord of the rings #denethor #marta blathers #long post is long

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piduai · 3 years

Audio

another golden kamuy drama cd with the script provided by noda, so manga canon as well. it is 13(!) minutes long and is all happening in abashiri. there’s a third drama cd that came out this january but i can’t find it online, if you have it, send it my way and i’ll translate it too.

same as the previous one, if you’re willing to make this into a video with synced subtitles, be my guest.

Inudou: Inmate number 628, Shiraishi Yoshitake. Seems like you kept breaking out of prisons here and there... Shiraishi: That's right. I went all around Japan to try the local specialties in each region, and happened to escape prisons on my way. Have you ever had sakura nabe, Warden Inudou, sir? It was exquisite! Inudou: Shut your mouth! Previous prisons might have served you as hotel rooms on your travels, but this one is different. Abashiri prison will be the final destination for you and the rest of the prisoners. Shiraishi: I wonder what tasty foods there are in Abashiri. Inudou: I'd recommend you the potatoes we grow on our fields. Shiraishi: Potatoes? Inudou: The prisoners that the pigs shit out after being fed serve as good fertilizer. Just think about escaping and you'll become nutrients for the potatoes too. Shiraishi: I'm sure that the potatoes would turn out very nice if they fed on me. Inudou: Head jailor Kadokura! Kadokura: Yes sir! Inudou: Take this revolting baldy out of my office!

Kadokura: Good grief, so you're that famous Escape King... Shiraishi: So my name has reached even this godforsaken place? Kadokura: I'd appreciate if you didn't escape on a day I'm on duty, you know. Shiraishi: It depends on my convenience. Kadokura: Don't you think it's high time to settle? Shiraishi: And then what? Take the escape thing away, and all is left is a regular hunk. Kadokura: Shut up. Listen here, Shiraishi Yoshitake. You may have succeeded up until now, but Abashiri prison relies on being extraterritorial. It's Warden Inudou's kingdom. He can fake inmate records as much as he likes. If one goes amiss and becomes potato fertilizer, no official will notice. Shiraishi: I'm on fire! I do love breaking unyielding bastards like that Inudou fellow.

Kadokura: This will be your cell. Take care. Inudou and the jailors are not the only dangerous guys here. You will be surrounded by vicious criminals, after all.

Shiraishi: Good day to you two. Sorry for the intrusion. I'm Shiraishi Yoshitake. And you? Nihei: Nihei Tetsuzou. Make yourself at home, I guess. It's not like I've been here for long before you came. They make us prisoners switch cells quite often. It's the first time I'm sharing one with Henmi-chan, too. Shiraishi: For how long? Nihei: For about a month. Shiraishi: I see. By the way, when I was brought here, I saw a church outside. Do you know of a lady named Sister Miyazawa? Nihei: Nope, don't know her. Shiraishi: So she's not here, either... No point in staying in Abashiri, then. Henmi: Um... Are you planning to escape, Shiraishi-san? Shiraishi: Sorry, but if you're going to ask me to take you with me, I'll have to pass. Escape is a one man's job, it's an iron rule. Henmi: Oh, I see... Are there any other iron rules? Shiraishi: If the situation calls, you need to have the resolve to do anything at all. I've never killed people before, but I would kill a guard without hesitation if he were to interfere. You need to be able to dropkick your doddering, kind grandma who gives you candy and whom you love at the back of the head if needed, without that resolve, escape is impossible. Do you think you have it in you to kill humans, Henmi-chan? You look like you wouldn't hurt a fly. Why are you here? Henmi: I killed 127 people. Shiraishi: [sounds] I see!

Kadokura: Bath time. All of you, get in line! Out!

Shiraishi: Hold on, hold on... What's up with these guys' tattoos? I can see a few people with them, they're not traditional ones, and have weird kanji and shapes. Do they belong to some organization? Kadokura: Hurry up and take off your clothes, stop zoning out.

Shiraishi: What's that, Nihei! You have those tattoos, too!

Hijikata: Head jailor Kadokura. Is that the new inmate, Shiraishi Yoshitake? Kadokura: You could become cellmates in the near future. Please be nice to him.

Shiraishi: What are those tattoos, uncle Nihei? Nihei: We are actually planning a mass escape. You'll have to get these tattoos too if you want to get out of here. Shiraishi: Who tattooed you? Nihei: A prisoner with no face, Nopperabou. Shiraishi: How are Inudou and the jailors allowing him to tattoo people? Nihei: Because it's a code leading to the hidden Ainu gold. Nopperabou is the only one who knows its location. He's trying to tell his comrades. Warden Inudou is aware of that, and is pairing Nopperabou with different prisoners. It's the only way to get information out of Nopperabou, apparently. Shiraishi: I see. This is why they change cells so often. But no, you have to be kidding me. The lady that I love and desperately search for is a Sister, she's earnest and chaste. Sisters have to stop being Sisters if they decide to marry. Imagine her sadness upon giving up on being a Sister to marry me and seeing these tattoos on our first night! Nihei: A Sister, huh... Makes me horny! [sounds] O God! Bestow upon us a serenity so great it would dissipate any dissatisfaction even with Shiraishi's child-like tiny dick! [roaring laughter] Shiraishi: I'm not participating in your escape plan. I'll get out on my own.

Henmi: You do plan to escape after all, Shiraishi-san. If I tried to meddle with your plans... Would you kill me? Shiraishi: Well, maybe I would. It depends. Henmi: [sounds] Aaah... how? Shiraishi: Well, uh, well... I'd... hit you with something hard? Henmi: [moans] Oh, hard... Something hard, you say... oh, something hard... But I think it's a bit boring. Let's think of something more cruel. What about tying each of my legs to a horse and have them rip me apart at the crotch? I'd try to bear with it with all the might I got, yet the sound of the crotch ripping is so unforgiving and slow... [sounds][sigh] Please... Give it a try... Shiraishi: Head Jailor Kadokura!! How long until we change cells?!!

Shiraishi: Alright. There's a cabin in the tall turret from where you can see everything that is happening around, and there's but one place on the hill slope from where you can watch the cabin. I noticed there's an angle that can't be seen from anywhere. If I were to escape through the wing, I need to climb over the wall that is by that angle. There are no bars on the ceiling windows. This is the wing's loophole. One more loophole is the ventilation vent under the floor. Sure, it's extremely narrow, but it's me we're talking about. My time limit is the month before we're made to change cells. Sister Miyazawa, I'll do anything to meet you.

[sounds] Kadokura: Hey, Shiraishi! What are you doing? Shiraishi: Oh, this? I'm masturbating. A way to keep my hands busy. Is there a problem? If you keep interrupting my sweet time with Sister, I'll escape on a day you're on duty. Henmi: [sounds] Shiraishi-san... If Warden Inudou cut off your arms and legs and shoved you, still alive, in the pigs den leaving you to wiggle like a hornworm... You're imagining how the pigs would start eating you from the butt up, right? I feel you. Shiraishi: [sounds]

Hijikata: We can use Shiraishi Yoshitake for our escape plan. He can get rid of shackles in a moment. We need to have him get tattoos and become one of us. I don't want him to escape on his own. Have you checked the iron bars on the doors? He once poured miso soup on the bar until it rusted and managed to escape. Kadokura: It should be fine. I checked the bars, plus they wouldn't rot in only one month. Besides, tomorrow you all will switch cells. I made it so you, Hijikata-san, Nopperabou and Shiraishi will share one. It's just that... Every night he keeps jerking off while looking at some weird picture. Soon enough his dick will catch fire. I think sharing a cell with that kind of guy must be unpleasant.

Kadokura: Weird. Must be because of the thunder that I didn't hear Shiraishi jerking off. Huh?! What is this? Shiraishi's not here! His futon is empty! Hey! Where is Shiraishi? Nihei: Uh, who? Kadokura: Look at this, the floorboard is missing!

Kadokura: Hey, you, Shiraishi. Get down or I'll shoot you! Shiraishi: Oh my, and I was so close... Kadokura: To think that you were pretending to be jerking off while messing with the floorboard. Shiraishi: That's right. I used a screw to sharpen the edge of an iron hoop into a saw. And every night I'd pretend to jerk off and saw, saw, saw, jerk off, jerk off, saw, jerk off, jerk off, masturbation, jerk off. Kadokura: So you were mostly jerking off after all. Anyway, I don't want to create a fuss. If you escape on a day I'm on duty, I'll suffer. I'll smooth things over. I'll repair that hole so Inudou doesn't find it, too. Shiraishi: I have a reason I need to escape. I need to meet Sister. This isn't the last time. Kadokura: Oh, give me a break...

Nihei: Seems like your escape attempt failed yesterday? Shiraishi: I was so close! Oh... [music] It can't be! That is... Sister! Jailor: Hey, Shiraishi, where are you going? Stop! What are you doing?! Henmi: Shiraishi-san, be sure to tell her your feelings! Shiraishi: Thanks, Henmi-chan!

Excuse me, could you! Could you be!

[sounds] Jailor: Come, Shiraishi! [sounds]

Nihei: Shiraishi, did you meet Sister? Shiraishi: Uh-huh... Yeah. Well... I'm off to solitary.

Kadokura: This is your new room from now on. Say hello to your new friends.

Shiraishi: I'm Shiraishi Yoshitake, pleased to meet you.

So, about the tattoos...

Can I get them too?

#golden kamuy #shiraishi yoshitake #noda satoru #translation #no amount of neuroplasticity will give me back the brain cells i lost while translating this.#it's very funny. but you also suffer #drama cd

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flawediamond · 3 years

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Floriography Masterpost

Abraham’s Balm - Coldness, Command

Adder’s Tongue - Jealousy

Adonis Vernalis - Bitter Memories

Achillea - War

Aloe - Superstition

Anemone - Estrangement, Forsaken, Brevity, Sickness

Anemone Field - Sickness, Illness

Anemone Garden - Forsaken, Withered Hopes, Illness

Apocynum - Falsehood, Deception

Basil - I Hate You

Bee Balm - Your Whims Are Unbearable

Begonia - Beware, A Fanciful Nature

Belvedere (Wild) - I Declare Against You

Bilberry, Whortleberry - Treachery

Borage - Bluntness

Bramble, Dew Berries, Black Berries - Lowliness, Remorse

Briers - Envy

Bouquet Of Withered Flowers - Rejected Love

Bugloss - Falsehood

Burdoc, Beggar’s Buttons - Importunity

Candytuft - Indifference

Carnations (Stripeed, Yellow) - Rejection, Disdain, You Have Disappointed Me

Carnation (Purple) - Capriciousness

Catalpa Flower - Beware Of The Coquette

Cherry Blossom - False Hopes

Chrysanthemums (Yellow) - Dejection, Slighted Love

China (Pink) - Aversion

Clematis - Artifice (Deception, Trickery)

Clotbur - Rudeness

Coboea - Gossip

Convolvus Major, Bindweed - Dead Hope

Colt’s Foot - Justice Shall Be Done You

Columbine - Folly

Coxcomb - Foppery

Creeping Cereus - Horror

Crown Imperials - Arrogance, Pride Of Birth

Cyclamen - Resignation And Good-Bye

Daffodils - Vanity

Dahlia - Instability

Darnel - Vice

Deadly Nightshade - Falsehood

Dendrobium - Selfish Beauty

Dodder - Meanness

Dragon’s Wort - Horror

Dogbane - Falsehood, Deception

Flytrap - Deceit

Foxglove - Falsehood, Deception

Fritillaria, Guinea-Hen Flower - Persecution

Fraxinella, Cultivated Dittany, Gas Plant - Fire

Furze - Anger

Geraniums (Horseshoe) - Stupidity

Harebell, Campanula - Humility, Grief

Helenium, Sneeze Weed - Tears

Hellebore - Scandal

Hemlock - You Will Be The Death Of Me

Hyacinth (Purple, Yellow) - Jealousy

Hydrangea - Frigidity, Heartlessness, Boastfulness

Ice Plant - Your Looks Freeze Me

Laburnum - Forsaken

Larkspur (Pink) - Fickleness

Larkspur (Purple) - Haughtiness

Laurel - Treachery

Lavender - Distrust

Lettuce - Cold-Hearted

Lichen - Dejection, Solitude

Licorice - I Declare Against You

Lily (Tiger) - Pride

Lily (Orange) - Hatred

Lily (Yellow) - False And Gay, Falsehood

London Pride - Frivolity

Lythrum, Loosestrife - Pretension

Madder - Calumny, Slander

Manchineel - Falsehood, Deception

Mandrake, May Apple, Devil’s Apples, Satan’s Apples - Horror

Marigold - Cruelty In Love, Despair, Grief, Jealousy, Vulger Minded

Meadow Sweet - Uselessness

Milford - War

Mistletoe - You Are A Parasite

Mock Orange - Counterfeit

Monk’s-Hood, Monk’s-Head - Beware, A Deadly Foe Is Near, Danger Is Near

Morning Glory - Coquetry

Mourning Bride - Unfortunate Attachment

Mush Plant - Weakness

Narcissus - Vanity, Self Love

Nettles - Slander, You Are Spiteful

Night-Blooming Cereus, Queen-Of-The-Night - Transient Beauty

Night Shade - Bitter Truth

Nuts - Stupidity

Oleander - Caution, Beware

Orange Lillies - I Hate You

Orange (Mock) - Deceit

Pennyroyal - You Had Better Go

Peony - Anger

Petunias - Resentment, Anger

Pink (Indian) - Aversion

Primrose (Evening) - Inconsistency

Quaking Grass - Agitation

Quamoclit - Busybody

Queen Of The Meadow - Uselessness

Queen’s Rocket - You Are The Queen Of Coquettes, Fashionable

Quince - Temptation

Rhododendron - Danger, Beware, I Am Dangerous, Agitation

Rocket - Rivalry

Rose (Black) - Foreshadow Of Death

Rose (Carolina) - Love Is Dangerous

Rose (Dark Crimson) - Mourning, Bashful Shame

Rose (Dried White) - Death

Rose (Garland Or Crown) - Beware Of Virtue

Rose (Withered White) - Transient Impression, Fleeting Beauty

Rose (Yellow) - Decrease Of Love, Jealousy

Rose (York & Lancaster Together) - Conflict

Scabious, Mourning Bride - Widowhood, Unfortunate Love

Sardonia - Irony

Snapdragon - Falsehood, Deception

Sorrel - Wit Ill-Timed

St. John’s Wort - Superstition

Straw (Broken) - Broken Agreement

Sunflower (Tall) - False Riches, Pride

Sweetbrier (Yellow) - Decrease Of Love

Tansy - I Declare Against You

Thistle - Austerity, Sternness

Thistle (Fuller’s) - Misanthropy

Thistle (Scotch) - Retaliation

Thornapple - I Dreamed Of Thee, Deceitful Charms

Thorn (Black) - Difficulty

Thorns - Severity

Thornapple - Deceitful Charms

Throatwood - Neglected Beauty

Tiger Flower - May Pride Befriend Thee

Touch-Me-Not, Jewel Weed, Impatiens, Balsam - Impatience

Tuberoses - Dangerous Pleasures

Tulip (Yellow) - Hopeless Love, No Hope For Reconciliation

#masterpost #flowers

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aion-rsa · 2 years

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Munich: Netflix WW2 Movie Holds Mirror Up to Today

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

“You know I’d gladly stand against the wall and be shot if it prevented a war.” So speaks Jeremy Irons’ Neville Chamberlain in an early but insightful scene during Netflix’s new pre-World War II thriller, Munich: The Edge of War. In the sequence, Irons’ British Prime Minister is doddering around a garden with his wife and new aide-de-camp, Hugh Legat (George MacKay). The doomed world leader appears both hopeful and hopelessly ineffectual. And that’s the image of Chamberlain which has gone down in history: the face of weak appeasement.

Yet the most compelling aspect about this Munich film is in its best moments, not only does it make you see things from Chamberlain’s misguided perspective, but it makes you see yourself and our current tumultuous moment in history within him. Here is a man desperate to avoid the worst case scenario, and a leader who’s committed to a fault to the traditions and decorum of international relations being exercised to prevent a disaster that would surely be more catastrophic than even The Great War. And yet, the tension that arises in Munich is not only knowing the bitter end of failure that awaits Chamberlain’s efforts, but also seeing our own moment of anxiety—and the faith some leaders put in the institutions to calm the storm—echoed in Chamberlain’s faith that the worst can be avoided when dealing with a capricious madman like Adolf Hitler.

In that sense, Munich: The Edge of War works as a great geopolitical tragedy, even if its ostensible main appeal as a spy thriller turns out to be a lot more wanting.

A blend of fact and fiction, this Munich—which is not to be confused with Steven Spielberg’s chilling 2005 espionage thriller of the same name—centers around the doomed Munich Conference in September 1938, which was instigated by Chamberlain in an effort to stave off war with Nazi Germany. At the time, Hitler (Ulrich Matthes) and the German military were amassing armed forces on the border of Czechoslovakia, with conquest of the Sudetenland seemingly inevitable. With Great Britain and France pledged to defend the Czech border, Chamberlain reached out to Hitler through Italy in the hopes of brokering an agreement that would carve up Czechoslovakia to Germany’s liking and, supposedly, satisfy the Führer’s desire for conquest.

We all know how that went.

Hence the fictional drama simultaneously occurring between two friends: the aforementioned Hugh Legat and his German buddy from Oxford days, Paul von Hartman (Jannis Niewöhner). The pair fell out after school due to Paul’s infatuation with the then-rising Nazi Party and promises of Germany’s glory. But six years later, Paul is disillusioned and part of a secret resistance within the German government working against Hitler. Also due to some rather convenient plotting, he’s come into possession of a document that proves Hitler’s intent to acquire more “living space” for Germans through a war of conquest across Europe. Thus Paul arranges to share that document with Hugh and Chamberlain at the Munich Conference in a last ditch hope to convince Chamberlain to aid a German military coup in Berlin.

Of course if either Hugh or Paul are caught conspiring in a German city filled with spies and prying Nazi eyes, both could be executed, one as a spy and the other as a traitor.

Munich: The Edge of War is directed by Christian Schwochow, who’s worked extensively in television, including on the series The Crown. This makes sense as many of the compositions and the overall mise en scène consists of shaky handheld close-ups with shallow depths of field. The handheld is intended to make quiet rendezvouses at biergartens and dark German streets appear more clandestine and dangerous, but they perhaps speak more to the typically lower funded efforts of many Netflix dramas greenlit by a streaming service eager for content.

This particularly hurts the way some pivotal plot points occur, such as when Paul and Hugh are filmed as having a shouting match in the lobby of a German hotel where the British delegation is staying—and which would’ve been crawling with Nazi eyes, who couldn’t have spotted such forced melodrama any easier than if the pair had been wearing matching neon onesies. In that sense, the most theatrical flourishes fall flat whenever the film is attempting to be a full-title thriller.

Nevertheless, there is a gnawing and inescapable tension caked throughout the film that becomes almost unbearable as the screws tighten and Chamberlain places Europe’s destiny firmly in the lion’s mouth. This is partially due to Irons’ expertly judged performance as the British PM. Still a captivating screen presence when he wants to be (or when he’s given solid enough material), Irons inhabits the weakness of Chamberlain, yes, but also cultivates a seeming awareness of his doomed folly. He knows his efforts will fail but he will pursue the charade in any event in the hopes of peace. Is that accurate to the man? I don’t really know, but it makes for good, despairing drama.

Additionally of value is the movie’s vantage of Chamberlain and these last ditch efforts to avoid war. Traditionally, the efforts of British appeasers have been dramatized with a sense of sneering schadenfreude or disdain from later generations. Think James Fox’s oblivious fool, Lord Darlington, in The Remains of the Day (1993). But Munich: The Edge of War was filmed in the fall of 2020, during the height of the COVID pandemic and at what felt like another inflection point for Western democracy with the decay of the American presidency in North America, and the lingering effects of Brexit and the rise of anti-immigrant bigotries in Europe.

While the worst was avoided (for a time) in the U.S., like the characters in this drama, it can still feel like we’re all on a teetering edge, if perhaps closer to flashbacks of Hugh and Paul’s Oxford days in 1932 than the last breath before the plunge in ’38. The norms and systems which have governed the modern world for decades appeared to be cracking when the movie was made, and when it arrives more than a year later, they still appear fairly weakened and fragile, with younger generations resembling the film’s fictional protagonists who stare into the abyss while being promised by the older generation of leaders that the fall will be avoided. That there will be peace in our time.

Munich is made at a moment in history when Chamberlain’s fears, and his follies, are entirely more tangible than they were a few decades ago. And when that realization hits you, the movie’s tension never lets go.

Munich: The Edge of War is streaming on Netflix now.

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